To me, the correct way to do this is to compute the (implied) rate of returns of solar investment over the lifetime of the panels :
(x-x^25)/(1-x)=20/3.2 => x ~ 0.85
x = 1/(1+r) => x ~ 0.17
So yes, a 17% rate of returns is insanely good (if the two assumptions, "25 years lifetime" and "3.2k/year", stands) and will beat pretty much every other investment.
(which should makes you suspicious about the assumptions)
I am not a community organizer, but if I was, I would just edict the MAD rule : if any dispute can’t be reasonably settled (in a way that would escalate to a panel), both the plaintiff and the defendant are kicked out of the community. The ratio of assholes to victims being low (hopefully), frame it as a noble sacrifice from the victim to keep the rest of the community safe (whoever is the actual victim here). "Some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make".
True, you’re slightly disincentivizing the reporting of true abuses (but not so much...
There are a bunch of problems with this even if implemented in good faith, but an obvious attack is that you convince a friend external to the community to (meet the minimum qualifications for membership and) accuse your target. This gets your target and your friend banned without investigation, but of course your friend does not care about getting banned.
category boundaries should be drawn for epistemic and not instrumental reasons
Sounds very wrong to me. In my view, computationally unbounded agents don’t need categories at all ; categories are a way for computationally bounded agents to approximate perfect Bayesian reasoning, and how to judge the quality of the approximation will depend on the agent goals — different agents with different goals will care differently about a similar error.
...(It's actually somewhat interesting; the logarithmic score doesn't work as a measure of category-system goodness
A prime example of what (I believe) Yudkowsky is talking about in this bullet point is Social Desirability Bias.
"What is the highest cost we are willing to spend in order to save a single child dying from leukemia ?". Obviously the correct answer is not infinite. Obviously teaching an AI that the answer to this class of questions is "infinite" is lethal. Also, incidentally, most humans will reply "infinite" to this question.
E=mc2 is only valid in the rest frame of the system. The formula in a non-rest frame is E^2 - p^2*c ^2=m^2*c^4 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-momentum for more details.
You’re right, the 2^(-3/4) (and the 2^1/4) is probably quantitatively wrong (unless each side is perfectly heat-conducing but both are isolated from each other. Or if the planet is a coin facing the sun. You know, spherical cows in a vacuum…). But I don’t think that changes the qualitative conclusion, which hold as long as the bright side is hotter but not twice as hotter than the perfectly-heat-conducing planet.
Given perfect conduction (uniform surface temperature, bright side and dark side have the same temperature at all times), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation#Temperature_relation_between_a_planet_and_its_star applies : temperature does not depend on rotation speed. Then T = T_sun sqrt(R_sun/(2D)) ; it is the temperature T that balance incoming radiation P_inc = pi (R_planet^2) (R_sun^2) (T_sun^4)/(D^2) and emitted radiation P_em = 4 pi (R_planet^2) * T^4
Let's suppose no conduction at all. The bright side and the dark side does not exch...
I’m trying to translate some material from LessWrong for a friend (interested with various subjects aborded here, but can’t read english…), and I’m struggling to find the best translation for “evidence”. I have many candidates, but every one of them is a little bit off relative to the connotation of "evidence". Since it’s a so central term in all the writings here, I figured out that it could not be bad to spend a little time finding a really good translation, rather than a just-okayish one.
English readers :
Can’t tell for the Romantic Manifesto, but in Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand uses the word “value” as a synonym of “rule of conduct”. For example, she argue that “rational evaluation” is a correct value for man in the same way that “flying” is a correct value for birds.
She calls her philosophy objectivism because the thinks that correct values, which means rules of conduct that leads to environmental fitness (in her words says : “survival”), are objective.
I still don’t understand HOW cancer kills.
I mean, we just have some additional cells who does not perform their normal functionality. But we still have a big bunch of normal, functioning cells.
In my (very very) distant family, someone died from lung cancer a few months ago. I still don’t understand the link between the few additional cells in his lungs and the acute hepatic failure that killed him.
I read somewhere that a primary cancer seldom kills ; most of the time the metastasic-induced does. Why ? There should be far more "bad" cells in the primary site, doesn’t it ?
(medecine illiterate there, sorry if half of my assumptions are wrong)
A few day ago, I saw an interesting article on a site somewhat related to lesswrong. Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to read it, so I bookmarked it.
Computer crashed, lost my last bookmarks and now I spent 2 hours trying to find this article, without luck. Here is the idea of the article, in a nutshell : we human are somewhat a king of learning machine, trying to build a model of the “reality”. In ML, overfitting means that in insisting too much on fitting the data, we actually get a worse out-of-sample performance (because we start to fit the modeling...
Of course yes, since there's only one ruliad by definition, and we’re observers living inside it.
In Wolfram terms I think the question would more be like : "does every slice in rulial space (or every rulial reference frame) has an observer ?"
Possibly of interest : https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/12/observer-theory/
One part that I don’t see as sufficiently emphasized is the "as a time-persistent pattern" part. It seems to me that that part is bringing with it a lot of con... (read more)