I understand how you feel about this, but I think most of the veterans would think more of a person who showed them respect by getting feedback before putting their first post on the main page. Certainly I would.

...I wonder if it would be possible to implement the following feature: the first post for a new account automatically goes to the Discussion page for a few days before it posts to the main site. If that were a known feature,would you be bothered by it?

In regards to prediction: I just heard (starts at 9:20) some claims that no method of prediction for the economy is doing better than extremely crude models. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a cite for the "two young economists" who did the research.

However, I'm not sure that prediction is a matter of wisdom-- I think of wisdom as very general principles, and prediction seems to require highly specific knowledge.

It was obvious that real estate prices couldn't go up forever, especially as more and more people were speculating in real estate, but as far as I can tell, it was not at all obvious that such a large amount of the economy was entangled in real estate speculation that a real estate bust would have such large side effects.

Solutions to difficult technical problems became much more feasible after science was around for a while. I'm not dead certain we even have the beginnings for understanding complex social systems.

Part of the difficulty of prediction is that it's dependent on both science and tech which hasn't yet been discovered (our current world is shaped by computation having become easy while battery tech is still fairly recalcitrant) and on what people are doing-- and people are making guesses about what to do in a highly chaotic situation.

Taleb is interesting for working on how to live well when only modest amounts of prediction are feasible.

I'm inclined to agree with your proposal, but I wonder if there are supplementary community norms that, if made explicit, might make it easier to venture into confusing and polarizing topics without losing LW's usual level of accuracy and of signal to noise. (I assume fear of filling the blog with nonsense, and thereby losing some good readers/commenters, is much of what currently keeps e.g. political discussion off of LW.)

Maybe it would help to have heuristics such as "if you don't have anything clear and obviously correct to say, don't say anything at all", that could be reiterated and enforced when tricky topics come up.

I'm very sympathetic to your comment. I feel that there's an emerging community of people interested in answering these questions at places like Less Wrong and GiveWell but that the discussion is very much in its infancy. The questions that you raise are fundamentally very difficult but one can still hope to make some progress on them.

I'll say that I find the line of thinking in Nick Bostrom's Astronomical Waste article to be a compelling justification for existential risk reduction in principle. But I'm still left with the extremely difficult question of determining what the most relevant existential risks are and what we can hope to do about them.

My own experience up until now has been that it's better to take some tangible action in real time rather than equivocating. See my Missed opportunities for doing well by doing good posting.

Clumsy humans have caused plenty of disasters, too. Matching human dexterity with human-quality hardware is not such a high bar.

For example, we cannot get a robot to walk and run in a robust way (BigDog is a start but it will be a while before its doing martial arts), we can't create a face recognition algorithm that matches human performance. We can't even make a robotic arm that can dynamically stabilise an arbitrary weight (i.e. pick up a general object reliably).

Two of these (walking/running, and stabilizing weights with a robotic arm) are at least partially hardware limitations, though. Human limbs can move in a much broader variety of ways, and provide a lot more data back through the sense of touch than robot limbs do. With comparable hardware, I think a narrow AI could probably do about as well as humans do.

Huh, I got the opposite impression - that the timeline for brain emulation was less uncertain than the timeline for AI.

It is less uncertain, but be careful to distinguish between uploads and emulation. Emulation just takes being able to scan at a sufficient level to get something brain-like; uploading requires getting sufficient resolution to get actual personalities and the like. It's intuitively probable that you can get dangerous neuromorphic AI via emulation before you can get a fully emulated previously in-the-flesh human specific simulation that would count as an 'upload'. But I don't have a strong technical argument for that proposition. Perhaps the Whole Brain Emulation Roadmap (PDF) would have more to say.

I really like this post. It touches on two topics that I am very interested in:

How society shapes our values (domesticates us)

and

What should we value (what is the meaning of life?)

I find the majority of discussions extremely narrow, focusing on details while rarely attempting to provide perspective. Like doing science without a theory, just performing lots of specific experiments without context or purpose.

1 Why are things the way they are and why do we value the things we value? A social and psychological focus, Less Wrong touches on these issues but appears focused on specific psychological studies rather than any overall perspective (I suspect this would start to touch on politics and so would not be discussed). I think our understanding of the system we are a part of significantly shapes our sense of meaning and purpose and, as a result, strongly influences our society.

I would go so far as to suggest we are psychologically incapable of pursuing goals that are inconsistent with our understanding of how the universe functions (sorry Clippy), i.e. if we are selfish gene darwinists we will value winning and reproductive success. If we have a Confucian belief that the universe is a conflict between order and chaos we will pursue social stability and tradition. I have my own take on this for those who are interested (How we obtain our values, the meaning of life)

2 What problems do we want to solve? It seems much easier to find problems to solve than goals to obtain. A recent post about Charity mentioned GiveWell. This organisation at least evaluates whether progress is made but as far as I am aware there is no economics of suffering no utilitarian (or otherwise) analysis of the relative significance of different problems. Is a destructive AI worse than global warming, or cancer or child abuse or obesity or terrorism. Is there a rational means to evaluate this for a given utility function? Has anyone tried? (this is an area I'm looking into so any links would be greatly appreciated)

3 What can we do? Within instrumental rationality and related fields there are a lot of discussions of actions to achieve improvements in capability. Likewise for charity, lots of good causes. However there seems to be relatively little discussion of what is likely to be achieved as a result of the action, as if any progress is justification enough to focus on it. For example, what will be the difference in quality of life if I pursue a maximally healthy lifestyle vs a typical no exercise slacker life. In particular, do I want to die of a heart attack or cancer and alzheimers (which given my family history are the two ways I'm likely to go). If we had a realistic assessment of return on investment, as well as how psychologically likely we are to achieve things, we could focus our actions rationally.

I suggest that if we know how things work, what the problems are and what we can do about them, then we have a pretty good start on the meaning of life. I am frequently frustrated by the lack of perspective on these issues, we seem culturally conditioned to focus on action and specific theoretical points rather than trying to get a handle on it all. Of course that might be more fun, and that might be a sensible utility function. But for my own peace of mind I'd like to check there isn't an alternative.

I like your post because it makes me feel bad.

Thanks, I think? You're not explicit about why it makes you feel bad, and I'm curious. (Rather, while you address it in the next sentence, I'm not sure I understand what kind of "feeling bad" you mean.)

I think for most people deep down, community is more important than ideology (or indeed achieving anything)

I think you've hit the nail on the head here.

but a community where you cannot be yourself is one in which you always feel uncomfortable

This is why it bothers me to see it happen. I'm an empathetic sort, and seeing my friend try to fit in like a square peg in a round pegboard makes me cringe. (Well, that, and I'm one of the people who finds the behavior obnoxious when applied to the wrong context.)

an intellectually direct way of communicating

I think this is an interesting way to phrase it, although I can't put my finger on why. What would you call the opposite? I'm on the lookout for terms to use for these which don't imply value on either side, since the only criteria for value I see are utility and effectiveness, which are context-dependent.

With the disclaimer that I'm no expert and quite possibly wrong about some of this, here goes.

Is it correct, to say that the entropy prior is a consequence of creating an internally consistent formalisation of the aesthetic heuristic of preferring simpler structures to complex ones?

No. Or, at least, that's not the conscious motivation for the maximum entropy principle (MAXENT). As I see it, the justification for MAXENT is that entropy measures the "uncertainty" the prior represents, and we should choose the prior that represents greatest uncertainty, because that means assuming the least possible additional information about the problem.

Now, it does sometimes happen that MAXENT tells you to pick a prior with what I'd guess you think of as "simpler structure". Suppose you're hiding in your fist a 6-sided die I know nothing about, and you ask me to give you my probability distribution for which side'll come up when you roll it. As I know nothing about the die, I have no basis for imposing additional constraints on the problem, so the only operative constraint is that P(1) + P(2) + P(3) + P(4) + P(5) + P(6) = 1; given just that constraint, MAXENT says I should assign probability 1/6 to each side.

In that particular case, MAXENT gives a nice, smooth, intuitively pleasing result. But if we impose a new constraint, e.g. that the expected value of the die roll is 4.5 (instead of the 3.5 implied by the uniform distribution), MAXENT says the appropriate probability distribution is {0.054, 0.079, 0.114, 0.165, 0.240, 0.348} for sides 1 to 6 respectively (from here), which doesn't look especially simple to me. So for all but the most basic problems, I expect MAXENT doesn't conform to the "simpler structures" heuristic.

There is probably some definition of "simple" or "complex" that would make your heuristic equivalent to MAXENT, but I doubt it'd correspond to how we normally think of simplicity/complexity.