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“I don’t like how they said it” and “I don’t like how this made me feel” is the aspect of the human brain that has given us Trump. As long as the idea that “how you feel about it” is a basis for any decision making, the world will continue to be fucked. The authors audience largely understand that “this made me feel” is an indication that introspection is required, and not an indication that the author should be igno…
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Along these lines I am sort of skimming articles/blogs/websites about Lightcone, LessWrong, etc, and I am still struggling with the question...what do they DO?
Twenty years or so ago, Eliezer Yudkowsky, a former proto-accelerationalist, realized that superintelligence was probably coming, was deeply unsafe, and that we should do something about that. Because he had a very hard time convincing people of this to him obvious fact, he first wrote a very good blog about human reason, philosophy and AI, in order to fix whatever was going wrong in people's heads that caused them t…
Well, he was right about that. Pretty much all the details were wrong, but you can't expect that much so it's fine.
The problem is that it's philosophically confused. Many things are "deeply unsafe", the main example being driving or being anywhere near someone driving a car. And yet it turns out to matter a lot less, and matter in different ways, than you'd expect if you just thought about it.
Also see those signs everywhere in California telling you that everything gives you cancer. It's true, but they should be reminding you to wear sunscreen.
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Are there other philosophy- or history-grounded sources that are comparable? If so, I’d love some recommendations. Yudkowsky and others have their problems, but their texts have an interesting points, are relatively easy to read and understand, and you can clearly see which real issues they’re addressing. From my experience, alternatives tend to fall into two categories: 1. Genuine classical philosophy, which is usua…
It's not a nice response but I would say: don't be so lazy. Struggle through the hard stuff. I say this as someone who had the opposite experience: I had a decent humanities education, but an abysmal mathematics education, and now I am tackling abstract mathematics myself. It's hard. I need to read sections of works multiple times. I need to sit down and try to work out the material for myself on paper. Any impressio…
But if you can't even narrow the breadth of possible choices down to a few paths that can be traveled, you can't be surprised when people take the one that they know that's also easier with more immediate payoffs.
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The nature of unknowns is that you don't know them. What's the probability of AI singularity? It has never happened before so you have no priors and any number you assign will be pure speculation.
Same is true about anything you're trying to forecast, by definition of it being in the future. And yet people have figured out how to make predictions more narrow than shrugging.
Most of the time we make predictions based on how similar events happened in the past. For completely novel situations it's close to impossible to make a prediction and reckless to base policy on such a prediction.
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> They don't really ever show a sense of "hey, I've got a thought, maybe I haven't considered all angles to it, maybe I'm wrong - but here it is". Aren't these the people who started the trend of writing things like " epistemic status: mostly speculation " on their blog posts? And writing essays about the dangers of overconfidence? And measuring how often their predictions turn out wrong? And maintaining webpages tit…
I grew up with some friends who were deep into the early roots of online rationalism, even slightly before LessWrong came online. I've been around long enough to recognize the rhetorical devices used in rationalist writings: > Aren't these the people who started the trend of writing things like "epistemic status: mostly speculation" on their blog posts? And writing essays about the dangers of overconfidence? And meas…
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They remind me of the "Effective Altruism" crowd who get completely wound up in these hypothetical logical thought exercises and end up coming to insane conclusions that they feel trapped in because they got there using pure logic. Not realizing that their initial conditions were highly artificial so any conclusion they reach is only of academic value. There is a term for this. "Getting stuck up your own butt." It wo…
The overlap between the Effective Altruism community and the Rationalist community is extremely high. They’re largely the same people. Effective Altruism gained a lot of early attention on LessWrong, and the pessimistic focus on AI existential risk largely stems from an EA desire to avoid “temporal-discounting” bias. The reasoning is something like: if you accept that future people count just as much as current peopl…
I get the feeling these people often want to seem smarter than they are, regardless of how smart they are. And they want to get money to ostensibly "consider these issues", but really they want money for nothing.
If they wanted to do right by the future masses, they should be looking to the things that are affecting us right now. But they treat those issues as if they'll work out in the wash.
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As Adam Becker shows in his book, EAs started out being reasonable "give to charity as much as you can, and research which charities do the most good" but have gotten into absurdities like "it is more important to fund rockets than help starving people or prevent malaria because maybe an asteroid will hit the Earth, killing everyone, starving or not".
It seems very odd to criticize the group that most reliably and effectively funds global health and malaria prevention for this. What is your alternative? What's your framework that makes you contribute to malaria prevention more or more effectively than EAs do? Or is the claim instead that people should shut down conversation within EA that strays from the EA mode?
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Here's a theory of what's happening, both with you here in this comment section and with the rationalists in general. Humans are generally better at perceiving threats than they are at putting those threats into words. When something seems "dangerous" abstractly, they will come up with words for why---but those words don't necessarily reflect the actual threat, because the threat might be hard to describe. Neverthele…
No offense, but this way of thinking is the domain of comic book supervillains. "I must destroy the world in order to save it." Morality is only holding me back from maximizing the value of the human race 1,000 or 1,000,000 years from now type nonsense. This sort of reasoning sounds great from 1000 feet up, but the longer you do it the closer you get to "I need to kill nearly all current humans to eliminate genetic d…
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The overlap between the Effective Altruism community and the Rationalist community is extremely high. They’re largely the same people. Effective Altruism gained a lot of early attention on LessWrong, and the pessimistic focus on AI existential risk largely stems from an EA desire to avoid “temporal-discounting” bias. The reasoning is something like: if you accept that future people count just as much as current peopl…
Intelligence and rational thought is useful, but like any strategy it has its tradeoffs and limitations. No amount of intelligence can overcome the chaos of long time horizons, especially when we're talking about human civilization. IMHO it's reasonable to pick a long-term problem/risk and focus on solving it. But it's pure hubris to think rationality will give you anything approaching high confidence of what the big…
The real conflict here is between Darwinism and enlightenment ideals. But I have yet to see any self-styled Rationalists take this seriously.
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Here's a theory of what's happening, both with you here in this comment section and with the rationalists in general. Humans are generally better at perceiving threats than they are at putting those threats into words. When something seems "dangerous" abstractly, they will come up with words for why---but those words don't necessarily reflect the actual threat, because the threat might be hard to describe. Neverthele…
> Ironically paperclip-maximizing-robots are exactly the thing that the rationalists are so worried about. They are a group of people who missed, and then disavowed, and now advocate disavowing, this "personal" morality, and unsurprisingly they view the world in a lens that doesn't include personality morality, which means mostly being worried about problems of the same sort. But it provokes a strong negative reactio…
The AI will do what its programmed to do, but its programmers morality may not match my own. What more scary is that it may be developed with the morality of a corporation rather than a person. (That is to say, no morals at all.)
I think its perfectly justifiable to be scared of a very powerful being with no morals stomping around!