[Link] Review of "Doing Good Better"

0 fortyeridania 26 September 2015 07:58AM

The article is here.

The book is by William MacAskill, founder of 80000 Hours and Giving What We Can. Excerpt:

Effective altruism takes up the spirit of Singer’s argument but shields us from the full blast of its conclusion; moral indictment is transformed into an empowering investment opportunity...

Either effective altruism, like utilitarianism, demands that we do the most good possible, or it asks merely that we try to make things better. The first thought is genuinely radical, requiring us to overhaul our daily lives in ways unimaginable to most...The second thought – that we try to make things better – is shared by every plausible moral system and every decent person. If effective altruism is simply in the business of getting us to be more effective when we try to help others, then it’s hard to object to it. But in that case it’s also hard to see what it’s offering in the way of fresh moral insight, still less how it could be the last social movement we’ll ever need.

[LINK] Amanda Knox exonerated

9 fortyeridania 28 March 2015 06:15AM

Here are the New York Times, CNN, and NBC. Here is Wikipedia for background.

The case has made several appearances on LessWrong; examples include:

[Link] How to see into the future (Financial Times)

6 fortyeridania 07 September 2014 06:04AM

How to see into the future, by Tim Harford

The article may be gated. (I have a subscription through my school.)

It is mainly about two things: the differing approaches to forecasting taken by Irving Fisher, John Maynard Keynes, and Roger Babson; and Philip Tetlock's Good Judgment Project.

Key paragraph:

So what is the secret of looking into the future? Initial results from the Good Judgment Project suggest the following approaches. First, some basic training in probabilistic reasoning helps to produce better forecasts. Second, teams of good forecasters produce better results than good forecasters working alone. Third, actively open-minded people prosper as forecasters.

 

But the Good Judgment Project also hints at why so many experts are such terrible forecasters. It’s not so much that they lack training, teamwork and open-mindedness – although some of these qualities are in shorter supply than others. It’s that most forecasters aren’t actually seriously and single-mindedly trying to see into the future. If they were, they’d keep score and try to improve their predictions based on past errors. They don’t.

LINK: "This novel epigenetic clock can be used to address a host of questions in developmental biology, cancer and aging research."

4 fortyeridania 22 October 2013 07:59AM

The paper is called DNA methylation age and human tissues and cell types and it's from Genome Biology. Here is a Nature article based on the paper.

I have submitted this to LW because of its relevance to the measurement of aging and, hence, to life extension. Here is a bit from the Nature piece:

"Ageing is a major health problem, and interestingly there are really no objective measures of aging, other than a verified birth date," says Darryl Shibata, a pathologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. "Studies like this one provide important new efforts to increase the rigour of human aging studies."

Note: The discrepancy in spelling ("ageing" vs. "aging") is in the original.

[link] Betting on bad futures

20 fortyeridania 22 September 2012 03:50PM

Garett Jones, an economist at George Mason University and guest blogger for EconLog, suggests a way for people to bet on apocalyptic events:

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/09/how_to_bet_on_b.html

The basic idea:

Suppose Alice and Bob disagree on whether the world will end a year from tomorrow, with Alice believing it will end. If she is right, then there will be no way to settle the bet, what with the apocalypse and all that. Thus there is no way for her to collect, and so she has no incentive to bet on the apocalypse, no matter how certain she is.

Or so it would seem! The way around the difficulty is simply for Alice to get her money today, and enjoy it for a year. If she turns out to have been right, then she will have been paid properly. If the world doesn't end, then of course she'll have to return the money, plus interest--plus a penalty for being wrong.

The actual terms should depend on the confidence Alice and Bob place in their respective positions.

Personal note: Several people at my place of work have told me that they are worried about the world ending later this year. They saw a movie about it, or something. So far, they have rejected my bet proposals.

[link] One-question survey from Robin Hanson

-3 fortyeridania 07 September 2012 11:35PM

As many of you probably know, Robin Hanson is writing a book, and it will be geared toward a popular audience. He wants a term that encompasses both humans and AI, so he's soliciting your opinions on the matter. Here's the link: http://www.quicksurveys.com/tqsruntime.aspx?surveyData=AYtdr2WMwCzB981F0qkivSNwbj1tn+xvU6rnauc83iU=

H/T Bryan Caplan at EconLog.

Robot ethics [link]

3 fortyeridania 01 June 2012 03:43PM

The Economist has a new article on ethical dilemmas faced by machine designers.

Evidently:

1. In the event of an immoral decision by a machine, neural networks make it too hard to know who is at fault--the programmer, the operator, the manufacturer, or the designer. Thus, neural networks might be a bad idea.

2. Robots' ethical systems ought to resonate with "most people."

3. Proper robot consciences are more likely to arise given greater collaboration among engineers, ethicists, policymakers, and lawyers. Key quotation:

Both ethicists and engineers stand to benefit from working together: ethicists may gain a greater understanding of their field by trying to teach ethics to machines, and engineers need to reassure society that they are not taking any ethical short-cuts.

The second clause of the above sentence is quite similar to something Yudkowsky wrote, perhaps more than once, about the value of approaching ethics from an AI standpoint. I do not recall where he wrote it, nor did my search turn up the appropriate post.

[link] New Scientist, on the distant future

1 fortyeridania 07 March 2012 10:15AM

The magazine has a bunch of articles dealing with what the world may be like 98,000 years hence. What with the local interest in the distant future, and with prediction itself, I thought I'd bring it to your attention.

http://www.newscientist.com/special/deep-future?cmpid=NLC|NSNS|2012-0503-GLOBAL|deepfuture&utm_medium=NLC&utm_source=NSNS&utm_content=deepfuture

[link] Admitting errors (in meteorology)

9 fortyeridania 16 December 2011 05:21PM

From Cafe Hayek (original): Two meteorologists have announced that they will stop using certain forecast methods, even though they've used them for 20 years.

There's a correction at the end of the article, too!

Russ Roberts and Gary Taubes on confirmation bias [podcast]

4 fortyeridania 04 December 2011 05:51AM

Here is the link. The context is nutritional science and epidemiology, but confirmation bias is the primary theme pumping throughout the discussion. Gary Taubes has gained a reputation for contrarianism.* According to Taubes, the current nutritional paradigm (fat is bad, exercise is good, carbs are OK) does not deserve high credibility.

Roberts brings up the role of identity in perpetuating confirmation bias--a hypothesis has become part of you, so it has become that much harder to countenance contrary evidence. In this context they also talk about theism (Roberts is Jewish, while Taubes is an atheist). And, the program being EconTalk, Roberts draws analogies with economics.

*Sometime between 45 and 50 minutes in, Roberts points out that given this reputation, Taubes is susceptible to belief distortion as well:

What's your evidence that you are not just falling prey to the Ancel Keys and other folks who have made the same mistake?

I do not think Taubes gives a direct answer.

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