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gjm 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: 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.