All of oooo's Comments + Replies

Two words, one meme: Robin Hanson.

What that means is that we have a lot of people with individualist personalities who are developing themselves in a way that is primarily an individual endeavor.

The term gamification has been bandied about a lot to the point of uselessness, but it seems this community benefits directly from such re-framings. Individual endeavours could be considered Level 1.

That sort of makes trying to have well-organized group projects a bit of a challenge. I think if you're arguing that we should encourage people to develop their social skills, I wouldn't be oppos

It all works quite well and after using it for a few months the idea of going back to simple upvotes/downvotes feels like a significant regression.

This Slack-specific emoji capability is akin to Facebook Reactions; namely a wider array of aggregated post/comment actions.

Thank you for these exercise samples. I didn't realize that I was running through a less powerful flavour of these exercises until this post. Do you by chance have any examples of exercises that you've both worked on to increase your child's verbal and linguistic capabilities?

I upvoted you because I noticed that the term "team level rationality" piquing my interest. Is "team level" or "group rationality" emphasized or taught in follow-on CFAR workshops?

This seems like a potential area of low-hanging fruit where existing "executive team coaching program" content could be adapted. Somebody hypothesized that the growing popularity of local meetups and professional growth sapping LW readership. Group effectiveness content, especially in the context of the world-class teams/names/organizations... (read more)

Not even Freicoins? Or do you mean weird, un-innovative altcoins that seem to add no real value to the ecosystem? Generally, it's hard to tell, but it seems certain altcoins try hard to differentiate themselves. Monero and Freicoin stand out as sufficiently different that they could turn out to be valuable (as far as altcoins go).

EDIT: Read the rest of the comments and noticed that you explicitly stated Freicoin is a possible exception to the rule. People may also be interested (although may also choose for various reasons not to invest) in other altcoins ... (read more)

OP: >>So MIRI is interested in making a better list of possible concrete routes to AI taking over the world. And for this, we ask your assistance.

Louie: >>Katja doesn't speak for all of MIRI when she says above what "MIRI is interested in".

These two statements contradict each other. If it's true that Katja doesn't speak for all of MIRI on this issue, perhaps MIRI has a PR issue and needs to issue guidance on how representatives of the organization present public requests. When reading the parent post, I concluded that MIRI leadership ... (read more)

Upvoted for only this sentence fragment: "More benevolently, the AI makes a huge amount of money off of financial markets [...]".

Q6. How much influence will the ethics committee actually have? For example, are there commercial and IP clawback provisions if the committee is deemed to be ignored or sidelined?

A North American non-Montessori educator (director of daycare) said that Montessori is different in various parts of the world. I did not do more research into this, and obviously this comment can be easily biased and seen to have an agenda. However, based on this comment alone, I'm also interested in whether you (Gunnar_Zarncke) thought about putting your children through (European) Montessori.

Unlike real estate which requires much higher amounts of capital (read: your after-tax savings) to invest in, Bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies allow for people with just double-digit or less discretionary income to speculate.

In this manner, speculators/gamblers/investors are able to gain some experience with actual money and trading. The fees on the cryptocurrency exchanges are rather low, and since cryptocurrencies can go down to multiple decimal places, transaction fees of 0.45% (for example) are still feasible even on sub-$1 trades.

Of course, one co... (read more)

"Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength, mastering yourself is true power."

-Lao Tzu (c.604 - 531 B.C.)

Judge.me was shutdown in July 2013, but evidently Net-Arb is another service carrying on the Judge.me torch and focusing primarily on internet arbitration.

How much would AI developers be willing to sacrifice? They may be sufficiently concerned to at this risk as explained, but motivated and well-funded organizations (or governments) should have no problem attempting to influence, persuade or convert a fraction of AI developers to think otherwise.

I wonder if global climate change can be used as an analogy highlighting what some climate scientists are willing to publish due to funding and/or other incentives beyond scientific inquiry.

This presupposes that the AGI community is, on average, homogenous across the world and would behave accordingly. What if the political climates, traditions and culture make certain (powerful) countries less likely to be fearful given their own AGI pool?

In otherwords, if country A distrusts their staff more than country B due to political/economic/cultural factors, country A would be behind in the AGI arms race, which would lead to the "even if I hold onto my morals, we're still heading into the abyss" attitude. I could see organizations or governments rationalizing against the community moral pledge in this way by highlighting the futility of slowing down the research.

Taken for the first time. 'Twas fun.

To do this your best bet is to talk to large numbers of biomedical engineering alumni. As a data point, you mentioned before that SFU has one of the most respectable biomed engineering programs. As another data point, University of Toronto doesn't allow general stream undergraduate engineers to choose certain specialties requiring that extra bit of intellectual horsepower unless you are able to enter (and survive) the more theoretical Engineering Science program. Biomed Engineering is one of the specialties that falls in this category.

I feel the reason tha... (read more)

Perhaps in your corporate ladder discussions it may be useful to mention unions vs. managers to make the point clearer. Focusing on senior managers vs. executives is a weaker description because most people see that as one unified ladder, and not two separate ladders.

Similarly: What's a corporate executive? I understand that there is a management hierarchy, but why the arbitrary distinction between a senior manager and a junior executive? Aren't those just two rungs on the ladder? In corporate-speak, an executive is called a "decision maker."

Agreed. There is no qualitative difference between senior manager and executive beyond the increased scope of responsibilities and scale with which your decisions affect others, both of which could be attributed to the word "agentiness."

I believe the main distinction was primarily historical when nobles and aristocracy commanded peasants. I had always thought that commissions (from the Queen/King or head of state) used to be put on sale by the state, similar to how France at one point used to sell public offices.

In today's more modern times, one can become an officer by dint of having a post-secondary education. At least in Canada, you are typically an officer when you enlist provided you have a bachelor degree and pass certain intelligence tests.

Everybody else (NCOs or enlisted) typica... (read more)

Plugging your terms into Google turned up some immediate links. This one seems to have behaviorism references to the underlying studies.

Aha, mastery is the question, isn't it? I have no full answer for that.

Does the OP really mean mastery or setting one on the path to mastery? Perhaps a series of MOOC-like college courses would be more appropriate to gradually introduce and incrementally advance one's demonstrated understanding of LW content over time (and multiple courses).

Perhaps a parallel for the syllabus and starting point of a MOOC style would be Coursera's Critical Thinking or How To Argue courses.

Other professional goals, skills, or structure-based needs might be satisfied by college,

As you pointed out earlier in your response, Internet learning (and LW in particular) could have been particularly useful before attending college. I would go one step further and suggest that attending college and learning from the internet should not be mutually exclusive for those who are interesting in learning and making a potential college social life trade-off.

I currently believe that most students attending college realize that the degree itself is of primary signalling importance, even if they're not able to explicitly articulate why.

Sorry this is a small nitpick. The main searchlores author is Fravia, not Favia. He was instrumental in providing a community and rallying point for various reversing groups. He was anonymous for quite some time, until he passed away in 2009.

There are lots of open source research programs for graphical model stuff.

@jamesf - which one of the programs will you be picking?

What type of work in software would you like to do? The rest of my comment will assume that you mean the software technology industry, and not programming specifically.

There are many individual contributor roles in technology companies. Being a developer is one of them. Others may include field deployment specialists, system administrator, pre-sales engineers, sales or the now popular "data scientist".

I agree that credentials help with hiring and promotions. When I evaluate staff with little work experience graduate credentials play a role in my ... (read more)

I did not understand the math. I have more to learn. Thanks.

I wish the paper was available to read. Do you have a copy available?

Trading would imply that Swimmer963 is giving up some of her attractiveness in exchange for attention, by treating 'beauty' as a resource that can be depleted. However, her attractiveness in your example of the trade (beauty attention) isn't depleted significantly.

Perhaps you meant something like trading her spatio-temporal presence (in which the subject gets to admire her visage in a non-awkward social situation for a prolonged period of time) in exchange for the subject's attention; or more succinctly, trading face time with attention?

I agree with you t... (read more)

You have three conflicting goals that only you can weight accordingly:

• Work at a successful startup (fame, fortune, culture or vision)
• Find a mate / companionship
• Employment market desirability hedge (what-if...)

What I would really like to do is build my own startup, or join a startup that I think has good prospects.

Winner: London.

The pool of women I am interested in dating is much bigger there. Dating prospects are probably less good [...]

Winner: London.

[...] and also the long-term effect of accepting a pay cut - if I worked in London again l

We cooperate to compete, and a high level of fellow feeling makes us better able to unite to destroy outsiders.

--Robert Bigelow

How about starting in a supportive domain that you happen to be interested in where existing taxonomies and skill progressions seem to exist?

• http://intelligence.org/courses/
• http://rationality.org/recommended-reading-on-rationality/
• LW "curriculum"

Tech/skill trees help with the visualization process, and that goes a long way to motivation. Much of my struggle battling akrasia and learning math & beginner rationality is to try to stop imagining forbidding mountains of concepts, nomenclature and future practice, and instead focus on images ... (read more)

Now you're at the point where the career center tries to usher you into a job at megacorp or lure you into formal graduate school.

Depending on which region of the world you're in, the term "Engineer" may have certain regulatory obligations, meaning that you may feel the (sometimes debatable) allure of attempting to work enough years (usually 3) under an accredited engineer to earn your own designation; at least, so it seems in some countries.

Enthusiastically pursue some different avenue of research, persuading others to follow you

I am reading Kaj Sotala's latest paper "Responses to Catastrophic AGI Risk: A Survey" and I was struck by this thread regarding ethically concerned scientists. MIRI is following this option by enthusiastically pursuing FAI (slightly different avenue of research) and trying to persuade and convince others to do the same.

EDIT: My apologies -- I removed the second part of my comment proactively because it dealt with hypothetical violence of radical ethically motivated scientists.

Canonical software development examples emphasizing "proving safety/usefulness before running" over the "tool" software development approach are cryptographic libraries and NASA space shuttle navigation.

At the time of writing this comment, there was recent furor over software called CryptoCat that didn't provide enough warnings that it was not properly vetted by cryptographers and thus should have been assumed to be inherently insecure. Conventional wisdom and repeated warnings from the security community state that cryptography is extr... (read more)

The link is broken. Seems that MIT has an e-book storefront and understandably wants to charge for the electronic version.

This will teach me to skim next time. Thanks.

Maybe you need better machines.

This should be one of the LW Rationality Quotes for next month.

Your math education link is incorrectly specified and leads to a 404 on the LW website instead of directing to your http://mathisbeauty.org site.

I like "Thinking, Right and Wrong".

Since it's an ebook, I suggest a set of hashtags or summary keywords that trigger the responses for people to look up themselves, such as "rationality, heuristics, biases, artificial intelligence."

Another suggestion: "Thinking 001"

Is anybody aware of anybody having tried this? I'm also curious to know if this would work. I suspect the biggest obstacle will be hoping that your child[ren] can stay on point and not get distracted on their own tangents, that is, not quite answering the question that you asked.

When my child starts to speak, I will try this game and update the local LW group on how it turns out.