= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
How many students have found work in data science (so far), what problems are they solving now, and what are the associated companies/cities/salaries?
So if I lock you up in my house, and you try to run away, so I give you a lobotomy so that now you don't run away, we've thereby become friends?
Not with a lobotomy, no. But with a more sophisticated brain surgery/wipe that caused me to value spending time in your house and making you happy and so forth- then yes, after the operation I would probably consider you a friend, or something quite like it.
Obviously, as a Toggle who has not yet undergone such an operation, I consider it a hostile and unfriendly act. But that has no bearing on what our relationship is after the point in time where you get to arbitrarily decide what our relationship is.
I greatly dislike the term "friendly AI". The mechanisms behind "friendly AI" have nothing to do with friendship or mutual benefit. It would be more accurate to call it "slave AI".
I disagree. I have no problem saying that friendship is the successful resolution of the value alignment problem. It's not even a metaphor, really.
In response to
Instrumental Rationality Questions Thread
Are there any nootropics that have decent evidence of nonnegligible effectiveness that aren't listed in Slate Star Codex's Nootropics Survey Results. Asking so I can use replies to this comment + survey as an exhaustive list of nootropics worth considering.
Gwern's records of his own self-experimentation are not to be missed: http://www.gwern.net/Nootropics
In response to
Book Review: Naive Set Theory (MIRI research guide)
I finished this book about four months ago, and time is making me increasingly glad that I read it. In particular, its treatment of countable infinities, functions, proof by induction, and the Peano axioms have been worth their weight in gold. When I encounter similar subjects 'out in the wild', I can approach them with relative skill and trust my intuitions in a way that I couldn't before. It's really growing on me.
That said, as a near-introduction to set theory, it was a very difficult read at times. It was a treatment of mathematics far deeper than I had come to expect from my university courses (which were largely in continuous mathematics, according to ancient engineers' tradition). If school has trained you to approach mathematical subjects as a tool the same way it did me, you'll need to adjust your expectations. This book is about virtuosity, not just surveying the tools.
Seems to be an established conversation around this point
Well, I guess coming up with an idea a century-ish old could be considered better than /not/ having come up with something that recent...
When I was a freshman, I invented the electric motor! I think it's something that just happens when you're getting acquainted with a subject, and understand it well- you get a sense of what the good questions are, and start asking them without being told.
In response to
Open thread, Aug. 03 - Aug. 09, 2015
Cardinal numbers for utilons?
I have a hunch.
Trying to add up utilons or hedons can quickly lead to all sorts of problems, which are probably already familiar to you. However, there are all sorts of wacky and wonderful branches of non-intuitive mathematics, which may prove of more use than elementary addition. I half-remember that regular math can be treated as part of set theory, and there are various branches of set theory which can have some, but not all, of the properties of regular math - for example, being able to say that X < Y, but not necessarily that X+Z > Y. A bit of Wikipedia digging has reminded me of Cardinal numbers, which seem at least a step in the right direction: If the elements of set X has a one-to-one correspondence with the elements of set Y, then they're equal, and if not, then they're not. This seems to be a closer approximation of utilons than the natural numbers, such as, say, if the elements of set X being the reasons that X is good.
But I could be wrong.
I'm already well past the part of math-stuff that I understand well; I'd need to do a good bit of reading just to get my feet back under me. Does anyone here, more mathematically-inclined than I, have a better intuition of why this approach may or may not be helpful?
(I'm asking because I'm considering throwing in someone who tries to follow a cardinal-utilon-based theory of ethics in something I'm writing, as a novel change from the more commonly-presented ethical theories. But to do that, I'd need to know at least a few of the consequences of this approach might end up being. Any help would be greatly appreciated.)
Seems to be an established conversation around this point, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_utility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_utility
"The idea of cardinal utility is considered outdated except for specific contexts such as decision making under risk, utilitarian welfare evaluations, and discounted utilities for intertemporal evaluations where it is still applied. Elsewhere, such as in general consumer theory, ordinal utility with its weaker assumptions Is preferred because results that are just as strong can be derived."
Or you could go back to the original Theory of Games proof, which I believe was ordinal- it's going to depend on your axioms. In that document, Von Neumann definitely didn't go so far as to treat utility as simply an integer.
Excellent post - the analysis of our temporal rank with regards to star formation are interesting and novel (for me). I look forward to your next post.
The gist of this is that the astronomical evidence appear to strongly support mediocrity, and thus a prior in which biological life is not super rare.
I'm especially interested in what kind of bets you'd place concerning future discovery for life elsewhere in the solar system such as Europa. I hope you cover Mars too at some point.
In response to
comment
by
on
Astronomy, Astrobiology, & The Fermi Paradox I: Introductions, and Space & Time
In the case of Mars, we have an improbable advantage, because there is already a huge industry and body of knowledge devoted to the discovery of organic-rich rock deposits in regions that are likely to preserve complex carbon forms. If there ever was an ecosystem on the surface of Mars, Exxon will help us find it.
(Although actually, Mars lacks active tectonic plates, so it's not quite the same problem. But many industry tricks and technologies will transfer seamlessly.)
In response to
Open Thread, Jul. 27 - Aug 02, 2015
There are different levels of impossible.
Imagine a universe with an infinite number of identical rooms, each of which contains a single human. Each room is numbered outside: 1, 2, 3, ...
The probability of you being in the first 100 rooms is 0 - if you ever have to make an expected utility calculation, you shouldn't even consider that chance. On the other hand, it is definitely possible in the sense that some people are in those first 100 rooms.
If you consider the probability of you being in room Q, this probability is also 0. However, it (intuitively) feels "more" impossible.
I don't really think this line of thought leads anywhere interesting, but it definitely violated my intuitions.
Your math has some problems. Note that, if p(X=x) = 0 for all x, then the sum over X is also zero. But if you're in a room, then by definition you have sampled from the set of rooms- the probability of selecting a room is one. Since the probability of selecting 'any room from the set of rooms' is both zero and one, we have established a contradiction, so the problem is ill-posed.
View more: Next
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Hi Toggle,
Thanks for your question!
Most of our students have just started looking for jobs over the past ~2 weeks, and the job search process in the tech sector typically takes ~2 months, from sending out resumes to accepting offers (see, e.g. "Managing your time" in Alexei's post Maximizing Your Donations via a Job).
The feedback loop here is correspondingly longer than we'd like. We expect to have an answer to your question by the time we advertise our third cohort.
Understood, sounds like that information won't be in for a while. I look forward to hearing about your results in a few months!