it’s a prescription rather than a cosmology
I don’t think Chapman would disagree with this. According to the “yanas” page Buddhism-at-large in some sense allows several fundamentally contradictory worldviews without a firm commitment to an overarching cosmology. The free version of Claude says that this framework is pretty much standard Tibetan Buddhism.
a mathematician’s job can be understood as the invention and learning of new languages to discuss previously unseen entities and associated phenomena
Would you say that LLMs are already good at the ‘invention’ part? My mostly-outsider impression is that they have a decent grasp of already existing languages and can apply them in appropriate circumstances that humans have overlooked, which is what’s driving the current action.
Yeah, I wouldn’t expect his position to be popular, because he’s basically saying that in order to improve its marketability western Buddhism has discarded the “vibe” of total renunciation, while essentially maintaining the system of practices that had been developed with renunciative ends in mind. I don’t suppose that there’s an objective way to resolve this until substantial studies of the effects of these practices are conducted.
Hmm. Do you disagree with Chapman that western Buddhism is largely Sutra-derived, and the ultimate goal of Sutra is renunciation of worldly concerns (the stuff that’s considered indispensable in the west)?
even the non-supernatural parts are a mix of good and bad things, and sorting it out would be too much work, so it is better to start from zero instead and only adopt the provable good stuff
Yeah, rationalists are liable to say this sort of thing, but I’m not so sanguine about their ability to avoid generating quite a few more piles of skulls given enough power. That’s not to say that I think that any other way forward commonly advocated these days is particularly promising either.
Unfortunately, not only do they fail to commit to the bit, the critics then fail to point this out and condemn them for it.
The Overton window gets moved in small increments. Cancelling all the anti-zoophilia bigots is a few steps away yet.
Probably not. You wouldn’t have gotten a “Khrushchev thaw” in that scenario, you’d get a massive land war in Europe way ahead of schedule. Which, still, is a sacrifice that quite a few Americans and Brits were willing to make, I’d bet.
Sure, there’s some of that, but just to be clear, that’s not the full extent of disagreement with EA-flavored AI safety. Peter Thiel, for one, certainly believes that we should be “accelerating”, for what he considers to be good reasons.
Clearly you have very unusual preferences/opinions, and ordinary relationships are highly unlikely to satisfy you. I’d say that your best bet is to become famous/impressive enough that an exceptional woman sends you a dating application (the Eliezer Yudkowsky/Scott Alexander strategy).
The strongest taboos are not the sort of thing that people fear saying, but the sort that never even enter their heads (or go in one ear, then out the other). “Women are inferior in such and such way, therefore...” isn’t a way that conversations go.
women is on average is physically weaker than men
Amusingly, here’s the first google result on entering this for me: How Gendered Myths of Strength Keep Women Weaker
I don’t imagine Bonne Maman wants to stop women getting to their jam—I imagine that nobody cares.
Nobody is allowed to care. The notion that the average female is in any way inferior to the average male is one of the strongest taboos of “polite society”.
The Green Revolution, which saved millions from starvation in the second half of the twentieth century, was born from the same impulse as High Modernism: it is top-down, science-driven and generic, scaling standardized solutions across entire continents.
Stalinist collectivization wasn’t science-driven though, it was ideology-driven, which seems like an important distinction. Square evenly-spaced grids aren’t enough by themselves.
And even as scientific consensus on climate did eventually appear, most countries have done little of substance in response, because their incentives to ignore the consensus outweigh the perceived risk.
To clarify, the scientific consensus on climate change is that it’s emphatically not an extinction risk, abundant misleading media presentations notwithstanding.
I think much of woo in general has the same combination of “makes clearly nonsensical claims about reality, even as many of their practices have clear value and just lack legible mainstream explanations”.
How much value, though? The claim that any popular variety of woo provides some positive utility for its practitioners is, on the one hand, plausible, but on the other, unexciting. Meanwhile, woo-meisters tend to promise all sorts of crazy benefits, which is what mainly attracts (and repels) people.
Trying things out is good and all, but there’s always the opportunity cost. If you’re going into it clear-eyed, looking for some kind of a (poorly understood) therapeutic effect, which realistically wouldn’t change your life—by all means. If, however, you’re attracted by extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence is in short supply.
Interesting. How do actual top players deal with this, have private competitions based on honor system?
What is surprising to me is that despite being partially divorced from the narrative coherence, this coherent mind is, once recognized, still very legible and human-like.
I’d say that it’s even more human-like than a character entirely circumscribed by some idealistic narrative. “The face presented is not the whole model mind, and the model is the unit under selection in training” is entirely applicable to humans as well, after you swap “model” for “organism”.
If I was reasonably confident I knew better than you, how you should live, under what basis do I have the obligation to take away your agency to elect override your own preferences?
Under the norms of your society/culture. They obviously aren’t static, and can e.g. fade away, having lost to external competition (like vikings had), or change in response to internal critique (like how colonialism became discredited). If you would rather operate under some hypothetical perfect rules derived from first principles, then you will likely be disappointed, seeing how philosophy has for millennia utterly failed to discover those.
I think a better way of presenting it is in a different order:
I think insect suffering might cause a million times more suffering than human suffering
But that’s not the important rhetorical point that the claimant likely intends to make in this case. EAs know that insect suffering sounds obviously crazy to the uninitiated, so the likely target audience here are people who already think that animal suffering charities of some sort (e.g. factory farming-related) satisfy the “effective” criterion, which is equivalent to thinking that animal suffering (at some scale) could be more important than human suffering. From there the claim that suffering among one subset of animals swamps all other by orders of magnitude isn’t crazy at all.
I think that Palestinians are basically screwed regardless of what they do, but insofar as their goals include weakening/isolating Israel, they have achieved success beyond their wildest dreams (but at a grievous cost).
Sorry, should be fixed now.
AIUI his point is that the worldview and practice are supposed to be a congruent package. Since renunciation is the fundamental principle of Sutra, the practitioner should occupy a state of mind where it makes sense to renounce undesirable stuff. I wouldn’t be surprised that various traditional Sutra schools significantly differ in their presentation, and agree that it’s misleading to imply homogeneity.