As the dictum goes, “If it helps but doesn’t solve your problem, perhaps you’re not using enough.” But I still find that I’m sometimes not using enough effort, not doing enough of what works, simply put, not using enough dakka. And if reading one post isn’t enough to get me to do something… perhaps there isn’t enough guidance, or examples, or repetition, or maybe me writing it will help reinforce it more. And I hope this post is useful for more than just myself.

Of course, the ideas below are not all useful in any given situation, and many are obvious, at least after they are mentioned, but when you’re trying to get more dakka, it's probably worth running through the list and considering each one and how it applies to your actual problem. And more dakka won’t solve every problem - but if it's not working, make sure [...]

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Epistemological status: At least a fun journey. I wanted to post this on April Fool's Day but failed to deliver on time. Although April Fool's Day would have been lovely just for the meme, this is my best guess after thinking about this problem for seven years.

I invite you to dive deep into the consciousness iceberg with me. The story will be presented chapter by chapter, presenting you with the circulating ideas I've absorbed, building ideas in your brain to deconstruct them better until I present you with my current position. Theoretically, this should be easy to follow; this post has already been beta-tested.

We'll go through a pre-awakening phase, during which I was unfamiliar with the theory of mind literature, then an awakening to the problem of consciousness, followed by a presentation of some essential elements of the scientific literature on consciousness, and finally [...]

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Outline:

(01:42) Chapter 1: Pre-awakening, before stumbling upon the hard problem

(04:16) Chapter 2: Awakening to the problem

(10:16) Chapter 3: Let's try the scientific method!

(10:47) Global Workspace Theory

(14:51) Integrated Information Theory

(17:36) The list of criteria method

(18:31) Chapter 4: I’m lost

(25:49) Chapter 5: Moral Helpnesness

(28:09) Chapter 6: Doubts

(33:34) Chapter 7: Eureka!

(34:01) The Meta problem

(37:36) Clustering is hard

(41:07) Interpretability

(43:33) The ghost argument

(45:52) Chapter 8: Digital Sentience

(47:34) Further Exploration

(49:13) Addendum: AI Safety and Situational Awareness

(52:13) Addendum: From Pain to Meta-Ethics

The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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[Metadata: crossposted from https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2024/04/koan-divining-alien-datastructures-from.html.]

Exploring the ruins of an alien civilization, you find what appears to be a working computer——it's made of plastic and metal, wires connect it to various devices, and you see arrays of capacitors that maintain charged or uncharged states and that sometimes rapidly toggle in response to voltages from connected wires. You can tell that the presumptive RAM is activating in complex but structured patterns, but you don't know their meanings. What strategies can you use to come to understand what the underlying order is, what algorithm the computer is running, that explains the pattern of RAM activations?

Thanks to Joss Oliver (SPAR) for entertaining a version of this koan. Many of B's ideas come from Joss.

Real data about minds

Red: If we want to understand how minds [...]

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Outline:

(00:59) Real data about minds

(05:58) RAM divination

(11:02) Greens problem

(14:33) Themes of investigation

(19:05) J-trees

(22:47) Parochial abstractions

(27:20) Grown in a lab

(28:15) Morals of the story

(33:51) Self-given

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I just ran a workshop teaching the rationality concepts I've developed this year.

If you're interested in paying money for a similar workshop, please fill out this form.

Six months ago, I started thinking about improving rationality.

Originally my frame was "deliberate practice for confusing problems". For the past two months, I've been iterating on which skills seemed useful to me personally, and which I might convey to others in a short period of time.

I settled into the frame "what skills are necessary for finding and pivoting to 10x better plans?". It's the area I most needed rationality for, myself, and it seemed generalizable to a lot of people I know.

I ended up with 5-10 skills I used on a regular basis, and I put together a workshop aiming to teach those skills in an immersive bootcamp environment. The skills wove together into a [...]

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Outline:

(01:55) tl;dr on results

(02:51) Workshop Outline

(05:41) Core Workshop Skills

(05:56) Metastrategic Brainstorming

(07:08) 2+ Plans at 3 Strategic Levels

(09:37) Fluent, Cruxy Operationalization

(12:12) Feedback

(13:04) What changes did you make to you plan?

(13:59) Whats the most money youd have paid for this workshop?

(14:44) Whats the most money youd have paid for the idealized version of this workshop that lives in your head, tailored for you?

(15:15) Overall, how worthwhile was the workshop compared to what else you could have been doing? (scale of 1-7)

(15:38) Rating individual activities/skills

(16:02) My own updates

(17:39) Would you like to attend a Ray Rationality Workshop?

(17:44) (or: what are your cruxes for doing so?)

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Birth rates in the developed world are below replacement levels and global fertility is not far behind. Sub-replacement fertility leads to exponentially decreasing population. Our best models of economic growth suggest that a shrinking population causes economic growth and technological progress to stop and humanity to stagnate into extinction.

One theory of fertility decline says it's all about opportunity costs, especially for women. Rising labor productivity and expanded career opportunities for potential parents make each hour of their time and each forgone career path much more valuable. Higher income potential also makes it cheaper for parents to gain utility by using financial resources to improve their children's quality of life compared to investing time in having more kids. Simultaneously, economic growth raises the returns to these financial investments in quality (e.g education).

In addition to higher incomes, people today have more diverse and exciting [...]

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Outline:

(02:31) Micro Data

(05:13) Macro Data

(06:52) Mechanism

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Linkpost URL:
https://www.maximum-progress.com/p/the-2nd-demographic-transition

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I have a long and confused love-hate relationship with the field of complex systems. People there never want to give me a simple, straightforward explanation about what its about, and much of what they say sounds a lot like woo ("edge of chaos" anyone?). But it also seems to promise a lot! This from the primary textbook on the subject:

The present situation can be compared to an archaeological project, where a mosaic floor has been discovered and is being excavated. While the mosaic is only partly visible and the full picture is still missing, several facts are becoming clear: the mosaic exists; it shows identifiable elements (for instance, people and animals engaged in recognizable activities); there are large patches missing or still invisible, but experts can already tell that the mosaic represents a scene from, say, Homer's Odyssey. Similarly, for dynamical complex adaptive systems, it is clear [...]

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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Summary: the moderators appear to be soft banning users with 'rate-limits' without feedback. A careful review of each banned user reveals it's common to be banned despite earnestly attempting to contribute to the site. Some of the most intelligent banned users have mainstream instead of EA views on AI.

Note how the punishment lengths are all the same, I think it was a mass ban-wave of 3 week bans:

Gears to ascension was here but is no longer, guess she convinced them it was a mistake.

Have I made any like really dumb or bad comments recently:

https://www.greaterwrong.com/users/gerald-monroe?show=comments

Well I skimmed through it. I don't see anything. Got a healthy margin now on upvotes, thanks April 1.

Over a month ago, I did comment this stinker. Here is what seems to the same take by a very high reputation user here, @Matthew Barnett , on X: https://twitter.com/MatthewJBar/status/1775026007508230199

Must [...]

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People around me are very interested in AI taking over the world, so a big question is under what circumstances a system might be able to do that—what kind of capabilities could elevate an entity above the melange of inter-agent conflict and into solipsistic hegemony?

We theorize about future AI systems hiding their motives until they are in a position to take over the world, so they don’t get noticed and shut down beforehand.

But humans and their institutions aren’t very fixed. They might (arguably) have the same deep human values over time and space. But surface-level, sometimes they like little moustaches and the opera and delicate etiquette and sometimes they like ecstatic rock’n’roll re-negotiations of social reality. Sometimes they want big communal houses with their extended kin, and sometimes quiet condos. Eleven children or cushions that look like cats. The same person born in different eras [...]

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Visiting researcher Rose Hadshar recently published a review of some evidence for existential risk from AI, focused on empirical evidence for misalignment and power seeking. (Previously from this project: a blogpost outlining some of the key claims that are often made about AI risk, a series of interviews of AI researchers, and a database of empirical evidence for misalignment and power seeking.)

In this report, Rose looks into evidence for:

Misalignment,[1] where AI systems develop goals which are misaligned with human goals; and

Power-seeking,[2] where misaligned AI systems seek power to achieve their goals.

Rose found the current state of this evidence for existential risk from misaligned power-seeking to be concerning but inconclusive:

There is empirical evidence of AI systems developing misaligned goals (via specification gaming[3] and via goal misgeneralization[4]), including in deployment (via specification gaming), but it's not clear to Rose whether these problems will scale far [...]

The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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Another round? Of economists projecting absurdly small impacts, of Google publishing highly valuable research, a cycle of rhetoric, more jailbreaks, and so on. Another great podcast from Dwarkesh Patel, this time going more technical. Another proposed project with a name that reveals quite a lot. A few genuinely new things, as well. On the new offerings front, DALLE-3 now allows image editing, so that's pretty cool.

Table of Contents

Don’t miss out on Dwarkesh Patel's podcast with Sholto Douglas and Trenton Bricken, which got the full write-up treatment.

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