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Open Thread, March 2011
Has been a lot of open threads in the past, but not recently. It is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets good enough, open a new top-level post. Besides, I have an issue to discuss it here. Enjoy!
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Comments (62)
On March 5 I moved from Russia to Switzerland and now work for Google Zurich. I guess this makes me available for new and exciting plots :-) Any LWers nearby?
We were discussing at the London meet on Sunday how everyone on LW is called Vladimir or Dave. Thus, everyone who isn't should seriously consider changing their name forthwith.
I worked once at a small startup (very small; I was employee #6) at which two of us were named Dave, which led to many funny moments, or at least moments made funny by stress and sleep deprivation.
Some time afterwards we hired a developer named Dave, which resulted in a development group composed entirely of Daves.
We then hired a QA engineer into the group, who wasn't named Dave, and we decided that this was an unacceptable violation of development-group polymorphism, so we officially renamed him "Dave." I think we even gave him a certificate.
This is why tech support is called Bob - all tech support at Demon Internet at one point in the mid-1990s were called Bob.
More generally, it's the London Dave Problem. (e.g. I get "Diva". This was the name of my cat.)
[I've just worked out what function the Open Thread serves now!]
Exactly: it's for discussion of topics too trivial for the Discussion section.
Beats waiting around for an opportunity to hijack a comments thread from some other post, I suppose.
It's a conspiracy, I tell you!
This got even weirder than I thought. When I came to log in, I made an account and typed my first post as OtherDavid, and just before hitting send noticed that one of the most recent comments in the sidebar was from TheOtherDave.
My new username is an attempt to be slightly more distinctive within the Dave subset 'people referencing they are called Dave'.
It's not LW's fault, mind. I recently started a new job and was the third David there, in a team of under 20. I didn't want to be 'Dave' or known by my surname, so ended up calling myself D3.
Armor digivolution!
I mostly got R2D2 type jokes at work. Which then led to a whole Star Wars "who in the office is the Dark Lord of the Sith' thing.
Congratulations! But frankly I'm a bit concerned. You described your previous job as leaving you plenty of free time to work on problems of interest to yourself (or perhaps more to the point, problems that are of interest to me :). Does it look like Google will be working you harder?
Yeah, it does so far. But even in my first three days at Google I've found plenty of free time to solve some problems concerning Solomonoff induction and managed to prove a tricky point to paulfchristiano :-)
If you want someone intelligent to argue with, look up Adam Wildawsky @your office - he's a devout Randian :)
Congratulations. Were you headhunted or did you get a referral or apply? IIRC from some thread on HN before you don't interview well. Good you got over that.
I was referred by someone who found me online (on LiveJournal, of all places). It's true that I often fail interviews where they ask about technology specifics like API calls, because I've given up memorizing this stuff long ago. Math and algorithms, on the other hand, are easy and I never failed an interview on those. The best interviews are the ones where I get to write code and explain it :-)
This sounds like a good filter to get hired by the right sort of software company.
Minor question about netiquette for this site.
If I find a comment that I disagree with, and post a reply explaining why I disagree with it, can I also down-vote that comment or is it considered petty to do both? What if someone if someone posts a reply to one of my comments disagreeing with me, and I am not swayed and still think they are wrong, do I down-vote them or does only have the effect of punishing disagreement?
Not a question of much significance, but this is probably the most appropriate place to ask.
No clue about a general answer, so I'll give you mine. I figure if enough people do that, a general answer may emerge.
I consider the two independent. That is, I'll downvote if I think it's worth downvoting, and I'll reply if I think it's worth replying, and I'll do both if I think both. I don't think that's petty.
I endorse adding an explanation of the downvote when i do both, although I don't always actually do it.
As for when to downvote; the rule of thumb is "downvote what you want less of; upvote what you want more of."
Beyond that, well, individual preferences differ. For my own part, I don't want less disagreement per se so I don't downvote things I disagree with, although many things I downvote I also disagree with. But some people do.
I agree.
I agree.
I generally hold off on downvoting any posting I'm publicly engaging with. It feels too much like discussion as a fight, in which I am armed not only with the Broadsword of Argument, but also the Flintlock of Karma.
When I downvote anything, it's for more than just simple disagreement, but something beyond that: insults, persistence in refusing to read background information, etc. I've even upvoted things I disagreed with, for making an argument that was worth making, if only to see it refuted, and I've downvoted things I agreed with, on grounds such as triviality or irrelevance.
ETA: I also never mention any specific up or downvotes.
In general, I will only downvote a comment in a thread that I have commented in if the comment is egregiously wrong or rude. I don't feel any similar restraint against upvoting comments that seem correct even if they agree with me. I also will upvote comments that disagree with me if they make good points even if I think they are overall wrong. I don't know how common this approach is.
My take: if it is a conversation with several people or is a first-level comment, it is fair game. If it is a two-person conversation, it generally bad form.
Ok, so I some time ago had an idea, but haven't posted about it because it seemed to dangerous. However, I just came up with a workaround for that.
Things that speak for telling someone: Clever, interesting, fun, demonstrates TDT stuff, and sounds like the kind of thing that likely have consequences I haven't thought of. Things that go against telling it: It being the case does not seem very probably, it's not very closely checked or rigorous, falls into a reference class with a bad history, and has a small but significant chance of being a dangerous roko-style memetic hazard.
My idea for a solution: anyone who wants to know about it AND have gone thought the Roko thing unharmed thus having proven reasonably resistant to these things, please PM me for discussion to see if it's worthwhile/harmless enough to make a public post about.
(Note to people voting on this post: Unless stated otherwise in a comment, I'll interpret upvotes as approval to handling this kind of danger this way and downvotes as saying I should have just posted it publicly right away. (Not that I would have done that even if I though people wanted it, still to risky))
Roko Mijic - Bootstrapping safe AGI goal systems. 80% Roko, 20% Mark Waser.
"Lovely AI": friendlier-than-thou. So cheesy, though.
Hmm, a lot of the people in the question section need to learn what a question is.
That would be Eray Ozkural at the end. The question section is somewhat entertaining - at least for me. On the one hand, it is kind-of fun to see researchers touching SIAI positions - but on the other hand rather disappointing that they didn't do a better job of it.
For instance, when Roko said he was kind-of OK with crushing non-governmental research, in addition to "what a shame", it also seems important to add: "how?" and "will the Eastern block agree to that?" and "do you really think that is going to work?"
Today's xkcd deals with some themes relevant to Less Wrong.
Revealed preference theory wins again.
Proposal: should there be Non-Rationality Quote Posts? These would be a place to post quotes which are not closely related to rationality, but which may be of interest to various people in the Less Wrong community.
(Poll instructions: vote up your preferred option; then vote down the karma balance.)
No, there should be no Non-Rationality Quote Posts.
Yes, there should be Non-Rationality Quote Posts.
The "Discussion" section has taken over from the old open thread system.
EDIT: All right, but at least post Open Threads in the Discussion section?
You were corrected conclusively when making this point last month. Did you read the (heavily upvoted) replies? Similar discussions - with the same conclusion - have been had in earlier threads as well and require no further reiteration.
Open threads continue to be used in the discussion section for things that are not worth creating a whole discussion thread on but which are nevertheless worth making a comment on.
Advice to Thomas: Make threads like this only when you actually have a comment to make that requires it! On-demand instantiation!
My experience as a computer scientist/software engineer tells me that this is obviously right, but given that humans are not computers, that their implementation of on-demand instantiation does not abstract away the complexity behind a call to an accessor function but instead requires the human to do deliberate, conscious work which can make them give up on the whole thing even though it is totally easy, I think it alright if someone wants to create an open thread for the month that will be already in place when someone else wants to add a comment to it.
That said, there wasn't actually all that much discussion - though the low cost of threads probably means they're still worthwhile.
Yes. (I am perturbed that I didn't notice before that this wasn't in the discussion section, where I would expect an open thread to be.) And this one should be moved.
My karma points were counted as it was in this section (1 point each vote) as it was here, even when it wasn't. An interesting bug?
Cracked has an article about how many common forms of socially conscious actions don't do anything helpful or actively hurt. Essentially fuzzies v. utilons in a nutshell.
http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2011103200369
SIAI, hire this kid before string theory gets him!
Joshua Greene - Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality - video for "Harvard Thinks Big". An 11 minute lecture. Joshua Greene's thesis is well known around here.
It's about trolley problems and the ethics of helping strangers.
Note: this link has subsequently been posted again here.
I ran into a nice little piece about the interaction between logic and probability. It discusses work by Michael Hardy (found here) which helps clarify how logic and probability should behave when propositions are uncertain.
And another new xkcd that is highly relevant to LW themes. I almost have to wonder if Munroe is lurking here.
Just stumbled upon a fascinating link that may spawn some interesting discussion here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfRVCaA5o18&feature=player_embedded