All of cwillu's Comments + Replies

cwillu00

I think this might have been intended more in the purple dragon sense than anything: focus on how they know exactly what experimental results they'll need to explain, and what that implies about their gut-level beliefs.

cwillu00

That seems to be conceding the point that it has moral weight.

0gjm
"It" is the day's torture for the hostage? Yes, I think it has moral weight. I'm not sure why you use the word "conceding"; I never suggested that it doesn't, and I'm not sure anyone else did.
cwillu00

I teleport a hostage about to be executed to a capsule in lunar orbit. I then offer you three options: you pay me 1,000,000,000$, and I give him whatever pleasures are possible given the surroundings for a day, and then painlessly kill him; I simply kill him painlessly; I torture him for a day, and then painlessly kill him, and then pay you 1,000,000,000$.

Do you still take the money?

This strikes me as a pretty stark decision, such that I'd have a really hard time treating those who would take the money any different than I'd treat the babyeaters. It's almost exactly the same moral equation.

0gjm
With a billion dollars one can save thousands of lives, which seems like a bigger deal than one person being tortured for a day. I can certainly see reasons for not taking that offer, but taking it doesn't seem very babyeaterish to me if the taker's intention is to use much of the money to do a lot more good than the donor does harm.
cwillu00

Last time I played, I just used pennies and nickles.

I really want to try it with a bucket of generic lego pieces some time.

cwillu00

It's a permanent mark that easily leads to tearing.

cwillu90

How... what...

People on the internet aren't from Saskatoon, that's my city!

cwillu10

Beetle-sized (of the beautifully blue sort), at least.

Note also that the body the mind wears apparently (according to quirrel) does have an impact on the mind.

cwillu130

[...] Often I find that the best way to come up with new results is to find someone who's saying something that seems clearly, manifestly wrong to me, and then try to think of counterarguments. Wrong people provide a fertile source of research ideas.

-- Scott Aaronson, Quantum Computing Since Democritus (http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec14.html)

4PhilGoetz
It's even more useful to you when they turn out to be right. (As happened to me with sailing upwind faster than the wind, and with Peter deBlanc's 2007 theorem about unbounded utility functions.)
-2Raw_Power
Reversed Stupidity?
cwillu50

Can you say anything more substantive than that? It's plausible given the studies mentioned in Cialdini, an example of which follows:

Freedman and Fraser didn't stop there. They tried a slightly different procedure on another sample of homeowners. These people first received a request to sign a petition that favored "keeping California beautiful." Of course, nearly everyone signed since state beauty, like efficiency in government or sound prenatal care, is one of those issues no one opposes. After waiting about two weeks, Freedman and Eraser se

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Dorikka130

I wasn't agreeing or disagreeing with the substance of the linked abstract -- I only meant to say that it probably didn't belong in this thread because it looked more like a link to research than what usually goes in the 'Rationality Quotes' thread.

cwillu30

I think you're leaving out another possibility: that they actually think they're right. This obviously doesn't apply to all cases, but I do think it's more common than you would think.

There's also a (related?) strong desire for consistency, which is explored in "Influence - Science and Practice" (Cialdini), which I found sheds some new light on the material in "How to win friends and influence people".

[Also, welcome to lesswrong]

cwillu130

And this sums up why I feel that respect for the silly beliefs of others is important: it sets the stage for the acceptable treatment of things that are confusing or silly.

It's not that you take the belief seriously, but rather that you take seriously the epistemic position that makes that belief seem sensible.

-2Will_Newsome
Beautifully put.
cwillu00

Oddly enough, the first song to come to mind when you said that was the chicken dance.

2orthonormal
Oddly enough, the first song to come to mind when you said that was Yakety Sax.
cwillu-10

We're really good at this sort of group coordination: -20 karma for sure :)

0prase
So modify: predict that the karma will be negative with 90% confidence.
cwillu00

They are rational to the extent they are interested and successful at achieving their goals.

8Jayson_Virissimo
Imagine two people, Alice and Bob, share the goal of deadlifting X lbs. Alice and Bob are equally "interested and successful at achieving" all their other goals besides deadlifting X lbs. Bob is stronger than Alice. Therefore, he is more likely to be able to deadlift X lbs. Can we thereby conclude that Bob is more rational than Alice?
cwillu100

Since so many poker opponents often decide at whim, we need to do more than just strategically analyze their actions relative to what they should be doing. We need to watch and listen and determine what they are doing.

--Mike Caro, Caro's Book of Tells

cwillu70

That's my bet: Harry doesn't believe in souls, but he swallows the explanation without a second thought.

cwillu40

Harry has already been forbidden from leaving the Hogwarts wards without sufficient cause and escort by this time; lunch with Quirrell was explicitly included in this ban. That's not far from what he'd say as an innocent.

cwillu80

Make sure you're logged out first, otherwise your search results are tuned according to your search history.

4thomblake
Even logged out, search results are personalized. This can be avoided somewhat by appending &pws=0 to the search string, but they will still use your IP address to customize your search by locale.
cwillu00

It doesn't feel very fundamental. How commonly they crop up, and how easy they are to debug have much to do with your editor, coding style and interpreter/compiler.

  • the use of long'ish descriptive identifiers makes it less likely that single typos collide with other valid names, while text-completion largely eliminates single-character typos as a class of error.
  • syntax highlighting provides a useful form of spell-checking
  • consistent formatting makes it difficult to accidentally hide 'structural typos', especially given editor support (mainly brace matc
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cwillu30

I took the liberty of mucking up the spreadsheet a little bit:

  • Calculate preferred time in UTC
  • Sort names alphabetically
  • Total number of people who would prefer to have the meeting at a given UTC time.

Once more people have filled in their preferred times, it might make sense to re-sort by that.

cwillu00

I'm in; Saskatoon, Canada.

cwillu60

I think the "it's bigger on the inside" phenomenon is a better foundation to build such a spell on.

4RolfAndreassen
Ah yes! You can store the whole human body in a cavity of the cat's body, and vice-versa; lightspeed is no issue - indeed you could run the whole thing at ordinary neural speed. This might even solve the problem of how to order a cat's body around; the Animagus in effect has a cat as an ordinary part of her body, and has learned to operate it the same way she learned to operate her human body. One problem is the carrying-over of wounds from the animal to the human body, and vice-versa; this does not seem implied by the model, and requires additional explanation. Psycho-somatic damage? Since there a requirement for conscious control of which shape one is in, the opportunities for unconscious failure seem strong.
cwillu00

Beware Canadians seeking paperclips.

cwillu20

On further consideration, my complaint wasn't my real/best argument, consider this a redirect to rwallace's response above :p

That said, I personally don't take 'many' as meaning 'most', but more in the sense of "a significant fraction", which may be as little as 1/5 and as much as 4/5. I'd be somewhat surprised if the number of old machines (5+ years old) in use wasn't in that range.

re: scaling, the Ubuntu folding team's wiki describes the approach.

cwillu00

One who refers to their powered-off computer as 'idle' might find themselves missing an arm.

2Rain
Except I'm talking about opportunity cost rather than redefining the word. You can turn off a machine you aren't using, a machine that's idle.
cwillu00

Many != all.

My desktop is old enough that it uses very little more power at full capacity than it does at idle.

Additionally, you can configure (may be the default, not sure) the client to not increase the clock rate.

1mattnewport
It is also not equal to 'some'. The vast majority of computers today will use more power when running folding at home than they would if they were not running folding at home. There may be some specific cases where this is not true but it will generally be true. You've measured that have you? Here's an example of some actual measurements for a range of current processors' power draw at idle and under load. It's not a vast difference but it is real and ranges from about 30W / 40% increase in total system power draw to around 100W / 100% increase. I couldn't find mention of any such setting on their site. Do you have a link to an explanation of this setting?
0Rain
Idle could also mean 'off', which would be significant power savings even (especially?) for older CPUs.
cwillu00

I use the origami client manager thingie; it handles deploying the folding client, and gives a nice progress meter. The 'normal' clients should have similar information available (I'd expect that origami is just polling the clients themselves).

cwillu00

Granted that in many cases, it's donating money that you were otherwise going to burn.

2mattnewport
No, modern CPUs use considerably less power when they are idle. A computer running folding at home will be drawing more power than if it were not.
cwillu100

Has anybody considered starting a folding@home team for lesswrong? Seems like it would be a fairly cheap way of increasing our visibility.

After a brief 10 word discussion on #lesswrong, I've made a lesswrong team :p

Our team number is 186453; enter this into the folding@home client, and your completed work units will be credited.

3nhamann
Does anyone know the relative merits of folding@home and rosetta@home, which I currently run? I don't understand enough of the science involved to compare them, yet I would like to contribute to the project which is likely to be more important. I found this page, which explains the differences between the projects (and has some information about other distributed computing projects), but I'm still not sure what to think about which project I should prefer to run.
1Jack
So I think I have it working but... theres nothing to tell me if my CPU is actually doing any work. It says it's running but... is there supposed to be something else? I used to do SETI@home back in the day and they had some nice feedback that made you feel like you were actually doing something (of course, you weren't because your computer was looking for non-existent signals, but still).
1Jack
What is this?
cwillu00

Fair point, but the assumption that it indeed is possible to verify source code is far from proven. There's too many unknowns in cryptography to make strong claims as to what strategies are possible, let alone which would be successful.

1NancyLebovitz
And we've got to assume AIs would be awfully good at steganography.
cwillu00

Conditional on one site or the other going down, the second instance adds little buffer.

An ufai would simply focus its efforts on pieces of code likely to be common between the two sites, ensuring that it can take both down at the same cost. This also assumes that developing such an attack is costly, which it may not be: I would expect a sensory modality for code to reduce our commonly made coding blunders to the level of "my coffee cup is leaking because there's a second hole at the bottom".

cwillu00

Within the confines of the story:
No star that has been visited by starline has ever been seen from another, which implies a vastly larger universe than can be seen from a given lightcone. Basically, granting the slightly cryptographic assumption that travel between stars is impossible.
The weapon is truly effective: works as advertised.

Any disagreement with that would have to say why """ 'Assume there is no god, then...' "But there is a god!" """ fallacy doesn't apply here.

The threat of a nova feels like a more interesting avenue than the mere detonation.