If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
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Perhaps it would be beneficial to use a unary numeral system when discussing topics on which biases like scope insensitivity, probability neglect, and placing too much weight on outcomes that are likely to occur. Using a unary numeral system could prevent these biases by presenting a more visual representation of the numbers, which might give readers more intuition on them and thus be less biased about them. Here’s an example: “One study found that people are willing to pay $80 to save || 1000 (2,000) birds, but only $88 to save |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| 1000 (200,000 birds).”
Edit: Made it a bit easier to read.
A unary number system is a really fancy name to an ASCII graph :)
Reminds me of the "irony meter" some of my friends use instead of smilies, as smilies are binary, while this can express that something is almost but but not quite serious: [...........|.....]
365tomorrows recently published a hard science-fiction story of mine called "Procrastination", which was inspired by the ideas of Robin Hanson. I believe LessWrong will find it enjoyable.
Woody Allen on time discounting and path-dependent preferences:
In my next life I want to live my life backwards. You start out dead and get that out of the way. Then you wake up in an old people's home feeling better every day. You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension, and then when you start work, you get a gold watch and a party on your first day. You work for 40 years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You party, drink alcohol, and are generally promiscuous, then you are ready for high school. You then go to primary school, you become a kid, you play. You have no responsibilities, you become a baby until you are born. And then you spend your last 9 months floating in luxurious spa-like conditions with central heating and room service on tap, larger quarters every day and then Voila! You finish off as an orgasm!
The rationality gloss is that a naive model of discounting future events implies a preference for ordering experiences by decreasing utility. But often this ordering is quite unappealing!
A related example (attributed to Gregory Bateson):
If the hangover preceded the binge, drunkenness would be considered a virtue and not a vice.
Tsk, tsk. You don't collect your pension or gold watches, or drink alcohol, etc. You pay someone else your pension, give away a gold watch, and un-drink the alcohol.
A simiar one by Vonnegut:
...It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter plans flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody good as new. When
...supporters say the opposition leader was assassinated to silence him...
I see headlines like this fairly regularly.
Does anybody know of a list of notable opposition leaders, created when all members of the list were alive? Seems like it could be educational to compare the death rate of the list (a) across countries, and (b) against their respective non-notable demographics.
I want to make some new friends outside of my current social circle. I'm looking to meet smart and open minded people. What are some activities I could do or groups I could participate in where I'm likely to meet such people?
I'm particularly interested in personal experiences meeting people, rather than speculation, e.g. "I imagine ballroom dancing would be great" is not as good as "I met my partner and best friend ballroom dancing."
Also of interest would be groups where this is bad, e.g., if ballroom dancing was no good then "I never made any friends ballroom dancing, despite what I initially thought" would be a useful comment.
(I have a small list of candidate groups already, but I want to see what other people suggest to verify my thinking.)
What gets more viewership, an unpromoted post in main or a discussion post? Also, are there any LessWrong traffic stats available?
Assuming no faster-than-light travel and no exotic matter, a civilization which survives the Great Filter will always be contained in its future light cone, which is a sphere expanding outward with constant speed c. So the total volume available to the civilization at time t will be V(t) ~ t^3. As it gets larger, the total resources available to it will scale in the same way, R(t) ~ V(t) ~ t^3.
Suppose the civilization has intrinsic growth rate r, so that the civilization's population grows as P(t) ~ r^t.
Since resources grow polynomially and population grow...
A smuggler's view of learning:)
Knowledge as acquired in school-time (attending + holidays; just about until you graduate almost all your time is governed by school) is like an irregular shoreline with islets of trivia learned through curiosity and rotting marshland lost because reasons and never regained. (We congratulate ourselves for not risking malaria, seeing as we are experienced pirates and all.)
And we forget the layout and move inland, because that's where stuff happens. Jobs, relationships, kids, even dead ends are more grownup then the crumbling ...
I have not yet read the sequences in full, let met ask, is there maybe an answer to what is bothering me about ethics: why is basically all ethics in the last 300 years or so universalistic? I.e. prescribing to treat everybody without exception according to the same principles? I don't understand it because I think altruism is based on reciprocity. If my cousin is starving and a complete stranger is halfway accross the world is starving even more, and I have money for food, most ethics would figure out I should help the stranger. But from my angle, I am ob...
Note: This post raises a concern about the treatment of depression.
If we treat depression with something like medication, should we be worried about people getting stuck in bad local optima, because they no longer feel bad enough that the pain of changing environments seems small by comparison? For example, consider someone in a bad relationship, or an unsuitable job, or with a flawed philosophic outlook, or whatever. The risk is that you alleviate some of the pain signal stemming from the lover/job/ideology, and so the patient never feels enough pressure...
It seems people make friends two ways:
1) chatting people and finding each other interesting
2) going through difficult shit together and thus bonding, building camaraderie (see: battlefield or sports team friendships)
If your social life lags and 1) is not working, try 2)
My two best friends come from a) surviving a "deathmarch" project that was downright heroic (worst week was over 100 hours logged) together b) going to a university preparation course, both get picked on by the teacher who did not like us, and then both failing the entry exam in ...
If there is a way of copying and pasting or importing text of a google doc into an article while retaining LessWrong's default formatting, would be very happy to know it....
Where do I start reading about this AI superintelligence stuff from the very basics on? I would especially be interesed in this: why do we consider our current paradigms of software and hardware 1) close enough to human intelligence in order to base a superintelligence on 2) why don't we think by the time we get there the paradigms will be different? I.e. AI rewriting its own source code? Why do we think AI is a software? Why do we think a software-hardware separation will make sense? Why do we think software will have a source code as we know it? Why woul...
One obvious source if you haven’t already read it is Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence. Bostrom addresses many of the issues that you list, e.g. an AI rewriting its own software, why an AI is likely to be software (and Bostrom discusses one or two non-software scenarios as well), etc. This book is quite informative and well worth reading, IMO.
Some of your questions are more fundamental than what is covered in Superintelligence. Specifically, to understand why “alphabetical letters invented thousands of years ago to express human sounds” are adequate for any computing task, including AI, you should explore the field of theoretical computer science, specifically automata and language theory. A classic book in that field is Hopcroft and Ullman’s Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages and Computation (caution: don’t be fooled by the “cute” cover illustration; this book is tough to get through and assumes that the reader has a strong mathematics background). Also, you should consider reading books on the philosophy of mind – but I have not read enough in this area to make specific recommendations.
To explore the question of “why do we think software will have a source code as we know ...
Regulation to prevent forming space junk seems beneficial, as space junk could create Kessler syndrome, which would make it much harder to colonize space, which would increase existential risk, as without space colonization a catastrophe on Earth could kill off all intelligent Earth-originating life.
I know this isn't completely on-topic, but I don't know of any forum on x-risk, so I don't know of any better place to put it. On a related note, is there any demand for an x-risk forum? Someone (such as myself) should make one if there is enough demand for it.
In Pascal's Mugging, the problem seems to be using expected values, which is highly distorted by even a single outlier.
The post led to a huge number of proposed solutions. They all seem pretty bad, and none of them even address the problem itself, just the specific thought experiment. And others, like bounding the utility function, are ok, but not really elegant. We don't really want to disregard high utility futures, we just don't want them to highly distort our decision process. But if we make decisions based on expected utility, they inevitably do.
So w...
VNM utility is basically defined as "that function whose expectation we maximize". There exists such a function as long as you obey some very unobjectionable axioms. So instead of saying "I do not want to maximize the expectation of my utility function U", you should say "U is not my utility function".
That is, if you look at the space of all possible outcomes, and select the point where exactly 50% of them are better, and exactly 50% are worse. Choose actions so that this median future is the best.
This seems vulnerable to the following bet: I roll a d6. If I roll 3+, I give you a dollar. Otherwise I shoot you.
It seems that watching talkative sports fans watch sports might be a big opportunity to observe that bias that makes people evaluate bad and good properties in a lump, the Affect Heuristic. And that sports like biathlon are more handy than, say, football, since they give rapid binary updates (for the shooting), and almost-binary (?) ones for the running. And you can control for variables like 'country', etc. What do you think?
Having an algorithm fit a model to some very simple data is not noteworthy either. It's possible that the means by which the "pure mechanical invention" was obtained are interesting, but they are not elaborated on in the slightest.
Woody Allen on time discounting and path-dependent preferences:
The rationality gloss is that a naive model of discounting future events implies a preference for ordering experiences by decreasing utility. But often this ordering is quite unappealing!
A related example (attributed to Gregory Bateson):
As Jiro and Toggle point out, this isn't time reversal, this is Benjamin Button disease). I think the original short story, much more than the film, portrays this correctly as a tragi-comedy. For example, he's a Brigadier-General, but he gets laughed out of the army because he looks like a 16-year-old.
I wonder about people who think that life would be better lived backwards, or that effect should precede cause. Isn't this the universe telling you "Change your ways" in neon capital letters?