"Hmm... I can prove that this is in NP, but not in P or in NP-Complete. That's not worth any points at all!" (crumples up and throws away paper)

The way I see it is this:

Hey, another crazy person like me. Now we are two.

I've had a similar take on it for a long time. It seems like the expansion is an attempt to explain observed red shifts, necessitating an increasingly convoluted theory to explain other observations.

The observation is, the farther away, the greater the shift, in a linear fashion.

f = (c - H * D) / w where w is the wavelength from which it was emitted.

f=f_0 - D*Constant

What if it light just loses energy as it travels, so that the frequency shifts lower?

That seems like a perfectly natural solution. How do we know it isn't true?

What would be the implications to the current theories if it were true?

I am naive and inexperienced in the ways of love, but it seems implausible that romantic love is often (usually?) bidirectional. Of all the people of the right sex that one is close too, why do people usually fall in love with someone who is likewise in love with them?

There is a peculiar consequence of this, pointed out by Cosma Shalizi. Suppose we have a deterministic physical system S, and we observe this system carefully over time. We are steadily gaining information about its microstates, and therefore by this definition, its entropy should be decreasing.

You might say, "the system isn't closed, because it is being observed." But consider the system "S plus the observer." Saying that entropy is nondecreasing over time seems to require that the observer is in doubt about its own microstates. What does that mean?

Russell is an entirely respectable and mainstream researcher, at one of the top CS departments. It's striking that he's now basically articulating something pretty close to the MIRI view. Can somebody comment on whether Russell has personally interacted with MIRI?

If MIRI's work played a role in convincing people like Russell, that seems like an major accomplishment and demonstration that they have arrived as part of the academic research community. If Russell came to that conclusion on his own, MIRI should still get a fair bit of praise for getting there first and saying it before it was respectable.

In either case, my congratulations to the folks at MIRI and I will up my credence in them, going forwards. (They've been rising steadily in my estimation for the last several years; this is just one of the more dramatic bumps.)

Did the survey. Mischief managed.

Did you read about Google's partnership with NASA and UCSD to build a quantum computer of 1000 qubits?

Technologically exciting, but ... imagine a world without encryption. As if all locks and keys on all houses, cars, banks, nuclear vaults, whatever, disappeared, only incomparably more consequential.

That would be catastrophic, for business, economies, governments, individuals, every form of commerce, military communication....

Didn't answer your question, I am sorry, but as a "fan" of quantum computing, and also a person with a long time interest in the quantum zeno effect, free will, and the implications for consciousness (as often discussed by Henry Stapp, among others), I am both excited, yet feel a certain trepidation. Like I do about nanotech.

I am writing a long essay and preparing a video on the topic, but it is a long way from completion. I do think it (qc) will have a dramatic effect on artifactual consciousness platforms, and I am even more certain that it will accellerate superintelligence (which is not at all the same thing, as intelligence and consciousness, in my opinion, are not coextensive.)

Taking up on the "level above mine" comments -- Scott is a very talented and successful researcher. He also has tenure and can work on what he likes. The fact that he considers this sort of philosophical investigation worth his time and attention makes me upwardly revise my impression of how worthwhile the topic is.

How about this as a policy:

1) You can't advocate violence or criminal acts.

2) You can't engage in what the moderator determines to be massive down voting of a single person.

3) You can't create posts that the moderator determines are not beneficial to the LessWrong community.

4) The moderator has the right to ban posts or users that violate (1), (2), or (3).

I'm developing a low-level strongly typed virtual machine suitable for running thought processes with provable program properties, and which result in checkable partial execution traces with cryptographically strong bounds on honest vs fraudulent work. Such a framework meets the needs for a strong AI boxing setup.