All of mako yass's Comments + Replies

humanities current situation could ever be concerned with this is a dream of Ivory Tower fools

It might be true that it's impractical for most people, living today, to pay much attention to the AI situation. Most of us should just remain focused on the work that they can do on these sorts of civic, social and economic reforms. But if I'd depicted a future where these reforms of ours end up being a particularly important part of history, that would not have been honest.

Situationist theory: The meat eater grinds to shine for the same reason gentry with servants do; a kind of latent guilt, to be reminded every day that so much has been sacrificed for them, a noblesse oblige, a visceral pressure to produce feats that vindicate the decadence of their station. (Having dedicated tutors may do a bit of this as well.)

A theory like this would explain why it doesn't seem to be a result of missing nutrients, contending that it's psychosocial.

[just having a quick look at George Church]. Said there he's "off and on vegan" which suggests to me that he was having difficulty getting it to work. But I checked his twitter and he said he was vegan as of 2018. He studies healthspan, so his voice counts. His page on his personal site unfortunately doesn't discuss his approach to dieting or supplements but maybe he'd link something from someone else if someone asked.

Today, somewhat, but that's just because human brains can't prove the state of their beliefs or share specifications with each other (ie, humans can lie about anything). There is no reason for artificial brains to have these limitations, and any trend towards communal/social factors in intelligence, or self-reflection (which is required for recursive self-improvement), then it's actively costly to be cognitively opaque.

Lots of great stuff here. Strongly recommend following Asterisk.

I wonder to what extent MIRI's Functional Decision Theory's categorical imperative relates to this. In FDT, there is no such thing as an independent agent, it's essentially an acknowledgement that we can't escape the bonds, the entrainment/entanglement, the synchronies, created by the universality of the mathematics of decisionmaking.
To practice FDT, you have to be aware that your decisions will be mirrored by others, EG, you don't defect against other FDT agents in prisoner's dilemmas, because you're aware that you'll both tend to make the same decision, ... (read more)

Btw, I'd generally recommend always at least skimreading a thing before you put it down, IME it leads to much better outcomes than just not reading it at all.

Yeah this seems like a silly thought to me. Are you optimistic that there'll be a significant period of time after intellectual labor is automated/automatable and before humans no longer control history?

We shouldn't actually do this because mastodon is not good software and will probably be obsolete soon, but if that were not the case.

It would be a strategic win for EA to conspicuously fund the development of a community notes feature for Mastodon.

Here's what I think would happen: most mastodon communities would shit on it and refuse to use it because it had EA funding, but not vehemently enough to remove the feature from their forks, so this would just result in them looking incredibly wrong and bad and guilty every time anyone saw a successful community... (read more)

I can certainly wait, as I still don't eat pork for nutritional reasons (fat composition). I guess it should be you who makes contact, I'd be a lot less rigorous. If you need locals, I could connect you with people in the community. I don't know anyone who's been involved in pig welfare, but I know some people who've done chicken stuff (meat chicken welfare in NZ is still bad, but egg chicken welfare is mostly fine.)

At this point I'm expecting we're going to find that yes, humane farms would benefit from aggregating, but still, very large contiguous parcel... (read more)

Do you believe such farms exist? Do you have any evidence they exist?

I do know of one non-atrocity pig farm franchise that runs at least 5000 pigs worth of farms (IIRC they're the main pork brand at most supermarkets in NZ) freedom farms. I'm having difficulty finding specifics about where the farms are and whether any individual freedom farm is huge. But they'd be good people to ask about this. Shall I?

Slow-growing chicken operations exist, why wouldn't they aggregate into huge farms for economies of scale for the same reasons any industry does that?

That sure is some information. Doesn't address my question.

by using USDA data on the size of farms, and then defining any farm over a certain size as a 'factory' farm

Does the size tell you what sorts of methods are being used? I'm confused as to how it could.

not really, just didn't want to draw too much attention to it.

I guess if we you saw a lot of noise in the prediction, random misspellings, tortured grammar, you'd reject.

(Well I declare that the message is very short.
What would 48bits of entropy, in grammatically and semantically correct text, look like? Edit: I guess, if I could assume I could think of 4 synonyms for every word in the paragraph, the paragraph would only have to be a bit over 24 words long for me to be able to find something. Fortunately, it's only 11 words long.)

But would he describe the paper that way to his brother, who he knows is left-center? He'd likely want to tell Max that it isn't an extreme paper, and if he were a right-winger, he'd likely believe it.

It's also possible that Max wasn't cognisant that his brother had published in that paper and so they may have not thought to talk about it, from what I can tell, Per has worked for a lot of more prominent publications than that.

I'm curious as to what kind of potentially existentially relevant proposal the NDF would have submitted? What did they think they had to offer?

(registering a tentative guess: sha256sum ..52ca22c6cd32)

Good to know what the typical spread is like.

These are some of the incidents that article cites as being representative of Nya Dagbladet's problems, are they as described?

On its website, Nya Dagbladet publishes right-wing extremist content such as the racist myth of an ongoing “population replacement”, Holocaust revisionism, claims that Muslims are attempting to conquer Europe, and conspiracy theories related to the covid-19 pandemic.

For several years, Nya Dagbladet has also had a pro-Russian orientation. In September, the platform published an article bas

Move on from what aspect of EA? I can't really imagine how a person would move on from the general concept of an extended community for reasoned, quantified, applied moral philosophy?

I'm sympathetic even though my background in technology and futurism has persistently drawn my attention away from things like this, so I might also be a bit clueless, but that might shed light on why we haven't discussed this much yet and I think we'd be very open to hosting those discussions and the associated communities.
I'd be super interested to see a historian or anthropologist attempt to estimate the moral weight of the preservation of cultural knowledge or artifacts, and weigh it against other work.

As a starting point... how many people should one ... (read more)

It is a joke, but it's an appropriate one.

EA has a pathology of insisting that we defer to data even in situations where sufficient quantities of data can't be practically collected before a decision is necessary.

And that is extremely relevant to EA's media problem.

Say it takes 100 datapoints over 10 years to make an informed decision. During that time:

• The media ecosystem, the character of the discourse, the institutions (there are now prediction markets involved btw) and the dominant moral worldviews of the audience has completely changed, you no longer n

The media is an extremely different discursive environment than the EA forum and should have different guidelines.

I don't want to assume that the public sphere cannot become earnestly truthseeking, but right now it isn't at all and bad things happen if you treat it like it is.

(this is partially echoing/paraphrasing lukeprog) I want to emphasize the anthropic measure/phenomenology (never mind, this can be put much more straightforwardly) observer count angle, which to me seems like the simplest way neuron count would lead to increased moral valence. You kind of mention it, and it's discussed more in the full document, but for most of the post it's ignored.

Imagine a room where a pair of robots are interviewed. The robot interviewer is about to leave and go home for the day, they're going to have to decide whether to leave the lig... (read more)

it's not clear to me that that is the assumption of most

Thinking that much about anthropics will be common within the movement, at least.

Since we're already in existential danger due to AI risk, it's not obvious that we shouldn't read a message that has only a 10% chance of being unfriendly, a friendly message could pretty reliably save us from other risks. Additionally, I can make an argument for friendly messages potentially being quite common:

If we could pre-commit now to never doing a SETI attack ourselves, or if we could commit to only sending friendly messages, then we'd know that many other civs, having at some point stood in the same place as us, will have also made the same commitm... (read more)

I believe the forum allows commenting anonymously, though I wouldn't know how to access that feature.

Psuedonyms would be a bit better, but it'll do.

I'm excited by the prospect of Polis, but it's frustratingly limited. The system has no notion of whether people are agreeing with a statement because it's convincing or bridging the gap, or because it's banal.

In this case... I don't think we're really undergoing any factionalization about this? In that case, should we not just try talking more... that usually works pretty well with us.

I guess prediction markets will help.

Prediction markets about the judgements of readers is another thing I keep thinking about. Systems where people can make themselves accountable to Courts of Opinion by betting on their prospective judgements. Courts occasionally grab a comment and investigate it deeper than usual and enact punishment or reward depending on their findings.

I've raised these sorts of concepts with lightcone as a way of improving the vote sorting (where we'd sort according to a prediction market's expectation of the eventual ratio between positive and negative reports from readers). They say they've thought about it.

Although I cheer for this,

What makes EA, EA, what makes EA antifragile, is its ruthless transparency

- although I really want to move to a world where radical transparency wins, I currently don't believe that we're in a world like that right now (I wish I could explain why I think that without immediately being punished for excess transparency, but for obvious reasons that seems impossible).

How do we get to that world? Or if you see this world in better light than I do, if you believe that the world is already mostly managing to avoid punishing important tr... (read more)

You might try to explain it away

I wouldn't, I didn't realize they were recognizing new saints! That's quite surprising and I can't see why they'd do it unless they believed it was correct.

Trying to rationalise Christian belief as 'well I guess they must be compatibilist deists'

I will persist with this a bit though, there must be an extent of compatibilist deism, given the extent to which the world was obviously and visibly set up to plausibly work in an autonomous way and the extent to which most of the catholics I know are deeply interested in science, be... (read more)

which is unhelpful because nobody (not even the Calvinists!) thinks providence is incompatible with agency

Mostly I was just trying to derive, in my odd way, that they wouldn't. But if that's common knowledge yeah it might not have been helpful.

And divine providence cannot just mean that the deist god set everything up just right in the beginning such that everything just worked out as planned ... Your model, I think, is incompatible with Christian dogma

Mm, that is my relationship with nature. I'd heard that there were deists in the christian world (I think... (read more)

You partly acknowledge this, but I really think there's probably a bit of pre-compatabilist confusion going on here. Knowing with certainty that you will succeed at preventing catastrophic risks does not excuse you from working hard to do it. Prophesies do not undermine agency, they include it, they are about it, they are realized through and in accordance with the agency of their subjects.

Consider this: When I was writing this comment, I was absolutely certain that I would finish writing the comment, and that it would be posted. It wouldn't be in spite of... (read more)

I'm dubious that EAs younger than about 40 would end up being anything more than pawns in political games they don't understand

Can't disagree, only 32, still don't fully understand how american politics works.

the name of this video's sponsor is 80,000 hours

Oh. I was really hoping Veritasium had just organically gotten interested in differential progress, that's kind of a let down lmao.

I really want to thank 80,000 hours for sponsoring this part of the video

Alternately, maybe he just wanted to save the 80K ad for the video that would be most watched by the audience who'd be interested in 80K.

I definitely don't spend 2 hours a day scrolling facebook, though I may spend about that long scrolling twitter (mostly miserably but occaisonally I see something really useful).

I think I'd do that even if there were no algorithm, though. There isn't one in my twitter list of consistently good accounts, nor in mastodon, I still check these things often, they are not much less juicy.
People often say that twitter was designed to be addictive. It mostly wasn't designed at all. It was selected. And most of that "addiction" is just a craving for a thriving social space online.

in which a minor slip-up means instant death for everyone so a 1 – epsilon probability of success is unacceptable.

Oh, does Eliezer still think (speak?) that way? I think that would be the first clear reasoning error (that can't just be written off as a sort of opinionated specialization) I've seen him make about AI strategy. In a situation where there's a certain yearly baseline risk of the deployment of misaligned AGI occurring (which is currently quite low and so this wouldn't be active yet!), it does actually become acceptable to deploy a system that ha... (read more)

I didn't realize how many mid posts the algorithm has been curating out for me... :{ I didn't finish scrolling. Felt inefficient.

Broad input (low production-quality) narrow output (extensively filtered by extended curation systems) is probably the main reason memes were ever considered to be good. Without curation, it's... well it's almost literally not "memes" at that point, as they're not doing the thing where they propagate and reproduce and compete.

With a 'select all' format, one loses the information about which are the most important

Have you found that people answer that way? I'll only tend to answer with more than one option if they're all about equally important.

You might expect that it's uncommon for multiple factors to be equally important, I think one of the reasons it is common, in the messy reality that we have (which is not the reality that most statisticians want): multiple factors are often crucial dependencies.
Example: A person who spends a lot of their political energy advocating for Qu... (read more)

Well, in one sense that is shallow, what would an agnostic person + (some other religion mean)? 

Uh that specifically? Engaging in practices and being open to the existence of the divine but ultimately not being convinced. This is not actually a strange or uncommon position. (What if there are a lot of statisticians who are trying to make their work easier by asking questions that make the world seem simpler than it is.)

it seems like some religions like Buddhism, which accepts other practices, would be understood to accept other practices [but not beli

I think one consideration is that they want to make the surveys comparable year to year

Makes sense. But I guess if it's only been one year, there wouldn't have been much of a cost to changing it this year, or, the cost would have been smaller than the cost of not having it right in future years.

if someone could select different political identities or religions, that would make the result difficult to interpret

Could you explain why? I don't see why it should, really.

WAY too many of the questions only allow checking a single box, or a limited number of boxes. I'm not sure why you've done this? From my perspective it almost never seems like the right thing, and it's going to significantly reduce the accuracy of the measurements you get, at least from me.

An example would be, there's a question, "what is the main type of impact you expect to have" or something, and I expect to do things that are entrepreneurial, which involve or largely consist of communitybuilding, communication and research. I don't know which of those ... (read more)

even if our abstract utility functions don't say they matter any less just because other things matter more

A utility function can't say anything else, in decision theory. Total caring is, roughly speaking, conserved.

The psuedo utility functions that a hedonic utilitarian projects onto others can introduce more caring for one thing without reducing their caring for other things, but they're irrelevant in this context. (and if you ask me, a preference utilitarian, they're not very relevant in the context of utilitarianism either, but never mind that.)

Hmm, although I think I get what you mean, I'm not sure how it could actually be true given that (preference) utility functions are scale and offset invariant, so the extent of an agent's caring can only be described relative to the other things they care about?

It's sort of implicitly saying "I think your that your time, and your development, is worth much less than mine". I wish we were the kind of community where people would say that to my face, then we could have a conversation and find out whether that's really true.

That's especially easy to do where I live, we don't have factory farming here (cows go for "finishing" at a grain feed only at the end of their life, for a short time, too short for serious stomach problems). Their lives kinda seem positive on net.

However, the conservation issues are worse, methane emissions are high, and runoff from farming messes up the streams and lakes, threatening many native fish species. [realizes I'm talking to brian tomasik] Evolution spent billions of years creating the species. I don't think we'll ever create anything quite like... (read more)

You should only put approximately zero weight on anecdotes that got to you through a sensationalism-maximizing curation system with biases you don't understand, which I hope this wasn't? Regardless, the anecdotes are mostly just meant to be clarifying examples of the kind of thing effect that I am trying to ask about, I don't expect people to pass them along or anything.

I decided not to talk about biological plausibility, because I don't get the impression pharmacology or nutrition follows reductive enough rules that anyone can reason a-priori about it ver... (read more)

are multi-stage (sequentially dependant?) breakthroughs more impressive than a similar number of breakthroughs that aren’t sequentially dependant or that happen far apart in time from each other?

Yes, because... it means they couldn't have been finding low-hanging fruit. When one problem leads to another, you don't get to wander off and look for easier ones, you have to keep going down one of these few avenues of this particular cave system. So if someone solved a contiguous chain of problems you can be sure that some of those were probably genuinely really... (read more)