All of Galap's Comments + Replies

Galap50

There's a difference between 'working hard' and actually inhumane conditions, which, while I did not experience them in high school, seem to pop up by default in a lot of situations. So I wouldn't be really surprised if it happened in some high schools, because there isn't much defending against it there.

So yeah the labor unions having the goal of 'not having to work hard' is a protection against a very serious and insidious problem.

1Viliam
The situations like: "Hey, I am not telling you to work so hard that you will damage your health. You would never hear me saying something like that; that's a horrible strawman. Actually, please sign these papers that you were specifically instructed to take great care about your health, so that you can't sue me if anything happens. Thank you! Now I want to remind you that if you get outcompeted by people who are less careful about damaging their health (which I officially know nothing about, because I prefer not to care about such details and only look at the outcomes), you may get fired. It's your choice, though, and I take no responsibility."
Galap00

Have any stats on that?

(note I'm not trying to be that annoying guy who asks for statistics to try and win an argument if the other party fails to produce them; I really want to see info on people's expected vs actual employment outcomes)

Galap00

I think you're right that the top 1/2 of 1% are much more varied and idiosyncratic than the norm, because they are all going to be gifted in very unique and divergent ways.

However, honestly I think the best way to utilize them (and remove tremendous frustration on both their part and the part of people who would manage them) is treat them like a black box; tell them, "ok, go off and act as you would by default. We'll make sure no one will bother you. Sink or swim on your own, though. Try to find something interesting. Good luck.

Some of them may not pr... (read more)

Galap30

This may not be strictly statistical, but I would choose the idea that in order to make any meaningful statement with data, you always have to have something to compare it to.

Like someone will always come in some political thread and say , "X will increase/decrease Y by Z%.) And my first thought in response is always, "Is that a lot?"

For a recent example I saw, someone showed a graph of Japanese student suicides as a function of day of the year. There were pretty high spikes (about double the baseline value) on the days corresponding to the ... (read more)

Galap20

Why do people believe that AI is dangerous? What direct evidence is there that this is likely to be the case?

0polymathwannabe
This is one of MIRI's pivotal papers on the subject.
3Manfred
It's because computers do what you program them to do. If you build an AI with superhuman intelligence and creativity, and the way it makes decisions is to best fulfill some objective, that objective might get fulfilled but everything else might get fubar. Suppose the objective is "protect the people of Sweden from threats." This AI will almost certainly kill everyone outside Sweden, to eliminate potential threats. As for the survivors, well - what's a "threat?" Does skin cancer or the flu or emotional harm count? What state would you say truly minimizes these threats - that sounds like a coma or a sensory deprivation tank to me.
3MrMind
Since we have no AI, we do not have any direct evidence. The argument though goes like this: AI is orthogonal to purpose, so any sufficiently advanced AI could self-improve and have an exponential impact on our society. But human values are fragile and complex, and if we do not carefully design said AI purpose carefully, it could trample all over them uncaringly.
3ChristianKl
Read Bostrom's Superintelligence. It summarizes all of the main arguments.
Galap20

I don't really buy it. The world is changing too fast. Things are way different now than they were in the 50s, so I don't think the statistics from then really mean much anymore.

In another 50 years what will the landscape look like? who knows? Maybe the diseases won't really be such a huge problem because our anivirals will become as good as our antibiotics.

The one thing that can be said with pretty high certainty is that for the most part it will be a completely different world in the second half of the 21st century.

Looking at stuff in the second half of ... (read more)

0turchin
Earlier near-misses are better known because secrecy was lifted. But such events still happen, like nuclear alert in Russia in 1995, Indian-Pakistan standoff in 2001, Ebola 2014. So the main question is if general safety and sanity lines will rise? And they probably rise in main superpowers but we have many new nuclear countries as well as new risky technologies. We don't know what kind of technologies will be dominating in the second half of 21 century, but more important question is what kind of safety levels will be used? We could see that in general safety is growing in all domains: nuclear, cars, planes are safer now. But also number of users is also growing which may result in more accidents. So near-misses may be very preliminary and rough estimate of general safety levels which is typical to humanity and thus could be used to make reasonable expectation about future risks. It also shows that rising general safety levels in all domains may be universal instruments to prevent global catastrophes. But also the number of "trails" is rising and it rises a possibility of even very improbable catastrophies
Galap30

I'm not sure this is bad. In my research (and in everyday life), often the best solution is to try to do something, anything, just perturb the system in some way to see what happens, because I find you often need a vector to start optimizing and correcting. Often I find what a desirable outcome is by taking the action of putting things in motion or thinking of them in motion.

Galap30

Hmm.... I'd say that simulations and representations aren't the same thing. A representation only presents the appearance of something in some way, whereas a simulation tries to present the appearance of something for the same types of causal reasons the real thing has. So no, I wouldn't say that a video of mars is a simulation of mars.

0turchin
I mean "Martian" movie. It is simulation of Mars, not actual video. Anyway my point is more like analogy, than straightforward argument. The key idea is that we should be sceptical to both possibilities: that we are real and that we are in simulation.
Galap40

I don't think I'm in a simulation, and I only just now reading this became able to verbalize why that is.

I reject as a premise any arguments that rely on some kind of 'probability that I find myself as me'.The reason for this is that I don't think that such probabilities can be considered to exist. You may say that I could have been born a hunter-gatherer thousands of years ago, some guy living in the future, or some guy living in a simulation in the future, but I don't think that these really work as potentialities. The hunter-gatherer's experiences are d... (read more)

0torekp
turchin uses some unfortunate language. For example opposing simulation people to "real" people. I'm skeptical too, but before we reject the hypothesis let's phrase it in the best form. To wit, our universe is hypothesized to be caused intentionally by intelligent residents of another, for purposes analogous (in what ways? ) to those for which we create virtual worlds. That doesn't make us unreal.
1turchin
We can't take reality for granted. Most interesting things we see are simulations. For example, I see Mars. Most likely I see it on TV, or in dream, or in a book. So in most cases we need to invest to prove that the object is real, not that it is simulated. Most time we see images or dreams, not real things. So even in our world most experience are simulations. If I say you that I have a palace with 100 rooms, most likely I lie. So being skeptical means not believe in reality of anything, especially large and expensive. Of course, it would be premature to start to believe that we are in the simulation without any practical evidence. But we should give simulation hypothesis higher a priory probability.
Galap30

I know very well a registered dietitian who deeply knows her stuff. She's explained quite a lot to me, and given me considerable knowledge (it helps that my field is chemistry, and while biochem is different than what I do it's not completely alien).

Unfortunately I can't say much about nutrition in one single post. Like so many things, it's a really complex and rich science and to really know something about it would take years of education on the subject. As you may imagine, everything comes with lots of exceptions and qualifiers. My recommendation if you... (read more)

3zedzed
Any recommendations?
1SanguineEmpiricist
Galap30

Am I the only one who thinks that there's some kernel of truth in this? that many people's perception of 'quality' is very strongly influenced by the perceived social status of the creator?

4Richard_Kennaway
There is "some" kernel of truth in everything. There's a large distance between "only your guess" and "no other difference" on the one hand, and "many people's perception" and "very strongly influenced" on the other. Besides which, status cannot be the whole explanation of status.
1Emile
I think that for the specific case of Harry Potter Fanfic, this hypothesis has been disproved by [Yudkowsky, 2010]. Though for "many people's perception of 'quality'", there's probably some truth there.
Galap20

Here's what I know about the matter:

At low atomic number, isotopes that are more stable tend to be close to a 1:1 ratio of neutrons to protons. At high atomic number, this ratio approaches 3:2. I do not know why this is the case, and I believe it is not entirely understood by anyone. Also, this is not a very good predictor anyway.

The real problem is that unlike electron energy levels in an atom, which are well known and easily approximable by various systems and techniques, the nuclear energy levels are not very well understood, and I think to an extent th... (read more)

9Luke_A_Somers
We know exactly why the balance tends more towards the neutrons for heavier elements, but the system is messy enough that it's very hard to predict just how much it does. Sphericality and cubicality are orthogonal issues, and not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. The main issues that make nucleons harder than electrons are: 1) There isn't an externally imposed force that dominates the system (for the electrons, that's the nucleus); it's all internal, and that's harder. Every time you add a new particle, the new ground state is little like the old ground state. For electrons, a thorough understanding of Hydrogen tells you nearly everything you need to know about, say, Oxygen; at a nuclear level, a thorough understanding of Hydrogen barely tells you anything about Oxygen. 2) The questions you need to answer are much much harder. You aren't perturbing the system and finding the new ground state, like in chemistry. You need to find barrier heights and transition rates on upheavals to the whole system. 3) Last and least, there are two species (electrons -> protons AND neutrons), with differences in how they feel the forces.
Galap00

Sorry for the delayed response; I don't come on here particularly often.

The assumptions I'm making are that evolution is a stochastic process in which elements are in fluxional states and there ere is some measure of 'difficulty' in transitioning from one state to another, an energetic or entropic barrier of sorts, that to go from A to B (for example, from an organism with asexual reproduction to an organism with sexual reproduction) some confluence of factors must occur, and that occurrence has a certain likelihood that's dependent on the conditions of th... (read more)

Galap10

I'd liken it to a chemical reaction. Many of them are multistep, and as a general statement chemical processes take place over an extremely wide range of orders of magnitude of rate (ranging from less than a billionth of a second to years). So, in an overall reaction, there are usually several steps, and the slowest one is usually orders of magnitude slower than any of the others, and that one's called the rate determining step, for obvious reasons: it's so much slower than the others that speeding up or slow down the others even by a couple of orders of m... (read more)

1Sophronius
Interesting. However, I still don't see why the filter would work similarly to a chemical reaction. Unless it's a general law of statistics that any event is always far more likely to have a single primary cause, it seems like a strange assumption since they are such dissimilar things.
Galap30

I don't agree that metals and heavy elements are necessary for industry and spaceships: you can do quite a lot with light elements, particularly carbon (for example plastics, carbon fiber, etc.). Also, biology makes all of its structure through lighter elements.

That being said, I think you're very much on the money with the general idea: I also thought something similar while reading the artifcle (that the filters are likely multivariate and interdependent), but not in as well thought out a way.

1AnthonyC
We can do quite a lot with light elements now, after we spent millennia figuring out metals. We still use a lot of metal equipment and catalysts in the manufacturing of polymers and carbon fiber. I'm sure there are processes for making them without metals, but getting civilization going in the first place would be much harder without elements heavier than iron.
Galap30

So basically the bottom line I'm getting from this a kind of variant of Occam's Razor: Evolution is unlikely to produce solutions that include complexity or considerations it doesn't need.

Or more specifically, and with an example, there are probably a lot more ways to get to taste buds that give good results in environments and contexts the organism is likely to encounter than ways to get to taste buds that give good results in both environments and contexts that the organism is likely and unlikely to encounter.

Galap00

Yeah, I've definitely had to learn the hard way to tone it down with respect to having ideas and interests that run completely orthogonal to familiarity with peers/society.

Perhaps what annoys me even more is when I like something that coincidentally has associated with it one of those Outside The Box groups, when I don't want to be associated with that group, or more accurately, don't want to have to hear the canned response for it, whatever it may be.

For example, I like heavy metal and anime, but have no desire to be a part of those counter-cultural group... (read more)