Sunny from QAD
Visualize what it would be like to heal.
Imagine breathing in, breathing out, realizing you’re okay now, and taking flight.
It won’t fix you immediately. You cannot fix misery with a single thought.
But if you do it every now and then, you’re practicing for when it really happens.
You’re wearing the groove.
Any other LessWrongers like to use the catface emoticon? :3
I feel comfortable and safe asking a question like “Is this an attitude problem on my part?” on this website in a way I don’t when talking to most people. It’s humility. It’s me saying: “I might be really wrong, and you all might know it”. I don’t usually say that kind of thing, and it’s because for most people I might be talking to, it’s really not true. You wouldn’t talk like that to a toddler; I wouldn’t talk like that to a normie. But I would talk like that here, because I think people here are smart and kind in a way normies aren’t. Those are the same qualities I want in a friend, and I wonder if the humility I feel posting stuff on this site is a taste of what I’d feel all the time if I lived in a world that was mostly full of people I see as Actual Adults. Instead, in the real world, which is full of people I see as Basically Toddlers, I feel deeply and broadly arrogant, and although I think that feeling is justified and I wouldn’t exactly want to change it, it really isn’t fun :(
I feel very lonely in life, and I think the biggest reason is that I can’t relate to most people. They’re too dumb. Trying to make friends with a rando at a bar feels like trying to make friends with a toddler.
Has anyone else had this experience? Is this an attitude problem on my part? Is there somewhere I can find smart friends? If it’s an attitude problem, do you have any wise words about how I can see that, so I can start fixing it?
My few smart friends seem to themselves have lots of smart friends, but when I complain that I have difficulty finding friends, their faces don’t light up in recognition or sympathy. They just look at me blankly and spit out generic platitudes about how maybe I should try putting myself out there. IDK if that’s all they had to do to make smart friends, but I do put myself out there, and it doesn’t work. I mostly only meet idiots, and even the idiots usually don’t care to get to know me.
Yeah, I had one in my last apartment and then accidentally managed to choose a new place that didn’t have one. Sob.....
The size and complexity of the palette of reactions that comes up when I want to react to part of a post is overwhelming to me, enough that it forms a significant barrier of friction against using it.
Possible valuable life wisdom: take pot shots.
That is: try things that are unlikely to work but cheap to try.
I’m tall, and when I try to wash dishes at a sink made for normal people, I usually end up bending my back in a painful way without thinking. A couple weeks ago I noticed that the faucet can be unsheathed from a thing that holds it in place, and then it springs up a little and hangs higher, and makes it more comfortable to use for me. Win!
It came with the problem that it became hard to swing the faucet over to the side; the sheath that holds it down was also supposed to control its angle. Every time I swung it to the side, it would swing most of the way back. I had an idea-without-a-model for how to maybe fix it: just try swinging the sheath arm to the side I wanted to swing the faucet itself to, even though it wasn’t sheathed in it. Lo and behold, that worked!
Swinging the sheath arm over to that side also puts it in the way of the soap bottle, which I have to grab to re-soap the sponge a few times per washing session. I tried re-arranging things on that side of the sink to fix the problem, and couldn’t make it work. Oh well.
Final outcome: Washing dishes is now 50% more comfortable, for the cost of three pot-shots.
I’d happily have put 2 hours of work into this outcome if I’d had an assured plan to achieve it, so that’s a big win. Even if we allow for 30 other pot shots towards other goals that I’ve forgotten about because they didn’t go anywhere, I still got a big discount compared to what I’d have been willing to pay.
Scream! This feels like an extremely rude thing to do… then again, I guess the person making the accusation is probably being pretty rude to begin with… maybe it works?
Accusing someone of being stubborn in the middle of an argument doesn’t make sense. If the argument is still going, you’re both being that stubborn.
Maybe you mean to accuse them of being unreasonable, of sticking to a statement that is clearly false. In that case, say that.
It can make sense to accuse someone of being stubborn in general, if you often yield to their requests and they rarely yield to yours.
Note: I guess “stubborn” can mean what I’ve used “unreasonable” to mean. I feel like I’ve been told I’m being too stubborn just for sticking to my guns for too long, when they haven’t even tried to really argue with me and so can’t say that I’m being unreasonable in light of good counterarguments. I wish I could swap “stubborn” for a word like “persistent”, but I can’t think of one that means the right thing and has the right ring. I’m posting anyway because Quick Take.
This seems like a totally reasonable complaint to me. I wouldn’t even call it petty. Everyday things should work for everyday people.
So does the near-certainty of alignment failure come from empirical observations, then? If so, is there a repository of such failure anecdotes that I can look at?
I’m having trouble understanding your last paragraph. What do we not see much of? If you mean we don’t see many of these alignment failures in practice, then I’d feel justified in rejecting this as a reason to become as certain as Eliezer sounds to me, from my current position of only (“only”) being uncertain enough to justify a research halt. (And I wouldn’t understand the connection to Eliezer — his thoughts on next-token prediction obviously wouldn’t change the amount of alignment failures we see in practice, so I assume I’m misreading you.)
I think part of the intended interpretation of Dath Ilan is: “it would be easier to run an adequate society if everyone knew some basic economics”.
I know almost no economics. Even my understanding of supply & demand is shaky. Is there some bit of economics I can learn and start applying on Earth to see why this claim might be reasonable?
Reading about Dath Ilan[1] makes me homesick for a place that doesn’t exist. I want to live in a society like that. And I feel like, on the real Earth, I would be pretty fulfilled in a career where I was helping to bring it about, even if we only made Earth-realistic progress.
- ^
A fictional world that Eliezer Yudkowsky pretends to be from on April Fool’s day sometimes, where everything works better because people are better at coordinating.
- ^
I’ve had people use “argument from absurdity” to dismiss me when I point out that something they’ve said is absurd.
I like the Quick Take format. I find there’s lots of stuff I’m willing to share in a low-commitment format that feel I wouldn’t share if it had to be a whole post. (Usually because I’m not confident enough I endorse it to want to make it a whole post, or because it’s too short.)
I might share even more if there was a convenient way to post anonymously. Obviously I’m already using a pseudonym, but I mean if there was a way to make my Quick Take just show up without an author to other people.
“Appeal to emotion” can be a slur for “kindness”.
“Argument from consequences” can be a slur for “modus tollens”.
“Argument from absurdity” can be a slur for “common sense”.
They can all also be used legitimately, I think.
I take AI risk seriously, but I feel like I need help understanding more technical detail about why gradient descent definitely doesn’t produce alignment by default.
I totally understand the analogy to evolution, and I agree that humans aren’t “aligned” relative to the loss function evolution selects for. I also get that, even though gradient descent is different from evolution, the appropriately pessimistic assumption is that it might share this failure mode. And I’d be happy to say that that alone is enough grounds to halt AI research until we better understand the issue / can do something about it.
But I read Eliezier and Nate as saying we should be confident that gradient descent doesn’t produce alignment by default — that the probability of alignment is near-zero, and that this probabilistic judgment isn’t just appropriately-pessimistic naivety, but rather is based on a good, clear understanding of the issue.
Where does it come from?
I didn’t necessarily find it surprising, just saddening. But also I disagree with your conclusion: some people at the meetup were perfectly pleasant to talk to, so empirically, there can’t really be that strong of a guarantee that Rationalism implies Spockishness.
I think I spot some of the mistakes in your reasoning: for one, I don’t think pedantry is the same as real understanding. When I said “pedantic”, I meant something like “too nitpicky about words”. Even if your goal is to achieve real understanding, it doesn’t serve you well to be too nitpicky; it would be better to be the right amount of nitpicky. I would also describe myself as depressed and poorly-adjusted, but I think I’m good at socializing. I ended up making the whole group laugh a few times one of the recent times I went.
(I’ve also been guilty of all the sins myself at one point or another, so I don’t mean to put myself above it all either, but I think I do them a lot less nowadays than the people I’m complaining about, so I think it’s fair to use myself as an illustration of the fact that it’s doable.)
I go to a weekly rationality meetup at a bar in my area, which usually has 5-10 attendees. My unfortunate impression of half of the regulars is that they are depressed, pedantic, and bad at socializing, and that makes me sad because that feels like them being Spock instead of being Awesome.
What are other people’s experiences with this? I imagine it’s kind of hit-or-miss, with some groups being great and others being duds?
Minor nitpick: I’m not sure it’s every really wrong to be calm. But, I agree with the actual point, that Spock isn’t the ideal of rationality we should aspire to.