A physical sensation entangled with an interpretation.
romeostevensit
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Extracurricular events around conferences seem underrated as a differentiating factor for scene formation.
Rambling/riffing: Boundaries typically need holes in order to be useful. Depending on the level of abstraction, different things can be thought of as holes. One way to think of a boundary is a place where a rule is enforced consistently, and this probably involves pushing what would be a continuous condition into a condition with a few semi discrete modes (in the simplest case enforcing a bimodal distribution of outcomes). In practice, living systems seem to have settled on stacking a bunch of one dimensional gate keepers together as presumably the modularity of such a thing was easier to discover in the search space than things with higher path dependencies due to entangled condition measurement. This highlights the similarity between boolean circuit analysis and a biological boundary. In a boolean circuit, the configurations of ‘cheap’ energy flows/gradients can be optimized for benefit, while the walls to the vast alternative space of other configurations can be artificially steepened/shored up (see: mitigation efforts to prevent electron tunneling in semiconductors).
Who has a life I would want? What proxy measures are least goodharted? Where can I find them and how can I learn from them?
Where can I live that would have the highest quality of life? What data can I gather beyond summary statistics? How are the summary statistics biased?
How can I save money for the future given high uncertainty about socio-political volatility over the next 40 years?
How can I find good data about the vast work life balance deltas between people, sometimes even in the same field?
What sort of people should I pursue for friendships and romance? What factors predict the things I care about in relationship?
Should I consider moving or making other large scale lifestyle adjustments for consideration X? Where is predictive accuracy good and bad here?
Will my preferences change in any easy to predict ways given certain things happening? Can I reach reflective equilibrium faster?
How malleable are my own preferences and values? Where does this warrant caution and opportunity?
I don’t see if this is addressed, but the way mutual kompramat works is that both parties are strongly incentivized to neutralize the other’s kompramat on them, and only then move in for the kill. The random timing of his arrest in the conspiracy scenario is that it’s when they happened to neutralize his dead man’s switch.
Many proposals seem doomed to me because they involve one or multiple steps where they assume a representation, then try to point to robust relations in the representation and hope they’ll hold in the territory. This wouldn’t be so bad on its own but when pointed to it seems like handwaving happens rather than something more like conceptual engineering. I am relatively more hopeful about John’s approach as being one that doesn’t fail to halt and catch fire at these underspecified steps in other plans. In other areas like math and physics we try to get the representation to fall out of the model by sufficiently constraining the model. I would prefer to try to pin down a doomed model than stay in hand wave land because at least in the process of pinning down the doomed model you might get reusable pieces for an eventual non doomed model. Was happy about eg quantilizers for basically the same reason.
I think Metaphors We Live By is an attempt to traverse a certain part of pattern space.
I think the part of being a Boy Scout where you are an older teen and expected to look after the younger children in the troop had some of this effect on me. I am bummed that Boy Scouts has collapsed for poor leadership reasons.
After playing 10k hours of video games...I do think fake cultivation and fake achievements are a substantial danger.
Eg “requires skill and discipline”
No, it is not only designed to be beaten (by children), but designed to tick an artificially addictive skill curve as optimally as possible.
My abandoned wiki for capturing concepts, mental moves, and patterns. The process of making the lists was much more valuable than documenting them, as it turned out, because the mental organization that happened as a result, i.e. konmarie also works inside your head
https://conceptspace.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Lists_of_Concepts
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation. Some lead lives of loud desperation.
reproduce ability helps with the critical path but not necessarily with all the thrown out side data in cases where it turns out that auxiliary hypotheses were also of interest.
Not type tracking seems to be the thing that makes people susceptible to bad philosophical intuition pumps. In particular, that the referent of a token shifts between a proposition being used at different points in the problem.
Science resists surveillance (dramatically more detailed record keeping) because real science is embarrassing.
I believe many people interpret claims that they might be causing harm as a social attack and not about causal reality.
Currently the burden of proof is on those who claim danger, while we would prefer the burden of proof to be on those who claim safety. Burden of proof moves are regulated by tribal circuitry IME.
Disagree with the framing metaphor being one of binary decisions that lead to crashes when made wrong. We intentionally design our systems so that wide deviation along the relevant dimensions don’t cause problems. For example, joysticks allow much more precise steering than steering wheels. But in testing this was found to be undesirable, you don’t actually want precision at the expense of sensitivity. Joystick users were more precise but crashed more because it was easier to accidentally give an extreme input.
If you do AI research competently you’ll start quickly noticing that a lot of research is dual use, with uncertainty about how much your work would contribute to safety vs capability gain. Thus, the virtue of silence.
I find I have to caveat somewhat when I recommend Sarno to people because he makes the same mistakes as the early somatic people he talks extensively about makes in that he denigrates other methods or the idea that injuries could be structural way too harshly instead of a more measured approach that things can be a combination of factors including the vasoconstriciton and that it is incredibly helpful to separate out these factors for separate treatment.
what kind of a “theory of change”
Every org has a tacit theory of change implied by what they are doing, some also have an explicit one (eg poor to middling examples: business consulting orgs). Sometimes the tacit one lines up with the explicit one, sometimes not. I think having an explicit one is what allows you to reason about and iterate towards one that is functional. I don’t know the specific theory of change that would be a good fit for what CFAR was trying to do, I was, at the time, bouncing off the lack of any explicit one and some felt sense of resistance towards moving in the direction of having one in 1 on 1 conversations. I think I was expecting clearer thoughts since I believed that CFAR was in the business of investigating effect sizes of various theories of change related to diagnosing and then unblocking people who could work on x-risk.
Weirdly, we encountered “behaviors consistent with wanting fancy indirect excuses to not change” less than I might’ve expected, though still some.
This gets much stronger once you get big effect sizes that touch on core ways of navigating the world someone holds.
Agreed that fake dealbreakers are a bad plan. Ignoring real dealbreakers (long term plans around family and finances) is also a bad plan.