Comment author: magfrump 06 January 2014 07:23:16PM 0 points [-]

My parents did this when I was a kid (or at least I specifically remember my mom doing it a lot) and I turned out great! </humblebrag>

In response to Fascists and Rakes
Comment author: magfrump 06 January 2014 07:20:44PM 7 points [-]

I think this post would have been stronger without any use of the term fascism, and then you also could have left out the term "rakes."

The title could be "Permissiveness and Harm" or something like that. You only even use the titular terms a few times, more than three quarters of the way through the article.

Comment author: [deleted] 26 October 2013 09:11:30AM 3 points [-]

I would still call it "intelligence" by Eliezer's definition: ability to optimize the universe, or at least some small slice of it.

IIRC the optimization power has to be cross-domain according to his definition, otherwise Deep Blue would count as intelligent.

In response to comment by [deleted] on What should normal people do?
Comment author: magfrump 26 October 2013 07:13:02PM 3 points [-]

That doesn't seem to count as a problem with the above definition. Taboo "intelligent." Is Deep Blue an optimizing process that successfully optimizes a small part of the universe?

Yes.

Is it an optimizing process that should count as sentient for the purposes of having legal rights? Should we be worried about it taking over the world?

No.

Comment author: orthonormal 23 September 2013 07:45:27PM 0 points [-]

Overall I still have no understanding of theorem 5.1 though. I'm not terribly familiar with the field in general but the other proofs were still fairly straightforward, whereas this proof loses me in the first sentence, without referencing a result I can look up either inside or outside of the paper.

Were you OK with the proof of Theorem 4.1? To me, that and the proof of Theorem 5.1 are of equal difficulty. (Some of the other authors had more experience with Kripke semantics than I did, so they did most of the editing of those proofs. They work better with diagrams.)

orthonormal seems to believe that PrudentBot couldn't be implemented for the LessWrong PD competition, although he did say with algorithmic proof search, would he change his opinion using Kripke semantics?

Yes; a PD tournament among modal sentences using the code Eliezer linked would be feasible and quite interesting!

Comment author: magfrump 09 October 2013 05:47:01PM 0 points [-]

I would say that "I am surprised that the bots have not been submitted to a PD tournament" but then I saw the paper was published in May and that's less than 6 months ago so instead I'll make the (silly, easy-to-self-fulfill) prediction that many or all of those bots will show up in the next PD tourney.

Comment author: orthonormal 23 September 2013 07:45:27PM 0 points [-]

Overall I still have no understanding of theorem 5.1 though. I'm not terribly familiar with the field in general but the other proofs were still fairly straightforward, whereas this proof loses me in the first sentence, without referencing a result I can look up either inside or outside of the paper.

Were you OK with the proof of Theorem 4.1? To me, that and the proof of Theorem 5.1 are of equal difficulty. (Some of the other authors had more experience with Kripke semantics than I did, so they did most of the editing of those proofs. They work better with diagrams.)

orthonormal seems to believe that PrudentBot couldn't be implemented for the LessWrong PD competition, although he did say with algorithmic proof search, would he change his opinion using Kripke semantics?

Yes; a PD tournament among modal sentences using the code Eliezer linked would be feasible and quite interesting!

Comment author: magfrump 09 October 2013 05:45:58PM 0 points [-]

To the first point: I guess I'm not really comfortable with the proof of Theorem 4.1, per se, however the result seems incredibly intuitive to me. The choice of symbol/possible LaTeX error where one of the symbols is a square is confusing, and looking at it again three weeks later (I have not been on LW recently) I've forgotten too much of the notation to review it in depth in two to five minutes.

But I see Theorem 4.1 as the statement that "you can't stop someone from punishing you for something unless you think at a higher level than they do" and I assume that there exists a proof of that statement, and that the proof provided is such a proof.

I see Theorem 5.1 as saying that some set is compact for some reason and that implies existence of something for some reason, but I don't know why the thing is compact or why the desired object is the limit of the the things we constructed in the right way.

Although again it's been a while so I could be misremembering here.

Comment author: Nisan 17 September 2013 12:52:08AM 1 point [-]

That was a response to

Is there a good (easy) reference for the statement about quining in PA

Comment author: magfrump 09 October 2013 05:34:15PM 0 points [-]

Let me rephrase my question, then, because the diagonal lemma seems clear enough to me. What is a good definition of quining? The term isn't used at all either in the article you linked or it the page on self-reference, which surprised me.

Comment author: Nisan 16 September 2013 02:35:06PM 2 points [-]

On quining in arithmetic, see any exposition on Gödel's First Incompleteness Theorem and the Wikipedia article on the diagonal lemma.

Comment author: magfrump 17 September 2013 12:21:04AM 0 points [-]

I am unsure which of my questions this is supposed to answer, although perhaps that will become clear on reading the wikipedia article.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 12 September 2013 10:58:56AM *  24 points [-]

One way that the banking crisis is similar to AGI, and not in a way that cheers me up, is that people were making money in the lead-up-- they didn't want it to be over because they were riding the boom. Coming up with near-AGI-- self-improving programs which aren't very generalized-- is going to be very advantageous.

Comment author: magfrump 16 September 2013 03:42:14AM 1 point [-]

Also the ways they were making money were very technical, so people with technical skillsets that might be useful in mitigating risk were drawn in to making money rather than risk mitigation.

Comment author: magfrump 16 September 2013 01:55:59AM 3 points [-]

I'm coming to this quite late, and these are the notes I wrote as I read the paper, before reading the comments, followed by my notes in the comments.

Has any of the (roughest) analysis been done to bound proving time for PrudentBot? It should be fairly trivial to get very bad bounds and if those are not so bad that seems like a worthwhile thing to know (although what does "not so bad" really mean I guess is a problem.)

Is there a good (easy) reference for the statement about quining in PA (on page 6 below CliqueBot)? Under modal agents Kleene's recursion algorithm is mentioned; should probably be mentioned at first use rather than second?

The proof of theorem 5.1 is losing me where other proofs didn't; I don't understand how minimality of modal rank gives other results.

Reading the comments to answer some of my own questions: orthonormal seems to believe that PrudentBot couldn't be implemented for the LessWrong PD competition, although he did say with algorithmic proof search, would he change his opinion using Kripke semantics?

Vaniver's comment seems like a promising way of thinking about how to identify TrollBots. Or at least, the most promising thing about it I've seen; has this been pursued any further? Perhaps as a possibly-answerable question: call a bot a troll if it can't survive in a population with only itself or only itself and CB and DB (since these are the simplest bots to describe). I'll also note that PseudoTitForTatBot seems like an interesting basic candidate to play against; or say "TimeLimitTitForTatBot" which plays tit for tat until the time limit is near, so no single N can always fool it. Is there a way to (modally; if that is the right word for not-by-quoting-source-code) defeat TLTFTB?

Overall I still have no understanding of theorem 5.1 though. I'm not terribly familiar with the field in general but the other proofs were still fairly straightforward, whereas this proof loses me in the first sentence, without referencing a result I can look up either inside or outside of the paper. Was this written by a different person/at a different time from the rest of the paper? The second sentence is less bad than the first but still worse than the entire rest of the paper.

In response to comment by novalis on Why Eat Less Meat?
Comment author: peter_hurford 23 July 2013 10:28:20PM 14 points [-]

This essay's thesis is that we should eat less meat, but its evidence is only that factory-farmed meat is a problem.

I only think factory-farmed meat is the problem. I use "eat less meat" as a shorthand, since nearly all meat is factory-farmed meat.

~

The coop where I buy my meat says (pdf) that it buys only "humanely and sustainably raised" meat and poultry

I definitely agree it's better to buy "humanely raised" meat and poultry than not "humanely raised" meat/poultry. And perhaps you have found a trustworthy source.

But be careful of why I put "humanely raised" in quotes -- many such operations are not actually humane. Cage-free is much better than not cage-free, but conditions are still pretty bad. Free-range is better than not free-range, but just legally requires the animal be allowed to stay outside. There are no legal restrictions on the quality of the outside section, how long they can stay outside, or crowding. Vegan Outreach has more information.

~

I might stop eating most of the factory-farmed meat that I eat. It would simply mean never eating out at non-frou-frou places. The exception would be dealing with non-local family (for local family, I could simply bring meat from the coop to share).

That sounds like an excellent idea!

Comment author: magfrump 26 July 2013 09:02:04PM 1 point [-]

How much value would this conversion have relative to vegetarianism?

For example, I recently changed to only buying grass-fed beef (in part for health/taste reasons); how much humane value would you think that has relative to replacing my beef with whatever else?

What about replacing eggs with cage free or free range eggs versus a vegan replacement?

View more: Next