comsciftw

[comsciftw @comsciftw]

limiting myself to one glass of milk tonight

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People are going to use this film in 20 years as a reference point for the decline of cinema (it isn't, Sturgeon's Law and all that).

[🇿🇦Denver🇵🇸 @doubledworth]

Absolutely incredible scene man

[comsciftw @comsciftw]

@pietergaricano 6ii was very fun

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@tekbog His time will come, believe

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@thepostsoffice <3 ok see you next time

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@thepostsoffice Are you still here lol I live here dawg

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@_tedks Is it trying to say vibecamp people are boring and milquetoast?

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I kinda love the sound of the street cleaning vehicle going by.

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Policeman just pulled over a lyft bike #endingtheanarchy

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@SukritGanesh Yes. The trees in the valley floor rise about 100 feet, so you could fit 5-over-ones without affecting views while hiking above. But also, there would have to be a condition of no additional cars (theres a free bus, and valley fills with cars to a standstill all times but winter)

[comsciftw @comsciftw]

dad books arrived in the mail and I felt a warm glow, is this what it feels like to get older

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Company stock down 5% again today, I am opening LinkedIn

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@richard_normal bigger stadiums

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@dwarkesh_sp Please ask J Storrs Hall about nanotech

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Just putting it out there...very respectfully...Karpathy is handsome

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

Culture was possibly the key breakthrough in human history.

Once we could share ideas, learning became much more efficient, and complex technologies became possible.

LLMs haven't yet built their own culture or organisations. But it seems plausible they will.

On the podcast last year, @karpathy speculated about what it will take for LLMs to build their own culture, and why they're not there yet.

[comsciftw @comsciftw]

The scanning-and-destroying-rare-books thing is kind of metal ngl. Pretty soon the only way to learn some obscure knowledge is to ask claude (and models distilled from claude?) to dig deep into its memory

[comsciftw @comsciftw]

@ExistentialEnso A good wiki read https://t.co/sbqojzHknS . Unfortunately it's only been a short period of human history where positive-sum games have existed, and in some ways may have reversed in the past 50 years.

[comsciftw @comsciftw]

Everything Is Regularization

[William MacAskill @willmacaskill]

In collaboration with Christian Tarsney, I’ve developed a new theory of population ethics, which I call the Saturation View.

I think that, from a purely intellectual perspective, it’s probably the best idea I’ve ever had. It was certainly great fun to work on.

The motivation is that many views of population ethics, like the total view, suffer from some major problems. Some are already widely discussed:

The Repugnant Conclusion: For any utopian outcome, there’s always another outcome containing an enormous number of barely-positive lives that is better.

Fanaticism: For any guaranteed utopian outcome, there’s always some gamble with a vanishingly small probability of an even better outcome that has higher expected value.

Infinitarian Paralysis: Given that the universe contains an infinite number of both positive and negative lives, no finite or infinite change to the world makes any difference to overall value.

These are pretty bad!

But there’s another less-discussed problem, too:

The Monoculture Problem: Given fixed resources, the best-possible future consists essentially only of qualitatively identical replicas of a small number of lives.

Essentially all extant impartial accounts of population ethics suffer from the monoculture problem. It follows from Pareto and Anonymity alone — you don't need totalism. And perfectly-replicable digital minds mean this is a real issue that future generations will face.

But a monoculture seems far from ideal. Endless galaxies containing nothing but the same blissful experience, repeated and repeated, seem impoverished; like a song with only one note.

The Saturation view deals with all these problems at once, using broadly the same machinery for all of them.

The core idea is that the realisation value of a type of life (or experience) is determined by both the wellbeing of that life, and by how many very similar lives there are in the world. Endlessly creating replicas of the same identical life becomes progressively less valuable, tending to an upper bound. The total value of a world is given by the integral of realisation value over the space of types.

Think of types of life as forming a landscape. Adding different types of life lights up different parts of the landscape. The value of the world is given by how fully illuminated the landscape is.

Why does this help? In brief:

Monoculture: Because there are diminishing returns to increasing wellbeing of very similar types, there’s greater value in having a diversity of lives.

Repugnant Conclusion: The classic path to the Repugnant Conclusion requires trading a utopian world for an enormous population of barely-positive lives. But, on the Saturation view, barely-positive lives can only illuminate a tiny corner of the landscape. The path to the Repugnant Conclusion is blocked.

Fanaticism: Total achievable value is bounded above. That means no tiny-probability gamble can have arbitrarily high expected value.

Infinite ethics: In any infinite universe, the value of a world is finite and well-defined — even if some locations have infinite wellbeing. Unlike other approaches, this does not depend on spatiotemporal structure or choice of ultrafilter.

Separability: Like nearly all non-totalist views, Saturationism is non-separable — background populations can affect how we rank options. But the violations are tame: populations with sufficiently different populations simply add, and at small scales the view behaves just like totalism.

If the Saturation View is right, then the best future isn't the one where we've found the optimal experience and copy-pasted it across the cosmos. The best future is the one where we've gone exploring, and we've fully lit up the landscape of possible experiences.

[comsciftw @comsciftw]

@iliekcomputers Started kind of annoyed by him but was smiling by the end of it