It seems like the source of your disagreement is that you do not believe turkeys actually suffer (as you write “suffer” in scare quotes), while the OP clearly believes they do. I think this question needs to be settled first before we decide which emotional reactions are reasonable. (I myself have no idea what the answer is.)
seed
[Question] Is MIRI actually hiring and does Buck Shlegeris still work for you?
>> Sometimes I try to tell the people what I can see, and that doesn’t always go well. I’m not sure why.
Can you describe a concrete example? Without looking at a few examples, it is hard to tell if a “context-free integrity” fallacy is to blame, or you are just making bad arguments, or something.
Well, first of all, I’d take money from the poor and give it to the military. What? It doesn’t matter how “benevolent” I am, it’s just what I have to do to stay in power.
Seriously, if you’re legitimately concerned for the public good, don’t become a dictator. Become an entrepreneur or a scientist.
I believe there is nothing wrong or irrational about taking collective action or calling to it. On the contrary, a culture that prohibited collective action has failed at instrumental rationality and is about to be conquered by a culture that didn’t. So I am strongly opposed to your first suggested rule.
Yes, I believe we shouldn’t get involved in politics if it endangers alignment research efforts or otherwise hurts the community for little gain. But we should take collective actions which carry negligible risks and huge expected benefits. Rationality is about winning. Being divided makes us weak and less likely to win. Let’s not do this.
I’m so confused. How did Luna survive the Killing Curse?
Not to mention that the default result of rebellion is failure. (Figure from https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-future-of-nonviolent-resistance-2/)
OP doesn’t claim that dictators are unchecked in their power, he jokingly claims that dictators and monarchs inevitably end up overthrown. Which is, of course, false: there were ~55 authoritarian leaders in the world in 2015, and 11 of them were 69 years old or older, on their way to die of old age. Dictator’s handbook has quite a few examples of dictators ruling until their natural death, too.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/09/10/when-dictators-die/
I don’t think what you are doing should be called a shittest, since arguing isn’t shitty behaviour. It’s just a regular test, which doesn’t seem objectionable.
Your central examples of shittesting (giving a partner an unreasonable task to see if they do it, insulting a suitor, or behaving in a particularly unpleasant way to test for loyalty) all involve bad behaviour, and I don’t think men should do more of it. If someone acted that way towards me, I’d probably just walk away to find a more pleasant partner, especially if I realised they hurt me on purpose to “test” me.
Babble challenge: 50 ways to stop torture
I signed the petition on the assumption that it was all just a misunderstanding, but I’m willing to fight dirty if they ignore the petition and publish the name anyway.
>> High decouplers will notice that, holding preferences constant, offering people an additional choice cannot make them worse off. People will only take the choice if its better than any of their current options.
This is demonstrably untrue in cases of suicide. 70% of people who survive a suicide attempt do not attempt it again, so their decision to try is probably a bout of temporary madness / irrationality, and not an expression of stable well-considered preference for death over life.
This was very funny and the best HPMOR continuation I’ve read so far.
Eliezer mentioned on twitter that MIRI is looking for Haskell programmers. Why is there no mention of Haskell on the vacancy page?
I agree that this statement could be understood this way, and I don’t find your interpretation objectionable. It also could be understood to mean that Russian POWs say what they say to stop torture, there is no disclaimer against this interpretation. I should probably have interpreted everything in the most charitable way possible, if it was one thing. I am pushing back because several things made me feel paranoid.
Advising Ukrainans to flee while banning commenters from giving any advice to Western powers or discussing morality and justice seemed not neutral. (Russian people remaining nonviolent is not in Ukrainians’ interest either.) Comparing Putin’s situation to a trolley problem frames him as someone selflessly trying to do what’s best for others. I am not saying that these posts are pretending to objectivity while secretly being kremlin propaganda, it just looks to me like lsusr is trying to be neutral and falling short.
Ok, so LLMs don’t give an advantage in bioterrorism planning to a team of RAND researchers. Does it mean they don’t give an advantage to actual terrorists, who are notoriously incompetent? https://gwern.net/terrorism-is-not-effective#sn17
If you are leaving relatives or friends behind, consider developing some kind of code language, because people in Russia might be afraid to tell you their real opinions over the phone in plain speech.
Great observation! I was struggling with the same issue when I moved from studying math to graduate ML research. Depth-first search is the right approach to reading a math textbook. Say, you started to learn homology theory and realized you don’t know what’s an Abelian group. You should stop and go read about Abelian groups, or you won’t understand what comes next.
However, the same approach was getting me in trouble when trying to understand state-of-the-art in voice processing. I would start reading an article in the morning, and by the evening I’d finish no articles and find myself stuck in the middle of a textbook reading about some 50 years outdated method which wasn’t relevant to modern research. So, I worked out that the effective approach to this task is breadth-first search: read the article from beginning to end, write down all unknown terms, go on to look up the most important one.
I think another reason why people might default to depth-first search is that BFS requires to store a list of unexplored nodes in memory and people don’t have a lot working memory. So a note-taking system like Zettelkasten really helps with applying this approach more broadly in one’s life.
How come MIRI never hired a Living Library in 3 years?
Does it make sense to apply if I’m Russian? What do you think is the chance of Trump allowing H1B visas next year? Will you even consider foreign applicants? Do you provide green cards?