All of Borasko's Comments + Replies

Thank you, that's good to know. I'll give it a download.

If we were to blur the name Eliezer Yudkowsky  and pretended we saw this a bunch of anonymous people talking on a forum like Reddit, what would your response be to somebody who posted the things Yudkowsky posted above. What pragmatic thing could you tell that person to possibly help them? Every word can be true but It seems overwhelmingly pessimistic in a way that is not helpful, mainly due to nothing in it being actionable. 

The position of timelines being too short and the best alignment research being too weak / too slow, while having no avenue... (read more)

I noticed every since I started reading math textbooks I like written communication a lot more than verbal communication. Written communication is faster to process and usually is direct with what it is trying to get across, rather than verbal communication which is usually loaded with ambiguity and non verbals. If its important I mostly prefer it in writing now. Of course the communicator does help a lot in both regards to understanding what the important part being communicated is. 

This leads me to be less interested in meetings at work, as communication usually needs to clarified multiple times verbally but I think would usually be easily squared away had the words been written.

I'm not a neuroscientist but I think a nice corollary to your theory would be to look into the minds of those with addictions. I've read a lot about addictions online and talked to a few addicts who are addicted to different things (Alcohol, narcotics, etc). They all seem to have induced a dim world within themselves, but a specific one that is usually only acted out upon with their drug of choice, rather than like a psychopathic child killing animals. But late stage addicts do routinely do socially harmful behavior. All addicts seem to have a similar ratc... (read more)

I am currently struggling my way through Probability and Statistics by DeGroot. I was reading it because it seemed to be the best introductory textbook I can find for probability and yet it still seems like there could be better ways to show the material sometimes. I've learned a good bit from it but I am feeling worried about gaining and retaining useful knowledge.

My current worries are about trade-offs. I do a few of the exercises at the end of the chapter, some I get right some I get wrong. For those I get wrong I usually try to see what I messed up, so... (read more)

I've stopped bringing up the awkward truths around my current friends. I started to feel like I was using to much of my built up esoteric social capital on things they were not going to accept (or at least want to accept). How can I blame them? If somebody else told me there was some random field that a select few of people interested in will be deciding the fate of all of humanity for the rest of time and I had no interest in that field I would want to be skeptical of it as well.  Especially if they were to through out some figures like 15 - 25 years... (read more)

Sometimes it really does suck to not know what you don’t know. Having no college math education I didn’t know what I needed to know to be on par with what math undergraduates know. The further I make it into my self selected MOOC courses meant to stand in for a C.S degree the more I realize where I am lacking and what I need to do to fix it. If I really want to put my money where my mouth is and do research I’m gonna need to go pretty deep into math I’ve been avoiding. 

Coding MOOC’s try to do their best to offer their courses to anyone, even the peopl... (read more)

I completely agree with the problems of making big changes at once. But six months is a long time, I thought if I try to implement one new skill or life improvement a month, then by a year that's twelve new things that are better for me. A month is a long enough time for things to sink in without getting overwhelming, and then can be easily continued with a routine in the next month when adding another thing.

I'll be totally honest and say I don't always know what to add or I am too lazy to do it even during an entire month, but it's best not to be hard on ... (read more)

I have not, but I'll look into it. I hope it goes well for you!

Very interesting! I don't know much about the brain but I think this post did a good job of explaining the concept and showing it's importance. I wonder how the brain does this with neuroplasticity.  I've read this article from MIT about researchers rewiring eye inputs to the audio processing parts of the brain. Would the hypothalamus have that hyper-prior on what eye data "looks like" and create loops and systems that could de-code that data and reintegrate it with the undamaged processing systems? Could an AI system just as easily create or re-use e... (read more)

If you believe AGI will be created. What would be the median year you think it will be created at? 

Ex. -2046, 2074, etc. 

I think I am approaching the end game of video gaming.

 I can scroll through Steam and GoG for hours while seeing nothing that slightly interests me. Every once and a while a great game comes and revolutionizes my experience with video games, but like riding a roller coaster its then hard to go back to the Farris wheel after and feel a rush, all games after are discounted on their novelty. The games that did that for me were the Pathologic "series" and Disco Elysium.  Yesterday was a bit different, I went on a site called Legendsworld.com and they... (read more)

It's brushed over in the book but he believes weights put unnatural stress on the body causing it to deteriorate quicker. Little evidence other than his anecdotal experiences is given for this. It is mostly the assert and move on.

I work at my county's health department helping with the vaccination process and I can confirm that you are scheduled for two weeks out exactly when your first shot is done.  If you miss that date or have to reschedule you are put on a waiting list for a different date in time,  I don't have access to the list, but I also assume it's scheduled for you again with the hopes things will just work out.

I take inbound calls sometimes and many people are worried if they cancel they won't ever get, or since it's been longer than 2 weeks "something" would... (read more)

As far as QR code privacy goes, anybody that has their location checked on in their phone is getting tracked much more than that code could ever do. Although I'm sure they wouldn't mind having the 'vaccinated/non-vacinated' categories. If being vaccinated wasn't already inferable by reading the persons emails / listening to their phone calls.

I really like the idea of privacy. But I just assume after Snowden's leaks everybody is being maximally tracked 24/7. I'm not saying its right, but I have no power to stop it. So when I hear of people's privacy concern issues about being tracked the best I can do is be sympathetically supportive, but I believe it's a lost cause and thus usually pre-factor it in to government proposals.

"But the front-page articles really shouldn't be about the controversy, the buzz, the second-order perceptions and spin and perceptions-of-spin."

I totally agree, but this seems like a business optimization problem. Considering all the different news sources that compete against each other for their consumers very limited time, they have to make it click-baity and scandalous if they want people to pick them over a competitor. I think sometimes when we get really close to an election that the election basically does become a tv show or a sports game. I... (read more)

That's a good idea, I'll try that.

Awesome! Thanks for your answer!

 This was really interesting to read. I'm still pretty new to the AI space so I don't know how this compares to our current FLOP usage. Assuming our current course of computing power doesn't change, how long is the timeline to get to 10^34 FLOP of computing power? 

At the start of this year I stopped playing video games except when in social situations. My hope for doing this was I would be able to study more without the distraction, and sometimes playing videogames encourages behavior that lead me to be more reclusive than I think is healthy for me.

This worked fine for the first two months, however the last two days have been really rough on my mental state. I found myself breaking down and playing video games last weekend. I was bummed. I planned to go a full year without doing that. But considering I am still aliv... (read more)

Those are good to know! Thanks!

I seem to be going back into a major depressive state, emotionally it doesn't feel much different from my normal functioning depression, but I notice a largely decreased ability to devote mental energy and get started on tasks. Words seem to not make sense, like everybody is writing in Wernicke's Aphasia, it's all there and fluent but the words have no meaning to me.

When I try to code or do mathematics my ability do calm down and try to solve problems get severely reduced, I short circuit to irritability and anger that I can't quickly solve what I thi... (read more)

Thanks for posting this, I didn't know about radvac before and now I am excited. I will read the white paper and probably make some myself. If your results are good which I really hope they are, I will try to help my family members get some as well. I don't mind paying $1000+ for family safety, and with the delayed vaccine rollout I would feel better even getting the vaccine to them one month earlier.  So thanks again! I hope all goes well.

I haven't seen almost any traders going off a "real value" analysis for Game Stop. Almost everybody believes Game Stop has a broken business model with no fundamentals, but are all buying it and taking losses just to screw over hedge funds. This is coordinated short-sited financial shitposting out of spite. There is bound to be many losers, but man is it interesting to watch.

Edit: I would also love to see an analysis at one point of the game theory involved getting so many individual traders to coordinate.

I lived in a Fraternity for most of my undergraduate schooling. The same problems you had we also had. noise, cleanliness, politics, amount of clothing worn in common areas, taking up space in common areas, showers, money. Except, fraternity level. It seemed every semester there would be at least a few altercations between roommates, it's just natural. 

However we being an 'organization' really helped us function as a group of a bunch different people living in one house under one banner. We specifically had internal structures for dealing with grievan... (read more)

{I don't know how long these can be but this might be a long post, mostly a vent on frustrations with online none university learning}

1.

When I search for a new skill to learn there are hundreds and hundreds of tutorials and websites and courses that are instantly presented. Some of them seem more high quality than others, which is easy to tell both from websites hosting them (Khan Academy, etc), and then the ratings those individual courses have inside the websites. But there is also free vs paid courses. As somebody who has tried many open online learning... (read more)

I wonder if something like this could be pared with AI Dungeon? If they do release a image generator model for public or private use I think it would be fun to see an image accompany the last line(s) of the text output that has been generated for the story thus far. 

Then more complex AI generated games wouldn't be too far away either.

I've been interesting in getting into plant life lately. Do you have any learning resources you would recommend?

I think the rise of the popularity of the internet has actually strengthened moral mazes in companies. 

Especially now since everybody on the internet can access their own very intense small scale subgroups which usually perfectly conforms to whatever ideology / life style that person wants. Not only does the internet allow people to find their niche interests, it allows them to jump between group cultures relatively easily.  In each of these groups there is norms and unwritten culture rules about what is and isn't acceptable, I think that's why t... (read more)