And the dangerous people, they’ll actually try this.

What is dangerous about that?

It wasn’t easier, the ghost explains, you just knew how to do it. Sometimes the easiest method you know is the hardest method there is.

It’s like… to someone who only knows how to dig with a spoon, the notion of digging something as large as a trench will terrify them. All they know are spoons, so as far as they’re concerned, digging is simply difficult. The only way they can imagine it getting any easier is if they change – digging with a spoon until they get stronger, faster, and tougher. And the dangerous people, they’ll actually try this.

-Aggy, from Prequel.

On the importance of looking for more efficient ways to do things.

To add to the hail of links, you might want to inspect the big official MIRI progress report on the problem here.

Also, though i know quite a bit less about this topic than the other people here (correct me if I'm wrong somebody), I'm a little suspicious of this distribution because I don't see any way to approximate the length of the shortest proof. Given an unproven mathematical statement for which you aren't sure whether it is true or false, how could you establish even a rough estimate of how hard it is to prove in the absence of actually trying to prove it?

Silly question for people who work at MIRI: If you had the choice between receiving one flash drive from the 5-year-future MIRI employees, and acquiring one year's supply of NZT-48, which would you pick?

What do the physicists on here think of Sean Carroll's attempt at deriving the Born rule here?

Is it correct, interesting but flawed, wrong, or what?

Instead of measuring "bad events per unit of time measured from the other person's point of view", wouldn't "bad events per unit of subjective time" be a much better metric which doesn't fall prey to this paradox?

And why are you bothering to distinguish between "there is no true preferred rest frame" and "there is a true rest frame which is perfectly indistinguishable from all the other moving ones"? They both make the exact same predictions, so why not just fold them into one hypothesis? What does that little epiphenominal tag hanging off one of them get you? Just because relativity is derivable from some fairly basic starting conditions doesn't seem to imply that there is an indistinguishable true rest frame to me, though I may be missing something obvious.

Online Videos Thread

I was trying to figure out how big 3^^^3 was, which led to the following interesting math result. How high would a power tower of 3's have to be to surpass a googolplex raised to the googolplexth power? For what value of X is (3^^X)>(googolplex^^2)? I don't have the full answer, but an upper bound for X is 16. A power tower of 3's 16 high is guaranteed to be vastly larger than a googolplex raised to itself. And when you consider that 3^^^3 is a power tower 7.6 trillion 3's tall... it's way larger than I thought.

What would you say is the most effective organization to donate to to reduce artificial biology X-risks?

You could have also spent that time watching TV or surfing reddit. I'd rank a half-finish project that genuinely used your creative energy above those sorts of things.

I guarantee you most of the people on this site have a mountain of similar half-finished projects.