Ratios

• RatiosSep 12, 2023, 8:18 PM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: dr_s’s comment on: Is there some­thing fun­da­men­tally wrong with the Uni­verse?

  It’s hard to argue what reasonable expectations are. My main point was that ‘perhaps’ thinks that in a world that contains torture, wars, factory farming, conscious beings being eaten alive, rape, and diseases, the worst thing that is worth noting is that humans demand so much of it and that the “universe has done a pretty great job.”
  
  I find it incredibly sociopathic (Specifically in the sense of not being moved by the suffering of others).

• RatiosSep 12, 2023, 8:00 PM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: dr_s’s comment on: Is there some­thing fun­da­men­tally wrong with the Uni­verse?

  Imagine a reverse Omelas in which there is one powerful king who is extremely happy and one billion people suffering horrific fates. The King’s happiness depends on their misery. As part of his oppression, he forbids any discussion about the poor quality of life to minimize suicides, as they harm his interests.

  “That makes the whole thing subjective, unless you take a very naive total sum utility approach.”

  Wouldn’t the same type of argument apply to a reverse Omelas? The sum utility approach isn’t naive; it’s the most sensible approach. Personally, when choosing between alternatives in which you have skin in the game and need to think strategically, that’s exactly the approach you would take.

• RatiosSep 12, 2023, 5:35 PM

  7 points

  −2

  in reply to: RHollerith’s comment on: Is there some­thing fun­da­men­tally wrong with the Uni­verse?

  I would argue that the amount of murders committed by people with the desire for “revenge against the universe” is less than 0.01% of murders and probably much less than murders committed in the name of Christianity during the Crusades. Should we conclude that Christianity is also unhealthy for a lot of people?
  
  This idea of cherry-picking the worst phenomenon related to a worldview and then smearing with it the entire worldview is basically one of the lowest forms of propaganda.

• RatiosSep 12, 2023, 5:20 PM

  2 points

  0

  on: Is there some­thing fun­da­men­tally wrong with the Uni­verse?

  You should check out Efilism or Gnosticism on Negative Utilitarianism. There are views that see the universe as rotten in its core. They are obviously not very popular because they are too hard psychologically for most people and, more importantly, hurt the interest of those who prefer to pretend that life is good and the world is just for their own selfish reasons.
  
  Also, obviously, viewing the world in a positive manner has serious advantages in memetic propagation for reasons that should be left as an exercise for the reader. (Hint: There were probably Buddhist sects that didn’t believe in reincarnation back in the day...)

• RatiosSep 12, 2023, 5:15 PM

  9 points

  4

  in reply to: Perhaps’s comment on: Is there some­thing fun­da­men­tally wrong with the Uni­verse?

  “If there’s something wrong with the universe, it’s probably humans who keep demanding so much of it. ”

  Frankly, this is one of the most infuriating things I’ve read in LessWrong recently, It’s super disappointing to see it being upvoted.

  Look, if you weigh the world’s suffering against its joy through hedonistic aggregation, it might be glaringly obvious that Earth is closer to hell than to heaven.

  Recall Schopenhauer’s sharp observation: “One simple test of the claim that the pleasure in the world outweighs the pain…is to compare the feelings of an animal that is devouring another with those of the animal being devoured.”

  It’s all roses and sunshine when you’re sitting pretty in a Western country, isn’t it? But I bet that perspective crumbles if you’re looking through the eyes of a Sudanese child soldier or an animal getting torn apart.

  If a human dreamt up the cruel process that is evolution, we’d call him a deranged lunatic. At the very least, we should expect the universe not to treat conscious beings like disposable objects, but apparently, that’s “demanding so much of it.”

• RatiosSep 5, 2023, 7:55 AM

  5 points

  0

  on: Im­pend­ing AGI doesn’t make ev­ery­thing else unim­por­tant.

  I think AGI does add new difficulties to the problem of meaninglessness that are novel and specific that you didn’t tackle directly, which I’ll demonstrate with a similar example to your football field parable.

  Imagine you have a bunch of people stuck in a room with paintbrushes and canvases, so they find meaning in creating beautiful paintings and selling them to the outside world, but one of the walls of their room is made of glass, and there is a bunch of robots in the other room next to them that also paint paintings. With time, they notice the robots are becoming better and better at painting; they create better-looking paintings much faster and cheaper than these humans, and they keep improving very fast.

  These humans understand two things:

  1. The problem of shorter time horizons—The current paintings they are working on are probably useless, won’t be appreciated in the near future, and will not be bought by anyone, and there is a good chance their entire project will be closed very soon.

  2. The problem of inferiority and being not important—Their work is worse in any possible way than the work of the robots, and no one outside really cares if they paint or not. Even the humans inside the room prefer to look at what the robots paint compared to their own work.

  These problems didn’t exist before, and that’s what makes AGI-Nihilism even worse than usual Nihilism.

• RatiosAug 4, 2023, 7:05 AM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: mruwnik’s comment on: All AGI Safety ques­tions wel­come (es­pe­cially ba­sic ones) [July 2023]

  Why would it lie if you program its utility function in a way that puts:

  solving these tests using minimal computation > self-preservation?
  
  (Asking sincerely)

• RatiosJul 22, 2023, 9:58 AM

  1 point

  0

  on: All AGI Safety ques­tions wel­come (es­pe­cially ba­sic ones) [July 2023]

  A simple idea for AI security that will not solve alignment but should easily prevent FOOM and most catastrophic outcomes is using safety interlocks for AIs.

  A “safety interlock” is a device that prevents the system from reaching a dangerous state. It is typically used in machinery or industrial processes where certain conditions need to be met before the system can operate.
  
  In a microwave, the door includes a safety interlock system that prevents the microwave from operating if the door is open. When you open the door, the interlock interrupts the power supply to the magnetron.
  
  In AI, it might look like this: you create a list of tests that the AI must fail in order to stay activated, this list of tests represents the upper boundary of allowed AI capabilities, and the AI will be tested in short intervals giving a high priority in its utility function to trying to pass these tests. As soon as it passes this test, it’s shut down automatically. It could be tested in short intervals so it won’t have the time to self-improve vastly above this threshold between the tests.
  
  To give a more specific example, an LLM could be asked a hard physics question that wasn’t included in training data that it will be asked to solve every few seconds. Being shut down as soon as it can.
  
  This idea seems very simple and straightforward to me, and I don’t see any glaring issues with it, but yet it doesn’t seem to be researched or considered seriously as a robust safety solution (to the best of my knowledge).
  
  My question is, what are the issues with this idea? And why doesn’t it solve most of the problems with AI safety?

• RatiosJun 28, 2023, 12:38 PM

  15 points

  5

  on: Munk AI de­bate: con­fu­sions and pos­si­ble cruxes

  “For one thing, if we use that logic, then everything distracts from everything. You could equally well say that climate change is a distraction from the obesity epidemic, and the obesity epidemic is a distraction from the January 6th attack, and so on forever. In reality, this is silly—there is more than one problem in the world! For my part, if someone tells me they’re working on nuclear disarmament, or civil society, or whatever, my immediate snap reaction is not to say “well that’s stupid, you should be working on AI x-risk instead”, rather it’s to say “Thank you for working to build a better future. Tell me more!”

  Disagree with this point—cause prioritization is super important. For a radical example: imagine the government spending billions to rescue one man from Mars while neglecting much more cost-efficient causes. Bad actors use the trick of focusing on unimportant but controversial issues to keep everyone from noticing how they are being exploited routinely. Demanding sane prioritization of public attention is extremely important and valid. The problem is we as a society don’t have norms and common knowledge around it (And even memes specifically against it, like whataboutism), but the fact it’s not being done consistently doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t.

• RatiosJun 2, 2023, 1:10 PM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: Against Con­flat­ing Ex­per­tise: Dist­in­guish­ing AI Devel­op­ment from AI Im­pli­ca­tion Analysis

  Why though? How does understanding the physics that makes nukes work help someone understand their implications? Game theory seems a much better background than physics to predict the future in this case. For example, the idea of Mutually assured destruction as a civilizing force was first proposed first by Wilkie Collins, an English novelist, and playwright.

• RatiosJun 1, 2023, 7:29 PM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: Against Con­flat­ing Ex­per­tise: Dist­in­guish­ing AI Devel­op­ment from AI Im­pli­ca­tion Analysis

  Every other important technological breakthrough. The Internet and nuclear weapons are specific examples if you want any.

Against Con­flat­ing Ex­per­tise: Dist­in­guish­ing AI Devel­op­ment from AI Im­pli­ca­tion Analysis

• RatiosFeb 25, 2023, 11:37 PM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: lc’s comment on: [Link] A com­mu­nity alert about Ziz

  You seem to claim that a person that works ineffectively towards a cause doesn’t really believe in his cause—this is wrong. Many businesses fail in ridiculously stupid ways, doesn’t mean their owners didn’t really want to make a profit.

• RatiosFeb 25, 2023, 10:25 PM

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: lc’s comment on: [Link] A com­mu­nity alert about Ziz

  In both cases, the violence they used (Which I’m not condoning) seemed meant for resource acquisition (a precondition for anything else you must do). It’s not just randomly hurting people. I agree that it seems they are being quite ineffective and immoral. But I don’t think that contradicts the fact that she’s doing what she’s doing because she believes humanity is evil because everyone seems to be ok with factory farming. (“flesh-eating monsters”)

  
  “Reading their posts it sounds more like Ziz misunderstood decision theory as saying “retaliate aggressively all the time” and started a cult around that.

  This is a strawman.

• RatiosFeb 25, 2023, 5:06 PM

  17 points

  2

  in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: [Link] A com­mu­nity alert about Ziz

  I downvoted for disagreement but upvoted for Karma—not sure why it’s being so heavily downvoted. This comment states in an honest way the preferences that most humans hold.

• RatiosFeb 25, 2023, 3:36 PM

  4 points

  −5

  in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: [Link] A com­mu­nity alert about Ziz

  I agree with your comment. To continue the analogy, she chose the path of Simon Wiesenthal and not of Oskar Schindler, which seems more natural to me in a way when there are no other countries to escape to—when almost everyone is Nazi. (Not my views)

  I personally am not aligned with her values and disagree with her methods. But also begrudgingly hold some respect for her intelligence and the courage to follow her values wherever they take her.

• RatiosFeb 25, 2023, 12:59 PM

  13 points

  13

  on: Sam Alt­man: “Plan­ning for AGI and be­yond”

  The lack of details and any specific commitments makes it sound mostly like PR.

• RatiosFeb 25, 2023, 12:55 PM

  10 points

  −18

  in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: [Link] A com­mu­nity alert about Ziz

  I don’t think it’s that far-fetched to view what humanity does to animals as something equivalent to the Holocaust. And if you accept this, almost everyone is either a nazi or nazi collaborator.

  When you take this idea seriously and commit to stopping this with all your heart, you get Ziz.

• RatiosFeb 21, 2023, 9:25 PM

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: yakimoff’s comment on: Ban­kless Pod­cast: 159 - We’re All Gonna Die with Eliezer Yudkowsky

  Consider the target audience of this podcast.

• RatiosFeb 21, 2023, 5:54 PM

  1 point

  0

  on: “Con­spir­acy the­o­ries” ver­sus “world mod­el­ling”

  The term “Conspiracy theory” seems to be a language construct that is meant as a weapon to prevent poking at real conspiracies. See the following quote from Conspiracy theory as heresey

  Whenever we use the term ‘conspiracy theory’ pejoratively we imply, perhaps unintentionally, that there is something wrong with believing in conspiracies or wanting to investigate whether they’re occurring. This rhetoric silences the victims of real conspiracies, and those who, rightly or wrongly, believe that conspiracies are occurring, and it herds respectable opinion in ways that make it more likely that powerful interests will be able to get away with conspiracies.

  It’s a very insidious use of language, and the comparison to heresy is apt. We probably need a different term to differentiate between low-status-silly-conspiracy-theories and serious-minded-conspiracy-theories. Just like there is a difference between alternative medicine and medicine. The issue is that this term is so popular that it will be very hard to spread an alternative term and explain that some conspiracy theories are valid. What makes it even worse is that people in power love that term. It definitely serves their interests that trying to analyze their conspiracies has an immediate, easy rebuttal, such as saying ironically, “That’s a very interesting conspiracy theory.” And that’s true for all the people in power. It doesn’t matter what their ideology is.

  In a way, it’s a stable memetic attractor that always serves the interests of the group in power—which can explain why it will be hard to get rid of. However, it’s obviously manipulative in an Orwellian way.