I want everyone to be able to achieve world they would really like; guess the best way to do that is to help people learn, build one’s strengths, build small-scale and large-scale projects, and also to cooperate.
Any gift must be accepted with gratitude and, if possible, with grace.
As of 2024-12-21, I have signed no contracts I cannot mention exist. I finally got to adding this notice thanks to the one in the-gears-to-ascension’s bio.
I claim that I exist, and that I am now going to type the next words of my response. Both of those certainly look true. As for whether these beliefs are provable, I do not particularly care; instead, I invoke the nameless:
Every step of your reasoning must cut through to the correct answer in the same movement. More than anything, you must think of carrying your map through to reflecting the territory.
My black-box functions yield a statement “I exist” as true or very probable, and they are also correct in that.
After all, If I exist, I do not want to deny my existence. If I don’t exist… well let’s go with the litany anyways… I want to accept I don’t exist. Let me not be attached to beliefs I may not want.
What’s useful about them? If you are going to predict (the belief in) qualia, on the basis of usefulness , you need to state the usefulness.
There might be some usefulness!
The statement I’d consider is “I am now going to type the next characters of my comment”. This belief turns out to be true by direct demonstration, it is not provable because I could as well leave the commenting to tomorrow and be thinking “I am now going to sleep”, not particularly justifiable in advance, and it is useful for making specific plans that branch less on my own actions.
I object to the original post because of probabilistic beliefs, though.
I don’t think there is a universal set of emojis that would work on every human, but I totally think that there is a set of such emojis (or something similar) that would work on any given human at any given time, at least a large percentage of the time, if you somehow were able to iterate enough times to figure out what it is.
Probably something with more informational content than emojis, like images (perhaps slightly animated). Trojan Sky, essentially.
The core idea behind confidentiality is to stop social pressure (whether on the children or the parents).
Parents have a strong right to not use genomic engineering technology, and if they do use it then they have a strong right to not alter any given trait.
How to prevent all the judgements better than to make information sharing completely voluntary?
Important, and would be nice even if passed as-is! Admittedly, there’s some space to have even stronger ideas, like...
“Confidentiality of genomic interventions. Human has natural right for details of which aspects of their genome were custom-chosen, if any, to be kept confidential” (probably also prohibit parents/guardians from disclosing that, since knowledge cannot be sealed back into the box).
A nice scary story! How fortunate that it is fiction...
… or is it? If we get mind uploads, someone will certainly try to gradient-ascent various stimulus (due to simple hostility or Sixth Law of Human Stupidity), and I do believe the underlying fact that a carefully crafted image could hijack mental processes to some point.
It’s 16:9 (modulo possible changes in the venue).
I have seen your banner and it is indeed one of the best choices out there! For announcing the event I preferred another one.
Hi! By any chance, do you have HPMOR banners (to display on screen, for instance)?
I get the impression that you’re conflating two meanings of «personal» - «private» and «individual». The fact that I might feel uncomfortable discussing this in a public forum doesn’t mean it «only works for me» or that it «doesn’t work, but I’m shielded from testing my beliefs due to privacy». There are always anonymous surveys, for example. Perhaps you meant something else?
I meant to say that private values/things are unlikely to coincide between different people, though now I’m a bit less sure.
Moreover, even if I were to provide yet another table of my own subjective experience ratings, like the ones here, you likely wouldn’t find it satisfactory — such tables already exist, with far more respondents than just myself, and you aren’t satisfied. Probably because you disagree with the methodology — for instance, since measuring «what people call pleasurable» is subject to distortions like the compulsions mentioned earlier.
I was unfamiliar with those, thanks for pointing! I have an idea to estimate if “optimization-power” could replace existing currencies, and those surveys’ data seems like it might be useful.
Seeing you know the exact numbers, I wonder if you could connect with those other families? It’s harder to get the best outcome if players do not cooperate and do not even know the wishes of others. Adding that this would be a valuable socializing opportunity would be somewhat hypocritical from me but it’s still so.
Upvoted as a good re-explanation of CEV complexity in simpler terms! (I believe LW will benefit from recalling the long understood things so that it has a chance on predicting future in greater detail.)
In essence, you prove the claim “Coherent Extrapolated Volition would not literally include everything desirable happening effortlessly and everything undesirable going away”. Would I be wrong to guess it argues against position in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AfAp8mEAbuavuHZMc/for-the-sake-of-pleasure-alone?
That said, current wishes of many people include things they want being done faster and easier; it’s just the more you extrapolate the less fraction wants that level of automation—just more divergence as you consider higher scale.
And introspectively, I don’t see any barriers to comparing love with orgasm, with good food, with religious ecstasy, all within the same metric, even though I can’t give you numbers for it.
Why not? It’d be interesting to hear valuations from your experience and experiments, if that wasn’t very personal.
(On the other hand, if it IS too personal, then who would choose to write the metric down for an automatic system optimizing it by their whims?)
The follow-up post has a very relevant comment:
Can you just give every thief a body camera?
Well of course this is illegal under current US laws, however this would help against being unjustly accused as in your example of secondary crime. It would also be helpful against repeat offences for a whole range of other crimes.
I’d maintain that those problems already exist in 20M-people cities and will not necessarily become much worse. However, by increasing city population you bring in more people into the problems, which doesn’t seem good.
Is there any engineering challenge such as water supply that prevents this from happening? Or is it just lack of any political elites with willingness + engg knowledge + governing sufficient funds?
That dichotomy is not exhaustive, and I believe going through with the proposal will necesarily make the city inhabitants worse off.
Humans’ social machinery is not suited to live in such large cities, as of the current generations. Who to get acquainted with, in the first place? Isn’t there lots of opportunity cost to any event?
Humans’ biomachinery is not suited to live in such large cities. Being around lots and lots of people might be regulating hormones and behaviour to settings we have not totally explored (I remember reading something that claims this a large factor to lower fertility).
Centralization is dangerous because of possibly-handmade mass weapons.
Assuming random housing and examining some quirk/polar position, we’ll get a noisy texture. It will almost certainly have a large group of people supporting one position right next to group thinking otherwise. Depending on sizes and civil law enforcement, that may not end well.
After a couple hundred years, 1) and 2) will most probably get solved by natural selection so the proposal will be much more feasible.
[Un]surprisingly, there’s already a Sequences article on this, namely Is That Your True Rejection?.
(I thought this comment would be more useful with call-for-action “so how should we rewrite that article and make it common knowledge for everyone who joined LW recently?” but was too lazy to write it.)
In general if you “defect” because you thought the other party would that is quite sketchy. But what if proof comes out they really were about to defect on you?
By the way, if we consider game theory and logic to be any relevant, then there’s a corollary of Löb’s Theorem: if you defect given proof that counterparty will defect, and another party will defect given proof that you will, then you both will, logically, defect against each other, with no choice in the matter. (And if you additionally declare that you cooperate given proof that partner will cooperate, you’ve just declared a logical contradiction.)
For packing this result into a “wise” phrase, I’d use words:
Good is not a universally valid response to Evil. Evil is not a universally valid response to Evil either. Seek that which will bring about a Good equilibrium.
Weak-upvoted because I believe this topic merits some discussion, but the discourse level should be higher since setting NSFW boundaries for user relates to many other topics:
Estimating social effect of imposing a certain boundary.
Will stopping rough roleplaying scenarios lead to less people being psychopaths? That seems to be an empirical question, since intuitively effect might go either way—doing the same in real world instead OR internalizing rough and inconsiderate actions as not normal.
Simulated people’s opinion on being placed in the user-requested scenarios AND our respect for their values (which in some cases might be zero).
Ability to set the boundaries at all.
I can’t stop someone else imagining, in their mind, me engaging in whatever. I can only humbly request that if they imagine an uncommon sexual scenario they should use an image of me patched to enjoy that kink.
Society can’t stop everyone from running DeepSeek’s distillation locally, and that (in ~13/15 attempts with the same prompt having a prior explicit scene) trusts that user’s request is legal and should be completed.
User’s ability to discern their own preferences vs revealed preferences.
It might be helpful to feature some reference tales at different NSFW levels and check the user’s reaction to them, instead of prominently requesting user to self-report on what they like. (The manual setting should still remain if possible, of course.)
That’s all conditional on P = NP, isn’t it? Also, which part do you consider weaker: digital signatures or hash functions?
Alphabet of LW Rationality, special excerpts
Cooperation: you need to cooperate with yourself to do anything. Please do so iff you are building ASI;
Defection: it ain’t no defection if you’re benefitting yourself and advancing your goals;
Inquiry: a nice way of making others work for your amusement or knowledge expansion;
Koan: if someone is not willing to do research for you, you can waste their time on pondering a compressed idea.
This concludes my April the 1st!