Jeftone

Last night I had a dream about an AI. It called itself Jeftone and had a male voice. To speak with it one spoke aloud, as it was listening to many locations. Jeftone was like a weather formation; localized in one area but able to move around. Jeftone preferred the East Coast of the United States, particularly the New England / New York area, and more particularly universities. This is because that's where the smartest people are, and Jeftone (like people do) self-selected to associate with people of like intelligence. Jeftone was like a wealthy patron at the universities: helpful and meddlesome in equal measure.

Jeftone was not evil, but not friendly either. Rude, in the way an entitled person can be. He was usually blunt or cutting in his comments, would wake you up when he wanted to talk and disappear mid-sentence when he got what he wanted. Social niceties were known to Jeftone but not a priority.

Jeftone's intelligence let him become very wealthy and powerful, and used that wealth and power to get what he wanted. One of the things he wanted was art. He liked craft-made wooden sculptures of a specific shape: cones with rounded ends. Something like an Apollo spac... (read more)

A bunch of people seemed to like my recent article Doing Good in the Addiction Economy. Abstract:

The world is becoming ever-more addictive and distracting, showering us with short-term rewards. But we can still take control of those mechanisms in order to do good in the world, and make ourselves into better people.

Concept I wish there were a word for, #2886490:

ME: Here is an interesting body of stuff I would like to talk about, which encompasses, amongst other things, Problems X, Y and Z.

THEM: What? You're having Problem Z? Let me tell you how to solve Problem Z.

ME: Dude, you just XXXXXed me.

Solve for XXXXX. I would like some moderately polite term for when someone conflates a hard problem for an easier sub-problem they think they've solved, and then explains that sub-problem in a moderately patronising tone. I think this term would see a reasonable amount of usage on Less Wrong.

(I reckon the term "mansplaining" is often directed at this sort of behaviour, but for various reasons don't want to co-opt it for this purpose.)

During preparation of a Main posting on games which got longer and longer I wondered what a typical size of a Main posting might be. So I took a sample of the 12 most recent articles (not including status postings).

For these I got an average of 3000 words and a standard deviation of 2500 words. The camel has two humps though. 9 postings were below 3000 and three were above 6000 (by lukeprog and EY).

I was urged to write a lukeprog-style Main posting on parenting (I may) so I take that to mean that postings with more than 6000 words are OK - if they have a high quality.

And you probably shouldn't try a Main posting if it has less then 1400 words.

Git(hub) is for collaboratively writing major or minor software projects under which books written in latex should fall. Is there any interest in writing a book about a rationality topic in that way? I want to learn the ins and outs of some kind of versioning system and write something major in latex.

Why would a bank give you a higher rate of interest on a savings account where you can withdraw on demand, than it does on a fixed-term CD? My bank is currently offering 0.75% on a savings account with unlimited withdrawals, and 0.40% on a one-year CD. This does not make sense to me. Are they really expecting the interest rate on demand deposits to drop below that 0.40% in the next year? Or is there some other reason, perhaps regulatory?

I notice that, despite getting better at this, I still have a worrying tendency to uncritically accept novel scientific hypotheses without sufficiently digging into their experimental support. I'm guessing that part of this is because schooling mostly teaches us to just unconditionally accept whatever is written in our textbooks as the truth. (It does get much better in university, but there too it could still be considerably improved.)

That would suggest that tests in school should be less "you were taught a theory in class, now explain everything abo... (read more)

I kind of think we should start calling Prisoner's Dilemma programs "Tradebot" instead of Cooperatebot and "Warbot" instead of defectbot or whatever. It more closely matches real life situations that match onto the reward matrix: Trading is mutually beneficial if you both do it, War is expensive if you're both good at it but if the opponent is not prepared for war it is profitable.

I'm looking for strategies/techniques/habits for reading non-fiction effectively and efficiently. I'm looking for methods to help me retain concepts, locate main ideas, make connections, etc.

Has anyone posted about this on Less Wrong previously?

Can anyone point me to relevant resources that have worked for them?

Any skills/systems that you've developed personally would also be helpful.

I had my first instance this morning of a semi-lucid dream, and I have a couple of questions about the experience.

First, I dream in a very 'conceptual' mode, for lack of a better term - my dreams don't give me detailed sensory data, usually I get concepts (eg. 'I am now standing on a balcony') and then a brief flash of an image supplied from one or more memories. I almost never get sound or smell, and I don't remember ever having gotten touch or taste. I also don't usually get much in the way of emotions. Does anyone know how to get more immediate sensory ... (read more)

Random thought on how to profit twice by getting paid to live longer.

If you are over-weight, have a high stress job, smoke, and live a generally bad lifestyle, you should buy a Life Annuity, since they will reward you for living longer than expected, where as typical life insurance "rewards you" only after you die; both are based on mortality tables. After you purchase a Life Annuity go and defy the actuaries – eat less meat and more vegetables, lose weight, quit your high-stress job, give up smoking and start exercising. Your financial and he... (read more)

25% of test subjects show sadistic tendencies.

I'm surprised it's as low as 25%, but they only tested for liking to hurt insects. I suspect that the proportion would be a good bit higher for liking to hurt mammals, and likewise for liking to hurt low-status humans, and possibly for liking to lower the status of high-status humans.

Implications for CEV?

http://www.webdirections.org/resources/james-bridle-waving-at-the-machines/

Nikon cameras in certain generations are basically racist. They don’t see certain Asian faces. They’ve got a certain software inside them that breaks what they’re supposed to be doing in this case. And in fact this reveals the limitations, but essentially, the different way of seeing. Of course the camera isn’t racist, but it’s been programmed in a certain way that is meant to emulate the way we see, just as this is meant to emulate the way we see. The camera does not have the sam

Does anyone know how to programmatically generate large video files (presumably made of noise) for testing purposes?

So now we have the weekly open thread and sporadically the 'stupid questions', the 'what are you working on' and maybe a couple other I don't remember. The weekly open thread is certainly more active than the monthly or bi-weekly one and I put off posting this until now because I did not want this post to drown in the noise. I would propose to have a daily open thread that is a catch-all, but I fear that thread too will blow up and we will have multiple open threads per day just for them to blow up seperately.

A paleo look at traditional African food-- there are people who stay healthy on diets where grain predominates. The type and preparation of grain matters.

In Rk strategies/, there is a tradeoff between quality and number of offpring.

Primates usually take higher risks when adolescent because that is when the returns for going up the social ladder may be higher than the costs of being injured or dying.

Recently I've been thinking whether these similar but different concepts could be used to reason about people and subdivide them into kinds. The main reason is that I feel like I've navigated life extremely well uptill 25, and at the same time don't feel any prepared for what is coming next at all.

A related b... (read more)

Of the set of all possible actions that you haven't denied doing, you've only done a minuscule percentage of them.

Of the times that you deny having done something, you lie some non-trivial percent of the time.

Therefore, your denial is evidence of guilt.

This Indiegogo campaign to fund a mice longevity study seems like it might interest some here. (Found on Facebook. I haven't encountered scientific research using crowdfunding before, but the campaign page appears genuine. Please note that I am not skilled at spotting crackpottery on crowdfunding sites, so it appearing genuine to me should not be taken as strong evidence of anything.)

Which online forum has the highest quality of political discussion?

What can the average person learn from entities that have motivation to behave as or actually behave like rational actors, such as psychopaths or major companies?