ioannes

https://applieddivinitystudies.com/2020/09/05/rationality-winning From near the end: > The primary impacts of reading rationalist blogs are that 1) I have been frequently distracted at work, and 2) my conversations have gotten much worse. Talking to non-rationalists, I am perpetually holding myself back from saying "oh yes, that’s just the thing where no...

I'm not an investment advisor and this isn't investment advice. Excerpted from an occasional newsletter I write about investing. Related: Engaging Seriously with Short Timelines, You Need More Money Recent developments in AI (AlphaGo Zero, AlphaFold, GPT-3) make transformative AI seem plausible within the next 10-50 years. There's no fire...

https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4845 From the beginning: > Will He Go?, by legal scholar Lawrence Douglas, is, at 120 pages, a slim volume focused on a single question: what happens if the 2020 US election delivers a narrow or disputed result favoring Biden, and Trump refuses to concede? This question will, of course,...

Full title: Is the Orthogonality Thesis Defensible if We Assume Both Valence Realism and Open Individualism? https://qualiacomputing.com/2019/11/09/is-the-orthogonality-thesis-defensible-if-we-assume-both-valence-realism-and-open-individualism/ An excerpt: > The cleanest typology for metaphysics I can offer is: some theories focus on computations as the thing that’s ‘real’, the thing that ethically matters – we should pay attention to...

https://numinous.productions/ttft An excerpt: > We're often asked: why don't you work on AGI or [brain-computer interfaces (BCI)] instead of tools for thought? Aren't those more important and more exciting? And for AGI, in particular, many of the skills required seem related. > They certainly are important and exciting subjects. What's...

https://unstableontology.com/2019/09/10/truth-telling-is-aggression-in-zero-sum-frames/ Excerpt: > If we adopt a frame that says that unusual social plots are actions that are against someone (which is a zero-sum frame), this leads to the conclusion that truth-telling is aggression, as it is necessarily part of an unusual social plot. > Non-zero-sum frames, of course, usually...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/08/27/book-review-reframing-superintelligence/ > Drexler asks: what if future AI looks a lot like current AI, but better? > For example, take Google Translate. A future superintelligent Google Translate would be able to translate texts faster and better than any human translator, capturing subtleties of language beyond what even a native speaker...