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You can also join our Facebook group.
Don't forget the mailing list, too.
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Meetup : Helsinki LW meetup
I hate mailing lists. Are there many people on it that are not on e.g. fb? Language subreddits or [lang] tagged threads here if wanted?
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on
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 24, chapter 95
I think probably the latter. His conclusion is "So you really do care" not "So other people aren't rational enough to try to ressurect their loved ones."
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comment
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on
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 24, chapter 95
From "So you do really care" and his well-established view that most people are painfully stupid, he should deduce also the latter, as it is more unlikely that Harry is both exceptionally rational and exceptionally caring unless he has a reason to believe that the former causes or at least strongly correlates with the latter.
Then again, someone who has a low opinion of others' intelligence should already believe that others are not rational enough to seek resurrection, even if they cared to want it.
In response to
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on
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 16, chapter 85
As soon as I saw the stable time loop in HPMOR, I thought, "Oh, they're all in a simulation."
In response to
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on
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 16, chapter 85
I think a simulation (Y) is a process of mimicking something else (X). In which case we should not observe in Y something (Z) that couldn't happen in X.
So maybe we should rather say that Y is a game with otherwise X-like rules, but additional rules that allow Z, rather than calling it simulation. Or at least I think if "simulation" Y is not an accurate simulation of X, we should use some explicit qualifier to indicate its non-accuracy.
FWIW, I estimate that I spend 5-15 minutes every day dealing with spam on the existing LessWrong wiki and dealing with collateral damage from autoblocks, which would be ~3 hours a month; I don't even try to review edits by regular users. That doesn't seem to be included in your estimate of maintenance cost.
- 1,920 hours of SI staff time (80 hrs/week for 24 months). This comes out to about $48,000, depending on who is putting in these hours.
- $384,000 paid to remote researchers and writers ($16,000/mo for 24 months; our remote researchers generally work part-time, and are relatively inexpensive).
- $30,000 for wiki design, development, hosting costs
- Dealing with spam shouldn't be counted under "design, development and hosting".
- The first item establishes SIAI staff time cost at 25 $ / h. If the (virtual) server itself, bandwidth and technical expert maintenance is 500 $ / month, that still leaves 720 hours of SIAI staff-priced work in the "design, development and hosting" budget.
- If we roughly quadruple your time estimate to 3 hours per week to combat spam, then that still leaves 720 hours - 2 years * 52 weeks * 3 hours/week = 408 hours, which still seems excessive for "design, development and hosting" considering that we have a lot of nice relatively easily customisable wiki software available for free.
"- try pondering this one. Why does 2 + 2 come out the same way each time? Never mind the question of why the laws of physics are stable - why is logic stable? Of course I can't imagine it being any other way, but that's not an explanation."
I have recently had a thought relevant to the topic; an operation that is not stable.
In certain contexts, the operation d is used, where XdY means "take a set of X fair dice, each die having Y sides (numbered 1 to Y), and throw them; add together the numbers on the uppermost faces". Using this definition, 2d2 has value '2' 25% of the time, value '3' 50% of the time, and value '4' 25% of the time. The procedure is always identical, and so there's nothing in the process which makes any reference to time, but the result can differ (though note that 'time' is still not a parameter in that result). If the operation '+' is replaced by the operation 'd' - well, then that is one other way that can be imagined.
Edited to add: It has been pointed out that XdY is a constant probability distribution. The unstable operation to which I refer is the operation of taking a single random integer sample, in a fair manner, from that distribution.
The random is not in the dice, it is in the throw, and that procedure is never identical. Also, XdY is a distribution, always the same, and the dice are just a relatively fair way of picking a sample.
In response to
A Scholarly AI Risk Wiki
The price tag of the wiki itself sounds too high: If 1920 hours of SI staff costs USD 48000, that's USD 25/h. If hosting and maintenance is 500 / month(should be much less), over 24 months that would leave USD 18k to design and development, and at SI staff rates that would be 720 hours of work, which sounds waaay too much for setting up a relatively simple(?) wiki site
In response to
A Scholarly AI Risk Wiki
Actually, it occurs to me that my previous comment makes the case that SI should have a single logical document, kept up to date, maintaining its current case. It doesn't argue that it should be a wiki. One alternative would be to keep a book in revision control - there are doubtless others, but let me discuss this one.
Pros:
- A book has a prescribed reading order; it may be easier to take in the content if you can begin at the beginning and work forwards. This is a huge advantage - I'd upload it to the Kindles of all my friends who have given me permission.
- The book would be written in LaTeX, so it would be easier to convert parts of it to academic papers. MediaWiki format is the most awful unparseable dog's breakfast; it seems a shame to use it to create content of lasting value.
- Real revision control is utterly wonderful (eg hg, git) - what MediaWiki provides absolutely pales in comparison.
- Real revision control makes it easier for outsiders to contribute without special permissions - they just send you patches, or invite you to pull from them.
Cons:
- Mediawiki is easier to use
- People are used to wikis
- Wikis more naturally invite contribution
- Wikis don't need you to install or compile anything
- Much of the content is more wiki-like than book-like - it's not a core part of what SI are discussing but an aside about the work of others, and in a book it would probably go in an appendix.
There are several relatively mature wiki engines beside mediawiki, with different markup languages etc. The low barrier of entry for wikis, even with less familiar markup languages is a very important consideration.
This article rings very true to me:
In our experience, valuable volunteers are rare. The people who email us about volunteer opportunities generally seem enthusiastic about GiveWell’s mission, and motivated by a shared belief in our goals to give up their free time to help us. Yet, the majority of these people never complete useful work for us.
...almost 80% of people who take the initiative to seek us out and ask for unpaid work fail to complete a single assignment. But maybe this shouldn’t be surprising. Writing an email is quick and exciting; spending a few hours fixing punctuation is not.
Now, maybe you are one of the volunteers who will turn out to be productive. I already have 6-8 volunteers who are pretty productive. But given my past experience, an excited email volunteering to help provides me almost no information on whether that person will actually help.
With good collaboration tools, for many kinds of tasks testing the commitment of volunteers by putting them to work should be rather cheap to test, especially if they can be given less time-critical tasks, or tasks where they help speed up someone else's work.
Serious thought should go into looking for ways unpaid volunteers could help, since there's loads of bright people with more time and enthusiasm than money, and for whom it is much easier to put in a few hours a week than to donate equivalent money towards paid contributors' work
In response to
A Scholarly AI Risk Wiki
That 1920 h should be 24 months of 80 h/month, not 80 h / week.
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Because it seems likely that someone like Eliezer would write a magic system of the sufficiently-advanced-technology-is-indistinguishable-from-magic sense rather than the waves hands-because-magic!-waves hands sense.
Further, if souls existed, Harry would have no reason to want people to not die, which kind of breaks the story (unless I suppose there's some mechanism to kill souls, which I admit would be interesting)
Isn't AK supposed to destroy the soul?