Scary Mark Zuckerberg interview on AI risks where the Facebook founder says:
"I think that along the way, we will also figure out how to make it safe. The dialogue today kind of reminds me of someone in the 1800s sitting around and saying: one day we might have planes and they may crash. Nonetheless, people developed planes first and then took care of flight safety. If people were focused on safety first, no one would ever have built a plane."
Yes, but if the crash of a single airplane would cause the extermination of mankind we would all be dead. A better analogy is scientists in 1940 considering whether detonating an atomic bomb would ignite the atmosphere.
I wonder if Zuckerberg is familiar with the concept of "hard takeoff". I've been under the impression the concept has become mainstream, but I've been in the OB/LW sphere for the entirety of my adult life, and I have no idea how big the inferential distance has gotten.
moderator action: Old_Gold is banned
Another account of Eugine_Nier / Azathoth123 / Voiceofra / The_Lion / The_Lion2 is banned, effective now. I am posting this as a comment in Open Thread to avoid writing articles about banning the same person again and again, thus reducing the administrative cost of enforcing the already existing ban.
This specific change of policy does not apply to other potentially banned users (unless they are obvious spammers or scammers) who still deserve a separate post.
Is it ever likely to be feasible to undo all Eugine's votes? It seems clear that whack-a-mole banning is not terribly effective; since the main thing (I think) we want to disincentivize is unproductive mindkilled mass-downvoting, making that less effective (because likely to be undone after a while) might be worth the effort.
(My feeling is that this is an obvious enough point that probably it hasn't been done because doing it would be difficult, or because there's some strong objection I haven't thought of.)
[EDITED to add:] In the interests of full disclosure, I should perhaps mention that undoing all Eugine's votes would benefit me personally; I have fairly often (though not, I think, as severely as some) been one of his targets.
PSA: if you have chronic, low-level respiratory/sinus problems, there is a good chance it is caused by poor air quality in your place of residence. There are a lot of possible causes, including mold, bad carpeting, and poorly maintained HVAC systems.
I may be especially vulnerable, but I've experienced significant respiratory problems caused by bad air in several different apartments over the years. A couple of years ago, I was going through a particularly bad episode, and I thought I had simply developed adult-onset allergies to standard allergens (pollen, etc) but I noticed that when I spent a week away on a family visit, the symptoms almost went away. Then I moved out of the place with bad air, and the problems disappeared in a matter of weeks.
The good news is: it should be easy to tell if your apartment is causing problems, by staying elsewhere for a couple of days and noticing changes in the symptoms. The bad news is, if you'd prefer to fix the problem instead of moving to a different place, it might be hard to do, or even to identify the problem exactly.
I have an idea for a billion dollar company in the space of health care. It's a bit similar to metamed but has much better business model. I'm at the moment not sure whether to persue it commercially. From an EA perspective I would also be happy if someone else builds the company.
At the moment I'm thinking about writing a longer document laying out the idea but don't know about the best venue for it. Are you aware of any competitons for ideas where money can be won by writing a document about health care innovation without having an startup working on the idea?
I have been thinking a lot about Trump and I would like to start a discussion thread on him but I recognize that this would obviously violate LW's implicit rule against discussing politics so I thought I would run a poll to see if I have permission.
Should we have a discussion thread on Trump?
[pollid:1128]
Update: I won't be starting a Trump thread because of these poll results.
It's one of the most important and surprising events of our time and much of the discussion is anti-rational, i.e. bad people support Trump so Trump is bad; many are claiming that electing Trump would be catastrophic and discussing potential catastrophes is supposed to be one of the purposes of LW.
I am maybe 95% confident that Torchlight_Crimson is yet another Eugine account, and he (or someone) is mass-downvoting my comments (and probably others', but my own are easier to notice).
"You could also, if you had a sufficiently good understanding of organic biology and aerodynamics, build an airplane that could mate with birds. I don't think this would have been a smart thing for the Wright Brothers to try to do in the early days."
— Eliezer, in this interview with John Horgan, when asked whether AIs will experience sexual desire
"As you know, birds do not have sexual organs because they would interfere with flight. In fact, this was the big breakthrough for the Wright Brothers. They were watching birds one day, trying to fi...
Haven't asked in a bit: Is the real book version of AI to Zombies out yet or still just e? I would gladly buy a few copies at textbook-scaled prices, let alone normal book prices, but I want to buy several as gifts for people outside of this community (we've already read the sequences), most of whom take being e-exclusive as a sign of not being good enough to print. As I myself do, frankly, but a fallible one that's wrong here. And besides, you can't wrap it ;)
Anyway, I'd be curious if it's happened yet, and if not, if there's anything I can do to help move it along. Thanks.
I've just read an interview to a Danish artist/enterpreneur who invented a low cost light bulb, trying to promote it to a poor African village.
The reaction he got when he explained the project was "Yeah, it's a cute idea, but this is a prosperous village, you should try to sell it to the poorer village down the road".
He then moved to the next village, which had the same level of average earning, but proposing his light-bulb as an appliance for rich people, this time receiving a lot more interest. The artist later remodeled the bulb, keeping it lo...
Quarterly life report: 2016
Mental health
No longer chronically suicidal, suicidality more sporadic and it's a rather dull urge mashed up with conflicting other urges
Renewed interests in cryonics. Hmmm...
Writing, being open socially and back pain exercises are clearly improving my mental health.
Attending an outpatient mental health clinic. Approaching their upper age limit and will probably graduate to the clinic downstairs. They are helpful, but less helpful than services attended in the past like the university mental health clinic. Psychologists
I remember reading a few times on LW that psychologists have the same treatement success as non-psychologists. Has someone looked more deeply into this issue and can point me to academic research around that claim?
An interesting article I found a long time ago. Scroll down to the tables. I've found these tables extremely interesting. Way better than the descriptions of what the different personality traits are supposed to mean.
E.g. Openness seems to be your measure of liberal vs conservative/ red tribe vs blue tribe stuff.
Conscientiousness measures focus/akrasia/ADHD.
Introversion is obvious, but what it correlates to is interesting. Extroverts are interest in parties, but introversion correlates very strongly with "nerd" culture stuff.
Agreeableness is athe...
I am torn as to if I should tie my astrobio bloggery to my professional identity. Primarily because such bloggery is known here and in one or two other online spaces in which I also occasionally piss people off.
Containment thread
Requests for information
Why is there is no space where can I dance with strangers in public for free without prior preperation or an exceptional value proposition to prospective partners (e.g. I'll pay you to dance with me, or you get to look at my handsome self - hint: I'm not super handsome). Or is there, and I'm not aware of it? In a foreign country, perhaps?
Which life insurer do you use? Anyone know if Commonwealth bank or uni super will payout for cryonics?
Recently I've been toying with the notion of political determinism. I'd
What do you guys think of the theories of Ernest Becker, and of the more modern terror management theory?
The basic argument as that many, if not all, human behaviors are the result of our knowledge of our own mortality and our instinct to deny and forget about it in order to seek some kind of literal or symbolic immortality (by living forever, or writing a famous book, etc.) Religion exists to tell us that it's okay to die, culture to make us forget about religion, so we don't examine it too closely or think about death in general (it can still be scary be...
Cryptography Pioneers Receive 2015 ACM A.M. Turing Award
...Whitfield Diffie, former Chief Security Officer of Sun Microsystems and Martin E. Hellman, Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, are the recipients of the 2015 ACM A.M. Turing Award, for critical contributions to modern cryptography. The ability for two parties to communicate privately over a secure channel is fundamental for billions of people around the world. On a daily basis, individuals establish secure online connections with banks, e-commerce sites, email server
Speaking of NRx :-)
Clarkhat (who, I'm pretty sure, is Clark formerly of Popehat) wrote a good post talking about what is neoreaction. A taste:
...Neoreaction defines itself more in in terms of what it is opposed to than in terms of what it is in favor of.
Fine. So what is neoreaction against?
Democracy.
Neoreaction is the political philosophy that says that democracy is not merely the well-meaning god that happened to fail, but that our current wreckage was predetermined, because democracy fatally intertwined with progressivism since its birth, that it is a too
Tyler Cowen on mindkilling politics:
...Again, both the Democrats and the Republicans have their ready made, mostly true, and repeatedly self-confirming stories about the defects of the other. They need only read the news to feel better about themselves, and the academic contingent of the Democrats is better at this than are most ordinary citizens. There is thus a rather large cottage industry of intellectuals interpreting and channeling these stories to Democratic voters and sympathizers. On the right, you will find an equally large cottage industry, som
Containment thread 2
saints of effective altruism
Peter Singer, Patron Saint of Fame
I think the biggest issue with the lack of competition in the charity evaluation space is highlighted by begging a question you'd imagine they'd have answered, but haven't: What is the most cost-effective QALY with room f
Which economics websites would you recommend reading? I would prefer websites that write analyses of economies and industry sectors rather than theoretical ones, although good websites of the latter kind are also of interest.
With transhumanist technology, what is the probability that any human alive today will live forever, and not just thousands, or millions of years? I assume an extremely small, but non-zero, amount.
If you find unknown Strong AI and you have to ask it only one question, what it should be? (You can't skip asking)
Some possibly good ideas:
How to create Friendly AI?
2+2=?
Is there a computable infinite sequence of bits, and a constant c>1, such that any algorithm that prints the sequence requires at least c^n time to print the nth bit?
Found this website selling very cool mattresses. Anyone tried them?
"very cool" = connected to a smartphone, collecting data about your sleep, adjustable by clicking a button
Containment thread
Requests for information
Why is there is no space where can I dance with strangers in public for free without prior preperation or an exceptional value proposition to prospective partners (e.g. I'll pay you to dance with me, or you get to look at my handsome self - hint: I'm not super handsome). Or is there, and I'm not aware of it? In a foreign country, perhaps?
Which life insurer do you use? Anyone know if Commonwealth bank or uni super will payout for cryonics?
Recently I've been toying with the notion of political determinism. I'd be interested in a text analysis program that could analyse new legislation (this exists already) brought before parliament and predict (this doesn't exist yet) the political feasability based on content and contextual factors. Any suggestions? Given I have access to the text mining software that can classify legislation, can I propose a kaggle competition to predict responses to it? Right now political feasability analysis is pretty crude and requires human specialists not instead, policies could one day be generated based on plausibility then simply selected by human supervisors in parliament.
What is the relationship between housing characteristics and the elements of flourishing?
Science PhD's are frequently derided for being in vast oversupply to demand, resulting in poor employment outcomes for those who go for them. How do management and marketing PhD's compare as a career capital aquisition strategy? Hearsay suggets busines PhD's are far more valuable and there is high demand for business academics. However, my research suggests this may be explained by higher barriers to entry to business PhD's than science PhD's. Regarding management professional doctorates:
As a rule, students had 15 years of professional experience and were 40 years old. Two out of three were male and the students were from all sorts of industries – such as financial services, consulting firms, or IT and telecommunication – or ran their own businesses. Most of the students worked full-time, mainly in senior and middle management.
However, professional doctorates are a step higher than traditional PhDs. www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20140507145246893. The fact that Oxford publishes a list of its unemployed PhD students from its last graduates is slightly telling of the markets disequilibrium. Take into account their already small intake and the high barriers to entry (Oxford Said GMAT simulator). The case for the marketing PhD is simpler. There is disequilbrium between supply and demand, but also mismatch between marketing PhD graduate characteristics and marketing job requirements so marketing PhD's are neccersarily even that geared towards academia. My tentative conclusion is that marketing and management PhD's are fraught endeavours justlike science PhD's (both being more job worthy than arts PhD's) in general.
Based on political affiliation, some studies argue conservatives, on average, are happier than liberals. A potential explanation is greater acceptance of income inequalities in society leads to a less worried nature.
-wiki
In fact, if I was to design a study from which to draw a cauasal inference, my hypothesise would test to see if becoming interested in donating harmed the donor.
Moralistic aggression. A protection mechanism from cheaters acts to regulate the advantage of cheaters in selection against altruists. The moralistic altruist may want to educate or even punish a cheater.
-wiki. How can they protect against that if at all?
Partnerships. Altruism to create friendships.
EA's don't try to improve the wellbeing of their own group directly generally so they're reducing their own fitness. In nature, altruistic cabals form and split away from the less altruistic groups, and if altruism is an effective strategy for their adaptiveness then that altruistic community thrives.
interesting research
Public interest alert. MIRI take note. I met a girl the other day who's researching reasoning about Goal Revelation in Human Negotiation. Specifically, she's working on training AI's to out-negotiate humans in psychological games. The implications for the AI box experiment are clear and terrifying. She seems unaware of the implications, and the field doesn't have a strong web-presence at my institute - but Harvard seems to be the powerhouse for papers in the subfield right now.
The One Weird Trait That Predicts Whether You’re a Trump Supporter
autobiographical episodic memory cueing the remedial equivelant to reference class forecasting
In Meditation and attention: A comparison of the effects of concentrative and mindfulness meditation on sustained attention the case is made that long term meditators can sustain their concentration longer than short term meditators, and that mindfulness meditators deal between with unexpected tasks of attention than concentrative meditators, but no differences otherwise.
Can't concentrate for long? In Volitional modulation of autonomic arousal improves sustained attention the case is made that their autonomic arousal biofeedback protocol can increase sustained attention in neuropsychiatrically impaired populations. It probably applies to nonclinical populations too if you're looking for a cognitive superpower.
This research examines the influence of power on consumer decision strategies. It proposes that high power directs consumers' attention to options' positive features, making choosing a more preferred strategy than rejecting, whereas low power shifts consumers' focus to negative features, making rejecting a more preferred strategy than choosing. Two studies using different manipulations of power provide consistent support for this effect. The results also indicate that consumers in a state of high power are more satisfied with their choices when they adopt a choosing strategy than when they adopt a rejecting strategy, whereas the opposite is true for consumers in a state of low power. In addition, study 2 shows that the previous effects are reduced when consumers' sense of responsibility is made salient.
A main assumption behind privatisations, public-private partnerships and private finance initiatives in major programme delivery is that the involvement of private risk capital in programme delivery, for instance in infrastructure provision, will bring much-needed discipline to the planning and delivery of programmes.
The research in this project is designed to test this assumption. So far the assumption has been tested only with small samples of programmes and the evidence is mixed. Statistically valid conclusions do not exist. This study will attempt to change this state of affairs.
-The powerful select, the powerless reject: Power's influence in decision strategies - empirical support for the 'abundance mentality' theory of personal development
asking individuals to think about “how much time they would like to donate” (vs. “how much money they would like to donate”) to a charity increases the amount that they ultimately donate to the charity.
opinion
A/PROF ANISH NAGPAL, former mechanical engineer, former economist and present day marketing professor. Wow.
end the objectification of children and infants for the cuteness, they are not objects and deserve respect and self determination and rights not trivialisation and paternalism
media
EA's don't try to improve the wellbeing of their own group directly generally so they're reducing their own fitness. In nature, altruistic cabals form and split away from the less altruistic groups, and if altruism is an effective strategy for their adaptiveness then that altruistic community thrives.
That could be related to EA being a lot about signalling.Spending is a high value signal. Of course in principle it reduces your fitness in the long term. But being a costly signal is the whole point of signalling. So it keeps the size of the EA population small - which could be seen as the selection against altruism effect mentioned - but intended from a signalling point of view.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threadspage before posting.)
3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.
4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.