RHollerith

Karma: 2,530

Richard Hollerith. 15 miles north of San Francisco. hruvulum@gmail.com

My probability that AI research will end all human life is .92. It went up drastically when Eliezer started going public with his pessimistic assessment in April 2022. Till then my confidence in MIRI (and knowing that MIRI has enough funding to employ many researchers) was keeping my probability down to about .4. (I am glad I found out about Eliezer’s assessment.)

Currently I am willing to meet with almost anyone on the subject of AI extinction risk.

Last updated 26 Sep 2023.

RHollerith 18 Jun 2009 0:53 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Arenamontanus’s comment on: Ask LessWrong: Human cognitive enhancement now?
Will Arenamontanus or someone else please elaborate on the problem with amphetamines not shared with modafinil? To tell me that amphetamines “impair considered choice” is not enough to inform a session with a search engine. I am aware that amphetamines can impair certain kinds of judgement, but was told that that happens only at doses high enough to cause euphoria. Thanks.

RHollerith 19 Jun 2009 18:04 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Z_M_Davis’s comment on: Applied Picoeconomics
The benefits and attractions Z.M. describes are similar to what attracted me to goal system zero. The following three passages from Z.M.’s comments particularly resonated with me.

when you have an open-ended concept of things-worth-doing, there’s no failure, only degrees of win.

In other words, all you have to do to win the Game of Life is to play the Game the best you can. (And a big part of that is making sure that none of your deliberations are rationalizations in the service of an unacknowledged agenda.)

I really think it is a tautology that you should always be doing the best thing you could possibly be doing. You can’t stop time; you’re always going to be doing something, even if that something is nothing in particular. And so if you have to do some uniquely determined thing—it should be the best thing.

And it is important to stress that oftentimes the best thing for me to do is to get my mind off of all planning and all tasks that are not intrinsically rewarding on a short time scale, so I can relax and rest. (Actually, there is a whole lot more to “keeping the ape happy” than getting enough relaxation and rest, but relaxation and rest illustrate the general point.)

I have but one Self, a timeless abstract optimization process to which this ape is but a horribly disfigured approximation.

One way Z.M. differs from me during my period of loyalty to goal system zero is that the value I assigned to my life and my self flowed entirely from my usefulness to goal system zero. In other words, I did not assign any intrinsic value to my life or my self. Goal system zero was the only source of intrinsic value I recognized. (Z.M. probably differs from the former version of me in a lot of other ways, too.)

RHollerith 2 Jul 2009 19:20 UTC
8 points
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Open Thread: July 2009
That is precisely my problem with them: in my humble opinion, the discussions about self-improvement have not met the intellectual standards of the other discussions here. And since they have represented a significant fraction of all comments here, they have decreased the intellectual standards of the average comment enough to make me worry that the kind of participants I most want to interact with are leaving Less Wrong at a rate higher than the other participants are.

EDIT. It would ease my worries if they were easier to avoid: for example, it would ease my worries if there were fewer of them in the comment sections of posts with no obvious connection to self-improvement.

RHollerith 3 Jul 2009 4:07 UTC
6 points
in reply to: HalFinney’s comment on: Open Thread: July 2009

Is it rational, for example, to have a list of “things to do before I die”? Especially if you believe that it is likely that you will not remember whether you did them or not, after you die?

It is rational to have a list of things to do before you die if you have preferences over configurations of external reality outside the small part of external reality that causes your internal experiences.

RHollerith 3 Jul 2009 20:20 UTC
0 points
on: Welcome to Less Wrong!
Handle: rhollerith_dot_com

Name: Richard Hollerith.

Location: just north of San Francisco, California.

Contact information.

More information.

Suppose you are reading this because you are reading every comment under the user name rhollerith_dot_com from newest to oldest. Well, you have almost finished with that: there are only 4 comments older than the comment you are reading. But there are more comments written by me under a different user name, namely, rhollerith.

RHollerith 4 Jul 2009 22:37 UTC
3 points
on: Rationality Quotes—July 2009
There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.

-- Samuel Johnson

RHollerith 12 Jul 2009 17:56 UTC
11 points
in reply to: PeterS’s comment on: Jul 12 Bay Area meetup—Hanson, Vassar, Yudkowsky

Never been to one of the meetups before, but I’m thinking of showing up to this one. What can I expect?

The summer interns I have met are all nice, interesting and extremely bright. unless I am severely mistaken, the summer interns are mostly college age, 18-22, though Roko is probably a few years older than that. Some are under 18, and the dad of one of them came to pick him up during the last meetup. Most of the summer interns live in the big house where the meetup will take place.

There will be four to six full-time employees of the Singularity Institute in attendance. Most of these have science and math as their strongest skills or are full scientific generalists with a mastery of all the sciences, natural and social, and of important social skills like philanthropic networking or running a technology startup. You can tell how wondeful Eliezer is just by studying his vast body of written public communications. What you might not yet know is that Eliezer’s standards for whom he works with are extremely high in the intellect department and in the altruism department.

In case you are now intimidated, rest assured that there will also be a few less scintillating intellects in attendance, like my pal Richard Karpinski and I, who although welcoming and well-meaning are not extremely bright, but rather only very bright, that is, only 2 standard deviations above the human average [insert: in IQ :insert] and who now suffer from the inevitable mental decline that comes with our being old farts.

(In case you are wondering, I did clear this paragraph with Richard Karpinski before posting it!)

Probably because the attendees have spent little of their lives trying to conform and to be similar to the people around them, the individual personalities vary more than they do at most gatherings.

In summary, if you get pleasure from discussing the world from an atheistic scientific perspective and from an altruistic or selfless/global perspective and if you are even remotely presentable, then there is a good chance that this meetup is among the best opportunities to experience that particular pleasure you will ever have.

RHollerith 12 Jul 2009 21:48 UTC
0 points
in reply to: PeterS’s comment on: Jul 12 Bay Area meetup—Hanson, Vassar, Yudkowsky

Well that sounds interesting. And fairly terrifying too, given that I’m somewhat shy.

Only two standard deviations above the human average… sounds like you’re talking about IQ?

I am talking about IQ. Parenthetically, an IQ 2 standard deviations above the mean is by definition an IQ of 130 which is right about the average for professional computer programmers and some engineering occupations. (Scientific occupations tend to average around 140.)

RHollerith 14 Jul 2009 9:23 UTC
0 points
in reply to: CarlShulman’s comment on: Jul 12 Bay Area meetup—Hanson, Vassar, Yudkowsky
OK but in addition to the local high school senior, one of last year’s summer interns is 17 or just turned 18. (And both were present at the meetup.)

RHollerith 15 Jul 2009 15:33 UTC
0 points
on: The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You
This comment has been deleted by the author.

RHollerith 15 Jul 2009 16:12 UTC
15 points
on: The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You

What’s the craziest thing the AI could tell you, such that you would be willing to believe that the AI was the sane one?

That the EV of the humans is coherent and does not care how much suffering exists in the universe.
What links here?
- James_Miller's comment on Q&A #2 with Singularity Institute Executive Director by lukeprog (13 Dec 2011 17:49 UTC; 4 points)

RHollerith 15 Jul 2009 17:47 UTC
4 points
in reply to: MichaelVassar’s comment on: The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You
The craziest true thing I can imagine right now that Eliezer’s hypothetical inhumanly well-calibrated AI could tell me is that the project of Eliezer and his friends will succeed and the EV defined by Eliezer and his friends coheres and does not care how much suffering exists in the universe.

Maybe I am playing the game wrong.

I interpreted the object of the game to be to minimize the probability that Eliezer currently assigns to my response to Eliezer question (what is the craziest thing that . . .) because Eliezer is blinded by anosognosia or by an “absolute denial macro”.

That is the only interpretation that I could imagine that would assign a sensible motive for Eliezer to ask his question (what is the craziest thing that . . .) and to define the game.

But maybe I am just not smart enough to play this game that Eliezer has defined.

EDIT. Oh wait. I just imagined a second interpretation that gives Eliezer a sensible motive—that motive’s being to cause the reader of Eliezer’s post to do for himself what under my first interpretation I was attempting to do for Eliezer. In other words, I am supposed to imagine what truth I am denying.

A third interpretation is that his motive is for us to respond with a statement that the entire human civilization is denying but is actually true—in which case I stick to my original response, which I will now repeat:

The craziest true thing I can imagine right now that Eliezer’s hypothetical inhumanly well-calibrated AI could tell me is that the project of Eliezer and his friends will succeed and the EV defined by Eliezer and his friends coheres and does not care how much suffering exists in the universe.

The probability that I assign to the event that CEV goes that way is probably higher than any other humans. In addition, two humans I know of probably assign it a probability above 1 or 2%. I cannot rule out the possibility of humans I have not discussed this issue with also assigning it a probability above 1 or 2%, but surely the vast majority of humans are “absolutely denying” this, i.e., assigning it a probability under .01%

RHollerith 17 Jul 2009 21:12 UTC
1 point
in reply to: taw’s comment on: Absolute denial for atheists
Here’s another piece of data relevant to estimating the expected laid-utility of interventions designed to increase fame, wealth or power relative to the expected laid-utility of other interventions one might design.

Actress Dana Delany told an interviewer from People magazine or similar magazine that if you want her to kiss you, owning a jet plane and a condo on Bon Air does not make up for having bad breath because of gum disease. That suggest that making a point of never getting so strapped for cash that you cannot afford to pay a good dental hygenist might increase laid-utility more than starting your own company.

Parenthetically I might write a post explaining why according to my mental models, for a male scientist who is bad at getting laid to choose to work on an extinction-risky technology has significantly lower expected utility than for a male scientist good at getting laid to choose to do so where U (the human species goes extinct) = −1 and U (nonextinction) = 0. The effect might apply to female scientists, too, but I am currently almost completely confused about that—except “confused” might be the wrong word because it might connote that I expect to gather additional evidence for or against the question. The effect stems from what has been called the crime-genius connection and from the cognitive benefits to the man of the love of a woman with strong “ego skills”, “ego skills” being the term some psychotherapists use for some practical fragment of rationality.

RHollerith 17 Jul 2009 23:50 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Absolute denial for atheists

Er… perhaps you would find different responses here from non-actresses not being interviewed in People magazine. Or not. Just sayin’, the degree to which someone cares about something may have something to do with the degree to which they are ordinarily deprived of it. If you are not deprived of men owning jet planes, then you may feel free to weight it less than bad breath, [writes Eliezer].

I’ll be the first to concede that my humble data point would be helpless to resist any real evidence of the sort that social psychologists specialize in obtaining. But even though I have failed to establish anything that cannot be easily knocked down by even one piece of strong evidence, I have undermined the “Roko hypothesis” entailed in Roko’s comment that interventions to improve a man’s weath or power have high expected laid-utililty—since after all there is also no real evidence for the “Roko hypothesis”. Or so it seems to me.

Also, and this is evidence that has professional social scientific experimental expertise or expertise in opinion surveys or such behind it, high status women are even less likely to form certain kinds of sexual bonds (marriage?) with a man of lower status than the woman has than middle-class or lower-class women are likely to—a result born out by my personal experience as a man of bottom-quartile financial security and bottom-quality social status according to the the metrics used by some of the women who have been willing to discuss with me the idea or possibility of their having sex with me (I refer here to the ones that do not swoon over my intelligence, good looks, tallness and mastery of science) and robust across at least American, East-Indian/Hindu and IIRC British women. In other words, you would think that an American or East-Indian woman who already has more financial security than most kings and emperors throughout history have had would care less about the financial security of her long-term mate than the average woman would, but peer-reviewed psychological or opinion research finds that they care more. In other words, owning a Lear jet is more helpful to convince Dana Delany to enter into certain kinds of sexual bonds with you than it is helpful to convince the hairdresser at the corner mall or the average co-ed at a prestigious university to enter into that kind of sexual bond.

(The reason for the need for me to use the phrase “certain kinds of sexual bonds” is that I do not recall whether the studies I have seen surveyed opinions about marriage or what and that it is a robust result believed by a strong consensus of evolutionary psychologists that if Dana Delany is married to some rich movie star but contemplating an extra-marital no-strings-attached coupling, for the cuckolder to own a Lear jet probably does him almost no good at all—signs of genetic fitness such as muscles, tallness, self-confidence and good looks being what women look for in that situation.)

Moreover, the image going through his mind when Roko wrote his words was probably that of a high-status woman.

RHollerith 18 Jul 2009 0:05 UTC
0 points
in reply to: taw’s comment on: Absolute denial for atheists
Our civilization does indeed have quite solid evidence that rich men have more sex and have sex with a greater variety of women than less-rich men. However, that removes only a small fraction of the support for the proposition that the kind of heterosexual single man reading these words is better off hiring a pickup/seduction trainer or spending heavily on dentists, hairdressers, gym memberships, etc, than seeking to enter the top percentile of wealth or power if his goal is to increase his sexual access to the sorts of women who will most improve his life—because it is not as if getting a few million dollars is easy. All the dollars in the world are owned by persons, and these persons invariably resisting giving the dollars up. It is significantly easier to identify the women with whom sex will most improve your life and then get them to give the sexual favors up.
What links here?
- RHollerith's comment on Absolute denial for atheists by taw (18 Jul 2009 5:29 UTC; 1 point)

RHollerith 18 Jul 2009 2:21 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Absolute denial for atheists
Alicorn writes,

There’s really no chance that people are going to stop discussing “attractive women” (specifically, the sexual favors of attractive women) as objects that can and should be be attained under the right circumstances, is there? :(

I want you to continue to participate here, Alicorn. And I want to increase the female: male ratio in the rationalist/ altruistic/ selfless/ global-situation community. So if you ever see me using language that objectifies women or that alienates you, please let me know.
What links here?
- Sayeth the Girl by Alicorn (19 Jul 2009 22:24 UTC; 75 points)
- RHollerith's comment on Sayeth the Girl by Alicorn (20 Jul 2009 10:37 UTC; 9 points)

RHollerith 18 Jul 2009 5:29 UTC
1 point
in reply to: AllanCrossman’s comment on: Absolute denial for atheists

You seem to accept that women prefer men who have more money than them. Therefore, a man with a lot of money has more potential mates.

Well, yeah, but if you do not already have a lot of money, I claim that if you are very bright, there are probably ways of making yourself more attractive to women that are quicker, more reliable and easier than getting a lot of money.

What are those ways? I list some here.

RHollerith 18 Jul 2009 10:54 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Absolute denial for atheists

I’m not sure objectification is the cause of the red flag here : would you get the same impression if he said “If I were rich, I’d have a nice house and a sports car and a gardener”? [writes Emile]

until I’ve given this more thought all I will say is that it’d probably be better to say “a garden” than “a gardener” [writes Alicorn].

Alicorn, I am curious what is your answer to Emile’s question if we replace “gardener” with “butler”?

Please do not take my question as a dismissal of your concern. In fact, I think it is probable that you have a valid concern. I ask my question not in the spirit of a debate but rather in the spirit of a cooperative quest to understand. I am planning more top-level posts about sex, and I do not want my ignorance of your concerns and similar concerns to cause me to alienate female Less Wrongers.

RHollerith 20 Jul 2009 10:37 UTC
9 points
on: Sayeth the Girl
When Alicorn wrote, “some people seem to earnestly care about the problem”, she accompanied it with a link to a comment made by me, in which I said that “I want to increase the female: male ratio [here]. So if you ever see me using language that objectifies women or that alienates you, please let me know.”

Let me clarify that although I want to hear Alicorn’s objections to my statements about women (especially since she is better than most feminists at explaining the grounds for her objections) I might not be able to cater to all her objections.

For example, most existential-risks activists (scientists doing networking and research about risks like unFriendly AI) are male, and I plan a top-level post to assert that not having reliable access to sex with the kind of sexual partners who can most improve the life of an existential-risks activist should be considered a large disability in a male prospective existential-risks activist—in the same way that, e.g., an inability to stop rationalizing one’s own personal agenda should be considered a large disability.

Note that recruiting existential-risks activists (though he did not use that exact phrase) is one of the stated goals in Eliezer’s creating this web site.

Since a large fraction of the young men who have many of the other qualifications for existential-risks activism (such as extremely good mastery of math) do not currently have the knowledge necessary to obtain reliable access to sex with the kind of partners who can most improve their lives, I have a strong interest in trying to convey knowledge about it to them (because doing so decreases existential risk according to my current models of male psychology) and it is possible that despite persistent strenuous effort on my part, I will not be able to do a lot of that without alienating Alicorn and other feminists.

Maybe the correct course is for me to start another site where male prospective existential-risks activists can acquire this sort of knowledge, but sex is such a large part of life that it seems overly limiting for the 90 or 95% or so of the participants on this site who are heterosexual men to refrain from discussing how to identify the prospective sexual partners who can most improve their lives and how to increase one’s sexual chances with those prospective partners.

RHollerith 20 Jul 2009 21:33 UTC
1 point
in reply to: nerzhin’s comment on: Sayeth the Girl

Since a large fraction of the young men who have many of the other qualifications for existential-risks activism [...] do not currently have the knowledge necessary to obtain reliable access to sex [...], I have a strong interest in trying to convey knowledge about it to them

You may think this is a great contribution you can make, but it’s probably simpler and more effective to donate money.

OK, nerzhin, I’ll bite: donate money to whom?