All of avalot's Comments + Replies

Very tricky question. I won't answer it in two ways:

1. As I indicated, in terms of navigation/organization scheme, LW is completely untraditional. It still feels to me like a dark museum of wonder, of unfathomable depth. I get to something new, and mind-blowing, every time I surf around. So it's a delightful labyrinth, that unfolds like a series of connected thoughts anyway you work it. It's an advanced navigation toolset, usable only by people who are able to conceptualize vast abstract constructs... which is the target audience... or is it?

2. I've been in

Thanks for the irony!

Lesswrong is certainly designed for the advanced user. Most everything on the site is non-standard, which seriously impedes usability for the new user. Considering the topic and intended audience, I'd say it's a feature, not a bug.

Nonetheless, the site definitely smacks of unix-geekery. It could be humanized somewhat, and that probably wouldn't hurt.

Anti-vaccination activists base their beliefs not on the scientific evidence, but on the credibility of the source. Not having enough scientific education to be able to tell the difference, they have to go to plan B: Trust.

The medical and scientific communities in the USA are not as well-trusted as they should be, for a variety of reasons. One is that the culture is generally suspicious of intelligence and education, equating them with depravity and elitism. Another is that some doctors and scientists in the US ignore their responsibility to preserve the p... (read more)

Interesting too is the concept of amorphous, distributed and time-lagged consciousness.

Our own consciousness arises from an asynchronous computing substrate, and you can't help but wonder what weird schizophrenia would inhabit a "single" brain that stretches and spreads for miles. What would that be like? Ideas that spread like wildfire, and moods that swing literally with the tides?

By "strangers and superficial acquaintances", I didn't mean bosses or co-workers. In business, knowing the ground is important, but as a foreigner, you get more free passes for mistakes, you're not considered a fool for asking advice on basic behavior, and you can actually transgress on some (not all, not most) cultural norms and taboos with impunity, or even with cachet.

I was not talking specifically about Americans. Americans indeed tend to find out that they have a lot to answer for when traveling abroad. I believe this is also often compounde... (read more)

Thank you! You have no idea just how helpful this comment is to me right now. Your answer to all-consuming nihilism is exactly what i needed!

I think there is a widespread emotional aversion to moving abroad, which means there must be great money to be made on arbitrage.

I think a lot of the aversion is fear of inferiority and/or ostracism. These are counter-intuitively misplaced.

The theory is this: You're worried that the people over there have their own way of doing things, they know the lay of the land, and they're competing hard at a game they've been playing together since they were born. Whereas you barely speak the language, don't know the social conventions, and have no connections. What... (read more)

Yes, and I think this is the one big crucial exception... That is the one bit of knowledge that is truly evil. The one datum that is unbearable torture on the mind.

In that sense, one could define an adult mind as a normal (child) mind poisoned by the knowledge-of-death toxin. The older the mind, the more extensive the damage.

Most of us might see it more as a catalyst than a poison, but I think that's insanity justifying itself. We're all walking around in a state of deep existential panic, and that makes us weaker than children.

• The sound of one hand clapping is "Eliezer Yudkowsky, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Eliezer Yudkowsky..."
• Eliezer Yudkowsky displays search results before you type.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky's name can't be abbreviated. It must take up most of your tweet.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn't actually exist. All his posts were written by an American man with the same name.
• If Eliezer Yudkowsky falls in the forest, and nobody's there to hear him, he still makes a sound.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn't believe in the divine, because he's never had the experience of discovering Elieze

Surprised that nobody has posted this yet...

"Self" is an illusion created by the verbal mind. The Buddhists are right about non-duality. The ego at the center of language alienates us to direct perception of gestalt, and by extension, from reality. (95%)

More bothersome: The illusion of "Self" might be an obstacle to superior intelligence. Enhanced intelligences may only work (or only work well) within a high-bandwidth network more akin to a Vulcan mind meld than to a salon conversation, one in which individuality is completely lost. (80%)

I don't have a very advanced grounding in math, and I've been skipping over the technical aspects of the probability discussions on this blog. I've been reading lesswrong by mentally substituting "smart" for "Bayesian", "changing one's mind" for "updating", and having to vaguely trust and believe instead of rationally understanding.

Now I absolutely get it. I've got the key to the sequences. Thank you very very much!

Maybe it's a point against investing directly into cryonics as it exists today, and working more through the indirect approach that is most likely to lead to good cryonics sooner. I'm much much more interested in being preserved before I'm brain-dead.

I'm looking for specifics on human hibernation. Lots of sci-fi out there, but more and more hard science as well, especially in recent years. There's the genetic approach, and the hydrogen sulfide approach.

March 2010: Mark Roth at TED

...by the way, the comments threads on the TED website could use a few more... (read more)

Getting back down to earth, there has been renewed interest in medical circles in the potential of induced hibernation, for short-term suspended animation. The nice trustworthy doctors in lab coats, the ones who get interviews on TV, are all reassuringly behind this, so this will be smoothly brought into the mainstream, and Joe the Plumber can't wait to get "frozed-up" at the hospital so he can tell all his buddies about it.

Once induced hibernation becomes mainstream, cryonics can simply (and misleadingly, but successfully) be explained as "... (read more)

You are right: This needs to be a fully decentralized system, with no center, and processing happening at the nodes. I was conceiving of "regional" aggregates mostly as a guess as to what may relieve network congestion if every node calls out to thousands of others.

Thank you for setting me right: My thinking has been so influenced by over a decade of web app dev that I'm still working on integrating the full principles of decentralized systems.

As for boiling oceans... I wish you were wrong, but you probably are right. Some of these architectures ... (read more)

You're right: A system like that could be genetically evolved for optimization.

On the other hand, I was hoping to create an open optimization algorithm, governable by the community at large... based on their influence scores in the field of "online influence governance." So the community would have to notice abuse and gaming of the system, and modify policy (as expressed in the algorithm, in the network rules, in laws and regulations and in social mores) to respond to it. Kind of like democracy: Make a good set of rules for collaborative rule-mak... (read more)

Alexandros,

Not surprised that we're thinking along the same lines, if we both read this blog! ;)

I love your questions. Let's do this:

Keynesian Beauty Contest: I don't have a silver bullet for it, but a lot of mitigation tactics. First of all, I envision offering a cascading set of progressively more fine-grained rating attributes, so that, while you can still upvote or downvote, or rate something with starts, you can also rate it on truthfulness, entertainment value, fairness, rationality (and countless other attributes)... More nuanced ratings would proba... (read more)

Clippy, how can we get along?

What should humans do to be AI-friendly? For paperclip-maximizing AIs, and other "natural" (non-Friendly) AIs, what are the attributes that can make humans a valuable part of the utility function, so that AIs won't pull the plug on us?

Or am I fooling myself?

At the moment, humans seem to be Clippy or slightly sub-clippy level intelligence. And even with all our computing power, most ain't FOOMing any faster than Clippy. At this rate, we'll never gonna ensure survival of the species.

If, however, we allow ourselves to be modified so as to substitute paperclip values for our own, then we would devote our computing power to Clippy. Then, FOOM for Clippy, and since we're helping with paperclip-maximization, he'll probably throw in some FOOM for us too (at least he'll FOOM our paperclip-production abilities), and we... (read more)

I'm wired for empathy toward human intelligence... Clippy is triggering this empathy. If you want to constrain AIs, you better do it before they start talking. That's all I'm saying. :)

I'm sure this sounds very one-sided from Clippy's perspective. "Friendliness Constraints" sounds like something that would in many cases entail expending enormous amounts of energy and effort on the innumerable non-paperclip-producing goals of humans. In comparison, how much of our wealth and health are we willing to give up to ensure continued paperclip production? Humans don't have paperclip maximizing constraints, we'd do it only out of self-interest to secure Clippy's help. Why should Clippy not be similarily allowed to make his own utility ... (read more)

There's a few questions in there. Let's see.

Authentication and identity are an interesting issue. My concept is to allow anonymous users, with a very low initial influence level. But there would be many ways for users to strengthen their "identity score" (credit card verification, address verification via snail-mailed verif code, etc.), which would greatly and rapidly increase their influence score. A username that is tied to a specific person, and therefore wields much more influence, could undo the efforts of 100 bots with a single downvote.

Bu... (read more)

Good point! I assume we'll have decay built into the system, based on age of the data points... some form of that is built into the architecture of FreeNet I believe, where less-accessed content eventually drops out from the network altogether.

I wasn't even thinking about old people... I was more thinking about letting errors of youth not follow you around for your whole life... but at the same time, valuable content (that which is still attracting new readers who mark it as valuable) doesn't disappear.

That said, longevity on the system means you've had mo... (read more)

I'd love to discuss my concept. It's inspired in no small part by what I learned from LessWrong, and by my UI designer's lens. I don't have the karma points to post about it yet, but in a nutshell it's about distributing social, preference and history data, but also distributing the processing of aggregates, cross-preferencing, folksonomy, and social clustering.

The grand scheme is to repurpose every web paradigm that has improved semantic and behavioral optimization, but distribute out the evil centralization in each of them. I'm thinking of an architectur... (read more)

This touches directly on work I'm doing. Here is my burning question: Could an open-source optimization algorithm be workable?

I'm thinking of a wikipedia-like system for open-edit regulation of the optimization factors, weights, etc. Could full direct democratization of the attention economy be the solution to the arms race problem?

Or am I, as usual, a naive dreamer?

Advertising is, by nature, diametrically opposite to rational thought. Advertising stimulates emotional reptilian response. I advance the hypothesis that exposure to more advertising has negative effects on people's receptivity to and affinity with rational/utilitarian modes of thinking.

So far, the most effective tool to boost popular support for SIAI and existential risk reduction has been science-fiction books and movies. Hollywood can markedly influence cultural attitudes, on a large scale, with just a few million dollars... and it's profitable. Like ... (read more)

Alex, I see your point, and I can certainly look at cryonics this way... And I'm well on my way to a fully responsible reasoned-out decision on cryonics. I know I am, because it's now feeling like one of these no-fun grown-up things I'm going to have to suck up and do, like taxes and dental appointments. I appreciate your sharing this "bah, no big deal, just get it done" attitude which is a helpful model at this point. I tend to be the agonizing type.

But I think I'm also making a point about communicating the singularity to society, as opposed to... (read more)

I don't know if anyone picked up on this, but this to me somehow correlates with Eliezer Yudkowsky's post on Normal Cryonics... if in reverse.

Eliezer was making a passionate case that not choosing cryonics is irrational, and that not choosing it for your children has moral implications. It's made me examine my thoughts and beliefs about the topic, which were, I admit, ready-made cultural attitudes of derision and distrust.

Once you notice a cultural bias, it's not too hard to change your reasoned opinion... but the bias usually piggy-backs on a deep-seated... (read more)

Hello.

I'm Antoine Valot, 35 years old, Information Architect and Business Analyst, a frenchman living in Colorado, USA. I've been lurking on LW for about a month, and I like what I see, with some reservations.

I'm definitely an atheist, currently undecided as to how anti-theist I should be (seems the logical choice, but the antisocial aspects suggest that some level of hypocrisy might make me a more effective rational agent?)

I am nonetheless very interested in some of the philosophical findings of Buddhism (non-duality being my pet idea). I think there's so... (read more)

I'm a bit nervous, this is my first comment here, and I feel quite out of my league.

Regarding the "free will" aspect, can one game the system? My rational choice would be to sit right there, arms crossed, and choose no box. Instead, having thus disproved Omega's infallibility, I'd wait for Omega to come back around, and try to weasel some knowledge out of her.

Rationally, the intelligence that could model mine and predict my likely action (yet fail to predict my inaction enough to not bother with me in the first place), is an intelligence I'd like... (read more)