Advice solicited. Topics of interest I have lined up for upcoming posts include:

• The history of life on Earth and its important developments
• The nature of the last universal common ancestor (REALLY good new research on this just came out)
• The origin of life and the different schools of thought on it
• Another exploration of time in which I go over a paper that came out this summer that basically did exactly what I did a few months earlier with my "Space and Time Part II" calculations of our point in star and planet order that showed we are not early and are right around when you would expect to find the average biosphere, but extended it to types of stars and their lifetimes in a way I think I can improve upon.
• My thoughs on how and why SETI has been sidetracked away from activities that are more likely to be productive towards activities that are all but doomed to fail, with a few theoretical case studies
• My thoughts on how the Fermi paradox / 'great filter' is an ill-posed concept
• Interesting recent research on the apparent evolutionary prerequisites for primate intelligence

Any thoughts on which of these are of particular interest, or other ideas to delve into?

https://aeon.co/ideas/what-i-learned-as-a-hired-consultant-for-autodidact-physicists provides payed serious feedback as a service.

Save less because of the high probability that the AI will (a) kill us, (b) make everyone extremely rich, or (c) make the world weird enough so that money doesn't matter.

The article misses the point. It doesn't talk about the significance of the story.

A better headline might be "The Chinese government decided that it's in their interest to be public about data fabrication by Chinese scientists."

Given that this comes right after the Chinese government decides that it makes sense to reduce red meat consumption in China, it's a sign of progress and good Chinese leadership.

Awesome! This strikes me as a very good thing, especially with your suggested social norms. I have 3 additional suggestions, though:

1. Add a social norm where commenters make short summaries, or quote a couple sentences of new info, without the fluff. The title of the link serves much the same purpose, and gives readers enough info to decide whether or not to click through. This is standard practice on the more intellectual subreddit, since they already have the background context and knowledge that 90% of the article is spent explaining.

2. Add a social norm where the best comments get linked to. I enjoy Yvain's SSC posts, and the comments section often contains some gems, but digging through all of them to find the gems is tedious. I intend to quote or rephrase gems when I find them, and link to them in comments here.

3. Maybe we should have subreddits on LW. I'm not sure about this one. Tags serve some of the same purposes, so perhaps what would be ideal would be to subscribe and unsubscribe from tags you're interested in. However, just copying the Reddit code for subreddits would be simpler. It would divide up the community though, so probably not desirable while we're still small.

I don't have this problem, but a lot of people I know pay astonishing amounts of money for day care. If you could figure out a way to build the Starbucks of day care, you could probably make billions of dollars. Similarly for elder care.

I've this weird fanfiction where LessWrong is a monastery/school of magic who has been abandoned by its creator a long time ago but it's still operating, that sometimes has been attacked by a disgruntled student who was expelled, but has somehow learned to do necromancy and has returned with an army of meat-puppets.
Now I'll have to incorporate that due to some random magic accident, the monastery disappeared, but not the rooms inside it.

I'd suggest you prioritize your personal security. Once you have an income that doesn't take up much of your time, a place to live, a stable social circle, etc...then you can think about devoting your spare resources to causes.

The reason I'd make this suggestion is that personal liberty allows you to A/B test your decisions. If you set up a stable state and then experiment, and it turns out badly, you can just chuck the whole setup. If you throw yourself into a cause without setting things up for yourself and it doesn't work out the fallout can be considerable.

100%? Well, your future charitable donations will be markedly curtailed after you starve to death.

The problem is that the statistics don't show the claimed bias. Normalized on a per-police-encounter basis, white cops (or cops-in-general) don't appear to shoot black suspects more often than they shoot white suspects. However, police interact with black people more frequently, so the absolute proportion of black shooting victims is elevated.

The fact that the incidence of police encounters with blacks is elevated would be the actual social problem worth addressing, but the reasons for the elevated incidence of police-black encounters do not make a nice soundbite.

None of this is important of course because, as is usual for politics, the whole mess degenerates into cheerleading for your team and condemning the other team, and sensitive analysis of the actual evidence would be giving aid and comfort to the hated enemy.

The Gentle Seduction by Marc Stiegler ; search strategy was [short story about technological change saturn]

You develop a system for setting up and running a day care center, in the same way that Starbucks has a system for running coffee shops. That gives you economies of scale, because you only need to develop the system once, and then you can copy it across the country. What are the best toys? How do you physically set up the center? How do you manage the pickup transition (what do you do if a parent is chronically late to pickup?) Do you include a transportation (bus/van) service to get kids to the center?

Then you also develop a brand, which gives you a huge marketing advantage. New parents wonder where to send their kids to day care, and the LironCare brand is already at the top of their mind.

Having a brand also makes you more trustworthy, for game theory reasons, and there's nothing more important in day care than trust. Parents know that if there's a fiasco at any one LironCare center, that's going to be a huge black mark for the entire company, and they know you know that too, and so will work 100% to make sure there's no fiasco.

My life places me in a position to observe an uncommon number of people repenting and trying to change. As you might expect, humans being what we are, few accomplish their goal.

A fact that I've observed is that NONE of those who other themselves and blame the shard get it done. If someone says "I've got a terrible temper", he will still hit. If he says "I hit my girlfriend", he might stop. If someone says "I have shitty executive function", he will still be late. If he says "I broke my promise", he might change.

So, when you say "I have an addiction", I'm a bit concerned. A LW truism is that we don't have brains, we are brains. We aren't ghosts manning machines, we are machines.

I think it is some old "devil made me do it", stuff. The "other me" isn't real, so energy spent fighting him is wasted. Effort spent changing my behavior might bear fruit.

I'm reading a lot into phrasing, so if this isn't you, my bad. Just...my advice... be sure to own your stuff man. You either "have an addiction", or "screwed some randos without protection", and my experience suggests that thinking of it as the second one will help you more.

Joi Ito said several things that are unpleasant but are probably believed by most people, and so I am glad for the reminder.

JOI ITO: This may upset some of my students at MIT, but one of my concerns is that it’s been a predominately male gang of kids, mostly white, who are building the core computer science around AI, and they’re more comfortable talking to computers than to human beings. A lot of them feel that if they could just make that science-fiction, generalized AI, we wouldn’t have to worry about all the messy stuff like politics and society. They think machines will just figure it all out for us.

Yes, you would expect non-white, older, women who are less comfortable talking to computers to be better suited dealing with AI friendliness! Their life experience of structural oppression helps them formally encode morals!

ITO: [Temple Grandin] says that Mozart and Einstein and Tesla would all be considered autistic if they were alive today. [...] Even though you probably wouldn’t want Einstein as your kid, saying “OK, I just want a normal kid” is not gonna lead to maximum societal benefit.

I should probably get a good daily reminder most people would not, in fact, want their kid to be as smart, impactful and successful in life as Einstein, and prefer "normal", not-too-much-above-average kids.

This is also interesting: Barack Obama on Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Cars, and the Future of Humanity

Ignore all the stuff about provably friendly AI, because AFAIK its fairly stuck at the fundamental level of theoretical impossibility due to lob's theorem and its prob going to take a lot more than five years. Instead, work on cruder methods which have less chance of working but far more chance of actually being developed in time. Specifically, if Google are developing it in 5 years, then its probably going to be deepmind with DNNs and RL, so work on methods that can fit in with that approach.

20 years ago the very first crude neural nets were just getting started

The very first artificial neural networks were in the 1940s. Perceptrons 1958. Backprop 1975. That was over 40 years ago.

In 1992 Gerry Tesauro made a neural-network-based computer program that played world-class backgammon. That was 25 years ago.

What's about 20 years old is "deep learning", which really just means neural networks of a kind that was generally too expensive longer ago and that has become practical as a result of advances in hardware. (That's not quite fair. There's been plenty of progress in the design and training of these NNs, as a result of having fast enough hardware for them to be worth experimenting with.)

This is really awesome and could change the fate of lesswrong. I really think this will bring people back (at least more than any other easy to implement change.) I personally expect to spend more time here now, at least.

One thing to take note of is that lesswrong, by default, sorts by /new. As the volume of posts increases, it may be necessary to change the default sort to /hot or /top/?t=week. Especially if you want it to be presentable to newcomers or even old timers coming back to the site, you want them to see the best links first.

Aging. I would pay $20,000 a year to stop aging, more if I could figure out a way to increase my income.

This is ridiculous. Arguing that 234 stars is a tiny number and therefore it was aliens...

On the contrary, 234 is 234. If something has been found in 234 stars, it is a naturally occurring phenomenon.

This is exactly as ridiculous as ID in human biology. In fact it is the same thing, just applied to a different area.

Is there something similar to the Library of Scott Alexandria available for The Last Psychiatrist ? I just read "Amy Schumer offers you a look into your soul" and I really liked it but I don't have enough time to read all posts on the blog.

Because the IRS isn't popular and it's not a good move for a politician to speak in favor of the IRS and advocate increase of IRS funding.

What is the best source for this in your view?

The raw data is plentiful -- look at any standardized test scores (e.g. SAT) by race. For a full-blown argument in favor see e.g. this (I can't check the link at the moment, it might be that you need to go to the Wayback Machine to access it). For a more, um, mainstream discussion see Charles Murray's The Bell Curve. Wikipedia has more links you could pursue.

Is it your view that past slavery in America still has a large impact on African Americans in the present day U.S.?

My view is that history is important and that outcomes are path-dependent. Slavery and segregation are crucial parts of the history of American blacks.

open to learning

Your social circles might have a strong reaction to you coming to anything other than the approved conclusions...

Our biosphere's junk DNA

Junk DNA generally doesn't survive that long in evolutionary timescales because there's nothing that prevents mutations. It seems a bad information storage system.

I can't figure out how to edit the post description to include a summary paragraph. Help?

... Now the actual link is gone and I can't edit it back in! It's supposed to point here. Mods/admins, can you help? Here is a screenshot of what I see.

Worth noting:

• Rudimentary grain cultivation has been pushed back at least 23k years ago, well into the last glacial maximum and probably older: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0131422

• Cooked grain flour has been observed in Italy over 30k years ago, no information on the plants it came from.

Possibly indicating that the end of the last glaciation rather than new invention drove the more or less simultaneous large-scale agricultural transitions that occurred all across the old and new world ~10k years ago.

My favorite crazy unlikely idea about that is that the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum 50 megayears ago - a 200k year pulse of high CO2 levels and temperatures in which the CO2 was added over a timescale of less than 10k years (potentially much less) and had an isotopic composition consistent with having been liberated from biogenic deposits - could theoretically be explained by all the coal and oil deposits of Antarctica being burned followed by some positive feedbacks kicking in.

(Most land of Antarctica never having been investigated geologically in any detail at all due to being under kilometers of ice) (And Antarctica at that time being completely unglaciated and relatively temperate despite being where it is now by then) (And subsequent glaciation having scraped most of the surface clean of anything that was on it at the time)

We have an advantage in that we evolved in the tropics - you can take a tropical animal and keep it warm near the poles by wrapping it in clothes. It's much more difficult to take a cold-adapted polar animal and keep it alive in the tropics...

Hell yes this is a problem! Hours worked and hourly pay are very much correlated (it costs a lot to get someone to work that 80th or 120th hour in a week) and part time jobs often don't come with health benefits. Many workers have the opposite problem - the local retail store won't increase their hours and they never hire anyone full time ever because then they would have to provide health insurance.

Needing to have a job to support myself. But I suspect that is a problem that entrepreneurs will have great difficulty solving.

Sorry, can't see why situation III is so bad. I generally like the fact that I like spending time with my husband. On the other hand, I can almost imagine the 'and then zombie apocalypse happened and she had to bash his head in with the frying pan' end of story. What exactly did you have in mind?

Sex and love addiction, sexual compulsions, insecure attachment, risky sexual behaviour, HOCD, HIVOCD

What if you lost the love of your life due to a sexual impulse? What if you recognised sexual impulsivity as a pattern of your behaviour, deeply deeply ingrained into your being, and that you want to overcome it? That’s me.

I chose the name clarity because when I started to post, I was dipping in and out of psychoses and other really mentally unhealthy states. I would have moments of clarity, inspired by stuff I read in the sequences and other LessWrong posts and they would be like gulps of air saving me from drowning in really turbulent water. Now that I’m on some kind of boat, I don’t have to actively think about how to breath.

Until now, again.

I haven’t posted a lot recently. Mainly because I have been doing really, really well. My epic failures I dare so have given me a reputation here, and I talk about them freely. But, again, I have been doing well lately.

With an exception. Let me explain:

Since I already have a soldiery mindset due to some abuse from my childhood I thought I could grow by joining the French Foreign Legion. I had decided not to in the past due to risk of permanent injury but considered it again. I decided not to this time because I figured I wouldn’t be able to meet, court and enjoy time with someone, fall in love etc. – it’s unsuitable for married life (which correlates strongly with happiness), according to this link: https://www.cervens.net/legionbbs123/archive/index.php/t-53.html

Lately I am infatuated with someone. She seems to have the potential to meet my criteria for a good potential wife: communication skills, personality, responsibility, emotional honesty, attractiveness, matching sex drives, and value alignment. I just wish I had some good comebacks for when a person is out and about with an Asian girl and people making comments that make me feel self-conscious. She gives me a different feeling than that bewilderment kind of pleasant feeling I would get when my ex housemate I fell for used open her small mouth really really wide in amazement at something, haha. I get more of the nice chill longing of when I think of that cute little housemate listening too hip-hop.

I’ve been thinking about her strong feelings for veganism so I looked up some stuff about the case for veganism.

I decided to go milk free after watching this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UcN7SGGoCNI Wool free after watching watching just 243 of this video. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=siTvjWE2aVw

So another recent experience really stood out to me as a bad choice, by a similar rationale. I consider myself heteroflexible, or perhaps hetero but rather sexually fluid. On Sunday night I went to a gay sauna, tossed up a bit between that and a brothel, but decided I prefer the idea of guys this time. I’m a bit anxious and unattached to guys physically, except if its porn (which I had watched before going). So I went into a dark room with two guys I later saw were ugly AF and of course, like previous times, they give me tonnes or props and validation as a good looking guy. One guy said he was a cleaner when I asked what he does. The other had scaly crusty balls. I didn’t stop, unfortunately. And now maybe that sore was Herpes or Genital Warts and now if I got herpes which is incurable, then it might ostracise me from 4/5 of the beautiful women in the world (maybe just not the slutty ones who have that too, and may just break my heart in time anyway).

Worst case scenario, I just HIV. I mean it’s a dark room, anything can happen, a grazing, a bite, etc., a pin prick from some vexed crazy guy. No accountability. In the heat of the moment something could slip off too. And, I’m not familiar with much more than the superficial statistics around HIV transition and lore, like that oral sex HIV could but they doubt it often happens – but as a medical researcher I know the quality of research must be judged in a case by case basis and never take the overviews credibility for granted.

I reflected in the moment and realised I wasn't enjoying myself in the slightest. I think it’s some need for validation, or loneliness or risk taking or a compulsion. Fuck me autocorrect almost corrected to compulsive homosexuality. Got to fix that too, or I will be outed.

I think I have HOCD, or something accounted for by these accounts:

I find each of them helpful and hope to revisit them.

http://blogs.psychcentral.com/sex-addiction/2013/03/when-straight-men-are-addicted-to-gay-sex/ http://www.sexaddictionscounseling.com/can-a-straight-man-be-addicted-to-gay-sex/ http://www.brainphysics.com/yourenotgay.php https://www.google.com.au/amp/m.wikihow.com/Overcome-Sexual-Addiction%3famp=1?client=ms-android-optus-au

If I don't do it (regardless of where unless I find myself in a stable relationship with that person before or within a week) again by 2020 I'll give one my close friends $141 as a prize to encourage me. 1/1/2020. If not I’ll donate the same amount to a sex, love and or romance focussed impulse control related group.

Masturbating alone is hedonically better and it’s safer anyway, what the fuck is wrong with me?

I have an addiction but I have some much will power and a track record of discipline. This is the last frontier. Never again.

I am essentially imagining you to be similar to me about five years ago.

It sounds like you are not really excited about anything in your own life. You're probably more excited about far-future hypotheticals than about any project or prospect in your own immediate future. This is a problem because you are a primate who is psychologically deeply predisposed to be engaged with your environment and with other primates.

I used to have similar problems of motivation and engagement with reality. At some point I just sort of became exhausted with it all and started working on "insignificant" projects like writing a book, working on an app, and raising kids. It turns out that focusing on things that are fun and engaging to work on is better for my mental health than worrying about how badly I'm failing to live up to my imagined ideal of a perfectly rational agent living in a Big World.

If I find that I'm having to argue with myself that something is useful and I should do it, then I'm fighting my brain's deeply ingrained and fairly accurate Bullshit Detector Module. If I actually believe that a task is useful in the beliefs-as-constraints-for-anticipated-experience sense of "believe", then I'll just do it and not have any internal dialogue at all.

Hey Gleb. I really like your insights on general EA marketing and the way you help people build a local EA community in the Facebook EA Marketing group.

When I first opened this video I was pleasantly surprised that you made such a modern, attractive video about effective giving; exactly what I hoped InIn would do. Unfortunately, again, you put your Organisation, Intentional Insights (InIn), on the same level as Givewell, ACE, TLYCS and GWWC.

Isn't this exactly what the EA community had a problem with?

a) Posting to the forums and EA sites with a much higher frequency than others, creating the impression that InIn was a bigger deal in the EA community than it really was, and b) using the EA brand despite wanting to target laypeople using listicles and clickbait articles.

You updated from b and started to drop the label and go for advocating "effective giving" only, which was great and could no longer taint the EA brand. However, this new video again puts Intentional Insights on the same level as much more rigorously researched organisations with an entirely different target group and an already established good reputation.

This video could have been great if it left out your organisation entirely. Now I don't really want it to get shared. I hope I don't sound too harsh when I say that, from this video, I get the impression that InIn wants to leech off the reputation of the most popular EA organisations.

Furthermore, implementing stricter regulations on CO2 emissions could decrease the probability of extreme ecoterrorism and/or apocalyptic terrorism, since environmental degradation is a “trigger” for both.

Disregarding any discussion of legitimate climate concerns, isn't this a really bad decision? Isn't it better to be unblackmailable, to disincentivize blackmail.

In ten years what's the probability that a CRISPR-competent terrorist group could exterminate mankind? The optimal consequentialist anti-terrorist policies if this answer is >1% should horrify a deontologicalist.

Could chewing gum serve as a suitable replacement for you?

Nothing. I don't think facebook membership counts are a good measurement.

If we knew that AI will be created by Google, and that it will happen in next 5 years, what should we do?

I think we discussed this previously on LW. In general the argument isn't convincing in his case.

Gilead made 20$ billion with a drug that cures one virus. If a pharma company would think that his approach has a 10% of working to cure all viruses spending 100$ million or more would be very interesting for traditional pharma companies under the current incentive scheme.

Primates and eukaryotes would be good.

I think it's well within the realm of possibility it could happen a lot sooner than that. 20 years is a long time. 20 years ago the very first crude neural nets were just getting started. It was only the past 5 years that the research really took off. And the rate of progress is only going to increase with so much funding and interest.

I recall notable researchers like Hinton making predictions that "X will take 5 years" and it being accomplished within 5 months. Go is a good example. Even a year ago, I think many experts thought it would be beaten in 10 years, but not many thought it would be beaten by 2016. In 2010 machine vision was so primitive it was a joke at how far AI has to come:

In 2015 the best machine vision systems exceeded humans by a significant amount at object recognition.

Google recently announced a neural net chip that is 7 years ahead of Moore's law. Granted only in terms of power consumption, and it only runs already trained models. But nevertheless it is an example of the kind of sudden leap forward in ability. Before that Google started using farms of GPUs that are hundreds of times larger than what university researchers have access to.

That's just hardware though. I think the software is improving remarkably fast as well. We have tons of very smart people working on these algorithms. Tweaking them, improving them bit by bit, gaining intuition about how they work, and testing crazy ideas to make them better. If evolution can develop human brains by just some stupid random mutations, then surely this process can work much faster. It feels like every week there is some amazing new advancement made. Like recently, Google's synthetic gradient paper or hypernetworks.

I think one of the biggest things holding the field back is that it's all focused on squeezing small improvements out of well studied benchmarks like imagnet. Machine vision is very interesting of course. But at some point the improvements they are making don't generalize to other tasks. But that is starting to change, as I mentioned in my above comment. Deepmind is focusing on playing games like starcraft. This requires more focus on planning, recurrency, and reinforcement learning. There is more focus now on natural language processing, which also involves a lot of general intelligence features.

Lots of other problems with it too. Why is there any last-universal-common-ancestor in this scenario? You would want to drop a full ecosystem with millions of different organisms, each with different FEC shards of data. If you can deliver some bacteria to a virgin planet, you can deliver multiple kinds of bacteria, not just one. Yet, genetics finds that there's a LUCA (not that much of LUCA survives in current genomes).

What are the reasons?

For example, there were 4,636 murders committed by white people and 5,620 murders committed by black people in 2015 (source). On the per-capita basis this makes the by-white murder rate to be about 2.2 per 100,000 and the by-black murder rate to be about 16.2 per 100,000.

Boo politics discussion during the pre-election madness.

Depends on in what way you're having trouble with it. If you need to interact with lots of people in whatever context, I find that taking an initial tone of mildly self-deprecating humor helps smooth things out. If you're the first one to mock yourself, it releases any tension that might be in the air. But then, you should let go of the self-deprecation before it starts to suggest actual low self-confidence.

It can also be good to formulate a pithy explanation for why you don't have the skill, so that you can casually explain the situation without bogging people down. "There weren't any swimming pools near where I grew up." Something short and simple, even if it leaves out important biographical details.

In the vast majority of cases, people are too involved in their own business to even think about you. If I see an adult swimming really badly, I just assume that nobody ever taught them to swim, which is a completely value-neutral assessment, and then continue on with whatever I was thinking about. I recently took a handful of jiu-jitsu lessons and was obviously as useless as a newborn kitten, but I don't really need to offer any kind of expository explanation for this lack of skill, because "just started learning" is a fully self-contained explanation.

In the hypothetical scenario in which there was something to find in Antarctica in the first place, given the thorough scraping the continent has gotten for 20+ megayears by kilometers-deep glaciers you can't expect to find much at all. The areas not covered by glaciers are generally mountains which erode - their modern exposed surfaces would have been quite deep underground at the time.

The sorts of things you could actually expect to find would be more along the lines of missing coal seams, long rods of long-ago-oxidized steel poking vertically through multiple strata into areas that would have held petroleum deposits at the time, really deep coal seams turned to ash in situ by underground gasification, hydrothermal features that concentrate copper and silver ore capped by weird craters that obliterate where the highest concentrations would have been with a big pile of copper-depleted gravel nearby. Perhaps odd isotope ratios in a very narrow sediment band if nuclear reactions were ever explored. The ecological effects you would expect on the continent are kind of overshadowed in the ocean sediment record by the worldwide climate event that the PETM represents (6C temperature spike, deep ocean hypoxia, phytoplankton death and repopulation).

It's worth noting that there are probably particular clades that are predisposed to being smart. There's a fascinating book out by Dr. Herculano-Houzel ("The Human Advantage") detailing recent work over the last decade examining brain structure across the mammals. She and her group found something fascinating: neural scaling laws differ from clade to clade. Mammals in general have a neural scaling law that if you make a brain 10x as large, it only has 4x as many neurons as the neurons on average increase in volume (partially due to longer connecting fibers). Primates break this though - all primate neurons are about the same size, which is remarkably small, the same size as that of a mammal that's like 10 grams in mass. A large primate brain is MUCH more powerful than a generic mammal brain of the same mass. Their recent work since that book came out indicates that birds also break that scaling law and have marvelously efficient brains - all bird neurons are approximately the same size like the primates, but what's more that size is 6x as small as those of primates. It is an interesting question if this would also have applied to dinosaurs, their close relatives who nonetheless were not under crazy selective pressure for low weight.

The most striking problem with this paper is how easy all of the tests of viability they used are to game. There are a bunch of simple tests you can do to check for viability, and it's fairly common for non-viable tissue to produce decent-looking results on at least a couple, if you do enough. (A couple of weeks ago, I was reading a paper by Fahy which described the presence of this effect in tissue slices.)

It may be worth pointing out that they only cooled the hearts to -3 C, as well.

cat weight might be relevant, cat current age, cat body shape (fat/skinny), description of cat's response to catnip,

Thank you James Lamine, Vaniver, and Trike Apps.

I also wanted to quote something Vaniver has said, but that was unfortunately downvoted below the visibility threshold at the time:

I've pushed for doing things the right way, even if it takes longer, rather than quicker attempts that are less likely to work.

The development of Native Americans has been stunted and they simply exist within the controlled conditions imposed by the new civilization now. They aren't all dead, but they can't actually control their own destiny as a people. Native American reservations seem like exactly the sort of thing aliens might put us in. Very limited control over our own affairs in desolate parts of the universe with the addition of welfare payments to give us some sort of quality of life.

We create friendly AI that maximizes the happiness of humans. This AI figures that we would be happiest in our galaxy if we were alone.

His name is literally Dagon.

You misunderstood my point.

The Europeans did not "proceed with a controlled extermination of the population". Yet, what happened to that population?

You don't need to start with a deliberate decision to exterminate in order to end up with almost none of the original population. Sometimes you just need to not care much.

I'm surprised to find such rhetoric on this site. There is an image now popularized by certain political activists and ideologically-driven cartoons, which depict the colonization of the Americas as a mockery of the D-Day landing, with peaceful Natives standing on the shore and smiling, while gun-toting Europeans jump out of the ships and start shooting at them. That image is even more false than the racist depictions in the late 19th century glorifying the westward expansion of the USA while vilifying the natives.

The truth is much more complicated than that.

If you look at the big picture, there was no such conquest in America like the Mongol invasion. There wasn't even a concentrated "every newcomer versus every native" warfare. The diverse European nations fought among themselves a lot, the Natives also fought among themselves a lot, both before and after the arrival of the Europeans. Europeans allied themselves with the Natives at least as often as they fought against them. Even the history of the unquestionably ruthless conquistadors like Cortez didn't feature an army of Europeans set out to exterminate a specific ethnicity. He only had a few hundred Europeans with him, and had tens of thousands of Native allies. If you look at the whole history from the beginning, there was no concentrated military invasion with the intent to conquer a continent. Everything happened during a relatively long period of time. The settlements coexisted peacefully with the natives in multiple occasions, traded with each other, and when conflict developed between them it was no more different than any conflict at any other place on the planet. Conflict develops sooner or later, in the new world just as in the old world. Although there certainly were acts of injustice, the bigger picture is that there was no central "us vs them", not in any stronger form than how the European powers fought wars among themselves. The Natives had the disadvantage of the diseases as other commenters have already stated, but also of the smaller numbers, of the less advanced societal structures (the civilizations of the Old World needed a lot of time between living in tribes and developing forms of governments sufficient to lead nations of millions) and of inferior technology. The term out-competed is much more fitting than exterminated, which is a very biased and politically loaded word.

You cannot compare the colonization of the Americas to the scenario when a starfleet arrives to the planet and proceeds with a controlled extermination of the population.

designing technology is a special case of prediction

It's possible to be very good at prediction but still rather bad at design. Suppose you have a black box that does physics simulations with perfect accuracy. Then you can predict exactly what will happen if you build any given thing, by asking the black box. But it won't, of itself, give you ideas about what things to ask it about, or understanding of why it produces the results it does beyond "that's how the physics works out".

(To be good at design you do, I think, need to be pretty good at prediction.)

To the speed section, you might want to add examples of parallel learning. Parallelizing learning of robot arm manipulation, or parallel playing of Atari games, which are both (much) faster in terms of wallclock time and also can be more sample and resource efficient (A3C actually can be more sample-efficient than DQN with multiple independent agents, and it doesn't need to waste a great deal of RAM and computation on the experience replay).

This.

Also, schlep alert: this might be the densest regulatory thicket outside of healthcare, with huge variation in standards at (at least?) the state/province level. In my little environment of 13 million Ontarians, a recent arbitrary change of the teacher/child ratio allegedly drove a good many daycares out of business.

Also, parents are insane (source: am parent).

Seconding resuf's comments: both that this is a pretty good, professional looking video, but also that it's another instance of you seeming to listen to some of the exact-letter-of-the-request when people ask you to stop or do things differently, without understanding the underlying reasons why people are upset.

And that this is especially important if your goal is to be a public-facing outreach organization.

This is similar to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":

• First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

• Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

Sorry, I didn't mean that to be what you took from it.

I used to be fat. ( I still am, but not nearly to the same extent) Like, Jabba fat. My parents got doctors to say that I had an eating disorder, and maybe I did.

Othering my appetite never helped me. Like "I have an eating disorder" focused my energy on something (my disorder) that didn't have a mind. It couldn't get tired, or bored...it didn't exist. It's like "fighting" cancer.

But that doesn't mean that what worked was thinking "I'm a glutton".

When you say that "I am a dumb person", it isn't any closer to a thought you can act on. Kicking yourself when you are down feels good (or, at least, it did for me), it feels like "paying" for the behavior, but that's just thoughts. It doesn't actually change stuff.

I was shooting for more "I am a person who had unprotected sex with sketchy folks at place X". That feels, 'actionable', if you will, to me. Like, if the problem is a sex addiction, I dunno what the solution is. If the problem is being a dumb person, I dunno what the solution is. But if the problem is going to a place and doing stuff, there are a bunch of solutions.

1: Carry protection, everywhere. Put it in something that you carry everywhere (wallet, little thingy on your car keys, cell phone case, whatever). If you ever screw someone sketchy, make sure you take it out and use it. If they aren't willing, maybe that's a spur to reconsider?

2: Enlist the help of the dudes who run the place. Tell them if they see you there, you will give them ten thousand dollars, or however much money would sting. Ask them, as friends, to kick you out. Tell them you have leprosy. Whatever words you have to say to make sure you aren't welcome back there.

3: If this place is pay to play, then ration your funds. Each morning put exactly as much cash as you'll need that day in your wallet, and don't carry a credit card.

I don't know if any of these could work for you, but something similar might. A behavior that you don't want to repeat can always be made more inconvenient. That's what helped me out with eating too much. I hope that you can do a similar thing to get yourself a different habit.

So your current value can be considered a value and none else?

That objection is not logical :-P

It's using your brain mechanics seeking for a higher power

Sorry, don't have those. Maybe somewhere in dusty off-line storage, but certainly not activated.

Because is it really that bad to value logic over all else?

That strikes me as an expression devoid of meaning. Logic is a tool. Tools can be useful or not so much, but tools are not values unto themselves, they just make it easier to reach actual goals.

Do tell, how The One True Value of logic led you to post word salad on LW?

Thank you, I'm not looking for a religious conversion experience.

Neither I'm likely to take blind leaps of faith on the say-so of internet strangers. Logic isn't a "value", anyway.

I wonder how my coworkers will do...

EDIT (2016.10.21): In case anybody is interested, the results with my coworkers are...

• 6 variations of "I don't know" with one outright "You didn't give me any information about the shepherd... he could be any age"

• 4 numeric answers ranging from 5 to 35

• 1 got distracted and never answered the question

I've got a party to attend tomorrow, we'll see if they do better.

Interestingly, no notable historical group has combined both the genocidal and suicidal urges.

Actually such groups existed, for example the Khmer Rouge turned in on themselves after killing their enemies. Something similar happened with the movement lead by Zhang Xianzhong only to a much greater extent, i.e., they more-or-less depopulated the province of Sichuan, including killing themselves.

In 20 century most risks were created by superpowers. Should we include them in the list of potential agents?

Also it seems that some risks are non-agential, as they result from collective behaviors of a group of agents, like arms race, capitalism, resource depletion, overpopulation etc.

tl;dr Obama doesn't really now what he's talking about but tries to use talking points to make sense of the new project.

"Utilitarianism is a theory in normative ethics holding that the best moral action is the one that maximizes utility." -Wikipedia

The very next sentence starts with "Utility is defined in various ways..." It is entirely possible for there to be utility functions that treat sentient beings differently. John Stuart Mill may have phrased it as "the greatest good for the greatest number" but the clutch is in the word "good" which is left undefined. This is as opposed to, say, virtue ethics which doesn't care per se about the consequences of actions.

https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-get-Wi-Fi-for-free-at-a-hotel/answer/Yishan-Wong

Want free wifi when staying at an hotel? Ask for it. Of course!, Duh, seems so obvious now that I think about it.

Some possible argument against charities. Personally I think that it is normal to donate around 1 per cent of income in form of charity support.

1. Some can't survive on less or have other obligations that looks like charity (child support)
2. We would have less initiative to earn more
3. It would hurt our economy, as it is consumer driven. We must buy Iphones
4. I do many useful things which intended on helping other people, but I need pleasures to recreate my commitments, so I spend money on myself.
5. I pay taxes and it is like charity.
6. I know better how to spent money on my needs.
7. Human psychology is about summing different values in one brain, so I could spent only part of my energy on charity.
8. If I buy goods, my money goes to working people, so it is like charity for them. If I stop buying goods, they will be jobless and will need charity money for survive. So the more I give for charity, the more people need it.
9. If you overdonate, you could flip-flop and start to hate the thing. Especially if you find that your money was not spent effectively.
10. Donating 100 per cent will make you look crazy in views of some, and their will to donate diminish.
11. If you spent more on yourself, you could ask higher salary and as result earn more and donate more. Only a homeless and jobless person could donate 100 per cent.

I agree. I think it's very unlikely FAI could be produced from MIRI's very abstract approach. At least anytime soon.

There are some methods that may work on NN based approaches. For instance my idea for an AI that pretends to be human. In general, you can make AIs that do not have long-term goals, only short term ones. Or even AIs that don't have goals at all and just make predictions. E.g., predicting what a human would do. The point is to avoid making them agents that maximize values in the real world.

These ideas don't solve FAI on their own. But they do give a way of getting useful work out of even very powerful AIs. You could task them with coming up with FAI ideas. The AIs could write research papers, review papers, prove theorems, write and review code, etc.

I also think it's possible that RL isn't that dangerous. Reinforcement learners can't model death and don't care about self-preservation. They may try to hijack their own reward signal, but it's difficult to understand what they would do after that. E.g. if they just tweak their own RAM to have reward = +Inf, and then not do anything else. It may be harder to create a working paperclip maximizer than is commonly believed, even if we do get superintelligent AI.

That doesn't mean that there is nothing to do - if you don't know what FAI is, then you try to work out what it is.

Or possibly they are accurate measurements of the rates of Facebook use among these two groups. Maybe it's a good thing if people who are concerned about existential risk do serious things about it instead of participating in a Facebook group.

Get employed by Google.

There is 5 times more members in the group "Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT)" (9800) in Facebook than in the group "Existential risks" (1880). What we should conclude from it?

These six principles are true as far as they go, but I feel they're so weak so not to be very useful. I'd like to offer a more cynical view.

The article's goal is, more or less, to avoid being convinced of untrue things by motivated agents. This has a name: Defense Against the Dark Arts. And I feel like these six principles are about as effective in real life as taking the canonical DADA first year class and then going up against HPMOR Voldemort.

With today's information technology and globalization, we're all exposed to world-class Dark Arts practitioners. Not being vulnerable to Cialdini's principles might help defend you in an argument with your coworker. But it won't serve you well when doubting something you read in the news or in an FDA-endorsed study.

And whatever your coworker or your favorite blog was arguing probably derives from such a curated source to begin with. All arguments rest on factual beliefs - outside of math anyway - and most of us are very far from being able to verify the facts we believe. And your own prior beliefs need to be well supported, to avoid being rejected on the same basis.

Estimated cost of tax evasion per year to the Federal gov is 450B.

Can I ask you to examine the apparent assumption here - that the $450B is all loss? Have you considered the possibility that the people who avoided the tax put the money to good use? Or that the government would not put that money to good use if it took it?

A related concept is "inferential distance" - people can only move one step at a time from what they know.

Also typical mind fallacy.

The article distinguishes between "emotional empathy" ("feeling with") and "cognitive empathy" ("feeling for"), and it's only the former that it (cautiously) argues against. It argues that emotional empathy pushes you to follow the crowd urging you to burn the witches, not merely out of social propriety but through coming to share their fear and anger.

So I think the author's answer to "why help all those strangers?" (meaning, I take it, something like "with what motive?") is "cognitive empathy".

I'm not altogether convinced by either the terminology or the psychology, but at any rate the claim here is not that we should be discarding every form of empathy and turning ourselves into sociopaths.

You asked why is "the incidence of police encounters with blacks elevated". This is a direct answer.

If you want to know the reasons for different crime rates, this is going to get long and complicated.

I'm extremely interested in the last three of these especially the Fermi paradox one. Great essays.