Per Wikipedia:
In economic science, the tragedy of the commons is a situation in which individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use, act independently according to their own self-interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action.
The usual example of a TotC is a fishing pond: Everyone wants to fish as much as possible, but fish are not infinite, and if...
Yes.
Absolutely, yes.
An artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a computer program that can perform at least as good as an average human being can across a wide variety of tasks. The concept is closely linked to that of a general superintelligence, which can perform better than even the best human being can across a wide variety of tasks.
There are reasons to believe most, perhaps almost all, general superintelligences would end up causing human extinction. AI safety is ...
Towards a #1-flavored answer, a Hansonian fine insured bounty system seems like it might scale well for enforcing cooperation against AI research.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/01/privately-enforced-punished-crime.html
OP here, talking from an older account because it was easier to log into on mobile.
Kill: I never said anything about killing them. Prisoners like this don't pose any immediate threat to anyone, and indeed are probably very skilled white collar workers who could earn a lot of money even behind bars. No reason you couldn't just throw them into a minimum security jail in Sweden or something and keep an eye on their Internet activity.
McCarthyism: Communism didn't take over in the US. That provides if anything weak evidence that these kinds of policies can work...
Metcalfe's (revised!) law states that the value of a communications network grows at about .
I frequently give my friends the advice that they should aim to become pretty good at 2 synergistic disciplines (CS and EE for me, for example), but I have wondered in the past why I don't give them the advice to become okay at 4 or 5 synergistic disciplines instead.
It just struck me these ideas might be connected in some way, but I am having trouble figuring out exactly how.
Try to think about this in terms of expected value. On your specific example, they do score more, but this is probabilistic thinking, so we want to think about it in terms of the long run trend.
Suppose we no longer know what the answer is, and you are genuinely 50/50 on it being either A or B. This is what you truly believe, you don't think there's a chance in hell it's C. If you sit there and ask yourself, "Maybe I should do a 50-25-25 split, just in case", you're going to immediately realize "Wait, that's moronic. ...
Agreed on the difference. Different subcultures, I think, all try to push different narratives about how they are significantly different from other subcultures; they are in competition with other subcultures for brain-space. On that observation, my priors that rationalist content is importantly different to other subcultures in that regard are low.
I suppose my real point in writing this is to advise against a sort of subcultural Fear Of Being Ordinary -- rationalism doesn't have to be qualitatively different from other subcultures to be valuable. For people under its umbrella, it can be very valuable, for reasons that have almost nothing to do with the quirks of the subculture itself.
Great post! Simple and useful. For spaced-repetition junkies in the crowd, I created a small Anki deck, created from this post to help me retain the basics.
Scattered thoughts on how the rationalist movement has helped me:
On the topic of rationalist self-improvement, I would like to raise the point that simply feeling as though there's a community of people who get me and that I can access when I want to has been hugely beneficial to my sense of happiness and belonging in the world.
That generates a lot of hedons for me, which then on occasion allow me to "afford" doing other things I wouldn't otherwise, like spend a little more time studying mathematics or running through Anki flashcards. ...
When I stop to think of people I support who I would peg as "extreme in words, moderate in actions", I think I feel a sense of overall safety that might be relevant here.
Let's say I'm in a fierce, conquering mood. I can put my weight behind their extremism, and feel powerful. I'm Making A Difference, going forth and reshaping the world a little closer to utopia.
When I'm in a defeatist mood, where nothing makes sense and I feel utterly hopeless, I can *also* get behind the extremism -- but it's in a different light, now. I...
Causality seems to be a property that we can infer in the Democritan atoms and how they interact with one another. But when you start reasoning with abstractions, rather than the interactions of the atoms directly, you lose information in the compression, which causes causality in the interactions of abstractions with another to be a harder thing to infer from watching them.
I don't yet have a stronger argument than that; this is a fairly new topic of interest to me.
I would picture them as rectangles and count. Like, 2x3 would look like
xxx
xxx
in my head, and for small numbers I could use the size of it to feel whether I was close. I remember doing really well with ratios and fractions and stuff for that reason.
For larger numbers, like 8x8, I would often subdivide into smaller squares (like 4x4 or 2x2), and count those. Then it would be easy to subdivide the larger one and repeat-add. I would often get a sour taste if the answer just "popped" into my head and I would actively fight against it, so I think there...
For your specific situation, may I recommend curling up with Visual Complex Analysis for a few hours? 😊 http://pipad.org/tmp/Needham.visual-complex-analysis.pdf
On a more general note, I find that anyone who says they "learned it from first principles" is usually putting on airs. It's an odd intellectual purity norm that I think is unfortunately very common among the mathematically- and philosophically-minded.
As evolved chimpanzees, we are excellent at seeing a few examples of something and then understanding the more general abstrac...
I always like seeing someone else on LessWrong who's as interested in the transformative potential of SRS as I am. 🙂
Sadly, I don't have any research to back up my claims. Just personal experiences, as an engineering student with a secondary love of computer science and fixing knowledge-gaps. Take this with several grains of salt -- it's not exactly wild, speculative theory, but it's not completely unfounded thinking either.
I'm going to focus on the specific case you mentioned because I'm not smart enough to generalize ...
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand now I'm thinking I know what's wrong with me.
https://deponysum.com/2019/04/28/ocd-what-i-learned-fighting-mind-cancer/
Set up for Success: Insights from 'Naive Set Theory'
I very much doubt anyone else will care much about this post, so I will give my reasoning.
Please vote before you read my reasoning. :)
To generalize this heuristic a bit, and to really highlight where its weaknesses lie: An ethical argument that you should make a significant change to your lifestyle should be backed up more strongly in proportion to that change.
For example, to most people, the GWWC 10% pledge is a mildly extraordinary claim. (My parents actually yelled at me when I donated my Christmas money at 17.) But I think it does meet our bar of evidence: 10% income is usually no great hardship if you plan for it, and the arguments that the various EAs put forward for it are often quite strong.
Where this heuristic breaks down is an exercise to the reader. :)
I'm very wary of this post for being so vague and not linking to an argument, but I'll throw my two cents in. :)
The future will not have a firm concept of individuals.
I see two ways to interpret this:
The common threa...
1a -> Broadly agree. "Weaker" is an interesting word to pick here; I'm not sure whether an anarcho-primitivist society would be considered weaker or stronger than a communist one systemically. Maybe it depends on timescale. Of course, if this were the only size lever we had to move x-risk up and down, we'd be in a tough position - but I don't think anyone takes that view seriously.
1b -> Logically true, but I do see strong reason to think short term x-risk is mostly anthropogenic. That's why we're all here.
2 -> I do agree it would probably take a w... (read more)