Summary

I illustrate and defend actualist object views as my conception of radical empathy, of being concerned exactly with what we would actually care about. As a kind of asymmetric person-affecting view, the most important implication for cause prioritization is probably lower priority for extinction risk reduction relative to total utilitarianism.

1. I illustrate with an example where I find actualist object views handle changing preferences better than other views (more).
2. An important implication for cause prioritization is the (Procreation) Asymmetry: we have reasons to prevent miserable lives, but not to create happy or fulfilling lives, for the sake of what those lives would actually care about (more).
   1. This is not (necessarily) antinatalist or pro-extinction, but it would probably lead to less priority for extinction risk reduction, compared to total utilitarianism (more).
3. I highlight some problems for actualism, addressing

Fatebook is a website that makes it extremely low friction to make and track predictions.

It's designed to be very fast - just open a new tab, go to fatebook.io, type your prediction, and hit enter. Later, you'll get an email reminding you to resolve your question as YES, NO, or AMBIGUOUS.

It's private by default, so you can track personal questions and give forecasts that you don't want to share publicly. You can also share questions with specific people, or publicly.

Fatebook syncs with Fatebook for Slack - if you log in with the email you use for Slack, you’ll see all of your questions on the website.

As you resolve your forecasts, you'll build a track record - Brier score, Relative Brier score, and see your calibration chart. You can...

Epistemic Status: This post is an attempt to condense some ideas I've been thinking about for quite some time. I took some care grounding the main body of the text, but some parts (particularly the appendix) are pretty off the cuff, and should be treated as such. 

The magnitude and scope of the problems related to AI safety have led to an increasingly public discussion about how to address them. Risks of sufficiently advanced AI systems involve unknown unknowns that could impact the global economy, national and personal security, and the way we investigate, innovate, and learn. Clearly, the response from the AI safety community should be as multi-faceted and expansive as the problems it aims to address. In a previous post, we framed fruitful collaborations between applied...

This is a follow-up to last week's D&D.Sci scenario: if you intend to play that, and haven't done so yet, you should do so now before spoiling yourself.

There is a web interactive here you can use to test your answer, and generation code available here if you're interested, or you can read on for the ruleset and scores.

RULESET

Encounters

The following encounters existed:

Each encounter had a Threat that determined how dangerous it was to adventurers.  When adventurers encountered that, they would roll [Threat]d2 to determine how challenging they found it.

However, many encounters had two different Threat levels, depending on whether they were alerted to the adventurers or not.  (A dragon that's woken up from...

Edit 2: I'm now fairly confident that this is just the Presumptuous Philosopher problem is disguise, which is explained clearly in Section 6.1 here https://www.lesswrong.com/s/HFyami76kSs4vEHqy/p/LARmKTbpAkEYeG43u

This is my first post ever on LessWrong. Let me explain my problem. 

I was born in a unique situation — I shall omit the details of exactly what this situation was, but for my argument's sake, assume I was born as the tallest person in the entire world. Or instead suppose that I was born into the richest family in the world. In other words, take as an assumption that I was born into a situation entirely unique relative to all other humans on an easily measurable dimension such as height or wealth (i.e., not some niche measure like "longest tongue"). And indeed, my...

Introduction

How many years will pass before transformative AI is built? Three people who have thought about this question a lot are Ajeya Cotra from Open Philanthropy, Daniel Kokotajlo from OpenAI and Ege Erdil from Epoch. Despite each spending at least hundreds of hours investigating this question, they still still disagree substantially about the relevant timescales. For instance, here are their median timelines for one operationalization of transformative AI:

You can see the strength of their disagreements in the graphs below, where they give very different probability distributions over two questions relating to AGI development (note that these graphs are very rough and are only intended to capture high-level differences, and especially aren't very...

Crossposted from my personal blog. I was inspired to cross-post this here given the discussion that this post on the role of capital in an AI future elicited.

When discussing the future of AI, I semi-often hear an argument along the lines that in a slow takeoff world, despite AIs automating increasingly more of the economy, humanity will remain in the driving seat because of its ownership of capital. This world posits one where humanity effectively becomes a rentier class living well off the vast economic productivity of the AI economy where despite contributing little to no value, humanity can extract most/all of the surplus value created due to its ownership of capital alone.

This is a possibility, and indeed is perhaps closest to what a ‘positive singularity’ looks...