Posts mostly crossposted from my substack.
Yair Halberstadt(Yair Halberstadt)
Karma: 2,021
[Question] Best non-textbooks on every subject
Save Humanity! Breed Sapient Octopuses!
[Question] Challenge: Does ChatGPT ever claim that a bad outcome for humanity is actually good?
One thing to consider: if we successfully dissuade deepmind researchers from working on AGI, who actually do take alignment issues a little bit seriously, does it instead get developed by meta researchers who (for the sake of argument) don’t care?
More generally you’re not going to successfully remove everyone from the field. So the people you’ll remove will be those who are most concerned about alignment, leaving those who are least concerned to discover AGI.
Heuristic: Replace “No Evidence” with “No Reason”
The optimal angle for a solar boiler is different than for a solar panel
One big problem is the disparity between people with kids and those without—those with kids tend to take all their vacation days when school’s out.
Those without kids spread theirs around the year so they get cheaper prices.
In practice this means things are very quiet during the summer/winter vacations and then there’s a smearing of one or two people out each week for the rest of the year.
The company incentives would have to be more than the difference in prices for planes and hotels between on and off peak seasons—often thousands of dollars.
Humans have driven to extinction tens of thousands of species, and continue to kill more every year. Whilst mostly bad, very few of them have had terrible impacts on the ecosystem.
To then hyperfocus on one particular species, specifically one which kills hundreds of thousands of people each year, is essentially an isolated demand for rigour. If we wanted to reduce our impact on the ecosystem let’s focus instead on saving some of the species that don’t cause extreme human suffering.
Linkpost: Robin Hanson—Why Not Wait On AI Risk?
Design policy to be testable
Book Review: 1948 by Benny Morris
[Question] How would you build Dath Ilan on earth?
I will match this bounty, and encourage others to do the same.
To every people according to their language
Falling fertility explanations and Israel
Average utilitarianism is non-local
In precisely the same sense that we can write 1 + 1⁄2 + 1⁄4 + … = 2, despite that no real-world process of “addition” involving infinitely many terms may be performed in a finite number of steps, we can write 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + … = −1/12
I think this is overstating things (which is fair enough to make the point you’re making).
The first is simply a shorthand for “the limit of this sum is 2”, which is an extremely simple, general definition, which applies in almost all contexts, and matches up with what addition means in almost all contexts. It preserves far more of the properties of addition as well—it’s commutative, associative, etc. In most cases where you want to work with the sum of an infinite series, the correct value to use for this series is 2.
The second is a shorthand for something far more complex, which applies in a far more limited range of cases, and doesn’t preserve almost any of the properties we expect of addition. It’s not linear or stable. In most cases where you want to work with sums of infinite series, the correct sum for this series is infinity. Only very rarely would you want −1/12.
Is this post about anything more than semantics? If yes, why does it matter?
Isn’t that the point? Where we stand now, we have to make a decision without knowing if there will or won’t be a treacherous turn...