Terms I don't know: inferential gaps, general intelligence factor g, object-level thing, opinion-structure. There are other terms I can figure but I have to stop a moment: medical grade mental differences, baseline assumptions. I think that's most of it.
At the risk of going too far, I'll paraphrase one section with hopes that it'll say the same thing and be more accessible. (Since my day job is teaching college freshmen, I think about clarity a lot!)
--
"Can't I just assume my interlocutor is intelligent?"
No.
People have different basic assumptions. People ha...
Apparently clarity is hard. Because although I agree that it's essential to communicate clearly, it took significant wrapping my head around it to digest this post, to identify its thrust. I thought I had it eventually, but looking at comments it seems I wasn't the only one not sure.
I am not saying this to be snarky. I find this to be one of the clearer posts on LessWrong; I am usually lost in jargon I don't know. (Inferential gaps? General intelligence factor g?) But despite its relative clarity, it's still a slog.
I still admire the effort, and hope everyone will listen.
(IDK what most people think abt just abt anything, so I'll content myself with many aren't ready to accept.)
Secularism is unstable. Partly because it gets its values from the religion it abandoned, so that the values no longer have foundation, but also empirically because it stops people from reproducing at replacement rate.
Overpopulation is at worst a temporary problem now; the tide has turned.
Identifying someone with lots of letters after his name and accepting his opinions is not following the science, but the opposite. Science takes no one's word, but ...
I speak as someone who teaches college freshmen.
On the one hand, I see AI writers as a disaster for classes involving writing. I tried ChatGP3 last night and gave it an assignment like one I might assign in a general studies class; it involved two dead philosophers. I would definitely have given the paper an A. It was partly wrong, but the writing was perfect and the conclusion correct and well argued.
This isn't like Grammarly, where you write and the computer suggests ways to write better. I didn't write my paper; I wrote a query. Crafting the query took ...
I'd guess it's overabundance of working-class workers relative to the need. But recently I'm seeing claims that the elite are overabundant: for example, there aren't enough elite slots for the next generation, so Harvard's acceptance rate has gone from 30-odd% to around 1%; and would-be middle-class young people are having to stay with mom and dad to save on rent while working long hours. How can there be an oversupply of all different classes of workers? If it's that automation makes us all way too efficient, shouldn't that make us rich and leisured rather than overworked and desperate?
There is also a tremendous amount of make-work.
My uni has 2 new layers of management between professor and president (was 2, now it's 4) since 1998. Recently we noticed a scary budget shortfall. They decided to reorganize. After reorgnization...kept those extra 2 layers.
My doc's office joined a big corporation. It was ACA (Obamacare). They would have had to hire another clerical worker to handle the extra paperwork.
This blog post is about something else, but buried in it is the number of clergy for various US denominations. Whether the denomination i...
IDK where else to say this, so I'll say it here. I find many LW articles hard to follow because they use terms I don't know. I assume everyone else knows, but I'm a newbie. Ergo I request a kindness: if your article uses a term that's not common English use (GT3, alignment, etc.), define it the first time you use it.
I miss the old forums. (LW is on the way to this, but the format is a little more social-media.) When I moved from reading novels, and discussing things on threads, to social media posts, my concentration was shot. Maybe coincidence, but when I dumped FB (I never did Twitter) my concentration improved slightly as I recall. Point is that it seems that reading longer things helps me concentrate longer, and reading 5-second things does the opposite. FWIW.
I'm going to assume others have done an adequate job describing how to convince a rational being using reason (and I think they have). So I'll come from a different direction: how to convince a human.
What convinced me, back when, was two things:
* A long poem I found, in elementary/middle school, describing what heroin would do to your life. I think it was factually accurate. The modern equivalent might be Faces of Addiction, showing just how drugs wreck people. https://rehabs.com/explore/faces-of-addiction/ These drug users don't look healthy, or happy wit...
There is definitely a correlation! I have a handicapped child. His goals involve snacks and entertainments. His neurotypical brother's goals involve friends and getting schoolwork done (and snacks and entertainments). My goals involve making the world a better place, relating to God, loving my family, and -- snacks and entertainments. :)
And a more severely mentally handicapped person may have a goal simply of "I don't like to be upset." I'm thinking of a particular person, but I don't know her that well.
Having a handicapped family member helps me break through some ways of thinking that seem reasonable if I assume everyone's like me.
Confused about something -- about smart people not being nicer. That fits with my theory of how the world works, but not with my observation of children and teenagers. The smart kids are (usually) way nicer to each other. My 12-y-o observed this as he went from (nasty) 2nd grade to (nice) gifted program to middle school, with the middle school being a mix of nicer smart kids and more poorly behaved, poorly performing students. This also matches my personal experience, my wife's experience, and what we see in pop culture.
Now, you could say smart kids just f...
I'm having a disconnect. I think I'm kind of selfish too. But if it came to a choice between me dying this year and humanity dying 100 years from now, I'll take my death. It's going to happen anyway, and I'm old enough I got mine, or most of it. I'm confident I'd feel the same if I didn't have children, though less intensely. What is causing the difference in these perspectives? IDK. My 90-year-old friend would snort at the question; what difference would a year or two make? The old have less to lose. But the young are usually much more willing to risk their lives. So: IDK.
At one point, IIRC, I thought pain, or at least exhaustion, was meritorious. My mother and grandmother sure did. They'd have contests!
Later, I saw thru that. Play is more productive than work for the same task. Go for the joy. That sort of thing.
But think about it from the perspective of someone with chronic illness, or severely overworked, or in a great deal of emotional pain (death of a spouse or child, or other reasons). You'll have heard the analogy of spoons (https://www.healthline.com/health/spoon-theory-chronic-illness-explained-like-never-before). ...
I will definitely check out the "proofs for young earth" thing. A related issue is patching a problem: SA and Africa look like they fit together, and at the current rate of drift they haven't had time to separate in 10K years (haven't checked this, but surely it's right), so maybe they separated 6K years back in a single day. If C14 is really low in things we think are 10M y old (I'm making this up but it fits), maybe they're a few thou years old and a few thou years ago there was very little C14 around.
It's kind of aside, but I think this about safety systems in general. Don't give me a backup system to shut down the nuclear reactor if the water stops pumping; design it so the reaction depends on the water. Don't give me great ways to dispose of a chemical that destroys your flesh if it touches you; don't make the chemical to begin with. Don't give me a super-strong set of policies to keep the function-gained virus in the lab; don't make function-gained viruses. Wish they'd listened to that last one 3 years ago.
Admittedly it may be too late in a lot of w...
To me the biggest parallel I see in this to existing work is to that of program correctness. It is as hard IMHO to prove program correctness (as in: this program is supposed to sort records/extract every record with inconsistent ID numbers/whatever, and actually does) as it is to write the program correctly; actually, I think it's harder. So I never pursued it. Now we see a really good reason to pursue it. And even w/ conventional, non-AI programs, we have the problem of precisely defining what we want done.
For me, the case for doing this has not sufficiently been made. I read two sets of arguments for it. On this page, essentially, "aging is the leading cause of death," which is funny -- like engagement is the leading cause of marriage -- but more seriously: to attempt to abolish aging is largely about fighting death. Pointing out aging kills doesn't take us anywhere until we've shown death needs to go.
On the linked page about "pro-aging trance," it was that if I'm still asking that question, I must be in a trance, and that's not exactly sound.
I don't have c...
I think we can at least answer, why have 2 sexes rather than, 3, 4, or whatever.
Assuming the benefit of sex is to mix up genes with others' (seems reasonable, as that's what it does!),
In one generation 2 sexes mixes in 50% others' genes to 3 sexes mixing in 66%; not a huge difference. In 4 generations, it's 94% to 99%.
So the benefit of the extra sex isn't huge, but the cost of getting the third may be (just as the cost of finding one mate can be high, esp. if you're somebody's prey and need to both be noticed and not be noticed at the same time).
My autistic child used to be terrified of the lawn mower, even if he was inside. We couldn't use the mixer, the vacuum, or even the shower without him freaking out.
He went from terror to thinking these things were cool: if I cut the grass, he comes out to play nearby with his toy mower; he loves to vacuum. And -- glory of glories -- the shower is boring.
So I think for him at least, it's a progression from WAY TOO MUCH to fascinating and fun to bo-ring.
This leads me to wonder: if it's possible for a stimulus to be overwhelming but not too overwhelming, if exposure therapy might help rather than just making him freak. It's worth a try.
I never get them -- not for two decades. I have very strong teeth and everything has been fine. But I was quie confident. If I had regular cavities I would get it done. YMMV.
Likelihood of cancer -- quite low; cost of getting it -- quite high.
Likelihood of cavities -- higher; cost of getting them -- lower.
It's hard to figure small numbers times big numbers when you don't really have either. :)
>!Certain math sequences that aren't very useful, like, to get the next number add the digits in this one. Should often get down to something stable.
The pre-Hadean earth as postulated: form oceans, suck up the CO2 into rock, cool down till the oceans freeze, stop sucking up CO2 and eventually volcanoes spit out enough it melts the oceans, etc.
Social popularity of certain things like, say, socialism, individualism/conformity, bowdlerism/pornography, anything where if you get too much of it it either blows up or at least people like it less.!<
I assume this is meant to illustrate AI risk. If so, yes, I'm terrified.