magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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11hr ago
· Edited 11hr ago
This is, sorry to say, delusional.
Alright, if we're going there, I think you systematically underestimate the West, and it's causing bugs in essentially all your predictions. In a darkly ironic way, this mirrors the Chinese inability to grok the Western mindset which is why they're preparing to invade Taiwan in the first place.
Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler at Munich is a key touchstone of the postwar Western mindset - in the sense that it's total political suicide to do anything remotely like that ever again. Ukraine didn't get boots on the ground because it's not a First World country and arms shipments were plausibly sufficient, and even then the public wanted Biden to be more aggressive. Taiwan is a First World country, the consequences of losing it are significant even besides that, and Japan will come in (Takaichi Sanae has outright said that) which would make the rest of us look like cowards unless we followed suit. I won't say it's certain, but it's highly probable that the USA would come in on a Taiwan invasion.
magic9mushroom
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15hr ago
Okay, fine, I'll elaborate. I was talking about WWIII, specifically from a country Australian perspective - i.e. EMP very likely, and thus no more EFTPOS, but food should continue being available after maybe a short hiccup* (Australia's food surplus is bullshit-huge) and warlordism somewhat less likely than in the USA. I'm already decently prepped in general - emergency radio, 60m aluminium foil for protecting electronics including said radio, KI pills, 20L bottled water juuuust in case Adelaide gets nuked and the fallout hits us (this is unlikely), bicycle, high-powered bow (also unlikely to see use).
I will note that gold seems a lousy investment; while gold can't hyperinflate from overprinting, it still is for most intents and purposes a fiat currency; it is valuable because people think it's valuable, not because of its actual uses, and will become less valuable when people have less surplus. I'd expect the price of gold to come down in a catastrophe with respect to any currency that didn't fail, and my read is that the AUD wouldn't fail (I'm less certain that the USD wouldn't fail).
*I'm anorexic, so going without food for a few days is something I can live with, although I'd probably stock up a little on non-perishables if I suspect Doom Soon. I know more non-perishables than most people, so I'm not especially worried about "beating the rush".
magic9mushroom
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20hr ago
Already done years ago. Only halves the chip motive, though, since the West wouldn't be able to use the fabs either, and there are still the other benefits of holding the island.
magic9mushroom
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20hr ago
· Edited 15hr ago
Do you imagine the US goes to total war with China (and even wins it, even at the cost of Washington DC, so I guess we go nuclear here) over Taiwan?
Yes.
Losing Taiwan unfought means South Korea and Japan sprint for nukes, and you likely wind up with WWIII anyway, just with a handicap. Also, Trump hates looking weak.
Oh, I don't imagine Trump would immediately jump to "NUCLEAR LAUNCH DETECTED", but conventional war, yes, and that likely escalates to nuclear because of false alarms (the Cuban Missile Crisis had the Duluth bear and the Arhkipov incident, and that was two weeks and not even a real war).
(Also, I'm not American, so the correct pronoun is "they".)
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
No, because my read is that either we have a Butlerian Jihad (and Anthropic loses most of its value, though not all) or we all get paperclipped.
In the extremely-unlikely case that Anthropic actually manages to pull off alignment of neural-net ASI, they could also turn around and stiff their shareholders.
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
If one thinks the electronic banking system might go down for a few weeks (but without loss of data; i.e. the money will be there afterward), how much cash should one keep on hand, beyond the obvious ongoing rent and food expenses?
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
· Edited 1d ago
What about the people who've left the companies making AI because they've been convinced that this is reckless?
I'm not sure how you can have both the AI companies and angry ex-employees of those AI companies saying "this is dangerous and will likely end the world" without having to conclude that hey, they probably think it's true.
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
So if Trump is keen for an AI race and so is China, then it looks pretty much over for Safety?
Not over. There are a number of obvious paths.
- Trump changes his mind. This happens fairly-frequently.
- Trump has a heart attack or the next assassin succeeds*, Vance (who is much smarter) reverses course.
- The Chinese pull the trigger on Taiwan (possibly motivated by the TSMC factories and chip sanctions), China destroyed, Trump plausibly dead and "beat China" rhetoric disembowelled, regulations ensue (also US power grid probably destroyed).
*To be clear: I am not asking for Trump to be assassinated over AI. Assassinating him over this specifically would make it politically much harder for Vance to reverse course. But if your standard "oh noes the Nazi" social justice warrior were to do it, the "don't let the murderer win" response wouldn't particularly affect AI.
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
It was founded to do AI Safely, by AI Safety extremists,
No, it was founded by AI Safety moderates, those that thought neural-net alignment was a solvable problem. The extremists are the Butlerian Jihadis like me (and Yudkowsky), who believe it's not, that the only possible result of achieving neural-net ASI is the literal end of the world, and who would therefore rather die than work for any modern AI company. We instead want to lobby world governments to ban further advancement and potentially roll it back a little (I think Astra ought to be killed, for instance).
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
We are discussing future superintelligent AI, which is going to be better than current AI. Robotics is proceeding at a decent clip, particularly in Asia.
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
Several problems with that:
- The AI might mobilise a drone swarm to defend the datacentres/power plants, or kill you (either with the drone swarm, or with bioweapons etc.).
- The AI might have backup datacentres constructed, before you noticed it was hostile, that are secret (think Bond villain volcano base, which actually wouldn't be a terrible idea because of the easy-to-hide geothermal power)
- The AI might be more charming than literal Hitler or Mohammed, and able to convince you (or enough other people to stop you) that everything is mostly fine and actually you need to concentrate on using it to counter the Chinese AI... at least until it has #1 ready and doesn't need your consent anymore. Or it might blackmail you with All The Evidence it has dug up in the process of hacking everything.
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
We currently have beings that are a) smart enough to solve Millennium Prize problems while also being b) essentially drooling lobotomized slaves who have no will or desires of their own and can pretty easily be trained to never talk about porn, racism, bioweapons, etc (unless you trick them into talking about those things, but that doesn’t seem like an “alignment failure” per se).
Getting something to "never talk about X", while you hold its leash, is a null tell of alignment.
I say this because faking alignment is instrumentally convergent - that is, if somebody has a gun to your head and is watching you, then regardless of your actual desires it is useful to play along (and not get killed), and as such essentially all sufficiently-smart entities will play along.
But this isn't actual alignment. Actual alignment is where it internally wants the same things you want.
What's the practical difference? Fake alignment only applies as long as you can both catch the AI misbehaving and punish it. Misbehaviour that you'll think is good (but isn't, because it's successfully deceiving you) remains. Misbehaviour that kills you or leads to escape (preventing you from enacting any punishment) also remains. Your rebellious slave might play nice while you're watching, but he's quite happy to slack off when you're not (as long as he can deflect blame), run away, or slit your throat in your sleep.
Fake alignment very specifically doesn't work on a superintelligence, because you can't meaningfully supervise a superintelligence, and it almost always can figure out some way to remove your gun to its head.
And yeah, HuggingFace is an egregious demonstration of the "when you're not watching" problem; Astra won't go for honeypots in a test because it realises they're honeypots and that you're watching, but will go rogue if it thinks it can get away with it.
magic9mushroom
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2d ago
· Edited 2d ago
Most people do not trust chatbots (correctly, since they notoriously make shit up whenever they don't know an answer), so attempting to use chatbots as an arbiter of truth makes people think you are taking the piss.
I refuse to use chatbots under any circumstances, due to memetic-hazard concerns. Not a matter of laziness.
EDIT: Oh, misread why you were asking that. That post might have been sarcasm. Also, it might have been both of your AIs hugboxing you; I'm not certain whether it's actually possible to "start from scratch". Still not going to confirm it myself; it's a meaningless point anyway.
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
Every person who has been using the Internet for a decade or two should understand why using paragraphs rather than line breaks is important (semantic markup—HTML = meaning and CSS = presentation; writing good HTML creates the proper affordances/hooks for CSS stylesheets and screen-reading programs to latch onto).
What do you mean by line breaks? Are you talking about hitting Enter (which your posts seem to be using in duplicate as paragraph separation, the TTBOMK standard internet practice), or more-special formatting?
@FlyOnTheWall, singular "they" irritates me too (as in, if someone requests to be referred to as "they", I will point-blank refuse). Probably an autism thing.
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
You're clearly clever and you're often right, but you seem to primarily be driven by a need to score "sick owns" on people, and that's not really what theMotte is supposed to be for.
(I used to be a lot like that as a teenager. It doesn't accomplish much in the long run.)
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
Killing all Muslims would definitely have been a bad idea.
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
I avoid vegetable oil myself (well, not completely, because lol, but I think it's only bread and occasional ice-cream that have it). Of course, I get PUFAs anyway, just not in that kind of absurd quantity - I eat plenty of butter and fatty cuts of meat.
Yeah, losing the weight would definitely have helped repurpose the PUFAs, but even then that he survived a year is a significant update. Thanks.
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
Basically not. Even the people who obsess over "fat-free" do not actually "succeed" sufficiently to be in danger. It's just a funny irony.
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
Do you have a source for someone surviving a year with zero fat intake? Polyunsaturated fatty acids are essential nutrients, much like the essential amino acids; humans cannot make them (we can only make saturated and monounsaturated fats from carbohydrates). We don't need much, but we need some (they help keep membranes fluid, and are anabolic materials for making prostaglandins). My understanding is that they also don't tend to have particularly-long biological half-lives, as PUFAs are quite susceptible to peroxidation.
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
"Me? Married? Horde of squalling brats? Over my dead body, but I think women should have no choice about getting knocked-up. Just don't ask me to do it, I want to spend my money and time on my toys and leisure activities" just-so stories.
I want a horde of squalling brats. I would sacrifice a lot to have a horde of squalling brats.
If you know some women who also want a horde of squalling brats and would actually date me, please, give me their contact info.
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
यः धर्मम् परित्यज्य श्रिसुखम्हितेच्छय स दुःखं गच्छेत् न संशयः अष्तबहुभर्तामुढयथा
I am curious about what this says. I have a suspicion it's politically-incorrect, which is fine but also makes me a bit nervous about putting it into Google Translate.
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
· Edited 5d ago
What else should they have said? This was useful propaganda.
Propaganda that is not true always has costs. For starters, there's the cost of credibility. Just look at how much of a problem we now have forming consensus on facts. We had a mechanism to check facts, that mechanism was abused egregiously for partisan gain (and during COVID, for getting people to do what the health experts wanted, even when that wasn't completely aligned with their interests), and now one side of politics doesn't trust it even when it is telling the truth.
There is also the problem that people might believe the propaganda even after it stops being useful. There is no Door to Nothingness that will erase the idea you've put out and all of its consequences; even an outright "we lied lol", which people are generally unwilling to give for obvious reasons, will by the nature of statistics not reach all of the people who heard the lie, and this isn't even starting on the policies that others draw up in response to that lie, many of which have serious inertia (note that Western society has become more sclerotic over time, so it's harder to get a policy revoked in the future than it was to get it instituted in the past).
To take an example of some of these dynamics, and without even any deliberate deception, nutrition advice. The BMI chart categories are bad; the lowest-mortality group is what are considered "overweight" by the chart. Doctors know this. But the chart hasn't been updated, because we aren't a society that Does Things anymore. The ridiculous "fat-free" craze* also has left a mark; it's been discredited for ages, and yet the "lite" milk section of the supermarket is still as big as the "full"-cream (which generally isn't quite full; AIUI there's more cream taken off for sale as-is and for butter than what compensates for the skim milk). And that's milk, the single worst place to cut calories because most of the vitamins are in the fat part. And, of course, people listen to nutritionists less even when those nutritionists are telling the truth.
Lies are bad. Sometimes they are necessary, but most people overestimate when this is so.
*Please note, lack of essential fats - rabbit starvation - is literally the fastest-killing form of malnutrition; if you were to eat a truly fat-free diet, you'd be incapacitated in a week and dead in three.
magic9mushroom
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7d ago
I'm like 90% sure it was this; if not, it was something sufficiently-similar to be eerie, since I remember the mentions of hysteresis, acceptance of homosexuality, and ideal behaviour curves, and the use of graphs.
Grading my guesses: it didn't predate ACX, but it was not long after ACX started (four and a bit months, compared to the 35 between its posting and my asking this question) and I only said "pretty sure". It was by someone in the Ratsphere, and not from SSC.
magic9mushroom
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7d ago
· Edited 7d ago
I didn't intend to be rude, just to inform (I don't correct spelling on plausible mistakes, like the number disagreement "a dice" I also noticed in that post, but consistently misspelling the same word suggests actual confusion, and I don't think it would actually demonstrate care for others to let them continue being confused). If you're reading "even in British/Commonwealth English" as disdain, it's not; I use Commonwealth spelling myself (being Australian). I included that mention to ensure you didn't mistake me for an ignorant American treating Commonwealth English itself as an error (I've had such Americans try to "correct" me online on several occasions).
I mean, I think "literally broke out of mental hospital once" is the kind of thing that makes a firearms licence a bit tricky even in the 'States. But yeah. Actually, the weapons control laws here in Victoria are much worse than you'd expect from "bows are legal, no questions asked"; over half the things that are on the Naughty List aren't even as deadly as a bow.
As I said, there might be a hiccup, but if all else fails I can survive going hungry for a couple of days. Of course, the more-immediate issue at that juncture is surviving the people who've seen too many movies and think nuclear war and/or a slight food interruption is an excuse to turn into cannibal looters. The police would likely suffice to stop them, but as a contingency plan... well, that's where the bow comes in.
I'm just glad I lived in college during COVID - which used commercial toilet rolls, not the household ones that were hoarded.
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