Rossin

Karma: 166

Rossin 29 Oct 2017 2:31 UTC
9 points
on: Inadequacy and Modesty
I think the example with the lightbulbs and SAD is very important because it illustrates well that in areas that humanity is not prioritizing especially, one is much more justified in expecting civilizational inadequacy.
I think a large portion of the judgment of whether one should expect that inadequacy should be a function of how much work and money is being spent on a particular subject.

Rossin 19 Apr 2022 19:13 UTC
7 points
on: Fixed points and free will
I feel like a lot of the angst about free will boils down to conflicting intuitions.
1. It seems like we live in a universe of cause and effect, thus all my actions/choices are caused by past events.
2. It feels like I get to actually make choices, so 1. obviously can’t be right.
The way to reconcile these intuitions is to recognize that yes, all the decisions you make are in a sense predetermined, but a lot of what is determining those decisions is who you are and what sort of thing you would do in a particular circumstance. You are making decisions, that experience is not invalidated by a fully deterministic universe. It’s just that you are who you are and you’ll make the decision that you would make.

Rossin 24 Sep 2017 4:14 UTC
5 points
on: Goodhart’s Imperius
This seems largely correct to me, although I think hyperbolic discounting of rewards/punishments over time may be less pronounced in human conditioning as compared to animals being conditioned by humans. Humans can think “I’m now rewarding myself for Action A I took earlier” or “I’m being punished for Action B” which can seems, at least in my experience, to decrease the effect of the temporal distance whereas animals seem less able to conceptualize the connection over time. Because of this difference, I think the temporal difference of reward/punishment is less important in people for conditioning as long as the individual is mentally associating the stimulus with the action, although it is still significant.
Also what’s the name of the paper for the monkeys and juice study? I’d like to look at it because the result did surprise me.

Rossin 7 Apr 2022 23:21 UTC
4 points
on: What I Was Thinking About Before Alignment
I’m not sure the problem in biology is decoding. At least not in the same sense it is with neural networks. I see the main difficulty in biology more one of mechanistic inference where a major roadblock may be getting better measurements of what is going on in cells over time rather some algorithm that’s just going to be able to overcome the fact that you’re getting both very high levels of molecular noise in biological data and single snapshots in time that are difficult to place in context. With a neural network you have the parameters and it seems reasonable to say you just need some math to make it more interpretable.

Whereas in biology I think we likely need both better measurements and better tools. I’m not sure the same tools would be particularly applicable to the ai interpretability problem either.

If, for example, I managed to create mathematical tools to reliably learn mechanistic dependencies between proteins and/or genes from high dimensional biological data sets, it’s not clear to me that would be easily applicable to extracting bayes nets from large neural networks.

I’m coming at this from a comp bio angle so it’s possible I’m just not seeing the connections well, having not worked in both fields.

Rossin 28 Apr 2021 19:01 UTC
4 points
in reply to: joshuatanderson’s comment on: Let’s double crux theism
In your opinion, would a resurrection/afterlife change this equation at all?
Yes, an afterlife transforms death (at least relatively low-pain deaths) into something that’s really not that bad. It’s sad in the sense you won’t see a person for a while, but that’s not remotely on the level of a person being totally obliterated, which is my current interpretation of death on the basis that I see no compelling evidence for an afterlife. Considering that one’s mental processes continuing after the brain ceases to function would rely on some mechanism unknown to our current understanding of reality, I would want considerable evidence to consider an afterlife plausible.
To answer your thought experiment—it depends. For myself, almost certainly. Some friends and family I have discussed cryonics with have expressed little to no interest in living beyond the “normal” biological amount of time. I think they are misguided, but I would not presume to choose this for them. Those who have expressed interest in cryonics I would probably sign up. However, I think your analogy may break down in that it seems an omnipotent god should not need immense suffering to bring people to an afterlife. I don’t think a god need prevent all suffering to be good or benevolent, but I think there is a level of unjust suffering a good god would not allow.

Rossin 26 Jan 2021 23:30 UTC
4 points
on: Hammers and Nails
Favorite technique: Argue with yourself about your conclusions.
By which I mean if I have any reasonable doubt about some idea, belief, or plan I split my mind into two debaters who take opposite sides of the issue, each of which wants to win and I use my natural competitiveness to drive insight into an issue.
I think the accustomed use of this would be investigating my deeply held beliefs and trying to get to their real weak points, but it is also useful for:
1. Examining my favored explanation of a set of data
2. Figuring out whether I need to change the way I’m presenting a set of data after I have already sunk costs into making the visualizations
3. Understanding my partner’s perspective after an argument.
4. Preparing for expected real life arguments
5. Force myself to understand an issue better, even when I don’t expect I will change my mind about it.
6. Questioning whether the way I acted in a situation was acceptable.
7. An exercise in analytic thinking.
8. Evaluating two plausible arguments I’ve heard but don’t have any particularly strong feelings on
9. Deciding whether to make a purchase
10. Comparing two alternative plans

Rossin 27 Jun 2022 20:28 UTC
3 points
0
on: Announcing the Inverse Scaling Prize ($250k Prize Pool)
Would the ability to deceive humans when specifically prompted to do so be considered an example? I would think that large LMs get better at devising false stories about the real world that people could not distinguish from true stories.

Rossin 12 Apr 2022 23:42 UTC
3 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: The Efficient LessWrong Hypothesis—Stock Investing Competition
I of course don’t have insider information. My stance is something close to Buffett’s advice “be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful”. I interpret that as basically that markets tend to be overly reactionary and if you go by fundamentals representing the value of a stock you can potentially outperform the market in the long run. To your questions, yes disaster may really occur, but my opinion is that these risks are not sufficient to pass up the value here. I’ll also note that Charlie munger has been acquiring a substantial stake in BABA, which makes me more confident in its value at its current price.

Rossin 12 Apr 2022 20:35 UTC
3 points
on: Genetic Enhancement: a Strategy for Long(ish) AGI Timeline Worlds
Current bioethics norms will strongly condemn this sort of research, which may make it challenging to pursue in the nearish term. The consensus is strongly against, which will make acquiring funding difficult and any human CRISPR editing is completely off the table for now. For example, He Jiankui CRISPR edited some babies in China to make them less susceptible to HIV and went to prison for it.

Rossin 17 Feb 2021 17:05 UTC
3 points
on: Silence
I think the metaphor of “fast-forwarding” is a very useful way to view a lot of my behavior. Having thought about this for a while though, I’m not sure fast-forwarding is always a bad thing. I find it can be mentally rejuvenating in a way that introspection is not (e.g. if I’ve been working for a long period and my brain is getting tired I can often quickly replenish my mental resources by watching a short video or reading a chapter of a fantasy novel after which I’m able to begin working again, whereas I find sitting and reflecting to still require some mental energy).
Of course, this is an important habit to keep an eye on. I sometimes find myself almost unconsciously opening youtube when I don’t actually need a break which I’ve been trying to get myself to stop doing.

Rossin 7 Jun 2019 0:08 UTC
3 points
on: Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success
I think a very interesting aspect of this idea is that it explains why it can be so hard to come up with truly original ideas, while it is much easier to copy or slightly tweak the ideas of other people. Slight tweaks were probably less likely to get you killed, whereas doing something completely novel could be very dangerous. And while it might have a huge payoff, everyone else in the group could then copy you (due to imitation being our greatest strength as a species) so the original idea creator would not have gained much of a comparative advantage in most cases.

Rossin 15 Nov 2018 1:08 UTC
3 points
on: Stoicism: Cautionary Advice
I think these are very important points. I have noticed some issues with having the right responses for social situations (especially laughing when it’s not entirely appropriate), which is something I’ve been working on remedying by paying closer attention to when people expect a serious reaction.
The issue of ignoring problems also seems like something to look out for. Just because something does not make you feel bad should not mean you fail to learn from it. I think there is a fine balance between learning from mistakes and dwelling on them, which is another, related skill.
Losing risk aversion and motivation seem unlikely to be problems for me personally, as what you’re calling the stoic mindset seems to push those towards a more ideal spot from my natural inclinations. However, I suspect this advice may be critical for others, though they would never have occurred to me as associated problems. This is why I always feel hesitant to give self-help advice.

Rossin 24 Oct 2017 20:08 UTC
3 points
on: A Thousand “Heads” In A Row
Great sequence, I’ve really enjoyed it.
And I definitely agree with this view of rationality, I think the idea of incremental successes enphasizes the need to track successes and failures over time so that you can see where you did well and where you did poorly and plan to make the coin come up heads more often in the future.

Rossin 17 Oct 2017 16:46 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Hazard’s comment on: The Balance Between Hard Work and Exhaustion
Yeah, I think the biggest problem for me was that I felt deficient for failing to live up to the standard I set for myself. I sort of shunted those emotions aside and I really fell out of a lot of habits of self-improvement and hard work for a time. So I would say the emotional fallout lead to the most damaging part (of losing good habits in the aftermath).
Thinking about tradeoffs in terms of tasks completed is a good idea as well, I’ll try doing that more explicitly.

Rossin 30 Sep 2017 20:07 UTC
3 points
on: Models of Models
I find myself doing this a great deal when deciding whether to criticize somebody. I model most people I know as not being able to productively use direct criticism. The criticism, however well meant it may be, will hurt their pride, and they will not change. Indeed, the attempt will probably create some bad feeling towards me. It is just better not to try to help them in such a direct way. There are more tactful ways of getting across the same point, but they are often more difficult and not always practical in every situation.
The people I do directly criticize are generally the people I respect the most, because I expect that it will actually be useful to them because they will be able to overcome the impulse to become defensive and actually consider the critique.
I suppose your question indicates that I should try criticizing people more often, as I have gotten into the habit of presuming that people will be unable to productively receive criticism. But, at the same time, criticism is quite socially risky and I am quite confident that the vast majority of people will not handle it well.

Rossin 27 Sep 2017 21:48 UTC
3 points
in reply to: moridinamael’s comment on: “Focusing,” for skeptics.
In the book Gendlin says that the steps are really just to help people learn, they aren’t at all necessary to the process, so I think Gendlin would himself agree with that.

Rossin 24 Sep 2017 2:58 UTC
3 points
on: Nobody does the thing that they are supposedly doing
This reminds me of Donald Kinder’s research that shows people do not vote primarily on self-interest as one might naively expect. It seems that people tend to ask instead “What would someone like me do?” when they vote, with this question likely occurring implicitly.

Rossin 16 Jun 2022 19:51 UTC
2 points
on: On A List of Lethalities
On the idea of “we can’t just choose not to build AGI”. It seems like much of the concern here is predicated on the idea that so many actors are not taking safety seriously, so someone will inevitably build AGI when the technology has advanced sufficiently.
I wonder if struggles with AIs that are strong enough to cause a disaster but not strong enough to win instantly may change this perception? I can imagine there being very little gap if any between those two types of AI if there is a hard takeoff, but to me it seems quite possible for there be some time at that stage. Some sort of small/moderate disaster with a less powerful AI might get all the relevant players to realize the danger. At that point, humans have done reasonably well at not doing things that seem very likely to destroy the world immediately (e.g. nuclear war).
Though we’ve been less good at putting good safeguards in place to prevent it from happening. And even if all groups that could create AI agree to stop, eventually someone will think they know how to do it. And we still only get the one chance.
All that is to say I don’t think it’s implausible that we’ll be able to coordinate well enough to buy more time, though it’s unclear whether that will do much to avoiding eventual doom.

Rossin 13 Apr 2022 14:05 UTC
2 points
in reply to: hold_my_fish’s comment on: Genetic Enhancement: a Strategy for Long(ish) AGI Timeline Worlds
That’s true, there was a huge amount of outrage even before those details came out however.

Rossin 12 Apr 2022 20:50 UTC
2 points
on: The Efficient LessWrong Hypothesis—Stock Investing Competition
Alibaba (BABA) - the stock price has been pulled down by fear about regulation, delisting, and most recently instability in China as it’s zero covid policy fails. However, as far as I can tell, the price is insanely low for the amount of revenue Alibaba generates and the market share that it holds in China.