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.
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
It seems to me that Viliam's complaint is not that there would be more to talk about, but that more talk would be politicized.
I don't know for sure whether it was (I don't think I ever paid that much attention to the politics threads) but here's one way it could have been: suppose LW has few but very vocal neoreactionaries[1] and that most of the non-neoreactionaries are not very interested in talking about neoreaction[2]. If those few neoreactionaries arrange that every political discussion is packed with NRx stuff, then those political discussions will be annoying to everyone else because in order to read the bits they're interested in they have to wade through lots of NRx comments (and perhaps, though here they may have only themselves to blame, lots of anti-NRx responses).
[1] I think there is some evidence that this is actually so.
[2] This seems likely to be true, but I have no evidence. (I don't mean that most non-NRx people want never to talk about NRx; only that for most the optimal amount of NRx discussion is rather small.)
What about when you see a thread that you would want to read, but in which a few people obsessed with things you find uninteresting have posted hundreds of comments you don't want to read?
Of course it doesn't need to be neoreactionaries doing this. It could be social-justice types seizing every possible opportunity to point out heteronormative kyriarchal phallogocentric subtexts. It could be people terrified about AI risk turning every discussion of computers doing interesting things into debates about whether We Are All Doomed -- or people skeptical about AI risk complaining incessantly about how LW promotes paranoia about AI risk. It could be Christians proposing Jesus as the answer to every question, or atheists leaping on every case of suffering or successful scientific explanation to remind us that it's evidence against God. Etc., etc., etc.
It might be. Or it might be so only in the sense that for an alcoholic, having a glass of whisky is a significant opportunity to practice the discipline of self-control. (That is: in principle it might be but in practice the outcome might be almost certain to be bad.)
What do you mean by that? Do you mean that they're not interested in becoming lesswrong about the issue or that they only want to become lesswrong to the extent it doesn't involve being similar to those weird NRx's?