If they can find a Schelling codebook they might be able to get the perfect 5 ascii chars for each person. But I’m not sure one exists. (perhaps birth time? encoded how?)
Satya Benson
Karma: 291
A fun question is to think about what is the shortest string you can think of that would identify you. For me it’s the seven characters ‘satchlj’.
Xi and Ye have optimal names for this.
Upper bound for Americans might be USXXX-XX-XXXX
Suppose two beings are omniscient about Earth but not each other. One wants to point out one specific living human being on this planet to the other.
They must do this in the minimum number of ASCII characters such that they can be quite confident the other being will know exactly who they are referencing.
No previous common knowledge except common knowledge of the planet Earth and everything that can be logically deduced from that common knowledge.
Now suppose you pick a given person. How would you evaluate whether a proposed string has this property?
If they had a pre-agreed codebook, you’d need roughly log₂(8×10⁹) ≈ 33 bits ≈ 5 ASCII characters to index any human. If they are logically omniscient and omniscient about Earth, but do not have a pre-agreed codebook, how good can they get at minimax? How close to five chars?
Modeling a Constant-Compute Automated AI R&D Process
Egg freezing is great, and also I think many people should just have kids at a young age instead if able.
I worry that some people who would be very happy having children when they are young choose not to simply because it is not what their peers are doing / it’s not seen as normal, rather than because of the genuine tradeoffs with career etc (which are less significant than they often seem!)
Thank you—this matches my current thinking
To elaborate a bit (but you should go read the posts!) the classic Most Forbidden Technique scenario goes like this: you detect “bad thoughts” in the CoT/activations, you penalize them, and the model learns to have the same bad thoughts in ways your detector can’t see.
Goodfire seems to be doing something structurally different, by decomposing the gradient into semantic components and choosing which components to apply. Does that really make the the difference, thought? I don’t know!
[Question] Goodfire and Training on Interpretability
People who meditate a lot often drop their sense of agency and it does come with a layer of suffering being dropped, but the baseline experience remains.
In my experience, the conscious experience of pain changes quite dramatically when the aversion is properly dropped. So dramatically I wouldn’t know that the two experiences are at all related if I encountered them separately.
If the rules for phenomenal consciousness follow necessarily from physical laws then the phenomenal bridge should not be specified as part of the generating string.
I think your description of phenomenal consciousness as “a problem of mapping between our first-person perspectives (our direct experience) and a shared third-person perspective (the shared understanding of an objective world)” is absolutely correct; and I think that once a particular structure is specified from the outside (third-person), what it looks like from the inside (first-person) follows by necessity.
Demonstrating that first-person experience follows by necessity from the third-person view to be true and clearly showing how is one of my primary fantasy-ambitions, and I don’t claim to know that it is true, but I think it should be true.
I think that in philosophy in general and metaethics in particular, the idea that since many people disagree one should not be confident in one’s ideas is wrong.
I’ll somewhat carefully spell out why I think this; a lot of this reasoning is obvious, but the core claim is that the intuitions people use in philosophy in order to ground their arguments are often wrong in predictable ways.
“One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens” is usually what is at the core of ongoing philosophical disagreements. Suppose is universally agreed, is somewhat intuitive to everyone but the degree to which that intuition is compelling varies, and is somewhat unintuitive to everyone but the degree to which that intuition is compelling varies.
Then if anyone is to take a side on whether is true or is false, they must decide which bullet is worse to bite.
Debate and thought experiments can attempt to present either bullet in a more appealing way, but in the end both propositions are confidently found unacceptable to at least some people.
Now it is your job, observing this situation, to decide whether to be very uncertain about which bullet should be bitten, or to choose one to bite. How should you do it?
The answer is that you should ask how it came to be that there is a difference in the intuitions of people who believe is true and those who say is false. If you can understand the causes of those different intuitions, then you may be able decide which (if any) of them to be trusted.
Consider metaethics. The problems of mind-independence, moral ontology, normativity, internalism vs. externalism, etc. can all be framed in this way, and very roughly for the sake of this comment only (hold your objections since I would treat this more carefully in a post), collapsed into the same problem:
A. All facts are ultimately natural or descriptive.
B. Nothing is really right or wrong, better or worse, independent of human attitudes or conventions.
Again avoiding a careful philosophical treatment which we don’t have time for, I will just flag that the intuition behind a philosopher’s objection to is highly suspect due to the fact that they are the product of a particular human social structure which rewards strong beliefs about right and wrong.
I will admit that this explanation for objections to is not fully satisfying to me, although it is conceivable that it should be. There may be some other explanations for the objection—if anyone has ideas, I’d love to hear them.
But it is hard for me to imagine a pathway by which the intuition that is false comes about as a result of actually being false, although positing intelligent design might do the trick.
The hyphenated version isn’t working for me
I have a nine month old son and in no way feel like everything else is getting thrown under the bus (or that my ambition has decreased as a result).
I do obviously care about keeping my son alive and well, and that does require some degree of compromise with my other goals, but I haven’t experienced caring less about my other goals than I did previously.
Also the reasons I care about him have stayed pretty constant both before and after he was actually born, I don’t think oxytocin is noticeably influencing how I feel my goals (my guess is it’s just causing my feelings of affection towards him in small scale interactions).
Thank you for not deleting
I grew up on a farm. We had (my parents still have) dairy goats, chickens for meat, and rabbits for meat (we also killed the male goats and some of the females which we couldn’t keep for dairy). The animals weren’t for the business (the only thing we sold was low bush blueberries), they were just for my family, and by raising them we didn’t need to buy meat or dairy elsewhere.
I took care of the animals. I got to see how they lived and how they died, see them when they were in states of joy and of suffering. I also had a hand in killing them, especially the chickens.
I am very grateful that I was able to experience the reality of this firsthand. It gave me a good sense of what it means to eat meat.
I think that most people in my wealthy western society don’t share the same experiences I do. Their primary experiences with domesticated animals are either with house pets, through digital media, or as an occasional visitor to farms for sightseeing purposes. A small percentage of real animal enthusiasts might work at an animal shelter or as a veterinarian, still mostly interacting with pets.
That leaves most people’s moral intuitions extremely uncalibrated when it comes to eating meat. They know animals are adorable, nice to pet. They have emotional connections with their pets and feel that their pets dying would be a horrible tragedy. They know that cows and pigs and chickens aren’t so different from their pets, just less practical to live with indoors.
And they know that most meat comes from factory farms where animals live in horrible conditions and are suffering intensely for most of the time of their existence.
Most people, then, try to forget about the facts of where their meat comes from, or suppress whatever feelings they have about it, so that they can bear to go on doing what everyone else does and eating meat which tastes good. Some other people, less willing to selectively ignore parts of reality, decide they don’t want to eat meat anymore, and in fact they are willing to put some resources into trying to help some of the poor suffering animals.
Most people reach whatever behavior they wind up with regarding meat without firsthand knowledge of what it feels like to raise and kill an animal for food.
I don’t think there’s a way, at least not in this comment, to explain why I feel the way I do. But I do think that my feeling is shared by the vast majority of humans throughout history, and insofar as that is true, I am describing as real of a moral truth as any another.
Raising animals for meat can be good for those animals. They can have joyful lives. Killing them is sad. It’s something worth crying about sometimes. But it’s okay. Eventually, their time to live comes to an end, and their bodies provide the sustenance for others to go on living.
There’s no reason why someone who does not want to kill animals for food is wrong, if they do not feel the way I do. But what I am trying to drive home with this comment is that many people can feel morally good about eating meat without hiding from the reality of it one bit, and that I believe I am more directly familiar with the reality of eating meat than most people who choose to become vegan.
Now I’m going to apply the moral belief that killing animals for meat can be okay to thinking about the top level post (points are out of order).
Question: If you hate factory farming, should you stop eating meat?
Factory farming: OP thinks humanity will have to stop eating animal products to meaningfully halt factory farming. This is a major crux. I don’t believe this is true, although I do agree we will have to reduce the quantity of consumption. Short argument for why OP is wrong is that there are lots of really great agricultural practices that could scale but have never caught on at scale due to financial incentives.
Health: OP says even if being vegan make you less healthy than you would otherwise be, you can be vegan and be healthy enough. You can really get into the weeds here, but since I believe killing animals for meat is good as long as they live good lives, there’s no reason not to eat meat to improve your health if you can source it well.
Value drift: I think about this the opposite way. I think 84% of vegans quitting is evidence that being vegan is hard. Improving access to meat from good sources might be a much more effective way to reduce animal suffering than trying to convince more people to first become vegan and then stay vegan.
Price opportunity cost: If you want to forgo the most expensive parts of your diet in order to be able to donate more money in high leverage ways, by all means do so. Just note that you can apply this logic to all parts of your life, and that by buying ethically sourced meat you are creating demand for the thing you hope to increase access to.
Noticing this only works as an example if the two signals are (approximately) the same partition of , i.e. (temperatures at which the mirror fogs) is approximately the same as (temperatures at which you have goosebumps).
This was all clear to me, but only from reading the text; my comment is just to say that the graphical statement doesn’t show being a mediator in the premises, so in isolation it gives the wrong idea; this led to a little confusion.
To be clear, I am talking about the reverse direction, as pictured here:I understand that you have already set up as a mediator immediately above the image. Your text is perfectly clear:
In other words, we want to show: if Alice’ latent satisfies Mediation, and for any latent Bob could choose (i.e. any other mediator) we have , then Alice’ latent must be natural.
Graphical statement of Theorem 2
I find this picture pretty misleading, because it seems to say that if is determined by , then is a mediator, when really this is false, and it’s stated explicitly in the text above that Alice’s latent satisfying mediation is assumed.
From the previous post:
I think a core factor here is something like ambition or growth mindset. When I have shortcomings, I view them as shortcomings to be fixed or at least mitigated, not as part of my identity or as a subject for sympathy. On the positive side, I have goals and am constantly growing to better achieve them.
There is a tradeoff between this ambition and feeling at ease in the moment. Most people could probably use more ambition/agency, but I don’t think it’s clearly worse/worthy of disgust that many people don’t care about growth enough to expend more than a certain amount effort towards it.
I’d be interested to know more about why you think you came to have relatively strong motivation towards achieving goals and whether you think that’s ideal (even for people who value ease more than you do?).
I don’t think this would be true because the string chooser picks a string after they know which person they are trying to point to
So, given that they need to point to Wei Yi, they might choose to use the name instead of the Schelling codebook if the Schelling codebook has a lower success probability than the name (even if the Schelling point is quite unique!). This is not a repeated game.
It’s hard to say what a UDT agent would do, though. It could go either way.