Use the svgs here: https://www.lesswrong.com/w/lesswrong-reacts.
Shankar Sivarajan
Karma: 1,257
If you say “all persons” you have to define what a person is.
Part c) of your thought experiment makes this trivial: a “person” is anyone you could be swapped with.
A person with “depression, chronic pain, ennui or some other cognitive flaw” taking up some new religious ritual seems to me like a symptom of psychotic break, not the cause.
Two things I was not able to find a good replacement for in Linux when I was last using it a few years ago: Everything and AutoHotKey. Those are so good, and WSL perfectly adequate, that I’m now loath to switch away from Windows.
AHK_X11 is a fairly recent port of AHK for Linux that might be worth checking out; I haven’t used it, but if it’s half as good as the Windows version, it’ll be great. If nothing else, you might like vimium-everywhere, which that’ll let you run.
For Chrome, while Tridactyl might be more powerful, I’ve found Vimium sufficient.
I can’t tell you with certainty how the weights will move during the training process, but I can tell you where it’s going at a higher level.
Relevant xkcd: link.
See also: Hollywood accounting.
I think there’s a single framework that captures several of these ideas: the status quo is sticky, and it’s hard to steer out of, so if you think things are bad enough, you shake things up into a transient chaotic state and then as it settles down, you can guide the system into a state you like better. Different groups executing this strategy may seem aligned at the beginning, and their conflicting goals become apparent only after the status quo has been toppled. And it’s possible to lose badly enough in this second phase that you end up worse off than before, so that’s the gamble one takes when engaging in revolution instead of incrementalism.
if a great disaster (say, 3 Gorges Dam just spontaneously collapses) were to befall China tomorrow,
I agree with Adam Smith’s view expressed in The Theory of Moral Sentiments,
Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connection with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labors of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquility, as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger tomorrow, he would not sleep tonight; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.
simplified chart of human metabolism
That seems to have gotten compressed well past the point of legibility, but it looks like the Roche Biochemical Pathways poster by Gerhard Michal: link
It’s nice that Yudkowsky has already written fiction which shows the kind of world he advocates for: Cheliax from his Planecrash glowfic. Certainly it’s much “less effectively restrictive of practical freedoms” than Hell itself.
what makes this not straight up murder
Perhaps the same mysterious aspect of overwhelming state power that makes taxation not theft.
“Your enemies are saying X horrible shit” is possibly the most common form of slander on Twitter
Possibly, but it’s probably also simply true most of the time. Usually, you can simply quote tweet them (or post screenshots) saying the thing you’re accusing them of saying. Sure, sometimes, it’s missing relevant context, but that’s relatively rare: normally, your enemies really are saying the horrible things.
This argument works just as well for exponential decay: it’s “always the wrong model” because no decay lasts forever, eventually you’ll run out of atoms in your radioactive sample (or whatever else you’re modeling), and so some other curve that intercepts the y-axis in finite time is a better model because it gets the “basic shape” right and doesn’t make “an extremely obvious mistake when modeling reality.”
I think it undersells the hard work of the moderators behind the scenes to think that merely setting up the karma system reinforces the good worldview. See the Well-Kept Gardens post for the official stance of why keeping out unproductive distractions that disrupt the community is necessary.
you’ll just get less criticism not better criticism.
I believe this is simply false: instead of criticism like “Your idea is stupid and wrong,” you will get criticism like “you have failed to elaborate on this detail of your brilliant and insightful idea,” which is markedly better.
banning lab meat is completely rational for the meat-eater because if progress continues then animal meat will probably be banned before the quality/price of lab meat is superior
Vox has a post about this a little while ago, and presented what might be the best counterargument (emphasis mine): link
… But the notion that lab-grown meat could eventually lead to bans on factory-farmed animal products is less unhinged.
After all, progressives in some states and cities have banned plastic straws, despite the objective inferiority of paper ones. And the moral case for infinitesimally reducing plastic production isn’t anywhere near as strong as that for ending the mass torture of animals. So, you might reason, why wouldn’t the left forbid real hamburgers the second that a petri dish produces a pale facsimile of a quarter-pounder?
While not entirely groundless, this fear is nevertheless misguided.
Plastic straws are not as integral to American life as tasty meats. As noted above, roughly 95 percent of Americans eat meat. No municipal, state or federal government could ever end access to high-quality hot dogs, ribs, or chicken fingers and survive the next election.
(I think the argument is shit, but when the premise one is trying to defend is patently false, this might well be best one can do.)
James Madison’s Federalist #10 is a classic essay about this. He discusses the dangers of faction, “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community,” and how one might mitigate them.
the word “bodhi” has a fairly straightforward translation: it simply means “awakening” or “to wake up.”
I think this is misleading: it isn’t used in the everyday sense of “if you don’t wake up, you’ll be late for school,” (that’d be something like “Jagriti”) and is instead only used in the spiritual and philosophical sense.
contacting authorities if the user does something that Claude considers illegal,
It was my understanding that Anthropic presented that as a desired feature in keeping with their vision for how Claude should work, at least when read in the context of the rest of their marketing, instead of as a common flaw that they tried but were unable to fix.
It may be true that all cars sometimes fail to start, but if a car company advertised theirs as not starting if you’re parked at a meter that’s run out to ensure you get ticketed (very alignment, many safety), it’s reasonable to vilify them in particular.
Reminds me of the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.