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Given an extremely-high-resolution em with verified pointwise causal isomorphism (that is, it has been verified that emulated synaptic compartments are behaving like biological synaptic compartments to the limits of detection) and verified surface correspondence (the person emulated says they can't internally detect any difference) then my probability of consciousness is essentially "top", i.e. I would not bother to think about alternative hypotheses because the probability would be low enough to fall off the radar of things I should think about. Do you spend a lot of time worrying that maybe a brain made out of gold would be conscious even though your biological brain isn't?
In response to
How sure are you that brain emulations would be conscious?
I spend time worrying about whether random thermal fluctuation in (for example) suns produces sporadic conscious moments simply due to random causal structure alignments. Since I also believe most potential conscious moments are bizarre and painful, that worries me. This worry is not useful when embedded in systems one, a worry which the latter was not created to cope with, so I only worry in the system two philosophical curiosity sense.
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Simple investing for a complete beginner? (Just… developing world index funds?)
... D'awww. :)
I love how, sometimes, Lesswrongers can be so sweet in this totally unique and awesome way. :3
However, I actually meant "insane" in the same way FAI and cryonics are insane.
However however... Inferential distance!
This is how I have come to feel:
Don't try to explain people into caring about anything important.
If I really know the important things that I believe I know, then I should be able to use that knowledge to do amazing things. Things people can experience.
Then people will come to me begging for explanations.
I will say only that we have access to a Theory of Instruction that is to the field of education what Newton's Principia was to the field of physics. If you're really interested, then I could give you a fascinating reading list (and what is "libgen"?), but I aint gonna explain much. I've got engineering skills to teach myself, and there's a lot of bootstrapping to be done! :D
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Simple investing for a complete beginner? (Just… developing world index funds?)
Seeing as how classical mechanics is an effective theory for physically restructuring significant portions of reality to one's goals, you are promising something tantamount to a full theory of knowledge acquisition, something linguists and psychologists smarter than you have worked on for centuries.
Calm down with promises that will disappoint you and make an MVP.
In response to
Effective Altruist Job Board?
I do not understand why no one is interested.
In response to
New Monthly Thread: Bragging
My co-founder and I launched Floobits, a tool for remote pair programming. We'd been soft-launched and were slowly growing through word of mouth, but we hadn't tried to get publicity or told the world that we're a Y Combinator startup.
We got coverage on:
...and a couple other places I've forgotten about.
I also wrote an insubstantial post about getting into YC. It doesn't contain any special hints, just a summary of the journey so far.
Demo day is next week, so maybe I should have waited to post in this thread. :)
Do you have an Amazon wish list? You are awesome.
Thanks Am in the middle of writing up generalised proof of what I have done.
Work I did was mainly concerned with calculating integrated information for simple neuronal systems.
If I get some time, I could write up my result if people are interested
I am interested. What software did you use? I am trying to learn NEURON but it feels like Fortran and I have trouble navigating around the cobwebs.
In response to
Model Combination and Adjustment
I appreciate the snippets from EY's papers, which I don't read, because it's interesting to know what he's writing about more formally. I found the review mostly seemed like stuff I already know, although in returning to it I noticed that it did contain some new terminology around reference classes.
But this:
For example, gender-neutral language can reduce male bias in our associations (Stahlberg et al. 2007). In this spirit, I recommend we retire the phrase "the outside view..", and instead use phrases like "some outside views..." and "an outside view..."
Is really good. I mean, along with the general recommendation to use multiple reference classes. I guess my point is that the article is made possibly twice as awesome by the inclusion of this part, as it dramatically increases the probability that this will catch on memetically.
In the mathematical theory of Galois representations, a choice of algebraic closure of the rationals and an embedding of this algebraic closure in the complex numbers (e.g. section 5) is usually necessary to frame the background setting, but I never hear "the algebraic closure" or "the embedding," instead "an algebraic closure" and "an embedding." Thus I never forget that a choice has to be made and that this choice is not necessarily obvious. This is an example from mathematics where careful language is helpful in tracking background assumptions.
In response to
Model Combination and Adjustment
In mathematical terms, the map from problem space to reference classes is a projection and has no canonical choice (you apply the projection by choosing to lose information), whereas the map from causal structures to problem space is an imbedding and has such a choice (and the choice gains information).
In response to
Introducing Effective Fundraising, a New EA Org
Are we worried whether the compartmentalized accounting of mission and fundraising related financial activity via outsourcing to a different organization can incur PR costs as well? If an organization is worried about "look[ing] bad" because some of their funds are being employed for fundraising, thus lowering their effective percentage, would they be susceptible to minor "scandals" that put to question the validity of GiveWell's metrics by, say, an investigative journalist that misinterprets the outsourced fundraising as misrepresentation of effective charity? If I found out an organization reported a return of $15 on every $1, but in fact received a lot of money from outsourced fundraising which returned only $3 on every $1, their "true rate," when the clever accounting becomes opaque, may be significantly lower than $15, say $5 or $8. If I am a candidate donor that made his decision through an organization like Givewell, and my primary metric is ROI, I may feel cheated, even if that feeling is misplaced.
I suspect the above consideration is not very likely to be a big issue, but I did want to bring it to our attention as to give pre-emptive awareness. In the unlikely case it is worth thinking about, it may point to the different issue of measuring charity effectiveness by pure monetary ROI being equivalent to measuring the effectiveness of software by lines of code. If that is the case, perhaps a hybrid measure of monetary ROI and non-monetary but quantitive mission-related metrics can be employed by Givewell. Looking through their full reports, however, I sense this may already be the case. Anyway, this shows one has to be very careful when employing any one-dimensional metric.
Why does perfection in an encryption algorithm require compression? Did you mean to say "compression algorithm"?
Some notes on compression algorithms: If one defines a compression algorithm as a bijective map on all strings, and a decompression algorithm as an inverse of a compression algorithm, then according to this definition, all decompression algorithm are also compression algorithms. Suppose we apply a compression algorithm to a string, and then apply the algorithm to the result, and so on and so on. Suppose we call this the orbit of the string. Every orbit will be finite or infinite. A finite orbit will eventually come back to the original string. The length of strings in an orbit cannot be strictly monotonically decreasing, and if they are constant, then the orbit must be finite. In an infinite orbit, the length of the strings will tend towards infinity. So every compression algorithm will either simply cycle between some strings, or eventually makes things bigger.
Yes, thank you, I meant compression algorithm.
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Good piece. One minor point I wanted to expand upon, though:
Productivity need not be confined to your career. You could seek to become more productive in your hobbies or even more productive in spending time with your friends and family.
Furthermore, productivity need not be confined to doing more things. It could be doing your existing tasks more quickly and efficiently. In fact, many people cite "free more time to spend with friends and family" as their core reason for wanting to be more productive.
In other words, productivity need not be confused with busywork, and I suspect this is primarily an artifact of linguistic heuristics (similar brain procedures get lightly activated when you hear "productivity" as when you hear "workout" or "haste" or even "forward march").
If productivity were a currency, you could say "have I acquired more productons this week than last week with respect to my current goal?" If making your family well off can be achieved by lounging around in the pool splashing each other, then that is high family welfare productivity.