All of drgunn's Comments + Replies

drgunn21

Fanelli is a good, if dated reference for this. Another important point is that there are levels of misconduct in research, ranging from bad authorship practices to outright fabrication of results, with the less severe practices being relatively more common: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4269469/

Aside from all that, there's irreproducibility, which doesn't arise from any kind of deliberate misconduct, but still pollutes the epistemic commons: https://www.cos.io/rpcb

3Lance Bush
There are still more issues. Even if the results of a study can be reproduced given the raw data, and even if the findings can be replicated in subsequent studies, that does not ensure that results have identified the effect researchers claim to have found.  This is because studies can rely on invalid measures. If a study claims to measure P, but fails to do so, it may nevertheless pick up on some real pattern other than a successful measurement of P. In these cases, results can replicate and appear legitimate even if they don't show what they purport to show.
drgunn40

As someone with experience in BSL-3 labs, BSL feels like a good metaphor to me. The big issue with the RSP proposal is that it's still just a set of voluntary commitments that could undermine progress on real risk management by giving policymakers a way to make it look like they've done something without really doing anything. It would be much better with input from risk management professionals.

drgunn10

I'm confused.The protest is now listed at 4. Have you coordinated with them?

3Ben Pace
Perhaps I was unclear — we will meet at the ACX meetup, and set off from the in the time period between 3:15 and 3:30pm, in order to get to the protest on time.
drgunn30

I like it, but it feels like you could have worked snakes in there somehow: https://www.vectorsofmind.com/p/the-snake-cult-of-consciousness

1rogersbacon
ughh you are right, missed opportunity 
drgunn17-2

X-risk discussions aren't immune from the "grab the mic" dynamics that affect every other cause advocacy community.

There will continue to be tactics such as "X distracts from Y" and "if you really cared about X you would ..." unless and until people who care about the cause for the cause's sake can identify and exclude those who care about the cause for the sake of the cultural and social capital that can be extracted. Inclusivity has such a positive affect halo around it that it's hard to do this, but it's really the only way.

Longer-form of the argument: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

1M. Y. Zuo
The karma mechanic, and the concept of scoring tied to an identity in general, is supposed to circumvent that from what I understand. e.g. if someone with a lot of credibility such as gwern 'grabbed the mic' the average reader might give them 10 minutes of attention, whereas someone that just signed up under a pseudonym may be given 10 seconds. If it's deemed to be valuable, then their credibility increases, or vice versa if it's clearly malicious. Someone with only 10 seconds obviously gets kicked out fairly quickly, after a few malicious iterations. Thus even in the worst case not that much time is wasted, whether or not 'grab the mic' tactics became the norm.  Though perhaps you believe this method of discriminating and filtering by length of allotted attention is ineffective?
Answer by drgunn40

I'm not available, I'll be clear about that up front, but I am in my late 40s, in case that helps anyone update their priors about the demographics. YMMV as to whether I'm intellectually interesting ;-)

drgunn10

When I hear someone saying,

"Because it is asking to me to believe it completely if I believe it at all, I feel more comfortable choosing to consider it “false” on my terms, which is merely that it gave me no other choice because it defined itself to be false when it is only believed weakly."

what I think is "of course there are strong and weak beliefs!" but true and false is only defined relative to who is asking and why (in some cases), so you need to consider the context in which you're applying LoEM.

In other words, LoEM applies to "Does 2+2=4?" but it do... (read more)

1Thoth Hermes
Like in my comment to Richard_Kennaway about probability, I am not just talking about beliefs, but about what is. Do we take it as an axiom or a theorem that A or ~A? Likewise for ~(A and ~A)? I admit to being confused about this. Also, does "A" mean the same thing as "A = True"? Does "~A" mean the same thing as "A = False"? If so, in what sense do we say that A literally equals True / False, respectively? Which things are axioms and which things are theorems, here? All of that confuses me. Since we are often permitted to change our axioms and arrive at systems we either like or don't like, or like better than others, I think it's relevant to ask about our choice of axioms and whether or not logic is or should be considered a set of "pre-axioms."  It seemed like tailcalled was implying that the law of non-contradiction was a theorem, and I'm confused about that as well. Under which axioms? If I decide that ~(A and ~A) is not an axiom, then I can potentially have A and ~A either be true or not false. Then we would need some other arguments to support that choice. Without absolute truth and absolute falsehood, we'd have to move back to the concept of "we like [it] better or worse" which would make the latter more fundamental. Does allowing A and ~A to mean something get us any utility? In order for it to get us any utility, there would have to be things that we'd agree were validly described by A and ~A.  Admittedly, it does seem like these or's and and's and ='s keep appearing regardless of my choices, here (because I need them for the concept of choice).  In a quasi-philosophical and quasi-logical post I have not posted to LessWrong yet, I argue that negation seems likely to be the most fundamental thing to me (besides the concept of "exists / is", which is what "true" means).  "False" is thus not quite the same thing as negation, and instead means something more like "nonsense gibberish" which is actually far stronger than negation.
drgunn20

You seem to be talking about "combinatorial explosion". It's a classic problem in AI, and I like John Vervaeke's approach to explaining how humans solve the problem for themselves. See: http://sites.utoronto.ca/jvcourses/jolc.pdf

No one has solved it for AI yet.

2lunatic_at_large
Thanks for the response! I took a look at the paper you linked to; I'm pretty sure I'm not talking about combinatorial explosion. Combinatorial explosion seems to be an issue when solving problems that are mathematically well-defined but computationally intractable in practice; in my case it's not even clear that these objects are mathematically well-defined to begin with. The paper https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335525907_The_infinite_epistemic_regress_problem_has_no_unique_solution initially looks related to what I'm thinking, but I haven't looked at it in depth yet.
drgunn10

It's a very interesting model of the world that tastes 18 different brands of store-bought sauce and doesn't compare it to just making your own. Add "seriouseats" to any recipe-related query and you'll get recipes that both work and taste like they're supposed to. They may eventually fire their writers and replace them with AI trained on blogspam recipes, so exploit this knowledge while you can. Surprisingly few people know about it, given how much utility basic culinary knowledge can add to your life.

drgunn10

What if AI safety and governance people published their papers on Arxiv in addition to NBER or wherever? I know it's not the kind of stuff that Arxiv accepts, but if I was looking for a near-term policy win, that might be one.

drgunn10

It strikes me that 80000 hours puts you just about when the prediction markets are predicting AGI to be available, i.e., a bit late. I wonder if EA folks still think government roles are the best way to go?