But we are a community that faces a choice about what values we want: insularity and strong group membership, or openness and intellectualism. This seems fairly analogous to me, and after all don't we need strong new ideas to stop the AI apocalypse or improve lives all over the world? Perhaps the Amish vs. liberal German judaism would be a better analogy.
Epistemic status: probably BS This could be a causal explanation for why engineers are seen as having poor social skills and the usefullness of ASD traits in engineering. If you aren't sensitive to the productive conversations being bad socially, and so don't disrupt them, you will learn more.
As for salons the fact that a hostess lead the conversation and selected the guests meant that the conversation had to be interesting to her. Those who didn't have anything interesting to say, or disrupted interesting conversations, wouldn't be invited back. Sadly wikipedia doesn't say much about how they were run. They seem to also have selected books to read, which would steer the conversation towards those books.
I'm not sure how much of this was CFAR and x-risk vs. programming and autism. Certainly a lot of the people at the SF meetup were not CFARniks based on my completely unscientific examination of my memory. The community's survival and growth is secondary to X-risk solving now, even if before the goal was to make a community devoted to these arts.
Humans share our values and can generally be overwhelmed with sheer numbers should they not. Making them is unlikely to be dangerous. The same cannot be said for unfriendly AIs. We still have no idea how to make a friendly AI, and it could easily be a century before we begin to have an idea. Even if biology cannot keep up, improving intelligence in the short run will have positive effects on human productivity in the short run, which will get the goal of making a friendly AI closer.
I'm not saying that biological modification will ultimately bring about si...
Look at the cost of IVF: According to http://www.momjunction.com/articles/much-ivf-treatment-cost-india_0074672/ it is $450,000 Rs, which is $6,000 dollars. IVF is a prerequisite for the sort of genetic tampering we are talking about, unless you want to use rabies as a carrier. IVF is widely practiced and has few barriers to entry, making me think it won't get much cheaper. That is a lot of money for many parts of the world. To think this cost will come down in the next 10-20 years significantly requires believing that significant advances in automation of...
I can consume text at a rate sometimes as high as 26 words a second. I cannot do that with audio. If we had text-to-speech, I would use it for turning audio into text, and consuming the text. Or the author could use it and produce text, which they could then edit. Frequently when talking we do all sorts of things we don't do when writing: repeat ourselves, use funny turns of phrase, search for words, etc. The bandwidth advantage to the consumer of a small amount of work for the producer makes text continue to be valuable.
As far as diagrams go in technical ...
What if some policies correlate with kinds of arguments people find appealing? An argument from natural law against the legality of homosexuality is unlikely to convince anyone who doesn't love St. Thomas Aquinas, while the liberty principle won't convince a single Dominican. Then again this is more a problem of ethical foundations than factual arguments, so perhaps by separating values from beliefs you can finesse this difficulty.
However, they seem not to have examined the impact of starting a new political movement or political philosophy in the same way. Even higher variance, potentially even bigger rewards. Institutional change in particular can be extremely difficult to do without a clear mandate, which alliances in existing parties might not give.
I'm not sure I agree with 9. There is a lot of SF out there, and some of it (Roadside Picnic, Stanislaw Lem's works) presents the idea that the universe is inherently uncaring in a very real way. Anthropomorphization is not an inherent feature of the genre, and fiction might enable directly understanding these ideas in a way that argument doesn't make real for some people.
Donald Rumsfeld, from http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=2636 "Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."
This doesn't seem right. Let's assume that the stock gives double or nothing, with 51% probability of double. The Kelly Criterion suggests giving 1% of the total payroll in stock. Yes, this neglects the balancing fee. Your argument seems to suggest that we should be all in cash. But the Kelly bet outperforms this.
The few examples of UN lead responses to invasions that worked typically involved great powers backstopping the response. UN members are reluctant to expend blood and treasure without getting something in return. I think the only time it worked as intended was the Korean war, and that's because Stalin was sitting out for a bit.
The Prime Number Theorem
A group of four people can stand two by two, but a group of five people can only stand five in a line. The number of numbers like five, and not like four, between two numbers, is the number of times you take two times what you had, starting at one, to get between the two numbers if the two numbers are close.
By "Wall Street" I'm including the Buy Side as well as the Sell Side. The big buyside firms like Fidelity and Charles Schwab sell products that most people shouldn't buy. Insurance probably has a better case to buy some actively managed products, or some exotic derivatives, but I don't know why it can't do it itself.
To the extent that finance reallocates risk it can provide a positive utility benefit. However, the very productive businesses have questionable utility. Promoting active trading, picking hot funds etc, all eat into the returns client...
I think the problem with elite common sense is that it can be hard to determine whose views count. Take for instance the observed behavior of the investing public determined by where they put their assets in contrast with the views of most economists. If you define the elite as the economists, you get a different answer from the elite as people with money. (The biggest mutual funds are not the lowest cost ones, though this gap has narrowed over time, and economists generally prefer lower cost funds very strongly)
Considering this was an experimental tournament, learning how certain strategies perform against others seems far more interesting to me than winning, and I can't imagine any strategy I would label as a troll submission. Even strategies solely designed to be obstacles are valid and valuable contributions, and the fact that random strategies skew the results is a fault of the tournament rules and not of the strategies themselves.
I would have expected a few more metaevaluator bots which clean up the environment to prevent detection. Of course this can be an expensive strategy, and certainly is in programmer time. A metaevaluator bot would have probably broken several recursion detection strategies, or even defining set! out of the language.
I would like to declare the following: I have submitted a program that cooperates only if you would cooperate against CooperateBot. You can of course create a selective defector against it, but that would be a bit tricky, as I am not revealing the source code. Evaluate your submissions accordingly.
Small business are illiquid. They also have capital requirements that might not fit your investment needs. If you have enough money that these two problems aren't an issue, as well as the skill in finding small business that won't fail and that are on the market, and have the time to supervise them/manage them, then they could be a good investment. But that isn't a lot of people.
Things were a lot worse then everyone knew: Russia almost invaded Yugoslavia, which would have triggered a war according to newly declassified NSA journals, in the 1950's. The Cuban Missile Crisis could easily have gone hot, and several times early warning systems were triggered by accident. Of course, estimating what could have happened is quite hard.
Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antionus Pius, Marcus Aurelius we all able and capable administrators, and their reign was largely peaceful. But then they were followed by Commodus. Benevolent dictatorship with succession by training and adoption was tried, and so long as it worked it worked. But the one failure was a pretty dramatic one, considered by some to be the start of the fall of the Roman Empire.
Intrade sells fed OMC rate binary options. I think if the market was more liquid, it would absolutely get used to hedge interest rate risks, and as people tend to be long bonds and short rates as a result, there might be a bias towards predicting higher rates as people want the protection. But the total holdings and the degree of hedging would be very opaque. Policy prediction markets could have similar problems.
CAPM explains 70% of equity returns, Fama French model 90%, but over the 20th century it's not clear what the Fama-French factors are. I fully agree with your minor quibbles. As for upkeep and worry, yes, risk leads to return. But it is an input, and like any sort of input it should be minimized for a given level of output.
10% is the charitable giving limit. There is another thing to be asked about, and that is the impact of the job. If I were to be a tax lawyer, I would be directly harming the ability of the US government to spend on social welfare programs. If I worked on Wall Street anywhere but Vanguard I would be bilking people out of their life savings, and at Vanguard I wouldn't be making $100 K a year. Someone working as a tobacco farmer to raise money for cancer research has some misplaced priorities.
Hello, my name is Watson. The username comes from my initials and a Left 4 Dead player attempting to pronounce them. I am a math student at UC Berkeley and a longtime lurker. I've got a post on rational investing, based on the conclusions of years of research by academic economists, but despite lurking I never realized there is a karma limit to post in discussion. I'm interested in just about everything, a dangerous phenomenon.
Temporarily: their allies turned on them and Athens soon rebuilt its navy. Ultimately Alexander and Rome ended the whole struggle permanently.