The short version Three weeks ago, starting on a Sunday, my brother stood up to turn off the light and felt a wave of disorientation, which passed after a minute or two. Periods of cognitive impairment increased in frequency over the following week, along with mild photophobia, until they became...
(Updated 2020/08/08; appended to the bottom. New BLUF: "What's the expected total number of further C19 infections recursively resulting from a single infection, in the current USA environment?") (Original post: ) BLUF: How many days of life would I be statistically costing others by taking four flights and some family...
Three weeks ago, starting on a Sunday, my brother stood up to turn off the light and felt a wave of disorientation, which passed after a minute or two. Periods of cognitive impairment increased in frequency over the following week, along with mild photophobia, until they became continuous, and continued increasing in severity. He also experienced severe fatigue while driving and had to pull over. Doing some research of possible causes, and considering a suspicious rash he'd noticed for a few months, he hypothesized a small possibility of HSV encephalitis, a rare but deadly illness, and obtained an internet prescription for acyclovir and began to take it that Saturday night,... (read 3127 more words →)
While I (a year late) tentatively agree with you (though a million years of suffering is a hard thing to swallow compared to the instinctually almost mundane matter of death) I think there's an assumption in your argument that bears inspection. Namely, I believe you are maximizing happiness at a given instance in time - the present, or the limit as time approaches infinity, etc. (Or, perhaps, you are predicating the calculations on the possibility of escaping the heat death of the universe, and being truly immortal for eternity.) A (possibly) alternate optimization goal - maximize human happiness, summed over time. See, I was thinking, the other day, and it seems possible... (read more)
"Complex" doesn't imply "hard to emulate". We likely won't need to understand the encoded systems, just the behavior of the neurons. In high school I wrote a simple simulator of charged particles - the rules I needed to encode were simple, but it displayed behavior I hadn't programmed in, nor expected, but which were, in fact, real phenomena that really happen.
I agree with you almost perfectly. I'd been working on a (very long-shot) plan for it, myself, but having recently realized that other people may be working on it, too, I've started looking for them. Do you (or anyone reading this) know of anybody seriously willing to do, or already engaged in, this avenue of work? Specifically, working towards WBE, with the explicit intent of averting unaligned AGI disaster.
It bears mention that, compared to the median predicted unaligned AGI, I'd hands-down accept Hitler as supreme overlord. It seems probable that humans would still exist under Hitler, and in a fairly recognizable form, even if there were many troubling things about their existence. Furthermore, I suspect that an average human would be better than Hitler, and I'm fairly optimistic that most individuals striving to prevent the AGI apocalypse would make for downright pleasant overseers (or whatever).
I'm not convinced "want to modify their utility functions" is the perspective most useful. I think it might be more helpful to say that we each have multiple utility functions, which conflict to varying degrees and have voting power in different areas of the mind. I've had first-hand experience with such conflicts (as essentially everyone probably has, knowingly or not), and it feels like fighting yourself. I wish to describe a hypothetical example. "Do I eat that extra donut?". Part of you wants the donut; the part feels like more of an instinct, a visceral urge. Part of you knows you'll be ill afterwards, and will feel guilty about cheating your diet;... (read more)
I feel like the concept of "neural address" is incompletely described, and the specifics may matter. For example, a specific point in the skull, yeah, is a bad way to address a specific concept, between individuals. However, there might be, say, particular matching structures that tend to form around certain ideas, and searching on those structures might be a better way of addressing a particular concept. (Probably still not good, but it hints in the direction that there may be better ways of formulating a neural address that maybe WOULD be sufficiently descriptive. I don't know any particularly good methods, of the top of my head, though, and your point may turn out correct.)
"When you are finished reading this, you will see Bayesian problems in your dreams."
Whaddaya know; he was right.
Also, yes the other version (on Arbital) is better, with more information - though this one has a point or two that aren't in the other version, like the discussion of degrees of freedom.
Ah, thanks; that looks pretty relevant. I'll try to read it in the next day or so.
Yeah, and it would also cut out close contact with a number of people. It's actually looking pretty likely the second of the mentioned alternatives will happen (assuming I go at all) - it's possible I'll stay at home with an immediate family member, rather than go to Utah. This reduces my close contact from ~20 people (in ~4 families) down to like 3 people (1 family), and should significantly reduce the odds of my catching it. I started writing a huge response, but moved it into an update.
(Updated 2020/08/08; appended to the bottom. New BLUF: "What's the expected total number of further C19 infections recursively resulting from a single infection, in the current USA environment?")
(Original post: )
BLUF: How many days of life would I be statistically costing others by taking four flights and some family vacation?
I live in Ohio, and my parents live in Arizona. A few months ago, my parents shared future plans to take a family trip. I don't think it even occurred to me to consider the future state of COVID-19 at the time of the trip - August was ages away, and the entirely implicit reasoning probably read "surely things will have... (read 2106 more words →)
Thanks. In case this additional detail helps anybody: my brother says he'd take valacyclovir two times a day, and it seemed like his rash (and possibly cognitive symptoms, hard to tell) would get worse a couple hours after, then subside.