All of negamuhia's Comments + Replies

This seems useful and simple enough to try. I'll set up an implementation intention to do this next time I find myself in a long conversation. It also reminds me of the reversal test, a heuristic for eliminating status-quo bias.

Bostrom, Ord (2006)

Does anyone else, other than me, have a problem with noticing when the discussion they're having is getting more abstract? I'm often reminded of this fact when debating some topic. This is relating to the point on "Narrowing the scope", and how to notice the need to do this.

0Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
A general strategy of "can I completely reverse my current claim and have it still make sense?" is a good one for this. When you're talking about big, vague concepts, you can usually just flip them over and they still sound like reasonable opinions/positions to take. When you flip it and it seems like nonsense, or seems provably, specifically wrong, that means you're into concrete territory. Try just ... adopting a strategy of doing this 3-5 times per long conversation?

I signed up for a CFAR workshop, and got a scholarship, but couldn't travel for financial reasons. Is there a way to get travel assistance for either WAISS or the MIRI Fellowship program? I'll just apply for both.

3AnnaSalamon
WAISS, MSFP, CfML, and (for high-school-aged folk) EuroSPARC all have some ability to apply for travel assistance.

What reaches your attention when you see is not ‘reality’ but a mix of light measurements with cryptotheories that were useful for making snap judgments in the environment of ancestral adaptation.

Eric S. Raymond here: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7076

See my above point about how reasoning by analogy at its best is reasoning from a weak reference class. (Do people think this is worth a toplevel post?)

Yes, I do. Intuitively, this seems correct. But I'd still like to see you expound on the idea.

negamuhia-20

If you practice mindfulness meditation, you'll realize that your sense of self is an illusion. It's probably true that most people believe that their "self" is located in their head, but if you investigate it yourself, you'll find that there's actually no "self" at all.

The core ideas in LW come from the Major Sequences. You can start there, reading posts in each sequence sequentially.

Sergey Levine's research on guided policy search (using techniques such as hidden markov models to animate, in real-time, the movement of a bipedal or quadripedal character). An example:

Sergey Levine, Jovan Popović. Physically Plausible Simulation for Character Animation. SCA 2012: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~svlevine/papers/quasiphysical.pdf

The text of [the parts I've read so far of] Superintelligence is really insightful, but I'll quote Nick in saying that

"Many points in this book are probably wrong".

He gives many references (84 in Chapter 1 alone), some of which refer to papers and others that resemble continuations of the specific idea in question that don't fit in directly with the narrative in the book. My suggestion would be to go through each reference as it comes up in the book, analyze and discuss it, then continue. Maybe even forming little discussion groups around e... (read more)

negamuhia100

It’s tempting to think of technical audiences and general audiences as completely different, but I think that no matter who you’re talking to, the principles of explaining things clearly are the same. The only real difference is which things you can assume they already know, and in that sense, the difference between physicists and the general public isn’t necessarily more significant than the difference between physicists and biologists, or biologists and geologists.

Reminds me of Expecting Short Inferential Distances.

I'm hand-typing the code from the pdf. I know it would be easier if I used the .lhs file from github, but I'd like to make sure I read and understand the code first. Reading the .lhs file hurts my eyes due to formatting issues in Emacs.

9So8res
Here you go. Made via vim command: ggqqqqqV/begin.code<ENTER>d/end.code<ENTER>O<ESC>j@qq@q<ESC>kdG
1John_Maxwell
You might want to write a quick script to remove all of the comments from the LHS file and turn it in to a regular old Haskell file.

This is great, thanks. I'll implement a rudimentary spam filter with this sometime next week.

I'm not sure about "day-to-day life", but this application of general abstract nonsense certainly did make my day better when I read it: link

6Qiaochu_Yuan
So, in mathematics general abstract nonsense has a more specific meaning than this. It specifically refers to certain kinds of arguments in category theory.

Language in Thought and Action, by S. I. Hayakawa. It goes without saying that this book is highly recommended. To those who've read the sequences, and have therefore had just a bite of the hearty meal, you should really get it. An anecdote about how I came to find this gem: My grandfather is a retired linguist, and in his library, in a house I grew up in, he keeps, and still has, a gigantic collection of books. A member of that distinguished class of "books older than me", this book is a part of his linguistics collection, and I didn't even know... (read more)

2djcb
Linguistics are interesting, and this book is a classic of the field, but could you explain why you think it is so great? Haven't read the book yet, but I'm interested to know if I should give it some extra priority in my reading queue.
4BerryPick6
Your family is awesome.

Chillstep : I've found this online collection to be quite relaxing, as the genre name suggests.

The Art Of Noise - The Seduction of Claude Debussy : I hadn't listened to any music by this super-group before this year, and now they're one of my favourite groups...I'm either fickle or these guys are awesome, and I'm not fickle. There's one song I liked in particular, Metaforce, and its remixes. It'll show you just how versatile this group is, with the rest of the album as a backdrop.

Likewise, thank you for your suggestion.

dbaupp, ParagonProtege, thank you both for the links and suggestions. I'm going with the laptop. Anything else I could do (naturally, there's a lot i want to do) will be kickstarted by the modest, but easy(ish) money I'll get by doing ~$100 websites, as I upgrade my code-fu for Other Stuff. ;)

I also haven't cycled actively for years & I'm afraid my unfit body might conk out on me, making me unable to Do The Job once I commit. Cliff scaling is much harder than hill climbing.

From Alicorn's post , I can easily tell that after I get the laptop, the correc... (read more)

negamuhia110

Happy New Year, LWers, I'm on a 5 month vacation from uni, and don't have a job. Also, my computer was stolen in October, cutting short my progress in self-education.

Given all this free time I have now, which of these 2 options is better?

  • Buy a road bicycle & start a possibly physically risky job as a freelance bike-messenger within my city ( I'm that one guy from Nairobi )in order to get out of the house more, then buy a laptop and continue my self-education in programming, computer science, philosophy, etc.

or

  • buy a laptop, do quick and easy wo
... (read more)
2negamuhia
dbaupp, ParagonProtege, thank you both for the links and suggestions. I'm going with the laptop. Anything else I could do (naturally, there's a lot i want to do) will be kickstarted by the modest, but easy(ish) money I'll get by doing ~$100 websites, as I upgrade my code-fu for Other Stuff. ;) I also haven't cycled actively for years & I'm afraid my unfit body might conk out on me, making me unable to Do The Job once I commit. Cliff scaling is much harder than hill climbing. From Alicorn's post , I can easily tell that after I get the laptop, the correct thing to have would be a bike, since I can ease myself back into cycling regularly. It's also weird how I saw the Other Option (buy bike, work, afford laptop, buy laptop, cut down on bike work as I increase study & laptop work hours) as just as good, even though I know I will feel like a flake if I stop riding after it gets tougher and more tiring, which is more likely than giving up on wordpress. Wordpress isn't even the only option for devastatingly easy Internet work.
7[anonymous]
I concur with dbaupp's suggestion. Additionally, you can try the reframing technique. Anna describes it here: The example she gives isn't quite isomorphic to the choice you're making, but I think the technique still may be worth trying. Imagine you're currently living out one option but given the chance to take the other - how would you feel about it? And vice versa.
dbaupp130

I don't have anything specific to offer, but (in theory) hard choices matter less. And if you literally can't decide between them, you can try flipping a coin to make the decision and as it is in the air, see which way you hope it will end up, and that should be your choice.

This happens to me sometimes, and I sort of bring myself back to normality by reminding myself of the fact that the things my meat-brain chooses to bring to my attention are out of my control (for a short time) when I'm in panic mode. Other facts I recall: I have a reflectively-inconsistent meat brain, I was raised in a Christian home (I'm atheist now), and just about everything relevant that I can remember from Kahneman (correspondence bias etc.) and other psychology texts. Also, the Sequences.

Annoying aliefs are annoying.

A thing to do would be to condense all that gratitude into the word "awesome". Best said with a wide grin.

I realize (and I'm probably not alone in this) that I've been implicitly using this {meta-work, strategy-work, direct-work} process to try and figure out where/how to contribute. Thanks for this guide/analysis.

I'd love to get these as audio files. I'd even volunteer to transcribe them if that were to happen.

"AI Will Be Maleficent By Default"

seems like an a priori predetermined conclusion (bad science, of the "I want this to be true" kind), rather than a research result (good problem statement for AGI risk research). A better title would be rephrased as a research question:

"Will AI Be Maleficent By Default?"

5pengvado
If you've already done the research, and the wishlist entry is just for writing an article about it, then putting your existing conclusion in the title is fine.

famous dinner parties at which the Illuminati congregate.

Upvoted. Your sense of humor is just awesome. Unless this is one humongous Fnord.

I've downloaded most Summit talks from archive.org as [ogg] audio files, and I'm kinda partial to listening to them podcast-style i.e. while i do other stuff... So, will there be audio versions of the talks? Or is there a way I can download the videos from fora.tv, do a quick audio rip, then upload the resulting .OGGs to the archive?

Rudy Rucker's Ware Tetralogy. I'm thisclose to starting Freeware. I'm about to finish book 2 (The Golden Apple) of the Illuminatus! Trilogy...in fact that's what I'm currently reading... :) I just got Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow and Charlie Stross...haven't got around to reading it yet though... And I have about 39 fiction+nonfiction books on my current reading list, so...phew....

1Bill_McGrath
I love the Illuminatus! trilogy. I have a soft spot for Discordian ideas in general, actually.
3gwern
I read Rapture recently.

I've been listening to Sphongle a lot lately... the two albums Nothing Lasts and Are You Sphogled? have some pretty gnarfy Muzaks... Also, though this has been a constant in my life since about 4 years ago, Juno Reactor's Gods and Monsters... Beethoven's 9th (my favourite), via Gunter Wand. The Social Network's OST is also quite nice.... Question: Who loves chiptune?

0tim
*Shpongle Would second the recommendation if you like weird psychedelic/trancey music.

This reminds me of something i read in Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion" about the "Zeitgeist" of the particular age you find yourself born into...however, i think the "sane" thing to do here would be to conform, since non-conformism doesn't even carry with it the benefit of having the technology -- or even the knowledge -- to save your wife which, in this century, certainly is the case. I see what evand below says about:

[the behaviour] is also done to gain the societal safe harbor protection

but this is only valid in a world where you absolutely can not get any better. i certainly get the sense of "existential despair" this brings.

In the new version of Newcomb's problem, you have to choose between a box containing Robin Hanson and a box containing an upload of a cult

negamuhia100

Less Wrong is not a cult so long as our meetups don't include Unfriendly God.

Wow.

Edit: and this counterexample, immediately after.

politics is isomorpic to physics

Edit #2: Aargh.

In the new version of Newcomb's problem, you have to choose between a box containing timeless torture and a box containing torture

The thirty eigthth virtue of rationality is "always obey the guiding inluence of Robin Hanson"

I agree. You should change the name iff your current name-brand is irreparably damaged. Isn't that an important decision procedure for org rebrands? I forget.

EDIT: Unless, of course, the brand is already irreparably damaged...in which case this "advice" would be redundant!

You seem to be suggesting a Not-Glenn-Beck Turing-like Test.

This being my first comment, I found LW through Google Plus, and my first reading was So You Want To Save The World, which took me a couple of weeks due to the prerequisite papers, plus a ton of other stuff i was reading at the time. One might say, that that might have been an unnecessarily daunting introduction to a community - any community - but I'm glad of the way it happened because I'd never have gotten as interested in cogsci and "A-grade+ rationality" as i have been ever since. That was just before Christmas last year. Now, I've read mos... (read more)