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lukeprog comments on Open thread, January 25- February 1 - Less Wrong Discussion

8 Post author: NancyLebovitz 25 January 2014 02:52PM

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Comment author: lukeprog 26 January 2014 08:59:03AM *  36 points [-]

Every now and then I like to review my old writings so I can cringe at all the wrong things I wrote, and say "oops" for each of them. Here we go...

There was once a time when the average human couldn't expect to live much past age thirty. (Jul 2012)

That's probably wrong. IIRC, previous eras' low life expectancy was mostly due to high child mortality.

We have not yet mentioned two small but significant developments leading us to agree with Schmidhuber (2012) that "progress toward self-improving AIs is already substantially beyond what many futurists and philosophers are aware of." These two developments are Marcus Hutter's universal and provably optimal AIXI agent model... and Jurgen Schmidhuber's universal self-improving Godel machine models... (May 2012)

This sentence is defensible for certain definitions of "significant," but I think it was a mistake to include this sentence (and the following quotes from Hutter and Schmidhuber) in the paper. AIXI and Godel machines probably aren't particularly important pieces of progress to AGI worth calling out like that. I added those paragraphs to section 2.4. not long before the submission deadline, and regretted it a couple months later.

one statistical prediction rule developed in 1995 predicts the price of mature Bordeaux red wines at auction better than expert wine tasters do. (Jan 2011)

No, that's a misreading of the study.

On September 26, 1983, Soviet officer Stanislav Petrov saved the world. (Nov 2011)

Eh, not really.

in the U.S., the administering charity need not spend from the donor-advised fund as the donor wishes, though they often do. (Jul 2012)

Silly. Donor-advised funds basically always fund as the donor wishes.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 26 January 2014 10:12:56AM *  11 points [-]

On September 26, 1983, Soviet officer Stanislav Petrov saved the world. (Nov 2011)

Eh, not really.

The Wiki link in the linked LW post seems to be closer to "Stanislav Petrov saved the world" than "not really":

Petrov judged the report to be a false alarm, and his decision is credited with having prevented an erroneous retaliatory nuclear attack

...

His colleagues were all professional soldiers with purely military training and, following instructions, would have reported a missile strike if they had been on his shift.

...

Petrov, as an individual, was not in a position where he could single-handedly have launched any of the Soviet missile arsenal. ... But Petrov's role was crucial in providing information to make that decision. According to Bruce Blair, a Cold War nuclear strategies expert and nuclear disarmament advocate, formerly with the Center for Defense Information, "The top leadership, given only a couple of minutes to decide, told that an attack had been launched, would make a decision to retaliate."

A closely related article says:

Petrov's responsibilities included observing the satellite early warning network and notifying his superiors of any impending nuclear missile attack against the Soviet Union. If notification was received from the early warning systems that inbound missiles had been detected, the Soviet Union's strategy was an immediate nuclear counter-attack against the United States (launch on warning), specified in the doctrine of mutual assured destruction.

That he didn't literally have his finger on the "Smite!" button, or that the SU might still not have retaliated if he'd raised the alarm, is not the point.

Comment author: gjm 26 January 2014 10:29:46AM 10 points [-]

previous eras' low life expectancy was mostly due to high child mortality.

I have long thought that the very idea of "life expectancy at birth" is a harmful one, because it encourages exactly that sort of confusion. It lumps together two things (child mortality and life expectancy once out of infancy) with sufficiently different causes and sufficiently different effects that they really ought to be kept separate.

Comment author: TylerJay 26 January 2014 07:18:11PM 2 points [-]

Does anybody have a source that separates the two out? For example, to what age can the average X year old today expect to live? Or even at a past time?

Comment author: Lumifer 26 January 2014 07:33:42PM 5 points [-]

Does anybody have a source that separates the two out? For example, to what age can the average X year old today expect to live?

Sure, there is the concept of life expectancy at specific age. For example, there is the "default" life expectancy at birth, there is the life expectancy for a 20 year-old, life expectancy for a 60-year-old, etc. Just google it up.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 27 January 2014 07:11:26AM 1 point [-]

It's kind of important to the life insurance business ....

Comment author: TylerJay 26 January 2014 08:08:13PM 1 point [-]

Thanks. Interestingly, My numbers never matched up between any 2 sources.

The US SSA's actuarial tables give me a number that's 5 years different from their own "additional life expectancy" calculator.

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 26 January 2014 07:17:51PM 2 points [-]

Smart move not only to review but post the results. Shows humbleness and at the same time prevents being called on it later.

This is an approach I'd like to see more often. Maybe you should add it to the http://lesswrong.com/lw/h7d/grad_student_advice_repository/ or some such.

Comment author: ChrisHallquist 27 January 2014 03:17:51AM 1 point [-]

Huh. I followed the link to the correction of the Petrov story, and found I'd already upvoted it.

But if you'd asked me yesterday for examples of heroes yesterday, I'd have cited Petrov immediately. S

hows how hard it is to unlearn false information once you've learned it.

Comment author: private_messaging 26 January 2014 05:35:32PM 0 points [-]

On the AIXI and such... you see, its just hard to appreciate just how much training it takes to properly understand something like that. Very intelligent people, with very high mental endurance, train for decades, to be able to mentally manipulate the relevant concepts at their base level. Now, let's say someone only spent a small fraction of the time - either because they've pursued a wrong topic through the most critical years, or because they have low mental endurance. Unless they're impossibly intelligent, they have no chance of forming even a merely good understanding.

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