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programming teaches cognitive skills that you can't get any other way
That looks highly doubtful to me.
You mean that most cognitive skills can be taught in multiple ways, and you don't see why those taught by programming are any different? Or do you have a specific skill taught by programming in mind, and think there's other ways to learn it?
In response to
What do rationalists think about the afterlife?
On your last point, no. To put it colloquially, the simpler answer is more likely.
In practical terms, saying that all binary choices without evidence causes conflicts. Namely, if there's a 50/50 chance that your consciousness dissolves when you die, and a 50/50 chance that a hidden FAI captures your brain state, and a 50/50 chance that a hidden UFAI captures your brain state. That implies that in every case that a FAI captures your brain state so does a UFAI.
If you are not forced to used them, and if their existence doesn't raise the price of other seed how would they cause you to starve?
If the farmer is actually a subsistence farmer, they save their own seed, so they don't care about the price of seed, nor would they buy single generation seed (say of a new crop or variety) knowingly. However, if someone nearby plants single generation seed, they can end up with genetic material in their variety of that crop, which cuts their germination (or seed baring) rates the following season.
In response to
Three Parables of Microeconomics
Subsistence farmers don't trade for their sustenance, they farm what they subsist upon. So perhaps the moral is do be a subsistence farmer...
In response to
The Extended Living-Forever Strategy-Space
Also, avoiding dying in ways that destroy brain state. I'm not sure how probable those are, or how easy they are to avoid, and if that includes dementia (and so on) it gets rather common and tricky.
Under different light contexts an reflective object might be closer to either midnight blue or navy. Have you attempted using paint chips or something to test yourself under sunlight versus florescent light or anything?
I know at the moment it seems to me that the colors are far enough apart that light conditions at my PC are not the main problem.
My notebook is slightly differently configured and I didn't judge many Anki cards wrongly when answering on the notebook instead of my main monitor.
I know at the moment it seems to me that the colors are far enough apart that light conditions at my PC are not the main problem. Your monitor emits light, so the light conditions matter less, mostly needing to overcome the ambient light (laptop in sun).
Most things don't produce their own color though, they reflect varying amounts of the incoming spectrum. If that incoming spectrum is different, the outgoing spectrum is different. You can take advantage of that in various ways, but it might also confound the question of what color "is" this object.
Or maybe you automatically take that into account by using the ambient light as a reference, I was wondering whether you had tested for that or not?
In response to
Discovering Your Secretly Secret Sensory Experiences
The huge problem is that we lack vocabulary to talk about unique qualia. Our words come from talking to other people and if nobody around us has the same qualia as we are, nobody gave us a word.
At the moment I'm learning to distinguish colors better via an Anki deck. I use the CSS color name definition. Seeing the difference between navy and midnightblue is still hard for me but I'm confident that I can learn it with practice. Some day I will hopefully even be able to tell apart snow from floralwhite.
I like the particular deck and if someone wants to train their color perception I'm happy to share it. It's build in a way that you get progressively more difficult decisions and provides years of fun at 5 new cards per day.
I would also like to create a deck to train sound perception. Does anyone know of a good tool that can automatically produce sound files with a specific pitch for pitch training? At best a tool that can be used via the command line.
Under different light contexts an reflective object might be closer to either midnight blue or navy. Have you attempted using paint chips or something to test yourself under sunlight versus florescent light or anything?
Also, for sound perception: sox(1)
In response to
How much wealth is produced by high IQ people?
The relevant studies all seem to be behind paywalls, but the graphs from this one looked promising.
Jay L. Zagorsky (2007): "Do You Have to Be Smart to Be Rich? The Impact of IQ on Wealth, Income and Financial Distress." Intelligence, 35 (5), 489-501.
In response to
Making LessWrong notable enough for its own Wikipedia page
If someone starts a meetup in a small town, it would not be difficult for them to get a newspaper article talking about the event. Though I'm not sure Wikipedians would consider little-tiny-newspaper to be adequate coverage...
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This is actually a question I've thought about quite a bit, in a different context. So I have a cached response to what makes a programmer, not tailored to you or to AI at all. When someone asks for guidance on development as a programmer, the question I tend to ask is, how big is the biggest project you architected and wrote yourself?
The 100 line scale tests only the mechanics of programming; the 1k line scale tests the ability to subdivide problems; the 10k line scale tests the ability to select concepts; and the 50k line scale tests conceptual taste, and the ability to add, split, and purge concepts in a large map. (Line numbers are very approximate, but I believe the progression of skills is a reasonably accurate way to characterize programmer development.)
New programmers (not jimrandomh), be wary of line counts! It's very easy for a programmer who's not yet ready for a 10k line project to turn it into a 50k lines. I agree with the progression of skills though.