Eliezer Yudkowsky is a research fellow of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which he co-founded in 2001. He is mainly concerned with the obstacles and importance of developing a Friendly AI, such as a reflective decision theory that would lay a foundation for describing fully recursive self modifying agents that retain stable preferences while rewriting their source code. He also co-founded LessWrong, writing the Sequences, long sequences of posts dealing with epistemology, AGI, metaethics, rationality and so on... (read more)
Someone is well-calibrated if the things they predict with X% chance of happening in fact occur X% of the time. Importantly, calibration is not the same as accuracy. Calibration is about accurately assessing how good your predictions are, not making good predictions. Person A, whose predictions are marginally better than chance (60% of them come true when choosing from two options) and who is precisely 60% confident in their choices, is perfectly calibrated. In contrast, Person B, who is 99% confident in their predictions, and right 90% of the time, is more accurate than Person A, but less well-calibrated... (read more)
AI Risk is analysis of the risks associated with building powerful AI systems... (read more)
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Thanks, edited that section with a link.
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"The X-Men comics use terms like “evolution,” “mutation,” and “genetic code,” purely to place themselves in what they conceive to be the literary genre of science. The part that scares me is wondering how many people, especially in the media, understand science only as a literary genre." -- from Eliezer's post Science as Attire.
As far as I understand, * means something that something that one would want, agree, decide, etc. under ideal reflection conditions (e.g. knowing most plausibly relevant arguments, given a long time to think, etc) See, e.g. the CEV as defined not in relation to alignment targets or Wei Dai's metaethical alternatives 3-5.
Nit: What do the "*" mean? I find them slightly distracting.
"The X-Men comics use terms like “evolution,” “mutation,” and “genetic code,” purely to place themselves in what they conceive to be the literary genre of science. The part that scares me is wondering how many people, especially in the media, understand science only as a literary genre." -- from Eliezer's post Science as Attire.
Related tags and wikis: Disagreement, Modesty, Modesty argument, Aumann agreement, The Aumann Game, ⟨M,N,ε,δ⟩-agreement
Sequences on Shard Theory:
"Noticing confusion" means noticing the "tiny note of discord" (the quiet sense of "something is off") that our minds produce when what we're seeing differs from what we would have expected to see.
There is much rationality skill to be found in learning to raise this subtle signal to full consciousness, and to pay attention to it.
We also offer a Markdown editor. If you want to use Markdown, here is a guide that discusses Markdown syntax, and we generally recommend usingyou can also this Google Docs add-on to convert your Google Docs drafts (formatted as you like) into Markdown syntax.Markdown.
What does this fractional portion mean? Roughly speaking, logarithms measure not only how long a number is, but also how much that number is really using its digits. 12 and 9997 are both two-digit numbers, but intuitively, 12 is "barely" two digits long, whereas 97 is "nearly" three digits. Logarithms formalize this intuition, and tell us that 12 is really only using about 1.08 digits, while 97 is using about 1.99.
Question: log10(100)=2, but clearly, 100 is 3 digits long. In fact, logb(bk)=k for any integers b and k, but k+1 digits are required to represent bk in base b (as(as a one followed by k zeroes). Why is the logarithm making these off-by-one errors?
You may be wondering, are two 5-digits really worth more than one 10-digit? Sure, you can place them in 25 different configurations, but how do you encode "9" when none of the digits have a "9" symbol written on them? If so, see The symbols don't matter.
Are we sure that the gene doesn't just cause people who have it to believe in Functional Decision Theory?