I think the answers to 1 and 2 are as reasonably close to 0 as calculated probabilities can be. That may be independent with the question of how reasonable it is to step into the teleporters, however.
It looks like confused thinking to me when people associate their own conscious existence with the clone that comes out of the teleporter. Sure, you could believe that your consciousness gets teleported along with the information needed to construct a copy of your body, but that is just an assumption that isn't needed as part of the explanation of the physical...
Thanks for the response, especially including specific examples.
My motivation for asking these questions, is to anticipate that which will be obvious and of greatest humanitarian concern in hindsight, say in a year.
This is a scenario that I think is moderately probable, that I'm worried about:
Part 1, most certain: Israeli airstrikes continue, unclear if they're still using their knocking system much. Due in part to deliberate Hamas mixing of combatants and non-combatants, numbers of civilian casualties rise over time.
Part 2, less certain: Israel cont...
My utmost sympathy goes out to the civilians (and soldiers for that matter) who have been harmed in such a horrible way. The conduct of Hamas is unspeakable.
My guess is that you most likely do not expect the currently unfolding Israeli response to result in a massive humanitarian tragedy (please correct me if that's wrong). Do you have any specific response to those who have concerns in this vein?
Specifically, the likely results of denying food supplies and electricity to Gaza seem disastrous for the civilians therein. Water disruption is also dangerous, t...
I disagree with this. The fact that the active mechanism of any functional weight loss strategy is having lower caloric intake than expenditure is obviously a critical aspect of dieting that makes sense to talk about, so I disagree with calling it a red herring.
Calorie counting doesn't work well for everyone as a weight loss strategy, but it does work for some people. Obviously a strategy that works well when adhered to, and which some people can successfully adhere to, is worth talking about. Also obviously, people who have trouble with implementing it themselves should try other strategies. Find the strategy that works for you, and combine with a form of exercise that you enjoy.
In my opinion, the risk analysis here is fundamentally flawed. Here's my take on the two main SETI scenarios proposed in the OP:
Automatic disclosure SETI - all potential messages are disclosed to the public pre analysis. This is dangerous if it is possible to send EDM (Extremely Dangerous Messages - world exploding/world hacking), and plausible to expect they would be sent.
Committee vetting SETI - all potential messages are reviewed by a committee of experts, who have the option of unilaterally concealing information they deem to be dangerous.
The argument ...
That does clarify where you're coming from. I made my comment because it seems to me that it would be a shame for people to fall into one of the more obvious attractors for reasoning within EA about the SBF situation.
E.G., an attractor labelled something like "SBF's actions were not part of EA because EA doesn't do those Bad Things".
Which is basically on the greatest hits list for how (not necessarily centrally unified) groups of humans have defended themselves from losing cohesion over the actions of a subset anytime in recorded history. Some portio...
From what I've heard, SBF was controlling, and fucked over his initial (EA) investors as best he could without sabotaging his company, and fucked over parts of the Alameda founding team that wouldn't submit to him. This isn't very "EA" by the usual lights.
It's not immediately clear to me that this isn't a No True Scotsman fallacy.
I'd be interested in someone with legal expertise weighing in on whether the farm example is in violation of child labor laws. There are special regulations and exemptions for farms, especially run by a parent or person standing for the parent, but a nine year old driving that tractor seems very likely to be illegal to me. I broadly agree with all the stuff about letting children roam, and it comports well with my own experience, but tractors in particular can be very dangerous and 9 seems very young to be doing genuinely independent ag work like this. Would be interested in other people's thoughts.
It seems like you might be reading into the post what you want to see to some extent(after reading what I wrote, it looked like I'm trying to be saucy paralleling your first sentence, just want to be clear that to me this is a non valenced discussion), the OP returns to referring to K-type and T-type individual people after discussing their formal framework. That's what makes me think that classifying people into the binary categories is meant to be the main takeaway.
I'm not going to pretend to be more knowledgeable than I am about this kind of framework, ...
I'm not persuaded at all by the attempt to classify people into the two types. See: in your table of examples, you specify that you tried to include views you endorse in both columns. However, if you were effectively classified by your own system, your views should fit mainly or completely in one column, no?
The binary individual classification aspect of this doesn't even seem to be consistent in your own mind, since you later talk about it as a spectrum.
Maybe you meant it as a spectrum the whole time but that seems antithetical to putting people into two well defined camps.
Setting those objections aside for a moment, there is an amusing meta level of observing which type would produce this framework.
Would you be willing to summarize the point you're making at the object level? Is it something like "the Soviets had to make the Molotov Ribbentrop pact, and that doesn't say anything meaningful about their cultural approach to the interaction of world religions"? I don't want to put words in your mouth or anything, I just want to understand the "extremely low-epistemics" bit.
It seems like you've retreated fully from your bailey:
"at the risk of being the Captain Obvious, I must remind the readers that mountain climbing is stupid"
to your motte:
"There is no greatness in being the 5001th man who climbed Everest"
I suspect most people responding take greater issue with the former position, so maybe if you still stand by it you could defend that one.
To me, it seems like the standard of "if it increases your chances of dying, it's a stupid recreational activity" is one that is unlikely to be applied evenly by just ab...
Conceptually I like the framing of "playing to your outs" taken from card games. In a nutshell, you look for your victory conditions and backchain your strategy from there, accepting any necessary but improbable actions that keep you on the path to possible success. This is exactly what you describe, I think, so the transposition works and might appeal intuitively to those familiar with card games. Personally, I think avoiding the "miracle" label has a significant amount of upside.
Not every occupation is the same, but nations occupied by military force are often denied the ability to run their own affairs with regard to legal proceedings, defence, etc. In particular not being allowed to have final authority over legal matters on their own soil seems to historically be a great sticking point: see the Austro-Hungarian demands of Serbia leading to WW1.
This is one of the key domains which defines the authority of a sovereign nation, whereas it doesn't seem that uncommon in history for there to be foreign military assets in a natio...
I think it's useful to point out that training muscles for strength/size results in a well documented phenomenon called supercompensation. However, training for other qualities like speed doesn't really work the same way. There's lots of irrational training done because people make an inferential leap from the supercompensation they see in strength training and apply it to cases which intuitively seem like they might be analogues (e.g., weighted sprints don't make you faster).
I think counterexamples are relevant because sometimes intuition points out real ...
You imply that you understand it's a metaphor, but your other sentences seem to insist on taking the word "wrestling" literally as referring to the sport. The sentence in bold
"This was no passive measure to confirm a hypothesis, but a wrestling with nature to make her reveal her secrets."
Makes it pretty clear I think. Do you simply not like the metaphor?
I suspect that massive destabilization following the precipitous fall of most of the great powers (NATO + Russia at the least) would result in war on every continent (sans Antarctica). If Asian countries don't get nuked in this scenario like you suppose, I think it's quite plausible general war in Asia would follow shortly as the surviving greatest powers jockey for dominance. If we posit the complete collapse of U.S. power projection in the Pacific, surely China is best positioned to fill the void, and I don't think it's clear where they'd draw the new lines.
In practice, leading thinkers in EA seem to interpret AGI as a special class of existential threat (i.e., something that could effectively ‘cancel’ the future)
This doesn't seem right to me. "Can effectively ’cancel’ the future" seems like a pretty good approximation of the definition of an existential threat. My understanding of why A.I. risk is treated differently is because of a cultural commonality between said leading thinkers such that A.I. risk is considered to be a more likely and imminent threat than other X-risks. Along with a less widespread (I think) subset of concerns that A.I. can also involve S-risks that other threats don't have an analogue to.
These are just one native speaker's impressions, so take them with a grain of salt.
Your first two examples, to me, scan as being about abstract concepts; respectively: the emotion/quality of curiosity and the property of being in context.
This quora result indicates that it's a quality of "definiteness" that indicates when articles get dropped (maybe as a second language learner you're likely to already have this as knowledge, but find it difficult to intuit).
In those examples, the meaning doesn't rely on pointing at two specific "curiosity" and "context" o...
It's possible you're in Ease Hell. It has been a while since I got into the weeds with my settings but there are pretty good reasons to change the default ease settings and reset the ease on old cards, as I recall. I'm also in the camp of only using the "again" and "good" buttons, since the other ones affect ease iirc. Anyway you've been at it longer than I have but maybe the ease hell thing is new info for you or other anki users.
I appreciate the clarification, at first #1 seemed dissonant to me (and #2 and #3 following from that) given the trope of highly inbred European nobility, but on further reflection that might be mostly a special case due to dispensations. I hadn't thought of worldwide consanguination/marriage norms as a potential X factor for civilizational development, but it's an interesting angle.
Just to clarify, with this sentence:
Christianity was also unusual in other potentially key dimensions - it dramatically promoted outbreeding (by outlawing inbreeding far beyond the typical), which plausibly permanently altered the european trajectory.
are you proposing that Christian Europe was historically successful in significant part due to inbreeding less than non-Christian-European civilizations? Is there somewhere I can read more about that thesis? I'm not familiar with it.
Without even getting into whether your specific reward heuristic is misaligned, it seems to me that you'd just shifted the problem slightly out of the focus of your description of the system, by specifying that all of the work will be done by subsystems that you're just assuming will be safe.
"paperclip quality control" has just as much potential for misalignment in the limit as does paperclip maximization, depending on what kind of agent you use to accomplish it. So, even if we grant the assumption that your heuristic is aligned, we are merely left with the task of designing a bunch of aligned agents to do subtasks.
This seems transparently false based on the most cursory of research. Just reading the wikipedia article, the story of the Black War/Tasmanian genocide seems to have ended with the last ~100 or so aboriginal Tasmanians surviving, out of a possible initial pre-contact population of between 3000-7000 (with 30 years elapsing between contact and the final exile of the Tasmanians from their homeland).
So: that the nation was wiped out by the British? I would ... (read more)