All of MakoYass's Comments + Replies

Yeah, reddit ends up getting a really huge quantity of useful information about its users this way.

I wouldn't expect LW/EA to reliably get that info with the tag subscription feature as it currently stands: I'm probably not going to subscribe to most of the tags I'm interested in, because receiving a notification for every single post to a tag isn't generally desirable. The only tags for which that sort of subscription is the right thing are the tags that get too little activity to be useful for matchmaking.

I'm glad this exists.

Feedback:

• Why no links to the post in the episode notes? If I find a post interesting, I'm basically always going to want to be able to click through and read comments or vote on it so I need that.
• I think there shouldn't be a preamble before reading the title. It kinda destroys the usecase of listening to article titles and skipping to decide whether you want to hear it, it makes that take two or three times as long as it needs to as a result of forcing the listener to sit through the same intro again.
  I'd suggest... just reading the tit

This is a really hard problem that people have been working on for decades

What problem are you referring to. Face tracking and remote presence didn't have a hardware platform at all until 2016, and wasn't a desirable product until maybe this year (mostly due to covid), and wont be a strongly desirable product until hardware starts to improve dramatically next year. And due to the perversity of social software economics, it wont be profitable in proportion to its impact, so it'll come late.

There are currently zero non-blurry face tracking headsets with that... (read more)

If an investor has a finger in every pie, then it will mean that they are invested in a company and also that company's competitors...

Blackrock generally are that way, although I don't know whether they actually intervene in governance decisions as often as people sometimes fear. I'd guess there are a lot of industry-specific ETFs that intervene more often than they do though?

... but this doesn't seem that important -- they had an incentive to create cartels, Universal Owner or no.

Yeah I guess I'm not saying UO will make this worse, more that there could b... (read more)

There's an interesting tension between.

• having a group of people with their fingers in every pie is good because it makes them care about the whole world.
• and having a group of people with their fingers in every pie is bad because it will lead to anti-consumer anti-competitive corporate governance interventions.

How does the balance weigh, in your view?

Hah!

I think it's worth discussing the straight answer to this, though: The future gives back simply by creating many of the things that I want to exist, which is a class of service that encompasses most of my values (I think).
This illuminates an interesting and surprising fact: Not all trade requires an exchange of physical objects, or even information. It is, in some cases, possible to evidence that something will occur, without ever entirely confirming it, which we will later find to be a foundational resolution in inter-universal moral trade schemes

Can you imagine a way to get a person to engage well with an impact market (or any market) when they don't understand money/beneficial self-reifying games or whatever?

I don't see a way for it to go on forever.

• We should expect the efficiency of farming to improve until no suffering is involved.
  (See the cellular agriculture/cultured meat projects.)
• We should expect humans to change for the better.
  
  It would be deliriously conservative to expect as many as 10 thousand years to pass before humans begin to improve their own minds, to live longer while retaining mental clarity and flexibility, to be aware of more, to be more as they wish to be, to reckon deeply with their essential, authentic values, to learn to live in accordan

A contract is also not usually transferable. It doesn't really have an owner.

But the implied analogy about the owner of the impact cert being morally credited for the work, is actually good, and clarifying. If you buy the credit for the act then you get credit for the act. Yes. That's how it's supposed to work. And if the worker wants to retain credit then they should retain a fraction of the impact cert, because selling the entire thing is genuinely supposed to mean that they relinquish all right to be retroactively rewarded to the buyer.

Well I think that would be an extremely uninformative and fairly confusing thing to call it. It's only an agreement insofar as any exchange of anything is an agreement, the class of agreement is uncharacteristically open-ended relative to most contracts, and reducible to a transfer of ownership.
I'm supportive of Ryan's suggestion of "credit" at this point. The difference between "an amount of credit" and "an amount of credits" might resolve the ambiguity it might have had with carbon credits.

I've been thinking about this sort of preference aggregation problem for a few years. I think the best way to do it, that we have right now, is to form a graph with edges weighted by the comparison strength, then do pagerank, or something like it. Rank entries by their pagerank scores.

But I've been working towards something more precise, and this might be novel: Parallel and serial reducer functions (and another one, a "crosslink" reducer, I believe), sort of like the reducer functions you'd use to make judgements about electronic circuit graphs, which, gi... (read more)

That's compatible with the systems being built, I believe. Impact Certs would be aggregated/componentized into impact class pools. If I grow a bunch of forests, the impact cert I file this as, could then be submitted to, and if found legitimate, permanently locked/ingested by some qualified authority to produce a corresponding quantity of fungible Carbon credits and JobCreator credits, which I could then sell to whoever likes those.

I think funding good criticism is a really good idea.

As a meetup organizer, I'm becoming very aware that preserving a culture of criticism is in tension with building a strong social fabric, or making friends. Maintaining the culture is really hard. It would help a bit, to have this very clear signal that we materially value good criticism, and that we protect our critics, even though we're normally so moderate and agreeable when we meet in person, do not be fooled, we know the value of disagreement too.

Another thing is, I think this prize would convince a... (read more)

I was about to write this exact comment, yes. I think the OP is making a necessary point, AI Risk is like Terminator lore, but it is importantly unlike the depictions that make up the bulk of the movies. We've been pretty absurdly miscommunicating our thoughts on this, but I think after this course correction we're still going to want to complain about Terminator.

Terminator lore contains the alignment problem, but the movie is effectively entirely about humans triumphing in physical fights against robots, which is a scenario that is importantly incompatibl... (read more)

I checked again and, yeah, that's right, sorry about the misunderstanding.

I think the root of my confusion on this is that most of my thinking about prediction platform designs, is situated in the genre of designs where users can create questions without oversight, and in this genre I'm hoping to find something highly General, and Robust. These sorts of designs always seem to collapse into being prediction markets.
So it comes as a surprise to me that just removing user-generated questions seems to turn out to prevent that collapse[1], and this thing it bec... (read more)

I think everyone will adapt. I vaguely remember hearing that there might be a relatively large contingent of people who never do adapt, I was unable to confirm this with 15 minutes of looking just now, though. Every accessibility complaint I came across seemed to be a solvable software problem rather than anything fundamental.

Regarding intellectual property connotations, it seems to me, at this point, that all of the systems we're making for trading impact certs would also be useful for trading intellectual property, so we might have to tolerate that.

I like "credit"... It might introduce too many ambiguities. I initially overlooked it because it also means "money"... it's also used in "carbon credits", which would exist in the impact cert system.. but another ambiguity is introduced there in that the impact cert for a carbon capture job and a "carbon credit" would be subtly dif... (read more)

Note, VR is going to get really good in the next three years, so I wouldn't personally recommend getting too invested in any physical offices, but I guess as long as we're renting it won't be our problem.

Lower cost of living, meaning you can have more people working on less profitable stuff.

I'm not sure 5000 free staters (out of 20k signatories) should be considered failure.

I proposed renaming them to "Transferable Attribution", usually shortened to just "Attribution". I like this, because the point of selling these things really is to transfer credit, and attribute the act to the buyer.

This would make it less awkward to refer to fractions of the tokens than "impact certificates", as "attribution" is a quantity word, rather than a discrete object, you can have amounts of it. Sort of gets rid of the speedbump of having to explain how it's possible to own a portion of a token or a certificate. (I guess "patronage" does this too... (read more)

expected impact of some action can be neutral even if it is bound to turn out (ex post) either extremely positive or extremely negative

I would recommend biting the decision theoretic bullet that this is not a problem. If you feel that negative outcomes are worse than positive outcomes of equal quantity, then adjust your units, they're miscalibrated.

Pot

So would The Pot be like, an organization devoted especially to promoting integrity in the market? I'm not sure I can see why it would hold together.

Maybe the goal (at least for the start) should be to create

Regarding public goods funding, and how it relates to AI Risk: Although I'm really interested in impact certificate markets and I have some mechanisms for it, I'd expect our current designs to make the alignment problem worse, on net.

The alignment problem is exactly the kind of problem that public goods funding markets we know of will totally mishandle. Progress in AI is largely about knowledge production and improving software infrastructure, which are non-excludable goods (which are generally always public goods), so public goods markets will tend to be ... (read more)

It should be mentioned that the border to NZ will be closed to most people (due to covid) until July, with a few exceptions opening up around March  https://covid19.govt.nz/international-travel/travel-to-new-zealand/when-new-zealand-borders-open/

• Skilled workers earning at least 1.5x the median wage may be eligible to be granted an ‘other critical worker’ border exception.
• [critical services include]
  • food production and its supply chain
  • key public services like health and emergency services
  • lifeline utilities such as power and water supplies
  • transport
  • c

thabk machine doggo.

The second image link is broken.

Is there anything that could be done (by governments, companies, NGOs, the general public, or whatever player) to make this even more likely?

Fair prompt. I get the impression that the most impactful thing you can do is to make sure that the people leading the standards dialog have strong technical vision and good taste. That'll also make it more likely to even succeed at establishing a standard. I guess that's something that EA (with so much software engineering acumen) could probably do better than most NGOs! But yeah, it looks like that might already be ... (read more)

org-roam doesn't appear to be multi user

I think the risk of a VR monopoly is probably low. A metaverse is just an office-compatible VRChat with external app screensharing, and portals. Lots of people are capable of making those. It's also not apparent to me that Meta are dangerously better at making the hardware than anyone else (apple, HTC and varjo are all stern competitors. Even HP are in the game. Also, by the way, you personally would probably be interested in SimulaVR, they're about to start making the first portable, self-contained VR workstation computer, and it runs NixOS. It is going t... (read more)

Correction: Metaculus's currency is just called "points", tachyons are something else. Aside from that, I have double-checked, and it definitely is a play-money prediction market (well, is it wrong to call it a prediction market it's not structured as an exchange, even if it has the same mechanics?) (Edit: I was missing the fact that, though there are assets, they are not staked when you make a prediction), and you do in fact earn points by winning bets.

and have an excellent forecasting track record

I'm concerned that the bettors here may be the types who h... (read more)

Metaculus currently gives ~20% probability to >60 months

I'd expect the bets there to be basically random. Prediction markets aren't useful for predictions about far out events: Betting in them requires tying up your credit for that long, which is a big opportunity cost, so you should expect that only fools are betting here. I'd also expect it to be biased towards the fools who don't expect AGI to be transformative, because the fools who do expect AGI to be transformative have even fewer incentives to bet: There's not going to be any use for metaculus po... (read more)

(why is the location marker wrong. Did it demand a street address?)

For the sake of coordination, I declare an intent to enter.

(It's beneficial to declare intent to enter, because if we see that the competition is too fierce to compete with, we can save ourselves some work and not make an entry, while if we see that the competition is too cute to compete with, we can negotiate and collaborate.)

I'll be working under pretty much Eliezer's model, where general agency emerges abruptly and is very difficult to align, inspect, or contain. I'm also very sympathetic to Eliezer's geopolitical pessimism, but I have a few tricks for ... (read more)

The community and events link is broken.

If it was the only thing we wanted we could actually work to explicitly specify that as the AI's goal, and that's CEV and hence problem solved.

This is just an aside, but it might be informative. I actually think that

• single alignment: "This specific blob of meat here "is" an "agent". Figure out its utility function and do that"

is going to be simpler to program than

• Hard-coded: "make a large number of many "humanlike" things "experience" "happiness""

I think it's clear that.. there seem to be more things in the hard-coded solution that we don't know how to for... (read more)

Hm. Well feel free to notify me if you ever write it up.

Yeah, that objection does also apply to humans, which is why, despite it being so difficult to extract a coherent extrapolated volition from a mammal brain, we must find a way of doing it, and once we have it, although it might not produce an agenty utility function for things like spiders or bacteria, there's a decent chance it'll work on dogs or pigs.

I'm referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uplift_(science_fiction) , sort of under the assumption that if we truly value animals we will eventually give them voice, reason, coherence. On reflection, I guess the most humane form of this would probably consist of just aligning an AI with the animals and letting it advocate for them. There's no guarantee that these beings adapted to live without speech will want it, but an advocate couldn't hurt.

...assuming that particular example is a concern of such an impact primarily on humans, could that be articulated as anthropocentric technopessimism ?

1. Why would you want to describe it that way?
2. On reflection, I don't think it can be called anthropocentric, no. There are four big groups of beings involved here: Humanity, Animals, Transhumanist post-humanity (hopefully without value-drift), and Unaligned AI. Three of those groups are non-human. Those concerned with AI alignment tend to be fighting in favor of more of those non-human groups than they are fight

There’s no answer for this

Sure there is. Just implement the decision theory whose nature is that which would have been the optimal nature for it to have always had.

That is, implement Logical Decision Theory.

I'm only being a little bit facetious. Logical Decision Theory often seems to me more like a mostly formal statement about the (arguably) perfect policy about coordination and pre-commitment and superrationality, rather than a method for actually unearthing it.

But pondering this statement does seem to have progressed my thinking a lot and I would genera... (read more)

We actually do have a good probability for a large asteroid striking the earth within the next 100 years, btw. It was the product of a major investigation, I believe it was 1/150,000,000.

Probabilities don't have to be a product of a legible, objective or formal process. It can be useful to state our subjective beliefs as probabilities to use them as inputs to a process like that, but also generally it's just good mental habit to try to maintain a sense of your level of confidence about uncertain events.

Regarding "change from within", I have since found confirmation from the excellent growth economist Mushtaq Kahn https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/mushtaq-khan-institutional-economics/ people within an industry are generally the best at policing others in the industry, they have the most energy for it, they know how to measure adherence, and they often have inside access. Without them, policing corruption often fails to happen.

Maybe a moratorium concerning soy and beef from the Amazon region would be enough to settle this issue; even so, given that the first driver of deforestation is speculation with land prices (besides illegal timber and mining),  I'm afraid such a ban wouldn't be enough to stop it.

The question then is, where is the value of the land coming from, how much of it is coming from each possible use, loggers, soy farmers, or meat farmers? If you stop those uses, wont speculation stop?

Crazyism about a topic is the view that something crazy must be among the core truths about that topic. Crazyism can be justified when we have good reason to believe that one among several crazy views must be true but where the balance of evidence supports none of the candidates strongly over the others

Eric Schwitzgebel, Crazyism

I am really puzzled by those graphs, mm. But as to the Easterlin paradox, it's still alive: http://repec.iza.org/dp7234.pdf Happiness has been increasing, and so has GDP, but the rates of increase still don't seem to have much of a relationship.

I was there and I can report that T is awesome in that particular way consistently.

I'm not sure the maceration of male chicks induces any suffering. IIRC, it's approved as a humane killing method by the SPCA or someone like that.

I'm glad to see the inclusion of anthropic units as a function of neuron count/brain mass. Turns out that makes a huge difference. Ideally I'd use brain mass*square(neuron count), but that would be overkill...

In building this, did you come across literature about this question of how anthropic measure relates to mass and neuron configuration? I'd love to see any if you have that. I've got quite an interest in the anthropic measure binding question, my somewhat unconventional stance influences my decisions regarding animal welfare, so I really ought to read whatever's out there.

I was a little concerned about the bid sniping recommendation, bad things often happen when a technique for subverting a system and getting an edge over others is widely adopted, but it occurred to me that all that would happen is ebay auctions would become, like, one shot simultaneous blind bids, which might well be an improvement. Auction processes, currently, are selected to benefit sellers, at the detriment of buyers, and at the detriment of pricing efficiency? (I'd expect the winner's curse to lead to overpricing), so it wouldn't be that surprising if... (read more)

I don't think you should be so defensive in the face of accusations of promoting a bragging culture. Own it. If someone asked me "Isn't it unethical to brag" I would tell them that, no, contrary, it's positively ethical to brag.

The following is opinion, probably contains innacuracies, but would be important if true.

Bragging (well) about how good you are is a good norm.

If credibly signalling our goodness is normalized, there will emerge social pressures to do more goodness than we otherwise would have. If you normalize the right sort of bragging, it will cr... (read more)