bokov

Replying toThe Rise of Parasitic AI

bokov5mo

The Rise of Parasitic AI

Here is what you can do to make your post better:

At the top put a very short, concise TLDR with NO IMAGES.
More data. It sounds like you did a pretty rigorous deep-dive into this stuff. Instead of making assertions like "These projects usually take one of a few forms ..." or "There appears to be almost nothing in this general pattern before January 2025" show the raw data! I get that you need to protect the privacy of the posters, but you could at least have a scrubbed table with date, anonymized user IDs, name of subreddit, and maybe tags corresponding to various features you described in your piece. Or at least

... (read more)

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Replying toThe Rise of Parasitic AI

bokov5mo

The Rise of Parasitic AI

Um, it is, isn't it?

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Replying toOpen thread, Nov. 16 - Nov. 22, 2015

bokov10y

Open thread, Nov. 16 - Nov. 22, 2015

I agree. My reason for posting the link here is as reality check-- LW seems to be full of people firmly convinced that brain-uploading is the only only viable path to preserving consciousness, as if the implementation "details" were an almost-solved problem.

Replying toOpen thread, Nov. 16 - Nov. 22, 2015

bokov10y

Open thread, Nov. 16 - Nov. 22, 2015

Finally, someone with a clue about biology tells it like it is about brain uploading

http://mathbabe.org/2015/10/20/guest-post-dirty-rant-about-the-human-brain-project/

In reading this, suggest being on guard against own impulse to find excuses to dismiss the arguments presented because they call into question some beliefs that seem to be deeply held by many in this community.

Replying toSeeking geeks interested in bioinformatics

bokov11y

Seeking geeks interested in bioinformatics

It depends. Writing a paper is not a realtime activity. Answering a free-response question can be. Proving a complex theorem is not a realtime activity, solving a basic math problem can be. It's a matter of calibrating the question difficulty so that is can be answered within the (soft) time-limits of an interview. Part of that calibration is letting the applicant "choose their weapon". Another part of it is letting them use the internet to look up anything they need to.

Our lead dev has passed this test, as has my summer grad student. There are two applicants being called back for second interviews (but the position is still open and it is not too late) who passed during their first interviews. Just to make sure, I first gave it to my 14 year old son and he nailed it in under half an hour.

Replying toSeeking geeks interested in bioinformatics

bokov11y

Seeking geeks interested in bioinformatics

Correct, this is a staff programmer posting. Not faculty or post-doc (though when/if we do open a post-doc position, we'll be doing coding tests for that also, due to recent experiences).

Replying toSeeking geeks interested in bioinformatics

bokov11y

Seeking geeks interested in bioinformatics

Having a track-record of contributions github/bitbucket/sourceforge/rforge would be a very strong qualification. However, few applicants have this. It's a less stringent requirement that they at least show that they can... you know... program.

Seeking geeks interested in bioinformatics

bokov

11y

I work at a small but feisty research team whose focus is biomedical informatics, i.e. mining biomedical data. Especially anonymized hospital records pooled over multiple healthcare networks. My personal interest is ultimately life-extension, and my colleagues are warming up to the idea as well. But the short-term goal that will be useful many different research areas is building infrastructure to massively accelerate hypothesis testing on and modelling of retrospective human data.

We have a job posting here (permanent, non-faculty, full-time, benefits):

https://www.uthscsajobs.com/postings/3113

If you can program, want to work in an academic research setting, and can relocate to San Antonio, TX, I invite you to apply. Thanks.

Note: The first step of the recruitment process will... (read more)

Replying toStuart Russell: AI value alignment problem must be an "intrinsic part" of the field's mainstream agenda

bokov11y

Stuart Russell: AI value alignment problem must be an "intrinsic part" of the field's mainstream agenda

it's not strictly an AI problem-- any sufficiently rapid optimization process bears the risk of irretrievably converging on an optimum nobody likes before anybody can intervene with an updated optimization target.

individual and property rights are not rigorously specified enough to be a sufficient safeguard against bad outcomes even in an economy moving at human speeds

in other words the science of getting what we ask for advances faster than the science of figuring out what to ask for

A hypothetical question for investors

bokov

11y

Let's suppose you start with $1000 to invest, and the only thing you can invest it in is stock ABC. You are only permitted to occupy two states:

* All assets in cash

* All assets in stock ABC

You incur a $2 transaction fee every time you buy or sell.

Kind of annoying limitations to operate under. But you have a powerful advantage as well. You have a perfect crystal ball that each day gives you the [probability density function](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_density_function) of ABC's closing price for the following day (but no further ahead in time).

What would be an optimal decision rule for when to buy and sell?

Replying toRequest for suggestions: ageing and data-mining

bokov11y

Request for suggestions: ageing and data-mining

(Note that transforming a sufficiently well specified statistical model into a lossless data compressor is a solved problem, and the solution is called arithmetic encoding - I can give you my implementation, or you can find one on the web.

The unsolved problems are the ones hiding behind the token "sufficiently well specified statistical model".

That said, thanks for the pointer to arithmetic encoding, that may be useful in the future.

Replying toRequest for suggestions: ageing and data-mining

bokov11y

Request for suggestions: ageing and data-mining

The point isn't understanding Bayes theorem. The point is methods that use Bayes theorem. My own statistics prof said that a lot of medical people don't use Bayes because it usually leads to more complicated math.

To me, the biggest problem with Bayes theorem or any other fundamental statistical concept, frequentist or not, is adapting it to specific, complex, real-life problems and finding ways to test its validity under real-world constraints. This tends to require a thorough understanding of both statistics and the problem domain.

That's not the skill that's taught in a statistics degree.

Not explicitly, no. My only evidence is anecdotal. The statisticians and programmers I've talked to appear to overall... (read more)

Request for suggestions: ageing and data-mining

bokov

11y

Imagine you had the following at your disposal:

A Ph.D. in a biological science, with a fair amount of reading and wet-lab work under your belt on the topic of aging and longevity (but in hindsight, nothing that turned out to leverage any real mechanistic insights into aging).
A M.S. in statistics. Sadly, the non-Bayesian kind for the most part, but along the way acquired the meta-skills necessary to read and understand most quantitative papers with life-science applications.
Love of programming and data, the ability to learn most new computer languages in a couple of weeks, and at least 8 years spent hacking R code.
Research access to large amounts of anonymized patient data.
Optimistically, two decades

... (read 339 more words →)

Blind Spot: Malthusian Crunch

bokov

12y

In an unrelated thread, one thing led to another and we got onto the subject of overpopulation and carrying capacity. I think this topic needs a post of its own.

TLDR mathy version:

let f(m,t) be the population that can be supported using the fraction of Earth's theoretical resource limit m we can exploit at technology level t

let t = k(x) be the technology level at year x

let p(x) be population at year x

What conditions must constant m and functions f(m,k(x)), k(x), and p(x) satisfy in order to insure that p(x) - f(m,t) > 0 for all x > today()? What empirical data are relevant to estimating the probability that... (read 832 more words →)

185

US default as a risk to mitigate

bokov

12y

Update: Thanks everyone for the continuing thought-provoking discussion. I intend to post my decision spreadsheet, and still am looking for suggestions on where to do so. It might come in handy come February. A discussion that I find interesting has branched off on the topic of technological progress versus Malthusian Crunch, and I started a new article on that over here.

I would like to kick off a discussion about optimal strategies to prepare for the event that the US government fails to raise the debt ceiling before the US Treasury Department's "extraordinary measures" are exhausted, which is estimated to happen sometime between October 17th and mid-November.

This is a risk *caused* by politics,... (read 291 more words →)

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Rationalizing: looking for the wrong kind of loopholes

bokov

12y

This morning I found what I think is an interesting way to explain rationalizing to my son, and I thought I'd share it:

Physical reality has rules that you can game to your advantage (natural laws).
People have another set of rules that you can game to your advantage (preferences, biases, cultural norms).
Rationalization is when you are trying to overcome an obstacle based in physical reality by trying to game human rules.

Two subsequent thoughts that ocurred to me:

If you're rationalizing-- the magic excuse fairy might not be there to hear you, but your subconsciousness is. And you will often convince your subconsciousness... to believe that the problem you're trying to solve is impossible, that

bokov

12y

Let's say Bob's terminal value is to travel back in time and ride a dinosaur.

It is instrumentally rational for Bob to study physics so he can learn how to build a time machine. As he learns more physics, Bob realizes that his terminal value is not only utterly impossible but meaningless. By definition, someone in Bob's past riding a dinosaur is not a future evolution of the present Bob.

There are a number of ways to create the subjective experience of having gone into the past and ridden a dinosaur. But to Bob, it's not the same because he wanted both the subjective experience and the knowledge that it corresponded to objective fact.... (read more)

Patternist friendly AI risk

bokov

12y

It seems to me that most AI researchers on this site are patternists in the sense of believing that the anti-zombie principle necessarily implies:

1. That it will ever become possible *in practice* to create uploads or sims that are close enough to our physical instantiations that their utility to us would be interchangeable with that of our physical instantiations.

2. That we know (or will know) enough about the brain to know when this threshold is reached.

But, like any rationalists extrapolating from unknown unknowns... or heck, extrapolating from anything... we must admit that one or both of the above statements could be wrong without also making friendly AI impossible. What would be the... (read 258 more words →)

Supposing you inherited an AI project...

bokov

12y

Supposing you have been recruited to be the main developer on an AI project. The previous developer died in a car crash and left behind an unfinished AI. It consists of:

A. A thoroughly documented scripting language specification that appears to be capable of representing any real-life program as a network diagram so long as you can provide the following:

A.1. A node within the network whose value you want to maximize or minimize.

A.2. Conversion modules that transform data about the real-world phenomena your network represents into a form that the program can read.

B. Source code from which a program can be compiled that will read scripts in the above language. The program outputs... (read more)

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LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

Seeking geeks interested in bioinformatics

What makes us think _any_ of our terminal values aren't based on a misunderstanding of reality?

Request for suggestions: ageing and data-mining

Rationalizing: looking for the wrong kind of loopholes

bokov

Seeking geeks interested in bioinformatics

A hypothetical question for investors

Request for suggestions: ageing and data-mining

Blind Spot: Malthusian Crunch

US default as a risk to mitigate

Rationalizing: looking for the wrong kind of loopholes

What makes us think _any_ of our terminal values aren't based on a misunderstanding of reality?

bokov

Seeking geeks interested in bioinformatics

What makes us think _any_ of our terminal values aren't based on a misunderstanding of reality?

Request for suggestions: ageing and data-mining

Rationalizing: looking for the wrong kind of loopholes

bokov

Seeking geeks interested in bioinformatics

A hypothetical question for investors

Request for suggestions: ageing and data-mining

Blind Spot: Malthusian Crunch

US default as a risk to mitigate

Rationalizing: looking for the wrong kind of loopholes

What makes us think _any_ of our terminal values aren't based on a misunderstanding of reality?