Overview for DanArmak - Less Wrong

DanArmak on [LINK] Prizes and open source for drug research (proposed, and some politics)

2013-05-17T20:23:48.818012+00:00

If rules were relaxed or costs were lower somewhere else, then wouldn't for-profit drug development move there as well? Whatever the funding model, the actual research and laws that govern it are the same.

DanArmak on Education control?

2013-05-17T20:15:27.700745+00:00

I fear somebody is going to complain that disruptive behavior is what we need to teach children so they can innovate and question authority. Open to discussion, but if it worked that way, we'd be overwhelmed with innovators and independent thinkers today.

Uh... We are overwhelmed with innovators and thinkers. This is the most innovative age in technology, science and the arts in history!

I don't know if childhood "disruptive behavior" is correlated or anti-correlated or independent of innovation in adulthood. But your argument doesn't seem to work.

DanArmak on Education control?

2013-05-17T20:12:48.454297+00:00

Education is legally mandatory and if you don't go to a normal school you have to have some alternate acceptable form of education (e.g. homeschooling).

Worse than that, homeschooling is almost entirely exclusive to the Anglosphere. It is illegal in almost all other countries.

DanArmak on The flawed Turing test: language, understanding, and partial p-zombies

2013-05-18T02:21:25.214894+10:00

if you ask them to do any planning, for instance, they'll come up with designs that sound good but fail: they parrot back other people's plans with minimal modifications

Guessing the teacher's password describes a common human behavior. An AI that behaves the same way not just passes the Turing test, it might really be said to be as intelligent as a relatively stupid human.

Also, there's a huge quantitative difference between a student repeating what the teacher said, and an AI repeating at will everything written in all digitized books and Internet sites it has read. An AI that is a little less intelligent than a human in some areas will still be vastly more intelligent than any human in most other areas. Even if humans remain much better at certain tasks, it may not truly matter.

DanArmak on Using Evolution for Marriage or Sex

2013-05-17T17:55:13.865846+10:00

The biggest biological danger of casual sex was (to women) unwanted pregnancy. It's now almost gone thanks to modern contraception.

STDs certainly exist, but they too have become rarer. Syphilis used to cause a lot of mortality and disability, and was mostly (not entirely) defeated by antibiotics. And with modern health care and social safety nets, if you do get sick, your outlook is much better than even a century ago.

DanArmak on How to calibrate your political beliefs

2013-05-14T05:34:12.936592+10:00

I expect it would be hard to obtain good data about the actual results of implemented politics. (Not policies, which is a much more general term; just those policies adopted through a highly politicized process, like national laws or budget changes.)

This is for two reasons. First, major policy changes mostly happen when power changes hands, and a lot of changes happen together; their effects are hard to disentangle from one another.

Second, because most policies are attempts to influence human behavior. And people's reaction to political policies is itself politicized. People will react differently based on which party introduced a policy, or what other opinions it is publicly associated with.

This is just my prediction; I haven't checked it and I have no data to present in support.

DanArmak on How to calibrate your political beliefs

2013-05-14T05:29:44.307566+10:00

Some people want to be politicians. They do best by joining an existing party or movement and adopting all their political opinions except for maybe one or two issues they personally care about.

Other people want to affect policy on a certain issue, and they decide to do so via politics. But once they enter politics, to get things done and based on the personal contacts they develop, I think most of them (not all) tend to affiliate with a party and again adopt their other opinions.

And yet other people (the majority, I think) try to affect policy without becoming politicians. Most changes in effective policy happen because a new product becomes available on the market, because someone expands or curtails a service, because someone changes prices by R&D or by contributing money to an existing concern. And these people can remain free of politics if they want to.

DanArmak on Post ridiculous munchkin ideas!

2013-05-13T08:00:51.646787+10:00

You don't find that surnames in Hebrew just get mispronounced a ton, in general?

Foreign ones do, certainly. That's why I'd be looking for one that's familiar to speakers of both Hebrew and English.

DanArmak on Post ridiculous munchkin ideas!

2013-05-13T03:05:31.104348+10:00

I voted 50%, which is correct +/- 10%.

I should note that I could save money by moving back in with my parents and not paying rent, municipal taxes, food, etc., but it's socially expected that I won't do this.

DanArmak on Post ridiculous munchkin ideas!

2013-05-12T07:47:36.099109+10:00

That rather assumes you can live on 25% of your income.

For me 25% of my income would be far below the poverty line and the legal minimum wage. I couldn't live on that even if I moved back in with my parents.

Are most people here really so rich that they can follow this advice and take it in stride?