It's like how in a dream, you can see someone and know who they're supposed to be, even though they may look and act nothing like that person they supposedly are. Or how you can be in both the first and third person perspective at the same time.
Heh, I've recently had a few weird half-lucid dreams, where on some level I seem to know that I'm dreaming, but don't follow this to its logical conclusions and don't gain much intentionality from it... In one of them, I ran into a friend I hadn't seen in a long time and later found he'd left something of his wit...
The largest number is about 45,000,000,000, although mathematicians suspect that there may be even larger numbers. (45,000,000,001?)
Yay, it is you!
(I've followed your blog and your various other deeds on-and-off since 2002-2003ish and have always been a fan; good to have you here.)
Shut Up and Multiply (SUM)
Unfortunately that's not even a very good phrase to begin with, let alone as a name for an organization. People hearing it for the first time without context mostly seem to assume that refers to reproduction, presumably by comparison to the phrase "be fruitful and multiply", or at least have that come to mind and are confused about what it has to do with rationality.
Would a "perfect implementation of Bayes", in the sense you meant here, be a Solomonoff inductor (or similar, perhaps modified to work better with anthropic problems), or something perfect at following Bayesian probability theory but with no prior specified (or a less universal one)? If the former, you are in fact most of the way to an agent, at least some types of agents, e.g. AIXI.
I thought the same and wondered if it might have been intentional and meant ironically (since IIRC that is not meant to be the actual eventual name of the organization anyway). Either way, not the best association.
Last year I formatted the TDT paper in LaTeX to teach myself LaTeX. (It's done, aside from a diagram that was missing from the original and possibly a citation or two that were underspecified.) Would this be useful to you, if I reformatted it for the new template?
It's a Google Group, sending any email to that address will indeed subscribe you to the list.
Or you've been neglecting to treat your Spontaneous Duplication.
You didn't delete the comment though, it's still visible.
I'm trans (MTF) and bi leaning a little bit toward gay.
I'm better with non-real-time communication than with things like IM, but in any case feel free to PM me if you'd like to ask anything.
"Magical gods" in the conventional supernatural sense generally don't exist in any universes, insofar as a lot of the properties conventionally ascribed to them are logically impossible or ill-defined, but entities we'd recognize as gods of various sorts do in fact exist in a wide variety of mathematically-describable universes. Whether all mathematically-describable universes have the same ontological status as this one is an open question, to the extent that that question makes sense.
(Some would disagree with referring to any such beings as &qu...
I (or someone) should update that page; the earliest source of the horseshoe story that I know of is from a 1927 essay by Heisenberg:
Niels closed the conversation with one of those stories he liked to tell on such occasions: "One of our neighbors in Tisvilde once fixed a horseshoe over the door to his house. When a mutual acquaintance asked him, 'But are you really superstitious? Do you honestly believe that this horseshoe will bring you luck?' he replied, 'Of course not; but they say it helps even if you don't believe it.'"
Edit: Actually tha...
Note also that I have a general policy of keeping anything related to religion out of the rationality book - that there be no mention of it whatsoever.
I regularly let tabs proliferate until I have a dozen windows open and hundreds of tabs between them and the browser gets so slow that I have to restart it or it just crashes. When this happens, I usually don't feel like waiting for hundreds of tabs to reload, so I move the saved browser session aside, telling myself I'm just making a "temporary" new session, and then the same thing happens and I never revisit any of my past sessions. I have browser session files dating back to… 2007? That can't be right, this has been going on for way longer than that… maybe I have the older ones on a backup somewhere.
Anyway, I think I have a problem.
I had read Overcoming Bias, very sporadically, and without really keeping track of authors or reading things in sequence, for a couple years before I found LW through it around July or August 2009 (at which point I started reading it more systematically).
Earlier in 2009 I had read "The Singularity Is Near", which was my first interaction with transhumanism/singularitarianism, and I was an excited Kurzweilian for a bit, which probably primed me to be particularly interested when I found out that the most prolific blogger on these awesome blogs of victory was the cofounder of something called the Singularity Institute.
I can only assume he wasn't actually talking about an AGI-level breakthrough. I don't think I'd expect him to underestimate the impact or value of AGI that severely.
I assumed that was more based on cultural norms than LW norms. Generally people don't discuss their IQs in polite company (or potentially-high-variance-IQ company, maybe), especially high IQs, because of the risk of being seen as bragging about something that other people may not view as high-status. In discussions outside LW I've heard people be somewhat condescending toward people who even admit to having gotten their IQs tested, as it's often associated with intellectual pretension. (And, in turn, being seen as claiming high status in a way that actually marks one as low-status is associated with social unawareness.)
One (currently slightly downvoted) comment doesn't seem like much of an indicator of a growing community social norm. Does anything else give you that impression?
This could also be fixed by splitting the question into "gender (male/female/other)" and "Are you trans? (yes/no)", but then you'd get other complaints.
I was going to raise exactly that issue and suggest that solution. What complaints would you expect, though? I don't know if I'd really expect any non-trans LWers to be insulted at the mere suggestion that the question is worth asking.
Also, for the record: I'm not "considering cryonics". I'm cryocrastinating. Cryonics is obviously the best choice, and I should be signing up for it in the next five seconds.
I'd have liked having that option too.
I took the survey.
After Eliezer Yudkowsky was conceived, he recursively self-improved to personhood in mere weeks and then talked his way out of the womb.
I seem to recall that we have WordOfGod that the Love Shield does not exist in the MoR universe due to its preposterousness (for basically the exact reason you describe). I'm not sure exactly where I think I'm remembering that from, but if the memory is correct, then I suppose it was probably on LW or in the Author's Notes. Anyone remember?
I would say that spite-voting isn't a large enough problem to need a technical solution unless somebody's being hugely egregious, and if someone's being hugely egregious, there are admins that can step in, right?
There are admins that can step in, but I'm not sure if they have in past egregious cases. Aside from Will Newsome, I think there have been other significant instances of mass downvoting (at least PJ Eby, maybe others), and (correct me if I'm mistaken) I don't recall anything being directly done about either in the end, except the removal of voti...
I try not to think (primarily) in terms of convenience, because from everything I've heard, it seems like adult cases of gender dysphoria don't go away and only get worse over time, eventually outweighing almost anything else. Conditional on the hypothesis that I do in fact have a transgender brain, I'd expect that if I decided to avoid transitioning now for instrumental reasons, I'd only end up regretting it later.
I did have some thoughts along those lines… e.g. at one point I was mildly wishing to be taller (I'm 5'6") for social impressiveness reaso...
Yeah, I wouldn't have proposed hard limits, I was thinking more of an automatic (i.e. not involving manually poking around in the database) means of allowing the administrators to check on large-scale suspicious voting and reverse it if necessary. (And, as I said, I'm by no means worried about my 16 precious votes (though I'd be starting to get concerned by 160), but this incident reminded me of the general problem and I wanted to check if I had missed any changes to how such things are handled.)
I might support just making all votes public; since on LW the...
If you don't mind me asking, what were the observations that lead you to locate and consider that hypothesis in the first place, and how did you come to reject it?
For my part, I've been trying always to hug the query as tightly as possible; when I can get myself to stop thinking abstractly and verbally about whether or not I'm "transgender" and instead wonder perceptually and at the object level about individual, separable questions such as "Have I ever been happy about becoming more masculine?" (if not, I don't have to, whether or not ...
Does LW have any system in place for detecting and dealing with abuses of the karma system? It looks like someone went through around two pages of my comments and downvoted all of them between yesterday and today; not that this particular incident is a big deal, I'm only down 16 points, but I'd be concerned if it continues, and I know this sort of thing has happened before.
Streamline, from their newest album, also seems fairly transhumanist, and in a more hopeful way than most of their songs.
Also, by the unholy power of confirmation bias, I hereby declare that Testament is about humanity's recklessness and apathy in the face of existential risks, and Tomorrow Never Comes is about our final desperate and ultimately futile efforts to stave off doomsday after having waited too long to act.
Apparently, many humans have a superpower whereby they can force themselves to do things they do not already feel pull-motivated to do, as though lifting themselves by their own bootstraps. I'm very jealous of this power and also very frustrated that most people who do have it are also unfamiliar with the typical mind fallacy and are confused about free will and think they understand their power but can only "explain" it in terms that sound to me like childish platitudes by now and certainly don't have any technical content, so of course they usu...
A well-designed optimization agent probably isn't going to have some verbal argument processor separate from its general evidence processor. There's no rule that says she either has to accept or refute humans' arguments explicitly; as Professor Quirrell put it, "The import of an act lies not in what that act resembles on the surface, but in the states of mind which make that act more or less probable." If she knows the causal structure behind a human's argument, and she knows that it doesn't bottom out in the actual kind of epistemology that woul...
But she won't be searching for reasons not to kill all humans, and she knows that any argument on our part is filtered by our desire not to be exterminated and therefore can't be trusted.
Roughly true, but downvoted for being basic (by LW standards) to the point of being an applause light. Good Rationality Quotes are ones we can learn from, not just agree with.
For starters, if she can prove she's friendly, then she can operate openly without causing nearly as much justified concern - which, in the early stages, will be helpful. Whatever her purposes are, if the restrictions of being friendly don't interfere as much as they help, that's a win.
If her current utility function is even a little bit different from Friendliness, and she expects she has the capacity to self-modify unto superintelligence, then I'd be very surprised if she actually modified her utility function to be closer to Friendliness; that would ...
Query, a unicorn pony of ata.
Awesome, thank you!!
Could I use that as my Facebook profile picture?
lesswrong.{com,net,org} are registered to Trike, and I seem to recall that they manage its hosting and technical administrative aspects as well.
"No. You have just fallen prey to the meta-Dunning Kruger effect, where you talk about how awesome you are for recognizing how bad you are."
— Horatio__Caine on reddit
I would like very very much to read that sequence. Might it be written at some point?
It's anthropomorphism to assume that it would occur to advanced aliens to try to understand us empathetically rather than causally/technically in the first place, though.
P(M) > 1
Typo?
If observing a dead cat causes the waveform to collapse such that the cat is dead, then P(D) = P(D) + P(M)(1-P(D)). This is possible only if P(D) = 1.
Sorry if I'm missing something, but are you implying that the Copenhagen interpretation implies that the waveform collapse happens so as to retroactively make the cat dead if Schrödinger would have mistaken the cat for dead? Why would the sort of model that forms in Schrödinger's brain after the fact control what did in fact happen, even given the Copenhagen interpretation? (I didn't think it was quite that silly.)
Since the above comment of mine was posted, I actually became a big fan of VNV Nation (thanks Eliezer! :P) and downloaded the rest of their discography. "The Farthest Star" is definitely a good one. Though I do remember from one live recording of "Further" that Ronan did in fact say that it's about living forever, but given the lyrics, it sounds more like it's about what it would be like for one or two people living forever while the rest of humanity dies, and honestly that probably would suck.
Yeah.
I am reminded of the ancient proverb: "Communicating badly and then acting smug when you're misunderstood is not cleverness."
In any case, that sort of thing could be done more elegantly with the HTML5 Canvas than with Java now (whether matching the current style or using something like Venn diagrams). Applets feel clunky.
To the extent that there are systematic neurological differences that account for transsexuality, there are physically plausible means whereby a more male brain could develop in a female body and vice versa (the fact that both sexes produce both estrogen and testosterone to varying degrees, and it may happen (I propose no specific mechanism) that someone's brain might develop with more influence from the one that doesn't match the one that's controlling the development of their physical sex characteristics, etc.). But there's no plausible way that a human ...
I know this is tangential, but what is it with libertarians and unnecessarily gendered language? I truly don't mean that as a rhetorical question or an attack on you personally or any kind of specific political point, it's something I've been sincerely curious about before and maybe you know the answer; why do so many (obviously not all) libertarian and Randian types seem to be so attached to the whole everyone-is-"man"/"he" schema, including the ones who are way too young to have lived in times before people started realizing why that was a bad idea? Proportionally, even social conservatives don't seem to do that nearly as much anymore.
Aw damn, I'm traveling this month. I hope this a huge success that everyone will want to repeat some time! :)
The idea that one cannot derive an "ought" from an "is" is so often asserted as a settled fact and so rarely actually argued by means other than historical difficulty or personal incredulity. I'd prefer it be stated without the chaotic inversion, if at all — not "one cannot derive an 'ought' from an 'is'", but "I don't know how to derive an 'ought' from an 'is'". In any case, have you read the metaethics sequence? A lot of people seem to disagree, but I found that it mostly resolved/dissolved this problem to my satis...
Huh, I wonder how I missed this post the first time around; I was already questioning my gender when it was posted. (It sounds like I'm in the same boat you were in two years ago; 21, biologically male, feel like I'm almost definitely trans (several other similar details too), but still have a lot of "And yet..."s.)
...The way it stands now, the so-called gender identity disorder isn't really something that is truly diagnosed, because it's based on self-reporting; you cannot look into someone's head and say "you're definitely transsexual"
Looks pretty good so far. I'm not a libertarian or a furry, but I have aesthetic sympathies for both.
Random thoughts as they come to me:
The artwork is good.
Despite your intentions, the political stuff will probably be pretty mind-killery, and mainly looks like applause lights for libertarians. (Ask yourself if libertarians are likely to learn anything new from it and/or if non-libertarians are likely to seriously reconsider anything as a result of reading it.)
We generally avoid calling things "irrational". Since we don't want to get attached to r...
Yes, me[2010-05] did not think of that :) I agree now