Louie

What I've learned from Less Wrong

Related to: Goals for which Less Wrong does (and doesn’t) help I've been compiling a list of the top things I’ve learned from Less Wrong in the past few months. If you’re new here or haven’t been here since the beginning of this blog, perhaps my personal experience from reading the back-log of articles known as the sequences can introduce you to some of the more useful insights you might get from reading and using Less Wrong. 1. Things can be correct - Seriously, I forgot. For the past ten years or so, I politely agreed with the “deeply wise” convention that truth could never really be determined or that it might not really exist or that if it existed anywhere at all, it was only in the consensus of human opinion. I think I went this route because being sloppy here helped me “fit in” better with society. It’s much easier to be egalitarian and respect everyone when you can always say “Well, I suppose that might be right -- you never know!” 2. Beliefs are for controlling anticipation (Not for being interesting) - I think in the past, I looked to believe surprising, interesting things whenever I could get away with the results not mattering too much. Also, in a desire to be exceptional, I naïvely reasoned that believing similar things to other smart people would probably get me the same boring life outcomes that many of them seemed to be getting... so I mostly tried to have extra random beliefs in order to give myself a better shot at being the most amazingly successful and awesome person I could be. 3. Most peoples' beliefs aren’t worth considering - Since I’m no longer interested in collecting interesting “beliefs” to show off how fascinating I am or give myself better odds of out-doing others, it no longer makes sense to be a meme collecting, universal egalitarian the same way I was before. This includes dropping the habit of seriously considering all others’ improper beliefs that don’t tell me what to anticipate and are only there for sounding interesting or sm

116Nov 20, 2010

Louie

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Young Americans believe they have the best health in the world...

Of course, it turns out they're actually last among developed nations in real health outcomes. > The U.S. ranks #1 among 17 affluent, western countries in the percentage of people aged 5 to 34 who rate their health as good. Unfortunately, when doctors look at people’s actual health, at indicators...

Feb 4, 20134

Course recommendations for Friendliness researchers

When I first learned about Friendly AI, I assumed it was mostly a programming problem. As it turns out, it's actually mostly a math problem. That's because most of the theory behind self-reference, decision theory, and general AI techniques haven't been formalized and solved yet. Thus, when people ask me...

Jan 9, 201396

Bounding the impact of AGI

For those of you interested, András Kornai's paper "Bounding the impact of AGI" from this year's AGI-Impacts conference at Oxford had a few interesting ideas (which I've excerpted below). Summary: 1. Acceptable risk tolerances for AGI design can be determined using standard safety engineering techniques from other fields 2. Mathematical...

Dec 18, 201227

LessWrong podcasts

Today we're announcing a partnership with Castify to bring you Less Wrong content in audio form. Castify gets blog content read by professional readers and delivers it to their subscribers as a podcast so that you can listen to Less Wrong on the go. The founders of Castify are big...

Dec 3, 201253

New WBE implementation

It usually isn't profitable to pay attention to science news, since science journalists largely misintrepret new "breakthroughs". But I am somewhat interested in this story about "artificial brains" coming out of Canada. Most large neuron simulations I've read about before don't actually do anything. But apparently there's a somewhat large...

Nov 30, 201227

Sign up to be notified about new LW meetups in your area

LessWrong has rolled out a new feature on the user preference pages under "Location": This is UNCHECKED by default. Also, we don't know by default where you live. If you think you might want to meet up with other LWers, please input your location and check this box. Once enough...

Nov 3, 201248

The Singularity Institute is hiring an executive assistant near Berkeley

The Singularity Institute is hiring an executive assistant for Executive Director Luke Muehlhauser. Right now his limiter (besides the need for some sleep and recreation) is not (1) cognitive exhaustion after a certain number of hours or (2) akrasia, but instead (3) needing to spend lots of time doing things...

Jan 22, 201224

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Louie

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What I've learned from Less Wrong

How to Save the World

96 Bad Links in the Sequences [fixed]

Course recommendations for Friendliness researchers

Louie

Young Americans believe they have the best health in the world...

Course recommendations for Friendliness researchers

Bounding the impact of AGI

LessWrong podcasts

New WBE implementation

Sign up to be notified about new LW meetups in your area

The Singularity Institute is hiring an executive assistant near Berkeley

What I've learned from Less Wrong

How to Save the World

96 Bad Links in the Sequences [fixed]

Course recommendations for Friendliness researchers

Young Americans believe they have the best health in the world...

Course recommendations for Friendliness researchers

Bounding the impact of AGI

LessWrong podcasts

New WBE implementation

Sign up to be notified about new LW meetups in your area

The Singularity Institute is hiring an executive assistant near Berkeley