If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
Recently I've been carrying textbooks and reading them over lunch, which is not my normal pattern. A friend asked me about it. A brief discussion of AI risk ensued, resulting in this quote:
Wow. Ten minutes ago, if you had given me a button and said "This button will put a random AI onto your computer", I would have pushed it. Now that seems like a really bad idea.
This startled me at first, and worried me greatly (as we both work at Google, and our peers are working on AI.) Upon reflection, I realized that I shared the same sentiment up until last year.
This episode really drove the False Consensus Effect home for me.
A few weeks ago I started assessing my own calibration, using tools such as the CFAR calibration game. I got fairly good and concluded that I am relatively well calibrated.
When given a question, my instincts would immediately throw out a number. I'd unpack it and adjust it in accordance to known biases. (Avoid representativeness, start from base rates, treat the initial number as a degree of support, factor in strength of evidence, etc.)
Yesterday, an assessment of probability came up in conversation. Immediately, my instincts threw out the number "80%". My thoughts went like this:
My gut says 80%. I'm well calibrated, so 80% is probably right.
I opened my mouth to speak.
Then I shut my mouth.
I understand Löb's theorem on an intuitive level now.
I achieved good calibration by paying attention to evidence and avoiding known biases as well as I was able. Once I had established reliable calibration, I experienced temptation to justify my first intuitive instinct by asserting my own calibration.
My calibration was based upon mediating my intuitions with reason. I can't invoke it to trust any old estimate that comes out of my mouth: if I did then I could say whatever I want and trust it to be calibrated (which would yield probability estimates out of touch with reality). Hence the parallels to Löb's theorem.
Debating etiquette: If you assert that X is "obvious", "blatantly obvious" or "so fucking obvious you'd have to be an evil, low-status person not to see it" then you are not allowed to provide any arguments or evidence for X unless you first concede that X is not obvious. None of this "Anyone with half a brain can see why X is true, but here's for paragraphs arguing for X anyway" nonsense.
People who do this are trying to double dip. By claiming their point is obvious they can shame their opponents for being too stupid to understand the plain truth. But since what they're saying isn't actually obvious, they layer arguments to make X look more obvious. If X is obvious, you should say "X" and everyone will know you are right. But if you find the need to defend X with arguments, don't try and shame the people who disagree that X.
A few days ago I was talking with two people who had "experienced" total brain inactivity for some period of time before (one for a few days on ice!). I tried asking what they thought about the discontinuous experience/identity and associated philosophical issues that e.g. cryonics or other forms of not-being-alive for a while entails, but I couldn't get them to interpret the question as anything besides "what do you think of the personality changes that might happen from such an event?".
I found this miscommunication highly informative.
There's a new chapter of HPMOR and it's pretty fun. The terrorists have won and now all citizens must go to the toilet in groups of three.
What are the reasons to go to family meetings, and meet the subset of family members who happen to be (1) Stupid (2) Religious (3) Non-rationalists (4) Absolutely clueless about reality (5) Pushy about inserting their ideas/ideals/weltenshaaung/motifs into you?
Of the top of my mind: [1] Avoid losing inheritance money [2] Avoid losing reputation with related family members who are not so silly [3] Avoid losing reputation with other people who may give you inheritance money [4] It is an investment in the far future, if you break a leg, or something, family members are more likely to take you to a hospital
These 4 reasons do not seem sufficient to me. Personally I don't think (a) You owe them, for their past good deeds towards you (b) Sharing genes is an important property or (c) One should love one's relatives.... have any truth in them. So do you have any extra arguments besides the 4 above that may be more convincing? Or should I abdicate the meetings alltogether?
It's a hard decision, I feel for you.
Having observed several people in a similar situation, I saw them go through the reasoning you describe. If you discard the virtue-ethics non-consequentialist reasons, like "One should love one's relatives" (regardless of how bad they are), or "You owe them, for their past good deeds " (despite all the poisonous and mean stuff they inflicted on you), you are left with enumerating options and calculating utilities.
At least one person I know had decided that the emotional damage of maintaining contact outweighs any potential financial benefits and severed her connections with one part of the family entirely, instead relying on her friends for socializing and emotional support. When her parents passed away some years later, they left their millions to some church charity and nothing to her, but that was already factored in her decision and so was not a big upset.
Another managed to learn to detach himself emotionally from whatever is going on at the meetings, by treating his family as low-level NPCs who simply follow their faulty programming and are no more worthy of being upset at than a wordprocessor program with a bug in it. ...
They keep you well calibrated about the level of insanity in the society. They allow you to not only have a good model of the society, but to also feel it on a gut level.
Advice that you probably don't need to hear, but might be useful to someone in a similar situation:
If you do cut family ties, try to do so without hurting anyone or burning any bridges. The outside view says you're likely to reconcile in 5-10 years, and that's a lot easier if you drifted apart than if you had a big cathartic fight.
What (not necessarily LW-related) things do people find useful to Anki? (Or have Ankied but they turned out not to be useful, etc.)
Some things I have:
the NATO phonetic alphabet
mass of Earth/Moon/Sun, radius of Earth/Moon
log_2 of 1.25, 1.5 and 1.75, and log_10 of 2 through 9
The 68-95-99.7 rule
Some things that I noticed I had to keep looking up: which is which between SQL left and right joins; the argument order to python's datetime.datetime.strptime function; the spellings of irrelevant and separate
I think only the latter group have had any use worth speaking of so far, though the third and fourth are things that I have more than once wanted to know and not known. The first two may just be almost-useless (though I like knowing them, so not necessarily worthless).
Things I kind of want to remember but suspect they wouldn't be worth it include other alphabets, and locations of countries/US states/UK counties/London underground stops (the aggregate may be useful, but there's an awful lot of cards there).
If you are going to memorize any logs, you should only bother memorizing logs of primes, since you can add those together to get other numbers.
This took me a minute. Just to unpack for the dense ones like me:
log(a * b) = log(a) + log(b)
so if you memorize log(7) and log (11), log(77) is easy as pi.
I'm tired of people never, ever, ever, EVER stopping 2 hours to 1) Think of what their goals are 2)Checking if their current path leads to desired goals 3)Correcting course and 4)Creating a system to verify, in the future, whether goals are being achieved. I'm really tired of that. Really.
Does anyone know of any job opportunities with constraints reasonably like this?
My qualifications are, extremely briefly, a physics PhD and two years' experience as architect and lead developer of the GooFit framework for maximum-likelihood fits.
Edit to clarify: I'm not asking people to google for me! I was thinking more in terms of networking, as in "do you kno...
My wife has constant pain. She describes most if it as "joint pain" and some in her right arm as "nerve pain". The joint pain has been around for about a decade and the right arm pain for about 3 years, ever since what certainly looked like a repetitive stress injury at work (lots of mousing with a desk that was too high).
Doctors have checked her out and haven't found a cause for either. Our possible next steps are:
A doctor friend's sister-in-law suffers similar pain. My friend and I discussed her condition, and he told me in private "yeah, she's screwed". From what I recall of the conversation, doctors have just no idea what do to with a patient like this.
I'm not sure how to go about this but it feels like it should be possible for some price.
That, in a nutshell, is the reason we spend so much on healthcare for remarkably little effect.
Any tips on journal keeping, specifically the format or style of writing?
I've been keeping a journal but I am unsatisfied with the result. I have no methodology, some days I write as if speaking to a future me, some I write as if to an audience, and some days I write essays, and others I just list what I have done. As a result, my journal is difficult to read, it doesn't have a consistent feel.
The septic tank is full: the official unfiltered dump thread has been archived 'cos it's six months old; need to start another one (or not).
Is it effective to study by writing down all the information you want to learn? When I'm faced with the task of studying from some source, say a textbook, my first impulse is to write all of it in a notebook. But recently I've been worrying that this makes me shift my focus away from learning and towards doing a scribe's work -- and also I think I'd be a little more motivated to start studying if my mental image of the activity involved less writing and more reading.
How does this method compare, in terms of information retention per time spent, with other study methods?
I have a moral question.
Is it better for the last million people of a certain population to die, or for two million people all around the world, randomly selected and evenly distributed, to die? For the first group, their death would not just result in loss of human life, but potentially loss of a lot of cultural information; their language, their religion, their mythology and folklore, their music. I feel like this cultural information has value.
Thoughts?
I would generally value a million lives over cultural information. We're always producing more culture, anyway; it's kind of what we do, as a species. Any particular set of in-jokes, songs, and stories is, I think, less valuable than a million people who will make more.
Yes it is. We can focus on preserving culture, or we can focus on preserving life. We only have a finite amount of money, so we have to decide which is more important, or if something else altogether is.
I seek help on a problem that I stumbled upon when thinking about a rational teleporter's story.
As typical of such protagonists, he finds that he can teleport and teleport a human's mass sideways with him, seemingly unharmed. As befits a rational protagonist, he experiments and finds out that he can teleport animals and after a demonstration to a very reluctant brother, he realises that he can teleport a human being, unharmed. After a crazy week of teleporting, he realises that he needs approximately 3 minutes to recuperate after a teleport to really do th...
Tutoring vs Classes
I want to learn American Sign Language. As a kid I grew up know some Deaf people and am attracted to the culture. It is also very relevant to my current job and my work will pay for me to learn (both my time and expenses).
I spent last semester taking classes at the local community college and while I learned the expected amount of ASL, I also learned I don't like going to classes. It feels like a good portion (>50%) is a waste of time. I'm conversing with other hearing students who don't know the language either; some things I already...
Any examples of total recursive functions that are not primitive recursive and do not violently explode?
The set of primitive recursive functions is interesting because it is pretty inclusive, (lots of functions have a primitive recursive implementation) and primitive recursive functions always terminate. I'm interested in trying to implement general purpose machine learning by enumerating primitive recursive functions. Which raises the question of just how general the primitive recursive functions really are.
Ackermann's function gives an example of what yo...
Is Friendly AI or more specifically CEV predicated on Eliminative Materialism being false? To what extent is FAI predicated on folk psychological theories of mental content turning out to accurately reflect human neurobiology?
From the article:
...Modern versions of eliminative materialism claim that our common-sense understanding of psychological states and processes is deeply mistaken and that some or all of our ordinary notions of mental states will have no home, at any level of analysis, in a sophisticated and accurate account of the mind. In other words,
So, question - has anyone written a proof that Bayes' Theorem works on log-odds? It's a pretty simple proof, but I couldn't actually find it anyone on LW, which seems odd.
If it hasn't already been written I might toss it up as a back-to-basics post.
This seems appropriate, considering the recent post on reality being weirdly normal: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ritaljhhk7s
Open subcomment thread: If you think it's worth saying, but not worth its own top-level reply in the open comment thread, you're too much of a nitpicker and seriously need to recalibrate your expectations of either what's worth saying or how much a comment costs.
My more recent failed attempt to get an Anki habit going involved using Vim and a text file to input cards, instead of the tedious Anki GUI. I write lines of three tab-separated sections into the deck text file, with the first being the question, the second the answer and the third the card tags. Anki's import will ignore lines that start with # as comments. This lets me do batch editing of the cards using the macros, search-and-replace and block editing functions in the text editor.
Problems with this approach is that I need the Anki software to preview my Latex formatting and I need to write raw HTML into the import if I want to use formatting or images. Anki should support card text with newlines if it's enclosed in quotes, but I don't seem to have cards using this in my example deck. Another problem is that Anki uses the question field of the card as a primary key and keeps the old deck when importing, so if I edit a question in one of the cards, I'll either need to completely regenerate my deck from the txt source or manually delete the card with the old question from the Anki database.
As a Vim-specific tweak, my text file has the modeline
This disables physical autowrap of long lines, ensures that pressing tab emits physical tab characters and makes long physical lines visually wrap at the word break and indent the continuation of the physical line on the next visual line by two spaces so it's easy to tell apart from the next item.
The text file approach does not store the review data for cards, to if I should lose the Anki database, I could reimport my deck but would have to go through all the cards with zero review data. More experienced Anki users can maybe tell how big a problem this would be.
For all this interest into making the thing technically nice to use, still haven't found a suitably big and growable set of stuff I want to memorize to bother with the habit.