3-6 months? People don't go on piling up savings indefinitely? How else do you retire? I mean... there is state pension in the country I live in but I would not count it not going bust in 30 years so I always assumed I will have what I save and then maybe the state pays a bonus.

I have an objection in general to the sort of atheist, or at least secularist, propaganda where a woman who grows up in a sexually oppressive cult finds it just liberating to set aside her abstinence and purity indoctrination when she leaves home.

Some recent examples:

I Once Signed an Abstinence Pledge and Wore a Purity Ring; Now, I’m a Sex-Positive Former Christian

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2015/02/27/i-once-signed-an-abstinence-pledge-and-wore-a-purity-ring-now-im-a-sex-positive-former-christian/

Sex as a Southern Woman: A Story of Shame

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/godlessindixie/2015/04/21/sex-as-a-southern-woman/

I could’ve been a Duggar wife: I grew up in the same church, and the abuse scandal doesn’t shock me

http://www.salon.com/2015/05/28/i_couldve_been_a_duggar_wife_i_grew_up_in_the_same_church_and_the_abuse_scandal_doesnt_shock_me/

After a First Time, Many Second Thoughts

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/style/after-a-first-time-many-second-thoughts.html

Namely, that this kind of sexual liberation doesn't necessarily work symmetrically for young men who grow up in similar religious environments. Women naturally hold the gatekeeping position, regardless of what their elders brought them up to believe about sex. So even average-looking women who decide to break away from these restrictions usually have a relatively easy way to do so.

But because of the asymmetry in human mating, the sexually unattractive young christian man who wants to break away from his sex-negative upbringing will discover pretty quickly that his apostasy hasn't increased his sexual market value. Instead he becomes just another sexually yucky and frustrated secular guy.

Yet atheist bloggers like Hemant Mehta keep publishing these dishonest stories by or about young, formerly christian women who decide to take off their purity rings and start hooking up with men. This sounds like a sexist way to make the case for the benefits of atheism: Wow, look at the fun all those women have when they become atheists and lose their sexual inhibitions.

It just doesn't work that way for a lot of guys who leave religion, however. Referring to the story I linked below about the male virgins in Silicon Valley, I doubt that they wound up that way because of christian upbringings. Silicon Valley doesn't have a reputation as a christian sort of place, and I suspect most of these guys have secular outlooks.

A way to discuss ideas for the site, vote on them, and incentivize the generation of good ideas. I sense that having this would be huge. a) I sense that there are a lot of good ideas out there in people's heads but that they haven't shared. b) I sense that by discussing things, there could be a lot of refinement of current ideas, and a lot of generation of new ideas.

By ideas for the site, do you mean changes for the site code? And if you mean changes to the code, do you mean the change ideas, or the change implementations?

The backend is open source, and posts were made in 2011 and 2012 on how to make modifications to the code so that users could submit improvements. I don't pay close attention, but my impression is that very few, if any, improvements have been submitted by users.

Issues can be reported (i.e. requests made) at the Google Code page. But resources to implement those changes are minimal, as I understand it.

It seems to me that the primary piece missing is the effort. Either volunteers need to familiarize themselves with the codebase and then make changes, or volunteers need to put up enough cash to hire devs to make changes. (Presumably the folks at Trike Apps, who would need to approve those changes anyway.)

A way for people to assign monetary value to requests ("I would pay $20 for five separate subreddits") and aggregate those pledges into prizes would perhaps be interesting and solve some of the core problems (while causing other, hopefully more minor, problems). Either it's clear that something is worth doing, it gets done, and the doer is rewarded, or it's clear that something is not worth doing, and it remains deliberately undone.

For diabetics, a blood sugar monitor.

i agree with the sentiment behind what you say here.

The difficult part is to shake ourselves free of any unexamined, implicit assumptions that we might be bringing to the table, when we talk about the problem.

For example, when you say:

And this is the reason why we should be worried about an AI with a poorly made utility function

... you are talking in terms of an AI that actually HAS such a thing as a "utility function". And it gets worse: the idea of a "utility function" has enormous implications for how the entire control mechanism (the motivations and goals system) is designed.

A good deal of this debate about my paper is centered in a clash of paradigms: on the one side a group of people who cannot even imagine the existence of any control mechanism except a utility-function-based goal stack, and on the other side me and a pretty large community of real AI builders who consider a utility-function-based goal stack to be so unworkable that it will never be used in any real AI.

Other AI builders that I have talked to (including all of the ones who turned up for the AAAI symposium where this paper was delivered, a year ago) are unequivocal: they say that a utility-function-and-goal-stack approach is something they wouldn't dream of using in a real AI system. To them, that idea is just a piece of hypothetical silliness put into AI papers by academics who do not build actual AI systems.

And for my part, I am an AI builder with 25 years experience, who was already rejecting that approach in the mid-1980s, and right now I am working on mechanisms that only have vague echoes of that design in them.

Meanwhile, there are very few people in the world who also work on real AGI system design (they are a tiny subset of the "AI builders" I referred to earlier), and of the four others that I know (Ben Goertzel, Peter Voss, Monica Anderson and Phil Goetz) I can say for sure that the first three all completely accept the logic in this paper. (Phil's work I know less about: he stays off the social radar most of the time, but he's a member of LW so someone could ask his opinion).

Still More to the Prisoner's Dilemma

After reading http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/05/16/1206569109.full.pdf+html , the detail that's caught my attention: "The player with the shortest memory sets the terms of the game." If a strategy remembers 0 turns, and simply Always Cooperates, or Always Defects, or randomly chooses between them, then no matter how clever its opponent might be, it can't do any better than by acting as if it were also a Memory-0 strategy. Tit-for-Tat is a Memory-1 strategy - and despite all the analysis that I've read on it before, I now see it from a new perspective, in that it's one of the few Memory-1 strategies that gracefully falls back to the appropriate Memory-0 strategy when faced with All-C or All-D... and any strategy which tries to implement a more complicated scheme based on longer strings is faced with the fact that Tit-for-Tat simply doesn't remember anything beyond a single turn.

I would like to see if this perspective can be extended to a Memory-2 strategy that falls gracefully back to appropriate Memory-1 strategies such as Tit-for-Tat when faced with Memory-1 strategies, and like Tit-for-Tat, to a suitable Memory-0 strategy when faced with Memory-0 ones.

Does anyone have a link to a suitable set of programs to run some experimental tourneys, and instructions on how to apply them? (If it matters, the OSes I have available are WinXP and Fedora 21.)

I must admit "seven in a square" was not obvious to me. I thought it was advice for the chess room.

With professional players, whose job it was to play Quidditch.

It won't survive children doing the same. More to the point, the snakes and ravens are deliberately and obviously exploiting the current rules, which will trigger all sorts of fair play instincts.

One way of preventing Dumbledore from using a time-turner is to have the disturbance take place at Azkaban. And after Bellatrix's breakout, it shouldn't be difficult to have him consider another potential Death Eater escape as a matter of absolute emergency requiring his personal intervention.

Of course, Azkaban is the one place Quirrell can't act in directly, so he'd probably want to Imperius an off-duty Auror or something.

Seeing as HPMoR is in large part about pointing out how narrative logic doesn't work in reality, it seems plausible to me that even if Q == V, that doesn't necessarily imply that he's evil. (Well, I mean, he is pretty evil, but I'm not sure he's going to end up being the Big Bad of the story.)