If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)
3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.
4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
Does there exist a paper version of Yudkowsky's book "Rationality: From AI to Zombies"? I only found a Kindle version but I would like to give it as a present to someone who is more likely to read a dead-tree version.
Yes, it's entitled "Good and Real." The shadowy cabal behind LessWrong wrote it under one of their other pseudonyms, "Gary Drescher."
(Note: this is not actually true. But Good and Real recapitulates most of the points you'll see in the philosophy-related sequences, with less focus on the basics and more on elaborating philosophical arguments. If this is the content you want to share, it might be a good choice.)
no. print your own after buying the ebook. If you go to an office-supply store they should be able to print and bind it for you.
Eugine strikes again - this is really creating a great deal of noise and reversing any indications of salience for posts. Previously, he mainly did only one downvote, now he's doing ten at a time, if my -20 karma that appeared in the last hour for the two comments I made is anything to judge by. He seems to also not only be targeting posts he dislikes, but also specific people he dislikes, such as Elo and me. Makes it really hard to judge the quality of my posts, as who knows who actually downvotes them. Frustrating.
What are the differences between the 'big names' of higher education, in comparison to other places?
For example, I often hear about MIT, Oxford, and to a lesser extent, Cambridge. Either there's some sort of self-selection, or do graduates from there have better prospects than graduates of 'University of X, YZ'?
In a little bit of unintended self-reflection I noticed that I have a strange binary way of thinking of higher education. It feels that if I don't go to one of the top n, my effort is wasted. Not sure why.
I'm just becoming somewhat paranoid regardin...
I studied at Cambridge (which, btw, is definitely better than Oxford :-)).[1] Being in the Cambridge area when I got out of academia meant that there were plenty of jobs around that suited me. (Obviously that's a good thing in itself, but perhaps if I'd been somewhere else then I'd have moved to, say, London and had a different range of job opportunities.)
Pretty much every job I've taken I've found out about because someone at my new employer knew me. In some cases those were people who studied with me. Does that count as an effect of having been at a good university? I don't know -- if I'd been somewhere else, presumably other people would have known me, and maybe they'd have been even more impressed for want of strong competition :-). But there are lots of Cambridge people in Cambridge jobs, for obvious reasons.
The point here is that lots of things useful to my career have arisen from my having gone to a good university -- but not in the obvious way (people looking at my history and saying "oooh, Cambridge PhD, must be very smart").
[1] It occurs to me that there is a slight danger of that being taken more seriously than I intend it, so let me mention that Oxford and Cam...
Yeah, Cambridge is pretty expensive. (I think the best US universities are a lot worse, but haven't actually looked at the numbers. Some or all of these places may have some kind of assistance available if you're very poor or very good or both.) The recent reduction in the value of the pound (because of all the "Brexit" hoohah) has made UK universities a bit cheaper for foreign students.
I'd hesitate to call anything universal, but I'd consider at least the following things. You've probably thought of them all already :-). Some of them are awfully hard to assess. You may be able to get useful answers to some of them from the universities themselves, though of course it may be in their interests to mislead you or to refuse to answer some kinds of question.
so thats the evolutionary advantage of altruism, more sex !
http://digest.bps.org.uk/2016/07/altruistic-people-have-more-sex.htm\
Altruism predicts mating success in humans British Journal of Psychology DOI: 10.1111/bjop.12208
How likely am I to die from taking SSRI's?
This review says:
...In conclusion, this review suggests the need for caution in the use of SSRI therapy, particularly among patients with other risk factors for bleeding and those taking NSAIDs. The estimated rate of hospitalization for upper GI bleeding in the US during the 1990s was ∼ 155 per 100,000 population per year [46]. The data examined suggests that the risk of GI bleeding may be increased 2 – 4-fold in patients taking SSRIs and 3 – 12-fold when combined with NSAIDs. However, one must recognise that the in
Anyone else worried about Peter Thiel's support for Donald Trump discrediting Thiel in a lot of people's eyes, and MIRI and AI safety/risk research in general by association?
Is there a procedure in Bayesian inference to determine how much new information in the future invalidates your model?
Say I have some kind of time-series data, and I make an inference from it up to the current time. If the data is costly to get in the future, would I have a way of determining when cost of increasing error exceeds the cost of getting the new data and updating my inference?
I bought a $1400 mattress in my quest for sleep, over the Internet hence much cheaper than the mattress I tried in the store, but non-returnable. When the new mattress didn’t seem to work too well once I actually tried sleeping nights on it, this was making me reluctant to spend even more money trying another mattress. I reminded myself that the $1400 was a sunk cost rather than a future consequence, and didn’t change the importance and scope of future better sleep at stake (occurring once per day and a large effect size each day).
from http://rationalit...
How likely is it that polls on happiness, subjective well-being, self-worth, subjective productivity etc. are influenced by the position of the date of the poll relative to school year? (School has dictated my plans for sixteen years, and with my kid enrolled in the kindergarten we enter the same pattern. That's half my life, optimistically speaking.)
I suppose in people whose work is built upon different seasonalities (like seashore resort employees, or long-distance delivery workers, probably?), ratings should differ from the rest of the population.
I have some questions on discounting. There are a lot, so I'm fine with comments that don't answer everything (although I'd appreciate it if they do!) I'm also interested in recommendations for a detailed intuitive discussion on discounting, ala EY on Bayes' Theorem.
Why car safety is not advertise as its main quality?
Tesla suffered its first fatal accident in self-driving mode after driving 130 million ml, while the average mileage between fatal accidents in the US is 90 million ml. This is presented as evidence of the safety of Tesla.
However, the safety of cars of different classes of security has 1000 times difference.
Kia Rio has one fatal accident at about 10 million ml, and Subaru Legacy has less than one per billion km (in fact zero).
The latest data on the risks of different car models is here: http://www.iihs...
Why car safety is not advertise as its main quality?
I think there's a major selection effect when safety comes into play; that is, there is a sizable fraction of drivers who do prioritize safety, they buy the cars that are reputed to be safest, and then those cars appear even safer in the statistics. (For example, there are some engineering differences about the Subaru compared to other cars, but the differences between Subaru drivers and the drivers of other cars are probably larger.)
Many serious accidents are single car crashes (more than half here). And a lot of collisions that aren't officially your fault you can still avoid if you pay attention.
Not only driver skill, I'd have thought; also how they're used. The Dodge Caravan is a big thing with space for lots of people. I bet it's used mostly for transporting large-ish families around. Whether you're an expert driver or a very poor one, I expect you drive more slowly and more carefully when your spouse and children are on board.
Lots of sleep science out this week, but this one purports that you need 6-8 hours sleep to flush the beta-amyloids out of the brain. They say that "Caverns" open in the brain during sleep, and cerobospinal flows in forcefully to flush out toxins.
Also don't use your smartfone as an alarm clock
http://qz.com/424120/our-poor-sleeping-habits-could-be-filling-our-brains-with-neurotoxins
This video discusses the most effective science-based strategies for communicating AI Risk to a broad audience. It focuses on issues such as minimizing the inference gap, using emotional engagement, avoiding pattern-matching to sci-fi narratives and instead pattern-matching to unemployment narratives and other topics that the audience would find realistic. It's unlisted, so you can watch and share it with others only if you have a link. Feel free to pass it on to those who you think might benefit from it.
Hi, I have silly question. How do I vote? It seems obvious but I cannot see any upvote or downvote button anywhere in this page. I have tried:
Assuming the universe is infinite, is it theoretically possible to transform it into something finite?
Reason for asking: if this is possible, it would have important implications on infinite ethics and the value and potential trajectories of the far future.
I have been considering the potential for demographic changes due to mind uploading to be even more extreme than you might initially think. This may be caused by people who are both willing to create massive numbers of copies of themselves and who are better suited for an economic niche than anyone else is for that niche, or at least anyone else willing to make very large numbers of copies of themselves. In such a situation, it would be more profitable for a firm to hire such a person than it would be for them to hire others, which may result it that niche...
Thanks for that – the point that I’m separating out uncertainty helped clarify some things about how I’m thinking of this.
So is time inconsistency the only way that a discount function can be self-inconsistent? Is there any reason other than self-inconsistency that we could call a discount function irrational?