People who think about how the world is ending often ask how to deal with the fact that the world is ending. For example, one could deny or pretend; one could be angry, or shrill, or panic; one could have determination. One could be sad or despairing. One could make the best of what's left, or play to one's outs, or work oneself to the bone... | .
[This post is labeled בבל, meaning it's especially experimental. See: בבל disclaimer]| .
You: We're building a bridge! It's going to be great! We've been thinking about it a bunch, and we're even starting work on it. We've got lots of great people. Let me tell you about why it's going to be great and very aesthetic.| .
How can we make many humans who are very good at solving difficult problems?| .
(Unresearched uncareful speculation.)| .
What is breaking? When something breaks, how does it break——how does it suddenly pass away? If it could have not broken, why did it break instead of not breaking? What drives the breaking forward?| .
[This post is labeled בבל, meaning it's especially experimental. See: בבל disclaimer]| .
I gave a talk on 20 Feb 2024 in the PIBBSS speaker series. It's a talk version of "A hermeneutic net for agency". | .
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 wh...| .
[This post is labeled בבל, meaning it's especially experimental. See: בבל disclaimer]| .
[Caveat lector: I know roughly nothing about policy!]| .
1. Laterally through the chronophoneLateral anachronism| .
[This post is labeled בבל, meaning it's especially experimental. See: בבל disclaimer]| .
Some argue that the natural way for a strong mind to form is by a group of smaller agents agreeing to ongoingly create new agents to trade with. Are there underlying premises about the nature of agents that would render valid some version of this argument?| .
How do you affect something far away, a lot, without anyone noticing?| .
theoriz3r is a tool to do exploratory automated theorem proving.| .
A hermeneutic net for agency is a natural method to try, to solve a bunch of philosophical difficulties relatively quickly. Not to say that it would work. It's just the obvious thing to try.| .
We have pretheoretic ideas of wanting that come from our familiarity with human wanting, in its variety. To see what way of wanting can hold sway in a strong and strongly growing mind, we have to explicate these ideas, and create new ideas. | .
Summary: AGI isn't super likely to come super soon. People should be working on stuff that saves humanity in worlds where AGI comes in 20 or 50 years, in addition to stuff that saves humanity in worlds where AGI comes in the next 10 years. | .
Time is the character of courses of events in which determinations——the ways that one event determines the next——are uniform across events and across composing determinations.| .
To come to know that a mind will have some specified ultimate effect on the world, first come to know, narrowly and in full, what about the mind makes it have effects on the world.| .
This blog contains most of my public writing. | .
When two people disagree about a proposition even though they've thought about it alot, the disagreement is often hard to resolve. There's a...| tsvibt.blogspot.com
1. Regime change Conjecture: when there is regime change, the default outcome is for a faction to take over——whichever faction is best prep...| tsvibt.blogspot.com
A mental element has to be open to revision, and so it has to be treated as though it might be revised.| tsvibt.blogspot.com
Novelty is understanding that is new to a mind, that doesn't readily correspond or translate to something already in the mind. We want AGI i...| tsvibt.blogspot.com
A mind has some effects on the world. What determines which effects a mind has? To eventually create minds that have large effects that we s...| tsvibt.blogspot.com
Words are good. Making more good words is good. Being better and faster at making more good words would be more good. Maybe we can get bette...| tsvibt.blogspot.com
[This post is labeled בבל, meaning it's especially experimental. See: בבל disclaimer ] [Note February 2023: this is an unedited first draf...| tsvibt.blogspot.com
A high-level confusion that I have that seems to be on the way towards understanding alignment, is the relationship between values and under...| tsvibt.blogspot.com
Explicitness is out-foldedness. An element of a mind is explicit when it is available to relate to other elements when suitable.| tsvibt.blogspot.com
To communicate, it's convenient to code information in words and numbers. Words are discrete, so they're well-suited to expressing binaries:...| tsvibt.blogspot.com
1. Dialogue 2. Synopsis 3. Highly theoretical justifications for having fun 4. Appendix: What is this "fun" you speak of? What's a cir...| tsvibt.blogspot.com
A very strong mind is produced by a trajectory of creativity. A trajectory of creativity that produces a very strong mind is hard to separat...| tsvibt.blogspot.com
"Did you know the Greenland shark doesn't reach reproductive maturity until it's over 100 years old?" "Yeah, it's crazy! What evolutionary...| tsvibt.blogspot.com
