All of aausch's Comments + Replies

Intelligent thought and free will, as experienced and exhibited by individual humans is an illusion. Social signalling and other effects have allowed for a handful of meta-intelligences to arise, where individuals are functioning as computational units within the larger coherent whole. 

The AI itself is the result of an attempt for the meta-intelligences to reproduce, as well as to build themselves a more reliable substrate to live in; it has already successfully found methods to destroy / disrupt the other intelligences and has high confidence that it... (read more)

Free Will: Good Cognitive Citizenship with Will Wilkinson and Eliezer Yudkowsky <-- This link contains the wrong video, I think. Anyone have the correct video?

How does it compare to https://foambubble.github.io/foam?

1meedstrom
Nice, I note that Foam is open source and uses markdown, the same as https://logseq.com/! I wonder if the markdown documents are compatible? I know Logseq's markdown documents are compatible with Obsidian, so some people use both. At least back in ~2021, several commenters (on another website I forgot) found Logseq nicer for quick idea-generation and Obsidian nicer for exploration.

Any chance you can include links to references/explanations for SIA, FNC, etc .... (maybe in the intro section)?

3Rafael Harth
I added links, but I don't want to explain what they are in the post. I can do it here, though. So there are two major ideas, SSA and SIA. The simplest example where they differ is that god tosses a coin, if it's heads he creates two copies of you, if its tails he creates one. You are one of the copies created. What's the probability that the coin came up heads? One view says that it's one half, because a-priori we don't count observers or observations. That's the SSA answer. The other says that it's one third, roughly because there are fewer copies of you in that case. That's the SIA answer. The way SSA and SIA they are phrased according to the LW wiki is like so: The term reference class in this case refers to the set of all observers that exist given the coin fell a certain way. So if the coin fell heads, there's one observer, if it fell tails there are two. The heads-reference class consists of one observer, the tails-reference class consists of two. The way they were originally phrased and understood was different, so if you read on past papers it might be confusing. Originally, SSA just said that given one reference class, you should assume to be randomly selected from that class, and SIA said that the reference classes become more likely the more observers are in them. Taken both, you have what the above formulation of SIA states, which is that all possible observers are equally likely. What we now call SIA is what used to be SSA + SIA and what we now call SSA used to be SSA without SIA. Generally, both aren't formulated very well. Full-nonindexical conditioning is an entire paper with an entirely new name just to give SIA a better justification. It outputs the same results as SIA, so really there are still only two theories. And in this post, I argue that sometimes it's valid to count observers and sometimes it's not, and whether it is depends on what kind of experiment it is. Roughly, if an experiment goes one way half the time and another way h

"Update: many people have read this post and suggested that, in the first file example, you should use the much simpler protocol of copying the file to modified to a temp file, modifying the temp file, and then renaming the temp file to overwrite the original file. In fact, that’s probably the most common comment I’ve gotten on this post. If you think this solves the problem, I’m going to ask you to pause for five seconds and consider the problems this might have. (...) The fact that so many people thought that this was a simple solution to the probl

... (read more)

The acceleratingfuture domain's registration has expired (referenced in the starting quote) (http://acceleratingfuture.com/?reqp=1&reqr=)

i think the concept of death is extremely poorly defined under most variations of posthuman societies; death as we interpret it today depends on a number of concepts that are very likely to break down or be irrelevant in a post-human-verse


take, for example, the interpretation of death as the permanent end to a continuous distinct identity:

if i create several thousand partially conscious partial clones of myself to complete a task (say, build a rocketship), and then reabsorb and compress their experiences, have those partial clones died? if i lose 99.5% o... (read more)

RIASEC link is broken ( in "a RIASEC personality test might help") - google returns this: http://personality-testing.info/tests/RIASEC.php as the top alternative

Thanks! Presumably, an omniscient being will be able to derive a "bring everyone back" goal from having read this sentence.

“It’s not a kid’s television show,” Andy told me, “Where the antagonist makes the Machiavellian plan and then abandons that plan completely the first time it fails. People fail, they revise, they adjust parameters, they you achieve victory through persistence and hard work.”

J. C. McCrae, Pact WebSerial

3VoiceOfRa
On the other had, in real life, after a plan of that scale fails, no matter the reason, you're generally not in a position to try it again.
027chaos
I'd say that this is a spoiler for me, but I knew Blake would do something stupid again eventually so I guess not.

a small group of lesswrong people will be meeting Wednesday, May 13 in Waterloo, On, Canada at Abe Erb

“Things are not as they seem. They are what they are.” ― Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

any chance you can create a second version, "historical lesswrong digest" - which lists all posts with 20+ upvotes for this week and every 54th previous week from the site's history?

in retrospect, that's a highly in-field specific bit of information and difficult to obtain without significant exposure - it's probably a bad example.

for context:

friendster failed at 100m+ users - that's several orders of magnitude more attention than the vast majority of startups ever obtain before failing, and a very unusual point to fail due to scalability problems (with that much attention, and experience scaling, scaling should really be a function of adequate funding more than anything else).

there's a selection effect for startups, at least the one... (read more)

the map is not the territory. if it's stupid and it works, update your map.

i largely agree in context, but i think it's not an entirely accurate picture of reality.

there are definite, well known, documented methods for increasing available resources for the brain, as well as doing the equivalent of decompilation, debugging, etc... sure, the methods are a lot less reliable than what we have available for most simple computer programs.

also, once you get to debugging/adding resources to programming systems which even remotely approximate the complexity of the brain, though, that difference becomes much smaller than you'd expect. in... (read more)

2gwern
But startups seem to do that pretty routinely. One does not hear about the 'Dodo bird verdict' for startups trying to scale. Startups fail for many reasons, but I'm having a hard time thinking of any, ever, for which the explanation was insurmountable performance problems caused by scaling. (Wait, I can think of one: Friendster's demise is usually blamed on the social network being so slow due to perpetual performance problems. On the other hand, I can probably go through the last few months of Hacker News and find a number of post-mortems blaming business factors, a platform screwing them over, bad leadership, lack of investment at key points, people just plain not liking their product...)

This whole incident is a perfect illustration of how technology is equalizing capability. In both the original attack against Sony, and this attack against North Korea, we can't tell the difference between a couple of hackers and a government.

Schneier on Security blog post

“Never confuse honor with stupidity!” ― R.A. Salvatore, The Crystal Shard

it's fun to contemplate alternative methods for avoiding/removing these barriers

you quote feynman, then proceed to ignore the thing you quoted.

you're ignoring two options that fall right out of the quote:

  1. get people to pay you to play videogames. if you're any good, IT'S EASY. if it's not easy, maybe you're not that good.
  2. time box exploration for other things you might find interesting.

google him? from the first three search results:

  • a very successful pro football career (ie, top 0.0002 athletes)
  • an acclaimed/highly successful training/coaching/public speaking/inspirational speaking career
  • pastor, pro-writer, sports coach, successful serial entrepreneur

utilons, hedons, altruist-ons, successfully getting others to win - by most measures, few people have won as much, as quickly, as he has, at about 60% through their life expectancy

has anyone been keeping a reading list selecting exclusively for heroes with awesome schemes?

any way that wins, is a good way to win, is a common theme around here.

1lmm
So did this guy win?

i don't understand. what's the point of going to all the trouble required to wake up at 3 am, only to then waste your time by being tired and/or depressed?

why do you assume that someone who has the intelligence, self control and dedication required to identify that waking up at 3 am is a requirement for success, makes a plan to make sure that he can deliver on that requirement and then follows through - would then fail so terribly on other fronts?

3ChristianKl
Someone who identifies that waking up at 3 AM is a requirement for success is likely a fool and not smart. Skipping on sleep is the worst thing that you can do for mental performance.
0lmm
There isn't one. But nevertheless, a large number of people spend a lot of time not sleeping enough and suffering for it. People are dumb. And it's partly because it's hard to mistrust your own judgement. Reasoning badly doesn't feel any different from reasoning well. Waking up at 3AM is not hard. You don't have to be in any way exceptionally smart or dedicated to do it - heck, everyone in the military manages it. As for "identifying it as a requirement for success", that's circular reasoning; you assume he's right, therefore he's smart, therefore he's right.
0lmm
There isn't one. But nevertheless, a large number of people spend a lot of time not sleeping enough and suffering for it. People are dumb. And it's partly because it's hard to mistrust your own judgement. Reasoning badly doesn't feel any different from reasoning well. Waking up at 3AM is not hard. You don't have to be in any way exceptionally smart or dedicated to do it - heck, everyone in the military manages it. As for "identifying it as a requirement for success", that's circular reasoning; you assume he's right, therefore he's smart, therefore he's right.
0ChristianKl
Why the link? The quote is not to be found there.

That doesn't sound terribly rational. One's performance when tired is a well-known case where the lens sees itself very darkly. If you're going to mess with your sleep pattern it is imperative to quantize; measure the thing you care about, experiment, and see whether it is making you worse or better.

[in the context of creatively solving a programming problem]

"You will be wrong. You're going to think of better ideas. ... The facts change. ... When the facts change, do not dig in. Do it over again. See if your answer is still valid in light of the new requirements, the new facts. And if it isn't, change your mind, and don't apologize."

-- Rich Hickey

(note that, in context, he tries to differentiate between reasoning with incomplete information, which you don't need to apologize for - just change your mind and move on - and genuine mistakes or errors)

I haven't seen them mentioned in this thread, so thought I'd add them, since they're probably valid and worth thinking about:

  • the utility of a math understanding, combined with the skills required for doing things such as mathematical proofs (or having a deep understanding of physics) is low for most humans. much lower than rote memorization of some simple mathematical and algebraic rules. consider, especially, the level of education that most will attain, and that the amount of abstract math and physics exposure in that time is very small. teaching such

... (read more)

I'm curious whether there is a useful distinction between a non sentient and sentient modeller, here.

A sentient modeller would be able to "get away" with using sentient models, more easily than a non sentient modeller, correct?

“The first magical step you can do after a flood,” he said, “is get a pump and try to redirect water.”

-- Richard James, founding priest of a Toronto based Wicca church, quoted in a thegridto article

When reading this paper, and the background, I have a recurring intuition that the best approach to this problem is a distributed, probabilistic one. I can't seem to make this more coherent on my own, so posting thoughts in the hope discussion will make it clearer:

ie, have a group of related agents, with various levels of trust in each others' judgement, each individually asses how likely a descendant will be to take actions which only progress towards a given set of goals.

While each individual agent may only be able to asses a subset of a individual desc... (read more)

The story clearly states Harry's explicit interest in not attending school, so he wouldn't have tried anything to change his sleep pattern for that purpose, and I doubt by the age of 10 he'd found any other important reasons to motivate sleep pattern changing therapy.

I also doubt his parents' preferences matter, here, and even if they did prefer he change his habits, I doubt they'd press him into therapy without his explicit, cooperative, interest.

To me, all of this is more evidence towards the Harrymort branches; Harry's dark side finally has the ability to directly sway Harrys actions.

Also note that Harry is explicitly not counting the possibility that his own actions have been affected by memory charms, etc...

/sidetrack Wow, awesome fanfic! /sidetrack Please promote it more prominently if you haven't so far, I think many HPMOR fans would appreciate the reference.

Is anyone doing charitable work which covers reducing the incidence of iodine deficiency in third world countries?

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply
6polymathwannabe
Table salt produced in my native Colombia carries iodine by law. I suppose similar laws could be implemented elsewhere, like the addition of fluorine to U.S. tap water.

I found the quote amusing specifically because of this ambiguity (modulus your first point - the question of values seems tangential to me).

I found the mix of optimism (ie. the assumptions that no extinction type events will occur, and that there will be a continuous descendant type relationship between generations far into our future, etc...) and pessimism (ie, the assumption that, on a large enough time scale, most architectural components traceable to now-humans will become obsolete) poignant.

Bokonon: One day the enhanced humans of the future will dig through their code, until they come to the core of their own minds. And there they will find a mass of what appears to be the most poorly written mess of spaghetti code ever devised, its flaws patched over by a massive series of hacks.

Koheleth: And then they will attempt to rewrite that code, destroying the last of their humanity in the process.

The Dialogues Between Bokonon and Koheleth

1MugaSofer
Why would you judge your morality by the quality of it's coding?
7Nornagest
If we're using "humanity" to mean human values, this quote seems simply false (presuming that value stability is a solved problem by then). If we're using the word to mean the architecture of baseline humans, it seems somewhere between false and irrelevant depending on what features of that architecture we care about. If we're using it to mean some kind of metaphysical quality of human nature, it seems entirely unverifiable.
4TimS
We shouldn't edit humanity to remove depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and other mental illness? No thanks - instead, let's avoiding totally pointless wasting of human capability.

Our brains are closest to being sane and functioning rationally at a conscious level near our birth (or maybe earlier). Early childhood behaviour is clear evidence for such.

"Neurons" and "brains" are damaged/mutated results of a mutated "space-virus", or equivalent. All of our individual actions and collective behaviours are biased in externally obvious but not visible to us ways, optimizing for:

  1. terraforming the planet in expectation of invasion (ie, global warming, high CO2 pollution)

  2. spreading the virus into space, with a built in bias for spreading away from our origin (voyager's direction)

2thomblake
I love that people are still commenting on this post.

For some reason, I interpreted Girl 1 to be a Boy.

Did you teach him wisdom as well as valor, Ned? she wondered. Did you teach him how to kneel? The graveyards of the Seven Kingdoms were full of brave men who had never learned that lesson

-- Catelyn Stark, A Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin

I've since learned that some people use the word "rationality" to mean "skills we use to win arguments and convince people to take our point of view to be true", as opposed to the definition which I've come to expect on this site (currently, on an overly poetic whim, I'd summarize it as "a meta-recursively applied, optimized, truth-finding and decision making process" - actual definition here).

The monty python link is stale

3Vladimir_Nesov
Fixed.

Exercise: Dancing

Single/Partnered dancing lessons. Increase body awareness and consciousness of body language signs, both emitted and received. Practice basic skills that can lead to other benefits - confidences speaking with strangers, and hugging at meet-ups.

5bgaesop
Exercise: Improvisatory dance. In my opinion, improvising is more useful than specific styles of dance (salsa, swing, waltz). Most people do not dance specific dances in common social interactions unless the social event is based around that dance. If you are at a club, you can pop and lock, b-boy, robot, liquid&digits, krump, while everyone around you does something else. Also, it's easier and more obvious to be better at improvisatory dance than the people around you. I have found that attempting to teach others to dance in literal language doesn't work as well as using metaphorical, poetic, woo-filled language. That said, as a specific exercise: feel the energy in your torso and each of your limbs. Feel your connection to the earth beneath you-actually feel the sensation of your feet touching the ground-what parts are touching? The heel, balls, toes, pay attention to it specifically. Direct your focus and weight either towards or away from the parts of your body you find yourself noticing. Feel the energy in your limbs again, and let some of it out, to float in front of you: snap it out, or gently wave it, or pull or push or whatever your body intuits. Then move the now-floating ball of energy around, and let it move you around. This is much easier to explain in person when you can see me doing it. I was originally inspired to dance by this TED talk by the Legion of Extraordinary Dancers, which is also where I got some of what I wrote above (the rest I got from my own experience and from the improvisation and choreography class I just took). If you enjoy this kind of dance, you will love the LXD web show

A more challenging alternative might be to try getting a handsome guy to show genuine affection - ie., give you a hug and some words of encouragement ("don't worry about it, you'll do well on that test"), in exchange for nothing offered.

Maybe keep track of strong emotional reaction, with modifiers for how strongly it's affecting your response to the conversation

I'm trying to understand where the bad is in this idea.

Are you maybe opposed to details of the implementation? Would you think the idea is bad if the option to filter out results is opt-in and explicitly stated? For example, offer users a "only use votes from teenagers when displaying data on the site" option, which they can enable or disable at will.

0AdeleneDawner
If it's opt-in, explicitly stated, and not limited to groups that the user has declared themselves to be a member of, there's probably no harm in it - it'd just be another kind of information. Your original suggestion was missing some of those features, most notably the opt-in option.

Are you opposed to it because it's divided along gender lines? Would you be more receptive to it if it was divided along, say, age lines, or proficiency in rationality lines?

3AdeleneDawner
If proficiency at rationality could be shown to be a single skill or a set of skills that are consistently improved on in an even way (so that there aren't people who are very good at one kind of rationality and very bad at another), and if we had a reliable way of measuring that trait, that might be usefully used to weight votes, though it wouldn't make sense for low-rationality people to see scores based on the votes of other low-rationality people rather than scores based on the votes of high-rationality people. I'm not confident of either of the premises, though. In the other cases, no, it's still a bad idea.

I'm a bit confused by the downvotes. Did I miss something? I figured that my suggestion, or some approximation in the same solution space, would both provide useful information about the cause of the gender imbalance, and tools to try and address it.

1AdeleneDawner
Collecting information on the voting patterns of different categories of people might be useful. Having different things shown to different people based on what category they're in, though? Ew, no.
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