All of ctintera's Comments + Replies

Yeah. I'm pretty sure that it's also hinted at that Dragon would not necessarily have humanity's best interests at heart were she allowed to properly mature.

Dragon was a well-intentioned but also well-shackled AI, kept from doing all the good she could do without her bonds and oftentimes forced into doing bad things by her political superiors due to the constraints placed on her by her creator before he died (which were subsequently never removed).

of course, an unfriendly AI, similarly limited, would want to appear to be like Dragon if that helped its cause, so

3gjm
This doesn't appear to me to be (or to be easily modified to be) a good argument for letting a boxed AI out of its box.

I'm currently working towards a Master's in Mathematical Data Mining, so I can't apply right now, but this is extremely relevant to both my skillsets and my interests.

ctintera100

Having an algorithm fit a model to some very simple data is not noteworthy either. It's possible that the means by which the "pure mechanical invention" was obtained are interesting, but they are not elaborated on in the slightest.

I'm having difficulty envisioning what problem this solves. Leap years are already defined by a very simple function, and subbing in a cosine for a discrete periodicity adds complexity, does it not?

1TylerJay
Last line of the article explains the motivation:
6gjm
I think (although Thomas leaves it frustratingly unclear) the point is that this algorithm was discovered by some kind of automatic process -- genetic programming or something. (If Thomas is seriously suggesting that his algorithm is an improvement on the usual one containing the "ugly constants" then I agree that that's misguided.)

"The steel ring upon his left pinky finger was yanked off hard enough to scrape skin, taking the Transfigured jewel with it."

I guess we'll see whether Dumbledore knew what he was talking about when he told Harry to carry his father's rock.

That depends -- does it have any other side effects, such as conditioning me against using the skill involved? Deliberate practice is hard, but this machine sounds quite convenient, and some skills that can be extremely useful can be not only inconvenient but also daunting or even dangerous to practice without such a machine.

Introducing a hard mind reset would be a massively negative feature of the vacation, regardless of how I feel about having fun with activities that bring no future benefit.

Depending on how the stats are compiled, the risk of being in an undiagnosed high-risk group is included in the risk for the general population.

If you later are in a situation where you will have greater risk, you can often get the vaccine when that situation arises, and probably won't be any worse off for having waited. Vaccines become less effective as time goes on, so you might have to renew the vaccine when that situation arises anyway.

I am unsure how immune disorders factor into this.

For meningococcal disease, the most volatile risk factor is sleeping... (read more)

ctintera150

Moreover, which vaccines are worth getting? For example, is it worth getting a meningococcal vaccine if you're not in any of the major risk groups?

Many universities strongly encourage their students to get the meningococcal vaccine (as sleeping in rubbish communal bedding is a risk factor), but for something really rare, even the risk involved in traveling to the clinic to get vaccinated could have more disutility than the protection the vaccine might provide would be worth.

The meningococcal vaccine causes a fever 3% of the time, and a few days of mild to ... (read more)

0HeelBearCub
Don't you need to include the risks of a)being in an undiagnosed high-risk group, and b) developing a condition that puts you in a high-risk group? Also, in terms of the driving risk, don't you need to understand that in terms of substitution (I think that is the right term)? In other words, when calculating the driving risk, it becomes complex because time in the car going to the clinic may/very likely will be bundled with other driving (going to the clinic for other services, going to a store afterwards, etc.), so you can only include driving risk for this vaccine if it would not have been substituted for by other driving.

Many people (specifically, people over at RationalWiki, and probably elsewhere as well) see the community as being insular, or as being a Yudkowsky Personality Cult, or think that some of the weirder-sounding ideas widely espoused here (cryonics, FAI, etc) "might benefit from a better grounding in reality".

Still others reflexively write LW off based on the use of fanfiction (a word of dread and derision in many circles) to recruit members.

Even the jargon derived from the Sequences may put some people off. Despite the staunch avoidance of hot-but... (read more)

2hesperidia
Out on my parts of the internet, a major reason to reject LWisms is because they are perceived as coming from a "Silicon Valley tribe" that does not share values with the majority of people (i.e. similar to the attitude of the newsblog (?) Pando, which regularly skewers tech startups). The libertarians claiming to be "apolitical", and the neoreactionaries, do not help this perception at all. (Although discussing more of this is probably unwise because politics SPIDERS.)
2Viliam_Bur
I wonder how much of that negative view comes from the two or three people on RW who in the past have invested a lot of time and energy describing LW in the most uncharitable way, successfully priming many readers. There are many websites on the internet with a dominant author, specific slang, or weird ideas. People usually ignore them, if they don't like them. I am not saying that LW is flawless, only that it is difficult to distinguish between (a) genuine flaws of LW and (b) successfuly anti-LW memes which started for random reasons. Both of them are something people will complain about, but in one case they had to be taught to complain.

The example you give to prove plausibility is also a counterexample to the argument you make immediately afterwards. We know that less-intelligent or even non-intelligent things can produce greater intelligence because humans evolved, and evolution is not intelligent.

It's more a matter of whether we have enough time to drudge something reasonable out of the problem space. If we were smarter we could search it faster.

0DanielLC
Evolution is an optimization process. It might not be "intelligent" depending on your definition, but it's good enough for this. Of course, that just means that a rather powerful optimization process occurred just by chance. The real problem is, as you said, it's extremely slow. We could probably search it faster, but that doesn't mean that we can search it fast.