The web game greatly suffers from the network effect. There's just very little chance you'll get >=3 people to log on simultaneously, and of course, because of this people will give up on trying, worsening the effect.

Maybe we can designate, say, 12:00 AM and PM, UTC, as hours at which people should log on? This will make it easier to reach critical mass.

To be fair, the DRAM bit flipping thing doesn't work on ECC RAM, and any half-decent server (especially if you run an AI on it) should have ECC RAM.

But the main idea remains yes : even a program proven to be secure can be defeated by attacking one of the assumptions made (such as the hardware being 100% reliable, which it rarely is) in the proof. Proving a program to be secure down from applying Schrödinger's equation on the quarks and electrons the computer is made of is way beyond our current abilities, and will remain so for a very long time.

I've written a post on my blog covering some aspects of AGI and FAI.

It probably has nothing new for most people here, but could still be interesting.

I'll be happy for feedback - in particular, I can't remember if my analogy with flight is something I came up with or heard here long ago. Will be happy to hear if it's novel, and if it's any good.

How many hardware engineers does it take to develop an artificial general intelligence?

The least convenient world is one where there's no traveler and the doctor debates whether to harvest organs from another villager. I figure that if it's okay to kill the traveler for organs, then it should be okay to kill a villager. Similarly, if it's against general principle to kill a villager for organs, then it shouldn't be okay to kill the traveler. Perhaps someone can come up with a clever argument why the life of a villager is worth intrinsically more than the life of the traveler, but let's keep things simple for now.

So, let us suppose that N sick people is the threshold wherein it is okay to kill a traveler, and hence a villager. If it's good to do once, it's good to do anytime this situation comes up. So we have ourselves a society where whenever the doctor needs is in dire need of organs for N patients, a villager is sacrificed. If we scale it up to the national level we should have ourselves a proper system wherein each month a certain number of people are chosen (perhaps by lottery) for sacrifice and their organs are harvested. I should imagine an epidemic of obesity and alcoholism as people seek to make their organs undesirable and so avoid being sacrificed.

I find that a fair number of morality puzzles of this sort exhibit interesting behavior under scaling.

Your own celibacy would have to massively benefit others - for instance, if you were going to have 2 children, your celibacy would have to allow your sibling to have 4 extra children.

So, let me see if I understand this right - you're contending that human behaviour is constrained to behaviour that best benefits the genes? That is to say, that human goals are really sneakily disguised genetic goals?

Then what about people who take a vow of celibacy, who deliberately choose not to have descendants, and therefore subvert any possible genetic goal? How is that possible?

But means and standard deviations are the results of modeling a gaussian distribution, and if the model fit is too bad, these metrics simply don't apply for this dataset.

?

Means and standard deviations are general properties one can compute for any statistical distribution which doesn't have pathologically fat tails. (Granted, it would've been conceptually cleaner for Yvain to present the mean & SD of log donations, but there's nothing stopping us from using his mean & SD to estimate the parameters of e.g. a log-normal distribution instead of a normal distribution.)

Birth Month Jan: 109, 7.3% Feb: 90, 6.0% Mar: 123, 8.2% Apr: 126, 8.4% Jun: 107, 7.1% .Jul: 109, 7.3% Aug: 120, 8.0% Sep: 94, 6.3% Oct: 111, 7.4% Nov: 102, 6.8% Dec: 106, 7.1%

[Despite my hope of something turning up here, these results don't deviate from chance]

It would appear 0% of lesswrongers were born in May. Which is strange, because I seem to remember being born then, and also taking the survey.

Ouch, I completely forgot about this (or maybe I never knew about it?), and that's a talk I wanted to hear...

Is it possible perhaps to get it in text form?

It's worth mentioning that EFF has resumed accepting Bitcoin donations a while ago.

https://supporters.eff.org/donate