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All of topherhunt's Comments + Replies

The Great Data Integration Schlep
topherhunt20

it takes me longer to ask the LLM repeatedly to edit my file to the appropriate format than to just use regular expressions or other scripting methods myself

Not surprised. I would expect GPT to be better at helping me identify data cleaning issues, and helping me plan out how to safely fix each, and less good at actually producing cleaned data (which I wouldn't trust to be hallucination-free anyway).

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What Are You Tracking In Your Head?
topherhunt32

When programming, I track a mixed bag of things, top of which is readability: Will me-6-months-from-now be able to efficiently reconstruct the intention of this code, track down the inevitable bugs, etc.?

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Ideal governance (for companies, countries and more)
topherhunt70

I'm surprised that this whole conversation has happened with no mention of the minor but growing trend towards self-management organizational structures, teal organizations, Holacracy, or Sociocracy.

I have some experience with Holacracy, and while I would never call it a cure-all, I feel strongly about the relevance of its driving principles to the question of what an ideal governance system would look like -- eg. a structure of nested units/teams with high levels of local autonomy, a unique method of making governance decisions on how to change said struc... (read more)

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Avoiding Your Belief's Real Weak Points
topherhunt10

you can find God killing the first-born male children of Egypt to convince an unelected Pharaoh to release slaves who logically could have been teleported out of the country. An Orthodox Jew is most certainly familiar with this episode

I've seen Yudkowsky make this point in a couple places (why bother inflicting mass infanticide etc. etc. when you're presumably omnipotent and could teleport everyone to safety) and it makes me blink, something about the argument feels off. Are there cases in the scriptures where God teleports large numbers of people large di... (read more)

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2DRosenbach
It seems to me a strawman only from the religious perspective. Those in the faith want to apply constraints sometimes, but not other times, and the way these constraints are selected seems quite arbitrary to a non-believer.  So why make an ark to save its inhabitants from a flood -- why not just have all those who perish die by miracle?  If the Jews are to annihilate the tribe of Amalek, isn't it more efficient and easier to just have Amalek die by divine decree...in other words, drop dead? Rather, the concept of a religion sets up a relationship between God and people.  And just like you ask you spouse or child (or sister, etc.) to do something for you when you could have just done it yourself, because you want to use it as a means of establishing and maintaining a relationship, so too, religion was crafted to establish and maintain a relationship between man and God.  So even if one doesn't believe in God, that person can understand why the people who do believe in any given religion make up a God that requires interaction and dedication and participation of the people, rather than just have everything miraculously happen. Which is why, once again, I sense that the truth of religion is a better way to argue than the morality angle.
0 And 1 Are Not Probabilities
topherhunt10

What are the odds that the face showing is 1? Well, the prior odds are 1:5 (corresponding to the real number 1/5 = 0.20)

I'm years late to this party, and probably missing something obvious. But I'm confused by Yudkowsky's math here. Wouldn't it be more correct to say that the prior odds of rolling a 1 are 1:5, which corresponds to a probability of 1/6 or 0.1666...? If odds of 1:5 correspond to a probability of 1/5 = 0.20, that makes me think there are 5 sides to this six-sided die, each side having equal probability.

Put differently: when I think of how to ... (read more)

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2Tetraspace
The real number 0.20 isn't a probability, it's just the same odds but written in a different way to make it possible to multiply (specifically you want some odds product * such that A:B * C:D = AC:BD). You are right about how you would convert the odds into a probability at the end.