titotal

• titotal 21 May 2020 1:06 UTC

  1 point

  on: Sig­nal­ing: Why Peo­ple Have Conversations

  I find that attempts to reduce everything down to signalling are usually overly simplistic, and in many cases gives you an incorrect view of peoples motivations.

  What is missing here is the fact that conversations are, for most people, an enjoyable activity. You get the fuzzy chemical from being around other people, learning things from them and being able to teach them things, sharing interesting stories and perspectives, and bonding over shared experiences. Now, I’m not denying that people often want to impress the other party, but to state that this is the primary motivation doesn’t really make sense. Most of my conversations are with people who I am already good friends with, for example. I listen to them because I care about them and want to help them feel better.

  I could make a similar post stating that people play videogames in order to signal their ability to be skilled and focused. I’m sure that plays a part in the motivation, but the primary reason is that it’s fun. The same goes for conversations.

• titotal 22 May 2020 9:51 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: liam_hinzman’s comment on: Sig­nal­ing: Why Peo­ple Have Conversations

  The problem is the shift from saying why a behaviour may have evolved, to saying why people do it now.

  Why do people enjoy videogames? well, our brains give off the good chemicals when we overcome challenges and succeeded in difficult tasks. This was likely a result of evolution trying to incentive’s hunting and gathering and so on, so we could do it more often and provide more food for our offspring. But does that mean that the primary motivation for playing videogames is to provide food for offspring? Obviously not.

  So yes, it’s possible that people evolved to enjoy social bonding because in pre-historic times it helped to form allies. But we live in a vastly different context from hunter-gatherer days. Now we do it for the pure enjoyment, not for the original reason that the enjoyment evolved.

  This is my primary concern with evopsych in general, to be honest. Looking at evolutionary pressure from the distant past will only tell us how people thought in the distant past, it doesn’t tell us how our minds have adapted to our changing context. If we want to know how people think now, we can study how they think now.

• titotal 15 Dec 2022 19:01 UTC

  21 points

  11

  in reply to: trevor’s comment on: The next decades might be wild

  I would strongly advise against circulating that paragraph, on the basis that it’s simply incorrect.

  In 1990, Moore’s law had been going strong for 15 years, and PC’s were already hitting 20% market penetration in the UK, which doubled to 40% by 2000. The web was only released in 1990, but already hit 40% penetration in the north america by 2000. Anyone in 1990 that had heard of moore’s law would not be super suprised that small computers were everywhere in 30 years. Pretty much anyone in 2000 wouldn’t be surprised either, the growth of the internet and it’s uses were very obvious at the time.

  Now, if you go back to 1980, that’s a different story, and I think they would find the ubiquity of small computers somewhat surprising. I think the overall point that the rise of PC’s was incredibly rapid is still reasonable, it just happened on a longer timescale (40 rather than 20 years) than the post makes out.

• titotal 8 Feb 2023 18:42 UTC

  9 points

  0

  on: Not­ing an er­ror in Inad­e­quate Equilibria

  his example was one of two major anecdotes that Yudkowsky presented to show that he can often know better than experts

  What was the other anecdote? Was it similarly overstated?

• titotal 8 Mar 2023 14:41 UTC

  27 points

  27

  on: Ar­ti­cle about abuse in LessWrong and ra­tio­nal­ist com­mu­ni­ties in Bloomberg News

  A lot of the defenses here seem to be relying on the fact that one of the accused individuals was banned from several rationalist communities a long time ago. While this definitely should have been included in the article, I think the overall impression they are giving is misleading.

  In 2020, the individual was invited to give a talk for an unofficial SSC online meetup (scott alexander was not involved, and does ban the guy from his events). The post was announced on lesswrong with zero pushback, and went ahead.

  Here is a comment from Anna Salamon 2 years ago, discussing him, and stating that his ban on meetups should be lifted:

  I hereby apologize for the role I played in X’s ostracism from the community, which AFAICT was both unjust and harmful to both the community and X. There’s more to say here, and I don’t yet know how to say it well. But the shortest version is that in the years leading up to my original comment X was criticizing me and many in the rationality and EA communities intensely, and, despite our alleged desire to aspire to rationality, I and I think many others did not like having our political foundations criticized/​eroded, nor did I and I think various others like having the story I told myself to keep stably “doing my work” criticized/​eroded. This, despite the fact that attempting to share reasoning and disagreements is in fact a furthering of our alleged goals and our alleged culture. The specific voiced accusations about X were not “but he keeps criticizing us and hurting our feelings and/​or our political support” — and nevertheless I’m sure this was part of what led to me making the comment I made above (though it was not my conscious reason), and I’m sure it led to some of the rest of the ostracism he experienced as well. This isn’t the whole of the story, but it ought to have been disclosed clearly in the same way that conflicts of interest ought to be disclosed clearly. And, separately but relatedly, it is my current view that it would be all things considered much better to have X around talking to people in these communities, though this will bring friction.

  There’s broader context I don’t know how to discuss well, which I’ll at least discuss poorly:

  Should the aspiring rationality community, or any community, attempt to protect its adult members from misleading reasoning, allegedly manipulative conversational tactics, etc., via cautioning them not to talk to some people? My view at the time of my original (Feb 2019) comment was “yes”. My current view is more or less “heck no!”; protecting people from allegedly manipulative tactics, or allegedly misleading arguments, is good — but it should be done via sharing additional info, not via discouraging people from encountering info/​conversations. The reason is that more info tends to be broadly helpful (and this is a relatively fool-resistant heuristic even if implemented by people who are deluded in various ways), and trusting who can figure out who ought to restrict their info-intake how seems like a doomed endeavor (and does not degrade gracefully with deludedness/​corruption in the leadership). (Watching the CDC on covid helped drive this home for me. Belatedly noticing how much something-like-doublethink I had in my original beliefs about X and related matters also helped drive this home for me.)

  Should some organizations/​people within the rationality and EA communities create simplified narratives that allow many people to pull in the same direction, to feel good about each others’ donations to the same organizations, etc.? My view at the time of my original (Feb 2019) comment was “yes”; my current view is “no — and especially not via implicit or explicit pressures to restrict information-flow.” Reasons for updates same as above.

  It is nevertheless the case that X has had a tendency to e.g. yell rather more than I would like. For an aspiring rationality community’s general “who is worth ever talking to?” list, this ought to matter much less than the above. Insofar as a given person is trying to create contexts where people reliably don’t yell or something, they’ll want to do whatever they want to do; but insofar as we’re creating a community-wide include/​exclude list (as in e.g. this comment on whether to let X speak at SSC meetups), it is my opinion that X ought to be on the “include” list.

  Here is Scott Alexander, talking about the same guy a year ago, after discussing a pattern of very harmful behaviour perpetrated by X:

  I want to clarify that I don’t dislike X, he’s actually been extremely nice to me, I continue to be in cordial and productive communication with him, and his overall influence on my life personally has been positive. He’s also been surprisingly gracious about the fact that I go around accusing him of causing a bunch of cases of psychosis. I don’t think he does the psychosis thing on purpose, I think he is honest in his belief that the world is corrupt and traumatizing (which at the margin, shades into values of “the world is corrupt and traumatizing” which everyone agrees are true) and I believe he is honest in his belief that he needs to figure out ways to help people do better. There are many smart people who work with him and support him who have not gone psychotic at all. I don’t think we need to blame/​ostracize/​cancel him and his group, except maybe from especially sensitive situations full of especially vulnerable people. My main advice is that if he or someone related to him asks you if you want to take a bunch of drugs and hear his pitch for why the world is corrupt, you say no.

  I don’t think X is still part of the rationalist community, but these definitely make it look like he is welcome and respected within your community, despite the many many allegations against him. I’ll end with a note that “Being ostracised from a particular subculture” is not actually a very severe punishment, and that maybe you should consider raising your standards somewhat?

• titotal 30 Mar 2023 8:30 UTC

  8 points

  7

  in reply to: Mitchell_Porter’s comment on: Paus­ing AI Devel­op­ments Isn’t Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down by Eliezer Yudkowsky

  If that were the case, then enforcing the policy would not “run some risk of nuclear exchange”. I suggest everyone read the passage again. He’s advocating for bombing datacentres, even if they are in russia or china.

• titotal 3 Apr 2023 1:16 UTC

  3 points

  1

  on: “a di­alogue with my­self con­cern­ing eliezer yud­kowsky”

  I must admit as an outsider I am somewhat confused as to why Eliezer’s opinion is given so much weight, relative to all the other serious experts that are looking into AI problems. I understand why this was the case a decade ago, when not many people were seriously considering the issues, but now there are AI heavyweights like Stuart Russell on the case, whose expertise and knowledge of AI is greater than Eliezer’s, proven by actual accomplishments in the field. This is not to say Eliezer doesn’t have achievements to his belt, but I find his academic work lackluster when compared to his skills in awareness raising, movement building, and persuasive writing.

• titotal 3 Apr 2023 10:17 UTC

  1 point

  −1

  in reply to: Mitchell_Porter’s comment on: “a di­alogue with my­self con­cern­ing eliezer yud­kowsky”

  Isn’t Stuart Russell an AI doomer as well, separated from Eliezer only by nuances?

  I’m only going off of his book and this article, but I think they differ in far more than nuances. Stuart is saying “I don’t want my field of research destroyed”, while Eliezer is suggesting a global treaty to airstrike all GPU clusters, including on nuclear-armed nations. He seems to think the control problem is solvable if enough effort is put into it.

  Eliezers beliefs are very extreme, and almost every accomplished expert disagrees with him. I’m not saying you should stop listening to his takes, just that you should pay more attention to other people.

• titotal 4 Apr 2023 0:00 UTC

  4 points

  −5

  in reply to: Mitchell_Porter’s comment on: “a di­alogue with my­self con­cern­ing eliezer yud­kowsky”

  Sorry, I should have specified, I am very aware of Eliezers beliefs. I think his policy prescriptions are reasonable, if his beliefs are true. I just don’t think his beliefs are true. Established AI experts have heard his arguments with serious consideration and an open mind, and still disagree with them. This is evidence that they are probably flawed, and I don’t find it particularly hard to think of potential flaws in his arguments.

  The type of global ban envisioned by yudkowsky really only makes sense if you agree with his premises. For example, setting the bar at “more powerful than GPT-5” is a low bar that is very hard to enforce, and only makes sense given certain assumptions about the compute requirement for AGI. The idea that bombing any datacentres in nuclear-armed nations is “worth it” only makes sense if you think that any particular cluster has an extremely high chance of killing everyone, which I don’t think is the case.

• titotal 12 Apr 2023 11:35 UTC

  2 points

  −1

  on: Evolu­tion pro­vides no ev­i­dence for the sharp left turn

  One thing that confuses me about the evolution metaphors is this:

  Humans managed to evolve a sense of morality from what seems like fairly weak evolutionary pressure. Ie, it generally helps form larger groups to survive better, which is good, but also theres a constant advantage to being selfish and defecting. Amoral people can still accrue power and wealth and reproduce. Compare this to something like the pressure not to touch fire, which is much more acute.

  The pressure to be “moral” of an AI seems significantly more powerful than that applied to humanity: If it is too out of line with it’s programmers, it is killed on the spot. Imagine if when humans evolved, a god murdered any human that stole.

  It seems to me that evolutionary metaphors would imply that AI would evolve to be friendly, not evil. Of course, you can’t rely too much on these metaphors anyway.

• titotal 12 Apr 2023 11:45 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: bhauth’s comment on: [Link] Sarah Con­stantin: “Why I am Not An AI Doomer”

  You can hook a chess-playing network up to a vision network and have it play chess using images of boards—it’s not difficult.

  I think you have to be careful here. In this setup, you have two different AI’s: One vision network that classified images, and the chess AI that plays chess, and presumably connecting code that translates the output of the vision into a format suitable for the chess player.

  I think what Sarah is referring to is that if you tried to directly hook up the images to the chess engine, it wouldn’t be able to figure it out, because reading images is not something it’s trained to do.

• titotal 20 Apr 2023 6:20 UTC

  9 points

  8

  on: Stop try­ing to have “in­ter­est­ing” friends

  People can generally tell when you’re friends with them for instrumental reasons rather than because you care about them or genuinely value their company. If they don’t at first, they will eventually, and in general, people don’t like being treated as tools. Trying to “optimise” your friend group for something like interestingness is just shooting yourself in the foot, and you will miss out on genuine and beautiful connections.

Could a su­per­in­tel­li­gence de­duce gen­eral rel­a­tivity from a fal­ling ap­ple? An investigation

• titotal 24 Apr 2023 7:29 UTC

  9 points

  4

  in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: Could a su­per­in­tel­li­gence de­duce gen­eral rel­a­tivity from a fal­ling ap­ple? An investigation

  I don’t think you should give a large penalty to inverse square compared to other functions. It’s pretty natural once you understand that reality has three dimensions.

  This is a fair point. 1/​r2 would definitely be in the “worth considering” category. However, where is the evidence that the gravitational force is varying with distance at all? This is certainly impossible to observe in three frames.

  the information about electromagnetism contained in the apple

  if you have the apple’s spectrum

  What information? What spectrum? The color information received by the webcam is the total intensity of light when passed through a red filter, the total intensity when passed through a blue filter, and the total intensity when passed through a green filter, at each point. You do not know the frequency of these filters (or that frequency of light is even a thing). I’m sure you could deduce something by playing around with relative intensities and chromatic aberration, but ultimately you cannot build a spectrum with three points.

  I think astronomy and astrophysics might give intuitions for what superintelligences can do with limited data. We can do parallax, detect exoplanets through slight periodic dimming of stars or Doppler effect, estimate stellar composition through spectroscopy, guess at the climate and weather patterns of exoplanets using Hadley cells.

  It depends on what you mean by limited data. All of these observations rely on the extensive body of knowledge and extensive experimentation we have done on earth to figure out the laws of physics that is shared between earth and these outer worlds.

• titotal 24 Apr 2023 11:53 UTC

  14 points

  12

  in reply to: Steven Byrnes’s comment on: Could a su­per­in­tel­li­gence de­duce gen­eral rel­a­tivity from a fal­ling ap­ple? An investigation

  I find it very hard to believe that gen rel is a simpler explanation of “F=GmM/​r2” than Newtonian physics is. This is a bolder claim that yudkowsky put forward, you can see from the passage that he thinks newton would win out on this front. I would be genuinely interested if you could find evidence in favour of this claim.

  A Newtonian gravity just requires way, way fewer symbols to write out than the Einstein field equations. It’s way easier to compute and does not require assumptions like that spacetime curves.

  If you were building a simulation of a falling apple in a room, would you rather implement general relativity or Newtonian physics? Which do you think would require fewer lines of code? Of course, what I’d do is just implement neither: just put in F=mg and call it a day. It’s literally indistinguishable from the other two and gets the job done faster and easier.

• titotal 24 Apr 2023 12:05 UTC

  27 points

  16

  in reply to: CarlShulman’s comment on: Could a su­per­in­tel­li­gence de­duce gen­eral rel­a­tivity from a fal­ling ap­ple? An investigation

  In the post, I show you both a grass and an apple that did not require Newtonian gravity or general relativity to exist. Why exactly are nuclear reactions and organic chemistry necessary for a clump of red things to stick together, or a clump of green things to stick together?

  When it comes to the “level of simulation”, how exactly is the AI meant to know when it is in the “base level”? We don’t know that about our universe. For all the computer knows, it’s simulation is the universe.

• titotal 25 Apr 2023 1:43 UTC

  4 points

  2

  in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: Could a su­per­in­tel­li­gence de­duce gen­eral rel­a­tivity from a fal­ling ap­ple? An investigation

  Indeed! Deriving physics requires a number of different experiments specialized to the discovery of each component. I could see how a spectrograph plus an analysis of the bending of light could get you a guess that light is quantised via the ultraviolet catastrophe, although i’m doubtful this is the only way to get the equation describing the black body curve. I think you’d need more information like the energy transitions of atoms or maxwells equations to get all the way to quantum mechanics proper though. I don’t think this would get you to gravity either, as quantum physics and general relativity are famously incompatible on a fundamental level.

• titotal 25 Apr 2023 11:38 UTC

  9 points

  3

  in reply to: Steven Byrnes’s comment on: Could a su­per­in­tel­li­gence de­duce gen­eral rel­a­tivity from a fal­ling ap­ple? An investigation

  I appreciate the effort of this writeup! I think it helps clarify a bit of my thoughts on the subject.

  I was trying to say “maybe it’s simpler, or maybe it’s comparably simple, I dunno, I haven’t thought about it very hard”. I think that’s what Yudkowsky was claiming as well. I believe that Yudkowsky would also endorse the stronger claim that GR is simpler—he talks about that in Einstein’s Arrogance. (It’s fine and normal for someone to make a weaker claim when they also happen to believe a stronger claim.)

  So, on thinking about it again, I think it is defensible that GR could be called “simpler”, if you know everything that Einstein did about the laws of physics and experimental evidence at the time. I recall that general relativity is a natural extension of the spacetime curvature introduced with special relativity, which comes mostly from from maxwells equations and the experimental indications of speed of light constancy.

  It’s certainly the “simplest explanation that explains the most available data”, following one definition of Ockham’s razor. Einstein was right to deduce that it was correct!

  The difference here is that a 3 frame super-AI would not have access to all the laws of physics available to Einstein. It would have access to 3 pictures, consistent with an infinite number of possible laws of physics. Absent the need to unify things like maxwells equations and special relativity, I do find it hard to believe that the field equations would win out on simplicity. (The simplified form you posted gets ugly fast when you try and actually expand out the terms). For example, the Lorentz transformation is strictly more complicated than the Galilean transformation.

How “AGI” could end up be­ing many differ­ent spe­cial­ized AI’s stitched together

Why AGI sys­tems will not be fa­nat­i­cal max­imisers (un­less trained by fa­nat­i­cal hu­mans)