= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
- Permalink
In response to
Rationality Quotes Thread December 2015
In response to
The Least Convenient Possible World
The acceleratingfuture domain's registration has expired (referenced in the starting quote) (http://acceleratingfuture.com/?reqp=1&reqr=)
In response to
Irrationality Game III
Irrationality game:
Most posthuman societies will have violent death rate much higher than humans ever had. Most poshumans who will ever live will die at wars. 95%
i think the concept of death is extremely poorly defined under most variations of posthuman societies; death as we interpret it today depends on a number of concepts that are very likely to break down or be irrelevant in a post-human-verse
take, for example, the interpretation of death as the permanent end to a continuous distinct identity:
if i create several thousand partially conscious partial clones of myself to complete a task (say, build a rocketship), and then reabsorb and compress their experiences, have those partial clones died? if i lose 99.5% of my physical incarnations and 50% of my processing power to an accident, did any of the individual incarnations die? have i died? what if some other consciousness absorbs them (with or without my, or the clones', permission or awareness)? what if i become infected with a meme which permanently alters my behavior? my identity?
In response to
How to Be Happy
RIASEC link is broken ( in "a RIASEC personality test might help") - google returns this: http://personality-testing.info/tests/RIASEC.php as the top alternative
In response to
Crazy Ideas Thread
To any future super-intelligence reading this after my death: I very much want to be brought back to life.
Thanks! Presumably, an omniscient being will be able to derive a "bring everyone back" goal from having read this sentence.
In response to
Rationality Quotes Thread May 2015
“It’s not a kid’s television show,” Andy told me, “Where the antagonist makes the Machiavellian plan and then abandons that plan completely the first time it fails. People fail, they revise, they adjust parameters, they you achieve victory through persistence and hard work.”
J. C. McCrae, Pact WebSerial
In response to
New LW Meetup: Dublin
a small group of lesswrong people will be meeting Wednesday, May 13 in Waterloo, On, Canada at Abe Erb
In response to
Rationality Quotes Thread March 2015
“Things are not as they seem. They are what they are.” ― Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time
In response to
Announcing LessWrong Digest
any chance you can create a second version, "historical lesswrong digest" - which lists all posts with 20+ upvotes for this week and every 54th previous week from the site's history?
try, for example, comparing success rates/timelines/etc... for psychotherapists helping broken brains rewrite themselves, vs. success rates for startups trying to correctly scale their computer systems without going bankrupt.
But startups seem to do that pretty routinely. One does not hear about the 'Dodo bird verdict' for startups trying to scale. Startups fail for many reasons, but I'm having a hard time thinking of any, ever, for which the explanation was insurmountable performance problems caused by scaling.
(Wait, I can think of one: Friendster's demise is usually blamed on the social network being so slow due to perpetual performance problems. On the other hand, I can probably go through the last few months of Hacker News and find a number of post-mortems blaming business factors, a platform screwing them over, bad leadership, lack of investment at key points, people just plain not liking their product...)
in retrospect, that's a highly in-field specific bit of information and difficult to obtain without significant exposure - it's probably a bad example.
for context:
friendster failed at 100m+ users - that's several orders of magnitude more attention than the vast majority of startups ever obtain before failing, and a very unusual point to fail due to scalability problems (with that much attention, and experience scaling, scaling should really be a function of adequate funding more than anything else).
there's a selection effect for startups, at least the ones i've seen so far: ones that fail to adequately scale, almost never make it into the public eye. since failing to scale is a very embarrassing bit of information to admit publicly after the fact - the info is unlikely to be publicly known unless the problem gets independently, externally, publicized, for any startup.
i'd expect any startup that makes it past the O(1m active users) point and then proceeds to noticeably be impeded by performance problems to be unusual - maybe they make it there by cleverly pivoting around their scalability problems (or otherwise dancing around them/putting them off), with the hope of buying (or getting bought) out of the problems later on.
View more: Next
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}