What's the best programming language to learn in order to get a job?

Eh, depends on what sort of job.

In my line of work, Python or maybe Ruby — they're both widely used by major employers, and particularly for automation tools.

But Java if you want to write for business computing; C# if you want to write for Windows; Objective-C if you want to write for the Mac or iGizmos; PHP if you want Great Cthulhu to rise from his tomb at R'lyeh. And Perl, Python, or Ruby and a smattering of shellscript if you want to do systems stuff.

it's too bad there isn't an "ask everyone who works in tech" thread or somesuch

You could start one.

I'm not sure, but one of the techniques that seems most salient to me is breadth-first search. Partly this is to hold off on proposing solutions. Take just a little bit longer to look at the problem and gather data before generating hypotheses. The second part is to find cheap tests to disprove your hypotheses instead of going farther down the path that an early hypothesis leads. Folks who use depth-first search, building up a large tree of hypotheses first or going down a long path of possible tests and fixes, seem more likely to get stuck.

I also really like troubleshooting out loud with colleagues who aren't afraid to contradict each other. Generating lots of hypotheses and quickly disconfirming most of them can quickly narrow down on the problem. "Okay, maybe the cause is a bad data push. But if that were so, it would be on all the servers, not just the ones in New York, because the data push logs say the push succeeded everywhere. But the problem's just in New York. So it's not the data push."

Because RW sucks at actually being rational. Rather they seem to have confused being "rational" with supporting whatever they perceive to be the official scientific position. Whereas LW has a number of contrarian positions, most notably cryonics and the Singularity, where it is widely believed the mainstream position is likely wrong and their argument for it is just silly.

I think the main reason is that basically nobody in the wider world talks about LW, and RW is the only place that talks about LW even that much. And RW can't reasonably be called very interested in LW either (though many RW regulars find LW annoying when it comes to their attention). Also, we use the word "rational", which LW thinks of as its own - I think that's a big factor.

From my own perspective: RW has many problems. The name is a historical accident (and SkepticWiki.com/org is in the hands of a domainer). Mostly it hasn't enough people who can actually write. It's literally not run by anyone (same way Wikipedia isn't), so is not going to be fixed other than organically. Its good stuff is excellent and informative, but a lot of it isn't quite fit for referring outside fresh readers to.

It surprises me how popular it is (as in, I keep tripping over people using a particular page they like - Alexa 21,000 worldwide, 8800 US - and Snopes uses us a bit) - it turns out there's demand for something that can set out "no, actually, that's BS and here's why, point for point". Raising the sanity waterline does in fact also involve dredging the swamps and cleaning up toxic waste spills. Every time we have a fundraiser it finishes ridiculously quickly ('cos our expenses are literally a couple thousand dollars a year). We have readers who just love us.

On balance, though, I do think RW makes the world a better place rather than a worse one. (Or, of course, I wouldn't bother.)

FWIW, there's a current active discussion on What RW Is For, which I expect not to go anywhere much.

I'm not sure I could reasonably steelman LW opposition to RW as if either were a monolith and there were no crossover (which simply isn't the case). I will note that RW is piss-insignificant, and if you're spending any time whatsoever worrying what RW thinks of LW then you're wasting precious seconds.

(The discussion of RW on LW actually came up on the LW and RW Facebook groups this morning too.)

How should I fight a basilisk?

Every basilisk is different. My current personal basilisk pertains measuring my blood pressure. I have recently been hospitalized as a result of dangerously high blood pressure (220 systolic, mmHg / 120 diastolic, mmHg). Since I left the hospital I am advised to measure my blood pressure.

The problem I have is that measuring causes panic about the expected result, which increases the blood pressure. Then if the result turns out to be very high, as expected, the panic increases and the next measurement turns out even higher.

Should I stop measuring my blood pressure because the knowledge hurts me or should I measure anyway because knowing it means that I know when it reaches a dangerous level and thus requires me to visit the hospital?

becomes wildly curious

Since you posted above that you're participating in the AMA, can you give some details of this plan? (Assuming step one isn't "tell people about this plan", in which case please don't end the world just because you precommitted to answering questions.)

This post reminds me of Denethor saying the Ring was only to be used in utmost emergency at the bitter end

Modern NLP (Natural Language Processing) uses statistical methods quite a bit - http://nlp.stanford.edu/fsnlp/

Hi Anatoly,

Initially it was a shock to my wife, but I took things very slowly as far as dropping practices. This helped a lot and basically I do whatever I want now (3.5 years later). Also transferred my kids to a good public school out of yeshiva. My wife remains nominally religious, it might take another 10 years :)

My kids don's speak Russian - my wife is American-born. I prefer English myself, so I'm not "unhappy" about them not speaking Russian in particular although I'd prefer them to be bilingual in general. They read a bit of Hebrew.

I'm happy to discuss my HFA kid via PM.

Thanks!

This was surprisingly simple: I got myself to want to run, started running, and patted myself on the back everytime I did it.

The want part was a bit of luck: I always thought I "should" do some sports, for physical and more importantly mental health reasons, and think that being able to do stuff is better than not being able, ceteris paribus. So I was thinking what kind of activity I might prefer.

I like my alone time (so team- or pair-sports are out), I dislike spending money when I expect it to be wasted (like Gym memberships, bikes, et al.). And I feel easily embarassed and ashamed, and like to get myself at least somewhat up to speed on my own.

Running fits those side requirements. Out of chance I got hold of "Born to Run", and even after the first quarter of the book I thought that it would be great if I could just go out on a bad day and spend an hour free of shit, or how it would be great that I could just reach some location a few kilometers away without any prep or machines or services.

I then decided that I will start running, and that my primary goal shall be that I like it and be able to do it even in old age if such would happen. With the '*' that I give myself an easy way out in case of physical pain or unexpected hatred against the activity, but not for any weasel reasons.

I didn't start running for another one and a half years, because Schweinehund, subtype Innerer. When my mood was getting slightly better (I was again able to do productive work), I started, with the "habit formation" mind-set. Also didn't tell anyone in the beginning. I think it helped that I already had some knowledge on how to train and run correctly, which especially in the beginning meant that I always felt like I could run further than I was "allowed" to.

And for good feedback: However it went, when I finished my training, I "said" to myself: I did good. I feel good. I feel better than before I started. I wrote every single run down on RunKeeper and Fitocracy, and always smiled at the "I'm awesome!" button of the latter one. I'm also quite sure that having at least one new personal best once a week helped. (Also, when you run barefoot, you get the "crazy badass" card for free, however slow you run. I like this.)

Once started, such a feedback loop is quite powerful. When I once barely trained for month, I was also surprised that getting back into regular running after that down-phase was so much easier. Now, after only seven months of training, I went from doing walk/run for 15 minutes to running 75 minutes, and having no problem with a cold-start 6% incline for the first two kilometers. I'm proud. Feels good (is quite new to me).

Meta: I think this was an important thing to say, and to say forcefully, but it might have been worth expending a sentence or so to say it more nicely (but still as forcefully). (I don't want to derail the thread and will say no more than this unless specifically asked.)

I don't know anything about MIRI research strategy than is publicly available, but if you look at what they are working on, it is all in the direction of formal verification.

After speaking to experts in formal verification of chips and of other systems, and they have confirmed what you learned from fiddlemath. Formal verification is limited in its capabilities: Often, you can only verify some very low-level or very specific assertions. And you have to be able to specify the assertion that you are verifying.

So, it seems that they are taking on a very difficult challenge.

I don't think I have anything to say that hasn't been said better by others in MIRI and FHI, but I think that AI boxing is impossible because (1) it can convince any gatekeepers to let it out and (2) any AI is "embodied" and not separate from the outside world if only in that its circuits pass electrons, and (3) I doubt you could convince all AGI reseachers to keep their projects isolated.

Still, I think that AI boxing could be a good stopgap measure, one of a number of techniques that are ultimately ineffectual, but could still be used to slightly hold back the danger.

Sure, I'll send it to you. If anyone else wants it, please contact me. I always knew that Semitic Noun Patterns would be a best seller :-)

I did not intend that interpetation, and have been repeatedly surprised to find people espousing it. There is a reduction in Luminosity's didacticism over the course of the book as I got caught up in the plot, and it's possible it happens to undergo a particularly noticeable drop around when Bella turns which people are reading this way. However, I didn't intend to show Bella's various errors as being consequences of any abandonment of her interior luminosity, however much less narration I spent on it. She has plenty of other personality flaws and resource shortages to drive her mistakes.

Oh man, Syzygy. That started closer to a decade ago, though I guess it did end around seven years ago. I don't hate it enough to break my rule that what goes up, stays up, so when I recovered the files from the unexpected cataclysm that caused the comic's end, up they went. But it's embarrassing, very noticeably amateur, both in the art and the writing. I'm still pleased with a couple of particularly nasty turns of plot, like Kulary's backstory, but they weren't presented to their best effect.

I don't have a routine.

I could be described as having writer's block right now; I was devoting pretty much all my creative output to Effulgence, which ground to a screeching halt due to coauthor brain problems, and now I am metaphorically upside-down like a particularly unfortunate turtle. I have been trying various things but nothing has produced good results yet (I have written, like, one short story, but no chapters). However, I have every expectation of being able to return to Effulgence full speed ahead when my coauthor can even if I don't manage to budge my novels between now and then.

I do almost no revising after I've gotten an entire chapter down (though I will sometimes iterate a sentence a bit while it's in progress, and I will rearrange paragraphs if my beta readers suggest it while I'm writing for my test audience.). I don't like revision after that; it slows me down and makes me second-guess myself and hate my output faster than I normally start to and leaves me with questionable mental maps of what has and has not happened. I will correct typos and grammatical errors and the like when I am made aware of them. Elcenia as it currently stands is a complete reboot which I generate without directly consulting the original - I extracted a loose plot outline, massaged it into making somewhat better sense, and haven't opened the old documents since except to remind myself of how to spell things and various assignments of numerical value, I write from the plot outline and memory. Effulgence I can't even fix typos because of the limitations of the Dreamwidth platform, so that's closer to literally no revision.

I received another question from this same interlocutor:

Also, I understand you haven't read the original bitcoind code but do you have any guess for why the author chose to lift your SHA256 implementation from Crypto++ when the project already required openssl-0.9.8h? Is there anything odd about the OpenSSL implementation that wouldn't be immediately obvious to someone who isn't a crypto expert?

Hmm, I’m not sure. I thought it might have been the optimizations I put into my SHA256 implementation in March 2009 (due to discussions on the NIST mailing list for standardizing SHA-3, about how fast SHA-2 really is), which made it the fastest available at the time, but it looks like Bitcoin 0.1 was already released prior to that (in Jan 2009) and therefore had my old code. Maybe someone could test if the old code was still faster than OpenSSL?

It's Chinese Pinyin romanization, so pronounced "way dye".

ETA: Since Pinyin is a many to one mapping, and as a result most Chinese articles about Bitcoin put the wrong name down for me, I'll take this opportunity to mention that my name is written logographically as 戴维.

What do you make of the decision to use C++?

It seems like a pretty standard choice for anyone wanting to build such a piece of software...

Do you have any opinions of the original coding beyond the 'inelegant but amazingly resilient' meme? Was there anything that stood out about it?

No I haven't read any of it.

No I don't think it's Szabo or anyone else whose name is known to me. I explained why I don't think it's Szabo to a reporter from London's Sunday Times who wrote about it in the March 2 issue. I'll try to find and quote the relevant section.

I had the article jailbroken recently, and the relevant parts (I hope I got it right, my version has scrambled-up text) are:

Nonetheless, the original bitcoin white paper is written in an academic style, with an index of sources at the end. I go to Wei Dai, an original cypherpunk, the proposer of a late-1990s e-currency called b-moneyand an early correspondent of Satoshi. When, in the first of several late-night chats, I ask him how many people would have the necessary competencies to create something like bitcoin, he tells me:

"Coming up with bitcoin required someone who, a) thought about money on a deep level, and b) learnt the tools of cryptography, c) had the idea that something like Bitcoin is possible, d) was motivated enough to develop the idea into something practical, e) was technically skilled enough to make it secure, f) had enough social skills to build and grow a community around it. The number of people who even had a), b) and c) was really small -- ie, just Nick Szabo and me -- so I'd say not many people could have done all these things."

A sudden frisson. Szabo, an American computer scientist who has also served as law professor at George Washington University, developed a system for "bit gold" between 1998 and 2005, which has been seen as a precursor to Bitcoin. Is he saying that Szabo is Satoshi? "No, I'm pretty sure it's not him." you, then? "No. When I said just Nick and me, I meant before Satoshi" So where could this person have come from? "Well, when I came up with b-money I was still in college, or just recently graduated, and Nick was at a similar age when he came up with bit gold, so I think Satoshi could be someone like that." "Someone young, with the energy for that kind of commitment?" "yeah, someone with energy and time, and that isn't obligated to publish papers under their real name."

...I go back to Szabo's pal, Wei Dai. "Wei," I say, "the other night you said you were sure Nick Szabo wasn't Satoshi. What made you sure?" "Two reasons," he replies. "One: in Satoshi's early emails to me he was apparently unaware of Nick Szabo's ideas and talks about how bitcoin 'expands on your ideas into a complete working system' and 'it achieves nearly all the goals you set out to solve in your b-money paper'. I can't see why, if Nick was Satoshi, he would say things like that to me in private. And, two: Nick isn't known for being a C++ programmer."

Perversely, a point in Szabo's favour. But Wei forwards me the relevant emails, and it's true: Satoshi had been ignorant of Szabo's bit-gold plan until Wei mentioned it. Furthermore, a trawl through Szabo's work finds him blogging and fielding questions about bit gold on his Unenumerated blog on December 27, 2008, while Satoshi was preparing bitcoin to meet the world a week later. Why? Because Szabo didn't know about bitcoin: almost no one outside the Cryptography Mailing List did, and I can find no evidence of him ever having been there. Indeed, by 2011, the bit-gold inventor is blogging in defence of bitcoin, pointing out several improvements on the system he devised.

I actually meant to email you about this earlier, but is there any chance you could post those emails (you've made them half-public as it is, and Dustin Trammell posted his a while back) or elaborate on Nick not knowing C++?

I've been trying to defend Szabo against the accusations of being Satoshi*, but to be honest, his general secrecy has made it very hard for me to rule him out or come up with a solid defense. If, however, he doesn't even know C or C++, then that massively damages the claims he's Satoshi. (Oh, one could work around it by saying he worked with someone else who did know C/C++, but that's pretty strained and not many people seriously think Satoshi was a group.)

* on Reddit, HN, and places like http://blog.sethroberts.net/2014/03/11/nick-szabo-is-satoshi-nakamoto-the-inventor-of-bitcoin/ or https://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/satoshi-nakamoto-is-probably-nick-szabo/ (my response) / http://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/occams-razor-who-is-most-likely-to-be-satoshi-nakamoto/

Thank you so much Wei Dai.

My idea with second question was to understand if there is like an anarchist motivation around bitcoin that may have some risks in the future. I mean, if somehow when it reaches Wall Street the original developers can do anythink to affect credibility.

You say you don't think it was Szabo. Have you ever try to know who he was? Could you share who is your solid hunch and why?

Is relevant to know Satoshi?

If you know what you know today, would you have patented bmoney? Do you think bitcoin inventers would have done the same?

Kind regards Marta

Since the birth and early growth of Bitcoin, how has your view on the prospects for crypto-anarchy changed (if at all)? Why?

My views haven't changed very much, since the main surprise of Bitcoin to me is that people find such a system useful for reasons other than crypto-anarchy. Crypto-anarchy still depends on the economics of online security favoring the defense over the offense, but as I mentioned in Work on Security Instead of Friendliness? that still seems to be true only in limited domains and false overall.

What do you think are the most interesting philosophical problems within our grasp to be solved?

I'm not sure there is any. A big part of it is that metaphilosophy is essentially a complete blank, so we have no way of saying what counts as a correct solution to a philosophical problem, and hence no way of achieving high confidence that any particular philosophical problem has been solved, except maybe simple (and hence not very interesting) problems, where the solution is just intuitively obvious to everyone or nearly everyone. It's also been my experience that any time we seem to make real progress on some interesting philosophical problem, additional complications are revealed that we didn't foresee, which makes the problem seem even harder to solve than before the progress was made. I think we have to expect this trend to continue for a while yet.

If you instead ask what are some interesting philosophical problems that we can expect visible progress on in the near future, I'd cite decision theory and logical uncertainty, just based on how much new effort people are putting into them, and results from the recent past.

Do you think that solving normative ethics won't happen until a FAI? If so, why?

No I don't think that's necessarily true. It's possible that normative ethics, metaethics, and metaphilosophy are all solved before someone builds an FAI, especially if we can get significant intelligence enhancement to happen first. (Again, I think we need to solve metaethics and metaphilosophy first, otherwise how do we know that any proposed solution to normative ethics is actually correct?)

You argued previously that metaphilosophy and singularity strategies are fields with low hanging fruit. Do you have any examples of progress in metaphilosophy?

Unfortunately, not yet. BTW I'm not saying these are fields that definitely have low hanging fruit. I'm saying these are fields that could have low hanging fruit, based on how few people have worked in them.

Do you have any role models?

I do have some early role models. I recall wanting to be a real-life version of the fictional "Sandor Arbitration Intelligence at the Zoo" (from Vernor Vinge's novel A Fire Upon the Deep) who in the story is known for consistently writing the clearest and most insightful posts on the Net. And then there was Hal Finney who probably came closest to an actual real-life version of Sandor at the Zoo, and Tim May who besides inspiring me with his vision of cryptoanarchy was also a role model for doing early retirement from the tech industry and working on his own interests/causes.

1 - I didn't take any steps to code up b-money. Part of it was because b-money wasn't a complete practical design yet, but I didn't continue to work on the design because I had actually grown somewhat disillusioned with cryptoanarchy by the time I finished writing up b-money, and I didn't foresee that a system like it, once implemented, could attract so much attention and use beyond a small group of hardcore cypherpunks.

2 - It's hard for me to tell, but I'd guess that it was probably a mixture of technical challenge and wanting to change the world.

3 and 4 - Don't have much to say on these. Others have probably thought much more about these questions over the past months and years and are more qualified than I am to answer.

5 - I haven't seen any indication of this. What makes you suspect it?

• More than 100% of my profit's are from market making. Overall, I lose money on my positions. For the firm as a whole, position trading might be slightly profitable.

• I have a basic strategy that works, and I run a couple variants on that strategy on a decent number of products. I am always trying to tweak the strategy to make it better, and add more products to trade. I also put some effort into developing new ideas. Most of the time, new ideas are a waste of time. There just aren't that many fundamentally different strategies that work, and that provide the kind of risk/return profile that works in my industry. I know it is a cliche that you learn more from failure than from success, but in developing trading strategies I think the opposite is true. You can spend forever trying things that don't work. Its much more valuable to understand and refine an idea that basically works.

I decided against responding to such a silly trap, so because zero is even and the truth condition thus fulfilled, I decided to answer the question, so because I decided to respond to the question and zero is even, I decided against responding to such a silly trap, so -s--s-..... -...

[You'll be our first line of defense against uFAI, smithereening it with a simple question.]

Why are you pessimistic about the future?

I worry about a regression to the historical mean (Malthusian conditions, many people starving at the margins) and existential risk. I think extinction or return to Malthusian conditions (including Robin Hanson's hardscrabble emulation future) are the default result and I'm pessimistic about the potential of groups like MIRI.

What are your practical issues about the Seasteading Institute?

As I see it, the main problem with SI is their over-commitment to small-size seastead designs because of their commitment to the principle of "dynamic geography." The cost of small-seastead designs (in complexity, coordination problems, additional infrastructure) will be huge.

I don't think dynamic geography is what makes seasteading valuable as a concept. The ability to create new country projects by itself is the most important aspect. I think large seastead designs (or even land-building) would be more cost-effective and a better overall direction.

My major issue is that even if everything else works, governments are unlikely to tolerate real challenges to their authority.

I've always thought the risk from existing governments isn't that big. I don't think governments will consider seasteading to be a challenge until/unless governments are losing significant revenues from people defecting to seasteads. By default, governments don't seem to care very much about things that take place outside of their borders. Governments aren't very agent-y about considering things that are good for the long term interests of the government.

Seasteads would likely cost existing governments mainly by people attracting revenue-producing citizens away from them and into seasteads, and it will take a long time before that becomes a noticeable problem. Most people who move to seasteads will still retain the citizenship of their home country (at least in the beginning), and for the US that means you must keep paying some taxes. Other than the US, there aren't a lot of countries that have the ability to shut down a sea colony in blue water. By the time the loss of revenue becomes institutionally noticeable, the seasteads are likely to be too big to easily shut down (i.e. it would require a long term deployment and would involve a lot of news footage of crying families being forced onto transport ships).

What political theories, if any, do you find plausible?

I like the overall meta-political ethos of seasteading. I think any good political philosophy should start with accepting that there are different kinds of people and they prefer different types of governments/social arrangements.You could call this "meta-libertarianism" or "political pluralism."

Maybe you can give some common misconceptions about how people recover from / don't recover from their addictions? That's the sort of topic you tend to hear a lot of noise about which makes it tough to tell the good information from the bad.

I'm not sure if these are misconceptions, but here are some general thoughts on recovery:

1. Neural genetics probably matters a lot. I don't know what to do with this, but I think neuroscience and genetics will produce huge breakthroughs in treatment of addiction in the next 20 years. People like me will probably be on the sidelines for this big change.
2. People who feel coerced into entering counseling will almost certainly relapse, and they'll relapse faster and harder compared to people who enter willingly. However...
3. ...this doesn't make coercion totally pointless--counselors can plant the seeds of a sincere recovery attempt, and give clients the mental tools to recognize their patterns.
4. People who willingly enter counseling still usually relapse, multiple times. The people who keep coming back after a relapse stand a much better chance of getting to a high level of functioning. People who reenter therapy every time they relapse will usually succeed eventually. (I realize this is almost a tautology.)
5. Clients with other diagnosed disorders are much less likely to fully recover.)

Do you have any thoughts on wireheading?

Wireheading is somewhat fuzzy as a term.... The extreme form (being converted into "Orgasmium") seems like it would be unappealing to practically everyone who isn't suicidally depressed (and even for them it would presumably not be the best option in a transhuman utopia in which wireheading is possible.)

I think a modest version of wireheading (changing a person's brain to raise their happiness set point) will be necessary if we want to bring everyone up to an acceptable level happiness.

Have you tried any 19th/20th century reactionary authors?

I've read a lot of excerpts and quotes, but not many full books. I read a large part of one of Carlyle's books and one late 19th Century travelogue of the United States which Moldbug approvingly linked to. (I've read a fair amount of Nietzsche's work, but I think calling him a reactionary is a bit like calling the Marquis de Sade a "libertarian.")

The one concept from Nietzsche I see everywhere around me in the world is ressentiment. I think much of the master-slave morality stuff was too specific and now feels dated 130 years later, but ressentiment is the important core that's still true and going to stay with us for a while; it's like a powerful drug that won't let humanity go. Ideological convictions and interactions, myths and movements, all tied up with ressentiment or even entirely based on it. And you're right, I would have everyone read Nietzsche - not for practical advice or predictions, but to be able, hopefully, to understand and detect this illness in others and especially oneself.

I'm not sure I entirely understand the question. I'll try to give a history in three stages

1) Roughly, the earliest stages of philosophy were mathematics, and attempts at reductive, systematic accounts of the natural world. This was going on pretty broadly, and only by virtue of some surviving doxographers do we have the impression that Greece was at the forefront of this practice (I'm thinking of the pre-Socratic greek philosophers, like Thales and Anaxagoras and Pythagoras). It was everywhere, and the Greeks weren't particularly good at it. This got started with the Babylonians (very little survives), and when the Assyrian empire conquered Babylon (only to be culturally subjugated to it), they spread this practice throughout the Mediterranean and near-east. Genesis 1 is a good example of a text along these lines.

2) After the collapse of the Assyrians, locals on the frontiers of the former empire (like Greece and Israel) reasserted some intellectual control, often in the form of skeptical criticisms or radically new methodologies (like Parmenides very important arguments against the possibility of change, or the Pythagorean claim that everything is number). Socrates engaged in a version of this by eschewing questions of the cosmos and focusing on ethics and politics as independent topics. Then came Plato, and Aristotle, who between them got the western intellectual tradition going. I won't go into how, for brevity's sake.

3) After Plato and Aristotle, a flurry of philosophical activity overwhelmed the Mediterranean (including and especially in Alexandria), largely because of the conquests of Alexander and the active spread of Greek culture (a rehash of the thing with the Assyrians). This period is a lot like ours now: widespread interest in science, mathematics, ethics, political theory, etc. Many, many people were devoted to these things, and they produced more work in a given year during this period than every that had come before combined. But as a result of the sheer volume of this work, and as a result of the fact that it was built on the shoulders of Plato and Aristotle, very little of it really stands out. As a result, a lot was lost.

What are you working on at google?

ngx_pagespeed and mod_pagespeed. They are open source modules for nginx and apache that rewrite web pages on the fly to make them load faster.

How much do you earn?

$195k/year, all things considered. (That's my total compensation over the last 19 months, annualized. Full details: http://www.jefftk.com/money)

How much do you give, and to where?

Last year Julia and I gave a total of $98,950 to GiveWell's top charities and the Centre for Effective Altruism. (Full details: http://www.jefftk.com/donations)

I've added an update to that post: http://www.jefftk.com/p/citric-acid

I ended up ordering malic and fumaric acids as well. I like the malic acid a lot, but the fumaric acid is really hard to taste. Not being soluble in water it just sits on the tongue being slightly sour. I probably just haven't found the right use for it yet.

The difference I was getting at is that when constructing a code you're taking experiences you've already had and then assigning them weight, whereas the universal prior, being a prior, assigns weight to strings without any reference to your experiences. So when people say "the universal prior says that Maxwell's equations are simple and Zeus is complex", what they actually mean is that in their experience mathematical descriptions of natural phenomena have proved more fruitful than descriptions that involve agents; the universal prior has nothing to do with this, and invoking it is dangerous as it encourages double-counting of evidence: "this explanation is more probable because it is simpler, and I know it's simpler because it's more probable". When in fact the relationship between simplicity and probability is tautologous, not mutually reinforcing.

This error really bothers me, because aside from its incorrectness it's using technical mathematics in a surface way as a blunt weapon verbose argument that makes people unfamiliar with the math feel like they're not getting something that they shouldn't in fact get nor need to understand.

(I've swept the problem of "which prefix do I use?" under the rug because there are no AIT tools to deal with that and so if you want to talk about the problem of prefixes, you should do so separately from invoking AIT for some everyday hermeneutic problem. Generally if you're invoking AIT for some object-level hermeneutic problem you're Doing It Wrong, as has been explained most clearly by cousin_it.)

I mostly don't, but when I do, Twitter. @willdoingthings mostly; it's an uninhibited drunken tweeting account. I also participate on IRC in private channels. But in general I've become a lot more secretive and jaded so I post a lot less.

So why do you talk about it at all when it just makes you seem crazy to most of us?

When it comes to epistemic praxis I am not a friend of the mob. I want to minimize my credibility with most of LessWrong and semi-maximize my credibility with the people I consider elite. I'm very satisfied with how successful my strategy has been.

Or perhaps you suspect your kind of experiences are more common than openly expressed?

Indeed.

I assume I'd take seriously your crazy experiences if they were mine. Is there anything at all you can say that's of value to someone like me who just hears crazy?

I am somewhat proud of the care I've taken in interpreting my experiences. I think that even if people don't think there's anything substantial in my experiences, they might still appreciate and perhaps learn from my prudence. Interpreting the supernatural is extremely difficult and basically everyone quickly goes off the rails. Insofar as there is a rational way to really engage with the contents of the subject I think my approach is, if not rational, at least rational enough to avoid many of the failure modes. But perhaps I am overly proud.

This is hard to answer. I mean something vague. A god is a seemingly transhumanly intelligent agent. (By this I don't mean something cheap like "the economy" or "evolution", I mean the obvious thing.) As to their origins I have little idea; aliens, simulators, programs simpler than our physical universe according to a universal prior, hypercompetent human conspiracies with seemingly inhuman motivations, whatever, I'm agnostic. For what it's worth (some of) the entity or entities I've interacted with seem to want to be seen as related to or identical with one or more of the gods of popular religions, but I'm not sure. In general it's all quite ambiguous and people are extremely hasty and heavy with their interpretations. Further complicating the issue is that it seems like the gods are willing to go along with and support humans' heavy-handed interpretations and so the interpretations become self-confirming. I say "gods", but for all I know it's just one entity with very diverse effects, like an author of a book.

I believe so for reasons you wouldn't find compelling, because the gods apparently do not want there to be common knowledge of their existence, and thus do not interact with humans in a manner that provides communicable evidence. (Yes, this is exactly what a world without gods would look like to an impartial observer without firsthand incommunicable evidence. This is obviously important but it is also completely obvious so I wish people didn't harp on it so much.) People without firsthand experience live in a world that is ambiguous as to the existence or lack thereof of god-like beings, and any social evidence given to them will neither confirm nor deny their picture of the world, unless they're falling prey to confirmation bias, which of course they often do, especially theists and atheists. I think people without firsthand incommunicable evidence should be duly skeptical but should keep the existence of the supernatural (in the everyday sense of that word, not the metaphysical sense) as a live hypothesis. Assigning less than 5% probability to it is, in my view, a common but serious failure of social epistemic rationality, most likely caused by arrogance. (I think LessWrong is especially prone to this kind of arrogance; see IlyaShpitser's comments on LessWrong's rah-rah-Bayes stance to see part of what I mean.)

As for me, and as to my personal decision policy, I am ninety-something percent confident. The scenarios where I'm wrong are mostly worlds where outright complex hallucination is a normal feature of human experience that humans are for some reason blind to. I'm not talking about normal human memory biases and biases of interpretation, I'm saying some huge fraction of humans would have to have a systemic disorder on the level of anosognosia. Given that I don't know how we should even act in such a world, I'm more inclined to go with the gods hypothesis, which, while baffling, at least has some semblance of graspability.