Make money playing poker, maybe?

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning —

• The Great Gatsby

I always liked Fitzgerald's portrayal of what Something to Protect feels like.

Happy New Year's resolutions, all.

This is not a human universal - people who put even a small amount of training into calibration can become very well calibrated very quickly. This is a sign that most Less Wrongers continue to neglect the very basics of rationality and are incapable of judging how much evidence they have on a given issue. Veterans of the site do no better than newbies on this measure.

Can someone who's done calibration training comment on whether it really seems to represent the ability to "judge how much evidence you have on a given issue", as opposed to accurately translate brain-based probability estimates in to numerical probability estimates?

I just want to know about the actuary from Florida; I didn't think we had any other LW'ers down here.

I thought of the idea that maybe the human decision maker has multiple utility functions that when you try to combine them into one function some parts of the original functions don't necessarily translate well... sounds like the "shards of desire" are actually a bunch of different utility functions.

I hereby request a research-filled thread of what to do when you feel like you're in this situation, which I believe has been called "welfare economics" in the literature.

It sounds like you're measuring your success by the impact you have on the person you are directly communicating with.

What happens if you measure success by your impact on the rest of your audience?

Scepticism is directed not at things, but at claims. And claims about things difficult to measure should face increased scepticism.

[S]kepticism should be directed at things that are actually untrue rather than things that are difficult to measure.

-- Bill James, American baseball writer and statistician.

Heh, clever. In a sense, iron has the highest entropy (atomically speaking) of any element. So if you take the claim that an aspect of solving intergalactic optimization problems involves consuming as much negentropy as possible, and that the highest entropy state of space time is low-density iron (see schminux's comment on black holes), then Clippy it is. It seems though like superintelligent anything-maximizers would end up finding even higher entropy states that go beyond the merely atomic kind.

...Or even discover ways that suggest that availability of negentropy is not an actual limiter on the ability to do things. Does anyone know the state of that argument? Is it known to be true that the universe necessarily runs out of things for superintelligences to do because of thermodynamics?

Not being in the field, but having experience in making the judgement "Should I read this paper", here are a handful of observations:

For:

1. The paper has a handful of citations not entirely from the author (http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=8141802968877948536&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en) but by no means a huge number of citations.

2. The abstract is remarkably clear (it's clear that this is a slight extension of other author's work), and the jargon-y words are easily figured out based on gentle perusal of the paper.

3. It looks like this paper is actually also a chapter in a textbook (http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-11876-0_8)

Against:

1. Nearly half of the paper's (very few) references in its reference section are self-citations.

I'd say it's worth reading if you're interested in it. Even the against-point above is more of a general heuristic and not necessarily a bad thing.