Comment author: turchin 11 October 2016 06:21:53AM 1 point [-]

And how she will use this relation to make safer AI?

Comment author: James_Miller 11 October 2016 02:33:02PM 3 points [-]

She could read "The Basic AI Drives" to him at night.

Comment author: turchin 10 October 2016 02:28:19PM 3 points [-]

Good point, but my question was about what we can do to raise chances that it will be friendly AI.

Comment author: James_Miller 11 October 2016 04:10:40AM 1 point [-]

Get a job at Google or seek to influence the people developing the AI. If, say, you were a beautiful woman you could, probably successfully, start a relationship with one of Google's AI developers.

Comment author: turchin 10 October 2016 11:13:53AM 5 points [-]

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

Comment author: James_Miller 10 October 2016 01:59:55PM 10 points [-]

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.

Comment author: CellBioGuy 04 October 2016 10:00:49PM *  11 points [-]

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?

Comment author: James_Miller 04 October 2016 11:30:04PM 4 points [-]

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

Comment author: James_Miller 26 September 2016 05:30:42PM 3 points [-]

My understanding of the medical value of body scanners comes from watching the TV show House. Given that, wouldn't having lots and lots of these scanners massively increase medical costs by creating many false positives?

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 20 September 2016 05:35:57PM 2 points [-]

Doesn't that sound like my second paragraph?

But there is an assumption here, that childhood IQ predicts adult IQ. In fact, it isn't very good at age 8. The SMPY age of 12 is better, though by no means perfect. When I say "good" or "better" I mean, of course, stability at the center, which might not predict stability at the tails. When SMPY finds that age 12 tests predict life outcomes, they are testing this directly. But what we really want to know is whether the SAT score at age 12 adds information to the low ceiling SAT score at age 17. I think that the SMPY results are strong enough to guarantee that, but I haven't checked.

Comment author: James_Miller 20 September 2016 06:49:44PM 2 points [-]

Doesn't that sound like my second paragraph?

Yes, my error.

But what we really want to know is whether the SAT score at age 12 adds information to the low ceiling SAT score at age 17.

For testing error/randomness reasons you would think so even independent of the low ceiling problem.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 19 September 2016 06:34:47PM *  6 points [-]

First of all, IQ tests aren't designed for high IQ, so there's a lot of noise there and this would mainly be noise, if he correctly reported the results, which he doesn't.

Second, there are some careful studies of high IQ (SMPY etc) by taking the well designed SAT test, which doesn't have a very high ceiling for adults and giving it to children below the age of 13. By giving the test to representative samples, they can well characterize the threshold for the top 3%. Using self-selected samples, they think that they can characterize up to 1/10,000. In any event, within the 3% they find increasing SAT score predicts increasing probability of accomplishments of all kinds, in direct contradiction of these claims.

Comment author: James_Miller 20 September 2016 04:44:14PM 2 points [-]

IQ tests aren't designed for high IQ,

But they might work on children with high IQs because you can compare their performance to older children. A genius 8-year-old does as well as a typical 14-year old, whereas a super-genius 8-year-old does as well as a 16 year old.

In response to Seven Apocalypses
Comment author: James_Miller 20 September 2016 03:52:21AM *  4 points [-]

"A Disneyland with no children" apocalypse where optimization competition eliminates any pleasure we get from life.

A hell apocalypse where a large numbers of sentient lifeforms are condemned to very long term suffering possibly in a computer simulation.

Comment author: gwern 19 September 2016 02:40:47AM 9 points [-]

My reading of the behavioral genetics literature is that high intelligence being driven by rare autism variants is looking unlikely. DeFries-Fulker extremes analyses like "Thinking positively: The genetics of high intelligence", Shakeshaft et al 2015 aren't consistent with the (relatively) high end being due to rare variants (but are consistent with the low end being due to rare variants) and current attempts to find rare variants enriched in the very high IQ with large effect sizes have turned up nothing: "A genome-wide analysis of putative functional and exonic variation associated with extremely high intelligence", Spain et al 2015. There is also an autism heritability observed in the GCTAs/LD score regression using only common SNPs (>=1% population frequency), along with a positive autism/intelligence genetic correlation, which undermines that idea.

My speculation at this point is that Spearman's law of diminishing returns is - based on all the genetic correlations with intelligence which have piled up and the current trends in brain imaging studies finding brain volume/thickness & global connectivity & white-matter integrity & connection speed to be the best predictors of intelligence - is due to intelligence reflecting a bottleneck between all the regions of the brain communicating to solve problems and that as the global communication becomes closer to optimal due to better health & development, individual specialized brain regions start to become the bottleneck to higher performance and shrinking the g factor.

Comment author: James_Miller 19 September 2016 04:30:35AM 6 points [-]

My reading of the behavioral genetics literature is that high intelligence being driven by rare autism variants is looking unlikely.

I haven't looked at this literature, but people with autism and very high IQs might be able to fake being neurotypical. As Steve Hsu told me, we don't know if von Neumann had a normal personality because he certainly had the intelligence to fake being normal if he felt this suited his interests.

Comment author: buybuydandavis 18 September 2016 10:01:04PM 1 point [-]

Can't remember where I saw it, but I think Adams is trying to transition his career to "trusted expert".

He's willing to take the financial hit to make the transition.

Comment author: James_Miller 18 September 2016 11:41:27PM 1 point [-]

Yes

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