“(1) we don’t know what is going on in LLMs (2) it’s outlandish to say that LLMs have no understanding of the world” both claims cannot be true
it’s really funny when people tag jimmy wales on twitter when they don’t like some of the content on wikipedia. it’s like someone would tag Nat Friedman when they find a bug in a program hosted there
but also the amount of time a broken clock is right has measure zero
in deontic logic, is ~obligation(~x)=permission(x)?
philosophical technique: A is X, B is Y, but there is a continuous transformation from A to B, but there isn’t from X to Y, where does the switch occur?
I really enjoy the portray of conseqduentialism in the SEP article on deontology: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/
philosophytube followers be pondering the impossibility of white bears in novaya semlya
tbh whenever someone is like “the existing arguments for agi xrisk were insufficient/unclear, here’s my better version” the arguments read exactly the same to me as the existing ones.
Zeynep’s razor (second-order effects): https://nitter.net/zeynep/status/1478766408691556353?lang=en
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7dRGYDqA2z6Zt7Q4h/goals-for-which-less-wrong-does-and-doesn-t-help?commentId=CRMuTvT8sYEYgddME this is just 80k hours. how did they know
Prediction: I will not like the Philosophy Tube Video about Effective Altruism
Daniel Wingman
TIL: gwern has met Jürgen Habermas in person: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DXcezGmnBcAYL2Y2u/yes-a-blog?commentId=nhpQK5787tMoaYDWp
Unlikely events can be good, likely events can be bad.
“I don’t know why anyone would ever want to do that, so we should punish it” is a beautiful warning sign (milder form is “I don’t know why anyone would ever want to do that, so nobody should even try”)
i am looking forward to seeing whether aliens similarly have two sexes, and whether they roughly split up by “sex that does the investing in the offspring” and “sex that provides a lot of variation in mating success”
google maps as a dating app
“But I’d love to be pinned down” — Toby Ord (The Precipice p. 397)
Reading The Precipice & struck by the fact that it was released before GPT-3, just as COVID-19 was ramping up. Pretty insane
“sorry dude, you have vingean uncertainty over the EA community”
critiques of effective altruism in the form “effective altruism isn’t blue/green enough” are really boring, and likely wrong
I need to learn how to crash dates that are going nowhere with way too much escalation. That should be fun
nofap promises so much and in the end just makes my balls ache a bit
tbh i can understand why people dislike Pinker so much—he’s usually right, but he so unfathomably smug about everything
aviation safety is a small shard of dath ilan that fell into our world
rapidly oscillating between nibbanic zero-ontology and plotinian “badness is non-being” views
help
I’m rapidly flip-flopping between believing that I’m extremely autistic and believing that everyone else is autistic compared to me
In this House — We might fail, but never with abandon — Every moment is fresh, unimpeded by the one before — We remove as many obligations as we add — There is something to protect, something to give everything for — Tsuyoku Naritai!
why does meditation make me so horny & temporarily relieve me of erectile dysfunction?
why is >80% of the most read literotica content incest related?
the last century was wild: “Her love of tennis included playing naked, with nude tennis ‘a common practice in those days among the more louche members of the middle classes’”, from the Wikipedia article on Enid Blyton.
pareto improvement: instead of letting students write bachelors/masters theses that are basically just literature reviews, let them rewrite the respective wikipedia articles instead (and then check the article)
gotta get a child with cancer to wish for a tiling-stable subagent-persistent otherizer idiom
another paper which relies on questionnaires for attention span. am i going crazy? how is this a good metric‽
My Generation — The Who (Eurobeat Remix)
noone told me that you can get basically free tutoring from professors during so-called office hours‽
Julius Caesar Scaliger pre-empted Scott Alexanders solution to theodicy: in his view god had created every being that would add more good than not to the cosmos
schelling.party
analogue players link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WB3Oj00p83Q
i want that bear onesie
proposal: ability to sort posts on forum magnum by length
Sauerkraut: The German Kimchi
how much programmer activity is spent writing new code vs. debugging existing code?
concept: Codex but fine-tuned on ticket description & diff pairs, for debugging instead of new code.
THE ACTOR OF THE MAIN CHARACTER FROM VGHS MARRIED THE ACTRESS PLAYING HIS LOVE INTEREST
arrière and derrière having the same meaning is just such a thing
of course the Soviet Union failed—they didn’t have computers yet!
computational complexity theory of self-modifying code. probably not good for execution speed, but great for code size.
i only allow myself to go the hard way. good or bad?
if agents are usually suffering negative sum games might be good via destructive warfare
MANGAO
Gauzian
The Honeycomb Conjecture was probably the longest-standing open conjecture in the history of mathematics. Open for 2035 years, if Wikipedia is to believed
predict yourself as if you’re a well-meaning but very unreliable friend of yourself
futuristic city image “the world if all externalities were internalized”
monotonic occam’s razor
multifaceted hedgehog
killing moloch is not glorious, it’s just tedious.
interpretability can ~re-create more discrete alignment methods over a leaky abstraction
maybe social constructivism is just descriptive in how most social scientists create their theories?
what’s the entomology of that?
gratitude should be a brahmavihara, not upekkha
{adequate,¬adequate}×{exploitable,¬exploitable}×{efficient,¬efficient}
public relations is a reality-masking puzzle.
actual nazis talk about moloch a lot
i care about the instantiation of human values in the universe, not about whether humanity reaches the stars
“citta” should probably just be translated as “psyche”
tension between markets & hacker æsthetic: markets want competition (same thing is done often, separately, with lots of turnover), while hackers want things to be done once and well, with high maintenance (canonical resources)
could MDMA microdosing help me get into the 2nd jhana?
new cause area: buy 0day exploits
on priors, if you want to impact the world, found a religion or start a company.
/r/gonewildstories will compliment vogon poetry, it seems
often⩬percent
MTF π-12 “tensor grease”
It’s impossible to tell whether he’s good or not
Yudkowsky moved AI alignment research forward by 4 years, but he also sped up timelines by 2.5 years, so it all cancels out
soft (rigidity), soft (texture)
Angels from Dr. Who but everytime you look away there’s new AI capabilities progress
Most zero-sum games are actually negative-sum games, because of transaction costs
It’s not fair! The graph was supposed to peak in 2047, not 2028!
pet peeve: line-splitting in an ff ligature
I’d hate to be the baby strapped to Voyager 1
there are actually six hindrances: the original five and thinking about how to practically dovetail the shortest brainfuck quine
rationalist meditation retreat: listening to Replacing Guilt as a dharma talk
Todo: become an anti-recycling fanatic at some point
Maybe just not have your search space contain Turing complete elements?
Anyone else wanna laugh at millennials when they realize they have gotten old?
80,000 hours podcast but it’s only Rob Wiblin speaking. Useful for voice synthesis.
Planecrash but just the dath ilan bits
Retaking an airplane after terrorist takeover is a coordination problem
You may start century time horizon projects
Playing hard to get imposes costs on other actually impossible to get players.
Well, you have my curse.
Why not focus on getting old LessWrongers to work on alignment instead of students? They might not be as skilled technically, but they probably have much deeper & well formed intuitions around the problem.
Concepts: Semiquine (a program that only outputs its code, but never halts); prefixquine (program that outputs its code, but something after that). Trivial other versions are postfixquine, substringquine, prefixsemiquine.
“I assume that not everything that can improve my thinking is found in The Sequences.”
put an epistemic status on a thing you’re really confident in, once in a while.
reaching exalted meditation states is not important per se, but that you have ample material to learn not clinging to.