It's not a novel algorithm type, just a learning project I did in the process of learning ML frameworks, a fairly simple LSTM + one dense layer, trained on the predictions + resolution of about 60% of the resolved predictions from PredictionBook as of September last year (which doesn't include any of the ones in the contest). The remaining resolved predictions were used for cross-validation or set aside as a test set. An even simpler RNN is only very slightly less good, though.
The details of how the algorithm works are thus somewhat opaque but fr...
I'm concerned that the described examples of holding individual comments to high epistemic standards don't seem to necessarily apply to top-level posts, or linked content- one reason I think this is bad is that it is hard to precisely critique something which is not in itself precise, or which contains metaphor, or which contains example-but-actually-pointing-at-a-class writing where the class can be construed in various different ways.
Critique of fuzzy intuitions and impressions and feelings often involves fuzzy intuitions and impressions and fe...
It might be nice to have a set of twenty EA questions, a set of twenty ongoing-academic-research questions, a set of twenty general tech industry questions, a set of twenty world politics questions for the people who like them maybe, and run multiple contests at some point which refine predictive ability within a particular domain, yeah.
It'd be a tough time to source that many, and I feel that twenty is already about the minimum sample size I'd want to use, and for research questions it'd probably require some crowdsourcing of interesting upcoming experiments to predict on, but particularly if help turns out to be available it'd be worth considering if the smaller thing works.
The usefulness of a model of the particular area was something I considered in choosing between questions, but I had a hard time finding a set of good non-personal questions which had very high value to model. I tried to pick questions which in some way depended on interesting underlying questions-for example, the Tesla one hinges on your ability to predict the performance of a known-to-overpromise entrepreneur in a manner that's more precise than either maximum cynicism or full trust, and the ability to predict ongoing ramp-up of manufacturing of tec...
I need to take a good look over what GJO has to offer here- I'm not sure if running a challenge for score on it would meet the goals here well (in particular I think it needs to be bounded in amount of prediction it requires in order to motivate doing it, and yet not gameable by just doing easy questions, and I'd like to be able to see what the probability assignments on specific questions were), but I've not looked at it closely with this in mind. I should at least hopefully be able to crib a few questions, or more.
Sounds good. I've looked over them and I could definitely use a fair few of those.
Thanks for letting me know! I've sent them a PM, and hopefully they'll get back to me once they're free.
On the positive side, I think an experiment in a more centrally managed model makes sense, and group activity that has become integrated into routine is an incredibly good commitment device for getting the activity done- the kind of social technology used in workplaces everywhere that people struggle to apply to their other projects and self-improvement efforts. Collaborative self-improvement is good; it was a big part of what I was interested in for the Accelerator Project before that became defunct.
On the skulls side, though, I think the big risk factor ...
Assuming by "it" you refer to the decision theory work, that UFAI is a threat, Many Worlds Interpretation, things they actually have endorsed in some fashion, it would be fair enough to talk about how the administrators have posted those things and described them as conclusions of the content, but it should accurately convey that that was the extent of "pushing" them. Written from a neutral point of view with the beliefs accurately represented, informing people that the community's "leaders" have posted arguments for some unus...
The pattern matching's conclusions are wrong because the information it is matching on is misleading. The article implied that there was widespread belief that the future AI should be assisted, and this was wrong. Last I looked it still implied widespread support for other beliefs incorrectly.
This isn't an indictment of pattern matching so much as a need for the information to be corrected.
It would be nice if you'd also address the extent to which it misrepresents other LessWrong contributors as thinking it is feasible or important (sometimes to the point of mocking them based on its own misrepresentation). People around LessWrong engage in hypothetical what-if discussions a lot; it doesn't mean that they're seriously concerned.
Lines like "Though it must be noted that LessWrong does not believe in or advocate the basilisk ... just in almost all of the pieces that add up to it." are also pretty terrible given we know only a fairly s...
The article is still terrible, but it's better than it was when Stross linked it. The greatest difficulty is describing the thing and the fuss accurately while explaining it to normal intelligent people without them pattern matching it to "serve the AI God or go to Hell". This is proving the very hardest part. (Let's assume for a moment 0% of them will sit down with 500K words of sequences.) I'm trying to leave it for a bit, having other things to do.
First, examining the dispute over whether scalable systems can actually implement a distributed AI...
This is one reason why even Google's datastore, AFAIK, does not implement exactly this kind of architecture -- though it is still heavily sharded. This type of a datastructure does not easily lend itself to purely general computation, either, since it relies on precomputed indexes, and generally exploits some very specific property of the data that is known in advance.
That's untrue; Google App Engine's datastore is not built on exactly this architecture...
Restricting the topic to distributed computation, the short answer is "essentially no". The rule is that you get at best linear returns, not that your returns diminish greatly. There are a lot of problems which are described as "embarassingly parallel", in that scaling them out is easy to do with quite low overhead. In general, any processing of a data set which permits it to be broken into chunks which can be processed independently would qualify, so long as you were looking to increase the amount of data processed by adding more proce...
This model trivially shows that censoring espousing violence is a bad idea, if and only if you accept the given premise that censorship of espousing violence is a substantial PR negative. This premise is a large part of what the dispute is about, though.
Not everyone is you; a lot of people feel positively about refusing to provide a platform to certain messages. I observe a substantial amount of time expended by organisations on simply signalling opposition to things commonly accepted as negative, and avoiding association with those things. LW barring espo...
I think in this context, "asking about" might include raising for neutral discussion without drawing moral judgements.
The connection I see between them is that if someone starts neutral discussion about a possible action, actions which would reasonably be classified as advocacy have to be permitted if the discussion is going to progress smoothly. We can't discuss whether some action is good or bad without letting people put forward arguments that it is good.
I think that a discussion in which only most people are mindkilled can still be a fairly productive one on these questions in the LW format. LW is actually one of the few places where you would get some people who aren't mindkilled, so I think it is actually good that it achieves this much.
They seem fairly ancillary tor LW as a place for improving instrumental or epistemic rationality, though. If you think testing the extreme cases of your models of your own decision-making is likely to result in practical improvements in your thinking, or just want to tes...
Ah, I see. That makes sense. They weren't actually asked to remove the whole of the quoting, just to remove some unrelated lines, which has been complied with, so there's no unimplemented requests as far as I know.
Of course, it might just have not asked for because having it pulled at this point could cause a worse mess than leaving it up, with more reputation damage. Some third party moderator could request it to avoid that issue, but I think at this point the horse is long gone and going to the work of closing the barn door might not be worth it.
It'd be reasonable for a hypothetical moderator taking an appropriate action to request they replace the whole thing with a summary, though; that makes sense.
Quoting without permission was clearly a mistake, but describing it as a "rather clear privacy agreement" is not particularly apt; Freenode policy on this is written as strong advice rather than "rules" as such, and the channel itself had no clear policy. As it was, it was mostly a social convention violation. I thus have to disagree that an indefinite ban for ignorance of advice or an unwritten policy would be an appropriate or optimum response. What's happened so far- the person being corrected quite sharply here and on the channel, a...
"The morally (and socially) appropriate thing to do" would be to learn the difference between a chat and a public forum before jumping to hasty conclusions.
The conclusions drawn, while erroneous, were erroneous for reasons unrelated to the difference between an IRC channel and a public forum. They were not wrong to think that they were being insulted because they were wrong to post logs. Strongly establishing that they made an error in quoting from the channel here does not establish that their issue is groundless.
Conflation of issues like thi...
This is just so utterly over the top I'm mystified that it was taken as anything but ritual insulting for the purpose of bonding/hazing in an informal group.
You've been lucky to avoid seeing jokes like this more often when moving around the Internet, then. Over the top jokes at the expense of minority groups are popular when representing actual opinions, not just as jokes to people you already know, particularly in communities where those opinions are accepted norms and the group in question is an acceptable target. The desire to score points often lead...
It's true that with all the information available now, a simple private message would have cleared it up. It's also true, though, that with all the information available now, simply not saying those specific lines would have avoided the whole issue in the first place. It was not realistic to expect either party to have known that at the time.
It isn't reasonable to expect someone who feels they have been insulted, and who has already responded in public with complaints like "what a disgusting thing to say", and observed everyone fail to care, to g...
No one has ever prefaced such a statement with "for your purposes." There is a reason for that.
It actually occurs fairly often. A good reason to prefix such a statement with "for your purposes", is to indicate that modelling a statement as true is effective for achieving your purposes, without getting into a more complex discussion of whether it actually is true or not.
For example, "for your purposes, the movement of objects is described by Newtonian physics". The statement after "for your purposes" is ill-defined...
Took the survey; doing all the extra tests for the last few extra questions was fairly interesting, not having done many personality tests or taken online IQ tests before.
This is interesting, particularly the idea of comparing wage growth against welfare growth predicting success of "free money" welfare. I agree that it seems reasonably unlikely that a welfare system paying more than typical wages, without restrictions conflicting with the "detached from work" principle, would be sustainable, and identifying unsustainable trends in such systems seems like an interesting way to recognise where something is going to have to change, long-term.
I appreciate the clarification; it provides what I was missing in...
It is true that in the long run, things could work out worse with a guarantee of sufficient food/supplies for everyone. I think, though, that this post answers the wrong question; the question to answer in order to compare consequences is how probable it is to be better or worse, and by what amounts. Showing that it "could" be worse merely answers the question "can I justify holding this belief" rather than the question "what belief should I hold". The potential benefits of a world where people are guaranteed food seem quite h...
The problem with this argument is that there are costs to causing things to happen via spreading misinformation; you're essentially biasing other people doing expected utility evaluations by providing inaccurate data to them. People drawing conclusions based on inaccurate data would have other effects; in this example, some people would avoid flying, suffering additional costs. People are also likely to continue to support the goals the conspiracy theory pushes towards past the point that they actually would have the greater expected utility without the co...
Looking at the press association example, I think that one problem here is that similar ideas are being blurred, and given a single probability instead of separate ones.
A lot of the theories involving press/politician association involve conspiracy to conceal specific, high impact information from the public, or similar levels of dysfunction of the media. Most of these are low probability (I can't think of any counterexamples offhand); as far as I know either no or a very small percentage of such theories have been demonstrated as true over time.
Different ...
PredictionBook itself has a bunch more than three participants and functions as an always-running contest for calibration, although it's easy to cheat since it's possible to make and resolve whatever predictions you want. I also participate in GJ Open, which has an eternally ongoing prediction contest. So there's stuff out there where people who want to compete on running score can do so.
The objective of the contest was less to bring such an opportunity into existence as to see if it'd incentivise some people who had been "meaning&... (read more)