the running 11 year average of global temperature has not flattened since 1990, but continued upward at almost the same pace with only a moderate decrease in slope since the outlier 1998 year. The 11 years 2000-2010 global mean temperature is significantly higher than the 10 years 1990-2000.
That is not "flat since the 90s". The only way to get "flat since the 90s" is to compare 1998 to various more recent years noting that it was nearly as hot as 2005 and 2010 etc. and slightly hotter than other years in the 2000s, as if 1 year ...
Don't worry, I just did reread it, and it is just as I remembered. A lot of applause lights for the crowd that believes that the current state of climate science is driven by funding pressure from the US government DoE. His "argument" is based almost exclusively on the tone of popular texts, and anecdotal evidence that Joe Romm was an asshole and pushing bad policy at DoE during the Clinton administration. Considerations of what happened during the 8 years of a GWB administration that was actively hostile to the people JoeR favored are ignore...
Taken.
As last year, I would prefer different wording on the P(religion) question. "More or less" is so vague as to allow for a lot of very different answers depending on how I interpret it, and I didn't even properly consider the "revealed" distinction noted in a comment here.
I appreciate the update on the singularity estimate for those of us whose P(singularity) is between epsilon and 50+epsilon.
I still wonder if we can tease out the differences between current logistical/political problems and the actual effectiveness of the science ...
I am a massive N on the meyers briggs astrology test, yes I scored 96% for openness on the big-5.
I suspect our responses to questions like "I am an original thinker" have a lot to do with our social context. Right now, the people I run into day to day are fairly representative of the general population with little to skew toward toward the intellectual or original other than "people who hold down decent jobs, or did so until they retired". It doesn't take a great lack of humility to realize that compared to most of these people, I am...
You say that "There will never be any such thing", but your reasons tell only why the problem is hard and much harder than one might think at first, not why it is impossible. Surely the kind of tech needed for self-driving cars, perhaps an order of magnitude more complicated, would make it possible to have safe, convenient, cheap flying cars or their functional equivalent.
At worst, the reasons you state would make it AI-complete, and even that seems unreasonably pessimistic.
It's only a crazy thing to do if you are pretty sure you will need/want the insurance for the rest of your life. If you aren't sure, then you are paying a bunch of your investment money for insurance you might decide you don't need (and in fact, you definitely won't need financially once you have self-funded).
If you are convinced that cryonics is a good investment, and don't have the money to fund it out of current capital, then that seems like a good reason to buy some kind of life insurance, and a universal life policy is probably one of the better ways...
" It is the view that if the only ways Z and A differ is that Z has a higher population, and lower quality of life, then Z is preferable to A. This may not be how Parfit is correctly interpreted, but it is a common enough interpretation that I think it needs to be attacked."
Generally it's a good idea to think twice and reread before assuming that a published and frequently cited paper is saying something so obviously stupid.
Your edit doesn't help much at all. You talk about what others "seem to claim", but the argument that you have cla...
Not even close. The primary content of the OP is based on a straw man due to a massive misunderstanding of the mathematical arguments about the Repugnant Conclusion.
The conclusion of what Partfit actually demonstrated goes something more like this:
For any coherent mathematical definition of utility such that there is some additive functions which allows you to sum the utility of many people to determine U(population), the following paradox exists:
Given any world with positive utility A, there exists at least one other world B with more people, and less ...
My understanding is that the "appeal to authority fallacy" is specifically about appealing to irrelevant authorities. Quoting a physicist on their opinion about a physics question within their area of expertise would make an excellent non-fallacious argument. On the other hand, appealing to the opinion of say, a politician or CEO about a physics question would be a classic example of the appeal to authority fallacy. Such people's opinions would represent expert evidence in their fields of expertise, but not outside them.
I don't think the poster's description makes this clear and it really does suggest that any appeal to authority at all is a logical fallacy.
Is it really off-topic to suggest that looking at the accuracy of the courts may amount to rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic in a context where we've basically all agreed that
the courts are not terrible at making accurate determinations of whether a defendant broke a law
The set of laws where penalties can land you in prison are massively inefficient socially and in most people's minds unjust (when we actually grapple with what the laws are, as opposed to how they are usually applied to people like us, for those of us who are white and not poor
Eliezer has proposed that an AI in a box cannot be safe because of the persuasion powers of a superhuman intelligence. As demonstration of what merely a very strong human intelligence could do, he conducted a challenge in which he played the AI, and convinced at least two (possibly more) skeptics to let him out of the box when given two hours of text communication over an IRC channel. The details are here: http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox
Confidence that the same premises can imply both ~T and T is confidence that at least one of your premises is logically inconsistent with he others -- that they cannot all be true. It's not just a question of whether they model something correctly -- there is nothing they could model completely correctly.
In puzzle one, I would simply conclude that either one of the proofs is incorrect, or one of the premises must be false. Which option I consider most likely will depend on my confidence in my own ability, Ms. Math's abilities, whether she has confirmed the logic of my proof or been able to show me a misstep, my confidence in Ms. Math's beliefs about the premises, and my priors for each premise.
The present value of my expected future income stream from normal labor, plus my current estimated net worth is what I use when I do these calculations for myself as a business owner considering highly risky investments.
For most people with decent social capital (almost anyone middle class in a rich country), the minimum base number in typical situations should be something >200kUS$ even for those near bankruptcy.
Obviously, this does not cover non-typical situations involving extremely important time-sensitive opportunities requiring more cash than you can raise on short notice (such as the classic life-saving medical treatment required).
I, too, find it hard to care about Sleeping Beauty, which is perhaps why this post is the first time in years of reading LW, that I've actually dusted off my math spectacles fully and tried to rigorously understand what some of this decision theory notation actually means.
So count me in for a rousing endorsement of interest in more practical decision theory.
I'm not sure it isn't clearer with 'x's, given that you have two different kinds of probabilities to confuse.
It may just be that there's a fair bit of inferential distance to clear, though in presenting this notation at all.
I have a strong (if rusty) math background, but I had to reason through exactly what you could possibly mean down a couple different trees (one of which had a whole comment partially written asking you to explain certain things about your notation and meaning) before it finally clicked for me on a second reading of your comment here...
I think of this as "heresy", and agree that it is a very useful concept.
Bringing myself back to what I was thinking in 2007 -- I think we have some semantic confusion around two different sense of absurdity. One is the heuristic Eliezer discusses -- the determination of whether a claim/prediction has surface plausibility. If not we file it under "absurd". An absurdity heuristic would be some heuristic which considers surface plausibility or lack thereof as evidence for or against a claim.
On the other hand, we have the sense of "Absurd!" as a very strong negative claim about something's probability of t...
You have to be careful with counterfactuals, as they have a tendency to be counter factual.
In a world in which soldiers were never (or even just very very rarely) deployed, what is the likelihood that they would be paid (between money and much of living expenses) anywhere near as well as current soldiers and yet asked to do very very little?
The reason the lives of soldiers who are not deployed are extremely low-stress and not particularly difficult is because of deployment. They are being healed from previous deployments and readied for future deployments...
I would think the key line of attack in trying to describe why a singularity prediction is reasonable is in making clear what you are predicting and what you are not predicting.
Guys like Horgan hear a few sentences about the "singularity" and think humanoid robots, flying cars, phasers and force fields, that we'll be living in the star-trek universe.
Of course, as anyone with the Bayes-skilz of Eliezer knows, start making detailed predictions like that and you're sure to be wrong about most of it, even if the basic idea of a radically altered soci...
I wouldn't necessarily read too much into your calibration question, given that it's just one question, and there was something of a gotcha.
One thing I learned from doing calibration exercises is that I tended to be much too tentative with my 50% guesses.
When I answered the calibration question, I used my knowledge of other math that either had to, or couldn't have come before him, to narrow the possible window of his birth down to about 200 years. Random chance would then give me about a 20% shot. I thought I had somewhat better information than random... (read more)