To what extent were AI tools used in writing this text? I sense the dead hand of ChatGPT.
Richard_Kennaway
Karma: 5,323
Agreed.
“As confident as we can be about any policy change” amounts to not very confident, especially so for making policy for 50 years hence.
I’m going by the summary by jefftk that I linked to. Having glanced at the material it’s based on, and your links, I am not inclined to root through it all to make a more considered assessment. I suspect I would only end up painting a similar picture with a finer brush. Their methods of getting to the strange places they end up already appear to require more of my attention to understand than I am willing to spend on the issue.
On a scale of 100,000 years, it pretty much is binary. Mathematics will not change; basic physical law also (although some of it may come to be seen as limiting cases of some more general ideas); little else can be counted on on that timescale. This feels somewhat analogous.
In the short term, of course things can be a lot more variable.
your credence in a valid logical argument’s conclusion must be at least as high as your credence in its assumptions. (It’s higher because, of course, there can be other sound logical arguments that support your conclusion.)
The longer the chain of reasoning built on uncertain assumptions, the further it may drift from reality.
Just like life, then!
My thinking about this (3 minute read) is that EA will be deliberately hijacked by an external organization or force
The recent examples linked from LW on the EA forum of (my personal judgement) batshit craziness about animal welfare (e.g. 12 (ETA: 14) bees are worth 1 human) has had me wondering about entryism by batshit crazy animal rights folks.
ETA: What’s Ziz up to these days?
The poll did not ask what virtue Petrov most displayed. It asked what virtue you think is most important.
We can be confident of mathematics because mathematics is precise and explicit, and exists independently of space, time, and people. Its truths are eternal and we can become arbitrarily certain of them.
This is not true of anything else.
The pure mathematics of voting systems, being mathematics, exists likewise, but its application to the physical world, like all applied mathematics, is contingent on the real world conforming to its ontology and its axioms.
“Is there any chance that replacing the current presidential voting system with any of the most promising current alternatives will be a mistake in 100,000 years?”
Even given a flourishing future for humanity, it seems vanishingly unlikely that the Presidency or the US will even exist in 100,000 years, or that anyone by then will care much what they were. I would not even bet on there being anything resembling a presidency or a political state after that passage of time, or on any positive conjecture about how our descendants would be living.
There is a concept in Japanese, sessa takuma (切磋琢磨), which lives in the same space as these, meaning “joyfully competitive striving for a common purpose”, or as Wiktionary puts it:
applying oneself and studying hard to cultivate oneself
friendly competition, improving oneself by learning from others
It is often used of the situation of people training at a martial arts dojo, but would also apply to a band, a football team, a cycling club, an MMORPG guild, and so on. It could even apply to a workplace.
Sounds like evaporative cooling in reverse (although actually more in keeping with the literal meaning): the fieriest radicals boiling off to leave the more tepid behind.
Rule 0: Cultivate those virtues that will stand you in good stead when you are faced with an opportunity to not destroy the world.
Virtue A is the most important outcome, but B,C, and D are part of what it takes to achieve A.
I think it’s rather unfair to classify me as a confidently underinformed fanatic.
I’m sure you’re informed. :)
We just have to ensure the policies we propose are actually good … and have large barrier to reversal
How are you going to know that 100 (or even 50) years in advance of them ever being implemented? This looks to me like solving AGI alignment by saying “we just have to ensure the AGI actually does what we want and stop anyone turning it off.”
I’m taking the outside view here and observing that knowing how society should work and making everyone do that has always worked out badly before. What would be different this time?
I got the poll and voted, but not the follow-up, only “You [sic] choice has been made. It cannot be unmade.”
Motto: “Maximising utility isn’t everything, it’s the only thing!”
There is an ongoing Petrov Day poll. I don’t know if everyone on LW is being polled.
I’m not a legal expert, but I’m sure we’ve solved the problem of how to create a binding contract.
Laws are not contracts.
No contract has the power to bind anyone but its signatories. No-one but the signatories has any standing to enforce a contract. A contract has no binding force against the common will of its signatories to alter or dissolve it. In some places, a contract has no binding force beyond some limited interval after the death of its signatories.
Laws are passed by governments to impose obligations on the people. Laws have less power to bind the government itself, and almost no power to bind its successors. What laws one government can write, the next government can as easily erase.
If you disagree that these policies are actually beneficial in the long run, I’m sure you can think of policies that you like that have long-run benefits and short-run costs.
And other people will disagree with those. No policy can be known to have long-run benefits until it has actually had a long run.
There is no way to make laws for 100 years hence, because we do not know what the world will be like then. Some even expect a singularity before 2120. Could anyone in 1920 make laws for the 2020s? Any attempt from back then would be regarded as laughable today. Who can say, at last we know the truth of how people should behave, and all we have to do is force them to do it? Only fanatics who would destroy the world and call it peace.
I have to wonder if you are posting this here in order to play Alice to our Bobs, distanced by writing it as a parable.
Now that Covid is, for practical purposes, over[1], has anyone made a study of whether there has indeed been a ratchet effect, i.e. draconian enabling measures introduced to deal with Covid remaining on the books?
I don’t see it in the news without searching it out, I see hardly one in a thousand people wearing masks even in packed concert halls, and no-one seems to be dying of it who wouldn’t be just as vulnerable to flu.