Weird works for me, and I actually associate positive value with weirdness. But of course your mileage may vary. Any term that works to indicate distance from an identity label viscerally to one's System 1 will do, as Gram_Stone pointed out.

Still, my question remains - is there real data out there to support the contention that P(elite career|IQ) has a local max and then decreases for higher IQ?

No. As I point out in my comment there, the evidence is strongly the other way: TIP/SMPY. To the extent that measures like wealth hit diminishing returns or even fall (eg Zagorsky), it has as much to do with personal choices & values as ability: the physicist who could make money on Wall Street but chooses to continue studying particles, the person who chooses to become an influential but poor writer, etc. (There are many coins of the realm, and greenbacks are but one.)

No, I think Adams assigns a higher probability to Trump winning than most people do. I think Adams accepted this theory on Trump would cost him money.

not the right place to start

Who says that's where I'm starting? :)

I already have my short-term physical supplies, including water, food, camping gear, and AA-battery-powerable handheld ham radio. I also have a highly-portable solar panel capable of keeping my phone, and the offline copy of Wikipedia I keep on its SD Card, functioning regardless of the power grid; and I have enough battery-backup stuff at home to run my laptop long enough to copy the latest Wikipedia dump (and whatever emergency-survival ebooks I've collected by then) onto that SD card.

I agree with your first paragraph, but Adams has described how his Trump writing has decimated his ability to earn money as a public speaker because people who hire such speakers want to avoid controversy. Adams appearing on the podcast of an obscure college professor was an act of altruism.

Unless you are wealthy being NEET is generally not a good thing IMO because you will feel crappy about being low status, and you will lack resources. Not sure what your definition of doing nothing is, but reasonable ones include eating at nice restaurants, expensive video games, gym memberships, courting mates, concerts, clothes, etc... doing nothing costs a fortune.

Sam Harris' TED talk on AGI existential risk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZhGkKFH1x0&feature=youtu.be

ETA: It's been taken down, probably so TED can upload it on their own channel. Here's the audio in the meantime: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B5xcnhOBS2UhZXpyaW9YR3hHU1k

I don't see much value in having a recent copy of Wikipedia or Project Gutenberg on my computer. In both cases the availability of the information is secured by other parties. It's more valuable to make sure that I store information that's not protected by other people

Relax when trying to remember something instead of making an effort.

You are repeatedly telling me I've said things I actually haven't, telling me I think things I actually don't, telling me I don't know things I actually do, etc., etc. You have not yet succeeded in communicating any new insights to me; we may of course disagree about why that is.

Bored now. Bye.

Time to rebuild a library

My 5 terabyte harddrive went poof this morning, and silly me hadn't bought data-recovery insurance. Fortunately, I still have other copies of all my important data, and it'll just take a while to download everything else I'd been collecting.

Which brings up the question: What info do you feel it's important to have offline copies of, gathered from the whole gosh-dang internet? A recent copy of Wikipedia and the Project Gutenberg DVD are the obvious starting places... which other info do you think pays the rent of its storage space?

Unfortunately it might also be an area where epistemic and instrumental rationality clash. In fact, most of the world does not have freedom of speech in the same way the US does - if one advocated HBD in, say, Germany, could one be thrown in prison in the same way people are imprisoned for saying 'seig heil'?

There is a difference between advocating something and merely believing it. But I'm mostly skeptical of the people that put "strongly disagree" on that question. As opposed to "disagree" or "neutral". The fact that it's so correlated with political ideology is more evidence that it's just political bias.

If I lived 200 years ago, I wouldn't go around advocating atheism. But I might have believed it privately, and I would be more skeptical of the openmindedness of people that say they "strongly oppose the evils of atheism".

The study I am thinking of did account for this.

I really don't know. When I researched this it seems like the effects are pretty hard to estimate. Different models give very different results. A recentish study using more modern climate models shows that the effects would be catastrophic and last for multiple years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#2007_study_on_global_nuclear_war

the products of a nuclear explosion have very short half-lives - the worst would be over within an hour. Not only do we not have enough bombs to contaminate the world, but ground zero would be habitable again after a few months.

Those first few months are the problem though. The crops and livestock die or absorb the radioactive isotopes. The people too if they don't happen to have a fallout shelter handy.

Also the nuclear bombs themselves aren't the only concern. You would have to deal with all the waste left in the cities they destroy. Nuclear power plants would melt down with no one to contain them. Vast amounts of chemical waste would leak from abandoned chemical plants and waste storage. Oil would leak and pollute the oceans with no cleanup.

I don't know how to estimate the damage of this. But it should be at least a bad or worse than major industrial accidents of the past, like Bhopal, deepwater horizon, or Chernobyl. But all happening at once and with no one left to organize any kind of response.

while I think a nuclear war between allmost all countries is unlikly, its still a lot more likly then 90% of humanity killed by environmental or political collapse.

I think you are underestimating the secondary effects. I imagine a complete destruction of the global economy. There isn't enough food to go around and lots of countries are starving. This would lead to more war and chaos.

A few thousand years ago the civilizations of the mediterranean all collapsed almost at once. It's now speculated to be the result of a serious drought and bad weather. The states that couldn't feed their population got overthrown, and their hungry populations went to war with neighboring countries for food, until nothing of the old orders remained. It was a serious setback for humanity.

If that happened in the modern world, technological civilization might end and never be restarted. The modern world depends on hugely complex infrastructure and tons of different industries and inputs. If we lose that, it would be very difficult to rebuild. We've already extracted most of the easy to get to minerals and fossil fuels. Much farmland has been degraded from overuse and depends on inputs of fertilizer, irrigation systems, and of course modern machinery which would be difficult to replace.

As a person who has read 100% of the Sequences, I would also prefer if there would exist a shorter version. But, as far as I know, it doesn't exist yet. Someone would have to make it. Someone other than Eliezer, because this is not at the top of his priority list.

Would I be losing anything if I didn't need to be convinced, I just want to know the pointers?

You would be probably more likely to forget them. In general, longer text requires you to spend more time focusing on the idea. If someone would convert the Sequences into a PowerPoint presentation of 20 pages, a week later you probably wouldn't remember anything.

I realize how what I wrote here conflicts with my desire to have a shorter version of the Sequences, and... I don't know. Perhaps the shorter version should use other techniques for easier memorization, e.g. funny pictures.

First, you should probably read the documents we refer to as the Sequences before you try to "correct" us.

Second,

A lot of things have you confused the territory being the map.

For example, that you exist, is a map.

That there is a being there, creature of some kind, it's a map.

That you have a brain.

Every. Single. Word. Is A Map.

We all know this.

What is the territory?

Become silent of all thoughts, without using thoughts to manipulate or lie, neither using thoughts not to manipulate or lie.

You seem to be referring to meditative states. A lot of us do this, for various reasons. It really has little to do with rationality or arationality. Quieting down and dissociating from one's thoughts certainly helps with clear thinking.

You think you are in control, thus the flow of life doesn't flow effortlessly. :)

We mostly don't believe in free will.

But it's fine to let go, and be present in this moment, where there, you are, the territory, which is arational.

There will be no reason for reasoning or understanding, it is arational.

Just because you're in a meditative state of thoughtlessness doesn't mean that you're doing anything beyond engaging with yet another set of maps. You're just engaging with them nonverbally and intuitively.

It is always the case, whether you think about it or not. I can welcome you in to see for yourself, there's a lot of beauty to be had.

Again, lots of us meditate, and we're all about beauty. Not sure where you're getting this perspective.

Please don't be dogmatic. Try and see for yourself the possible truth which is right before your eyes, the possible truth that you do not exist, that you, and the possibility that everything else is a fiction. The fiction of the mind.

But you will still be to function, to be able to go to AI conferences and talk about the latest improvements, or talk decision theory or whatever else you have going on in your life. Because the belief that you will lose these things, by becoming more aware, is a trick of the ego. It's highly improbable.

So go ahead, and see for yourself. Likely though you need to work on yourself, there's nothing which is more important than the machine which does not come with an instruction manual. That is you. What you think is you. What I mean is the practical you.

I see buried in here a sales pitch for engaging in some kind of meditative or mindfulness practice. I admit that the foundational documents of Less Wrong don't explicitly advocate for taking up meditation, but it's a popular community topic.

It looks like the analysis didn't suppress responses that gave something other than 50 as an answer to the question about a coin flip. It probably should.

Being around here has made me think that I know everything interesting about the world and suppressed my excitement and joy from many minor things I could do. I also feel like my sense of wonder diminished. As I write this, I am a little unhappy, and in a period of depression, but I had similar feelings, if less intense, even before this period.

I was wondering whether you have any advice on how to restore this; or even better, how to "forget" as much rationality and transhumanism as possible (if not actually forgetting, then at least "to think and feel as I did before I read the Sequences")?

Is there a thread for the calibration question analysis? I have some questions and comments about that, more than this.

This might make some sense if DNNs were being used to further our understanding of theoretical physics, but afaik they're not. They're being used to classify cat pics. SInce when do you use polynomial Hamiltonians to recognise cats?

These properties mean that neural networks do not need to approximate an infinitude of possible mathematical functions but only a tiny subset of the simplest ones

No finite DNN can approximate sin(x) over the entire real numbers, unless you cheat by having a sin(x) activation function.

I'd blame the MIT press release organ for being clickbait, but the paper isn't much better. It's almost entirely flash with very little substance. This is not to say there's no math - the math just doesn't much apply to the real world. For example, the idea that deep neural networks work well because they recreate the hierarchical generative process for the data is a common misconception.

And then from this starting point you want to start speculating?

Thanks for the analysis!

The median amount donated to bugs rights charities is listed as $157.5. That implies that half of survey respondents donated >$150 to bugs rights charities. Obviously this is kind of implausible. I assume the real number who donated to bugs rights charities is 4 people, since the donations sum to $1083.0 and the average amount donated is $270.75. This also goes for the other donation-related questions--just something to keep in mind.

Academic Publishing without Journals

By setting up the journals with a bitcoin type blockchain, you could reward reviewers, and citations. SciCred !

just a stub to think about

https://hack.ether.camp/#/idea/academic-publishing-without-journals

It's not as if LW has a problem of too much material these days.

I wrote a thing that turned out to be too long for a comment: The Doomsday Argument is even Worse than Thought

“Why does anything exist at all?”

I lose no sleep over this. I think people who do are just confused by language.

I'd say that if you examine your concept of "why", you find it presupposes existence.

Tried listening.

3 minutes: most scientists are wrong.

doubt the rest is worth it.

You can also point out the contradiction that they don't seem to be in a hurry to take the obvious first step by killing themselves. Proving that they see at least one human life as a net positive. Then talk about everyone else they don't want to kill or prevent being born.

Be aware, though, that this isn't truth-seeking. It's debate for the fun of it.

https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/greatfilter.html http://hanson.gmu.edu/hardstep.pdf https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Great_Filter ?

Aw come on guys. Negative karma for literally pointing out a news site? What does that even mean?

I feel it's important to note that he was talking about writing styles, not philosophy.

think like machines rather than humans

01101000 01100001 01101000 01100001 01101000 01100001 01101000 01100001

I suppose this might be better place to ask than trying to resurrect a previous thread:

What kind of statistics can Signal offer on prior cohorts? E.g. percentage with jobs, percentage with jobs in data science field, percentage with incomes over $100k, median income of graduates, mean income of graduates, mean income of employed graduates, etc.? And how do the different cohorts compare? (Those are just examples; I don't necessarily expect to get those exact answers, but it would be good to have some data and have it be presented in a manner that is at least partially resistant to cherry picking/massaging, etc.) Basically, what sort of evidence E does Signal have to offer, such that I should update towards it being effective, given both E, and "E has been selected by Signal, and Signal has an interest in choosing E to be as flattering rather than as informative as possible" are true?

Also, the last I heard, there was a deposit requirement. What's the refund policy on that?

You would, at the very least, be in violation of several acts regarding approval of GMOs: https://www.loc.gov/law/help/restrictions-on-gmos/usa.php https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_the_release_of_genetically_modified_organisms#United_States Specifically, you'd be violating FDA requirements by releasing '“new animal drugs” (NADs)' without approval. Depending on whether mosquitoes are considered plant pests, it looks like you'd also be violating Department of Agriculture laws. I assume you'd probably also be violating a number of EPA laws but didn't see anything specifically about that.

For you I suggest something that also advances your career so that you can devote more time to the project. If the answer to this isn't clear I suggest talking to your professors asking what they suggest. Another approach is to become a literal superhero. Assemble a group of scientists who on their own could eradicate mosquitoes and just do it. Don't wait for official approval.

I thought I remembered seeing it linked some years back from a friend's blog. The friend in question has moved his blog a couple of times, though, and after looking through all the atheism-related stuff in its current incarnation I didn't find the link. It's also always possible, of course, that I'm misremembering.

I thought that to most LW'ers the weak version of "Calories in, Calories out" was uncontroversial.

EY likes to say that "mass in, mass out" works even better for predicting changes in weight.

More like 1/100000, and then when they thaw you you'll be brain damaged and have to live in an institution forever. They don't really know how to do this yet. How far along are they now? Have they frozen and thawed a mouse yet, and did it behave the same as before? I won't let them freeze me earlier than that, because there's essentially no chance I'll be even able to walk and talk, let alone be someone present me would recognize as 'me'.

This is more something you would do for a laugh than something that is intended as a serious recruitment strategy. There is a disclaimer at the top of the post.

Cryo has bad signalling value - signals weird + selfish. It's hard to overcome this but I am open to suggestions.

We're consequentialists here, so I get all the credit for it even if it wasn't much effort, right?

^^

You have noticed things happening that don't match your model of how you think the world (and nutrition in particular) should work. Rather than defy the data, maybe you could come up with a different model that better explains the observations?

What are "allowable" variables and what makes one "allowable"?

I'm aiming for something like "once you know income (and other allowable variables) then race should not affect the decision beyond that".

That's the same thing: if S (say, race) does not provide any useful information after controlling for X (say, income) then your classifier is going to "naturally" ignore it. If it doesn't, there is still useful information in S even after you took X into account.

This is all basic statistics, I still don't understand why there's a need to make certain variables (like race) special.

True if gene drive is like antibiotics, but is it? Every day we wait 1,200 people die of malaria because of delay, a price worth paying if, but only if, you get some significant benefit from waiting. Another big "unknown unknown" is what other viruses mosquitoes will put in us if we don't quickly eliminate them.

Yes, this does reduce the benefit of getting Trump to support mosquito eradication.

I think there's a fundamental goal conflict between "fairness" and precision. If the socially-unpopular feature is in fact predictive, then you either explicitly want a less-predictive algorithm, or you end up using other features that correlate with S strongly enough that you might as well just use S.

If you want to ensure a given distribution of S independent of classification, then include that in your prediction goals: have your cost function include a homogeneity penalty. Not that you're now pretty seriously tipping the scales against what you previously thought your classifier was predicting. Better and simpler to design and test the classifier in a straightforward way, but don't use it as the sole decision criteria.

Redlining (or more generally, deciding who gets credit) is a great example for this. If you want accurate risk assessment, you must take into account data (income, savings, industry/job stability, other kinds of debt, etc.) that correlates with ethnic averages. The problem is not that the risk classifiers are wrong, the problem is that correct risk assessments lead to unpleasant loan distributions. And the sane solution is to explicitly subsidize the risks you want to encourage for social reasons, not to lie about the risk by throwing away data.

Medical benefits of dental floss unproven

The federal government has recommended flossing since 1979, first in a surgeon general's report and later in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans issued every five years. The guidelines must be based on scientific evidence, under the law.

Last year, the Associated Press asked the departments of Health and Human Services and Agriculture for their evidence, and followed up with written requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

When the federal government issued its latest dietary guidelines this year, the flossing recommendation had been removed, without notice. In a letter to the AP, the government acknowledged the effectiveness of flossing had never been researched, as required.

The AP looked at the most rigorous research conducted over the past decade, focusing on 25 studies that generally compared the use of a toothbrush with the combination of toothbrushes and floss. The findings? The evidence for flossing is "weak, very unreliable," of "very low" quality, and carries "a moderate to large potential for bias."

Last week I had a discussion with a person who believed that because a science fiction film said that dolphins use 30% of their brain, dolphins indeed use 30% of their brain and therefore more than humans with their 10%.

It felt a bit painful but it seem like the epistemic hygine of some people in our society is very poor. Various producers of TV shows might have more responsibility for not making facts up than they believe they have.

There are other ways to prevent global warming. Plan C is creating artificial nuclear winter by volcanic explossion or starting large scale forest fires with nukes.

Goes straight into the "Shit LW people say" bucket.

If the code is available in a form that enables people to build it, that seems likely to reduce sales considerably whatever the licence. (In any case, I don't think CC-ness of the licence is the relevant feature.)

If the source code is available then nagging, begging and crippling are easily removed. (Unless the crippling is a matter of omission and the uncrippling bits are paid for -- but that's just one variety of freemium.)

Your first suggestion, a good plugin API, seems like the way to go. moridinamael, what advantages do you see to open source over a plugin API?

Other possible options:

• Divide the app into two parts. One is open-source and is the part that would be extended by plugins. One is closed-source and has most of the secret sauce in it. Someone buying the app gets the binaries for both parts and the source for the extensible part. Of course this is only any good if you can find a way to split the app up that doesn't kill its efficiency or break its architecture.
  • The open-source extensible part might be minimal (just enough to support plugins -- this ends up looking a lot like the "plugin API" option, I think) or maximal (so that the only closed-source part is an "engine" that does some clever thing you are hoping other people can't duplicate) or in between.
• Have part of the app run not on the user's computer or mobile device but on servers under your control. Charge for access to those servers.
• Just make it open source and do something entirely different to satisfy your capitalist rent-seeking exploitative desires :-).

From the International Craniofacial Institute's web page on cleft palate.

What they say:

Statistics reassure us that having a child with a cleft does not mean you’ll have other children with the same condition. In fact, your chances only increase by 2 to 5 percent compared to couples with no cleft-affected children.

What they mean:

The chances that your next child will have cleft palate increases from 0.15% to about 4%. Your odds ratio multiplier is 25.

Let me give some feedback about your writing style, which I find consistently cryptic. You tend to describe your thoughts starting in the middle and giving the context later, or skipping it altogether. E.g. the fist sentence reads

I find myself more and more interested in how the concept of "systematized winning" can be applied to a large group of people who have one thing in common, and that not even time, but - in my own very personal case - ...

Until this point, a context like "biology research" etc. does not appear anywhere, and a "large group of people who have one thing in common" could be all people who like ice cream. It is of course possible to decipher what you mean, but by writing in reverse order you make it unnecessarily hard.

~~~

Possibly, a part of the problems you are describing could be solved by storing all the raw data that is collected during research, not just conclusions. In some cases, the amount of data might pose technological problems, but humanity's capacity to store information cheaply is increasing very quickly. So we can just let the future generations analyse the data by themselves, if they care to do so.

Potential sentience had got to count, or it would be ok to kill sleeping peopje

Marriage use to be a " public binding precommitment" before no-fault divorce.

Ratiionalists stil have too much trust in scientific studies, especially psychological studies.

Rationalists don't even lift bro.

Many do.

http://thefutureprimaeval.net/why-we-even-lift/

Stay safe, friend.

Why all these downvotes? Downvoters, you realise you are the reason people continue to leave LessWrong and you're killing this place.

I considered this at the time, but I also decided not to dig at it. Z is still around, but I imagine Z would protest when I suggest that the summary of the punching incident was a throw-away line of "I'm too crazy for treatment".

If the inquirer took the bait, they would end up arguing about a specific incident that may or may not have gone quite like that and may or may not have had motivations that actually make in the bigger picture. (i.e. ongoing arguments, several-directional fights) Setting that down, and not delving into it, was me maintaining composure and actually having the rest of the conversation.

If I were to focus on the suicidal ideation I would have missed every other problem that came up. And Z would have shut down, Z was not interested in talking about solving the suicidal ideation so I deliberately left it untouched. Lobbing an accusation about suicidal ideation is not a great idea for getting people to open up about their problems. As it is - I got a lot of information out of Z by not idling on suicide or the punching incident or other incidents.

"A few weeks ago I punched a housemate in the face ten times, breaking her nose"

At the time I considered the value of digging into this and decided against it. I suspect there was more to the story, but figured the details would come out if they were relevant. Given that it was the one example of hurting people, I don't think it was an ongoing problem. To shake up that specific event wouldn't have led to all the other possible problems.

(more to come later)

The conversation being six months in the past is irrelevant - this is the only piece of evidence we have, so there's no reason to change the conclusion.

You're asking people who, in their majority, aren't neurophysiologists, and so cannot possibly do these things. We do not even know what set of recognized mental conditions this person has.

OTOH, I would probably say that priority #1 would be to find someone - possibly the girlfriend - to keep track of Zebra's condition, since spacing out sounds very dangerous.

The conversation is more than 6 months old. How did you draw that conclusion? Did you have a set of possible problems? Did you narrow them down? Did you consider anything along the way? How did you rule them out?

Yeah, totally hear you about the file drawer effect, which is why I found two separate citations besides the Center for Policing Equity, which I cited in the piece - this one, and this one. One is a poll, and the other is a government statistical analysis on traffic stops that includes race information. Neither of these is something to which the file drawer effect (publication bias) would apply.

An article based on rationality-informed strategies of probabilistic thinking and de-anchoring to deal with police racial profiling. Note that the data on racial profiling is corrected for the higher rate of crimes committed by black people. This is a very by-the-numbers piece.

I slightly edited the opening formula to reflect the fact that one can no longer posts to Main. Also added the instruction to unflag the submission options.

Eugine strikes again - this is really creating a great deal of noise and reversing any indications of salience for posts. Previously, he mainly did only one downvote, now he's doing ten at a time, if my -20 karma that appeared in the last hour for the two comments I made is anything to judge by. He seems to also not only be targeting posts he dislikes, but also specific people he dislikes, such as Elo and me. Makes it really hard to judge the quality of my posts, as who knows who actually downvotes them. Frustrating.

Is the Absent-minded Driver an example of a single-player decision problem whose optimal policy is stochastic? Isn't the optimal policy to condition your decision on an unbiased coin?

I ask because it seems like it might make a good intuitive example, as opposed to the POMDP in the OP. But I'm not sure who your intended audience is.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but your comment here gives me the impression that you are asking an awfully general question, but actually want the answer to a very concrete question: "Should I study X at a top uni abroad, any uni at home, or not at all, given that I'm good enough to choose myself but will have to make debts to study". This would be a much easier question for us to answer, especially if you tell us what X is, whether you'd want to continue with a postgrad, and maybe what you goals are for the time after your studies. It's perfectly ok not to know all of these yet, but some info would help.

Does there exist a paper version of Yudkowsky's book "Rationality: From AI to Zombies"? I only found a Kindle version but I would like to give it as a present to someone who is more likely to read a dead-tree version.

There's a lot of self-selection, and the classes and extracurricular resources are therefore allowed to be geared towards smarter students, and that's nice. You'll also get more opportunities to learn about current research in your chosen field, which improves your grad school chances.

A lot of the value is if you plan to get a job straight out of college, going to a top n school will have a name brand advantage (not without reason).

However, controlling for smartness and research experience, I think that where you did your undergrad doesn't matter all that much for grad school.

I'm currently applying for jobs while finishing up my Master's degree, so I'm not technically in the group you are asking, but can hopefully still say something useful.

Background: I've been studying Computer Science with a natural language focus, both at a relatively unknown university in Eastern Germany and at University of Edinburgh. The latter is definitely top n in the field, although it does not have the same nimbus and does not offer as much of regular 1-on-1 teaching time with profs like Oxford and Cambridge do (you can get it if you ask, but it is not a default teaching mode). I can't compare to the US because I haven't been there yet.

Content comparison: I find that the courses at both universities is similar both according to content and quality. The focus is different of course, and workload is much higher in Edinburgh, probably because the degree program is only 1 year instead of 1.5 or 2 for roughly the same content. In both places I could get meetings with professors if I wanted to, although in Edinburgh there is additionally a lot of staff who checks up on us and reminds us about organisational things. Among students, there is a bigger share of really bright and enthusiastic people, and that is quite noticeable. The biggest difference here is that there is direct contact with the people who made major inventions and contributions to the field and are on top of things I actually care about. This is most important in a very narrow range of topics I want to go further. For the basics, it doesn't really matter who explains them. I currently also get very good dissertation supervision, but I cannot compare that to my old university because I wrote my dissertation there during an internship and largely with supervision from the company's research department.

Job applications: I feel like being in Edinburgh gives a significant boost to job applications. In Germany, profs were willing to write recommendations on request, but did not offer interesting company contacts on their own. There were partnerships between university and bigger companies, but this felt very cheesy and ineffective. Around here, I do get very cool company introductions and interviewers sometimes happen to have worked or studied here as well, which gives a good basis for conversation and might give a bonus, even if they try to avoid it consciously.

Conclusion: UK tuition fees at top-n universities (around £7k-25k/year) are low compared to US fees, so they are easier to justify and I think mine are worth it with regards to my future job. I would not say the same for knowledge gain per money, since German living costs are much lower and it does not have tuition fees. I could have done a two-year master in Germany for less money and could have had more relaxed studies with the same gain. I however wanted to have shorter, intensive studies, so the UK suited my preferences. Be aware however that Brexit causes trouble for British research, so this evaluation might totally change in 1 or 2 years.

I would endorse what John Maxwell has said but would be interested to hear more details.

After graduating, why would you need to be based in Kagoshima? Most postdocs travel around the world a lot in order to be with the leading experts and x-risk research is no different.

Have you taken a look at the content on MIRI's Agent Foundations forum?

Have you considered running a MIRIx workshop to practice AI safety research?

Have you considered applying to visit AI safety researchers at MIRI or FHI? That would help you to figure out where your interests and theirs overlap, and to consider how you might contribute. If you're not eligible to visit for some reason, that might imply that you're further from being useful than you thought.

Good luck!

I have spent 9 years writing texts about x-risks prevention. I spent a lot of money on it and lost a lot of business opportunities. I have been cheated all the time, in business, relationship and even science field. I have been humiliated in sexual field many times. I thought about suicide even I consider it impossible because of quantum immortality.

I thought to stop doing it many times. Nobody reads my texts and even if some one is reading it has zero influence on total probability of extinction.

But... I just return to my computer and continue to work on the texts in mornings, and try to have parties in evening. In fact solving complex intellectual problems provides me with consistent many hours pleasure. Relationship thing do the opposite.

OP wants me to help stop global catastrophic risks.

It's illegal to hurt the people who created the global catastrophic risks, so count me out. I don't work for free. I'd rather enjoy a nice life.

"Why, no," said Professor Quirrell. "I stopped trying to be a hero, and went off to do something else I found more pleasant."

"What? " said Hermione without thinking at all. "That's horrible! "

What they said about the U(-)=0 problem. But the way I think about it resolves more contradictions, more easily, IMO.

• Utility is no more than a mathematical artifact, do not phrase questions in terms of utility

Utility functions are equivalent under positive affine transforms. This is a huge clue that thinking about utility will lead to major intuition problems. Instead, use quantities that are not ambiguous. You're gonna have to get rid of the a and b in au(x)+b, so you're going to need three states of the world, always, before you're allowed to use intuition. You can combine them in different ways, but I like

r = [U(x)-U(z)] / [U(y)-U(z)]

Mere differences in utility are not pinned down, because of scale. Ratios of differences in utility are great, though. It's 2.67x as good to go from nothing to chocolate as to go from nothing to vanilla. 0 and 3 and 8, or 4 and 7 and 12, those are just there for computational convenience in some circumstances and can be ignored.

This is a real and important difficulty, but it isn't what the paper is about -- they assume one can always readily tell whether people are being harmed.

You're more likely to run into people if you are jogging around the office like your boss. Causing even one incident involving hot coffee would yield lots of negative utility. You'd go from "That fun, goofy guy who jogs around the office" to "That reckless, inconsiderate asshat who spilled scalding coffee on Dave".

I always try to park far away in large parking lots (burns calories and less chance of door dings) and sometimes jog to the front door. Maybe I get mood boost?

One other consideration is sweating. You're more likely to sweat if you jog any distance vs. just walking. Often not a big deal depending on your attire and agenda.

Later, the guy who cut it for me didn't want my money

specifically on this example; I would suggest that if you were only getting a few really short cuts it's almost not worth the effort to charge.

For all of 5 minutes of work; factors like; accounting and working out a price and finding change and anything else involved in the transaction is not worth the effort involved. I have had similar experiences getting pieces of wood and glass cut on the fly, and people are generous enough to not charge. Was the person explicit about your gender? (even if they were, they could have been explicit about another person's "great hat" or, "young lad", any excuse to do someone a favour could be possible)

I've written a summary of 'result-blind peer review' with all the references I could find: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholarly_peer_review#Result-blind_peer_review Anyone know of more?

For most problems like this, it's worth solving once or twice at small scale before you look for general solutions. How many parties have you thrown (or guided the food procurement for), and what have you found that makes for better estimation of needs?

Have you talked with caterers or other experts in such estimation? It would be interesting to learn how they decide when to risk too little vs too much, and the clever tricks they have to control consumption (which will make the estimates more accurate). For instance, having lots of cheap starches and limited meat, along with explicit or subtle rationing, can lead to high waste measured by weight or calories, but fairly low waste measured by cost.

I have some software I am thinking about packaging up and releasing as open-source, but I'd like to gauge how interesting it is to people other than me.

The software is a highly useable implementation of arithmetic encoding. AE completely handles the problem of encoding, so in order to build a custom compressor for some data set, all you have to do is supply a probability model for the data type(s) you are compressing (I call this "BYOM" - Bring Your Own Model).

One of the key technical difficulties of data compression is that you need to keep the encoder and decoder in exact sync, or the whole procedure goes entirely off the rails. This problem is especially acute for the use case of AE, where you are potentially changing the model in response to every event. My software makes it very easy to guarantee that the sender/receiver are in sync, and at the same time it reduces the amount of code you have to write (basically you don't write a separate encoder and decoder, you just write one class that is used for both, depending on the configuration).

Some interesting news: the first autonomous soft tissue surgery, sounds like a notable breakthrough in machine vision was involved for distinguishing all the messy, fleshy internals of the (porcine) patient.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a20718/first-autonomous-soft-tissue-surgery/