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Just a thought on chess playing. Rather than looking at an extreme like Kasparov vs the world, it would be interesting to me to have teams of two, three, and four players of well-known individual ranking. These teams could then play many games against individuals and against each other. The effective ranking of the teams could be determined from their results. In this way, some sense of "how much smarter" a team is than the individual members could be determined. Ideally, the team would not be ranked until it had had significant experience playing as a team. We are interested in what a team could accomplish, and no strong reason to think it would take less time to optimize a team than to optimize an individual.
Along the same lines, teams could be developed to take IQ and other GI correlated tests to see how much smarter a few people together are than a single human. Would the results have implications for optimal AI design?
Does anyone play (rated) chess on freechess.org? If so, do you want to get together to play some team games for the purposes of adding hard data to this discussion?
My blitz rating is in the high 1200s. My teammate should have a blitz rating close to that to make the data valuable. I play 8-minute games, and am not interested in playing enough non-blitz games to get my rating to be an accurate reflection of my (individual) skill. (Non-blitz games would take too much time and take too much out of me. "Non-blitz" games are defined as games with at least 15 minutes on the clock for each player.)
I envision the team being co-located while playing, which limits my teammate to someone who is or will be in San Francisco or Berkeley.
I've played a little "team chess" before. Was a lot of fun.
My contact info is here.
I cringe a little every time I see someone here write, "Suppose Omega told you X," when, "Suppose X," works just as well.
Have you read the comment sections on right wing blogs? Mostly awful.
The average comment isn't too great on LW either.
This is the iron law of blogs and web forums: the quality of the average comment is always well below that of the average post.
This so-called iron law does not hold (and has never held) for Hacker News (which is 6.2 years old).
Thanks. Where should I look for that file, on a Windows XP or Vista PC or on an Android 4 tablet?
Am going to refer you to google since I do not run Windows or Android.
Unless what I have read is unusually misinformative, though, it is possible on both. (On Android you need access to root.)
The Adblock Plus add-on for Firefox and Chrome will hide viglinks.
So will adding the line
0.0.0.0 api.viglink.com
to the /etc/hosts file according to at least a couple of writings on the web.
Designed to grow fast is hard to observe. The supply of companies appearing to fit that description increases to satisfy VC demand. The money in VC funds exceeds what the few VCs who are able to recognize good startups are able to usefully invest.
Designed to grow fast is hard to observe.
Did you read the part where Paul Graham implies that a significant fraction of the startups in his program (YC) grow at a rate of 5-7% a week? I.e., every week they get 5-7% more users than they did the week before.
Yes, most of these users are non-paying users, but the experience of VCs and angel investors has been that if even one startup in an investor's portofolio manages to acquire multiple 100s of millions of non-paying users, that startup will usually eventually figure out how to make enough money to make up for all the failed startups in the portfolio.
The money in VC funds exceeds what the few VCs who are able to recognize good startups are able to usefully invest.
Agree.
it looks like there is a big premium on risk
Eric Falkenstein presents some strong evidence against this in his book Finding Alpha. Low risk equities outperform high risk equities. The difference between equity and bond returns probably reflects something other than risk.
He also claims that private equity doesn't outperform publicly traded equity (suggesting that startups aren't a good investment, although "startup" doesn't seem to be a well defined category).
That still leaves an interesting question about whether it's wise to increase risk via leverage.
"startup" doesn't seem to be a well defined category.
Here is Paul Graham's definition:
A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.
That is from http://paulgraham.com/growth.html where we also find an explanation for why startups might outperform other classes of non-publicly-traded investments. Specifically, the explanation is that startups have less need for costly financial controls to protect the interests of the investors:
The other way to get returns from an investment is in the form of dividends. Why isn't there a parallel VC industry that invests in ordinary companies in return for a percentage of their profits? Because it's too easy for people who control a private company to funnel its revenues to themselves (e.g. by buying overpriced components from a supplier they control) while making it look like the company is making little profit. Anyone who invested in private companies in return for dividends would have to pay close attention to their books. The reason VCs like to invest in startups is not simply the returns, but also because such investments are so easy to oversee. The founders can't enrich themselves without also enriching the investors.
EDIT. Fixed the URL.
I saw a related issue in a blog about a woman who lost the use of her arm due to an incorrectly treated infection. She initially complained that the judge in her disability case didn't even look at the arm, but then was pleasantly surprised to have the ruling turn out in favor anyway.
I realized: of course the judge wouldn't look at her arm. Having done disability cases before, the judge should know that gruesome appearance correlates weakly, if at all, with legitimate disability, but the emotional response is likely to throw off evaluation of things like an actual doctor's report on the subject. Holden, similarly, is willing to admit that there are things about AI he personally doesn't know, but that professionals who have studied the field for decades do know, and is further willing to trust those professionals to be minimally competent.
I have enough experience of legal and adminstrative disability hearings to say that each side always has medical experts on its side unless one side is unwilling or unable to pay for the testimony of at least one medical expert.
In almost all sufficiently important decisions, there are experts on both sides of the issue. And pointing out that one side has more experts or more impressive experts carries vastly less weight with me than, e.g., Eliezer's old "Knowability of FAI" article at http://sl4.org/wiki/KnowabilityOfFAI
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I think what diegocaleiro is saying is that these social and emotional factors are adaptations that evolved due to the biological dangers. Now that the biological dangers are mostly gone, the adaptations are unnecessary and even harmful. So inasfar as we can consciously influence the social and psychological factors, we would benefit from changing them to promote more sex.
I know that most educated people believe that, but I've never seen a good argument for it.
At any rate I am almost sure that there are microbes causing significant amounts of death and disability (especially disability because it is a lot easier for our civilization to ignore or deny a cause of disability than to ignore a cause of deaths) that almost no one recognizes as pathogenic. And I tend to believe that for some significant fraction of these "insufficiently recognized" pathogens the more sexual partners you have, and the more likely you'll get it. (There are dozens of viral and bacterial infections -- including near a dozen at least in the herpes family -- that remain in the body and are more common in more promiscuous populations.)
In other words, there seems to be a strong selection bias whereby people tend to look only at the pathogens that are recognized as pathogens by, e.g., doctors.
It might be however that these biological dangers from less-recognized sexually-transmitted pathogens are concentrated in people who are old or already sick.
Any professional biologists or medical researchers wish to chime in?