So I've kind of formulated a possible way to use markets to predict quantiles. It seems quite flawed looking back on it two and a half weeks later, but I still think it might be an interesting line of inquiry.
I've started a blog, and I'm kind of unreasonably shy about it. Especially given that it's, you know, a blog.
I'm looking for a simple an aesthetic symbol for humanism and humanity, from our ancestors looking at the stars and wondering why, and telling each other stories, and caring for each other in the distant past, to the invention of agriculture, democracy, civilization, the Enlightenment and the Renaissance, the improvement in the human condition, technology and knowledge and truth.
I think some of you know what I mean. Humanism Pt. 3 style chills.
Ideas I've thought of: hands, sails, brains, seeds, eyes, sprouts, flames. I was looking at getting symbols of bot...
Stuff I learned at the Melbourne CFAR workshop. Class name was offline habit training, i.e. actually performing your habit multiple times in a row, in response to the trigger. Salient examples: Practicing getting out of bed in response to your alarm, practice walking in the door and putting your keys where they belong, practice putting your hands on your lap when about to bite nails, practice straightening your neck when you notice you're hunched. These are all examples I've implemented, and I have had good results.
Adding associations is a key part, too. F...
Anki is good for trigger -> response sorts of memorization, but requires a bit of hacking for other things. Combining mnemonics with spaced repetition, I've heard, is ridiculously powerful. I've got a card with three sides, Trigger, Association, and Response, to try and strengthen the trigger -> response bond. I've set it up so I've got Trigger -> Response, Association -> Response, Trigger -> Association and Trigger -> Association and Response cards. If anyone wants me to share this format, I'm happy to do so.
ETA: Combining this with habit-training techniques is, I predict, potentially powerful.
I have a Big List of Things To Try, or BLoTTT, because everything I do has to have a tacky self-helpy name even if I make it up myself. Lately I've just been, you know, trying them. It seems obvious, but it's easy to make this list and not do anything with it because you're always too busy or focused on something else or whatever. But really, it took two minutes to install f.lux and f.lux is awesome.
So is:
Boomerang
Anki
Evernote
Pomodoro
Sunlight
IFTTT
Not so awesome (for me):
Rails
Napping
Large amounts of caffeine
But I learned!
The Rails
More meetup posts clutter Discussion (which is kinda bad) but mean that people are actually going to meetup groups (which is kinda awesome). Maybe frame a meetup post not as a trivial inconvenience, but evidence that rationalists are meeting in person and having cool discussions and working on their lives instead of hanging around in Less Wrong.
When there's a lot of interesting content here, sometimes people ask why we're all sticking around talking about talking about rationality instead of doing stuff out in the world.
How about overlapping thread lifespans? This way when a new thread is created, recent comments on the previous thread won't go unread, and discussion can still happen there. A thread on Monday that lasts a week and a thread on Thursday does too, for example, with both threads pinned to the top and included under the Latest Open Thread feed on the side. I suspect this would be easier to implement than your second option. It's more difficult to implement than your first and third options, though.
If I live forever, through cryonics or a positive intelligence explosion before my death, I'd like to have a lot of people to hang around with. Additionally, the people you'd be helping through EA aren't the people who are fucking up the world at the moment. Plus there isn't really anything directly important to me outside of humanity.
Parasite removal refers to removing literal parasites from people in the third world, as an example of one of the effective charitable causes you could donate to.
I can't speak for you, but I would hugely prefer for humanity to not wipe itself out, and even if it seems relatively likely at times, I still think it's worth the effort to prevent it.
If you think existential risks are a higher priority than parasite removal, maybe you should focus your efforts on those instead.
Implicit-association tests are handy for identifying things you might not be willing to admit to yourself.
Once EA is a popular enough movement that this begins to become an issue, I expect communication and coordination will be a better answer than treating this like a one-shot problem. Maybe we'll end up with meta-charities as the equivalent of index funds, that diversify altruism to worthy causes without saturating any given one. Maybe the equivalent of GiveWell.org at the time will include estimated funding gaps for their recommended charities, and track the progress, automatically sorting based on which has the largest funding gap and the greatest benefit....
I used to read a lot in class, and the teachers didn't care because they were focused on teaching students that needed more help. I had a calculator I played with, and found things like 1111^2 = 1234321, and tried to understand these patterns. I discovered the Collatz Conjecture this way, began to learn about exponential functions, etc.
I also learned to draw probability trees from an explanation of the Monty Hall problem I read once, and I think learning that at a young age helped Bayesianism feel intuitive later on, and it was a fun thing to learn.
Second the Anki recommendation, but I'm not sure it's the most fun thing.
Writing fiction was something I enjoyed too, and improved my communication skills.
Currently working on a Django app to create directed acyclic graphs, intended to be used as dependency graphs. It should be accessible enough to regular consumers, and I plan to extend it to support to-do lists and curriculum mapping.
I need to work on my JavaScript skills. The back-end structure is easy enough, but organising how the graphs are displayed and such is proving more challenging, as well as trying to make a responsive interface for editing graphs.
Can blackmail kinds of information be compared to things like NashX or Mutually Assured Destruction usefully?
Most of my friends have information on me which I wouldn't want to get out, and vice versa. This means we can do favours for each other that pay off asynchronously, or trust each other with other things that seem less valuable than that information . Building a friendship seems to be based on gradually getting this information on each other, without either of us having significantly more on one than the other.
I don't think this is particularly original, but it seems a pretty elegant idea and might have some clues for blackmail resolution.
The theoretical microeconomics view is the one that claims:
After all, if there is unemployment, wages should fall, making it more attractive to hire workers. Therefore the equilibrium should be that everyone who wanted to work at the wages available should work. And this is not only an equilibrium, but an attractor: free-floating wages should move the economy towards the equilibrium.
If an em is running at 10x speed, do they get 10x the voting power, since someone being in power for the next 4 years will be 40 subjective years for them?
One vote for one person already seems suboptimal, given that not everybody has equal decision-making capabilities, or will experience the costs and benefits of a policy to the same degree. Of course, if we started discriminating with voting power incautiously it could easily lead to greater levels of corruption.
Solving the decision-making balance could be done with prediction markets on the effects of di...
Is there any particular reason an AI wouldn't be able to self-modify with regards to its prior/algorithm for deciding prior probabilities? A basic Solomonoff prior should include a non-negligible chance that it itself isn't perfect for finding priors, if I'm not mistaken. That doesn't answer the question as such, but it isn't obvious to me that it's necessary to answer this one to develop a Friendly AI.
Not the right term for what's happening. Deflationary spiral refers to low demand reducing prices, which reduces production, which reduces the employment rate/average wage, which reduces demand. The bitcoin economy is not large enough for this to be the case. Rather, it appears to be a speculative bubble, where people predict the price will go up, so more people buy it, and so the price goes up, etc. Then enough people at once go "this is as far as the train's going" and everybody panics and tries to sell and the price crashes.
Since bitcoin is a currency experiencing deflation due to a cyclic process, "deflationary spiral" would sort of make sense if it didn't already refer to another specific phenomenon.
Sorry, should've been more clear.
I've started work on a rudimentary play money binary prediction market using LMSR in django (still very much incomplete, PM me for a link if you'd like), and my present interface is one of buying and selling shares, which isn't very user friendly.
With a "changing the price" interface that Hanson details in his paper, accurate participants can easily lose all their wealth on predictions that they're moderately confident in, depending on their starting wealth. If I have it so agents can always bet, then the wealth ... (read more)