tailcalled

Karma: 7,039

tailcalled 11 Sep 2024 8:56 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: AI forecasting bots incoming
P(The scientific consensus on time switches from agreeing with Albert Einstein to agreeing with Henri Bergson) = 15%, P(The scientific consensus switches away from mechanistic thinking to agreeing with Henri Bergson on Elan Vital) = 5%.

tailcalled 10 Sep 2024 9:22 UTC
2 points
0
on: On Fables and Nuanced Charts

Perhaps the 1994 Crime Bill really did cause the drop in violent crime, or perhaps the causality goes the other way: the spike in violent crime motivated politicians to pass the act in the first place. (Note that the act was passed slightly after the violent crime rate peaked!)

In an ideal political system, wouldn’t we hope both of these happen?

If your job is creating shoes from start to finish, it’s fairly straightforward to measure productivity: it’s merely the dollar value of the shoes you make each year based on market prices.

Isn’t this completely wrong? The price will be something like their marginal value, but most shoes are worth much more than the marginal shoe, due to diminishing marginal returns. The marginal shoe probably just replaces a kinda-broken-but-still-usable shoe or an outgrown shoe, but you could handle this in other ways, e.g. going to a different shoemaker or getting hand-me-downs or whatever, leading to very low marginal value despite high absolute value. This quantification is thus ignoring almost all the consumer surplus.

Furthermore, the value of a shoe overestimates the productivity of making the shoe, because making it deprives society of the resources needed for the shoe. This is probably faithfully-enough reflected in the prices, but my model is society usually works with extremely thin profit margins, so the bulk of the price will be due to the cost of production.

Or another way of phrasing is that this quantification assumes consumer surplus equals production cost (kind of like the labor theory of value), which I think is only true in a very narrow range of circumstances.

tailcalled 10 Sep 2024 8:03 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: quetzal_rainbow’s comment on: Executable philosophy as a failed totalizing meta-worldview

Meaning of my comment was “your examples are very weak in proving absense of cross-domain generalization”.

I can buy that there’s a sort of “trajectory of history” that makes use of all domains at once, I just think this is the opposite of what rationalist-empiricists are likely to focus on.

And if we are talking about me, right now I’m doing statistics, physics and signal processing, which seems to be awfully generalizable.

This is precisely the position that I am referring to when I say “the assumption was that the world is mostly homogeneous”. Like physics is generalizable if you think the nature of the world is matter. And you can use energy from the sun to decompose anything into matter, allowing you to command universal assent that everything is matter. But does that mean matter is everything? Does your physics knowledge tell you how to run a company? If not, why say it is “awfully generalizable”?

tailcalled 9 Sep 2024 21:19 UTC
2 points
−1
on: tailcalled’s Shortform
Thesis: there’s a condition/trauma that arises from having spent a lot of time in an environment where there’s excess resources for no reasons, which can lead to several outcomes:
- Inertial drifting in the direction implied by ones’ prior adaptations,
- Conformity/adaptation to social popularity contests based on the urges above,
- Getting lost in meta-level preparations,
- Acting as a stickler for the authorities,
- “Bite the hand that feeds you”,
- Tracking the resource/motivation flows present.
By contrast, if resources are contingent on a particular reason, everything takes shape according to said reason, and so one cannot make a general characterization of the outcomes.

tailcalled 9 Sep 2024 20:38 UTC
6 points
0
on: AI forecasting bots incoming
Some results I got:
P(doom) = 2%, P(Blanchardianism) = 15%, P(mesmerism) = 5%, P(overregulation raises housing prices) = 35%, P(Trump wins 2024) = 55%, P(dyson sphere) = 2%, P(Eliezer Yudkowsky on AI) = 35%

tailcalled 9 Sep 2024 10:33 UTC
5 points
−8
on: My Number 1 Epistemology Book Recommendation: Inventing Temperature
It sounds cool, though also intuitively temperature seems like one of the easiest attributes to measure because literally everything is kind of a thermometer in the sense that everything equillibrates in temperature. My prior mental image on inventing temperature is iteratively finding things that more and more consistently/cleanly reflects this universal equillibration tendency.

Is this in accordance with how the book describes it, or would I be surprised when reading it? Like of course I’d expect some thermodynamic principles and distinctions to be developed along the way, but it seems conceptually very different from e.g. measuring neural networks where stuff is much more qualitatively distinct.

tailcalled 9 Sep 2024 7:52 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: quetzal_rainbow’s comment on: Executable philosophy as a failed totalizing meta-worldview
But I don’t think you are doing space colonization. I’d guess you are doing reading/writing on social media, programming, grocery shopping, cooking, … . And I think recursive self-improvement is supposed to work with no experience in space colonization.

tailcalled 8 Sep 2024 8:06 UTC
4 points
−11
on: The Virtue of Narrowness

And DON’T EVEN GET ME STARTED on people who think Wikipedia is an “Artificial Intelligence,”

With the invention of LLMs, this aged poorly. It turns out that most of the research that goes into developing artificial intelligence consists of cataloguing the world and writing it up on the internet.

tailcalled 7 Sep 2024 8:11 UTC
2 points
−3
in reply to: Ape in the coat’s comment on: Executable philosophy as a failed totalizing meta-worldview
Farming, law enforcement, war, legislation, chip fabbing, space colonization, cargo trucking, …

tailcalled 6 Sep 2024 17:08 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: Ape in the coat’s comment on: Executable philosophy as a failed totalizing meta-worldview
When talking about top performance in highly specific domains, one should indeed use lots of domain specific tricks. But in a grand scheme of things the rule of “coherence + contact with the world” is extremely helpful, among other things it allows to derive all the specific tricks for all the different domains.
This assumes you have contact with all the different domains, which you don’t, rather than just some of them.

tailcalled 6 Sep 2024 10:45 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: JenniferRM’s comment on: Executable philosophy as a failed totalizing meta-worldview
Rank the tasks by size as measured by e.g. energy content. Playing Minecraft, proving math theorems, and driving a theologically confused person to psychosis are all small in terms of energy, especially when considering that the models are not consistently driving anyone to psychosis and thus the theologically confused person who was driven to psychosis was probably highly predisposed to it.

Art competitions are more significant, but AFAIK the times when it won art competitions, it relied on human guidance. I tried to ask ChatGPT to make a picture that could win an art competition without giving it any more guidance, and it made this, which yes is extremely beautiful, but also seems deeply Gnostic and so probably unlikely to win great art competitions. AI art thus seems more suited for Gnostic decoration than for greatness. (Maybe healthy people will eventually develop an aversion to it? Already seems on the way; e.g. art competitions tend to forbid AI art.)

So, next token prediction can succeed in a lot of pathetic tasks. It has also gotten a lot of data with examples of completions of pathetic tasks. Thus the success doesn’t rely on homogeneity (extrapolation), it relies on heterogeneity of data (interpolation).

It’s not an accident that it has data on weak tasks. There are more instances of small forms than large forms, so there is more data available on the smaller forms. In order to get the data on the larger forms, it will take work to integrate it with the world, and let the data drill into the AI.

tailcalled 5 Sep 2024 15:26 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: Ape in the coat’s comment on: Executable philosophy as a failed totalizing meta-worldview
The negation of the backbone conjecture, though that may sound obviously wrong since rationalists obviously expect the laws of physics to function as a backbone for the universe, but they are merely a backbone in the sense of information and not of magnitude.

tailcalled 5 Sep 2024 5:41 UTC
9 points
−7
on: Executable philosophy as a failed totalizing meta-worldview
(Reposting my comment from twitter.)

Rationalist-empiricists wanted to derive everything from coherence + contact with the world. The assumption was that the world was mostly homogeneous, and so by becoming super powerful at learning one part of the world, it would open up easy entry into the rest.

It failed because the world is mostly inhomogeneous, and the appearance of homogeneity is simply because it is easier to command assent for the things that everyone can see.

tailcalled 3 Sep 2024 7:15 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Benquo’s comment on: Jimrandomh’s Shortform Posts
I think “awful” in its modern meaning is also compatible with a mental health frame. (But maybe I’m wrong because I’m ESL.) The distinction I see is that the person who thinks it’s awful might have in mind that assisting the criminal with fixing their life would stop them from doing further crimes, while the person who thinks it’s disgusting is first and foremost focused on avoiding the criminal.

tailcalled 2 Sep 2024 20:27 UTC
4 points
−2
in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: Jimrandomh’s Shortform Posts
Counterpoint: you know for sure that the person who calls it disgusting is averse to the crime and the criminal, whereas the person who calls it evil might still admire the power or achievement involved, and the person who calls it awful might have sympathy for the criminal’s situation.

tailcalled 30 Aug 2024 8:30 UTC
3 points
−5
on: tailcalled’s Shortform
Thesis: the median entity in any large group never matters and therefore the median voter doesn’t matter and therefore the median voter theorem proves that democracies get obsessed about stuff that doesn’t matter.

tailcalled 28 Aug 2024 7:38 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: In defense of technological unemployment as the main AI concern
I guess a key question is, where does the notion of property ownership derive from? If we just take it for granted that sovereign nation-states exist and want to enforce it well enough (including preventing A from defrauding B, in a sufficiently value-aligned sense which we can’t currently define), then I suppose your logic looks plausible.

To some extent this is just going to derive from inertia, but in order to keep up with AI criminals, I imagine law enforcement will depend on AI too. So “property rights” at the very least requires solving the alignment problem for law enforcement’s AIs.

If people are still economically competitive, then this is not an existential risk because the AI would want to hire or enslave us to perform work, thereby allowing us to survive without property.

And if people are still economically competitive, law enforcement would probably be much less difficult? Like I’m not an expert, but it seems to me that to some extent democracy derives from the fact that countries have to recruit their own citizens for defense and law enforcement. Idk, that kind of mixes together ability in adversarial contexts with ability in cooperative contexts, in a way that is maybe suboptimal.

At least the way I think of it is that if you are an independent wellspring of value, you aren’t relying on inertia or external supporters in order to survive. This seems like a more-fundamental thing that our economic system is built on top of.

tailcalled 28 Aug 2024 6:59 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: Stephen Fowler’s comment on: In defense of technological unemployment as the main AI concern
It’s somewhat intentional that I say “professionals” instead of “workers”, because if I understand correctly, by now the majority of the workforce in the most developed countries is made up of white-collar workers. I think AI is especially relevant to us because professionals rely almost exclusively on intelligence, knowledge and connections, whereas e.g. cooks also rely on dexterity. (Admittedly, AI will probably progress simultaneously with robots, which will hit people who do more hands-on work too.)

I think in the scenario you describe, one of the things that matters most is how well the police/military can keep up with the AI frontier. If states maintain sovereignty (or at least, the US maintains hegemony), people can “just” implement a wealth tax to distribute the goods from AI.

Under that model, the question then becomes who to distribute the goods to. I guess the answer would end up being “all citizens”. Hm, I was about to say “in which case we are back in the “but wouldn’t people’s capabilities degenerate into vestigiality?” issue”, but really if people have a guaranteed source of income to survive, as long as we are only moderately more expensive than the AI and not extremely more expensive, the AI would probably want to offer us jobs because of comparative advantages. Maybe that’s the sort of scenario Habryka was getting at...

tailcalled 28 Aug 2024 6:42 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Seth Herd’s comment on: In defense of technological unemployment as the main AI concern

I thought job loss was a short-term but not a long-term risk and only a secondary cause of x-risks. Which is why we don’t worry about it around here much. FWIW being enslaved permanently doesn’t sound better to me than being extinct, so I wouldn’t frame that distinction as a problem.

The AI wanting to permanently enslave us would change the game board in poorly explored ways. I could imagine that e.g. it would be more plausible that it would reliably form concepts of human values, which could be used to align it to prevent slavery. Also its control ability as a slavemaster would likely vastly exceed that of human slavemasters, meaning it probably wouldn’t need stuff like violence or keeping us fearful in order to control us. I don’t have a clear idea of what it would look like, partly because the scenario is not realistic since the AI would realistically have an absolute economic advantage over us and therefore would rather want us dead than slaves.

I thought the standard plan was: we figure out how to ensure that an aligned AGI/ASI takes over; it helps humans because it wants to. It’s way better than us at making stuff, so keeping humanity in good conditions is actually super easy, barely an inconvenience.

That is the standard rationalist plan, but “take over the world, for the greater good (of course)” is such a classic villain move that we shouldn’t be surprised when all the ways we’ve explored seem to lead to horrible outcomes.

Anyone who’s understood a Burning Man event knows that humans have a blast working on collaborative projects, even when they don’t need to be done at all, so I have no concerns that we’ll all get sad without necessary or “meaningful” work to do.

Idk, Burning Man consists of people who have been shaped by society and who go out of their way to participate. I could imagine that without society existing in the background, people would not really be maintaining the ambition or skills necessary to have something like Burning Man exist.

tailcalled 28 Aug 2024 6:18 UTC
6 points
1
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: In defense of technological unemployment as the main AI concern
Doesn’t comparative advantage assume a fixed trader pool and unlimited survival? If you’ve got two agents A and B, and A has an absolute advantage over B, then if A can scale and resources are limited, A would just buy up whatever resources it needs to survive (presumably pricing B out of the market) and then use its greater scale to perform both its original work and B’s original work.