Has Rossi done it? Will he be Emperor after all?

Cold fusion reactor independently verified, the arxiv pdf is here.

Computed volumetric and gravimetric energy densities [in the 116-hour experiment] were found to be far above those of any known chemical source. Even by the most conservative assumptions as to the errors in the measurements, the result is still one order of magnitude greater than conventional energy sources.

(...)

The results obtained indicate that energy was produced in decidedly higher quantities than what may be gained from any conventional source.

More articles, pro, contra.

What's next, a Rational (tm) Work Out sequence? A Rational (tm) Dating sequence? A Rational (tm) Build Your Own PC sequence?

There are plenty of important topics for which a reputed and sourced guide by a trusted authority with a community stamp of approval would be helpful, but the most efficient way to achieve that would be for regulars to seek out established and reputed guides online (since rational in this context translates simply to 'good'/'efficient'), then link to them in some "guide repository thread".

That being said, when proven high quality content providers on LW choose to write about anything, people will want to read it. Do you count yourself among that reference class?

A non-rationality sequence about financial planning, tailored to US citizens (with topics such as "401K matching") and a few paragraphs about "salary negotiation" and the like, written by a newcomer with unknown credentials in the field, labeled as "Rational" - the prior for "such a sequence is likely to increase the signal/noise ratio" goes lower and lower. Especially in the presence of easily accessible guides such as e.g. "Money 101" on CNNMoney.

There's something worse than no information, which is unreliable information from uncertain sources. Knowing that you know nothing versus falsely believing that you know something, and all that.

It sounds like you're pointing out that people often overestimate the difficulty of passing the Turing Test. Is that what you mean to say?

Yes. I think the Turing Test is useful, but that there are too many quite distinct tests mapping to "Turing Test", and details matter. College students as volunteers will lead to markedly different results than a randomly iid drawn human from anywhere on Earth.

As is the case so often, many disagreements I've seen boil down to (usually unrecognized) definitional squabbles. Without clarification, the statement "A Turing Test is a reasonable test for intelligence" just isn't well defined enough. Which Turing Test? Reasonable in terms of optimality, in terms of feasability, or in what way? Intelligence in some LW "optimizing power above certain threshold" sense (if so, what threshold?), or some other notion?

You thankfully narrowed it down to the specific Turing version I mentioned, but in truth I don't have only one concept of intelligence I find useful, in the sense of that I can see various concepts of intelligence being useful in different contexts. I pay no special homage to "intelligence1" over "intelligence2". Concerning this discussion:

I think that human-level intelligence - and the Turing Test is invariably centered on humans as the benchmark - shouldn't be defined by educated gifted people, but by an average. An "average human" Turing Test being passed is surely interesting, not least from a historical perspective. However, it's not clear whether such an algorithm would be powerful enough to foom, or to do that many theoretically interesting tasks. Many less privileged humans can't do that many interesting tasks better than machines, apart from recognizing tanks and cats on pictures.

So should we focus on a Turing Test tuned to an AGI on par with fooling the best researchers into believing it to be a fellow AI researcher? Maybe, although if we had a "winner", we'd probably know just by looking out the window, before we even set up the test (or we'd know by the AI looking in ...).

All considered, I'd focus on a Turing Test which can fool average humans in the civilized world, which seems to be the lowest Turing Test level at which such a chatbot would have a transformative influence on social human interactions.

for various reasons

Pray tell. Or just tell, no praying required, that would be telling. Just prying. Required, I mean.

What age do you think it would be appropriate to start rationality training, and how would you go about it?

About 3. How old is your son again? What are you, a bad father? No worries, it may not yet be too late, if you wake him up and start now. Just ingrain the rationality training as an aspect of the way you interact with him, I go for the Socratic Method. Don't set apart "rationality training" time (or are you planning to be irrational unless rationality is scheduled?!). Helping your kid develop mental models of others is my favorite. "Why is that person doing that, what does he want to achieve with that? What else could he do? Is what he doing the best way of reaching his goals? Yea, well done, now give the ice cream man his money, he's looking at us weirdly."

(Also keep in mind the "kids do as you do, not as you say" paradigm when interacting with others in the presence of your kid. Could lead to some strange conversations with the janitor, but aren't they always. Strange, I mean.)

Edit: Tone for comedic purposes, here's a special message to the downvoter(Edit:)s.

One oft-neglected aspect of a Turing Test is the other guy - the human whom you need to distinguish from the machine. The usual tricks of the trade include e.g. asking a question such as "If you could pose a question to a turing test candidate, what would it be?", which supposedly confuses a non-AGI, but not a hew-mon.

However, have you ever asked your gramps such a question? A barely literate goatherder in Pakistan? And in writing, no less.

The same applies when extending the Turing Test to other problem domains. The goal isn't to tell apart Pandora from her box, but a plain ol' average "Is this thing on now, dear?" homo barely sapiens.

Have you ever heard a clever or interesting argument from the other side - No!

YouTube source (44s)

(Let me just add to what TheOtherKawoomba already said)

This is an infinity, and therefore I have an infinity of beliefs. Is that wrong?

If that were so, then "I believe the sky is blue" would mean "I have an infinity of beliefs about the sky, namely that it is blue, so it also is "not blue+1/nth the distance to the next color" (then vary the n).

A student writing down "x>2" would have stated an infinity of beliefs about the answer. Does that seem like a sensible definition of belief? Say I picked one out of your infinite beliefs about the car's weight. Where is it located in your brain? Which synapses encode it? It would have to be the same ones also encoding an infinity of other beliefs about the car's weight. Does that make sense? I plead the Chewbacca defense.

There's another problem if you consider all the implications as if they were your beliefs, even if you've not explicitly followed the implication. Propositions in math simply follow from axioms, i.e. are implications of some basic beliefs. Yet for some of those their truth value is famously not yet known. If you held all beliefs which were logically implied by stated beliefs to also be your beliefs just the same, you'd face a conundrum - you'd be uncertain about such famous - yet unknown - propositions. Yet that uncertainty isn't in the territory - either the proposition is implied by the axioms or it isn't. Yet you couldn't build the "beliefs implied by this belief". So would you just follow "trivial" implications such as in your example? You'd still need to evaluate them, and it is that simple fact of having to evaluate whether an implication actually is one, or even if 99 is actually smaller than 100 - however trivial it seems - that is the basis for the new (derived) belief, the reason you cannot automatically follow an infinity of implications simultaneously. Since you cannot evaluate an infinity of numbers, you cannot hold an infinity of beliefs.

We may grok that scenario in decidedly different ways:

Maybe it would serve the wife and child best if I were successful in my resistance to some degree, to have a better bargaining situation? Maybe if I gave myself up, the regime would lose any incentive to keep the hostages alive? At that point we'd just be navigating the intricacies of such added details. Better to stick with the intent of the actions: Personally, I'd take the course of action most likely to preserve the wife and child's well-being, but then I probably wouldn't have grown into a role which exposes family to the regime as high-value bargaining chips.

Initially, my first instinct was to try and find the biggest font I could to say 'no'. After actually stopping to think about it for a few minutes... I don't know. It would probably have to be enough suffering to the point where it would destabilize society, but I haven't come to any conclusions. Yet.

That sounds a bit like muddling the hypothetical, along the lines of "well, if I don't let my family be tortured to death, all those strangers dying would destabilize society, which would also cause my loved ones harm".

No. Consider the death of those strangers to have no discernible impact whatsoever on your loved ones, and to keep the numbers lower, let's compare "x strangers tortured to death" versus "wife and child tortured to death". Solve for x. You wouldn't need to watch the deeds in both cases (although feel free to say what would change if you'd need to watch when choosing against your family), it would be a button choice scenario.

The difference between myself and many others on LW is that not only would I unabashedly decide in favor of my loved ones over an arbitrary amount of strangers (whose fate wouldn't impact us), I do not find any fault with that choice, i.e. it is an accurate reflection of my prioritized values.

I'd still like my self-image to be accurate.

As the saying goes, "if the hill will not come to Skeeve, Skeeve will go to the hill". There's a better alternative to trying to rewrite your values to suit your self-image. Which is constructing an honest self-image to reflect your values.

Yes, I am literally begging you to attain sentience.

Gonk. Gonk.