DPiepgrass

9mo

We will meet at the Bono Coffee Roasters, close to Murdoch park in Bridgeland. Megh will have an ACX meetup sign.

10mo

You know the drill at the Side Street Grill.

But do you know that the AGI Explosion arrives in 2028? Or possibly 2027?

At the Side Street Pub & Grill again, I guess?

Replying toTail SP 500 Call Options

Tail SP 500 Call Options

In the short term, yes. In the medium term, the entire economy would be transformed by AGI or quasi-AGI, likely increasing broad stock indices (I also expect there will be various other effects I can't predict, maybe including factors that mute stock prices, whether dystopian disaster or non-obvious human herd behavior).

Replying toTail SP 500 Call Options

Tail SP 500 Call Options

I've seen a lot of finance videos talking about the stock market and macroeconomics/future trends that never once mention AI/AGI. And many who do talk about AI think it's just a bubble and/or that AI ≅ LLMs/DALL·E; prices seem high for such a person. And as Francois Chollet noted, "LLMs have sucked the oxygen out of the room" which I think could possibly slow down progress toward AGI enough that a traditional Gartner hype cycle plays out, leading to temporarily cooler investment/prices... hope so, fingers crossed.

Replying toTail SP 500 Call Options

Tail SP 500 Call Options

I'm curious, what makes it more of an AI stock than... whatever you're comparing it to?

How about we meet at Side Street Pub & Grill again (1167 Kensington Crescent NW)?

The forecast is 15°C and sunny at 2PM in Calgary on Saturday. Let's meet outside. Look for picnic tables at 51.0411, -114.017.

Calgary ACX meetup, Aug. 4

Well, yeah, it bothers me that the "bayesian" part of rationalism doesn't seem very bayesian―otherwise we'd be having a lot of discussions about where priors come from, how to best accomplish the necessary mental arithmetic, how to go about counting evidence and dealing with ambiguous counts (if my friends Alice and Bob both tell me X, it could be two pieces of evidence for X or just one depending on what generated the claims; how should I count evidence by default, and are there things I should be doing to find the underlying evidence?)

So―vulnerable in the current culture, but rationalists should strive to be the opposite of the "gishy" dark-epistemic people I have on my mind. Having many reasons to think X isn't necessarily a sin, but dark-epistemic people gather many reasons and have many sins, which are a good guide of what not to do.

DPiepgrass1y*

TBH, a central object of interest to me is people using Dark Epistemics. People with a bad case of DE typically have "gishiness" as a central characteristic, and use all kinds of fallacies of which motte-and-bailey (hidden or not) is just one. I describe them together just because I haven't seen LW articles on them before. If I were specifically naming major DE syndromes, I might propose the "backstop of conspiracy" (a sense that whatever the evidence at hand doesn't explain is probably still explained by some kind of conspiracy) and projection (a tendency to loudly complain that one's political enemies have whatever negative characteristics you yourself, or your political heroes, are... (read more)

The Hidden-Motte-And-Bailey fallacy: belief in a Bailey inspires someone to invent a Motte and write an article about it. The opinion piece describes the Motte exclusively with no mention of the Bailey. Others read it and nod along happily because it supports their cherished Bailey, and finally they share it with others in an effort to help promote the Bailey.

Example: Christian philosopher describes new argument for the existence of a higher-order-infinity God which bears no resemblance to any Abrahamic God, and which no one before the 20th century had ever conceived of.

Maybe the Motte is strong, maybe it isn't, but it feels very strong when combined with the Gish Fallacy: the feeling... (read more)

I wrote a long comment and someone took the "strong downvote, no disagreement, no reply" tack again. Poppy-cutters^[1] seem way more common at LessWrong than I could've predicted, and I'd like to see statistics to see how common they are, and to see whether my experience here is normal or not.

^{^}
Meaning users who just seem to want to make others feel bad about their opinion, especially unconstructively. Interesting statistics might include the distributions of users who strong-downvote a positive score into a negative one (as compared to their other voting behaviors), who downvote more than they disagree, who downvote more than they upvote, who strong-downvote more than they downvote, and/or strong-downvote more often than they reply. Also: is there an 80/20 rule like "20% of the people do 80% of the downvotes"? Is the distribution different for "power users" than "casual users"?

I have a feature request for LessWrong. It's the same as my feature request for every site: you should be able to search within a user (i.e. visit a user page and begin a search from there). This should be easy to do technically; you just have to add the author's name as one of the words in the search index. And in terms of UI, I think you could just link to https://www.lesswrong.com/search?query=@author:username.

Preferably do it in such a way that a normal post cannot do the same, e.g. if "foo authored this post" is placed in the index as @author:foo, if a normal post contains the text @author:foo then perhaps the... (read more)

Calgary ACX meetup, July 7

Location Changed! Due to the chance of rain, let's go to First Street Market (1327 1st Street SW) rather than Pearce Estate Park.

I talked about switching to Saturdays―well, maybe next month.

Calgary ACX meetup, June 2

We hope to have a meetup in Pearce Estate Park, on picnic tables at 51.0411, -114.017. Parking is free and it appears to be a 10-minute walk from the nearest transit stop.

However! I'll check the WeatherCAN app the morning of (or day before) the meetup and, if a chance of rain or snow is listed, switch the location to First Street Market (1327 1st Street SW).

Pearce Estate Park, picnic tables at 51.0411, -114.017

Parking is free and it appears to be a 10-minute walk from the nearest transit stop.

ACX September Meetup