jknapka
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(I am in the midst of reading the EY-RH "FOOM" debate, so some of the following may be less informed than would be ideal.)
From a purely technical standpoint, one problem is that if you permit self-modification, and give the baby AI enough insight into its own structure to make self-modification remotely a useful thing to do (as opposed to making baby repeatedly crash, burn, and restore from backup), then you cannot guarantee that utility() won't be modified in arbitrary ways. Even if you store the actual code implementing utility() in ROM, baby could self-modify to replace all references to that fixed function with references to a different (modifiable) one.
What you need... (read more)
I agree that basic probability and statistics is more practically useful than basic calculus, and should be taught at the high-school level or even earlier. Probability is fun and could usefully be introduced to elementary-school children, IMO.
However, more advanced probability and stats stuff often requires calculus. I have a BS in math and many years of experience in software development (IOW, not much math since college). I am in a graduate program in computational biology, which involves more advanced statistical methods than I'd been exposed to before, including practical Bayesian techniques. Calculus is used quite a lot, even in the definition of basic probabilistic concepts such as expectation of a random variable. Anything involving continuous probability distributions is going to be a lot more straightforward if approached from a calculus perspective. I, too, had four semesters of calculus as an undergrad and had forgotten most of it, but I found it necessary to refresh intensely in order to do well.
Noted. I'll try to update accordingly.
Raemon, this is really great. As a lay leader of a Unitarian Universalist congregation, I love what you say about the importance of ritual -- it can be strongly affecting, and can motivate people to action they might not otherwise take. If we can construct rituals that inspire and invigorate, without misleading, then that is a win.
I'd suggest that when doing this kind of ritual, we should invite guests who are almost-but-not-quite in the rationalist camp. It can be a tool to attract new minds.
I will try to do a similar event at my church next year. We have quite a few atheists and fellow travelers, so I think it will work well. And maybe there will be further opportunities for rational ritual during the year -- other noteworthy astronomical events, perhaps. Or maybe when Nobels are announced.
Also, IMO it took guts to bring this to the LW community. So kudos for that, too.
I mean, eternal torture is pretty frickin' bad. I think in the end, I'd convert. And I'd also try to convert as many other people as possible, because I suspect I'd need to be cruel to fewer people if fewer people went against Christianity.
This is a very good point, and I believe I'll point it out to my rather fundamentalist sibling when next we talk about this: if I really, truly believed that every non-Christian was doomed to eternal damnation, you can bet I'd be an evangelist!
Extreme Altruism
... (read more)While I might not donate all my money to save 10, I think I value billions of lives more than my own life. Do I
I seem to be succeeding in helping to convince my graduate program in bioinformatics to ditch Perl in favor of Python. I'm very happy about this! When you don't have a programming background, and you're going into a field with heavy programming, Perl will hurt you -- it's likely to make you dislike programming. Python OTOH is like the fuzzy kitten of programming languages -- but it still has claws! (By which I mean, you can do serious stuff with it, despite its apparent adorableness.)
Also I've just started juggling again after a longish hiatus. I just decided to try a four-ball pattern the other day, and was absolutely... (read more)
I was over 100 years off, but in the opposite direction.
I took the survey, sometime last week I think. EDIT: I think I may also have messed up the "two-digit probabilities" formatting requirement. I can't recall specifically any answer that might have violated it, but I also don't recall paying attention to that requirement while answering the survey.
Hello, all. I'm Joe. I'm 43, currently a graduate student in computational biology (in which I am discovering that a lot of inference techniques in biology are based on Bayes's Theorem). I'm also a professional software developer, and have been writing software for most of my life (since about age 10). In the early 1990's I was a graduate student at the AI lab at the University of Georgia, and though I didn't finish that degree, I learned a lot of stuff that was of great utility in my career in software development -- among other things, I learned about a number of different heuristics and their failure... (read 362 more words →)
Survey taken. I hope I didn't break it - I am a committed atheist, but also an active member of a Unitarian Universalist congregation, and I indicated that in spite of the explicit request for atheists not to answer the denomination question. (Atheist UUs are very common, and people on the "agnostic or less religious" side of the spectrum probably make up around 40% of the UU congregations I'm familiar with.)