But it might be that some of these banks had a blind spot there.

Every model has blind spots. That's the nature of models. If you price risk by a specific model, people take less risk in your model and often take more risk that's not part of the model.

It's a systematic issue and if you want to get deeper into it read Antifragile or The Black Swan.

If you launch rockets, than it might be okay to assume that your risk model is good enough to optimize for it. If you are on the other hand talking about risk from UFAI there's no reason to assume that you understand the problem well enough to model it and there a good chance that you take less risk in your model but increase the chance of the Black Swan event that kills you.

It is my impression that there are at least some examples in which this is done in practice: as far as I know, in rocket design you do in fact calculate those for most components, including software used on the on-board computers. This information is used to e.g. decide on the amount of duplication of electronics components in critical systems of the rocket. I am, however, not an expert on rockets.

Of course it's possible to do risk calculations. At the same time that doesn't mean that you are safe. Long-Term Capital Management exploded despite having low "verified upper bound" risk in the sense you speak about risk.

Incidentally, I am also of the opinion that having any kind of calculation would work better than making a non-zero extinction risk taboo, or not subject to negotiation (which seems to be the case currently).

Calculation of risk often leads to people taking more risk because they believe that the models of the risk they have accurately describe the risk.

1 for all relevant possibilities, and an inner paint touching only part of that outer paint.

I don't get what the inner and outer paint stands for.

Thanks to Gunnar for setting up the poll and also to all who answered.

Registering a trademark doesn't cost that much. You can simply apply to register a trademark for your product for your usage and see whether the government will grant you a trademark for that usage.

Not looking for exactly this, but somewhat related.

Would you consider computer viruses as limited agents trying to appear as identical (superficially) as the unaltered system as possible?

Also note that the actual change between the original system and the altered system can be arbitrarily small though the change in behavior can be extremely large. Consider for example the Ken Thompson hack or the recent single gate security attack.

I have a question for LWers who are non-native English speakers.

I am working on a software system for linguistically sophisticated analysis of English text. At the core of the system is a sentence parser. Unlike most other research in NLP, a central goal of my work is to develop linguistic knowledge and then build that knowledge into the parser. For example, my system knows that the verb ask connects strongly to subjectized infinitive phrases ("I asked him to take out the trash"), unlike most other verbs.

The system also has a nice parse visualization tool, which shows the grammatical structure of an input sentence. You can check it out here.

This work began as a research project and I am trying to figure out a way to commercialize it. One of my ideas is to use the system as a tool for helping students to learn English. Students could submit confusing sentences to the system and observe the parse tree, allowing them to understand the grammatical structure. They could also submit their own written sentences to the system, as a way of checking their grammar. Teachers of ESL students might also ask them to submit their class papers to the parser to check for obvious mistakes (apparently there are many people who can communicate well in spoken English but whose written English is full of mistakes).

I would also write up a series of articles about subtle points of English grammar, such as phrasal verbs, argument structure, verb tense, and so on. Students could then read the articles and experiment with using the relevant grammar patterns in the parser.

Does this sound like a plausible product that people would want to use? Are there products already on the market that do something similar? (I am aware of Grammarly, but it doesn't appear to show parse trees).

Great! I'm very happy that you polished this and made it publicly available.

The ankiweb page for plugin: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1788670778

Maybe I'm too inexperienced an Anki user but I didn't know about Anki plugins/add-ons. At first it wasn't even clear whether this was for the web or the desktop version. For all being as surprised as I was: To install harcisis' add-on click on Tools (in the desktop version) and enter this code: 1788670778 (which corresponds to the ID in the URL). Then you can import via File -> Crowdanki...

I'm not clear about the workflow how to contribute changes back. It looks like I have to export to disk locally into a locally checked out git clone of the original Anki (and probably also having imported from there?), commit locally and submit a pull request to get it merged in. Correct??

That's what I thought you meant. But Christianity has existed for less than 4% of humanity's time, and what we ordinarily call "the ancient world" started 3000-6000 years earlier.