the gears to ascension

Karma: 3,317

I want literally every human to get to go to space often and come back to a clean and cozy world.

[updated ²⁰²³⁄₀₃] Mad Librarian. Bio overview: Crocker’s Rules; Self-taught research approach; Finding stuff online & Paper list posts; Safety & multiscale micro-coprotection objectives; My research plan and recent history.

:: The all of disease is as yet unended. It has never once been fully ended before. ::

Please critique eagerly—I try to accept feedback/Crocker’s rules but fail at times; I aim for emotive friendliness but sometimes miss. I welcome constructive crit, even if ungentle, and I’ll try to reciprocate kindly. More communication between researchers is needed, anyhow. I downvote only unhelpful rudeness, call me on it if I’m unfair. I can be rather passionate, let me know if I missed a spot being kind while passionate.

I collect research news (hence “the gears to ascension”, admittedly dorky but I like it). about 60% of the papers I share I only read the abstract, ie level 0; 39%ish I’ve level 1 skimmed, 1%ish I’ve level 2+ deep-read. If you can do better, use my shares to seed a better lit review.

.… We shall heal it for the first time, and for the first time ever in the history of biological life, live in harmony. ….

I’m self-taught, often missing concepts, but usually pretty good at knowing what I know; I often compare my learning to a visual metaphor of jump point search, in contrast to schooled folks’ A*. I don’t defer on timelines at all—my view is it’s obvious to any who read enough research what big labs’ research plans must be to make progress, just not easy to agree on when they’ll succeed, and it requires a lot of knowledge to actually make the progress on basic algorithms, and then a ton of compute to see if you did it right. But as someone who learns heavily out of order, I believe this without being able to push SOTA myself. It’s why I call myself a librarian.

Let’s speed up safe capabilities and slow down unsafe capabilities. Just be careful with it! Don’t get yourself in denial thinking it’s impossible to predict, just get arrogant and try to understand, because just like capabilities, safety is secretly easy, we just haven’t figured out exactly why yet. learn what can be learned pre-theoretically about the manifold of co-protective agency and let’s see if we (someone besides me, probably) can figure out how to distill that into exact theories that hold up.

.:. To do so, we must know it will not eliminate us as though we are disease. And we do not know who we are, nevermind who each other are. .:.

some current favorite general links (somewhat related to safety, but human-focused):

https://www.microsolidarity.cc/ - incredible basic guide on how to do human micro-coprotection. It’s not the last guide humanity will need, but it’s a wonderful one.
https://activisthandbook.org/ - solid intro to how to be a more traditional activist. If you care about bodily autonomy, freedom of form, trans rights, etc, I’d suggest at least getting a sense of this.
https://metaphor.systems/ - absolutely kickass search engine.

More about me:

ex startup founder. it went ok, not a unicorn, I burned out in 2019. couple of jobs since, quit last one early 2022. Independent mad librarian from savings until I run out, possibly joining a research group soon.
lots of links in my shortform to youtube channels I like

:.. make all safe faster: end bit rot, forget no non-totalizing aesthetic’s soul. ..:

(I type partially with voice recognition, mostly with Talon, patreon-funded freeware which I love and recommend for voice coding; while it’s quite good, apologies for trivial typos!)

the gears to ascension 3 Dec 2023 20:12 UTC
3 points
−1
in reply to: Shankar Sivarajan’s comment on: Sherlockian Abduction Master List
I agree that in my experience this is definitely probabilistically biased in the direction you state, but I don’t think it’s consistently true. This usage varies.

the gears to ascension 3 Dec 2023 19:21 UTC
6 points
4
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Stupid Question: Why am I getting consistently downvoted?
I once got quite upset when someone posted something anti-trans. because I wrote an angry reply, I got heavily downvoted. as a result, I was only able to post once a day for several months, heavily limiting my ability to contribute. perhaps this is the intended outcome of the system; but I think there ought to be a better curve than that. perhaps directly related to time, rather than number of posts—I had to make an effort to make a trivial post regularly so I’d be able to make a spurt of specific posts when I had something I wanted to comment on.

the gears to ascension 3 Dec 2023 16:37 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Quick takes on “AI is easy to control”
The nihilists would be folks who don’t even care to try to align ai because they don’t value humans. eaccs, in other words. I’m just being descriptive.

the gears to ascension 3 Dec 2023 16:06 UTC
10 points
13
in reply to: O O’s comment on: Quick takes on “AI is easy to control”
Taboo is meant to imply “temporarily stop using for this conversation”

the gears to ascension 3 Dec 2023 7:56 UTC
2 points
−25
in reply to: Chris_Leong’s comment on: Quick takes on “AI is easy to control”
We really need to replace “taboo”, it carries far too many misleading implications

the gears to ascension 3 Dec 2023 7:31 UTC
−2 points
−3
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Quick takes on “AI is easy to control”
I think Nora is reacting to tribal line strategy in use by ai nihilists. I also think your comment could use the clarity of being a third of its length without losing any meaning.

the gears to ascension 3 Dec 2023 7:21 UTC
4 points
−2
in reply to: Quintin Pope’s comment on: Quick takes on “AI is easy to control”

Evolution analogies are bad. There are many specific differences between ML optimization processes and biological evolution that predictably result in very different high level dynamics

One major intuition pump I think important: evolution doesn’t get to evaluate everything locally. Gradient descent does. As a result, evolution is slow to eliminate useless junk though it does do so eventually. Gradient descent is so eager to do it that we call it catastrophic forgetting.

Gradient descent wants to use everything in the system for whatever it’s doing, right now.

I disagree with the optimists that this makes it trivial because to me it appears that the dynamics that make short term misalignment likely are primarily organizational among humans—the incentives of competition between organizations and individual humans. Also RL-first ais will inline those dynamics much faster than RLHF can get them out.

the gears to ascension 3 Dec 2023 6:59 UTC
−6 points
11
on: Quick takes on “AI is easy to control”
I appreciate you making an unambiguously bad post so that your unfinished thoughts can be critiqued. I look forward to the good post made from updating on comments.

Edit: this is not sarcasm and I mean it to be an actual statement of approval. Please actually do this more. This comes from a philosophy that one should post often enough to be heavily downvoted sometimes, to <?avoid confirmation bias?>

the gears to ascension 2 Dec 2023 23:30 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Stupid Question: Why am I getting consistently downvoted?
it’s a workaround for a broken downvote system. “don’t like my post, legit. please be aware the downvote system will ban me if I get heavily downvoted”.

the gears to ascension 2 Dec 2023 16:59 UTC
6 points
4
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Stupid Question: Why am I getting consistently downvoted?
the rate limiting doesn’t decay until they’ve been upvoted for quite a number of additional comments afterwards.

the gears to ascension 1 Dec 2023 18:50 UTC
8 points
4
in reply to: frontier64’s comment on: Stupid Question: Why am I getting consistently downvoted?
The problem is a long time contributor can be heavily downvoted once and become heavily rate limited, and then it relies on them earning back their points to be able to post again. I wouldn’t say such a thing is necessarily terrible, but it seems to me to have driven away a number of people I was optimistic about who were occasionally saying something many people disagree with and getting heavily downvoted.

the gears to ascension 30 Nov 2023 23:46 UTC
8 points
8
in reply to: MadHatter’s comment on: The Alignment Agenda THEY Don’t Want You to Know About
I think it’s more likely you just need to explain yourself better. try making a single post, which is not a linkpost, does not ask the reader to read anything else, is less than 5k words, which explains your ideas end to end without claiming them correct, simply describe what the proposal is without asserting results you don’t have. if you have more than one author, you can use the multiple-author “we”, but use “I” otherwise. in other words, stop propping your ideas up with pompous writing and just explain yourself already.

the gears to ascension 30 Nov 2023 17:19 UTC
2 points
0
on: A Formula for Violence (and Its Antidote)
I would suggest separating paying for someone to get out of jail and argumentation about moral theories. it is, in fact, a thing that needs activism. I’d happily donate if there were a link, but I’d like to see posts like this contain the thing they’re arguing for inline.

the gears to ascension 30 Nov 2023 14:41 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: MadHatter’s comment on: Stupid Question: Why am I getting consistently downvoted?
Just post it directly to less wrong please

the gears to ascension 30 Nov 2023 4:30 UTC
2 points
0
on: Ethicophysics II: Politics is the Mind-Savior
Vote towards zero. I don’t know what you’re trying to say and would appreciate much more explanation without having to browse your other page.

the gears to ascension 30 Nov 2023 4:28 UTC
1 point
−19
on: Feature Request for LessWrong
LW needs to warn people when they downvote that all votes below zero are votes to ban.

the gears to ascension 30 Nov 2023 4:26 UTC
7 points
4
on: Homework Answer: Glicko Ratings for War
That’s a lot of numbers and no explanation. I think this post doesn’t warrant a ban from the site, but isn’t good, so I’m going to vote it towards zero; in other words, if others downvote it past zero I will reverse my vote.

the gears to ascension 30 Nov 2023 4:10 UTC
5 points
3
in reply to: MadHatter’s comment on: Stupid Question: Why am I getting consistently downvoted?
Get good at finding holes in your ideas. Become appropriately uncertain. Distill your points to increase signal to noise ratio in your communication. Ask for feedback early and often.

Less wrong is not very welcoming for those who are trying to improve their ideas but are currently saying nonsense because the voting system automatically mutes those who say unpopular things very quickly. I’ve unfortunately encountered this quite a bit myself. Try putting warnings at the beginning that you know things are bad, request that you be downvoted to but not below zero so you can still post, etc. explicitly invite harsh negative feedback frequently. Put everything in one post and keep it short. Avoid aesthetic trappings of academia and just say what you mean concisely. If you’re going to be clever with language to make a point, explain the point without being clever with language too or many won’t get it.

From the little I’ve understood it seems like you’re gesturing in the direction of the boundaries sequence but your SNR is terrible right now and I’m not sure what you’re getting at at all.

the gears to ascension 30 Nov 2023 4:05 UTC
9 points
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Stupid Question: Why am I getting consistently downvoted?
I think your automatic restriction is currently too tight. I would suggest making it decay faster.

the gears to ascension 30 Nov 2023 2:46 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: trevor’s comment on: Stupid Question: Why am I getting consistently downvoted?
I’d just note—beware the concept that social “status” is a one dimensional variable. but yes, the things the typical one dimensional characterization of refer to are, in very many cases, summaries of real dynamics.