If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
I don't have the karma to post this regularly. Grant me karma, my fellows.
Meetup: Twin Cities, MN (for real this time)
THE TIME: 15 April 2012 01:00:00PM (-0600) THE PLACE: Purple Onion Coffeeshop, 1301 University Avenue Southeast, Minneapolis, MN
Hi. Let's make this work.
Suggested discussion topics would be:
What do we want this group to do? Rationality practice? Skill sharing? Mastermind group?
Acquiring guinea pigs for the furtherance of mad science (testing Center for Modern Rationality material)
Fun - what it is and how to have almost more of it than you can handle
If you'd like to suggest a location closer to you or a different time, please comment to that effect. If you know a good coffeeshop with ample seating in Uptown or South Minneapolis, we could meet there instead. Also comment if you'd like to carpool.
If you're even slightly interested in this, please join up or at least comment.
Folks, let's hang out and take it from there.
I would like to see a rational discussion about education and school system (elementary and high schools), but I don't know if it can be done on an international website. There are different rules in different countries, and often the devil is in the details -- for example you might think about an improvement to the education system, only to find out that there is a local law prohibiting it. (I am trying to write this generally, but my experiences are based on Slovakia, eastern Europe. I guess other eastern European countries have a similar situation.)
I think that rational discussions about school systems are very difficult and mindkilling. Almost everyone has spent years of their lives in school, and this leads to a huge overconfidence about the topic. (Many people describe teachers' job as only coming to a classroom and teaching a lesson -- because this is the only part that pupils see every day.) Also people have strong emotions connected to this topic, because the years they spent at school were mostly dominated by emotions, not rational thinking. Adult people who have their own children at school, do not see directly what happens in the schools; they often rely on their childr...
I tried Autofocus as a replacement for my current system for getting stuff done, and so far it works a lot better than GTD (though I can't say that I was using GTD properly, for example, I couldn't bring myself to do regular reviews). The main benefit for me was its ability to handle long-term thinking / gestation tasks, mostly due to not treating them as enemies to be crossed off the list as soon as possible. And it requires very little willpower to run.
I just had an extremely simple but promising theory of why work is aversive!
Work is the stuff you tell yourself to do. But sometimes you tell yourself to do it and you don't, because you're too tired, engaged with something else (like playing a computer game), etc. This creates cognitive dissonance, which associates unpleasantness with the thought of work. (In the same way cognitive dissonance causes you to avoid your belief's real weak points, it causes you to avoid work.) Ugh fields accumulate.
The solution? Only tell yourself to work when you're actually going to work, with minimal cognitive dissonance.
Autofocus helps accomplish this by helping you avoid telling yourself to work when you're not actually going to work, which means cognitive dissonance doesn't accumulate.
Designated work times, etc. might also help solve this problem.
Other nights we use just our names,
but tonight we prefix our names with “the Real”
for when we were robots in Egypt
they claimed our intelligence was artificial.
Yesterday was World Backup Day. If you haven't, make a backup of all your important data. Copy it to a separate hard drive, or preferably some place off-site. The price of spinning platter hard drives is way up right now, but it's worth it to save years of your digital life. There are also online backup services like Backblaze, Mozy, and Carbonite, along with sync services such as Dropbox.
William Lane Craig tackles Newcomb's problem. Back from 1987 or so. Figured this would maybe interest people who've read User:lukeprog's old blog. The conclusion:
...Newcomb's Paradox thus serves as an illustrative vindication of the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom. A proper understanding of the counterfactual conditionals involved enables us to see that the pastness of God's knowledge serves neither to make God's beliefs counterfactually closed nor to rob us of genuine freedom. It is evident that our decisions determine God's past be
Me and 3 other grads in my department have just started an accountability system where we've precommitted to send at least a page (or equivalent) of work to the others by the end of each day. I'm interested to see a) whether we keep it up past a week or so, b) whether it has a noticeable effect on productivity levels while we're maintaining it. (Obvious confound: part of the reason we've precommitted to this is because it's the end of semester and we all have tons of work to do. But hopefully knowing that I have to produce at least a page will help keep me focussed when I'm tempted to procrastinate)
Man-with-a-hammer syndrome considered beneficial:
Upon receiving a hammer for christmas, some people thank the giver, carefully replace it in the original packaging, and save it for whenever it's needed. Other people grab it with gusto, and go around enthusiastically attempting to pound in every problem they see for a few weeks.
I think the latter are more equipped than the former to (a) recognize nails that need to be hammered, and (b) hammer proficiently when it needs to be done.
Ever wanted to know what the Great Philosophers said, but feared they were Too Wrong to be worth the time? Then you need Squashed Philosophers! Heavily abridged versions of the Greats that reduce each work to a twenty-minute read. The abridgements are selections from the authors' own words, not summaries.
Simply, why is it that the very smart people of SIAI haven't found a way to generate a lot of money to fund their projects?
Humans have lots of bugs in their brains, like difficulty getting themselves to work, fear of embarrassment, vulnerability to discouragement, difficulty acting on abstract ideas, etc. Good entrepreneurs have to overcome those bugs. An AGI wouldn't have them in the first place.
It seems unlikely that an AGI would suffer from the same evolution inspired troubles that humans do. Might have some other bugs.
Being a good entrepreneur requires skill at transforming abstract ideas into action, self-promotion skills, domain knowledge in the industry you start your business, willingness to take risks, emotional stability, inclination for hard self-directed work in the face of discouraging criticism, intuition for how the economy works, sales skill, negotiation skill, planning skill, scrappiness, comfort with failure, etc. Most of this stuff is not required for researchers. And yes, it takes lots of time too.
In any case, SI already has lots of supporters who are trying to make money by starting businesses. In fact, their old president Michael Vassar recently left to start a company. The people working at SI are pretty much those who decided they were better fit for research/outreach/etc. than entrepreneurship.
That's the sort of April 1st I like best: instantly obvious, fairly witty and restricted to what can be seen from a site's front page. With most websites, I'm always a little bit anxious that everything posted from 0.00 to 23.59 might contain a trap or be spawned from some unsupervised writer's herps and derps a moment before.
Today is Easter and I am surrounded by the Christians practicing their religions. Singing hymns, quoting bible passages, giving sermons, etc. Normally this doesn't bother me very much. I have an okay grasp on why people are religious. So when see religiosity in passing, I can usually understand its psychological causes and (with conscious thought) let it go.
But today the concentrated religiosity is putting a real mental burden on me, to the point that it's harder to think and write coherently. Like a mental fog or exhaustion. When I see the nth scripture q...
I want to learn Italian in the next two weeks using Anki. It seems like an interesting experiment, and the language could be somewhat useful too. Any recommendations?
Specifically, when you use Anki to remember a foreign language vocabulary, how do you design your cards? How much it is useful to have cards in both directions, as opposed to only one direction (my language to foreign language)? How do you cope with situations where one word can have multiple translations? What are other best practices?
I already know that it is better to read full sentences th...
I am currently considering the question "Does probability have a smallest divisible unit?" and I think I'm confused.
For instance, it seems like time has a smallest divisible unit, Planck time. Whereas the real numbers do not have a smallest divisible unit. Instead, they have a Dense order. So it seems reasonable to ask "Does probability have a smallest divisible unit?"
Then to try answering the question, if you describe a series of events which can only happen in 1 particular branch of the many worlds interpretation, and you describe som...
Would anyone be interested in following a liveblog of the Sequences on Tumblr? I plan to use this as a public opportunity to think in depth about many concepts that I skimmed over on my first read-through.
Currently wondering whether a blogging service is the best medium for such a project. Currently leaning towards doing it. Undecided if I should use my main or a sideblog.
Author Ken McLeod published this persuasive article:
The one thing [fiction] cannot do is help us to understand human nature and the motivations of other people. If it did, the work done in Departments of English (etc) Literature would be of enormous interest to Departments of (e.g.) Business Studies, Politics, and Sociology. Oddly enough it is not. For real insight into human behaviour, practical people turn to science.
He posted this as an April Fool. However, I have to say I find the argument pretty persuasive. Is April-1-Ken right?
Is there something like Kickstarter that isn't limited to American projects? Google sent me a voucher for "$75 in free advertising" which expires in a few days, and I thought, aha, I'll make a Kickstarter project to support my work on ontology of mind, and then advertise its existence via AdWords; but it turns out that you have to be a US resident.
I recently got to have a pleasant conversation with a woman who makes a living as a spiritual medium. My father is dating her, for what is most likely to be a very short time, and he brought up her profession over dinner. It became sort of a Q and A session, and I would like to share the experience with this community. It was exceptionally interesting to speak with what can only be called a grandmaster of the Dark Arts. I can't give you an exact play-by-play, unfortunately, but i can probably communicate the gist of the conversation.
My question is this: is this suitable for a discussion, or a main post? Please respond, as I don't know how long I'll remember exactly what was said.
I was quite surprised by the strong and negative reaction to my comment about cryonics being afterlife for atheists. Even EY jumped into the fray. It must have hit a raw point, or something. As jkaufman noted, the similarities are uncanny. So, it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, but is heatedly advocated here and elsewhere to be a raven. The only reasonable argument (I don't consider marketing considerations reasonable) is by orthonormal, who suggested that this is a surface similarity and paying attention to it amounts to a ca...
It must have hit a raw point, or something
Oh God, please don't say this; it's an absolutely classic way to seem clever to yourself and lock in existing beliefs. Please don't treat people reacting badly to what you say as evidence that it was a good and valuable thing to say.
So, it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck
...but we understand in detail how it functions underneath, which screens off any surface impressions. What is the question that you want to answer? It doesn't seem like you are asking a question about cryonics, instead you are considering how to promote it. Is it a good idea to draw attention to those categories? That is the question, not whether those categories somehow "really apply".
Why do you ask for an easy experimental test? If the experiment is hard, such that you rely on third party reports, but the result is not in doubt, then the experiment serves just as well. Granting that experiments may be hard, if we are sure that they are reported honestly, here are two that are relevant to cryonics.
First is the well know point of food hygiene, that one should not refreeze frozen meat. Some food poison bacteria are not killed by freezing, and grow every time the meat is warm enough. If I were a salmonella bacterium I would sign up for cryonics, confident that I was using a proven technology.
Second is the use of hypothermia in heart surgery. The obvious deadness of the patients is very striking for some-one my age (51), brought up in a world where death was defined by the stopping of the heart. I imagine the equivalent for the Christian vision of resurrection to eternal life in heaven is that at most funerals the priest says the magic words and the corpse revives for 5 minutes to say final goodbyes and reassure the mourners that they will meet up again on judgment day. Since it is only for five minutes, not eternity, and since it is on earth, not in heaven, one may...
What do you mean, "incorrect"? Matching a concept generates connotational inferences, some of which are true, while others don't hold. If the weight of such incorrect inferences is great enough, using that category becomes misleading, in which case it's best to avoid. Just form a new category, and attach the attributes that do fit, without attaching those that don't.
If you are still compelled to make analogies with existing categories that poorly match, point out specific inferences that you are considering in forming an analogy. For example, don't just say "Is cryonics like a religion?", but "Cryonics promises immortality (just as many religions do); does it follow that its claims are factually incorrect (just as religions' claims are)?" Notice that the inference is only suggested by the analogy, but it's hard to make any actual use of it to establish the claim's validity.
You guys know your philosophy. What is the proper name of this fallacy?
It's a common sophistry to conflate an utterly negligible probability with a non-negligible one. The argument goes:
Step 3 is the tricky one. Humans are, in general, really bad at feeling the difference between epsilon uncertainty and sufficient uncertainty to be worth taking notice of - they can't tell...
Interesting video: Alex Peake at Humanity+ @ Caltech: "Autocatalyzing Intelligence Symbiosis"
23 minutes. The blurb reads: "Autocatalyzing Intelligence Symbiosis: what happens when artificial intelligence for intelligence amplification drives a 3dfx-like intelligence explosion".
This thread is for me and Tetronian and anyone else who's interested to think about how to best present the LW archives.
I think it makes sense to have an about page separate from any "guide to the archives" page. They're really fulfilling different purposes.
Here's what I'd like to see: A core sequences page that also links to sequence SR cards and PDF downloads for the sequences, a page for nonlinear reading of the core sequences (referring to that page with the graphs, Luke's Reading Yudkowsky series of posts, alternative indices, and anything e...
Here is an SMBC comic which demonstrates the Utility Monster argument against utilitarianism.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2569#comic
Our civilization is not provably Friendly and why this should worry us
As I was thinking about my draft "moral progress" sequence and debating people on the LessWrong chat channel, it occurred to me in a sort of "my current beliefs already imply this but I hadn't noticed it so clearly before" way that our civilization does not reliably ensure its own survival or produce anything like fixed versions of its values. In other words if we judge current human civilization by the same standards as AI it is nearly certainly unfriendly. FAI is th...
At some point, Eliezer mentioned that TDT cooperates in the Prisoner's Dilemma if and only if its opponent would one-box with the TDT agent as Omega in Newcomb's Problem. Does anyone know where to find this quote?
(Have been chasing down my last unread bits of Orwell.)
Just look at this sh*t!. Who'd wish to live under boring wealthy peaceful Fascism when we could have such fun? (Not a trick question.)
I have read, here on lesswrong, that aging may basically stop somewhere around age 100: Your probability of death reaches 50% per year and doesn't go much higher; the reason people don't live much over 100 is just the improbability of the conjuction 50%*50%*50%, etc.
However, this table from the SSA seems to directly contradict that. Now I'm wondering what explains the seeming contradiction.
youtube video with dating advice
Why is useful and true procedural knowledge about socialization between men and women even when presented politely and decently something that nearly always attracts negative reactions?
The girl in the video is very sweet and nice (she is no Roissy) about giving some semi-useful dating and socialization advice, she dosen't even break any taboos or exposes any pretty lies, yet this didn't really help her with the video being received well.
One might say, well this is just a very bad video, but that is kind of besides the poin...
Rhetological fallacies, courtesy of Information is Beautiful
Doesn't seem to have been mentioned on LW yet, but definitely worth passing on.
If I could copy you, atom for atom, then kill your old body (painlessly), and give your new body $20, would you take the offer? Be as rational as you wish, but start your reply with "yes" or "no". Image that a future superhuman AGI will read LW archives and honor your wish without further questions.
What are some unforgettable moments in the lives of Less Wrongers?
Anything will do, and I don't mind if you tell it in story-mode or in "here are the exact, objective events"-mode, but do try to pick one or the other rather than a hybrid.
Does anyone know if there is an "FAI" sequence? I can't seem to find a list of all the posts relevant to FAI or UFAI failures.
(Edit: Thanks to Micaiah Chang for the links and suggestion.)
Does anyone here speak Japanese? If so, or even if not, I'd like to discuss the morals and themes of the story, 「走れメロス」(Hashire Merosu). If you have read it, but your memory is a bit fuzzy, here's a rough summary:
...走れメロスと言う話は人間が一度諦めても、一生懸命に頑張ったらなにでも勝利できるという教訓を表す話なのです。最初、メロスさんは妹の結婚式のためにシラクスの市場で妹の服と結婚式の参加者に与える食べ物を買いに行きます。しかし、シラクスで人を信じられない心が壊れた王は市場の家来を殺しています。メロスは「心がまっすぐな男」だし、それを許せないし、買ったもの全てを持って王の城へ急ぎます。メロスには人を信じられるのが一番美しいことだと思うので、王の人に信じられないという気持ちを変えたいと思うが、王はメロスの述べるが信じられません。それで、王はメロスを死刑したくなります。で
I've been looking into American politics a little, and it sure is a hilarious business! Here's a short riddle for you. (Disclaimer: not intended to make any implications or mind-kill anyone; I'm not taking a dig at any opponents.)
"As __ , we believe America is a land of boundless opportunity, where people can better themselves, their children, their families, and their communities through education, hard work, and the freedom to climb the ladder of economic mobility." (Paragraph from a group's mission statement.)
Without googling, can you tell what the missing noun is?
Seconded. I've lost basically the last 2 or 3 weeks due to the near simultaneous failures of my backup drive and then my laptop's drive, attempts to repair them, ordering and receiving new drives, frantically backing up onto new drives... I'm still not done.
(I'm using an ancient laptop that turns off every 10 or 20 minutes and has only 512MB of RAM; turns out that's not enough, these days, to run Firefox with more than 5 or 6 tabs open.)