All of PipFoweraker's Comments + Replies

You'd run into cognitive overhead limits. Manually reviewing other people's conversations can only really happen at 1:1 to 2:1 speeds. Summaries are much more efficient.

Plus, people behave very differently in radically observed environments. Panopticons were designed as part of a punishment system for a reason.

my project DRI starter kit

DRI = Directly Responsible Individual. Often a / the Project Manager, but not always!

By 'graceful', do you mean morally graceful, technically graceful, or both / other?

Thanks for the write-up, I recall a conversation introducing me to all these ideas in Berkeley last year and it's going to be very handy having a resource to point people at (and so I don't misremember details about things like the Yamanaka factors!).

Am I reading the current plan correctly such that the path is something like:
Get funding -> Continue R+D through primate trials  -> Create an entity in a science-friendly, non-US state for human trials -> first rounds of Superbabies?  That scenario seems like it would require a bunch of medical tourism, which I imagine is probably not off the table for people with the resources and mindset willing to participate in this.

I'm not sure that this mental line of defence would necessarily hold, us humans are easily manipulated by things that we know to be extremely simple agents that are definitely trying to manipulate us all the time: babies, puppies, kittens, etc. 

This still holds true a significant amount of the time even if we pre-warn ourselves against the pending manipulation - there is a recurrent meme of, eg, dads in families not ostensibly not wanting a pet, only to relent when presented with one.

This implies your timelines for any large impact from AI would span multiple future generations, is that correct?

Relatively small behavioural changes on your end may address some of the causes of these frustrations. It sounds like you might be overstocked with things of relatively low long-term utility, which is why it's hard to immediately pass them on. Have you scanned your spending patterns for hyperbolic discounting, for example?

Comics are a great example - if you have the willpower to hold off until you can but a TPB, they're cheaper, more economic, more durable, take up less storage space, and are much easier to pass on or pass around than individual comics. If... (read more)

Today's SMBC will drag a smile out of many people here if thy haven't read it already.

Whoah. That gets many points. What an excellent layout! We need to know what boots are for it to translate, but that's a lot closer to an ideal solution than I've worked through.

Edit - I thought the diagram looked familiar!

In your situation, in Australia, it's mostly about forward planning. Do you have any foreknowledge of likely changes in your health or family situation?

The insurance market in Australia has historically been pretty poor in terms of transparency and easy comparisons. I'm sure you've found the various compare-policy tools online. I'm assuming you don't want to piggyback on a family policy.

Are you looking for more data, or a list of considerations for insurance planning? If it's the latter, try browsing around insurance industry planner websites for their policy documents. I can probably get some friends in the industry to email me more comprehensive things if you want to work of their approaches.

Thanks! I've been playing around with it for a week or so but can't elegantly find a way to do it that meets my arbitrary standards of elegance and cool design :-)

Becomes easier when using non-circular shapes for Venn-ing, but my efforts look a little hacky.

Reminiscing over one of my favourite passages from Anathem, I've been enjoying looking through visual, wordless proofs of late. The low-hanging fruit is mostly classical geomety, but a few examples of logical proofs have popped up as well.

This got me wondering if it's possible to communicate the fundamental idea of Bayes' Theorem in an entirely visual format, without written language or symbols needing translation. I'd welcome thoughts from anyone else on this.

In any particular geographical or topical area?

I ran into this issue as well, being relatively well credentialed professionally and through the TAFE / AQF framework. It's hard to know where to put the scale, so I normally do an equivalence of hours-studied-full-time-loading in my head and use that.

Unfortunately, this. I did coverage work for WoTC for a few years and my custom dictionary is ridiculous.

For bonus points, I've also reviewed 200+ Spec Fic novels, so the amount of weird pronouns in the list is spectacular.

I have a non-specific recollection that, generally speaking, phrasing directions in the positive imperative ("Treat dogs well") rather than a negative imperative ("Do not treat dogs badly") leads to better rates of recall / compliance.

If it interests you I'll ask around and find a proper reference.

There is a continuum that moves from complete dream-obliviousness (not being aware one has dreamed upon waking) all the way up to comprehensively lucid dreaming, where a dreamer is able to create and control their dream environment at will and then retain an accurate memory upon waking.

There are obvious problems with the self-reporting of dreams and dream recall, so the exact definitions of the continuum are fuzzy, but I'm not aware of anyone seriously disputing the continuum exists.

Also making matters more interesting is the mechanics of dreaming in term... (read more)

You may want to spend some time thinking about how you can give your dog the best end of life experience that you can.

Losing a dog is painful. However, and I'm only speaking from personal experience here, you will probably have the opportunity to control to a great extent how your dog dies, its relative level of pain / discomfort, and in what situation and setting the death takes place.

Knowing that my dog - who my parents found abandoned a few weeks before I was born, who I grew up with, and who died in my early adulthood - died at home, surrounded by he... (read more)

Following simple ideas or explanations that are mostly right will still give me good outcomes in a plurality of iterations.

I don't have infinite time to carefully consider those ideas. Being a standardly incompetent human at many things, my ability to discern truthiness by looking is subject to error.

What options do I have for differentiating between simple explanations that are correct and simple explanations that are only mostly correct, and then figuring out whether the latter are worth investigating for corner-casery / quackery / etc?

The thought intrigued me enough to check with a native Korean speaking friend, and they said that cloning doesn't necessarily translate well and it could have been a question about the size of AlphaGo (in terms of copying it or the datasets) or its reproducability / iterations (i.e. are there v1.01, v1.02's floating around).

The recently posted Intelligence Squared video titled Don't Trust the Promise of Artificial Intelligence may be of interest to LW readers, if only because of IQ2's decently sized cultural reach and audience.

When animals are created and destroyed solely for a purpose attributed to them by their human overlords, that reduces their utilisable preferences to zero or near zero. Unless a meat producer had reason to believe that inflicting pain on an animal improved the resulting meat product, that pain would almost certainly be a by-product of whatever the farmer chose rather than an exclusive intent. I personally know no farmers that inflict 'pointless' injury on their livestock.

Given any amount of suffering in the animal stock needed to feed, say the US compared ... (read more)

If I'm exclusively limiting myself to animals that are raised in an organised fashion for eventual slaughter, I don't think I need too much data to assign broadly negative values to lives that are unusually brutish, nasty and short compared to either non-existence or a hypothetical natural existence.

In my consideration, simple things like the registering of a pain stimulus and the complexity of behaviour to display distress are good enough indicators.

I'm not certain if we need to understand how suffering works if we can simply remove the organs that house it.

It seems less tricky when a technological set of solutions come along that allow delicious engineered meat to be grown without all the unnecessary and un-delicious bits.

I think the in vitro meat industry will have an extraordinarily good time when things develop to the point of being able to synthesis a lazy-person's whole stuffed camel.

There is value in having crowds that view you mildly and strongly disfavourably, but much of this value depends on the rule of law in one's immediate environment.

I think that's a reasonable position for a preface to take.

My experience with giving people the data behind squatting to go to the dunny is that their awkwardness about it strongly outweighs, initially, their willingness to experiment.

Which leads to the thought that there are probably some provably life-enhancing things that people don't even consider doing because it is so far outside their social mores that the possibility doesn't occur. I have had an entertaining few minutes trying to think of some that my great-descendants will be bewildered we didn't consider.

It may be worthwhile to cast a wider net in order to glean more professional opinions and sources of data while reducing any emotional response. Consider spending a useful amount of time exploring mailing lists, forums, and professional bodies. Google indicates there are tons of professional bodies in both the US and overseas that will have members who have dealt with similar experience and questions before. Some have membership requirements which a determined person can get around without too many problems, PM me if you get stuck. You may also consider as... (read more)

One suggestion is to consider having more than one email for the purposes of separating emails from people who email you about personal things and people who email you about work things. This may be useful in addition to the suggestion in OP to have a separate email for subscriptions/mailing lists.

This has been useful to me in the past for being able to effectively segment my 'work life' while on holidays or taking a break without missing out on social updates and emails from friends and family members. Aslo, when I am on holidays in non-urban environments... (read more)

If you are not familiar with Carrico's blog and writing style, this is a feature, not a bug.

Thanks! Y'know, I actually spotted the doubling up of the pronoun, checked it, thought "Huh, random egotism, naming a centre after yourself" and went ahead and clicked 'Submit'. Cheers, random brainfart! Edited OP for accuracy.

I would posit that his actual children have a comfortably non-zero amount of influence over him, and that the rest of us have a non-zero-but-muchcloser-to-zero amount of influence over him.

Replying to clarify my point assigned was entirely for AskClippy :-)

Combining the first two would likely result in a more-memorable-than-most experience.

Does that not-want take into consideration your changed capacity to influence him if you became his child?

While browsing the Intelligence Squared upcoming debates, I noticed two things that may be of interest to LW readers.

The first is a debate titled "Lifespans are long enough", with Aubrey De Grey and Brian Kennedy of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging arguing against Paul Root Wolpe from the Emory Centre for Ethics and another panelist TBA. The debate is taking place in early February.

The second, and of potentially more interest to the LW community, is taking place on March 9th and is titled "Artificial Intelligence: The risks outweigh... (read more)

You're entirely right, 'Games Trainers Play' is not at all like Games People Play, but it is a useful book in terms of practical applications of applied human psychology. The amount of value I've observed added to newly-formed teams and temporary groups through the contents - in terms of near-immediate cohesion, bonding, and comfortable introductions to group dynamic discussions - has been tremendous.

If I were going to retitle the two, GPP would become "Communicative Dark Arts and How To Spot Them", whereas GTP would be "Communicative Light ... (read more)

I suggest that the more Musk influences OpenAI's agenda, the further it moves away from core competition with MIRI.

A counterexample might be if a series of AI researchers in China announced a formation a clone of MIRI but based out of Shanghai - a more clear-cut intelligence race than what we've currently go, which is an increasing number of institutions all starting down roadmaps that share initial common ground but have divergent ideal end states.

If you have any good (academic for preference) sources for the latter statement, I'd love to see them, mainly to add to my 'Collection of X-refuting hyperlinks' I have easily accessible when browsing the Internet At Large.

Is there a non-obvious reason why I can't create a non-profit entity whose sole purpose is to receive donations for selected effective charities that operate overseas and distribute that money to them, thereby enhancing the usefulness of local donations by allowing them to be tax-deductable?

(Specifically Australia, generally otherwise)

Seconded. Both my parents are well respected communication professionals, and they refer to the mechanics described in this book more than any other. Plus it has some very cute retro cartoons.

Some more healthy ideas can be found in a parallel book, Games Trainers Play, which is more useful for getting adults to engage in communication through (nominally) fun / silly activities as a way of learning about team communication dynamics etc. There are certainly lessons and models in there I have used in useful discussions as well.

I am challenged to think of a way that my Newly Minted MIRI Competitor could differentiate itself from MIRI in a way that is both:

a) optimal, and

b) non-divergent from MIRI's goals in such a way as to be functionally different.

I could certainly fund Evilbot Angry AI Development Labs, and we might see a difference in focus away from GAI frameworks and more towards how-to-kill-all-the-humans-as-effectively-as-possible research, but that doesn't let me weed out what 'local parochialism' is.

For me personally, a long career in a particular public service sector has made me surprisingly efficient at smilingly, politely ignoring what people say and digging out information from an unwilling audience. When someone drops a blanket 'You must fulfil condition Y to truly understand foo' statement,I respond by seeing it as an interrogatory challenge :-)

When people try to push me off with a 'I can't explain' or 'You need more experience' type of response, I usually deflect it by nodding, smiling broadly, and saying something along the lines of "I'm... (read more)

I'll second the suggestion of introducing people to overconfidence early on, because (hopefully) it leads to a more questioning mindset.

I would note that the otherwise-awesome Adventures in Cognitive Biases' calibration is heavily geared towards a particular geographic demographic, and that several of my peers that I've introduced this to were a little off-put by it, so consider encouraging them to stick through the calibration into the more meaty subject matter of the Adventure itself.

One normal-world handy use for the phrases 'skill' and 'intuition' is in shortcutting communication, either out of reticence or convenience. For example, if I ask a professional poker player why they made a particular play, if they don't want to get into a meaningful discussion about the sorts of math they work through while playing the game (plus attendant behavioural observations etc) then essentially either of those two responses are a reasonably polite way of brushing me off.

I'm sure you can think of instances where, regardless of the polite good inten... (read more)

One area to explore would be the concept of smart contracts, currently best exampled by experiments with blockchain technology - Ethereum and transparency in prediction markets would have places to start. One possible solution to a real-world non-criminal application of that problem would be to hire a neutral third party with appropriate confidentiality trust - like a lawyer - to create an agreement, witness it, and hold it in trust.

This becomes less reliable when you start delving into the ethical problems outlined by other responders if you're trying to create something deniable, but you can probably work around that with an 'if-then' agreement with a lawyer and a pre-sealed envelope.

Anecdotally, all of my matriarchal pre-funeralees have all indicated a strong dislike at both this poem's mild sexism and its somewhat mournful, rather than explicitly celebratory, approach.

Copyright shouldn't matter in these instances.