Source video for next Guru Decoding: Eliezer Yudkowsky
Added 2023-05-22 11:48:01 +0000 UTCHey everyone,
The next guru decoding which is to be recorded this week will be Eliezer Yudkowsky. For those who want to play along this is the material we will be looking at. Any interesting spots you note or thoughts let us know!
After that comes Chomsky or Matthew McConaughey.
A poll will be going up to canvas which one!
Comments
If it really is a global optima for a goal that doesn't require human existence, but does require energy then human life by definition can't continue to exist. Its not optimal until all the energy is utilized (I'm not sure I agree with the framing regarding optima as its not clear future AIs are just going to be optimizing machines, just because the training for neural networks uses optimization). Its not about necessarily killing all humans, its about not maintaining the conditions we need to live. Regarding moss and human global optima, we are certainly no-where near a global optima or a local one, but we have extincted countless species, and if global warming is both anthropogenic and going to get as bad as predicted then we will probably have caused a moss extinction event also (just wanted to get that pun in before the end).
billw2011
2023-05-30 07:22:12 +0000 UTCA couple thoughts here. How does the global optima for maximizing the objective benefit from killing off all human life. To tie it back to the OP's analogy, is moss getting in the way of our current human-centric global optima? Wouldn't it just be a massive waste or time and resources to proceed down the path of moss-genocide? Second, to what extend can we factor in the preservation of human life as a core value to AI progression? Is this already done? Or is this a completely meaningless idea?
Ben Childs
2023-05-29 20:00:49 +0000 UTCThank you for saying this. As a former anorexic I totally agree. I find people's veneration of those kind of regimes (when men do them) far more difficult to look at than any images of thin women. It was all about brutal self discipline for me, and was (obviously) destructive. I get why people who wish they had more self discipline look up to people with those kinds of routines, but I wish there was more questioning of why we see that kind of discipline as an inherent good (at least in men). It's not even tied to what it helps people achieve, it's often valued in its own right.
LR
2023-05-29 09:20:57 +0000 UTCYes, sexism is based on generalisations about whole populations in that women are oppressed as a sex class.
Diane Morrison
2023-05-27 04:19:55 +0000 UTCHail moss goddess
Diane Morrison
2023-05-25 12:55:22 +0000 UTCTrue. Agree with everything you said. Just wanted to add I think the worst part of the paradoxical standards women have to live up to is that we are meant to devote ourselves to trying to be perfect and skinny, while maintaining the illusion we are not even trying. Like Gillian Flyn's rant in 'Gone Girl' about the effort of trying to be 'cool girl'!! Lex if he was female would be the extreme opposite of cool girl and people would judge him for it!
Emma
2023-05-24 20:12:15 +0000 UTC@Daniel I don't think the routine in itself is macho or anti, it's the flaunting of it and the framing of it that differs along sex-based lines, as Emma has so brilliantly explained above. To add to what Emma said, male self-discipline in terms of exercise and diet are praised more or less without exception (currently) as being good for the soul and making you a good citizen or something, while the female version is always kept within very strict limits. Women should not eat too much or too little, be too big or too small, be too waif-like or too strong, and women who fully embrace exercise and diet regimens are often labelled 'sick' more quickly than men, because the female body is treated more as a public object of concern while the male body represents the individual. Your story about your acquaintance telling you his routine reminds me of an old colleague who did the same, going on about how he was eating less chocolate and more vegetables, like it was a grand revelation....but to be honest a lot of the time we shouldn't take the content of what people (AHEM men) say as literally as the fact they are putting some words together in order to have a conversation with us. I mean I talk a whole load of bollocks about the weather to people just to practise my Spanish.
Diane Morrison
2023-05-24 14:28:57 +0000 UTCThis is a good point. But I also think part of it is that when women implement self improvement regimes most of us go about it pretty quietly while men seem to have more of a tendency to be evangelical about whatever their newst fad is. I remember at work me and another guy both got into intermittent fasting about the same time. Except I was doing it properly. He was doing the cheat 800 calories a day version and tellingeveryonehe met how he was FASTING. Anyway no one at work knew I was doing it at all. Wheras the whole group was talking about this other guy and how amazing he was. Also same with I am vegan but very few people know, even in my friend group. While male vegans often have the word on their clothes or tatooed onto themselves :-) The other day I bumped into a male acquaintance I hasn't seen for a while and after some intro chit chat he out of the blue launched into a detailed account of his current weekly exercise regime, like i was his doctor or something?! It's not necessarily bad. It's just something I've often noted about men. A little male quirk.
Emma
2023-05-24 12:19:33 +0000 UTCLater in the episode Yudkowsky maybe does address the question of why unaligned AI would kill us all. He says global optima for maximizing the objective function (whatever it may be) are unlikely to involve human life. That may be true but I'm unconvinced it means likely human extinction, because I doubt global optima are likely to be attainable if they're even recognizable by a superintelligence. I'm in the objector camp with Yudkowsky though--I think AI is an existentially dangerous technology that is being developed recklessly.
Daniel
2023-05-24 07:34:33 +0000 UTCoh for fucks sake I cannot take another Lex-interview, will wait for the decoding
F
2023-05-23 08:53:23 +0000 UTCGreat point about the double standard, something I'd never considered. On the subject of gender and Lex, I appreciate that he's anti-macho in how he talks about feelings and expresses vulnerability, even if he's macho with his purported daily routine. That's kind of positive, right.
Daniel
2023-05-23 05:12:19 +0000 UTCGot halfway and brimming with thoughts: - Yudkowsky often claims you get one chance at alignment and if you get it wrong, "you die". This seems like a non sequitur to me. Why does an unaligned AGI necessarily kill us all? He might have a good argument but I didn't hear it here. - It's welcome that Yudkowsky can admit being wrong sometimes but is it with reference to anyone but his current, smarter self? He comes off as a bit narcissistic. - Yudkowsky seems sincere about wanting to save humanity though and that is noble, if not a messiah complex. - The "steel-manning" digression was amusing and again to me suggested some narcissism. It sounded like Yudkowsky doesn't like steel-manning because no one but him can represent his arguments correctly. I thought usually dopey Lex made some nice counterpoints on the validity and utility of steel-manning. - If something we were indifferent to, like moss, had created humans and human intelligence, why would we want to destroy all moss? We might be glad that the moss created us and revere it as our creator. Looking forward to this episode and to reading other people's thoughts!
Daniel
2023-05-23 04:53:43 +0000 UTCThere is nothing to decode there..
lun
2023-05-22 21:41:48 +0000 UTCThank you for your service 🤮
Exai
2023-05-22 14:57:43 +0000 UTCnow do Peter Hitchens 😂
Diane Morrison
2023-05-22 12:47:15 +0000 UTCApologies if this isn't totally relevant to the current Lex video. When I first heard people talking about Fridman, I got the impression he was a serious person and that he was about 40...mainly due to the way Adam Buxton was talking about being intimidated by his routine. I was gobsmacked when i heard and saw the real Lex - not that there's anything wrong with him per se but the way that men have reacted to him makes me question their judgement. A theme that comes up for me a lot is how when men get obsessed with extreme rituals of health and virtue (work, study, work out, abstain from bad things, all on a strict time-bound routine) they are put on a pedestal, whereas when women do it they are labelled as mentally ill. I mean from my own experience and from reading about others' experiences, anorexia is all about self-renunciation and self-discipline in order to be perceived as the most hardcore, yet there's little glory for it because everyone has opinions about women's health (can't stop being a baby machine, for the good of society as a whole) and maybe women are better at taking this kind of thing to its logical conclusion. When women have an obsessive diet and exercise and abstention routine, it's an illness, while men are praised for the same habits...anyway sorry for the rant but it drives me insane the low quality of pundits who are lauded nowadays (bring back national service!).
Diane Morrison
2023-05-22 12:45:05 +0000 UTC3 hours 😭
Diane Morrison
2023-05-22 12:34:10 +0000 UTCHonestly, I was sweating a little bit during the first half of that decoding. 😁It was good for me to hear the bits about his overuse of rhetoric. He's near and dear to my heart, but I'll always be baffled by his support of the Iraq War. There's something to say about childhood heroes. "Every hero becomes a bore at last." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Jake Lawrence
2023-05-22 11:59:16 +0000 UTCHitchens came out relatively ok though, right?
Christopher Kavanagh
2023-05-22 11:55:06 +0000 UTCFirst it was Hitchens, now Chomsky, are there no childhood heroes you won't destroy for me?!
Jake Lawrence
2023-05-22 11:49:37 +0000 UTC
