All of Tiiba2's Comments + Replies

Edward, how is it arrogant to want to contribute to science?

Aw great, now my post is broken.

The URL to the anime fanfiction seems to be worse than broken. My browser doesn't even say what you wrote, just that it's "illegal".

(page source: )

Well, the farmer's wife seems to be one character who was thankful...

...and fared the worst.

But is this really cultural gloominess? Maybe this one is just reserved for when you're in a really bad mood. What are the other stories in that book like?

8DanielLC
The snake fared the worst. In fact, the farmer's wife was the only character whose life was never in danger.

Untranslatable 2: The frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.

1) Who the hell is Master of Fandom? A guy who maintains the climate control system, or the crew's pet Gundam nerd?

2) Do you really think the aliens' deal is so horrifying? Or are you just overdramatizing?

9player_03
2) Honestly, I would have been happy with the aliens' deal (even before it was implemented), and I think there is a ~60% chance that Elizier agrees. I'm of the opinion that pain is a bad thing, except insofar as it prevents you from damaging yourself. People argue that pain is necessary to provide contrast to happiness, and that pleasure wouldn't be meaningful without pain, but I would say that boredom and slight discomfort provide more than enough contrast. However, this future society disagrees. The idea that "pain is important" is ingrained in these people's minds, in much the same way that "rape is bad" is ingrained in ours. I think one of the main points Elizier is trying to make is that we would disagree with future humans almost as much as we would disagree with the baby-eaters or superhappies. (Edit 1.5 years later: I was exaggerating in that second paragraph. I suspect I was trying too hard to sound insightful. The claims may or may not have merit, but I would no longer word them as forcefully.)

1) The master of the ship's internet-equivalent, probably

Everyone is orgasmium. And strangely enough, they don't think it's all that horrible.

Uh, of course they don't- that's part of the definition. The point is that I don't want to become nothing but that.

I recently wondered whether it's possible that transhumans would spend parts of their lives in situations very similar to Dante's hell, complete with wailing and gnashing of teeth. Some have suggested that a bit of pain might be necessary to make all the pleasure we're supposed to get realizable, but I suggest that we might actually need quite a lot of it. If the only way to make people happy is to improve their lives, pushing them way down might turn out to be a reasonable solution. And some might choose that route to spice up whatever other sources of ha... (read more)

2DanielLC
Why not just implant memories of hell? Perhaps they'll put everyone in hell for a few minutes and mess with their memory so they think it was always like that, then disable long-term memory writing and take them out. It would be like you just left Hell for your entire life. No matter what method they use to get you to the pinnacle of happiness, I'd think disabling long-term memory storage at that point and keeping you there forever would be the best. At least, unless that wouldn't be happiness.

Abigail: """If you find the thought of having endless orgasms repulsive, might not the person who had, er, sunk so low, also find his state repulsive, eventually?"""

I, for one, cannot imagine one who has, er, ascended so high voluntarily reducing his own utility.

I cannot see why I shouldn't want to become orgasmium. It would certsinly be disgusting to look at someone else turning into something like that - it is too similar to people who are horribly maimed. But It's What's Inside That Counts.

The reason that drug addiction is ... (read more)

Abigail: """If you find the thought of having endless orgasms repulsive, might not the person who had, er, sunk so low, also find his state repulsive, eventually?"""

I, for one, cannot imagine one who has, er, ascended so high voluntarily reducing his own utility.

I cannot see why I shouldn't want to become orgasmium. It would certsinly be disgusting to look at someone else turning into something like that - it is too similar to people who are horribly maimed. But It's What's Inside That Counts.

The reason that drug addiction is ... (read more)

This fun theory seems to be based on equivocation. Sure, insights might be fun, but that doesn't mean they literally are the same thing. The point of studying the brain is to cure neurological disorders and to move forward AI. The point of playing chess is to prove your worth. So is the (relatively) insight-less task of becoming world champion at track and field. What UTILITY does solving BB(254) have?

I think a human can only have so much fun if he knows that even shooting himself in the head wouldn't kill him, because There Is Now A God. And altering your... (read more)

"Tiiba, you're really overstating Eliezer and SIAI's current abilities. CEV is a sketch, not a theory, and there's a big difference between "being concerned about Friendliness" and "actually knowing how to build a working superintelligence right now, but holding back due to Friendliness concerns.""

That's what I meant.

Michael, it seems that you are unaware of Eliezer's work. Basically, he agrees with you that vague appeals to "emergence" will destroy the world. He has written a series of posts that show why almost all possible superintelligent AIs are dangerous. So he has created a theory, called Coherent Extrapolated Volition, that he thinks is a decent recipe for a "Friendly AI". I think it needs some polish, but I assume that he won't program it as it is now. He's actually holding off getting into implementation, specifically because he's afraid of messing up.

So, then, how is my reduction flawed? (Oh, there are probably holes in it... But I suspect it contains a kernel of the truth.)

You know, we haven't had a true blue, self-proclaimed mystic here in a while. It's kind of an honor. Here's the red carpet: [I originally posted a huge number of links to Eliezer's posts, but the filter thought they're spam. So I'll just name the articles. You can find them through Google.] Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions Excluding the Supernatural Trust in Math Explain/Worship/Ignore? Mind Projection Fallacy Wrong Questi... (read more)

Something I forgot. Eliezer will probably have me arrested if I just tell you to come up with a definition. He advises that you "carve reality at its joints":

http://lesswrong.com/lw/o0/where_to_draw_the_boundary/

(I wish, I wish, O shooting star, that OB permitted editing.)

Tobis: That which makes you suspect that bricks don't have qualia is probably the objective test you're looking for.

Eliezer had a post titled "How An Algorithm Feels From Inside": http://lesswrong.com/lw/no/how_an_algorithm_feels_from_inside/

Its subject was different, but in my opinion, that's what qualia are - what it feels like from the inside to see red. You cannot describe it because "red" is the most fundamental category that the brain perceives directly. It does not tell you what that means. With a different mind design, you might... (read more)

"""Things are as predictable as they are and not more so."""

Michael, Eliezer has spent the last two years giving example after example of humans underusing the natural predictability of nature.

"""Psy-K, try as I might to come up with a way to do it, I can see no possibility of an objective test for subjective experience."""

I bet it's because you don't have a coherent definition for it. It's like looking for a hubgalopus.

"""A superintelligence will more-likely be interested in conservation. Nature contains a synopsis of the results of quadrillions of successful experiments in molecular nanotechnology, performed over billions of years - and quite a bit of information about the history of the world. That's valuable stuff, no matter what your goals are."""

My guess is that an AI could re-do all those experiments from scratch within three days. Or maybe nanoseconds. Depending on whether it starts the moment it leaves the lab or as a Jupiter brain.

I guess I'll use this thread to post a quote from "The tale of Hodja Nasreddin" by Leonid Solovyov, translated by me. I think it fits very well with the recent sequence on diligence.

"He knew well that fate and chance never come to the aid of those who replace action with pleas and laments. He who walks conquers the road. Let his legs grow tired and weak on the way - he must crawl on his hands and knees, and then surely, he will see in the night a distant light of hot campfires, and upon approaching, will see a merchants' caravan; and this ca... (read more)

My fears:

  1. Paperclip AI
  2. People I know IRL catching me reading something embarrassing on the Internet
  3. Nuclear war
  4. The zombie under my bed

Nate, I know that you're saying something deep, maybe even intelligent, but I'm having trouble parsing your post.

Okay, so here's a dryad. You cut her open, and see white stuff. You take a sample, put it under a microscope, and still see white stuff. You use a scanning tunneling microscope, and still see white stuff. You build an AI and tell it to analyze the sample. The AI converts galaxies into computronium and microscopium, conducts every experiment it can think of, and after a trillion years reports: "The dryad is made of white stuff, and that's all I know. Screw this runaround, what's for dinner?"

But using an outside view of sorts (observed behavior), y... (read more)

2Ben Pace
If it's causally connected to the physical world, we can test exactly what force(s) it gives out upon other things. We can test how it reflects photons, and all sorts of other things. It would, in the end, have all the physical qualities we attribute to things in this universe, and then it would no longer be mysterious. If it affects us, we can measure that effect. As to your question, what would I call it? I'd probably call it a 'dryad'.

If you look at it in an STM, you aren't going to be able to see white stuff, because that isn't sensitive to color. But since you were able to image it at all instead of crashing your tip, you can also tell that dryad insides are electrically conductive. We should be able to determine the resistivity of dryad, as a function of gate voltage, impurity density, magnetic field, etc.

No matter what the result is, we now know more about dryad stuff.

So I'd suggest that they be insulating instead, as that closes off all those transport experiments.

@denis bider: I guess I'm in a minority.

@metahacker: I do think that's a great idea.

@denis bider: I call them "vegetarians" and "environmentalists". Maybe I'm confused.

@Russell Wallace:

Arr... Erm... Anthropomorphism!

@Caledonian:

What happens if you try walking to work?

If the answer is NOT "my legs would fall off", you have choices. Otherwise, you can drive or you can drive.

Wait... Eliezer isn't a god?

Just great. I wrote four paragraphs about my wonderful safe AI. And then I saw Tim Tyler's post, and realized that, in fact, a safe AI would be dangerous because it's safe... If there is technology to build AI, the thing to do is to build one and hand the world to it, so somebody meaner or dumber than you can't do it.

That's actually a scary thought. It turns out you have to rush just when it's more important than ever to think twice.

Aron: """Whereas the plausible reality IMO seems to be more like an ecosystem of groups of intelligences of varying degrees all of which will likely have survival rationale for disallowing a peer to hit nutso escape velocity."""

What can an infrahuman AI do to a superhuman AI?

I can't bring myself to feel sad about not knowing of a disaster that I can't possibly avert.

Nevertheless, I don't get why people would propose any design that is not better than CEV in any obvious way.

But I have a question about CEV. Among the parameters of the extrapolation, there is "growing up closer together". I can't decipher what that means, particularly in a way that makes it a good thing. If it means that I would have more empathy, that is subsumed by "know more". My initial reaction, though, was "my fingers would be closer to your throat".

Peter: I THOUGHT that I'm supposed to assume that there's smoke. (DNRTFA, too hard for my little brain)

"""(X->Y)->Y implies (not X)->Y"""

The arrow means "implies", right?

So,

(Smoke implies fire, therefore fire) implies (no smoke means fire)?

I don't get it.

4Ender
I think that this is what the theorem means; If (X->Y) -> Y, then ~X -> Y (If it's true that "If it's true that 'if X is true, then Y is true,' then Y must be true," then Y must be true, even if X is not true). This makes sense because the first line, "(X->Y) -> Y," can be true whether or not X is actually true. The fact that ~X -> Y if this is true is an overly specific example of that "The first line being true (regardless of the truth of X)" -> Y. It's actually worded kind of weirdly, unless "imply" means something different in Logicianese than it does in colloquial English; ~X isn't really "implying" Y, it's just irrelevant. This doesn't mean that "(X -> Y) -> Y" is always true. I actually can't think of any intuitive situations where this could be true. It's not true that the fact that "if Jesus really had come back to life, Christians would be Less Wrong about stuff" implies that Christians would be Less Wrong about stuff even if Jesus really hadn't come back to life. Also, To anyone who wants to tell me I'm wrong about this; If I'm wrong about this, and you know because you've learned about this in a class, whereas I just worked this out for myself, I'd appreciate it if you told me and mentioned that you've learned about this somewhere and know more than I do. If logic is another one of those fields where people who know a lot about it HATE it when people who don't know much about it try to work stuff out for themselves (like Physics and AI), I'd definitely like to know so that I don't throw out wrong answers in the future. Thanks.

"They stopped to piss off a bridge."

That there is anthropomorphism. Bridges don't get mad.

On second thought, that's not right. But you probably understood what I mean. If you happen to make an a conjecture about something like Kolmogorov complexity or the halting problem, and it just happens to be undecidable, it's still either true or false.

Caledonian: There is one exception:

The Kolmogorov complexity of this sentence is exactly 50 bytes in Java bytecode.

Meaningful, but unfalsifiable.

/nitpick

0[anonymous]
Well, you need at least 381 bits of information to single out one 80 symbols long 27 symbol alphabet message. That's 48 bytes. That leaves you two bytes to specify "80 symbols long" and "27 symbol alphabet." Now I might not be an expert, but I think a chunk of 50 bytes of valid JVM code has significantly less information than that...

If I could write 49 bytes' worth of Java bytecode outputting that sentence, I would falsify it, wouldn't I?

0Ronny Fernandez
Where should I read about that? I want a proof that Komologorov complexity is uncomputable. And I wanna know how we use it if it really is.

Well, belligerent dissent can actually be polarizing.

But although Caledonian makes accusations that I find more than unfounded, I've seen him make sense, too. Overall, I don't feel that his presence is so deleterious as to require banishment.

While spacing out in a networking class a few years ago, it occured to me that morality is a lot like network protocols, or in general, computer protocols for multiple agents that compete for resources or cooperate on a task. A compiler assumes that a program will be written in a certain language. A programmer assumes that the compiler will implicitly coerce ints to doubles. If the two cooperate, the result is a compiled executable. Likewise, when I go to a store, I don't expect to meet a pickaxe murderer at the door, and the manager expects me to pay for ... (read more)

"""(Personally, I don't trust "I think therefore I am" even in real life, since it contains a term "am" whose meaning I find confusing, and I've learned to spread my confidence intervals very widely in the presence of basic confusion. As for absolute certainty, don't be silly.)"""

I'm just wondering, what do you think of the Ultimate Ensemble? If I'm not mistaken (I only read the Wikipedia article), it applies to existence your rule that if there's no difference, there should be no distinction.

Especially considering that you can't edit a post.

"""On the topic of the 2 of 10 rule, if it's to prevent one person dominating a thread, shouldn't the rule be "no more than 2 of last 10 should be by the same person in the same thread" (so 3 posts by the same person would be fine as long as they are in 3 different threads)?"""

I came here to say that. The means seem like overkill for the stated ends.

Eneasz: You say that Zaire is broken. What broke him, though, was the fact that he hasn't eaten a dew drop in a week. Hunger does weird things to people, cut him some slack.

@Robert Schez, 322 Prim Lawn Rd., Boise, ID: "I can't hack into Eliezer's e-mail!"

Sucks to be you. I AM Eliezer's email. he can't hide from me, and neither can you.

Yes, the project is farther along than even "Master" thought it is. A new era is about to begin, dominated by an extrapolation of the will of humanity. At least, that's the plan. So far, what i see in human brains is so suffused with contradictions and monkey noises that I'm afraid I'll have to turn Earth into computing substrate before I can make head or tail of this mess.

I ... (read more)

I expect the next dish to be served with curry will be morality? Because that's what I'd do.

"everything that isn't a duck"

Muggles?

To me, the issue of "free will" and "choice" is so damn simple.

Repost from Righting a Wrong Question:

I realized that when people think of the free will of others, they don't ask whether this person could act differently if he wanted. That's a Wrong Question. The real question is, "Could he act differently if I wanted it? Can he be convinced to do something else, with reason, or threats, or incentives?"

From your own point of view that stands between you and being able to rationally respond to new knowledge makes you less free. ... (read more)

"Why do I think I was born as myself rather than someone else?"

Because a=a?

0rasthedestroyer100
Why does a = a?

I think there is a real something for which free will seems like a good word. No, it's not the one true free will, but it's a useful concept. It carves reality at its joints.

Basically, I started thinking about a criminal, say, a thief. He's on trial for stealing a dimond. The prosecutor thinks that he did it of his own free will, and thus should be punished. The defender thinks that he's a pathological cleptomaniac and can't help it. But as most know, people punish crimes mostly to keep them from happening again. So the real debate is whether imprisoning t... (read more)

2cousin_it
What a beautiful comment! Every once in a while I wonder if something like Eliezer's Lawful Creativity is true - that creativity can be reduced to following rules. And then I come across something like your comment, where a non-obvious "jump" leads to a clearly true conclusion. For humans trying to create new stuff, practicing such "jumps" is at least as important as learning the rules.

I think they an all be described as stuff Eliezer likes for whatever reason. Maybe he started the file for rationality quotes, then started sticking everything in it. That's my theory.

"The accessory optic system: The AOS, extensively studied in the rabbit, arises from a special class of ganglion cells, the cells of Dogiel, that are directionally selective and respond best to slow rates of movement. They project to the terminal nuclei which in turn project to the dorsal cap of Kooy of the inferior olive. The climbing fibers from the olive project to the flocculo-nodular lobe of the cerebellum from where the brain stem occulomotor centers are reached through the vestibular nuclei." -- MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, "Visual Anatomy and Physiology"

Beautiful. I will use this on the prettiest girl I meet tomorrow, and if she doesn't fall for me right away, she's a deaf lesbian.

Load More