Moldbug and Yudkowsky have been disagreeing with each other basically ever since their blogs have even existed.
I seem to recall a Yudkowsky anti-NRx comment on Facebook a year or two ago, but does anyone recall / have a link to an earlier disagreement on Yudkowsky's part?
Mutations occur randomly and environmental pressure perform selection on them.
Obviously, but "natural selection" is the non-random part of evolution. Using it as a byword for evolution as a whole is bad terminology.
Hanson makes so many assumptions that defy intuition. He's talking a civilization with the capacity to support trillions of individuals, in which these individuals are largely entirely disposable and can be duplicated at a moment's notice, and he doesn't think evolutionary pressures are going to come into play? We've seen random natural selection significantly improve human intelligence in as few as tens of generations. With Ems, you could probably cook up tailor-made superintelligences in a weekend using nothing but the right selection pressures. Or, at least, I see no reason to be confident in the converse proposition.
He claims we don't know enough about the brain to select usefully nonrandom changes, yet assumes that we'll know enough to emulate them to high fidelity. This is roughly like saying that I can perfectly replicate a working car but I somehow don't understand anything about how it works. What about the fact that we already know some useful nonrandom changes that we could make, such as the increased dendritic branching observable in specific intelligence-associated alleles?
It doesn't matter. Deepmind is planning to have a rat-level AI before the end of 2017 and Demis doesn't tend to make overly optimistic predictions. How many doublings is a rat away from a human?
We've seen random natural selection significantly improve human intelligence in as few as tens of generations.
"Random natural selection" is almost a contradiction in terms. Yes, we've seen dramatic boosts in Ashkenazi intelligence on that timescale, but that's due to very non-random selection pressure.
Have you read The Age of Em? Robin Hanson thinks that mind uploading is likely to happen before de novo AI, but also the reasons why that's the case mean that we won't get much in the way of modifications to ems until the end of the Em era.
(That is, if you can just use 'evolutionary algorithms' to muck around with uploads and make some of them better at thinking, it's likely you understand intelligence well enough to build a de novo AI to begin with.)
You're right, though I'm not sure what the best way to phrase it better is.
My question still stands, since the parts of science which are most fucked seems to be the parts that have the most immediate impact on people's choices.
My question still stands, since the parts of science which are most fucked seems to be the parts that have the most immediate impact on people's choices.
Sure, but the problem here is that the causality probably goes in the opposite direction. That is, the more a scientific endeavor will affect people's choices, the more pressure there is to corrupt that scientific endeavor.
More generally, I assume your reasoning here to be that actual food digestion is not a 1:1 to, say, food labels. Correct?
Yes, but more importantly, I ask whether the difference between "food labels" and "actual food digestion" may depend on the specific person. To use your example, some person may be able to better extract calcium from food than other person, either because their genes create different enzymes, or because their gut flora preprocesses the food differently.
Now apply this argument to the calories themselves. Is it possible that two people eat the same food, yet one of them extracts 1000 calories from the food, and the other extracts 1500 calories?
Define your 'work'.
Well, you have just returned my question. I was curious whether there are ways to spend calories that most people would forget to think about when thinking about "work".
For example, whether it is possible that we could observe two people the whole day and conclude that they do the same things (same kind of work, same kind of sport) and therefore their "calories out" should be approximately the same, while in reality their "calories out" would differ because one of them e.g. wears a warmer sweater.
Adding these two questions together, I am asking whether it is possible to have two people eat the same food, do the same amount of work and sport, and yet at the end of the day one of them gains extra calories and the other does not.
Yes, but more importantly, I ask whether the difference between "food labels" and "actual food digestion" may depend on the specific person.
Obviously; things like lactose tolerance seem like clear examples of this, and Lumifer's list seems like the sort of things I would expect matter in less obvious but more important ways.
That fear has been at least partially alleviated by new research showing that more educated people are having more kids
Could you please post a link if available?
I believe the impression is that lower and higher education women are having the same number of children by age 50. There's still a problem that education correlates with age at first child, and so you have fewer generations of more educated people running around in equilibrium.
Some may hope that if you do population control long enough, they eventually go extinct, but I think the evidence for that is pretty low.
We already eliminated Malaria carrying Mosquitos from large parts of the West with DDT and related techniques. Those mosquitos didn't manage to easily recolonize the areas from which they were driven away.
Louie Helm article suggest that SIT is enough to drive mosquito species to extinction. Do you think there a reason he's wrong? His numbers might be on the low end but spending a few billions would very much be worth it to eliminate all human biting mosquitos.
We already eliminated Malaria carrying Mosquitos from large parts of the West with DDT and related techniques. Those mosquitos didn't manage to easily recolonize the areas from which they were driven away.
My understanding is that this isn't the case where Oxitec has done its tests, but this may be a feature of the size of the area where Oxitec is doing its tests rather than a feature of the method itself. (I suspect we did DDT everywhere at once, which would reduce the ability of mosquitoes to recolonize relative to a single test area.)
I think my main objection is that it's a few billions to do the sterile insect approach, and a few millions to do the gene drive approach, if that much. Insisting on a 1000x increase in cost to maybe please the public more rankles.
I don't think that gene drives are the best technology when you account for the politics and indeed the post by Luke that you link doesn't use the term. SIT seems to be effective enough from a cost-benefit analysis and can be used in a very controlled way.
I look a while ago into the issue and wrote an LW post about it. I think there's a fair chance that pushing for gene drives mosquitos to be released will mean that mosquito elemintion will happen later rather than sooner.
Oxitec has today the technology that produes "sterile mosquitio" sterile for them means that the mosquitos die when they are larves. That means they compete in the early larve stage against other mosquito larves. Oxitec also inserts color coding genes to be able to proof that all of the offspring of the mosquitos they produce really dies and the genes that they produce really die.
It would be worthwhile if people think of mosquito erradication as being about release sterile mosquitos and not about releasing mutant GMO mosquitos.
If you actively want to do something on the PR front I think it would be worthwhile to contact someone at Oxitec and ask them what they think would be helpful. Maybe invite someone from Oxitec for your podcast and have a discussion with them about the strategic implications?
It's worthwhile to remember that the Obama administration was very effective about reducing Mercury pollution but not very effective about reducing CO2 pollution. More publish attention isn't always worthwhile to getting policy passed. Especially the scenario where a Republican Trump advocates a gene drive might mean that you get opposition from liberals who are currently against GMO's on the topic that prevents real action from happening.
It would be worthwhile if people think of mosquito erradication as being about release sterile mosquitos and not about releasing mutant GMO mosquitos.
The sterile insect approach is, at best, a population control measure, rather than an extinction measure. Some may hope that if you do population control long enough, they eventually go extinct, but I think the evidence for that is pretty low. (Cynically, the sterile insect approach is something that has to be done repeatedly to be effective, which makes it more of a utility than a one-off project.)
I think it's worth giving this the smallpox treatment--that is, there's a heroic scientific project involving the permanent elimination of a scourge on the human race, and stressing the importance of permanent solutions to the problem. Yes, smallpox required vaccination approaches that are similar to the sterile insect approach, but that doesn't work well with mosquitoes, so we'll use the tool that works well.
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There is some progress on this, but overall changes to the codebase have been slow-going. I've pushed for doing things the right way, even if it takes longer, rather than quicker attempts that are less likely to work.
Of the three pieces that I think are useful, one has been implemented, another written but not yet merged (it needs a bit more work), and a third has not yet been written. If you'd like to contribute coding effort, this issue is my highest priority of the open issues with no pull requests and seems like it should be fairly simple to me.