Notes and ideas for texts & programs & startups & projects & libraries
& factories & technologies that will be started decades in the future,
as well as music.
Here assumed rather low bound on payoff to prevent
Update to new Alcor payment structure
Extend to other options/providers
Full-body presveration
Cryonics Institute
Oregon Cryonics
Tomorrow Biostasis
Southern Cryonics
Kriorus (maybe not though, after the recent debacle)
Expand the section on the Guesstimate model
Make interactive calculator
Turning
Enumerating different ways of collapsing graphs representing inconsistent preferences into consistent preferences
E.g. a>b>c>a must be cut in one place, pretty much indifferent about where to cut?
Or merge DAGs into a path graph
Continuous case: vector field over the probability simplex of options
In the 2-option probability simplex, continuity is violated if at some point the vector field "turns around"
Make consistent by rotating vectors so that the integral over vector strength/volume/degree of rotation is minimal
Nontransitivity is probably maximal curl at some point in the vector field
This also feels relevant to Ontological crises/shifts: Is there a canonical way to map from the human preference simplex to the AI preference simplex, if we know the concept equivalences? (A is just 30% B and 70% C, so we can split the simplex into another dimension here…)
Wither Humanity? (Alternatively, “Ponderings on Population”)
Would a bigger humanity be a good idea?
Against:
Coordination
Resources
Safety from Malthusian Trap
For:
Growth
Specialization
Aggregative Arguments
About Longtermist's Children
Disclaimer:
If people want to have children for egoistic reasons, it is not useful to argue against
Trying to convince people to not do things they deeply desire is bad, even under consequentialist reasoning
People argue that effective altruists (and especially longtermists) ought to have children
Most arguments for having children are bad
However:
Children are expensive, opportunity cost
Perhaps better: invest time/energy into life-extension tech
Or spreading ones memes
Memes under heavy selective pressure too, though
Traits we like are only moderately heritable, and will be washed out in a few generations (especially under selective pressure)
On each EA-related trait 50% heritability → very likely not EA (seems like specific combination of personality characteristics)
Parents seem to have relatively little influence on the values of their children (Is this true?)
Humanity will very likely not die out due to people stopping to breed
Indeed, It seems to me much more likely that if we wait long enough, we fall back into the malthusian trap
Why I Dislike This Argument
It comes from the genre of "Let's outbreed the other/bad people", which is very molochian
It leads to a malthusian trap/pure replicator hell with no value and no option to get out (in the long run)
However, maybe in the medium run this makes sense (not short enough for the really important stuff to happen during our lifetimes, not long enough for us to worry about malthusian traps)
Even then, however, just trying to build better institutions is more useful?
Would people prefer procreating to indefinite longevity?
Modelling the Dream-Time (Population will probably start growing again)
How likely is another malthusian trap, how much time do we have got?
What kinds of scenarios lead to malthusian condition?
Base case biological humans
Base case without aging
Em case
What can be done against?
Population control
Monitoring
Reasons against worrying
Too far in the future
Number of children not heritable
But it is!
Population Ethics Test Suite
Look at comments on “An Impossibility Theorem for Welfarist Axiologies” (Arrhenius 2000)
Three-level population ethics
Symmetrical critical level
If any life below -critlevel, level 3
If all lifes above critlevel, level 1
Otherwise level 2
Average in Level 2, total in Level 1/3?
Prevents hijacking through efficient just-positive lives
Violates Mere Addition Principle
Has a symmetry (critlevel & -critlevel are symmetric), but also 2 discontinuities
Also somewhat counter-intuitive: Adding a person with
critlevel-ε can make a populations welfare infinitely
worse
Of course, still repugnant conclusion with critlevel+ε, but that's okay
But also many -critlevel+ε lives infinitely better than one
life -critlevel-ε (actively repugnant conclusion)
And also one person with critlevel+ε infinitely better
than many with critlevel-ε
Faster algorithm for ontology mapping, first described in de Blanc 2011
Scaling laws for debate
AI safety via debate (Geoffrey Irving/Paul Christiano/Dario Amodei, 2018) test debate on an MNIST classifier with depths 4 and 6, what are the scaling laws for the depth and size of models?
Overlapping Concerns for AI X-Risk and the Social Left
Interpretability
Useful for detecting & removing algorithmic bias
More understandable models can be more "democratic" and subject to regulations
Compute governance
Models requiring large amounts of compute are only available to big corporations
increase oligopolies
increased corporate vs. state capacity
companies pull away capable researchers to work on private projects
Large amounts of compute generate CO₂ (or, in the case of using green energy, counterfactually increase the price of green energy, leading to people (in expectation) purchasing more non-green energy)
More generally Overlap between Effective Altruism and the Social Left?
Repurposing honeypots for AI safety?
Kitchen sink versus integrated AI alignment
The Relation Between Corrigibility and Impact Measures
The matter/mind duality is an artifact of how our minds classify the world
The Hard Problem of Consciousness Is Not About Matter
Panpsychism is a Class of Theories of Consciousness, not a Theory of Consciousness
Intentional vs. Non-Intentional Consciousness
The reason why, even if, strictly speaking, trees are "conscious", we don't have to worry about damaging them as much as we have to worry about damaging animals
Most systems reimplement unix ("Those who don't understand unix are doomed to reimplement it, poorly.")
Libertarianism is too Simple
Libertarianism is a very simple method of organising society,
so it must have been tried in the history of societies. However,
none of those societies have survived, which makes it an
unsuccessful way of structuring societies
Counter-argument: Humans are consistently biased against liberty
Counter-argument: Libertarianism is very well suited for
modern (capitalist, technological) societies, which haven't
existed for very long
Limit “Philosophy” and “Art”
Against Advertising
Strong claim: Advertising is always bad
Weak claim: Advertising in public spaces is bad
Does this hold up to a good consequentialist calculation?
On the Importance of
Qualia Engineering
Track Records, Forecasting and Prediction Markets
The Difference in Sexual Behavior Between Men and Women
“You don't know the pseudonyms I assume, you don't know the pseudonyms I assume…for you. Are you happier now \ About the gods who are dying \ What do you dream of \ Festing with omniscient beer” (?) (text from Bite Hard by Franz Ferdinand)
In Non-Adversarial Universes, Systematic Trying Dominates Other Approaches
In short: trying to think better/act better can expected to yield monotonically increasing results with effort put in
Result: Utilitarianism works by its own standards, rationalism works by its own standards
(The Taoist Assumption)
Examples: Dating, basic math research without priorization is useful because muh number theory in cryptography
The Overlap Argument for Learning Latin does not Hold
The Existing-Uranium Argument Against Nuclear Waste Skepticism
Why We Need New Anthems
Most national anthems suck, let's make some more original ones
Some Epistemic Warning Signs in the Effective Altruism and Rationality Communities
People are Friends
People Date Each Other
Why a norm against this would be good
Opportunity to display a costly signal of deep belief in EA principles (cf Geeks, MOPs and Psychopaths & A Tale of Marriage Among the Gebusi)
Very Few People have Public Epistemic Track Records
Hot Messes
Leverage
Zizians
Psychotic Breaks in Berkeley
Some Useful Rationality Concepts
Option Value
The Is-Ought Distinction
The C Standard Library is Bad
Creating Positives versus Removing Negatives
Examples:
Epistemics: Removing Disinformation versus Writing Wikipedia Pages on Causal Inference
Climate Change: Protesting to Institute Carbon Taxes versus Doing a PhD on Plasma Physics for Fusion
Blockchain: Regulating Blockchain versus Trying to Find Pro-Social Uses of Blockchain (can proof-of-work be used to solve NP-hard problems from industry? If not, maybe it can be used to fixate CO₂ from the atmosphere? What about experiments for governance via DAOs?)
AI Alignment: Convincing AI capabilities researchers to stop working versus running experiments on alignment via debate
Economics: Reducing inequality versus supporting policy for economic growth (or funding a company)
Factory farming
General: Outlawing/regulating the Thing versus working on Thing safety
Left-long tails (removing negatives), right-long tails (creating positives), and symmetrically long tails (both are important)
Psychologically
Removing negatives probably coincides with Health/Purity
Removing negatives is more zero-sum, adding positives is more positive-sum (people in a negative-sum mindset don't really try to improve anything, I think)
Distinction between removing negatives/adding positives in method and in topic selection ("How can I solve this thing?" versus "What should I focus on?") (see negative versus positive utilitarianism)
See also upwing versus downwing (hat-tip FM-2030 via. John David Pressman)
Given No Singularity, Mars Colonization Soon is Unlikely, but Asteroid Mining Looks Promising
The Anti-Myopia argument for the dignity prior depends on myopia never being the right course of action
Or, shorter: The Anti-Myopia Argument For The Dignity Prior Has A Questionable Premise
Better arguments come from semi-open-source game theory and ethical injunctions
Overy violent vs. overly sexual examples
Sex & violence & maybe children weirdness in our culture
Why are we so okay with violence in movies & series, and so cucked about sex & sexuality?
Isn't sex good & violence bad‽
Bitcoin maximalism is not even wrong
Forecasting Track Records: Still Underrated
Argument: Metrics can be Goodharted. Answer: "A solution is technical if it is precise enough to be Goodharted and social if it is imprecise enough to be used to coalitionally extract value"
General idea: When you find out that making people wealthier
doesn't make them happier, you start thinking about how to make
them happier instead of trying to find reasons why making them
wealthier is still a good idea.
Do eggs burst when they're not poked before boiling?
Blinded, person needs to poke & write down, but not tell
Student's t-test
N=200
Pre-register
Precommit to Enlightenment
precommit to performing the steps from TMI & MCTB2 for
10000 hours over 10 years (~2h every day on average, plus
2 retreats a year), then report back what the effects were
frame as experiment (is that actually legit?)
Survey advanced meditators about their attainments and their monetary worth
That is, how much is your meditative attainment worth to you?
Counterfactual experience during everyday life [-5..5]
Type of pornography {none,text,audio,image,video}
Precommit to:
n: 6 9 11 8 3 10 5 12 7 4 2
i: 11 4 5 7 12 6 3 2 10 9 8
v: 12 9 8 11 7 2 4 6 10 3 5
t: 10 4 7 3 8 9 5 11 2 6 12
a: 4 2 3 8 9 11 10 7 12 6 5
set k 0; for i in 4 2 3 8 9 11 10 7 12 6 5; for j in (seq 1 10); set k (echo "\$k+\$i" | bc); date -I'date' -d "2028-11-17 +$k days"; end; end | xsel -psb
Ingredients to Moloch
Tragedy of the Commons
Nash Equilibria
Unilateralist's Curse
Pure Replicator Hell
Convergent Instrumental Goals
Egoistic Cost-Benefit Analysis of focusing on AI alignment
How much wireheading research has been/is being done?
Why is there so little wireheading research/why is it not very prominent?
Do animals (especially humans) develop tolerance to intracranial stimulation?
Do animals (especially humans) develop an addiction to intracranial stimulation?
Is wireheading reversible? (in principle, in practice so far)
How long can one wirehead until it leads to negative health outcomes (in principle, in practice)
How good does intracranial stimulation feel? (compared to other positive experiences)
Is wireheading actually pleasurable or just compelling? (in the sense that one wants to continue being wireheaded although it doesn't strictly "feel good")
How does intracranial stimulation work?
Desiderata:
Reversibility
Non-adaption
Non-addiction
Safety
Ability preservation
Anti-slipperiness
Try to find subway pollution levels in LOCAL_CITY
Expected value of plastic surgery for men (jaw augmentation)
Daygame test! Daygame test!
Also with google surveys for attractiveness before & after
Include decoy lizard question
Test computationally whether causal networks have more correlations or causations, project from here
Find Polygenic scores for subjective well-being and run them through Gwerns Embryo Selection Analysis
prevention of further work based on the innovation
copying is inherent to (all but quantum) information,
preventing it is theoretically (and for the most part also
practically) impossible
possible overcompensation: some people get a lot more money
than appropriate for the work they put in, some get nothing
it's ontologically confused
Possible solutions:
Pay for production
Patreon
Kickstarter
Premium models
Advertising
Problem: getting harder the more products come into the information domain
Open-source model: free work
This is essentially a discussion about how to finance public goods
Æsthematics
Infinite Fractal Meta Recursion
This is possibly just the ordinal numbers
Mendeljew Operator
Supersymmetric Copying
The Tyranny of the Mill
The Hedonic Treadmill is very good & very bad
Writing system based on all binary trees with maximal height 2
no 's' sounds
Moving the Lever Closer
Due to an asymmetry in human decision making, making somebody
causally more responsible for a negative action makes them less
likely to take that action
Related: The bystander effect
Salty fries
Buy something, that creates a need for something else (software <-> support, salty fries <-> drinks)
Running Away from Your Problems
Examples
Anti-biotics
de Grey anti-aging proposal
Cryptographic Agreement on Bribing
Encoding Conditionals Using Modulo
Yang Wenli and Reinhard von Lohengramm—Taoism and Confucianism?
Yang's "Win without fighting" is Wu Wei
The Argument from Explanation of Intuition
When you explain an intuition by its causal origin (e.g. a moral
one by evolutionary psychology), it often loses its bite
Sitting in X
You analyze everything under light of X
You believe that everyone else also intuitively analyzes everything under the light of X
The Generalized Concept of Addiction
Implications of Attainable Utility Preservation on practical rationality
Further argument why death is bad:
Removes many degrees of freedom for action
Preserve option value, avoid irreversible actions
Be conservative:
Preserve humans, ecosystems, language, culture (losing them is really bad, perhaps)
These are especially important for humans since our values change, in somewhat forseeable ways
Writing Notes
Concatenating Different Explanations
grass-cutting robots on -dimensional manifolds
Improving Coordination Over Time is a Longtermist Crux
Solution: If coordination is eventually easy with a non-negligible probability, it's not a problem
Should the EA Community Buy Large AI Labs?
Use the Rocket Squid quote from Erogamer
Clanishness vs. tribalism and relatedness in Dunbars number sized groups
Upwing and downwing as new political fronts
Hat-grab at John David Pressman
EA Cause Area Idea: Buy 0-day exploits and inform the companies
European vs. American Intervention Intuitions
Europeans (esp germans) seem to have very different intuitions than Americans on foreign interventions. This might be because of the the two world wars taking place on european, but mostly not on american soil
fMRI scans for enhancing brain preservation through cryonics
Society free-rides on a lot of altruism, this has consequences
The Fragile Blessing of Unrewarded Altruism
Implications for Open Borders
The General Societal Problem of Matching Things
Friends
Romantic Partners
Jobs to Workers
Living Locations to Tenants
For two function , , define how Goodharting optimizing for is when the outcome should be
Mathematical notation is not a planned and systematic
endeavour, but the result of a long process of generation
and selection of different notations. Here I collect
contemporary ideas for better notation, and discuss old &
discarded methods of writing mathematics.
Why on earth did this software become the replacement for forums?
Or: Lamentations on Fora
There is no Continous Probability Distribution without a Mode
Sharing Beliefs vs. Evidence vs. Models vs. Ontologies
With examples:
Beliefs: Very common, but no crisp example?
Evidence: Most of Metaculus comments, most of Wikipedia
Models: Textbooks
Ontologies: Grand philosophy books (e.g. The Sequences, the Tao te Ching, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung)
Growth
How long can growth continue if the maximal value of an atom is fixed?
Growth might slow to cubic (sphere expanding at constant fraction of c)
Defining long content
Conditions point to a cluster in thingspace
Comprehensive: long and detailed, providing sources, visualizations, code, predictions, etc.
Optimal: attempts to be a piece of content on the pareto frontier of what it is talking about)
Updated: even if it doesn't pertain to current events, the author is either still working on it or had worked on it for a long time
Hail Long Content
Most Topics are Too Short for Books
Hail FAQs
Properties of good curations
Completeness (everything relevant is there)
Order (sorted by importance/relevance)
Most problems get solved far too often, create (or maintain, or support) canonical resources
wasted motion
Long content and its curation
Mastery is Exceedingly Rare
Very few will aspire to real mastery themselves. Very few will take the
time to learn even the basics of meditation theory. Even fewer will go on
retreats. Of those that do, only a handful will get their concentration
strong enough to attain to basic jhanas or ñanas. Of these, only a
couple will be able to cross the A&P, handle and investigate the Dark
Night, attain Equanimity, and get stream entry. Of those who attain
stream entry, a reasonable number will progress to the middle paths,
but not many will attain arahantship. Call me cynical, but this was true
in the Buddha's time and it remains true today.
— Daniel Ingram, “Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha”, 2018
Improving your game is really really hard. It may be the hardest thing
you ever attempt. I'd estimate only 20% of men are even capable of
processing the basic concepts to reach an understanding of Game. Of
those men who theoretically "get" the idea of Game, probably only 20%
of them will do enough in-field work to become better with women. Of that
tiny sample, probably only 10% will actually become Good With Women. This
means that only 1 out of 250 men will even reach the intermediate level of
Game. Even those odds likely overstate the number of Players in the world.
Maybe quadratic voting, although I haven't looked into it too much
Taxes
Pigovian taxes instead of strict rules on damaging public goods
How computationally tractable are these?
Which computational complexity?
Harberger taxes (COST)
The thing Glen Weyl is talking about
Sokalling
Look up tweet by David Chapman
Adversarial submitting of fraudulent papers to journals
Besides stdin, stdout and stderr, add usrin and usrout as
standard unix files: latter is for confirming decisions,
status bars etc. I read this proposal a few years back,
but can't find it again.
Programming languages without operator precedence:
APL/K/J. Why? One less detail to keep in mind, structured
data flow. Downside: Inconsistency with mathematics,
not relevant in languages with little use of operators.
Status tags ({prototype, in progress, maintenance,
finished, hiatus, abandoned}) for open source projects.
Mental tool: How would you solve this if you had a hypercomputer?
Compute "path" of mind from existence in the world as a mathematical shape into n-dimensional (72-dimensional?) ball
hedonium has maximal symmetry, which should just be the ball, but little information content
hold this computation in timelessness so that the mind experiences the path indefinitely long
Hell
Dishwasher Paper Titles
Maybe with Abstracts
Homeless Super-Mathematicians
Perhaps in the SCP format?
Blue Reality
Like the Red Reality SCP, but people in there are really well (think MDMA)
The Intentionality of the Tyrannical Object
SCP format
Abstract Tyrannical Object as a thing in the real world
Has the property of intentionality (except for celibate men?)
Text by german early 20th century continental philosopher about this object
Fragments by a 11th century german monk about this
Guten Morgen
Brecht-style play about a worker who doesn't answer his boss saying "Guten Morgen" at 5 AM in the factory, and the class conflict erupting over this
All-Feeler
Object that untwists topological boundaries in phenomenological space
Qui Custodiet?
A group of AI alignment researchers by accident
stumbles upon cognitive enhancement and willpower direction
technologies. Because AGI seems imminent, they reluctanctly start
using the technology. They manage to always stay a step or two
ahead of the AI systems growing in capability, but continue
having to self-modify in order to devise new strategies. The
world watches as increasingly unaligned alignment researchers and
unaligned artificial intelligence battle for attainable utility…
A History of Names
Destructive Uplift Theory of the Boötes Void
A Fanfiction of Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die Rickpeat, explaining the dangers of hypercomputation
If you have a closed timelike curve, you are probably uncleashing computational titans the likes of which you can not fathom, beings that would snack superintelligences like potato chips
See also: Causal Noose by qntm, NP-complete Problems and Physical Reality Aaronson 2006, The Hundred-Light-Year Diary
Skalpell Bizeps
11-uhr-luft liegt rauh auf dem parkplatzboden. in den ritzen des
asphalt streitet sich krepierender löwenzahn mit ausgeblichenen
zigarettenstummeln um platz. abblätternde farbe liegt dazwischen,
obwohl die altbauten noch ein paar hundert meter entfernt liegen.
myzel
moderne kapitalistische verteilung ist weder zentralisiert noch
dezentralisiert, sie ist myzelisch, verwaberndes, meist unsichtbares
gewebe in einem fruchtbaren umfeld, mit anhäufungen, ballungen und
kumulationen von produktionszentren—zur festigkeit verdichtetes
gewebe dort fassbar, wo es sich am wenigsten äußert. werden als
eine kontingente verschmelzung von fast-sein und konkretheit"
simple language for assembling different files into one. syntax very
sed/ed like, mostly like this: [line,]line@file[<|^|>][line,]line[|comm]
where line is a regex enclosed in '/' with an optional number suffix
or a line number, file is a filename and comm is a shell command in
single quotes. the text from each file is inserted into a buffer and
printed at the end of the cap script.
toc
time out cat, which prints its input unless there was no
input for more than argv[1] seconds (try different
versions, settle for the most exact version that is
not unbearably slow).
lvst
print levensthein distances of strings
option '-f' for the field separator
can be used for fuzzy search
usage:
$ lvst "test"
foo
3:test:foo
bar
4:test:bar
cy
A very simple version control system, written in rc. inspiration from put and get, from "the unix programming environment".
supports 3 operations
init (initialize a repository)
put (make a commit)
get (go back to a certain commit)
tracks changes within files and deletion/creation of files
reason: git/hg are good, but way too huge for private, simple, linear, personal repositories.
Probably just because centralized systems outperform
decentralized ones, even when the underlying structure
is decentralized, as in git/GitHub, and Github then
focused on the issue tracking/continuous builds component
Patri Friedman site states he considers himself a rationalist, but that links to the page on philosophical rationalism, while I suspect this refers to the LW variety
Use the definition from “Algorithmic Game Theory” of correlated equilibrium in the article Correlated equilibrium, the current explanation uses (but doesn't introduce) $s_i$
Yeah, the current explanation is barely comprehensible
Those fuckers moved the Criticism into the Publications section again
Eric Drexler
Something like "Since TODO, Drexler has been working at the [[Future of Humanity Institute]] as a TODO, researching risks from advanced artificial intelligence."
Huh, this was apparently removed?
Price of stability/price of anarchy:
Collect bounds
Improve Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols: Add explanation of how to write them in
"“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight
you, then they fight you half-heartedly, then they’re
neutral, then they then they grudgingly say you might have
a point even though you’re annoying, then they say on
balance you’re mostly right although you ignore some of
the most important facets of the issue, then you win.”"
Comment on Guys don't want to get laid by Red Quest
1. Most guys don't have "get laid a lot with hot chicks" as a life goal because they have no coherent life goals at all
1.1. Long-term goals are far mode (love, abstraction, altruism), and pickup requires long-term thinking, but is in the domain of near mode (sex, pleasure, egoism)
1.2. There could be Hansonian self-deceptive reasons against thinking about sex too strategically
2. Humans are not automatically strategic
2.1. Or rational etc.
3. Cold approach is hard
3.1. The evolutionary argument for approach anxiety is not bad
3.1.1. See hangahiwa wandafunei from The Assassin's Footprint (William Buckner, 2019)
3.2. Most people don't achieve hard valuable things
3.2.1 E.g. jhanas (or insight stages), high physical health, mastery of anything, emotional mastery
3.2.2 Most people don't seem to do the bare minimum (e.g. invest money lying around in the stock market?) Probably due to trivial inconveniences
3.2.3 People are satisficers, and most guys get the odd girlfriend and then drop out
3.2.3.1 Note that many guys in pickup have a history of being quite unsuccessful with women