pnrjulius

I use a lot of emphasis in this comment; I want it to be clear that I am not angry---I am on the verge of despair. I am trying to understand how I can actually achieve something with my life after years of repeated failure, and your advice has not helped me in that endeavor, either because I don't understand it, or because it simply doesn't work.

This comment is not a rant. This comment is a desperate cry for help.

It has been 14 years since I wrote that post. I still haven't published that book.

By my own rights, I failed. Catastrophically. Years of my life... (read more)

It's wild that they genuinely seem to believe this is not a fast pace of development. I can't really wrap my head around that. It's so obviously untrue. This is the fastest-advancing technology in human history. #6 is also a dangerous belief to be confident about; it might be basically correct, but if it's wrong, it could be catastrophically wrong.

But other than that, I mostly agree with these students: AI is bad. We should never have let it get this far. The people who currently control it are corrupt, irresponsible, and psychopathically selfish. There i... (read more)

I am going to do something completely crazy and probably useless, but I nonetheless feel morally compelled to at least try it. I am going to try to talk you out of this entire project. I do not expect to succeed at such a quixotic endeavor; rather, I hope to at least put a little bit more doubt into the minds of at least a few of the people involved, in the hopes that this will eventually propagate forward into making a better future for humanity.

Liberal eugenics is better than regular eugenics, BUT IT IS STILL VERY, VERY BAD.

I absolutely do NOT believe in... (read more)

This question is broader than just AI. Economic growth is closely tied to technological advancement, and technological advancement in general carries great risks and great benefits.

Consider nuclear weapons, for instance: Was humanity ready for them? They are now something that could destroy us at any time. But on the other hand, they might be the solution to an oncoming asteroid, which could have destroyed us for millions of years.

Likewise, nanotechnology could create a grey goo event that kills us all; or it could lead to a world without poverty, without... (read more)

Well, ultimately, that was sort of the collective strategy the world used, wasn't it? (Not quite; a lot of low-level Nazis were pardoned after the war.)

And you can't ignore the collective action, now can you?

It's more a relative thing---"not quite as extremely biased towards academia as the average group of this level of intellectual orientation can be expected to be".

If so, then we're actually more rational right? Because we're not biased against academia as most people are, and aren't biased toward academia as most academics are.

It's not quite so dire. You can't do experiments from home usually, but you can interpret experiments from home thanks to Internet publication of results. So a lot of theoretical work in almost every field can be done from outside academia.

otherwise we would see an occasional example of someone making a significant discovery outside academia.

Should we all place bets now that it will be Eliezer?

Negative selection may be good, actually, for the vast majority of people who are ultimately going to be mediocre.

It seems like it may hurt the occasional genius... but then again, there are a lot more people who think they are geniuses than really are geniuses.

In treating broken arms? Minimal difference.

In discovering new nanotechnology that will revolutionize the future of medicine? Literally all the difference in the world.

I think a lot of people don't like using percentiles because they are zero-sum: Exactly 25% of the class is in the top 25%, regardless of whether everyone in the class is brilliant or everyone in the class is an idiot.

Well, you want some negative selection: Choose dating partners from among the set who are unlikely to steal your money, assault you, or otherwise ruin your life.

This is especially true for women, for whom the risk of being raped is considerably higher and obviously worth negative selecting against.

I don't think it's quite true that "fail once, fail forever", but the general point is valid that our selection process is too much about weeding-out rather than choosing the best. Also, academic doesn't seem to be very good at the negative selection that would make sense, e.g. excluding people who are likely to commit fraud or who have fundamentally anti-scientific values. (Otherwise, how can you explain how Duane Gish made it through Berkeley?)

I'm saying that the truth is not so horrifying that it will cause you to go into depression.

This is what I hope and desire to be true. But what I'm asking for here is evidence that this is the case, to counteract the evidence from depressive realism that would seem to say that no, actually the world is so terrible that depression is the only rational response.

What reason do we have to think that the world doesn't suck?

Politico, PolitiFact, FactCheck.org

The mutilation of male genitals in question is ridiculous in itself but hardly equivalent to the kind of mutilation done to female genitals.

Granted. Female mutilation is often far more severe.

But I think it's interesting that when the American Academy of Pediatrics proposed allowing female circumcision that really just was circumcision, i.e. cutting of the clitoral hood, people were still outraged. And so we see that even when the situation is made symmetrical, there persists what we can only call female privilege in this circumstance.

I know with 99% probability that the item on top of your computer monitor is not Jupiter or the Statue of Liberty. And a major piece of information that leads me to that conclusion is... you guessed it, the circumference of Jupiter and the height of the Statue of Liberty. So there you go, this "irrelevant" information actually does narrow my probability estimates just a little bit.

Not a lot. But we didn't say it was good evidence, just that it was, in fact, evidence.

(Pedantic: You could have a model of Jupiter or Liberty on top of your computer, but that's not the same thing as having the actual thing.)

The statistical evidence is that liberalism, especially social liberalism, is positively correlated with intelligence. This does not prove that liberalism is correct; but it does provide some mild evidence in that direction.

It's a subtle matter, but... you clearly don't really mean determinism here, because you've said a hundred times before how the universe is ultimately deterministic even at the quantum level.

Maybe predictability is the word we want. Or maybe it's something else, like fairness or "moral non-neutrality"; it doesn't seem fair that Hitler could have that large an impact by himself, even though there's nothing remotely non-deterministic about that assertion.

Yes, think about how none of us would ever have discovered Less Wrong if we never fucked around on the Internet.

This is not to say that we don't fuck around on the Internet more than we should, which I think I probably do and I wouldn't be surprised if most of you do as well.