This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.
Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.
To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.
Would an AI necessarily have something like a system 1/system 2 distinction? Might it have additional layers?
I have an intuition that if we implemented universal basic income, the prices of necessities would rise to the point where people without other sources of income would still be in poverty. I assume there are UBI supporters who've spent more time thinking about that question than I have, and I'm interested in their responses.
(I have some thoughts myself on the general directions responses might take, but I haven't fleshed them out, and I might not care enough to do so.)
The goal of a UBI isn't necessarily to eliminate poverty - which, given that poverty is relative, is impossible anyways - but rather to shift welfare from a complex set of rules with many hazards and pitfalls to a simple set of rules with few if any, while simultaneously permitting a simplification and flattening of the tax system without disproportionate adverse effects on the poor.
Why would the price of necessities rise?
There are three reasons why the price might go up:
Right now, everyone is already consuming these necessities, so if UBI is introduced, demand will not go up. So 1 would not be true.
Supply could go down if enough people stop working. But if this reduces supply of the necessities, there is a strong incentive for people on just UBI to start working again. There is also increasing automation. So I find 2 unlikely.
That leaves 3, inflation. I am not an economist, but as far as I understand this shouldn't be a significant factor.
If you want information on how increased income due to UBI would affect people's spending on food, you can look at the data that we already have on the relationship between income and spending on food. Three stylized facts:
As income goes up, the proportion of income spent on food goes down.
As income goes up, the total amount of money spent on food goes up.
As income goes up, the proportion of one's food budget spent on restaurants goes up.
These trends generally hold if you are comparing different countries with each other, or if you are comparing different people within a single country, or if you are looking at a single country over time as it gets richer. I don't see any strong reasons to think that they wouldn't also apply to people whose income went up due to receiving a new UBI.
So if a household was making $20,000 per year and spending 20% of it ($4,000) on food, and UBI increases their income to $25,000 per year, then we can predict that they will spend somewhere between $4,000 and $5,000 per year on food, and some of the increased spending will go towards increased quality & convenience (such as eating out). You could probably make more precise predictions if you tried to...
Logic can only take you so far, actual data is essential:
What traits do you look for when making friends?
Also, what clues or tells do you use to identify these specific traits?
What does 'difficulty concentrating' feel like for you? I often find that value words, like 'good', 'bad', 'difficult', 'happy', 'sad', mean different things for me than for most people.
I spend much of my free time working on a game that I intend to sell at some point. The indie game community talks a lot about focusing, overcoming difficulties concentrating, etc. But I've never seen someone describe in detail what 'difficulty concentrating' or 'difficulty getting to work' feels like. I find myself wondering if they are talking about what I think they are talking about. It's possible that their tips don't often work because we are thinking about different things.
Akrasia gets talked about a lot here, as well as ways of improving productivity, and I'm really curious what akrasia or difficulty concentrating actually feels like for other people. Taboo the words 'akrasia', 'procrastination', 'distraction' and other similar words, and tell me what it feels like.
Here's what 'difficulty getting to work' typically feels like for me: I look at my list of tasks and I get a strong feeling of despair. Starting work on the list feels like I'm chaining myself to an assembly line in a grey factory...
I have a feeling which seems related to satiety, in that I get it after eating and it makes me disinclined to eat more, but I experience it in my upper throat/back of my mouth rather than in my stomach. It's not exclusive with hunger in my stomach.
Does anyone recognise the sensation I'm describing, and know anything about it?
Possibly relevant details, but I haven't been keeping good track so maybe don't take them too seriously: I first noticed it, I think more than a couple of months ago, but less than three years ago. I associate it with chips (fries, but...
I'd guess the experience is, in fact, allergic reactions, and what you're feeling is a mild swelling of the tissues affected. Your banana allergy, given that it's particularly common with unripe bananas, is probably a latex allergy; kiwi, mango, guava, avocado, and a few other fruits also contain natural latex and should be avoided.
Chips, I'm less certain of, unless you're associating it with chips you happen to be dipping in guacamole.
ETA: Oh. English chips. That could be the oil they're cooked in; do you have any other food allergies you're aware of? (That burning sensation? Pay attention to it when you eat. I'd describe the flavor of allergic reaction as being like copper needles poking into your tongue - a spicy metallic taste. Personally I find it delicious.)
Also ETA: Try taking a Benadryl and see if the symptoms subside, provided you're not sensitive to it (dipenhydramine hcl, if looking for generics).
Also also ETA: Cup-A-Soup contains celery, which is listed as a moderately cross-reactive food for latex allergies.
http://latexallergyresources.org/cross-reactive-food - includes celery and potatoes. Thin-cut fried potato might have all the proteins in question destroyed by the frying process.
I sometimes get mild headaches. Is it best to take acetaminophen, ibuprofen, or aspirin when this happens?
Where can I find the most coherent anti-FOOM argument (outside of the FOOM debate)? [That is, I'm looking for arguments for the possibility of not having an intelligence explosion if we reach near human level AI, the other side is pretty well covered on LW.]
The recent talk about alien constructs and so Dyson spheres got me wondering.
Assuming their existence, why do we expect to see Dyson spheres in other star systems? A new Dyson sphere (that is, the star + Dyson sphere system) would not emit much anything and so would be invisible. Of course, the energy has to go somewhere and even superadvanced aliens -- assuming they haven't developed all new superadvanced physics -- will have a lot of waste heat. That heat, we expect, would be dumped into surrounding space as some sort of radiation and so we would see it....
I'm having a hard time understanding the following article, from Ben Levenstein at FHI on the epistemology of disagreement. I know it's a bit long but it seems pretty important and I want to make sure I understand it correctly. It's just that I'm having a hard time following the math and formal notation. Can someone summarize it for me? Thanks.
https://www.academia.edu/1997967/With_All_Due_Respect_The_Macro-Epistemology_of_Disagreement
I've been through the free will sequences a second time now, and I'm trying to figure out how to apply it to my life.
See, even that sounds weird, because applying to my life...trying...figure out...whether I do or not is inevitable, right?
Speaking from the naive standpoint, how does the determinist viewpoint affect your decisions? How do you think about it, incorporate it? Do you compartmentalize and pretend you're in control, or what?
In an infinite universe is it not the case that all possibilities have at least one instance where their probability is equal to one?
If we obtained a good understanding of the beginning of life and found that the odds of life occurring at some point in our universe was one in a million, then what exactly would follow from that. Sure the Fermi paradox would be settled, but would this give credence to multiverse/big world theories or does the fact that the information is anthropically biased tell us nothing at all? Finally, if we don't have to suppose a multiverse to account for a vanishingly small probability of life, then wouldn't it be surprising if there are not a lot of hugely improbable jumps in the forming of intelligent life?
Could there be some analogue of placebo-related genes in non-primate mammals, and how would that influence studies of drugs on highly inbred mice lines?
(I don't think it really would, but - stupid questions are stupid.)
...Interviewer: So Mr. Larity, you seem like a great fit for this job so far, do your values align with those of our company?
Clarity: (hmmm, I remember reading about values on the LessWrong wiki) ...
It is not known whether humans have terminal values that are clearly distinct from another set of instrumental values. Humans appear to adopt different values at different points in life. Nonetheless, if the theory of terminal values applies to humans', then their system of terminal values is quite complex. The values were forged by evolution in the ancestral env
Answer the question the interviewer means, not the question as you'd break it down on Less Wrong. Or more broadly: adapt your communication to the intended argument and goal.
In this particular example, you should know the values of the company before you end up at the interview, so this answer should be: Yes, followed by one or two examples show that your values match those of the company.
That it all "adds up to normality".
So I can finally ignore all those articles shared on social networks about how conscious observers magically cause things to happen. Without the nagging doubt that I may be preserving my peace of mind by ignoring some existing aspect of reality.
Could it be that 'qualia' are simply paths in the brain, evolved before language so that the brain-carrier would recognize, for example, edible from poisonous? Ancient people would not go around describing leaf shapes and margins in detail, but they would remember the crucial features, even if they had no names for them.
I used to get a feeling in my upper throat/back of throat that sounds similar to what you are feeling. It has been several years since I've felt it. It seems like the only time I ever had it was when eating thick cut fries. It felt like I had a wad of food stuck in the back of my throat or upper throat, even though I didn't. I usually found it to be uncomfortable and it seems like it was often accompanied by a slight sensation of heartburn. It didn't typically last long though, no more than ten minutes, possibly less if I drank a lot of water. But aside from having felt something similar, I have no further light to shed on the subject unfortunately.
Was there also excess saliva production/thick-feeling saliva?