All of MichaelVassar's Comments + Replies

Possibly valuable to talk with Robin Hanson and I for revision to HPMOR!Quirrell decision procedures from the source?

There's an anecdote near the beginning of "introduction to psychoanalysis" where he discusses the dreams of arctic explorers, which are almost entirely about food, not about sex, for understandable reasons.

It is possible to play both, but difficult, and you can't play both at once as well as equally smart non-analytical types will play just the social game.

Two examples. Sexual selection and speciation. Nuff' said.

Yep, but the vast majority of people in a workplace, even those nominally there to deliver technical skills, are there to deliver social skills in reality, and all of the most highly paid people are paid for social skills.
That said, your right, still worth it. Being officially a foreigner is possibly the best approach.

Another reasonable concern has to do with informational flow-through lines. When novel investigation demonstrates that previous claims or perspectives were in error, do we have good ways to change the group consensus?

I spent many hours explaining a sub-set of these criticisms to you in Dolores Park soon after we first met, but it strongly seemed to me that that time was wasted. I appreciate that you want to be lawful in your approach to reason, and thus to engage with disagreement, but my impression was that you do not actually engage with disagreement, you merely want to engage with disagreement, basically, I felt that you believe in your belief in rational inquiry, but that you don't actually believe in rational inquiry.

I may, of course, be wrong, and I'm not sure... (read more)

I think that people following the standards that seem credible to them upon reflection is the best you can hope for. Ideally, upon reflection, bets and experiments will be part of those standards to at least some people. Hopefully, some such groups will congeal into effective trade networks. If one usually reliable algorithm disagrees strongly with others, yes, short term you should probably effectively ignore it, but that can be done via squaring assigned probabilities, taking harmonic or geometric means, etc, not by dropping it, and more importantly, such deviations should be investigated with some urgency.

I think that attempting effectiveness points towards a strong attractor of taking over countries.

I think that this is an effective list of real weak spots. If these problems can't be fixed, EA won't do much good.

This is MUCH better than I expected from the title. I strongly agree with essentially the entire post, and many of my qualms about EA are the result of my bringing these points up with, e.g. Nick Beckstead and not seeing them addressed or even acknowledged.

Upvoted for clarity, but fantastically wrong, IMHO. In particular, "I suspect that taking straight averages gives too much weight to the opinions of cranks and crackpots, so that you may want to remove some outliers or give less weight to them. " seems to me to be unmotivated by epistemology and visibly motivated by conformity.

MetaMed is hopefully moving us towards a world with more rationality in the healthcare professions.

I tend to think that if one can make a for-profit entity, that's the best sort of vehicle to pursue most tasks, though occasionally, churches or governments have some value too.

My main comment on this is that if self-direction is as important as it appears to be, it would seem to me that 'become self directed' really should be everyone's first priority if they can think of any way to do that. My second comment is that it seems to me that if one is self-directed and seeks appropriate mentorship, the expected value of pursuing a conventional career is very low compared to that of pursuing an entrepreneurial career. Conversely, mentorship or advice that doesn't account for the critical factor of how self-directed someone is, as well as a few other critical factors such at the disposition to explore options, respond to empirical feedback from the market, etc, is likely to be worse than useless.

The most basic is that as far as I can tell, I had never been hit on while wearing glasses, and that started happening regularly.

You can assume that, but I assure you it's just not the case. We can debate the details some time in person if you'd like.

There are additional 'add-ons' with names like 'clear view'. The tech changes continually, so do some research before buying it.

Then something is wrong with the generator that your brain uses when trying to be unconventional. Try to figure out what and how to fix it, and tell me if you figure it out, as I have no idea how to do that.

legitimate concerns, but way WAY weaker than the strength of the argument they are set against.

Addendum. Also, learn to code, as that's MUCH more permanent than camming and less dependent on marketing than tutoring and hypnosis. If you can get paid for work you do yourself without marketing, you're doing well.

In theory. In practice, it would be Spock Rational to be against Spock Rationality, so we give it lip service.

3x GDP/student/year? That's an absurdly high estimate.

Generalizing about 'poor countries' like this annoys me.

Very feasible but lots of work. I wouldn't invest in someone starting such a venture unless they had demonstrated the ability to make money by working hard as an independent business owner in the past, but I'd be happy to invest in and advise such a venture if it was run by the right kind of person.

Seconded. I had NO IDEA how much discrimination I suffered for wearing glasses until I gave them up. Contacts might be a better alternative if you expect to be wearing Google Glasses in a few years anyway though.

yes

Whether it's unethical would seem to me to depend on who you are raising the money from and what they perceive the rules of the game to be. From my perspective, doing the submissive, 'morally cautious', un-winning thing rather than the game theoretical thing is unethical.

email me with info about that company, OK?
Sounds like maybe MetaMed should inquire into working with them.

It's not informative to send different signals than other people would send in your situation. You are proposing sending dishonest signals, which is uncooperative.

It seems to me like the whistler is saying that the probability of saving knuth people for $5 is exactly 1/knuth after updating for the Matrix Lord's claim, not before the claim, which seems surprising. Also, it's not clear that we need to make an FAI resistant to very very unlikely scenarios.

How confident are you of "Probability penalties are epistemic features - they affect what we believe, not just what we do. Maps, ideally, correspond to territories."? That seems to me to be a strong heuristic, even a very very strong heuristic, but I don't think it's strong enough to carry the weight you're placing on it here. I mean, more technically, the map corresponds to some relationship between the territory and the map-maker's utility function, and nodes on a causal graph, which are, after all, probabilistic, and thus are features of ma... (read more)

I recommend trying to take the harmonic mean of a physical and an economic estimate when appropriate.

Definitely, though others must decide the update size.

So about what do you think it IS worth? FYI, I think, based on experience with people whom have tried everything, that a 1% chance of finding something is unrealistically low. 20% with the first $5K and a further 30% with the next 35K would fit my past experience.

We won't publish anything, but clients are free to publish whatever they wish to in any manner that they wish.

Empirically, that general type of thing is good for at least a week worth of awesome. http://www.burningman.com/

Dr. Seuss wrote about this.

My most immediate question is whether you think your more rapidly increasing desire to be normal was due to biological differences, more cultural pressure, or something else.

Hell yeah.
That said, don't overestimate IQ relative to other important cognitive and behavioral traits.

This is really good... now... what if the universe of 'moral atoms' is NOT simple enough for 12-year-old kids to understand, but acknowledging that would cripple our efforts to get people to act morally? What if we already know this, but would need to figure out a whole new way of talking about the human condition in order to adopt the findings of psychology into our day-to-day lives?

In so far as happiness is what we strive for by definition the statement is vacant, and what is described as 'happiness' doesn't closely match the natural language meaning of the word.

Many people can effectively be kept out of trouble and made easier for caretakers or relatives to care for via mild sedation. This is fairly clearly the function of at least a significant portion of psychiatric medication.

It's not that clear to me in what sense mainstream academia is a unified thing which holds positions, even regarding questions such as "what fields are legitimate". Saying that something is known in mainstream academia seems suspiciously like saying that "something is encoded in the matter in my shoelace, given the right decryption schema. OTOH, it's highly meaningful to say that something is discoverable by someone with competent 'google-fu"

To be fair, I think that this triad is largely a function of the sort of society one lives in. It could be summarized as "submit to virtuous social orders, seek to dominate non-virtuous ones if you have the ability to discern between them"

It's an alternative to having a well-calibrated bias towards conformity.

Actually, I think you get points for doing things that work, whether they are fun or not.

As far as I can tell, SI long ago started avoiding that frame because the frame had deleterious effects, but if we wanted to excite anyone, it was ourselves, not other young people.

My actual take is that UFAI is actually a much larger threat than other existential risks, but also that working on FAI is fairly obviously the chosen path, not on EV grounds, but on the grounds of matching our skills and interests.