For me the breaking point was Roko's Basilisk, a self-proclaimed "most-dangerous idea of our time".
Also, you should read anything Yudkowsky himself has written about Roko’s basilisk. He’s never claimed that it could work, or that it’s dangerous at all.
(“Why did he ban it then?” Because he wanted to prevent it from inspiring an infohazard brainstorming session that could produce a real danger, and he apparently hadn’t heard about the Streisand effect.)
(This is not the same thing as “being certain that a minor modification of Roko’s basilisk would produce an evil time-travelling AI,” to be clear.)
A: "I have the most ground-breaking idea ever!"
B: "Okay, let's hear it?"
A: "No, it's too dangerous, it may well destroy the world, but trust
me it's brilliant and completely novel."
I believe that there are other ideas like that, things that set up spirals that are a lot worse than just "destroy energy to make money". Obviously they're not going to be universally compelling, an idea that's dangerous like that in one context might be perfectly safe in another. It depends on the target audience.
That's a good point on its own, but it's not a response. At no time did I or anyone here in this thread assert that "info hazards" do not exist. What is being discussed is whether it's worthwhile to be deferential to a person/community who is making claims of being in possession of an exceptionally catastrophic piece of information that by its nature would preclude public scrutiny on ethical grounds.
>At no time did I or anyone here in this thread assert that "info hazards" do not exist.
>What is being discussed is whether it's worthwhile to be deferential to a person who is making claims
It's honestly really not that clear what you're trying to discuss, certainly you haven't been making a clear statement like that. I don't think anyone is making claims of being in possession of such an infohazard for one thing, and if there were I don't think anyone would be saying you should be deferential towards someone who claimed to have one, sight unseen.
I think you're arguing with a bit of a straw man? Like no one is being all "let's be deferential towards Yudkowsky because he has the idea equivalent of a nuke". He doesn't, to the best of my knowledge, claim to have the idea equivalent of a nuke.
I assumed you were claiming that info-hazards don't exist because otherwise what exactly are you claiming?
Anyway, if that was your point, granted. Let's not be differential towards people who claim to have info-hazards, unless they can go into a room and make someone laugh themselves to death or something.
Well, he isn't willing to reveal how he convinced his opponents to let the AI out of the box.
It's not a waste if the product the PoW generates is valued as equal to or greater than the cost of generating the PoW, and the market ensures that is the case, as miners cannot operating at a loss.
Where it can be socially harmful is when energy consumers don't pay for the cost of the negative externalities that the energy they purchase created in its generation, but that applies to all energy usage, not just that used in generating PoW.
You should know that costly signalling strategies are widely employed in nature because costly signals are reliable:
> Where it can be socially harmful is when energy consumers don't pay for the cost of the negative externalities that the energy they purchase created in its generation, but that applies to all energy usage, not just that used in generating PoW.
Bitcoin alone uses as much power as a medium-sized nation. The increased power usage has caused old fossil-fuel power plants to come back online.
2. Money laundering can improve economic efficiency when the crimes that generate the illicit revenue are socially beneficial, as is the case when people in China escape the Communist government's capital controls, or when people in Venezuela escape their Communist government's steep inflation tax via mandates to use the state's fiat currency.
Even in ostensibly free societies, socially harmful laws that repress the right to voluntarily interact, like price controls on N95 masks that prolonged a shortage in them for months, or heavy taxation to pay the pensions of a bloated and over-paid public sector kleptocracy, can be socially beneficial to undermine.
So your deduction that money laundering or other forms of escape from institutional rules, is socially harmful, is overly simplistic. In some cases it is harmful, and in some cases it's beneficial.
3. Cryptocurrencies are by definition not ponzi schemes. You could argue they're speculative bubbles, but that is itself speculation.
>>Bitcoin alone uses as much power as a medium-sized nation.
Because it generates billions of dollars of currency a year, and its production is costly in energy and affordable in labor. The energy consumption of labor-intensive industries obfuscates the real energy requirements of those industries, by effectively outsourcing the energy consumption to the workers.
>Elevator pitch: Bring enough light to simulate daylight into your home and office.
>This idea has been shared in Less Wrong circles for a couple years. Yudkowsky wrote Inadequate Equilibria in 2017 where he and his wife invented the idea
As I don't bring up the rest of the article's points, I am neither supporting nor refuting them with that particular comment.
Math (or actually, logic) is a bit more resilient than you make it out to be.
If I wanted to, I'd probably go and research prior art first before making use of the word.
Also, I'd say that the article author is not referring just to brighter light as the invention, but rather as the use of extremely bright light indoors for different psychological effects.
The OP made a claim ("invented in 2017"), and this very claim is being criticized.
I found perplexing that you interpret the very same words in almost opposite ways.
If humans spend same proportion of income on lumens, and you get more lumens per watt, then you will use less wattage per the same proportion of income. Ergo LEDs are more efficient.
Adds up considering the proliferation of computing devices, particularly cryptomining.