All of Halfwit's Comments + Replies

A lot of people got this from shuttle launches, and so reacted negatively to the the (in my opinion good) arguments for focusing NASA's budget on robotic space exploration.

Hmm, one way to maybe get around this would be to start an intrinsically motivating project but limit oneself to the tools one has to learn for extrinsic reasons.

Then my advice is this: talk to someone who has the entry-level job you want and ask him or her what skills he/she needs to do it and what skills whoever hired him or her thinks one needs. Then learn them. As for the "oddly unable" thing, I suggest reflecting on how you learned what you are good at in the first place. If there's anything different about your current, ineffective approach to learning new techniques stop doing it. Unless you've recently suffered brain trauma, it's likely just some weird ugh field-like effect.

Yeah, that does sound pretty awful, not something you'd want to induce. For me it was just this: pressure on my chest, inability to move my limbs, and the feeling that some entity was observing me. There was no gnashing of teeth.

You're asking me for advice? That was the first time I've looked at code in my life. I'm sure the textbook recommendation thread has something on programming. From what I understand, though, halfway-decent programmers are very employable at the moment, so either you're overestimating your ability, there's some other factor you haven't shared, or my intuition on the employment prospects of halfway-decent programmers (I assume this means close to, if slightly below, the level of the average pro) is incorrect.

I was lucky enough to have read about that before the one time it happened to me. So I wasn't scared. I just thought, So this is sleep paralysis. Since then I've read that lucid dreamers often try to force themselves into sleep paralysis, as it's the first stop to the sandman's brooding realm. The next time it happens to you, you should try for a Feynman-style lucid dream. It could be fun.

I edited because the code I looked at seemed to be atypical, comparing it to what others have posted. No, I don't think I'm M3 at all--though my father probably is, as he picked up programming in his twenties and knows many languages. As I had expected the code to look like nonsense, I was merely surprised I could get some idea about what was going on. My prior for being able to get a programming job with <300 hours of dedicated practice is low, but it could be something to investigate as a hobby.

quickly check to see if you are a natural computer programmer by pulling up a page of Python source code and seeing whether it looks like it makes natural sense, and if this is the case you can teach yourself to program very quickly and get a much higher-paying job even without formal credentials.

I just did this. And I was surprised; this seemed far less inscrutable than I intuitively expected, having never read any code. My father is a computer programmer, so I may have it in my DNA. He is more intelligent than me though. Example, I once told him the ... (read more)

Some early science fiction isn't so much about conflict as it is a relation of an unlikely experience. But then, the stories I have in mind weren't exactly that great. So that's not exactly evidence against the assumption. Still, I think a sufficiently skilled writer could create an enjoyable story without conflict, but it would be like a painter throwing out a primary color.

One of my favorite of OP's short posts is Building Weirdtopia. (Yudkowsky's no spoilers approach to scientific pedagogy is such an intriguing one, I'm a quite sad he hasn't spun it in... (read more)

I do tend to think that Aubrey de Grey's argument holds some water. That is, it's not so much general society that will be influenced as wealthy elites. Elites seem more likely to update when they read about a 2x mouse. I suppose the Less Wrong response to this argument would be: how many of them are signed up for cryonics? But cryonics is a lot harder to believe than life extension. You need to buy pattern identity theory and nanotechnology and Hanson's value of life calculations. In the case of LE, all you have to believe is that the techniques that work... (read more)

I think we're past the point where it matters. If we had a few lost decades in the mid-twentieth century, maybe, (and just to be cognitively polite here, this is just my intuition talking) the intelligence explosion could have been delayed significantly. We are just a decade off from home computers with >100 teraflops, not to mention the distressing trend of neuromorphic hardware (Here's Ben Chandler of the SyNAPSE project talking about his work on HackerNews)With all this inertia, it would take an extremely large downturn to slow us now. Engineering a... (read more)

The mathematician John von Neumann, born Neumann Janos in Budapest in 1903, was incomparably intelligent, so bright that, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Eugene Wigner would say, "only he was fully awake." One night in early 1945, von Neumann woke up and told his wife, Klari, that "what we are creating now is a monster whose influence is going to change history, provided there is any history left. Yet it would be impossible not to see it through." Von Neumann was creating one of the first computers, in order to build nuclear weapons. But, Klari said, it was the computers that scared him the most.

Konstantin Kakaes

The fact that MIRI is finally publishing technical research has impressed me. A year ago it seemed, to put it bluntly, that your organization was stalling, spending its funds on the full-time development of Harry Potter fanfiction and popular science books. Perhaps my intuition there was uncharitable, perhaps not. I don't know how much of your lead researcher's time was spent on said publications, but it certainly seemed, from the outside, that it was the majority. Regardless, I'm very glad MIRI is focusing on technical research. I don't know how much farther you have to walk, but it's clear you're headed in the right direction.

The line I came up with, when asking the question to myself, was this: If the singularity is a religion, it is the only religion with a plausible mechanism of action.

"Why do people worry about mad scientists? It's the mad engineers you have to watch out for." - Lochmon

I believe you can live off Boost for an indefinite period of time.

5% is pretty high considering the purported stakes.

Untangling the Knot: A Users Guide to the Human Mind

Your Brain, an Owner's Manual

Less than One, Greater than Zero: The Sequences, 2006–2009

Approximating Omega (badly, of course)

Sharpening the Mace

Uncountable Infinite Shades of Grey (my apologies)

Stop Tripping Yourself: A Users Guide to the Human Mind

Marshaling the Mind: An Introduction to the Informed Art of Rationality

Motes and Meaning: The Less Wrong Archives

Of Motes and Meaning

Theory, in Practice

Thinking, in Practice

Thinking in Circles:Avoiding the Known Bugs in Human Reasoning.

He was an adviser. But I see he no longer is. Retracted.

He killed himself; this is true. He faced 35 years of confinement and the very-real prospect of rape. This, too, is true. He was criminalized for his intent to freely distribute scientific knowledge. This makes him a hero. He broke, but only storybook heroes are unbreakable. It's depressing how society seems to persecute those most able to improve it; that the broken machine slays those very engineers who've dedicated their lives to its repair.

In terms of minimizing the status loss for academics affiliating with SIAI, a banal minimally-descriptive name may be superior. People often overestimate the value of the piquant. Beige may not excite, but it doesn't offend. Any term which has the potential to become a buzzword, or acquire alternative definitions, should be avoided. The more exciting the term, the higher the chance of appropriation.

This was the point I was trying to make; on rereading it after posting, I realized it was remarkably poorly written and wasn't even clearly conveying what I was thinking when I wrote it. I didn't have time to edit it then, so I retracted.

When a heuristic AI is creating a successor that shares its goals, does it insist on formally-verified self improvements? Does it try understanding its mushy, hazy goal system so as to avoid reifying something it would regret given its current goals? It seems to me like some mind eventually will have to confront the FAI issue, why not humans then?

I thought this was rather tasteful media coverage: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/8691489/Robert-Ettinger-the-father-of-cryonics-is-gone-for-now.html

How much money would you need magicked to allow you to shed fundraising and infrastructure, etc, and just hire and hole up with a dream team of hyper-competent maths wonks? Restated, at which set amount would SIAI be comfortably able to aggressively pursue its long-term research?

The quantum lottery is my retirement plan, my messy messy retirement plan.

I just looked it up. That’s odd that there was little interest. There are so many advantages to a high-IQ child. Said child would likely need less years of child care, would require less attention academically and maybe attend college a few years earlier, likely with a full or partial scholarship. And in terms of maternal pride (i.e., signaling your own competence as a mother by talking about your child’s success) high-IQ sperm is a goldmine. Any single (or reproductively duplicitous) mother would be crazy not to select physicist or mathematician sperm, especially taking into account regression to the mean.

If sperm banks advertised high-IQ sperm, we would already have the beginnings of a eugenics program. If we found a way to clone eggs very cheaply, an average couple could have two children, each of whom would have half the DNA of a genius and half the DNA of one of their average parents. The advantage of this, in terms of social mobility, could be enough to avoid the need for coercive eugenics.

Regardless, I'm sure such a thing would be outlawed for various stupid reasons.

And remember, living in a world in which the average person is as smart as an upper-level computer programmer still isn't nearly as humbling as the fact that a well-organized cubic centimeter of carbon could be millions of times smarter than anyone.

I figure this to be a good general rule on these matters: unless you designed your own brain, you should not be proud of your own brain.

SRI's Shakey would be justified in its dualism.