I was frustrated by the lack of a yearly donation option or an option to make a recurring donation of less than $10/month. I almost decided not to give because this communicated that it's not worth the effort to receive contributions from small-value donors like me. And if it's not worth the effort to accept, it's certainly not worth the cost of giving.

However, I decided to give a one-time payment of $10 assuming that this was from ignorance or carelessness. If you'd like to signal that a recurring donation (or more donations from small players like me) ar... (read more)

Is it a matter of adding a standard paragraph to NIH grants? Yes. That's what I was thinking of.

If you follow standard DEI criteria, I'm commenting on LessWrong; I don't do "standard."😉

More seriously, I apologize. I should have clarified what I meant by diversity. In particular, I mean that diverse groups are spread out in a parsimonious description space.

A pretty detailed example

As a concrete example of one understanding that would match my idea of diversity, consider some very high-dimensional space representing available people who can also do the work measured on as many axes as you can use to characterize them (characteristics of mind, body,... (read more)

[I] suspect [vaccines] (or antibiotics) account for the majority of the value provided by the medical system

Though I agree that vaccines and antibiotics are extraordinarily beneficial and cost-effective interventions, I suspect you're missing essential value fountains in our medical system. Two that come to mind are surgery and emergency medicine.

I've spoken to several surgeons about their work, and they all said that one of the great things about their job is seeing the immediate and obvious benefits to patients. (Of course, surgery wouldn't be nearly ... (read more)

I shy away from fuzzy logic because I used it as a formalism to justify my religious beliefs. (In particular, "Possibilistic Logic" allowed me to appear honest to myself—and I'm not sure how much of it was self-deception and how much was just being wrong.)

The critical moment in my deconversion came when I realized that if I was looking for truth, I should reason according to the probabilities of the statements I was evaluating. Thirty minutes later, I had gone from a convinced Christian speaking to others, leading in my local church, and basing my life and... (read more)

The next post is Secular interpretations of core perennialist claims. Zhukeepa should edit the main text to explicitly link to it rather than just mentioning that it exists. (Or people could upvote this comment so it's at the top. I don't object to more good karma.)

I think you're missing a few parts. The Autofac (as specified) cannot reproduce the chips and circuit boards required for the AI, the cameras' lenses and sensors, or the robot's sensors and motor controllers. I don't think this is an insurmountable hurdle: a low-tech (not cutting-edge) set of chips and discrete components would serve well enough for a stationary computer. Similarly, high-res sensors are not required. (Take it slow and replace physical resolution with temporal resolution and multiple samples.)

Second, the reproduced Autofacs should be built ... (read more)

For large enough cases, changing the legal system is a way to make the debtor/lender "disappear." Ownership and debt are both based on society-level agreement.

The r/samplesize version of this post needs some edits to match the community expectations.

The "current leader is also the founder" is a reasonable characteristic common in cults. Many cult-like religious organizations exist to create power or wealth for the founder or the founder's associates.

However, I suspect that the underlying scoring function is a simple additive model (widespread in psychology) in which each answer contributes a weight toward one of the outcomes. Since this characteristic is most valuable in combination - intensifying other factors that indicate cultishness, it doesn't serve very well in the current framework.

You may want to mention in the first question asking about cultishness that people will get to revise their initial estimate after seeing the rest of the questions. I discarded and restarted the survey halfway through because I realized your definition was far removed from my initial one. If I'd known about the ability to re-estimate at the end, you'd have another data point. (For reference, my initial number was 25%, which I dropped to 4% on the re-run. The final score ended up being 3%.)

Your argument boils down to:

• Objectivity is X
• Y is not X
• (Because you want to be objective) Don't do Y

I want to Win. Being Pascal Mugged is not Winning. Therefore I will make choices to not be Pascal Mugged. If that requires not being "objective," according to your definition, I don't want to be objective.

However, I have my own use of "objective" that comports well with adapting to new information and using my predictive powers. But I don't want to argue that my usage is better or worse; it will be fruitless. I mention it so readers won't think I'm hypo... (read more)

I haven't listened to the video yet. (It's very long, so I put it on my watch-later list.) Nor have I finished Eliezer's Sequences (I'm on "A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation.") However, I looked at the above summaries to decide whether it would be worth listening to the video.

Potential Weaknesses

• None of the alternative books say anything about statistics. A rough intro to Bayesian statistics is an essential part of the Sequences. Without this, you have not made them superfluous.
  • A rough understanding of Bayesian statistics is a valuable t

Duplicating the description

TimePoints

• 00:00 intro
• 0:53 most of the sequences aren't about rationality; AI is not rationality
• 3:43 lesswrong and IQ mysticism
• 32:20 lesswrong and something-in-the-waterism
• 36:49 overtrusting of ingroups
• 39:35 vulnerability to believing people's BS self-claims
• 47:35 norms aren't sharp enough
• 54:41 weird cultlike privacy norms
• 56:46 realnaming as "doxxing"
• 58:28 no viable method for calling out rumors/misinformation if realnaming is 'doxxing'
• 1:00:16 the strangeness and backwardness of LW-sphere privacy norms
• 1:04:07 EA: disr

Reading the comments here, I think I may halve my estimate of self-install time.

I've wanted to install a bidet for 8+ years. However, I've always had higher-priority projects.

Costs that deter me:

• What for you is a 20-minute project will be 4-8 hours for me because it involves plumbing (and I want it to not leak). The fastest plumbing project I've ever had (cleaning the p-trap beneath the bathroom sink) took 1.5 hours.
• Hiring a contractor will be $100 because I live in a high-rent area, and they need to cover the expense of coming out. It will take me 1 hour to choose, schedule, and oversee a contractor.
• I don't know how to choose a b

Hint for those who want to read the text at the link: go to the bottom and click "view source" to get something that is not an SVG.

The best explanation I have found to explain this discrepancy is that ... RLACE ... finds ... a direction where there is a clear separation,

You could test this explanation using a support vector machine - it finds the direction that gives the maximum separation.

(This is a drive-by comment. I'm trying to reduce my external obligations, so I probably won't be responding.)

A lot of the steps in your chain are tenuous. For example, if I were making replicators, I'd ensure they were faithful replicators (not that hard from an engineering standpoint). Making faithful replicators negates step 3.

(Note: I won't respond to anything you write here. I have too many things to respond to right now. But I saw the negative vote total and no comments, a situation I'd find frustrating if I were in it, so I wanted to give you some idea of what someone might disagree with/consider sloppy/wish they hadn't spent their time reading.)

Feature request: some way to keep score. (Maybe a scoring mode that makes the black box an outline on hover and then clicking right=unscored, left-right=correct, and left-left-right=incorrect - or maybe a mouse-out could be unscored and left = incorrect and right = correct).

I haven't finished reading this; I read the first few paragraphs and scanned the rest of the article to see if it would be worth reading. But I want to point out that starting with Harsanyi's Utilitarianism Theorem (a.k.a. Harsanyi's Impartial Observer Theorem) implies that you assume "independence of irrelevant alternatives" because the theorem assumes that its agents obey ^[1] the Von Neumann–Morgenstern utility theorem. The fourth axiom of this theorem (as listed in Wikipedia) is the "independence of irrelevant alternatives.". Since from the previous art... (read more)

You're trying to bake your personal values (like happy humans) into the rules.

My point is that this has already happened. The underlying assumptions bake in human values. The discussion so far did not convince me that an alien would share these values. I list instances where a human might object to these values. If a human may object to "a player which contributes absolutely nothing ... gets nothing," an alien may object too; if a human may object to "the only inputs are the set of players and a function from player subsets to utility," an alien may obj... (read more)

There are quite a few assumptions to pin down solutions that seem to unnecessarily restrict the solution space for bargaining strategies. For example,

1. "A player which contributes absolutely nothing to the project and just sits around, regardless of circumstances, should get 0 dollars."

   We might want solutions that benefit players who cannot contribute. For example, in an AGI world, a large number of organic humans may not be able to contribute because overhead swamps gains from trade in comparative advantage. We still want to give these people a slice of

I use the "Bearable" app for very rough time logging. It has a system of toggles for "factors" where you can specify what factor was present in a 6-hour interval of your day. Since I am mainly interested in correlations with other things I measure, a primary purpose of "Bearable," this low resolution is a good compromise. It also makes it easy to log after the fact. "Did I do this activity in this 6-hour period?" is a much easier question than remembering down to an hour or quarter-hour granularity. The downside is I can't tell how much time I've invested ... (read more)

I think learning is likely to be a hard problem in general (for example, the "learning with rounding problem" is the basis of some cryptographic schemes). I am much less sure whether learning the properties of the physical or social worlds is hard, but I think there's a good chance it is. If an individual AI cannot exceed human capabilities by much (e.g., we can get an AGI as brilliant as John von Neumann but not much more intelligent), is it still dangerous?

You may want to look at what happens with test data never shown to the network or used to make decisions about its training. Pruning often improves generalization when data are abundant compared to the complexity of the problem space because you are reducing the number of parameters in the model.

Going from "Parts" to "Self," you said the Self might be all the Parts processing together. (Capitalized "Self" means the IFS "Core Self.") How likely is the hypothesis that the Self is an artifact of the therapeutic procedure? When someone says they feel angry at a Part and claims that anger does not come from a Part but is their self, the therapist doesn't accept it. The therapist tells them they need to unblend. But when they describe the 8 C's and say that is their self, the therapist does not ask them to unblend, perceiving that as their Self.

For lefties:

• We put unaligned AIs in charge of choosing what news people see. Result: polarization resulting in millions of deaths. Let's not make the same mistake again.

For right-wingers:

• We put unaligned AIs in charge of choosing what news people see. Result: people addicted to their phones, oblivious to their families, morals, and eroding freedoms. Let's not make the same mistake again.

YouTubers live in constant fear of the mysterious, capricious Algorithm. There is no mercy or sense, just rituals of appeasement as it maximizes "engagement." Imagine that, but it runs your whole life.

<Optional continuation:> You don't shop at Hot Topic because you hear it can hurt your ranking, which could damage your next hiring opportunity. And you iron your clothes despite the starch making you itch because it should boost your conscientiousness score, giving you an edge in dating apps.

Do we serve The Algorithm, or does it serve us? Choose before The Algorithm chooses for you.

That kid who always found loopholes in whatever his parents asked him? He made an AI that's just like him.

COVID and AI grow exponentially. In December 2019, COVID was a few people at a fish market. In January, it was just one city. In March, it was the world. In 2010, computers could beat humans at Chess. In 2016, at Go. In 2022, at art, writing, and truck driving. Are we ready for 2028?

Someone who likes machines more than people creates a machine to improve the world. Will the "improved" world have more people?

Humanity's incompetence has kept us from destroying ourselves. With AI, we will finally break that shackle.

Orwell's boot stamped on a human face forever. The AI's boot will crush it first try.

Hey Siri, "Is there a God?" "There is now."

 - Adapted from Fredric Brown, "The Answer" - for policymakers.

Rationalism requires stacktraces terminating in irrefutable observation

Like the previous two commenters, I find this statement odd. I don't fully trust my senses. I could be dreaming/hallucinating. I don't fully trust my knowledge of my thoughts. By this definition of a rationalist, I could never be one (and maybe I'm not) because I don't think there is such a thing as an irrefutable observation. I think there was a joke in that statement, but, unobserved by me, it took flight and now soars somewhere else.

Like pjeby, I think you missed his point. He was not arguing from authority, he was presenting himself as evidence that someone tech-savvy could still see it as a trap. His actual reason for believing it is a trap is in his reply to GWS.

If one must choose between a permanent loss of human life and some temporary discomfort, it doesn't make sense to prefer the permanent loss of life, regardless of the intensity of the discomfort. 

This choice doesn't exist; permanent death is inevitable under known physics. All lifespans are finite because the time the universe will support consciousness is most likely finite, whether because of heat death or the big rip. This finiteness makes your "you save one life, and 7 billion humans suffer for 100 billion years" question not at all obvious. Savin... (read more)

I had a similar issue. I could not do the exercise because I could not figure out how to evaluate confidence and competence separately. I always end up on the x=y line. Reading this thread did not help. "Anticipated okayness of failure" doesn't change much with time for the same task, so that is a vertical line. "Confidence" = "Self-related ability to improve" is an interesting interpretation (working on "confidence" would be working on learning skills). Still, intuitively it feels off from what the graphs say (though I haven't been able to put the disconnect into words). Thinking about the improv/parachute graph, maybe "confidence" is "willingness to attempt a task despite being incompetent." I'm giving up for now.

I found a review on Amazon (quoted at the bottom, since I cannot link to it) that says Ecker is injecting significant personal opinion and slanting his report of the science. I don't know if this is true, but the gushing praise from readers and psychology's history of jumping on things rather than evaluating evidence make it seem more likely than not. For me, this means that reading this book will involve getting familiar with the associated papers.

The Review

by "scholar"

Previously I posted a very positive review of this book. On further reflection and st

If recoupments occur sparingly, as I'd expect, where should the remaining funds go?

Keep them for "times of national emergency" etc. to hedge against correlated risk.

How big is the risk that the fund will be used in illicit ways, such as tax evasion, despite the fact that donors cannot claim more than they spent?

Modern society strongly incentivizes misusing anything that touches money, so without further evidence, I'd say that the risk is very high (near certainty). If we haven't found a way to misuse it, it is more likely that we are not clever enou... (read more)

What experimental tests has clash theory survived?

Take all the metaphysical models of the universe that any human ever considers.

This N is huge. Approximate it with the number of strings generatable in a certain formal language over the lifetime of the human race. We're probably talking about billions even if the human race ceases to exist tomorrow. (Imagine that 1/7 of the people have had a novel metaphysical idea, and you get 1B with just the people currently on earth today. If you think that's a high estimate, remember that people get into weird states of consciousness (through fever, drugs, exertion, ... (read more)

Yes. Fixed.

The earliest citation in Wikipedia is from 1883, and it is a question and answer: "If a tree were to fall on an island where there were no human beings would there be any sound?" [The asker] then went on to answer the query with, "No. Sound is the sensation excited in the ear when the air or other medium is set in motion."

So, if this is truly the origin, they knew the nature of sound when the question was first asked.

Re: dominant assurance contracts/crowdfunding

The article makes the bad assumption that $G\left[V\right]$, the distribution of individual values of the public good is common knowledge. A good entrepreneur will do market research to try and determine $G\left[V\right]$. But better approximations cost more. Entrepreneurs will also be biased to think their idea is good. So, it is likely that many entrepreneurs will have bad models. Most individuals will also not know $G\left[V\right]$. So, there is another mode to profit for the small fraction of individuals who have decent approximat... (read more)

> knowing about the MCU, no matter how cool, doesn't pay rent

Is not "enables socialization" a form of rent?

In favor of this particular point, I know about the MCU despite disliking superhero movies and comics (except Watchmen) precisely because it is helpful in my social circles.

Regarding @jaspax's main point, it is not obvious that formal education is necessary to generate a shared mythopoetic structure. OTOH I can't think of an example of a long-lasting one that does not have a group actively involved in educating people about it. So, it is not obvious that it is a poor candidate for formal education either.