Information system designer. https://aboutmako.makopool.com
Conceptual/AI writings are mostly on my LW profile https://www.lesswrong.com/users/makoyass
mako yass
Karma: 506
NLNet, open source software funders, are hiring assessors. I think their work could be important.
Lots of great stuff here. Strongly recommend following Asterisk.
I wonder to what extent MIRI’s Functional Decision Theory’s categorical imperative relates to this. In FDT, there is no such thing as an independent agent, it’s essentially an acknowledgement that we can’t escape the bonds, the entrainment/entanglement, the synchronies, created by the universality of the mathematics of decisionmaking.
To practice FDT, you have to be aware that your decisions will be mirrored by others, EG, you don’t defect against other FDT agents in prisoner’s dilemmas, because you’re aware that you’ll both tend to make the same decision, and defecting stops making sense when that’s the case.That does seem to be a compatible interpretation of the phrasing “I am because we are” (in the sense of “I am (a certain way) because we (our agent-class) are (a certain way)”). I’d be interested to know if that reading works in the original language too, it wouldn’t be surprising, FDT-synchrony isn’t a new or original idea, it’s a formalization of a recurring one. Kant’s categorical imperative was an attempt to grasp the same thing, and Reflectivism, culture, norms and contracts (and open source game theory) are kind of more embedded (less abstract) implementations of it.
Btw, I’d generally recommend always at least skimreading a thing before you put it down, IME it leads to much better outcomes than just not reading it at all.
Yeah this seems like a silly thought to me. Are you optimistic that there’ll be a significant period of time after intellectual labor is automated/automatable and before humans no longer control history?
We shouldn’t actually do this because mastodon is not good software and will probably be obsolete soon, but if that were not the case.
It would be a strategic win for EA to conspicuously fund the development of a community notes feature for Mastodon.Here’s what I think would happen: most mastodon communities would shit on it and refuse to use it because it had EA funding, but not vehemently enough to remove the feature from their forks, so this would just result in them looking incredibly wrong and bad and guilty every time anyone saw a successful community note.
And also: Community notes is the kind of feature that we should expect to actually substantially improve public policy discourse so it’s the kind of thing we should be funding in earnest.
But I’m not sure we should work in that area. It’s unfortunate that a global forum probably can’t rise to prominence if it’s received partisan funding, even if it’s bi-partisan, as Argumentum ad Aurum is live and well and cavorting all around.
mako yass’s Quick takes
I can certainly wait, as I still don’t eat pork for nutritional reasons (fat composition). I guess it should be you who makes contact, I’d be a lot less rigorous. If you need locals, I could connect you with people in the community. I don’t know anyone who’s been involved in pig welfare, but I know some people who’ve done chicken stuff (meat chicken welfare in NZ is still bad, but egg chicken welfare is mostly fine.)
At this point I’m expecting we’re going to find that yes, humane farms would benefit from aggregating, but still, very large contiguous parcels of land are just rare or hard to acquire, so a large number of stock on a single farm is going to be strongly correlated with overcrowding, as you expect.
the ‘factory’ element of factory farms
You still haven’t explained what you mean by this. A factory is just a process that produces something. A factory can have humans monitoring every stage of the process and making sure nothing is going wrong. A factory can be subject to certification requirements.
Do you believe such farms exist? Do you have any evidence they exist?
I do know of one non-atrocity pig farm franchise that runs at least 5000 pigs worth of farms (IIRC they’re the main pork brand at most supermarkets in NZ) freedom farms. I’m having difficulty finding specifics about where the farms are and whether any individual freedom farm is huge. But they’d be good people to ask about this. Shall I?
Slow-growing chicken operations exist, why wouldn’t they aggregate into huge farms for economies of scale for the same reasons any industry does that?
That sure is some information. Doesn’t address my question.
by using USDA data on the size of farms, and then defining any farm over a certain size as a ‘factory’ farm
Does the size tell you what sorts of methods are being used? I’m confused as to how it could.
not really, just didn’t want to draw too much attention to it.
I guess if we you saw a lot of noise in the prediction, random misspellings, tortured grammar, you’d reject.
(Well I declare that the message is very short.
What would 48bits of entropy, in grammatically and semantically correct text, look like? Edit: I guess, if I could assume I could think of 4 synonyms for every word in the paragraph, the paragraph would only have to be a bit over 24 words long for me to be able to find something. Fortunately, it’s only 11 words long.)
But would he describe the paper that way to his brother, who he knows is left-center? He’d likely want to tell Max that it isn’t an extreme paper, and if he were a right-winger, he’d likely believe it.
It’s also possible that Max wasn’t cognisant that his brother had published in that paper and so they may have not thought to talk about it, from what I can tell, Per has worked for a lot of more prominent publications than that.
I’m curious as to what kind of potentially existentially relevant proposal the NDF would have submitted? What did they think they had to offer?
(registering a tentative guess: sha256sum ..52ca22c6cd32)
Good to know what the typical spread is like.
These are some of the incidents that article cites as being representative of Nya Dagbladet’s problems, are they as described?
On its website, Nya Dagbladet publishes right-wing extremist content such as the racist myth of an ongoing “population replacement”, Holocaust revisionism, claims that Muslims are attempting to conquer Europe, and conspiracy theories related to the covid-19 pandemic.
For several years, Nya Dagbladet has also had a pro-Russian orientation. In September, the platform published an article based on a fake report incorrectly said to have been produced by an American think tank. The article became notorious after it was shared by the Embassy of Russia in Sweden.
Move on from what aspect of EA? I can’t really imagine how a person would move on from the general concept of an extended community for reasoned, quantified, applied moral philosophy?
I’m sympathetic even though my background in technology and futurism has persistently drawn my attention away from things like this, so I might also be a bit clueless, but that might shed light on why we haven’t discussed this much yet and I think we’d be very open to hosting those discussions and the associated communities.
I’d be super interested to see a historian or anthropologist attempt to estimate the moral weight of the preservation of cultural knowledge or artifacts, and weigh it against other work.As a starting point… how many people should one be willing to kill to save the mona lisa? The answer that most people will give (we learn from the one absurd trolley problem level that was about that) is “none”. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the mona lisa isn’t worth the millions that have been spent preserving it, but to me it does strongly suggest it and I don’t know where to go from there… (It’s always possible in surveys like this that the respondents are just being cowardly and aren’t expressing their true values I guess...)
My current state of understanding about this problem area would be, like… Yeah I think we should digitize the hell out of everything then subsidize politically neutral permastorage practices, and from listening to Ada Palmer’s podcast I’ve become aware that most ancient documents haven’t been digitized yet? Which is interesting, but I also don’t think digitizing them all before they rot will be especially difficult and is probably largely already happening? Analysis of the records can come much later and doesn’t need funding right now, and if the scans are good, it’s not obvious to me what the benefits are of keeping the physical objects in tact?
I’d guess that preserving, or recording living cultures is probably a lot more pressing and a lot more difficult. I want to see lots of recordings of artfully conducted interviews to capture cultural knowledge. I wish that most indigenous belief systems had not been destroyed by missionaries. I wish that they had been woven into a survivable syncretion of scientific industrial cultures so that they could have survived and contributed what they had. I’d be personally interested in working on that kind of thing.
Today, somewhat, but that’s just because human brains can’t prove the state of their beliefs or share specifications with each other (ie, humans can lie about anything). There is no reason for artificial brains to have these limitations, and any trend towards communal/social factors in intelligence, or self-reflection (which is required for recursive self-improvement), then it’s actively costly to be cognitively opaque.