Wasn’t the initial example around pottery?
Rattengift
Karma: 249
I did mean the reader’s median world! The reader’s idea of Yudkowsky’s MW would be too polar between participants; it would be less fun.
Good thoughts!
What would YOUR version of dath ilan be like? Do you think it would be better or worse than Yudkowsky’s? What would it get right that his doesn’t? What would it probably end up worse on?
Consider alternatively: People think that it is unlikely that specific predictions about which “wild” and “crazy” things will play out in the future will be correct, without actually thinking the present is all that’s possible.
This happens all the time. Where’s my flying car? Wait, it can drive itself now?
What are your thoughts about the click-tracking program?
Let’s say I want to illusory truth effect myself into caring about AI safety, or increasing chatbot capabilities, at least enough to have more interesting conversations about either topic. Where would you start? Where are the good reads? Have any of you written any good papers lately?
Consultants are easy to find for the sorts of things he does, with the resources he has. You have to remember that he makes second-screen videos for children. The sorts of consultants he actually needs are relatively cheap, relatively lacking in prestige, and generally less competitive than the ones that people in different fields would need.
The difficulty of finding a consultant scales exponentially against the quantifiability of your goal.
“Make the biggest cake.” → discrete and quantifiable goal, with pre-existing records (so you can tell at a glance who is the best at what they do, based on the simple comparison of a single number).
“Do good management.” → very difficult! Consultants are usually kids without management experience (McKinsey). Those who aren’t aren’t necessarily good at management; how do you know? Very difficult to quantify except by means of using proxy measures, very difficult to find a good consultant.
“Invent a (good) new field of philosophy.” → much harder; requires you to already understand things at at least a high level so that you have the taste to know who has succeeded in this and who hasn’t in recent memory (to override the fact that it’s at least in part a matter of taste and therefore unquantifiable), and requires them to be willing to actually help you out, but it’s an academic field, so quite competitive.
“Write good rationalist fanfiction.” → impossible; never been done before; everyone who has tried is only an aspiring good rationalist fanfiction author; consultant pool of zero.
Epistemic status: not sure.
People comparing Mackenzie Scott’s charitable donations to EA charities to dunk on them for “being ineffective” on a health basis seem to be arguing in pretty bad faith.
A large portion of those donations weren’t health-focused at all, but rather cause-focused. This doesn’t seem more out of line to me than (say) EA focus on x-risk non-profits: Both have nebulous return in a quantifiable sense, but both do (for better or worse) make noticeable impacts in the world on a long enough timescale.
Sometimes a person cares about a thing that isn’t about saving as many immediate-now lives as possible, and this seems… kind of critical? When EA was initially pitched to me, part of that pitch was, “More flashy stuff will likely get funded without you, so you can aim to spend as effectively as possible without worrying about the things you personally care about going underfunded.”
Things like the YMCA, LGBT advocacy groups, jazz arts funding (all taken from the Yield site) - I don’t feel like any of these are bad things to fund. If charitable spending was only malaria nets and chemoprevention, I feel like it’d be a worse world.
I’d go as far as to say that the current giving strategy Scott is undertaking is probably optimal for building soft power in the United States, though I don’t think she’s actually trying to at the moment.
Soft power breeds hard power in time. Who will society look more fondly on in twenty years, the people who allocated all of their funds to abstract figures overseas and constantly talked of how virtuous they were for it, or the person who grabbed the drowning child out of the lake, got them a good education, and then left them alone?
And who has more capability to be effective or damaging, the person who chooses who gets to control USAID, or the person who has $26bn to throw around?
I don’t actually know the sum and substance of her charitable donations; I haven’t paid that much attention, and I’m a pretty strong believer in malaria nets, so I’m weighted toward “probably pretty suboptimal,” especially in the immediate-now.
It just seems wrong to me to go after her in the specific way a lot of EAs are, though; yeah, she’s giving ineffectively. Giving most effectively in a cause-blind manner wasn’t her goal. But now a lot of the things you and people with capital care about domestically are taken care of for a while, and you can make more persuasive arguments for reallocating a bunch of funding to be genuinely optimal.
Not everyone is going to be a strict, Singer-style utilitarian; the world would be a lot worse if they were. Very few people are solely spending money on shrimp, even though from a utilitarian standpoint, it’s way more effective to improve the lives of shrimp than to save human lives, or to give to Lighthaven. You pick issues to care about, and you care about them; if nobody cares about the local problems, it seems likely that there’ll be no one to care for the shrimp after long enough.
If you make any cool drawings (or bad ones!), feel free to show me them! I have basically an infinite appetite for seeing people learn how to draw; that’s a really good plan!
What’s the best strategy for undertaking and executing on a very long goal, with a sort of blurry and ambiguous path, because you’re not really far enough along to know what the process of getting there looks like?
Say the goal of “I want to have done some novel research by the time I’m 30,” or, “I want to be skilled enough at drawing that I can successfully and quickly translate what I see in my head to canvas;” these are the sorts of goals you see people have often, but it seems unclear to me how to go about properly planning and executing on one of these.
Sure, your LLM might be able to run Photoshop, solve math problems, demonstrate that billions of people have no taste, convince children to commit suicide, cause psychosis in a surprising percentage of people I know personally, and write really bad code. But can it write a good glowfic? Checkmate.
Aliens are also animals. If you wouldn’t mass-murder all spiders, or mosquitos, or if you just generally avoid eating meat, it seems curious to kill things that are far away enough to be nearly-unable to cause you harm (assuming FTL travel remains impossible) while allowing all of the terrible animals on the current planet to survive. By the time that they get within range to do you harm, you’ll undoubtedly have far better weapons than you did initially, and will most likely be able to neutralize them perfectly fine, if need-be.
Well, yes. It was, as Vivek already pointed out, based on a misunderstanding of what was meant by a number.
I was assuming it was based around prime-age LFPR; it wasn’t. I still think the end conclusion in my comment is more or less true, however.
Vivek already pointed this out.
This was already edited hours before you made your react & reply.
(apparently putting Habryka’s own word against Alexander’s on the question of Alexander’s opinions about Achmiz?)
Hm.
I think this makes sense. habryka has a strong incentive to care about why and when influential people reduce their usage of the site; his social status and employment status are tied very heavily to the site. It seems much more likely that the ACT author said something to habryka and then forgot about it (given habryka is significantly more incentivized to remember a comment about the site than the ACT author) than habryka fabricating evidence.
I say this as someone who does not really mind Achmiz and is not particularly fond of any of the moderators of this site (I think many of the post-LW2 changes have been really bad and have unreasonably-weighted the wrong sort): I think you are working backwards from the outcome you want and allowing your reasoning to get sloppy to support it, while posting in sufficient volume to give the illusion of rigor when in reality you’re just out-bandwidthing. I am generally fond of your participation on the site, because I am a fan of people having fun on chat forums, and “never stop posting” is a mantra I believe in, but I think this is a trend for you and your patterns of thought at large in a way that seems genuinely distressing to you.
I mean this in the nicest way, as someone who thinks you may share part of the most-unfortunate piece of their mental scaffolding: Have you ever been screened for obsessive-compulsive disorder?
Plan S is pretty obviously the optimal outcome out of the choices presented, but the 2040 authors fall short of sketching what an ideal Plan S would look like. I would go as far as to say that something even further than Plan S would be ideal, but this is too far outside of the Overton Window, so probably not worth getting into on this forum.
It also is very clear that the authors speak to chatbots too much, based on the writing style used throughout. Example:
“We are sympathetic to Plan S and think that it might be better than Plan A. However, we recommend Plan A instead. Here’s our thinking:”
Note: This is not accusing them of using LLMs to generate this document. I am simply stating that they have chatbot-colonized patterns of speech.
Writing this just for my own future reference to be able to figure out how calibrated I was in retrospect:
38%* unemployment in 2029 is unhinged, and there’s no realistic path to hitting that target in the next two and a third years, even if models get good enough to automate all work within that time period (which I also think seems unlikely).
This will likely backfire in the same way 2027 did, PR-wise, because they do not make it clear enough that this is not, whatsoever, a median prediction. It will likely be taken by the wider public as, “Look at these AI researchers convinced of their doomsday cult’s wisdom trying to boost valuations pre-IPO.”
* Edited due to mistyping a number.
2nd edit to stop more Linchings: They aren’t talking about prime-age labor force participation rate in the doc. This comment was written under the assumption that they were, because total LFPR is basically useless as a statistic.
Richard’s viewpoints seem explicitly incompatible with a majority of the world and a plurality of Americans; if your goal is getting the best researchers overall, a coworker who is actively hostile and antagonistic to approximately 84% of the global population seems like a bad way to cast a wide net.
This is to say nothing about his views on alignment (while I think one could argue that ASI aligned to Richard’s point of view would be unaligned with most of humanity, it’s irrelevant here); he could likely contribute best to the alignment debate from a more scoped organization.