stavros

Karma: 169

stavros 3 Apr 2022 15:48 UTC
16 points
on: 20 Modern Heresies
This was wonderful; the post that finally got me to create an account here. I got quite a few sensible chuckles and a few hearty laughs out of your list. I think we’ve been reading similar books recently (Graeber’s Dawn of Everything? :) )

My contribution is to remind the participants that a somewhat recurring theme (something of an original in western philosophy—i.e. Socrates) in history is of wise people enjoying themselves too much and getting murdered by the people who’d grown increasingly scared/estranged/horrified by them.

Heretical thinking is fun, but in the real world there are people who would harm you for exposing them to it.
Practice safe heresy kids :)

stavros 27 May 2022 6:40 UTC
1 point
on: [$20K in Prizes] AI Safety Arguments Competition
The more powerful a tool is, the more important it is that the tool behaves predictably.
A chainsaw that behaves unpredictably is very, very, dangerous.
AI is, conservatively, thousands of times more powerful than a chainsaw.
And unlike an unpredictable chainsaw, there is no guarantee we will be able to turn an unpredictable AI off and fix it or replace it.
It is plausible that the danger of failing to align AI safely—to make it predictable—is such that we only have one chance to get it right.
Finally, it is absurdly cheap to make massive progress in AI safety.

stavros 28 May 2022 11:07 UTC
9 points
on: Can growth continue?
I disagree, strongly. Not only do I believe this line of reasoning to be wrong, I believe it to be dangerously wrong. I believe downplaying and/or underestimating the role of energy in our economic system is part of why we find ourselves in the mess we’re in today.
To reference Nate Hagens (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xr9rIQxwj4)
We use the equivalent of 100 billion barrels of oil a year. Each barrel of oil can do the amount of work it would take 5 humans to do. There are 500 billion ‘ghost’ labourers in our society today.
(Back to me)
You cannot eat ideas. You cannot treat sewage with them. You cannot heat your home with them. You cannot build your home with them. You cannot travel across an ocean on them.
1000x0 is 0. Technology is a powerful multiplier, but 0 is 0.
You cannot build cold fusion power plants with ideas. You cannot conjure up the material resources or the skilled labour and energy inputs necessary to build them with ideas. (once again Nate Hagens—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0pt3ioQuNc)
.… aaaand then there’s the whole topic of renewables and the hidden costs and limitations thereof.
The only idea I have encountered that nullifies this reality is a superintelligent AI. The thing we’re all so scared of, but simultaneously the only technology powerful enough to both harvest and utilize energy on scales beyond human ability. And also powerful enough to coordinate human activity such that Jeavons Paradox doesn’t nullify the benefits (and, more generally, such that we don’t waste such an insane amount of energy on stupid things).
And finally, re population:
Demographics, read about them—https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40697556-the-human-tide
tl;dr Yes, Malthus was ‘wrong’. He was wrong because it turned out that women with access to education and opportunity choose to have less children (there are exceptions, but not too many). Technology/ideas didn’t save us from exponential population growth, it was a natural (i.e. not consciously considered, organized, enacted) change in behaviour.

stavros 5 Jun 2022 4:54 UTC
1 point
on: What do you do to deliberately practice?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhan_zhuang
Both meditation and exercise. A daily (1hr a day is the sweet spot), lifelong practice without end. Easy to learn, probably impossible for most of us to master but that’s okay because mastery isn’t the point.
The point is to strengthen and broaden the connection between mind and body, and the connections within your body itself—to relearn how to move with the whole body.
To learn how to be still, and yet relaxed instead of stiff.
The point is also, at least for me, to do something impossibly slow and hard every day. To fail with a smile on my face. To appreciate the journey, knowing I will never reach the destination.

stavros 6 Jun 2022 4:58 UTC
2 points
−4
on: AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities
Feel free to delete because this is highly tangential but are you aware of Mark Solms work (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53642061-the-hidden-spring) on consciousness, and the subsequent work he’s undertaking on artificial consciousness?
I’m an idiot, but it seems like this is a different-enough path to artificial cognition that it could represent a new piece of the puzzle, or a new puzzle entirely—a new problem/solution space. As I understand it, AI capabilities research is building intelligence from the outside-in, whereas the consciousness model would be capable of building it from the inside-out.

stavros 2 Sep 2022 13:31 UTC
2 points
0
on: Why was progress so slow in the past?
Why doesn’t your analysis account for energy at all?

stavros 3 Sep 2022 7:01 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: jasoncrawford’s comment on: Why was progress so slow in the past?
So in your specific example of the threshing machine:
Surplus energy is required such that enough of the population are freed from subsistence and agriculture to specialize in other things.
Even more surplus energy is required for the creation/upkeep of cities, which are a prerequisite for technological innovation/growth (high density of different specialists living alongside eachother, as well as a labour force for factories/mass production).
And the railroads that enabled the widespread distribution of threshing machines—obviously highly energy intensive, and coincided with massive growth in coal use (steam engines originally invented for pumping water out of coal mines)
You seem to be labelling energy as a technology? If so, I think this is wrong. Energy is a fundamental input. Certainly technology is involved in capture/extraction/utilisation. But… hmm there’s a quote ‘Labour without energy is a corpse, capital (substitute technology here) without energy is a sculpture’.
My position is that all technological growth is dependent on sufficient surplus energy. That certain levels of technological and social complexity have minimum surplus energy requirements.
So to answer the question in your title directly: because there wasn’t enough surplus energy available. This was the single most important bottleneck at every stage in our development. It remains the single most important bottleneck today.
Vaclav Smil is one of the better people to read on this subject. And if I remember correctly he has an interesting example about the plough (in Energy and Civilization) - an even more headscratching example of ‘why wasn’t this invented waaaay earlier?’

stavros 4 Sep 2022 8:00 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: jasoncrawford’s comment on: Why was progress so slow in the past?
>Well, first, there are such things as energy technologies. The steam engine is a technology. Processes to create coke from coal, or to refine crude oil, are technologies. These technologies are what make all of that energy accessible and usable.
To quote my post:
>Certainly technology is involved in capture/extraction/utilisation. But… hmm there’s a quote ‘Labour without energy is a corpse, capital (substitute technology here) without energy is a sculpture’.
And back to you (emphasis mine):
>I don’t think this does answer the question, because technological/industrial progress is what made that surplus energy available. It didn’t just become available for some other reason. The surplus was created by progress itself. So it can’t be used to explain progress.
I agree that technologies increased our access to surplus energy. I strongly disagree that they ‘created’ it.
Fossil fuels are exogenous to tech, right? They’re an energy store that was created long before homo sapiens turned up. And the quality/quantity of this energy store is huge, gargantuan… it’s the greatest treasure trove in the history of our planet.
But without such a dense & economical energy source available… you don’t get an industrial revolution. Technological progress plateaus.
This is what I mean by a fundamental input—the energy store has to exist in the first place, in order to be harnessed by technology. The surplus is not being ‘created’, it is being ‘harvested’.
I think I’m derailing your topic somewhat, as we discuss more I think I understand more about your thought and I don’t think this ‘nuance’ of energy is very relevant within this framework.
Outside of it though, hugely important. The belief that we can ‘invent energy’ has fairly disastrous consequences for our civilization.

stavros 10 Dec 2022 7:58 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: CellBioGuy’s comment on: ChatGPT’s Misalignment Isn’t What You Think
Yep, big fan of Watts and will +1 this recommendation to any other readers.
Curious if you’ve read much of Schroeder’s stuff? Lady of Mazes in particular explores, among many other things, an implementation of this tech that might-not-suck.
The quick version is a society in which everyone owns their GPT-Me, controls distribution of it, and has access to all of its outputs. They use them as a social interface—can’t talk to someone? Send your GPT-Me to talk to them. They can’t talk to you? Your GPT-Me can talk to GPT-Them and you both get the results fed back to you. etc etc.

stavros 13 Dec 2022 8:27 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: shminux’s comment on: ChatGPT’s Misalignment Isn’t What You Think
So, two ideas:
- The language we use shapes how and what we think
- We believe what we write. From this book describing the indoctrination of American POWs in Korea:
Our best evidence of what people truly feel and believe comes less from their words than from their deeds. Observers trying to decide what a man is like look closely at his actions… the man himself uses this same evidence to decide what he is like. His behavior tells him about himself; it is a primary source of information about his beliefs and values and attitudes.
Writing was one sort of confirming action… It was never enough for the prisoners to listen quietly or even to agree verbally with the Chinese line; they were always pushed to write it down as well… if a prisoner was not willing to write a desired response freely, he was prevailed upon to copy it.
To bring this back to your idea of AI-augmented human posts:
To rely on AI to suggest/choose words for you is to have your thoughts and beliefs shaped by the output of that AI.
Yes, that seems like a bad idea to me.

stavros 25 Dec 2022 10:35 UTC
2 points
0
on: The case against AI alignment
To start with, I agree.
I really agree: about timescales, about the risks of misalignment, about the risks of alignment. In fact I think I’ll go further and say that in a hypothetical world where an aligned AGI is controlled by a 99th percentile Awesome Human Being, it’ll still end in disaster; homo sapiens just isn’t capable of handling this kind of power.^[1]
That’s why the only kind of alignment I’m interested in is the kind that results in the AGI in control; that we ‘align’ an AGI with some minimum values that anchor it in a vaguely anthropocentric meme-space (e.g. paperclips boring, unicorns exciting) and ensures some kind of attachment/bond to us (e.g. like how babies/dogs get their hooks into us) and then just let it fly; GPT-Jesus take the wheel.
(So yes, the Minds from the Culture)
No other solution works. No other path has a happy ending.^[2]
This is why I support alignment research—I don’t believe the odds are good, I don’t believe the odds are good even if they solve the technical problem, but I don’t see a future in which homo sapiens flourishes without benevolent GPT-Jesus watching over us.
Because the human alignment problem you correctly identify as the root of our wider problems—that isn’t going away by itself.
1. ^
  Not a ‘power corrupts’ argument, just stating the obvious: godlike power directed by monkeylike intelligence doesn’t end well, no matter how awesome the individual monkey.
2. ^
  Maaaaaybe genetic engineering; if we somehow figured out how to create Homo Sapiens 2.0, and they figured out 3.0 etc etc.
  
  This pathway has a greater margin for error, and far fewer dead ends where we accidentally destroy everything. It can go slow, we can do it incrementally, we can try multiple approaches in parralel; we can have redundancy, backups etc.
  
  I think if we could somehow nuke AI capabilities, this path would be preferable. But as it is AI capabilities is going to get to the finish line before genetics has even left the lab.

stavros 26 Dec 2022 10:49 UTC
4 points
0
on: Shared reality: a key driver of human behavior
Thanks for this post, it was insightful and perfectly timed; I’ve been intermittently returning to the problem of trust for a while now and it was on my mind this morning when I found your post.

I think shared reality isn’t just a ‘warm fuzzies’ thing, it’s a vital component of cooperation.

I think it’s connected with the trust problem; your ability to trust someone is dependent to some degree on a shared reality.

I think that these problems have been severely exacerbated by our current technologies and the social landscape they’ve shaped, but I’m also highly intrigued by the possibility that we can throw this in reverse—that there is an achievable engineering solution to this problem; that this is something we can not only ‘fix’ with the right technologies, but also empower far beyond ‘baseline’.

I’m interested in talking with anyone who’s exploring the trust problem in some way. I think even a 20% effective solution to this problem would be world changing; the trust problem is at (or near) the root of many of the dysfunctional aspects of our civilization.

I’m especially interested in anyone who strongly disagrees with me—about either the importance of the problem or the feasibility of finding a solution.

stavros 1 Jan 2023 13:15 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Valentine’s comment on: Slack matters more than any outcome
Thanks for your post, just wanted to contribute by deconfusing ADHD a little (hopefully). I agree that you and OP seem to be agreeing more than disagreeing.
So speaking from a pretty thorough ignorance of the topic itself, my guess based on my priors is that the problem-ness of ADHD has more to do with the combo of (a) taking in the culture’s demand that you be functional in a very particular way combined with (b) a built-in incapability of functioning that way.
Correct. However that problem-ness is often a matter of survival/highly non-optional. ADHD can be an economic (and thus kinda literal) death sentence—if it wasn’t for the support of my family I’d be homeless.
I think what the OP is referring to, why they raised ADHD specifically in this context, is because this habitualized conscious forcing/manipulation of our internal state (i.e. dopamine) is a crutch we can’t afford to relinquish—without it we fall down, and we don’t get back up.
I’m speaking as someone only recently (last year) diagnosed with (and medicated for) ADHD. I am easily twice as functional now as I was before I had medication (and I am still nowhere near as functional as the average person, let alone most of this crowd xD)
And, quite tidily, ADHD is one of the primary reasons I learned to develop slack—why I’m capable of grokking your position. ADHD is a neverending lesson in the necessity of slack, in learning to let go.

ADHD is basically an extreme version of slack philosophy hardwired into your brain—it’s great from a certain perspective, but it kinda gives us a healthy appreciation for the value of being able to force outcomes—in a ‘you don’t know what you’ve got til its gone’ sense.

stavros 6 Jan 2023 11:20 UTC
1 point
0
on: Investing for a World Transformed by AI
AI Therapy isn’t the first domino to fall, AI Customer Service is (it’s already falling).

95% of customer service humans can be replaced by a combination of Whisper+GPT; they (the humans) are already barely agentic, just following complex scripts. It’s likely that the AI customer service will provide a superior experience most of the time (less wait times, better audio quality at a minimum, often more competent and knowledgeable too, plausibly capable of supporting many languages).

Obviously huge cost savings so massive incentive for companies to replace humans (and why it’s already started with even weak chatbots).

Investing in it is tricky, same problem you mentioned at the start—picking which horse is going to win this race, most probably either don’t exist or aren’t publicly tradeable.

Zoom is a potential frontrunner, they acquired Solvvy last year which suggests some strategic awareness of this trend/potential market.

stavros 11 Jan 2023 17:34 UTC
1 point
0
on: What’s the deal with AI consciousness?
Have you read Mark Solms Hidden Spring?

stavros 22 Feb 2023 15:48 UTC
7 points
3
on: AI #1: Sydney and Bing
Re: EMH is false, long GOOG
I wish you’d picked a better example.
… but wait it gets worse
tl;dr LLMs make search cost more, much more, and thus significantly threaten GOOG’s bottom line.
MSFT knows this, and is explicitly using Bing Sydney as an attack on GOOG.
I’m not questioning the capabilities of GOOG’s AI department, I’m sure Deepmind have the shiniest toys.
But it’s hardly bullish for their share price if their core revenue stream is about to be decapitated or perhaps even entirely destroyed—ad based revenue has been on shaky ground for a while now, I don’t think it’s inconceivable that one day the bottom will fall out.
re: EMH in general
EMH gets weaker the less attention an asset has, the further out in time relevant information is (with significant drops around 1yr, 2yr, 5yr), and the more antimemetic that relevant information is (i.e. Sin is consistently undervalued because it makes people feel bad to think about. Most recently we saw this in coal, and I’m kicking myself for not getting in on that trade.).
Will GOOG go up? Maybe.
Is GOOG undervalued? Extremely unlikely.

stavros 26 Feb 2023 13:37 UTC
8 points
0
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: The Preference Fulfillment Hypothesis
In my experience the highest epistemic standard is achieved in the context of ‘nerds arguing on the internet’. If everyone is agreeing, all you have is an echo chamber.

I would argue that good faith, high effort contributions to any debate are something we should always be grateful for if we are seeking the truth.

I think the people who would be most concerned with ‘anti-doom’ arguments are those who believe it is existentially important to ‘win the argument/support the narrative/spread the meme’ - that truthseeking isn’t as important as trying to embed a cultural norm of deep deep precaution around AI.

To those people, I would say: I appreciate you, but there are better strategies to pursue in the game you’re trying to play. Collective Intelligence has the potential to completely change the game you’re trying to play and you’re pretty well positioned to leverage that.

stavros 26 Feb 2023 13:43 UTC
4 points
1
in reply to: Adam Zerner’s comment on: Nod posts
So I’m basically the target audience for the OP—I read a lot, of all kinds of stuff, and almost zero papers. I’m an autodidact with no academic background.

I appreciated the post. I usually need a few reminders that ‘this thing has value’ before I finally get around to exploring it :)

I would say, as the target audience, I’m probably representative when I say that a big part of the reason we don’t read papers is a lack of access, and a lack of discovery tools. I signed up for Elicit a while back, but as above—haven’t gotten around to using it yet :D

stavros 31 May 2023 9:35 UTC
8 points
0
on: Product Endorsement: Food for sleep interruptions
Wholely agree with the ‘if it works it works’ perspective.
Two minor niggles are worth mentioning:
1. As I understand it, eating any amount will signal the body to stop fasting. The overnight fast is the only one most people have and it seems to be quite important for long term metabolic health.
2. Your body has several inputs to its internal clock, and the two most significant ones are light and food. So there’s a pathway where this ‘solution’ might also be reinforcing the problem.
Niggles aside, if it works it works. And nothing is more important than sleep for health. If you are currently chronically sleep deprived and the usual things aren’t helping—absolutely try this.
Thanks Elizabeth for sharing another potential tool for helping people.

stavros 26 Nov 2023 10:13 UTC
4 points
0
on: What are the results of more parental supervision and less outdoor play?
There’s a guy called Rafe Kelley on youtube who has a fairly good answer to this, which I’m going to attempt to summarize from memory because I can’t point you toward any reasonable sources (I heard him talking about it in a 1h+ conversation with everyone’s favourite boogeyman, Jordan Peterson).
His reasoning goes thus:
1.) We need play in order to develop: play teaches us how to navigate Agent—Arena relationships

This speaks to the result of playground injuries increasing despite increased supervision—kids aren’t actually getting to spend enough time playing in the physical Arena, their capability to navigate it is underdeveloped because of excess indoor time and excess supervision.

2.) We need rough play (e.g. play fighting), specifically, to teach us a whole bunch of capabilities around Agent—Agent—Arena relationships; conflict, boundaries, emotional regulation are all, Rafe argues, rooted in rough play.

Through rough and tumble play, we learn the physical boundaries between agents. We learn that it hurts them, or us, when boundaries are crossed. We learn where those boundaries are. We learn to regulate our emotions with respect to those boundaries.

These are highly transferable, core skills, without which human development is significantly stunted.