All of somnicule's Comments + Replies

somnicule110

Wouldn't this be more ore appropriate for an open thread than the quotes thread?

somnicule240

I question the wisdom of reading books that someone was potentially killed for reading without better opsec than Malfoy was demonstrating.

5ChristianKl
Malfoy did hand the books for someone else to read.
3Velorien
It could be bait - the school is more secure than ever, and he may be keeping track of who knows that the books are being read. The wisdom of this is still questionable, but given how flashy Hermione's murder was, Malfoy is probably assuming that the killer can't just walk up to him and Avada Kedavra him when no one is looking.

I don't think so. They're running on the blockchain, which slows them down. The primary decision-making mechanisms for them are going to basically be the same as can be used for existing organizations, like democracy, prediction markets, etc. Unless you think your bank or government is going to become a seed AI, there's not that much more to DAOs.

7DanielVarga
They can follow the advice of any off-the-blockchain computational process if that is to their advantage. They can even audit this advice, so that they don't lose their autonomy. For example, Probabilistically Checkable Proofs are exactly for that setup: when a slow system has to cooperate with an untrusted but faster other. There's the obvious NP case, when the answer by Merlin (the AI) can be easily verified by Arthur (the blockchain). But the classic IP=PSPACE result says that this kind of cooperation can work in much more general cases. These are just the typical use cases proposed today. In principle, their decision-making mechanism can be anything whatsoever, and we can expect that there will be many of them competing for resources. The thing that I think makes them interesting from a FAI perspective is the "autonomous" part. They can buy and sell and build stuff. They have agency, they can be very intelligent, and they are not human. ...Okay, that sounded a bit too sensationalist, so let me clarify. Personally, I am much more optimistic regarding UFAI issues than MIRI or median LW. I don't actually argue that DAOs are dangerous. What I argue is that if someone is interested in how very smart, autonomous computational processes could arise in the future, this possible path might be worth investigating a bit.
5[anonymous]
I've definitely seen people around here think their government is going to become a seed AI, though the way they put it is that they're concerned that the NSA might make one.

Keep forgetting to say thanks for the advice. Haven't had the chance to give it a shot yet, but once I get some headphones I will.

You could post this as a top level discussion post here, if you want to make it more available and reduce trivial inconveniences to those without access to facebook.

Didn't get a response in the last thread, so I'm asking again, a bit more generally.

I've recently been diagnosed with ADHD-PI. I'm wondering how to best use that information to my advantage, and am looking for resources that might help manage this. Does anyone have anything to recommend?

In the short-term I'm trying to lower barriers for things like actually eating by preparing snacks in snaplock bags, printing out and laminating checklists to remind me of basic tasks, and finding more ways to get instant feedback on progress in as many areas as I can (for coding, this means test-driven development).

2someonewrongonthenet
You can get accommodations for many academic activities if you are still a student.
8atorm
My experience of ADHD includes a tendency to become distracted by thought while moving between tasks or places. I have found that headphones with an audiobook help lock my attention down to two tracks instead of half a dozen: I'm either thinking about my task, or the words in my ear. Obviously your mileage may vary, but ADHD people develop all sorts of coping methods, so my broad advice is "experiment with lots of things to help get things done, even if other people are skeptical of their effectiveness."

I'm using workflowy as well, and it's the only to-do list software I've ever actually used for more than a few days.

One feature that I've wanted for a while is dependencies. Let's say you need to print out a form, but you need to purchase printer ink first. Being able to hide "print out form for xyz" until "buy printer ink" is completed would be great.

somnicule110

I've recently been diagnosed with ADHD (predominantly inattentive). Does anyone here share this, and if so, what resources or books on the topic would you recommend?

My Bayes' is not very strong, so forgive me. This is about as naive as it gets.

Prior for adult ADHD is about 4%.

For working memory:

2SD difference given ADHD is 35%, and for the rest of the population it's 2.4%. I'll use LWM to represent a significantly lower working memory.

This suggests an overall population of 3.7% having a 2SD difference, since 4% x 35% + 96% x 2.4% = 3.7%

So P(ADHD | LWM) = 35% x 4% / 3.7% = 37.8%

For processing speed:

2SD difference given ADHD is 44.9%, and for the rest of the population it's 8.7%. I'll use LPS to represent a significa... (read more)

0SeventhNadir
Thanks for taking the time to math that out :) I have seen a few psychiatrists in the past 5 years and unfortunately medication wasn't an option. I do think I'm performing better with age however!

Learn Python the Hard Way is a pretty solid resource, though I used it before Codecademy came out. Both are excellent practice-based resources for starting programming.

After that, just get python books and work through them. Tools like Flask and Django if you want to do web development, other stuff if you want to do other stuff. If you don't know if you

Stackoverflow is usually where google will take you when you look for answers to your questions, so you might as well bookmark it.

And if you don't have something in mind you want to make, but you want to keep practising, try doing some ProjectEuler problems.

3[anonymous]
Thank you kindly for the suggestions.
somnicule190

Isn't that the point of the quote?

1lmm
Maybe, but if so the quote is ineffective at conveying it.

Typical low-moderation problems. Repeated discussions of contentious but played-out issues like religion, IQ, status of various fields, etc. The basilisk is an infohazard in that sense at this point, IMO. It's fun to argue about, to the point of displacing other worthwhile discussion.

5V_V
LessWrong also has low moderation. Why would the basilisk generate more trivial discussion than other topics?

Internal Family Systems is the analogous therapy technique, I think.

I don't exactly see how it clashes with heroic responsibility?

"When you do a fault analysis, there's no point in assigning fault to a part of the system you can't change afterward, it's like stepping off a cliff and blaming gravity."

0Shmi
Because it might seem to you that you cannot change it, but if you have Eliezer's do the impossible attitude, then maybe you can.

The general incentives for this one seem better than average, (they generally take a cut of your first year's income rather than an upfront fee, high average income aster etc.) but I get a different, fixed payment contract since I'm from NZ. It's tempting, but higher risk than if I were from the US, especially since without a completed bachelors it'd be much harder to get a visa, and work here or in Australia won't pay nearly as well.

I'm really losing motivation at university and have my own mental health issues, so the prospect of something like that has ... (read more)

I probably need to do some exposure therapy with phone calls, but it's definitely worthwhile doing that.

1hyporational
Few of the people were absolute dicks when I called them and told me just send the application, but then I figured I probably didn't want to work for them anyway. So don't give up if that happens.

Thanks, this is helpful. I've been hesitant about contacting family and friends for this, but on reflection there's no real reason for that.

I have been accepted to App Academy and have been considering it as a faster option to getting high-paying work, but as a younger, international candidate I'd have to pay for flights as well as a US$5000 deposit. It's something I'd even be willing to borrow money for, given my waning motivation for university, but without an income or much current earning potential I don't know if I could get a loan for it. And I couldn't earn enough to go to the round I've been accepted to in time.

1Xachariah
Anecdotally someone close to me did one of those and it was a quick way to burn thousands of dollars. I tried to dissuade them, but end the end they came back with less knowledge than I did of the subject, and all I did was follow some youtube tutorials and look at stack overflow to create a couple learning apps for android.

Rowing for one season, competed in a mathematical modeling competition and didn't win but got a special mention from the judges, traveled to Ecuador for a month as a volunteer project, did some maths and physics tutoring.

Personal projects are pretty limited, but I've got a Django play money prediction market site that I could get running again in a weekend.

Beyond that, there's nothing that leaps to mind.

1John_Maxwell
Those all sound pretty good to me. You might even come across as overqualified for menial work. If you want to reach a little bit, have you thought about trying to get freelance software development work? Getting paid to improve skills is always nice right? If you can't find anyone in real life ODesk.com is an option... if you build up a reputation on that site, you'll be able to work remotely from anywhere in the world. A degreeless friend of mine was making over $50 an hour after over-delivering for ODesk clients for 6-12 months.
somnicule240

How do you actually get a first job? I haven't completed my degree, am struggling to live on my government provided student allowance, and don't have any experience to put on my CV.

4Nornagest
I got my first real job by summing up all the volunteer work and major personal projects I'd ever done and putting them on my resume. It turns out that at least at the entry level, people don't actually much care if you've gotten paid for doing something before -- they just want to be able to verify that you know enough not to flail around wasting money for months or years while you learn the basics of process. (I'm in tech.)
1SilentCal
I found my first job using this tool http://mappedinny.com/. It's specific to tech jobs in New York City. I have no idea how anyone ever gets a job in other places/sectors.
1ChristianKl
You said you did some programming. Having your Django play money prediction market on github for people to see that you can program is likely valuable. You can go to meetup.com and search for for local meetups where programmers go. Then you go there and tell everyone that you speak with that you are searching for a job as a programmer.
0[anonymous]
What skills do you have?
3Steven_Bukal
Your school might have useful resources. If there is a career center, go there and see what kind of resources and help are available. There could be a student internship program, student job boards, career fairs, etc. Professors sometimes have work opportunities as well (they might announce these, or you may have to ask).
3Shmi
Informational interviews let you get an insider perspective and some connections and pointers. I've known people who got offers this way. People love giving advice. Also consider volunteering in your area of expertise to both gain experience and build your networks.

Maybe too obvious but: Ask around. Ask your friends, family, acquaintances... Your personal network is a key factor to finding a job (especially if you're not picky about what job you want).

As for rounding out your CV, create a category called: skills. Skills your probably have: Fluent in MS Office, research (you're at university right now, no?), out-of-the-box thinking (you're on LW, after all, you'll be better than average at this), works well in team (if you did any sort of team sport or online game)...

If you can't come up with anything for the "skills" category, ask your friends and family. They should be able to help you out.

1hyporational
I'm not sure if it's the same where you live, but I found using the phone much more effective than sending applications all over the place. I first sent the application, then called. A good personal first impression, if you manage to squeeze it in, seems to beat a well written application any time.
3John_Maxwell
Were you involved in any activities in high school? (Sports, clubs, volunteering, etc.) Are there any interesting projects you've completed on your own? (E.g. do you have a blog?) Do you have any hobbies? Personal qualities to highlight? How do you spend your time?
4advancedatheist
You never sacked groceries in a supermarket during your teen years, as I did? I can see why you might want to avoid having to do that in today's economy, however, where you have to invest your time in the most efficient work experiences you can get to position yourself for higher wages quickly.

Only works if UDT agents make a significant proportion of agents in the setting. 10 UDT agents plus 1000 CDT agents, say, and the UDT agents are still vulnerable.

2Stuart_Armstrong
It also works if UDT agents can credibly distinguish themselves from non-UDT agents, whatever the proportions.
0Gunnar_Zarncke
Agreed. But still less so than before.

I think most formulations of logical uncertainty give axioms and proven propositions probability 1, or 1-minus-epsilon.

5alex_zag_al
Yes. Because, we're trying to express uncertainty about the consequences of axioms. Not about axioms themselves. common_law's thinking does seem to be something people actually do. Like, we're uncertain about the consequences of the laws of physics, while simultaneously being uncertain of the laws of physics, while simultaneously being uncertain if we're thinking about it in a logical way. But, it's not the kind of uncertainty that we're trying to model, in the applications I'm talking about. The missing piece in these applications are probabilities conditional on axioms.

modelling subjective value judgements as a function.

Like a utility function?

I'm not sure what you mean by provably-secure, care to elaborate?

It sounds like it might possibly be required and is certainly not sufficient.

1VAuroch
Provably-secure computing is a means by which you have a one-to-one mapping between your code and a proof that the results will not give you bad outcomes to a certain specification. The standard method is to implement a very simple language and prove that it works as a formal verifier, use this language to write a more complex formal verifying language, possibly recurse that, then use the final verifying language to write programs that specify start conditions and guarantee that given those conditions outcomes will be confined to a specified set. It seems to be taken for granted on LW and within MIRI that this does not provide much value because we cannot trust the proofs to describe the actual effects of the programs, and therefore it's discounted entirely as a useful technique. I think it would substantially reduce the difficulty of the problem which needs to be solved for a fairly minor cost.

Look up Bayesian Truth Serum, not exactly what you're talking about but a generalized way to elicit subjective data. Not certain on its viability for individual rankings, though.

2sixes_and_sevens
This is all sorts of useful. Thanks.

I think there are two opposing effects that might happen if you try something like this.

  1. People get less defensive about the identity politics of the debate, which opens both sides to actually engaging with the other side, not automatically rejecting the other side, treating arguments less like soldiers, etc.

  2. People are more likely to let statements they disagree with slide, and the depth and vigor of the discussion is reduced, by focusing on agreements and amicability, rather than disagreements.

A lot of other factors are at play here, but depending ... (read more)

What about practical knowledge and skills you might want to practice from those fields? Anki is an excellent substitute for the "short answer" side of standardized testing, but there's more to it than that if you want to apply it, and it's often difficult to find systematic ways to practice such things.

Can you set multiple questions to the same card in Anki? Like, if I wanted to practice something like factoring quadratic equations, would I be able to copy a whole bunch of problems of that type to Anki, and not have each one as an independent card to be memorized?

0ChristianKl
There no real reason to have multiple problems on the same card. If you want to add 10 problems about factoring quadratic equations don't add 1 card but 10. That said I have little experience with testing procedural math knowledge via Anki.

For high school level knowledge, finding Cambridge International Exams past papers is a fairly good option. The exams are done twice a year, and go back to about 2003 IIRC.

Yeah, lately I've been trying to implement TruthCoin's SVD voting algorithm in Ethereum. Had a few hiccups so I'm putting it on the back burner for now.

But, unless I did something to the code I've forgotten, the judge can be an arbitrary contract here. A panel of judges, a single judge, a simple proof-of-stake voting system, or a TruthCoin-like system, etc.

Here, but it's not in working order right at the moment.

Similar results in a similar test. High akrasia, potentially confounded by depression and anxiety.

If video games have a significant effect

I had similar results from the WISC as a child, low processing speed relative to everything else. It's been something I've been meaning to ask about for a while as well, particularly since one educational professional predicted my test scores (roughly, of course) from certain problematic behavioural patterns, which was enough evidence that there's something meaningful there to get my attention.

My memory of the tests isn't entirely clear, but one task was something like transcribing unfamiliar symbols according to a substitution key in a particular time sp... (read more)

Is the desire to impose one's morality on alien intelligences surprising relative to the "Eliminate the alien species" option, or "Conduct trade with the alien species", or "Avoid the alien species as much as possible"?

-1Shmi
None of the above. Human cultures used to be pretty good at "let those other weirdos do what they want, as long as they don't bother us" until certain proselytizing religions came along.

The cryptocurrency I'm most excited about is ethereum, and though it is going to have a premine, development is being done in a very open fashion. It allows users to develop smart contracts that execute whenever they contract's address receives a transaction. I've already written a binary LMSR prediction market contract which could run on ethereum.

0gwern
Looks like it uses centralized judges, skimming the code. Wouldn't Truthcoin be better to work on?
0Jayson_Virissimo
Is your prediction market code open source? If so, where can we find it?

The specific examples may not be used, but would clarify what sort of thing you're talking about.

6sixes_and_sevens
One example: certain scholastic activities are simply less important than others. If your model is "everything given to me by an authority figure is equally important", you don't manage your workload so well.

so I would remain in the default state, which is doing nothing (beyond relieving instinctual needs).

That doesn't answer anything, really. All you've done is wrapped the same thing in some extra words. That doesn't seem to be anything resembling a "default state" to me, for instance, since humans tend to do a lot more than that even when they're not thinking about morality.

0blacktrance
I suspect we're using the term "morality" differently.

Basically I'm confused as to what process you went through to decide that sitting around doing precisely nothing is what you'd do. There's nothing that comes to mind to weight it over other options, and you seem pretty determined to stick to it.

0blacktrance
To do anything that requires thought/deliberation, I would have to choose to do it, and I'd have no reason to choose to do it, so I would remain in the default state, which is doing nothing (beyond relieving instinctual needs). Currently, I have reasons to do what I do, but if it were proven to me that there were no morality, it would also have to be proven that there are no reasons why I should do anything.

Wouldn't it be easier to just go with those impulses?

0blacktrance
Perhaps, but why should I do what's easier?
somnicule-10

So you don't have any impulse to relieve your own boredom, or to spend time with other people, or to seek out better-tasting food?

0blacktrance
Fulfilling those impulses would require significant conscious deliberation, and (unlike not eating/drinking) not fulfilling them would not be extremely unpleasant, so if I deliberated on them, I'd think "I have this impulse, but why should I fulfill it?" and I wouldn't fulfill it. In the case of food, I'd also think "I have this impulse, but why should I fulfill it?", but if I'd wait long enough, I'd feel so hungry that my deliberative process would be overridden. So, it takes not just having an impulse, but having an impulse strong enough to override conscious decisionmaking.

Hmm. It's an interesting point.

I'm not entirely clear on the purpose of the rule. It makes sense to not just increase the redundancy of anything people have said in other threads that have already got a lot of attention, but I'm sure there's plenty of interesting stuff buried deep in comment threads that haven't got much light and might be worth sharing. Conversely, there will be some quotes here from outside LW/OB that a high proportion of readers have seen already.

So it's definitely something that made sense when the LW/OB community was smaller and there wasn't much good stuff that people weren't seeing anyway, but perhaps it's time to relax the rule a little bit, replace it with the substance.

7Richard_Kennaway
I believe the purpose was to bring material to LW from outside rather than quoting each other (and especially, quoting Eliezer), to avoid an echo chamber effect. There was once an experimental LW Quotes Thread, but the experiment has not been repeated. I don't have a strong view about whether LW regulars posting on other LW regulars' blogs should be excluded from the quotes threads, but I incline against the practice. It was a good quote though.
0Mark_Neznansky
I can't comment on the size (so LW is growing?), but I have a tingling memory that long time ago (several years back) people did post LW quotes. Since LW doesn't exist that long I suppose it was the case in its inception. I can't say for sure, but actually Eugine's post seems to suggest that as well; otherwise it wouldn't have been "creeping into". Either way, should be easy to check. I do, too, think it is worthwhile to put LW quotes. I remember (I do!) reading those and being led to read the original articles whence they came.

Not sure I understand this properly. Why not do something?

-2blacktrance
Because I'd have no reason to. To clarify, I don't mean that I'd literally not do anything, I mean that I wouldn't have a reason to do anything. I would still have impulses that would cause me to do things. But I wouldn't do anything more complicated than feed myself when I'm hungry.

For a minimal product, perhaps just start with the dependencies and priorities side of things? That seems to be the core of such a product, and the rest is dressing it up for usability.

Tell me how it goes! I'm up in Auckland, haven't had much success getting a meetup group started here yet but I'll be trying again soon.

0mako yass
Please do! I'd definitely go.
somnicule250

“Even if it's not your fault, it's your responsibility.”

8Brillyant
This is a great tagline for the doctrine of Original Sin.