If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.
A couple of days ago, GiveWell updated their top charity picks. AMF is still on top, but GiveDirectly bumped SCI from #2 to #3.
They also (very) tentatively recommend splitting your donation among the three: 70% to AMF, 20% to GiveDirectly, and 10% to SCI. The arguments about this in the blog post and comments are pretty interesting. (But I wouldn't stress too much about it: harder choices matter less).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues: The future will not be cool
http://www.salon.com/2012/12/01/nassim_nicholas_taleb_the_future_will_not_be_cool/
Taleb's characterization of "technothinkers" as cultural ignoramuses doesn't sound quite right to me, because they tend to read and assimilate the writings of learned (in the liberal arts sense) fantasy and science fiction writers. In this way they at least get some exposure to humane culture once removed, if they don't immerse themselves in it directly. J.R.R. Tolkien taught Anglo-Saxon language and literatur...
I think the real difference between people like Taleb and the techno-optimists is that we think the present is cool. He brags about going to dinner in minimalist shoes, and eating food cooked over a fire, whereas I think it's awesome that I can heat things up instantly in a microwave oven, and do just about anything in meticulously engineered and perfectly fitted, yet cheaply mass-produced, running shoes without worrying about damaging my feet. I also like keyboards, and access to the accumulated knowledge of humanity from anywhere, and contact lenses. And I thought it was funny when he said that condoms were one of the most important new technologies, but aren't talked about much, as if to imply that condoms aren't cool. I think that condoms are cool! I remember when I first got condoms, and took one out to play with. After testing it a couple different ways, I thought: *how does anyone manage to break one of these!?" It's easy to extrapolate that no "cool" technology will exist in the future, if you don't acknowledge that any cool technology currently exists.
But I think Taleb's piece is valuable, because it illustrates what we are up against, as people tryin...
You might get a different perspective on the present when you reach your 50's, as I have. I used Amazon's book-previewing service to read parts of W. Patrick McCray's book, The Visioneers, and I realized that I could nearly have written that book myself because my life has intersected with the story he tells at several points. McCray focuses on Gerard K. O'Neill and Eric Drexler, and in my Amazon review I pointed out that after a generation, or nearly two in O'Neill's case, we can get the impression that their respective ideas don't work. No one has gotten any closer to becoming a space colonist since the 1970's, and we haven't seen the nanomachines Drexler promised us in the 1980's which can produce abundance and make us "immortal."
So I suspect you youngsters will probably have a similar letdown waiting for you when you reach your 40's and 50's, and realize that you'll wind up aging and dying like everyone else without having any technological miracles to rescue you.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Visioneers-Scientists-Nanotechnologies-Limitless/dp/0691139830/
A lot of young people, including me, seem to be getting a lot of "man, we're really living in the future" kind of emotional reactions relatively frequently. E.g. I remember that as a kid, I imagined having a Star Trek-style combined communicator and tricorder so that if someone wanted to know where I was, I could snap them a picture of my location and send it to them instantly. To me, that felt cool and science fictiony. Today, not only can even the cheapest cell phone do that, but many phones can be set up to constantly share their location to all of one's friends.
Or back in the era of modems and dial-up Internet, the notion of having several gigabytes of e-mail storage, wireless broadband Internet, or a website hosting and streaming the videos of anyone who wanted to upload them all felt obviously unrealistic and impossible. Today everyone takes the existence of those for granted. And with Google Glass, I expect augmented reality to finally become commonplace and insert itself into our daily lives just as quickly as smartphones and YouTube did.
And since we're talking about Google, self-driving cars!
Or Planetary Resources. Or working brain implants. Or computers beating ...
I'm 55 and I think the present is more shocking now than it was in the 1970s and 1980s. For me, the 70s and 80s were about presaging modern times. I think the first time I could look up the card catalog at my local library, ~1986 on gopher, I began to believe viscerally that all this internet stuff and computers was going to seriously matter SOON. Within a few months of that I saw my first webpage and that literally (by which of course I mean figuratively) knocked me in to the next century. I was flabbergasted.
Part of what was so shocking about being shocked was that it was, in some wierd sense, exactly what I expected. I had played with hypercard on macs years earlier and the early web was just essentially a networked extension of that. In my science fiction youth, I had always known or believed that knowledge would be ubiquitously available. I could summarize as saying there were no electronics in Star Trek (the original) that seemed unreasonable, from talking computers, big displays, tricorders and communicators. To me, faster-than-light travel, intelligent species all over the universe that looked and acted like made-up humans, and the transporter all seemed unreason...
I get the same feeling. It seems unusually hard to come up with an idea for how things will be like after ten or so years that don't sound either head-in-the-sand denial of the technological change or crazy.
I wonder how you could figure out just how atypical things are now. Different than most of history, sure, most people lived in a world where you expected life parameters to be the same for your grandparents' and grandchildren's generations, and we definitely don't have that now. But we haven't had that in the first world for the last 150 years. Telegraphs, steam engines and mass manufacture were new things that caused massive societal change. Computers, nuclear power, space rockets, and figuring out that space and time are stretchy and living cells are just chemical machines were stuff that were more likely to make onlookers go "wait, that's not supposed to happen!" than "oh, clever".
People during the space age definitely thought they were living in the future, and contemporary stuff is still a bit tinged by how their vast projections failed to materialize on schedule. Did more people in 1965 imagine they were living in the future than people in 1975? What ab...
On this site there is a lot of talk about x-risk like unfriendly AI, grey goo or meteorite strikes. Now x-risk is not a concept completely confined to humanity as a whole but is also applicable to any individual that is affected not only by global risks but also by local and individual events. Has anyone here researched ways to effectively reduce individual catastrophic risk and mitigate the effects of local and global catastrophic events? I am thinking of things like financial, juristic and political risk, natural disasters and pandemics. So far I have found the emergency kit as designed by www.ready.gov, but I am positive that there is much much more out there.
A black hole of light only, has its name - Kugelblitz. When you have enough dense light, a black hole is normally formed and has this cool name - Kugelblitz!
The black hole of almost exclusively neutrinos, what is its name? I googled a little but haven't found anything yet.
People in the very theoretical end of programming language research seem to be making noise about something called homotopy type theory, that's supposed to make programming awesome and machine-provable once someone gets around to implementing it.
...Like the lambda calculus before it (which is actually embedded in it), MLTT may be a fruit of mathematics that has a very real and practical impact on how programmers think about programming. It could be the unifying paradigm that eventually, finally puts an end to all the “programming language wars” of our time.
My father told me about someone he knew when he was working as a nurse at a mental hospital, who tried killing himself three times with a gun in the mouth. The first two times he used a pistol of some sort - both times, the bullet passed between the hemispheres of his brain (causing moderate but not fatal brain damage), exited through the back of his head, and all the hot gases from the gun cauterised the wounds.
The third time he used a shotgun, and that did the job. For firearm based suicide, I think above the ear is a safer bet.
So assuming you have good evidence of eldritch abominations what is the best suicide method? I'm guessing anything that really scrambles your information right. Please keep in mind practicality. Really powerful explosives seem hard to obtain. Having someone dispose of your body after suicide seems an ok but risky option.
Fire?
Rationality, winning, and munchkinry
I can't help but notice that, in reviews and comments to what we like to call "rationalist fiction", detractors often call characters whose approach to problems is to seek the winning approach. rather than, say, the "reasonable" approach (like one-boxing on Newcomb's rather than two-boxing) "munchkins", as if it were some sort of insult.
A work of fiction that Yudkwosky recently recommended, "Harry Potter and the Natural 20", features a protagonist, Milo, who is a wizard from a D&a...
Munchkinry is a terrible way to play a game because maximizing your character's victories and maximizing your and other players' enjoyment of the game are two very different things. (For one thing, rules-lawyering is a boring waste of time (unless you're into that, but then there are better rulesets, like the Talmud (Zing.)); for another, it's fun to let your character make stupid in-character mistakes.) It is a good way to live a life, and indeed recommended as such by writers of rationalist fiction.
Another paper on the low quality of much scientific evidence, here in the field of diet-related cancer risk. Just out in the Journal of Clinical Nutrition: Is everything we eat associated with cancer? A systematic cookbook review.
Is anyone doing self-scoring on everyday predictions? I've been considering doing this for a while - writing down probability estimates for things like 'will have finished work by 7PM' and 'will have arrived on time' and even 'will rain' or 'friend will arrive on time', so I can detect systemic errors and try to correct for them. (In particular, if you are consistently over- or under-confident, you can improve your score by correcting for this without actually needing to be any more accurate.) This seems like a pretty straightforward way of getting `better' at predicting things, potentially very quickly, so I'm curious about other's experiences.
There's been some talk recently of the need for programmers and how people that are unsatisfied with their current employment can find work in that area while making a decent living. Does there exist some sort of virtual meet-up for people that are working towards becoming programmers? I'd like to form, or be part of, a support group of LW-ers that are beginning programming. There may be something like this around that I've just missed because I mostly lurk and not even that regularly anymore. (Hoping to change that, though.)
Why do LWers believe in global warming? The community's belief has changed my posterior odds significantly, but it's the only argument I have for global warming at the moment. I saw the CO2 vs temperature graphs, and that seemed to sell it for me... Then I heard that the temperature increases preceded the CO2 emissions by about 800 years...
So why does the community at large believe in it?
Thanks!
From wikipedia.
Principles of cosmicism
...The philosophy of cosmicism states that there is no recognizable divine presence, such as a god, in the universe, and that humans are particularly insignificant in the larger scheme of intergalactic existence, and perhaps are just a small species projecting their own mental idolatries onto the vast cosmos, ever susceptible to being wiped from existence at any moment. This also suggested that the majority of undiscerning humanity are creatures with the same significance as insects and plants in a much greater struggle
Would a current or former Carnegie Mellon student be interested in talking to me, a high school senior, about the school? I intend on majoring in physics. Please private message me if you are.
Someone is planning to do (and documenting on video) 100 days of rejection therapy. He's currently up to day 26.
My friend just asked me how many people typically attend our meet ups. I don't know the answer. How do I find out?
I've recently become aware of the existence of the Lending Club which appears to be a peer-to-peer framework for borrowers and lenders. I find myself intrigued by the interest rates claimed, but most of what I've found in my own research indicates that these interest rate computations involve a lot of convenient assumptions. Also, apparently if the Lending Club itself goes bankrupt, there is no expectation that you will get your investment back.
It seems at least conceivable that the interest rates are actually that high, since it is a new, weird type of in...
Someone smart recently argued that there's no empirical evidence young earth creationists are wrong because all the evidence we have of the Earth's age is consistent either hypothesis that God created the earth 4000 years ago but designed it to look like it was much older. Is there a good one-page explanation of the core LessWrong idea that your beliefs need to be shifted by evidence even when the evidence isn't dispositive as versus the standard scientific notion of devastating proof? Right now the idea seems smeared across the Sequences.
Could someone please break down the exact difference between a 'preference' and a 'bias' for me?
Has anyone used one of those pay for a doctor's opinion websites? How do you know if it's a scam?
Can anyone give me a source/citation for the idea that more intellignet people are better at rationalisaiton? I've seen it mentioned several time but without link to experimental evidence.
Book Recommendation; Fiction; AI; While this might be the kind of scifi book to merely annoy experts, I found it enjoyable. It surrounds military use of potentially FOOM AI's which are wiped periodically to prevent the foom. Soiler: vg snvyf. It is also part of a series, in which some overlapping events are told from different perspectives, which I also found enjoyable. http://www.amazon.com/Insidious-Michael-McCloskey/dp/1440192529
Can anyone think of any good sci-fi written about a world in which time travel is a commonplace (like something everyone has access to and uses in accomplishing everyday tasks)? It occurs to me that 1) this might be interesting to try to sort out, and 2) I can't even imagine how it would work.
How should one distinguish disgreement on empirical grounds vs disagreement about values? I'm increasingly convinced I'm miscalibrated on this.
FOR THE EMPEROR! HE IS THE ONLY VIABLE SCHELLING POINT!
Beware the anthropic implications of aliens, the selection pressure behind mutants, the institutional damage of heresy.
-- Sanctus Muflax of Holy Terra
In the grim dark future of our hostile multi-verse, past the dark age of technology when the men of iron were crushed by those who would be less wrong as the Emperor sits a hundred centuries undying on the golden throne there is only war.
Coming soon.
Appropriate context. Fanfiction, you know you want it.
The Worst-Run Big City in the U.S.
An very interesting autopsy of institutional dysfunction related to government and non-profits. I recommend reading the whole thing.
...Minus the alleged harassment, city government is filled with Yomi Agunbiades — and they're hardly ever disciplined, let alone fired. When asked, former Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin couldn't remember the last time a higher-up in city government was removed for incompetence. "There must have been somebody," he said at last, vainly searching for a name.
Accordingly, mil
I agree with EY that collapse interpretations of QM are ridiculous but are there any arguments against the Bohm interpretation better than the ones canvassed in the SEP article?
Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) is favored by EY as having a shorter message than others.
However, the short-message version of MWI does not include a theory as to how my particular stream of consciousness winds up in one branch or another. So Copenhagen (wave function collapse) is a theory of what I will experience, MWI is not.
Further, I have always thought MWI motivated by the ideas behind Einstein's "God does not play dice with the universe." That is, a non-deterministic theory is no theory at all. And then, MWI, would be a theory witho...
how my particular stream of consciousness winds up in one branch or another
This assumes there is such a thing as a particular stream of consciousness, rather than your brain retconning a stream of consciousness to you when you bother to ask it (as is what appears to happen).
It seems clear to me that if conscious memory is predictive of future physical experience, it is drawn from something local to the Everett Branch my consciousness is in.
Whatever makes you think that your consciousness is in only one Everett branch? (And what do you think is happening on all those other branches that look so much like this one but that lack your consciousness?)
Surely the right account of this, conditional on MWI, is not that your consciousness is on a particular branch but that each branch has its own version of your consciousness, and each branch has its own version of your memory, and each branch has its own version of what actually happened, and -- not at all by coincidence -- these match up with one another.
What happens to your consciousness and your memories is much more like splitting than like collapse.
(It sounds as if you think that this ought to mean that you'd have conscious memories in one branch from other branches, but I can't see why. Am I missing something?)
Does this imply that you expected natural language to be impossible?
You know, I actually don't know!
It can't literally be impossible, because humans do it, but artificial natural language understanding seemed to me like the kind of thing that couldn't happen without either a major conceptual breakthrough or a ridiculous amount of grunt work done by humans, like the CYC project is seeking to do - input, by hand, into a database everything a typical 4-year-old might learn by experiencing the world. On the other hand, if by "natural language" you mean something like "really good Zork-style interactive fiction p... (read more)