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All of krs's Comments + Replies

Fifty Flips
krs52

I assumed that if you are flipping a coin, trials would be independent events and each flip would have a fixed rule (which is what happens when you flip a single coin). Instead, the coin had a different rule for odd and even numbered flips. I think that the language of the website should be amended to reflect this.

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Is the confirmation bias really a bias?
krs21

I think a useful heuristic for updating beliefs is to ask yourself "What would make this belief false?" rather than casting the issue in the framework of confirmation vs. balance. To make this concrete, consider the example of flat earthers vs. scientists. If you believed in a flat earth, there are any number of tests you could do to (e.g. watching ships sail down below the horizon) that would lead you to update towards falsifying your belief. This type of information seeking is neutral with respect to confirming your beliefs. This also allows us to look f... (read more)

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2Jiro
I believe that Russell's teapot does not exist.
2Lionel
On point 2, interesting question about bias-variance. His model looks at beliefs moving in the range 0-1. The world is either 0 or 1. The question is what kind of flow of information will allow you to make the likely right decision in the minimal amount of time. On point 1, I think Zhong's framework is general enough to cover the examples you give. If you can choose the type of information to collect very flexibly, and if more informative signals are more costly, it makes more sense to look for confirmation because, given your beliefs, you are more likely to quickly be confident enough to act on your beliefs. Contrarian or neutral sources are useful, but in expectation, given your beliefs, they would require you to take more time before making a decision.
What vegan food resources have you found useful?
Answer by krs*40

I'm only a vegetarian but I try to eat vegan when possible. I personally think that fortified foods are too often overlooked by people going on plant based diets. A lot of products targeted at vegans are fortified really well with nutrients that vegans tends to lack. For instance, at least at the grocery store I go to, the plant based milks contain as much calcium, b12, and vitamin D as the cow's milk. Breakfast cereals are also great and usually have an assortment of nutrients including iron (this comes with the usual caveat of avoiding the really sugary ... (read more)

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3blahblah
Check out How Not to Die and subsequent books in that series.
How I learned to stop worrying and love skill trees
krs21

Could you integrate Blackbelt with Anki or another spaced repetition framework?  Someone made this set of anki cards on AI alignment sometime ago, which I have found to be a useful resource: https://www.ai-alignment-flashcards.com/decks

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2junk heap homotopy
Yup, that's definitely on the roadmap. Sometimes you need facts to advance a particular skill (e.g., if you're figuring out scaling laws, you have got to know a bunch of important numbers) or even just to use the highly specialised language of your field, and there's no better way to do that than to use SRS. We're probably going to offer Anki import some time in the future just so we can take advantage of the massive amount of material other people have already made, but also I can't promise one-to-one parity since I'd like to aim more towards gwern's programmable flashcards which directly inspired this whole project in the first place.
Robin Hanson and I talk about AI risk
krs10

My tentative viewpoint on this is that the preference one has over value drift from AI vs. human made value drift comes from an entity's ability to experience joy and suffering. 

In the context of AI safety, many humans who experience mostly positive lives could be killed or made to suffer at the hands of superintelligent AI in the future, and the experience of the AI in terms of pain and suffering is mostly unknown. I'm worried that an AI will optimize for something that does not lead to any subjective increase of wellbeing in the universe at the cost of human happiness.

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