bbarth

Sorry. It didn't seem rude to me. I'm just frustrated with where I see folks spending their time.

My apologies to anyone who was offended.

Yeah, I might, but here I was just surprised by the down-voting for contrary opinion. It seems like the thing we ought to foster not hide.

I'm interested in general purpose optimizers, but I bet that they will be evolved from AIs that were more special purpose to begin with. E.g., IBM Watson moving from Jeopardy!-playing machine to medical diagnostic assistant with a lot of the upfront work being on rapid NLP for the J! "questions".

Also, there's no reason that I've seen here to believe that Newcomb-like problems give insights into how to develop to decision theories that allow us to solve real-world problems. It seems like arguing about corner cases. Can anyone establish a practica... (read more)

Harsh crowd.

It might be nice to be able to see the voting history (not the voters' names, but the number of up and down votes) on a comment. I can't tell if my comments are controversial or just down-voted by two people. Perhaps even just the number of votes would be sufficient (e.g. -2/100 vs. -2/2).

Seems unlikely to work out to me. Humans evolved intelligence without Newcomb-like problems. As the only example of intelligence that we know of, it's clearly possible to develop intelligence without Newcomb-like problems. Furthermore, the general theory seems to be that AIs will start dumber than humans and iteratively improve until they're smarter. Given that, why are we so interested in problems like these (which humans don't universally agree about the answers to)?

I'd rather AIs be able to help us with problems like "what should we do about the ec... (read more)

i don't see how your example is apt or salient. My thesis is that Newcomb-like problems are the wrong place to be testing decision theories because they do not represent realistic or relevant problems. We should focus on formalizing and implementing decision theories and throw real-world problems at them rather than testing them on arcane logic puzzles.

Given the week+ delay in this response, it's probably not going to see much traffic, but I'm not convinced "reading" source code is all that helpful. Omega is posited to have nearly god-like abilities in this regard, but since this is a rationalist discussion, we probably have to rule out actual omnipotence.

If Omega intends to simply run the AI on spare hardware it has, then it has to be prepared to validate (in finite time and memory) that the AI hasn't so obfuscated its source as to be unintelligible to rational minds. It's also possible that ... (read more)

If LW would update the page template to have the script in the html header, I think we'd be set. Isn't there a site admin for this?

I think this is critical, because rationality in the end needs mathematical support, and MathJax is really the de facto way of putting math in web posts at this point.

Wouldn't the right solution be to use MathJax?

As one of the folks who made this argument in the other job thread, I'm going to disagree with you. Paying an assistant $36k/yr seems low to me for the Bay Area, but $100k/yr is probably out of line. These all seem like assistanty things that draw more modest salaries. Indeed.com puts the average for administrative assistants in SF at $43k/yr, so given that it's non-profit, it's certainly in range. Do SIAI jobs come with health insurance?

Seriously? This place already has a rep for being a personality cult. Let's not purposefully reinforce it. ;)

Most grad students work half time! We pay ~$45k/yr full time rate (so most students get around $28k/yr) plus insurance and tuition. How much is a cool story worth?

No. Same here.

It's not a question of SIAI not being good enough for Yvain, it's a question of whether they might both do even better if he pursues something else. It clearly sounds like he's pursing a different path than joining SIAI now, so he must have done at least some of the math. He's in med school according to his webpage, so I suspect his prospects for helping the cause might be higher if he does well as a doctor and sends every dime he doesn't need (say his salary as a doctor less $36k/yr) to SIAI. It certainly seems like it might be a waste of his current efforts to drop his medical aspirations and become a curriculum producer at SIAI, but I might be suffering from a form of the Sunk Cost Fallacy here.

There's no indication that this is entry-level. Also, if you look further on that page, you'll see that the median full-time employed person over 25 years of age with a Bachelor's degree in the US makes $56k/yr. My read of the position description leans towards college grads given some of the qualifications that they want. If you look at overall median household incomes in the Bay Area, you'll see that they top $74k/yr depending on the county of choice. Given the way that full-time vs. part-time seems to skew the data, I still say they're undershooting for... (read more)

Here's how typical people read typical job ads (typically), especially ones that are this long: Read the title. Scan for a dollar sign or the words "salary" or "salary range". If both are good enough, scan for the first bulleted list of qualifications. Most ads call these "required qualifications". If the reader meets enough of these, they scan for the second bulleted list of qualifications which is usually called "preferred qualifications". Then, if they meet enough of both of these, they'll go back and start readin... (read more)

Like I said in response to Anna, I'm not offended. I just think you could have done better in setting expectations.

I'm sorry if I came across as overly critical. I had a flashback to the job ad that EY promoted in September of '10 which came off in a similar way to me (though, clearly, this one has much more detail), and that probably drove the tone of my posts. I'm certainly not offended.

Now, that being said, I've noticed that there are a number of young idealists in this community, and I think it would be good if we could help them understand what they're getting into. We have a responsibility to help the up and coming among us to make good decisions. Making it clea... (read more)

Agreed.

We pay grad students ~$45k for 40 hours a week. Most of them only work half time, so they take home a lot less than that. Of course they also get health insurance. Also, this doesn't appear to be seeking a student.

Edited to add: We pay their tuition, too.

It's also possible, for example, that they don't actually want people with work experience doing these things and would settle for folks who are decent at them but have so far only done these activities as a hobby/self-training exercise. If that's the case, then $36k/yr might be OK, and it might be a good opportunity for someone to get these skills on their resume for a later job search in a relevant industry. If that's what they're really looking for, they should state it as such. Otherwise, I remain highly skeptical of the position.