Tsvi Benson-Tilsen

Crosspost from my blog. This some quickly-written, better-than-nothing advice for people who want to make progress on the hard problems of technical AGI alignment. Background assumptions * The following advice will assume that you're aiming to help solve the core, important technical problem of desigining AGI that does stuff humans...

Crosspost from my blog. In the classic Prisoner's Dilemma (https://www.lesswrong.com/w/prisoner-s-dilemma), there are two agents with the same beliefs and decision theory, but with different values. To get the best available outcome, they have to help each other out (even if they don't intrinsically care about the other's values); and they...

[Metadata: crossposted from https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2024/04/koan-divining-alien-datastructures-from.html.] 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...

[Metadata: crossposted from https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2023/09/a-hermeneutic-net-for-agency.html. First completed September 4, 2023.] 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. Thanks to Sam Eisenstat for related conversations....

[Metadata: crossposted from https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2023/08/human-wanting.html. First completed August 22, 2023.] 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...

[Metadata: crossposted from https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2023/06/time-is-homogeneous-sequentially.html. First completed June 30, 2023.] 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. Thanks to Sam Eisenstat, Scott Garrabrant, Brady Pelkey, and Kyle Scott for related conversations. Reasons to...