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I've been commenting on the site or a few months now, but so far just replies and responses. I've been thinking about potential contributions for a top-level discussion post, and I thought I'd ask about it here first to gage interest.
I have taught university classes in the past, usually with traditional methodology but in one memorable case with some experimental methods. There were a few ways this was different; as an example, we used 'high expectations, low stakes'- we allowed students to retake any assignment as many times as they liked, but their grade for the entire class was basically the lowest grade they got on any assignment. (This was partly inspired by video games, actually.)
It will obviously be of particular interest to anyone else who does teaching, but there's reasonable hope that some of my experiences there would be of use to audidacts. Do you think this would be a good use of my time?
Does anyone know how Eliezer first met Robin? How did the first end up as a co-editor of the latter's blog?
Nick Bostrom toured a bunch to promote Superintelligence after it came out. This included presentations, basically he would give a very condensed summary of the book, roughly the same each time. For anyone who's read the book you're probably not going to hear anything new in that.
However, the Q&As that took place after these presentations are a somewhat interesting look at how people react to hearing about this subject matter.
Talks at Google, the Q&A Starts 45:14. The first person in the audience to speak up is Ray Kurzweil.
His talk at the Oxford Martin School, Q&A starts at 51:38.
His talk at UC Berkeley, hosted by MIRI. Q&A starts at about 53:37.
There have been a lot of posts over the years about the fungibility of money and time - but strangely (at least to me), they all fill up with suggestions for how to turn money into time. Personally, I have the opposite desire - to turn time into money. I have found it extremely hard to find a decently-paid part-time job that fits around my main job. I also don't know how to get into freelancing.
Does anyone have any good suggestions? Possibly relevant info: I live in the UK, and am a programmer, of good but not phenomenal skill.
Dudeism? What in the world are they blathering about?
It turns out Dudeism is a thing. Wikipedia summarizes it best:
The Dudeist belief system is essentially a modernized form of Taoism purged of all of its metaphysical and medical doctrines. Dudeism advocates and encourages the practice of "going with the flow", "being cool headed", and "taking it easy" in the face of life's difficulties, believing that this is the only way to live in harmony with our inner nature and the challenges of interacting with other people. It also aims to assuage feelings of inadequacy that arise in societies which place a heavy emphasis on achievement and personal fortune. Consequently, simple everyday pleasures like bathing, bowling, and hanging out with friends are seen as far preferable to the accumulation of wealth and the spending of money as a means to achieve happiness and spiritual fulfillment.
I thought it'd be worth bringing to attention here, because if there's one adjective that would not apply to the online LW community, it's "laid back". Note that many of us are lazy, but we struggle with laziness, we keep looking for self-help and trying to figure ...
I thought it'd be worth bringing to attention here, because if there's one adjective that would not apply to the online LW community, it's "laid back".
Hmm. I have pretty strong Daoist / Stoic tendencies, and a large part of that deals with rejection of "should-ness;" that is, things are as they are, and carrying around a view of how the world "should" be that disagrees with the actual world is, on net, harmful.
I've gotten some pushback from LWers on that view, as they use the delta between their should-world and their is-world to motivate themselves to act. As far as I can tell, that isn't necessary; one can be motivated by the is-world directly, and if one reasons in the is-world one is more likely to make successful plans than if one reasons in the should-world (which is where one will reason, since diffs between the should-world and is-world are defects!).
But I think that LW is useful at dissolving that pushback; the practice of cashing out beliefs as predictions about the world rather than tribal identifications or moral claims is basically the practice of living in the is-world instead of the should-world.
I am constructing a political bias quiz together with Spencer Greenberg, who runs the site Clearer Thinking and wonder if people could help me coming up with questions. The quiz will work like this. First, you'll respond to a number of questions regarding your political views: e.g., republican or democrat, pro-life or pro-choice, pro- or anti-immigration, etc. Then you'll be given a number of factual questions. On the basis of your answers, you'll be given two scores:
1) The number of correct answers - your degree of political knowledge. 2) Your degree of political bias.
The assigmment of political bias will be based on the following reasoning. Suppose you're a hard-core environemntalist, and are consistently right about the questions where hard-core environemntalist like the true answer (e.g. climate change) but consistenly wrong about the questions where they are not (e.g. GMOs). Now this suggests that you have not reviewed these questions impartially, but that you acquire whatever factual beliefs suit your political opinions - i.e. that you're biased. Hence, the higher the ratio between the correct answers you like and the correct answers you dislike is, the more biased you are.
(T...
When I was trying to make sense of Peter Watts' Echopraxia it has occurred to me that there may be two vastly different but both viable kinds of epistemology.
First is the classical hypothesis-driven epistemology, promoted by positivists and Popper, and generalized by Bayesian epistemology and Solomonoff induction. In the most general version, you have to come up with a set of hypotheses with assigned probabilities, and look for information that would change the entropy of this set the most. It's a good idea. It formalizes what is science, and what is not; ...
I see a lot self-help books and posts following the general pattern: Don't read all the advice and apply it all at once but read and master it step by step (mostly really urging not to continue reading). I think this is a sound approch which could be applied more often. It is kind of clicker-traing advice applied at a high level. I wonder about the best granularity. The examples below use between 3 and about 100 steps. And I'd guess the more is better here - if possible. But it may depend on the topic at hand.
Examples:
...If you have not yet read Jaynes' Probability Theory I urge you to do so. If you are not willing to read almost a thousand pages, just read the preface.
Started yesterday and I can't keep my eyes off it.
I've been rereading some of the older threads and urge you to do so too. There might be stuff you didn't see the first time around and there will be stuff you noted but have forgotten.
I've read Yvain's Meditations on Moloch and some of the stuff from the linked On Gnon, but I'm still unclear on what exactly Gnon is supposed to signify. Does someone have a good explanation?
IANANRx, but I think the maximally charitable answer is "Nature; especially, the biological, physiological, and game-theoretical constraints within which any society and culture must operate." By extension, a culture neglecting these constraints is necessarily in a state of collapse- a faux perpetual motion machine may move for a few moments because of initial momentum in the system, but it must necessarily halt.
As an additional corollary, homeostatic societies (which were, presumably, not in a state of collapse) must have been acting within these constraints. Therefore, long-running traditional cultures most clearly illustrate the terms of compliance with Gnon.
Gnon is reality, with an emphasis towards the aspects of reality which have important social consequences. When you build an airplane and fuck up the wing design, Gnon is the guy who swats it down. When you adopt a pacifist philosophy and abolish your military, Gnon is the guy who invades your country. When you are a crustacean struggling to survive in the ocean floor, Gnon is the guy who turns you into a crab.
Basically, reality has mathematical, physical, biological, economical, sociological, and game-theoretical laws. We anthropomorphize those laws as Gnon.
Dewey believed that the [Alexander] Technique was a method of enlightening the emotions. At the intellectual level, according to Jones:
[Dewey] found it much easier, after he had studied the Technique, to hold a philosophical position calmly once he had taken it or to change it if new evidence came up warranting a change. He contrasted his own attitude with the rigidity of other academic thinkers who adopt a position early in their career and then use their intellects to defend it indefinitely.
From Body Learning by Michael Gelb, while he's quoting anothe...
My spouse has agreed to give up either chicken or beef. Beef is significantly worse than chicken from an environmental standpoint, but more chickens die (possibly after suffering) to feed us. How can I compare the two different ethical dimensions and decide which to eliminate?
Which would you eliminate? [pollid:801]
Odds on the Philae comet lander finding prevalence of the "right" kind of aminoacids#In_biology) (conditional on the lander surviving long enough to run the experiment and transmit the results)?
I would guess < 1%.
Is there actually good AI research somewhere in Europe? (Apart from what the FHI is doing.) Or: can the mission for FAI benefit at all from me doing my PhD at the AI lab of some university? (Which is my plan currently.)
Suppose we believe that stock market prices are very good aggregators of information about companies future returns. What would be the signs that the "big money" is predicting (a) a positive postscarcity type singularity event or (b) an apocalypse scenario AI induced or otherwise?
I have a hypothesis based on systems theory, but I don't know how much sense it makes.
A system can only simulate a less complex system, not one at least as complex as itself. Therefore, human neurologists will never come up with a complete theory of the human mind, because they'll not be able to think of it, i.e. the human brain cannot contain a complete model of itself. Even if collectively they get to understand all the parts, no single brain will be able to see the complete picture.
Am I missing some crucial detail?
I think you may be missing a time factor. I'd agree with your statement if it was "A system can only simulate a less complex system in real-time." As an example, designing the next generation of microprocessors can be done on current microprocessors, but simulation time often takes minutes or even hours to run a simulation of microseconds.
A friend of mine recently succumbed to using the base rate fallacy in a line of argumentation. I tried to explain that it was a base rate fallacy, but he just replied that the base rate is actually pretty high. The argument was him basically saying something equivalent to "If I had a disease that had a 1 in a million chance of survival and I survived it, it's not because I was the 1 in a million, it's because it was due to god's intervention". So I tried to point out that either his (subjective) base rate is wrong or his (subjective) conditional ...
I am reposting my question from the last open thread: Where can I find reading groups for arbitrary books? I saw the Superintelligence reading group and I realised that I am currently in a reading group for another book. Since my reading list is huge, I could use the mild social incentive of a reading club. Also the commets are usually enlightening and drawing my attention to a point I have not considered before.
I prefer discussion board based groups as I can skip the meaningless discussions.
From Body Learning by Michael Gelb, while he's quoting another book in the middle. I know there are a handful of other LWers out there who do Alexander, but it's a very interesting technique because it seems useful to know (I wouldn't be surprised if it's the inspiration for a lot of the skillful movement stuff in Dune, which made an impression on me as a child) but useless to discuss: there's not really a way to teach it except by touch, which doesn't scale very well.
Alexander Technique is one somatic technique of many. All of them lead to skillful movement and without background knowledge there no reason to assume that a specific technique inspired Dune.
I don't think that discussing it is inherently impossible. It just hard. It's even more hard when the people you are talking with don't have the background to understand the basic claims and then want peer reviewed research for every claim.
If you want to discuss issues around shifting around your center of gravity than the people you talk to have to know what you mean with shifting around one's center of gravity and it's not something that can be easily done via a blog post.