In the course of my life, there have been a handful of times I discovered an idea that changed the way I thought about the world. The first occurred when I picked up Nick Bostr
Alright thank you that's enough.
this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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The first occurred when I picked up Nick Bostrom’s book “superintelligence” and realized that AI would utterly transform the world.
"The first occurred when I picked up AI propaganda and realized the propaganda was true"
I’ve now talked to some pretty well-qualified bio PHDs with expertise in stem cells, gene therapy, and genetics. While many of them were skeptical, none of them could point to any part of the proposed treatment process that definitely won’t work.
absolutely classic crank shit
I talked to some pretty well-qualified math PhDs with expertise in analytic number theory, algebraic number theory, and geometric number theory. While many of them were skeptical, none of them could point to any part of my proposed proof of Fermat's Last Theorem that definitely won't work.
I'm a mathematician and this is exactly what I was imagining lmao
so you're saying I successfully simulated your thoughts, eh???
wow. the ai really is going to get out of the box. if you as a lemmy poster can do this imagine how easy it will be for gpt5
Wow, I mean, look at who you're actually talking to here: I'm acausally reaching back in time to post this.
what rats think their nightmare is: robot god condemns them to hell for eternity
what their actual nightmare is: robot god shitposts on sneerclub
And they're already living it!
ah, the long-awaited activitypub to future simulated hell API integration
isn't that all fediverse software
I bet all of them pointed out the multifarious ways it could not work, though, and this guy heard "it shouldn't work... but it might".
Frankly, good; he removed himself from the gene pool and we can probably learn something from his remains.
That or we all get Kronenburg'd.
let's be clear: this guy is not going to stop until he's cooked his own brain out of his skull
Classic appeal to ignorance argument in use here.
I don't think we would work out..
So you're saying I have a chance?
Genetically altering IQ is more or less about flipping a sufficient number of IQ-decreasing variants to their IQ-increasing counterparts. This sounds overly simplified, but it’s surprisingly accurate; most of the variance in the genome is linear in nature, by which I mean the effect of a gene doesn’t usually depend on which other genes are present
Contradicted by previous text in the same article (diabetes), not to mention have you even opened a college-level genetics text in the last decade?
Anyway, I would encourage these people to flip their own genome a lot, except that they probably won't take the minimum necessary precautions of doing so under observation in isolation. "Science is whatever people in white coats say it is, and I bought a nice white coat off Amazon!"
most of the variance in the genome is linear in nature, by which I mean the effect of a gene doesn’t usually depend on which other genes are present
that person seems homeschooled on absolute bullshit; basic high school biology course thirty-odd years ago was saying otherwise.
that person seems homeschooled on absolute bullshit
the yudkowsky tradition! cause skimming a book and reconstructing the rest of the knowledge on your gut feelings is a perfectly good substitute for going to fucking school, Eliezer
LOL -- looking at the comments: "can somebody open a manifold market so I can get a sense of the probabilities?"
And yet the market is said to be "erring" and to have "irrationality" when it disagrees with rationalist ideas. Funny how that works.
It seems pretty obvious to me, and probably to many other people in the rationalist community, that if AGI goes well, every business that does not control AI or play a role in its production will become virtually worthless. Companies that have no hope of this are obviously overvalued, and those that might are probably undervalued (at least as a group).
asking the important questions: if my god materializes upon the earth, how can I use that to make a profit?
Question: if the only thing that matter is using AGI, what powers the AGI? Does the AGI produce net positive energy to power the continued expansion of AGI? Does AGI break the law of conservation because... if it didn't, it wouldn't be AGI?
n-nuh uh, my super strong AI god will invent cold fusion and nanotechnology and then it won’t need any resources at all, my m-m-mathematical calculations prove it!
ok but how will the AI exist and exponentially multiply in a world where those things don’t already exist?
y-you can’t say that to me! I’m telling poppy yud and he’s gonna bomb all your data centers!
Hmm, how significant are we talking
predicted IQ of about 900
lol
This is quite a grandiose plan for someone writing a LessWrong blog post. And there’s a decent chance it won’t work out for either technical reasons or because I can't find the resources and talent to help me solve all the technical challenges.
The phrase "technical reasons" is doing an absolutely majestic amount of work in this sentence.
don't forget the bit where anyone who thinks this idea leads to racist stupidity just hates science
Looking forward to LW articles with titles like "Ashkenazification via engineered viruses as a solution for African poverty: here's why it might work"
LWers love Ashkenazi so much they'll happily have some even without the Ashke.
If only he were neither constrained by technical hurdles or resources, dang.
From the comments:
Effects of genes are complex. Knowing a gene is involved in intelligence doesn't tell us what it does and what other effects it has. I wouldn't accept any edits to my genome without the consequences being very well understood (or in a last-ditch effort to save my life). ... Source: research career as a computational cognitive neuroscientist.
OP:
You don't need to understand the causal mechanism of genes. Evolution has no clue what effects a gene is going to have, yet it can still optimize reproductive fitness. The entire field of machine learning works on black box optimization.
Very casually putting evolution in the same category as modifying my own genes one at a time until I become Jimmy Neutron.
Such a weird, myopic way of looking at everything. OP didn't appear to consider the downsides brought up by the commenter at all, and just plowed straight on through to "evolution did without understanding so we can too."
For real. Totally ignoring that evolution doesn't work on individuals, only species over MILLIONS OF YEARS, and ALSO WE STILL HAVE ALZHEIMERS, CANCER, AND HARLEQUIN ICHTHYOSIS
Not to mention all the people that died of maladaptive mutations along the way.
lol another rationalist personificating evolution, shocking
the cell’s ribosomes will transcribe mRNA into a protein. It’s a little bit like an executable file for biology.
Also, because mRNA basically has root level access to your cells, your body doesn’t just shuttle it around and deliver it like the postal service. That would be a major security hazard.
I am not saying plieotropy doesn't exist. I'm saying it's not as big of a deal as most people in the field assume it is.
Genes determine a brain's architectural prior just as a small amount of python code determines an ANN's architectural prior, but the capabilities come only from scaling with compute and data (quantity and quality).
When you're entirely shameless about your Engineer's Disease
starts reading
looks at the scrollbar size
nope
If not for that pesky FDA, rats would develop the most bizzare case of liver failure that medicine has ever seen and took over the world with their superior intellect, any day now, you'll see
LLM's are great you doubters, look this guy even used it to get unshadowbanned on twitter.
Re the subject at hand 250+ upvotes oof. And once I again I feel the desire to write a 'gene editing to improve intelligence is immoral because of the higher depression risk that correlates with higher intelligence. But that would backfire very quickly (esp if we hook into other reasons why very smart people with no economic resources might even be extra depressed and poof we are back at eugenics and keeping the ~~Morlocks~~ poor away from intelligence improvements).
Vague association with eugenics make some academics shy away
This guys profile:
currently doing independent research on gene therapy with an emphasis on intelligence enhancement.
Gosh. (I honestly had not noticed these 2 quotes before I mentioned my trollpost + risk).
that's just brave new world with extra steps
I have thought that for the distopia a lot of the right fears brave new world fits a lot better than 1984. But that is unrelated to this.
Credit where it's due, I appreciate them leading with a TL;DR link to a summary. Unfortunately the summary was also too long and I didn't read it. I'm happy for you though. Or sorry it happened.
I clicked the original LW link (not the archive link) and got a malware warning.
it was warning you the page contained lesswrong rationalism
I just tried it again. it's my Orbi wi-fi thing, every time I follow a link to LW - "Orbit has blocked a malware attempt."
maybe whoever wrote the heuristic is also an anti-fan of rationalism and this is the form their sneering took
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I mean personally I would fix things that are broken first. The last thing I might want to edit is anything nerve related and even then problems before enhancements. Im pretty happy with my intellect level and could not see messing with that unless it clearly was needed in the sense that I fell below one standard deviation of average intellect.