Where do you get the exact "half-chance of nothing because you don't play"? How do you decide to play or not, given a favorable outcome of the test run?
You should play if the expected value is positive, and not if it's negative. If the test run results in heads, then the posterior probability is 2/3rds and 24*2/3-12=4, which is positive. If the test run results in tails, then the posterior probability is 1/3rd and 24*1/3-12=-4, which is negative.
(Why is the posterior probability 2/3 or 1/3? Check out footnote 3, or Laplace's Rule of Succession.)
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.
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But what if your friend offers you to stick the gum to any other coin and let you see which way it lands, to get a feel on how the gum "might" affect the result*, and then offer you this deal? How would you calculate Vol then?
This tends to be very context dependent; I don't know enough about biology to estimate. The main caution here is that people tend to forget about regression to the mean (if you have a local measurement X that's only partly related to Y, you should not just port your estimate from X over to Y, but move it closer to what you would have expected from Y beforehand).