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.
I asked Steve Hsu (an expert) "How long do you think it will probably take for someone to create babies who will grow up to be significantly smarter than any non-genetically engineered human has ever been? Is the answer closer to 10 or 30 years?"
He said it might be technologically possible in 10 years but " who will have the guts to try it? There could easily be a decade or two lag between when it first becomes possible and when it is actually attempted."
In, say, five years someone should start a transhumanist dating service that matches people who want to genetically enhance the intelligence of their future children. Although this is certainly risky, my view is that the Fermi paradox implies we are in great danger and so should take the chance to increase the odds that we figure out a way through the great filter.
In so far as the Fermi paradox implies we're in great danger, it also suggests that exciting newly-possible things we might try could be more dangerous than they look. Perhaps some strange feedback loop involving intelligence enhancement is part of the danger. (The usual intelligence-enhancement feedback loop people worry about around here involves AI, of course, but perhaps that's not the only one that's scary.)
I'm currently raising a child who is, age adjusted, considerably smarter than myself. It's challenging but fun. The danger for me isn't my resenting his intelligence, it's taking too much pride in it.
Gwern has written an article for Wired, allegedly revealing the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto:
Bug report: the antikibitzer's toggle button (which appears at the top right of the browser window's content area) doesn't work correctly for me (on recent Firefox on Windows) because the loop that attempts to identify the antikibitzer stylesheet fails. It fails because an earlier stylesheet in the list (actually, the very first) has a null href.
A simple fix is to change the obvious line in antikibitzer.js to this:
if (document.styleSheets[i].href && document.styleSheets[i].href.indexOf("antikibitzer") > 0)
but I make no guarantee that this is the fix the author of the code would prefer.
Some uncomfortable questions I've asked myself lately:
Could you without intentionally listening to music for 30 days?
I recall being taught to argue towards the predetermined point of view in schools and extra-curriculum activities like debating. Is that counterproductive or suboptimal?
Listening back to a recording I made of a therapy session when I was quite mentally ill, I feel amazed at just how much I have improved. I am appalled by the mode of thought of that young person. What impression do the people around me have that they won't discuss openly?
Aren't storm water drain explorer's potentially mapping out critical infrastructure which may be targetted more easily by terrorists? One way I see these things going is commercial drain tours. That way there would be a legitimised presence there and perhaps enhanced security.
something to be asked of academia
Imagine a person was abused for a large part of their childhood and is subsequently traumatised and mentally ill, then, upon regaining greater functioning as an adult decides to extort their abusive parents for money with the threat of exposing them while still counting on inheritence, instead of simply going to th
Paradox at the heart of mathematics makes physics problem unanswerable
Gödel’s incompleteness theorems are connected to unsolvable calculations in quantum physics.
Undecidability of the Spectral Gap (full version) by Toby Cubitt, David Perez-Garcia, Michael M. Wolf
...We show that the spectral gap problem is undecidable. Specifically, we construct families of translationally-invariant, nearest-neighbour Hamiltonians on a 2D square lattice of d-level quantum systems (d constant), for which determining whether the system is gapped or gapless is an undecidabl
Man has himself MRIed twice a week for a year and a half, plus tracking a lot about his life. The data mining is still going on, but at least it's been shown that (probably) people's connectomes change pretty rapidly.
I'm also posting this to the media thread because I'm not sure where it's more likely to be seen.
Interesting article on vox (not a new one, but it's the first time I've seen it and I thought I'd share; apologies if it's been featured here before) on 'how politics makes us stupid': http://www.vox.com/2014/4/6/5556462/brain-dead-how-politics-makes-us-stupid
tl;dr: The smarter you are, the less likely you are to change your mind on certain issues when presented with new information, even when the new information is very clearly, simply, and unambiguously against your point of view.
World's first anti-ageing drug could see humans live to 120
Anyone know anything about this?
The drug is metformin, currently used for Type 2 diabetes.
Please, not another bias! An evolutionary take on behavioural economics by Jason Collins
...So, I want to take you to a Wikipedia page that I first saw when someone tweeted that they had found “the best page on the internet”. The “List of cognitive biases” was up to 165 entries on the day I took this snapshot, and it contains most of your behavioural science favourites … the availability heuristic, confirmation bias, the decoy effect – a favourite of marketers, the endowment effect and so on ….
But this page, to me, points to what I see as a fundamental probl
Seems like some people replace the teleological model of "it evolved this way because the Spirit of Nature wanted it to evolve this way" by a simplistic pseudo-evolutionary model of "it evolved because it helps you to survive and get more sex".
Nope. Some things evolve as side effects of the things that help us "survive and get more sex"; because they are cheaper solutions, or because the random algorithm found them first. There are historical coincidences and path-dependency.
For example, that fact that we have five fingers on each hand doesn't prove that having five fingers is inherently more sexy or more useful for survival than six or four. Instead, historically, the fish that were our ancestors had five bones in their fins (I hope I remember this correctly), and there was a series of mutations that transformed them into fingers. So, "having fingers" was an advantage over "having no fingers", but the number five got there by coincidence. Trying to prove that five is the perfect number of fingers would be trying to prove too much.
Analogically, having an imperfect brain was an advantage over having no brain. But many traits of the b...
Hey everyone,
This is my first post!
This is what I've been wondering lately:
Who is the best sales person in the world? Who knows?
‘Sales competitions’ generally refers to ‘in-house’ competitions established by managers to motivate their sales people to compete against one another.
Recently I began thinking about the prospects for a ‘world sales tournament’ of sorts:
Successful sales people have lots of money. But sales is derided, whether it be in real estate, ‘charity mugger’ fundraisers, or even the people doing tenders for defence contracts.
What if we cou...
I'm from Baltimore, MD. We have a Baltimore meetup coming up Jan 3 and a Washington DC meetup this Sun Dec 13. So why do the two meetups listed in my "Nearest Meetups" sidebar include only a meetup in San Antonio for Dec 13 and a meetup in Durham NC for Sep 17 2026 (!)?
I'm thinking about people's capacity for emotional healing-- I believe this is possible because people have a base state to aim at, even if it's a slow and somewhat indirect process. My question is whether it would be possible to build something like this into an AI, since I assume an AI (even if not in a society of AIs) could either have mistakes built into its structure or make mistakes when changing itself.
When I go to CFAR web page, my browser complains about the certificate. Anyone else having this problem?
Curious: Are there any (currently active) readers who are in Idaho, Eastern Washington, or Eastern Oregon?
This article discusses FAI, mentioning Bostrom, EY etc. Its interesting to see how the problem is approached as it goes more mainstream, and in this particular case a novel approach to FAI is articulated: whole brain emulation (or biologically inspired neural nets) ... on acid!
The idea is that the WBE will be too at-one-with-the-universe to want to harm anyone.
Its easy to laugh at this. But I think there's also a real worry that someone might actually try to build an AI with hopelessly inadequate guarantees of safety.
Having said that, perhaps the idea is n...
So I’m attempting to adopt practices that will bring me closer to generally strategic behavior. I am also interested specifically in strategic/efficient studying. To that end I would like as much of an info dump as possible on the topic on failure.
This can include avoiding failure, preparing for failure even when avoiding it, how to notice when you are failing, and perhaps how to fail gracefully (as possible). I realize there is overlap/confusion here; I was simply rattling of primers for you to consider.
Please err on the side of inclusivity. I am not sta...
...It is not always possible to measure and calibrate expertise. Even when the opportunity exists, few professional disciplines make use of it. Very few experts have had any formal training or calibration for the provision of judgements. That should change. Perhaps a rationality startup could emerge to provide professional development across a range of professions. Until then, it’s important to know who to trust, how to trust them and when to trust them. To the lay person, graphs are intimidating. Atmospheric science is notoriously complex. Expert judgement
Part 2: 'Which experts to trust', 'Limitations' and 'Practice'
**Part 1: IS EXPERT OPINION A WASTE OF TIME? is available here
which experts to trust
Now for an application:
...Tetlock (2005) showed, based on 20 years of longitudinal research on several hundred political experts, the single most powerful predictor of forecasting skill had little to do with what experts think, and more to do with how they think: he called it ‘cognitive style’. As well as being a predictor of forecasting accuracy, ‘cognitive style’ is also a strong correlate of overconfidence. Cog
**Part 1: IS EXPERT OPINION A WASTE OF TIME?
Part 2 on 'Which experts to trust', 'Limitations' and 'Practice' available here
...It is not always possible to measure and calibrate expertise. Even when the opportunity exists, few professional disciplines make use of it. Very few experts have had any formal training or calibration for the provision of judgements. Perhaps a rationality startup could emerge to provide professional development across a range of professions. Until then, it’s important to know who to trust, how to trust them and when to trust them.
My impression after interviewing dozens of academics from various health related fields is that career advancement among these researchers pertains more to signalling the work is being done that actually doing the work. Thiel discredits this arrangement in Zero to One as dysfunctional.
Why can't seasoned politicians handle a windbag millionaire?
Is it because he is a caricature of them?
My guess is that a sales tournament would be a sufficiently simulated environment that it would train skills similar to, but not the same as, those used in actual sales. It would also be optimized for dramatic contests, which isn't quite the same thing as real world sales.