All of mlinksva's Comments + Replies

Of course it leaves things on the table. Presumably the authors judged that it'd be infeasible to directly attack party authority. If you're going to have party primaries (never mind first past the post), it makes some sense for them to have consequences. Approval/freedom voting ought to allow for dispensing with primaries altogther, but I totally respect that is likely too big of a bite right now.

For my future reference: I don't see the rules you cite in the section of the Missouri constitution that the initiative would amend https://www.sos.mo.gov/CMSIma... (read more)

I guess you're commenting on https://www.sos.mo.gov/cmsimages/Elections/Petitions/2024-110.pdf

It seems like a very useful improvement over what I presume is current election law in Missouri. If there's any existing mechanism for a primary loser to get on the general election ballot (as an independent?) I don't see how this initiative overrides that. What am I missing?

2ChristianKl
Yes, that document. I agree that's an improvement about the status quo, but I think it leaves some possible advantages on the table that people might expect with approval voting.  As far as I can see you need to register to be an independent before the primary ends and gather 10,000 signatures.  If you have first-past-the-post I can see why you might not want to let someone register as an independent after the primary is over, but I see no good reason for that in approval voting.  I also see no reason why the incumbent shouldn't just be able to appear on the ballot. If a majority of people want to reelect the incumbent they should be able to do so even if the incumbent is not the most popular candidate in his own party. Allowing for that makes bipartisanship easier. 

Great cause, godspeed!

Interestingly it appears Show Me Integrity and Missouri Agrees have rebranded approval voting as freedom voting. 

https://www.showmeintegrity.org/freedomvoting 

https://www.missouriagrees.org/learn-more

Or if the rebranding already existed elsewhere, I'm idly curious about its origin. No mention yet in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting 

2ChristianKl
If I understand their draft language it looks problematic. It seems like they designed it so that people who lose primaries generally have no chance to appear on the ballot. I don't see a good reason to give political parties that much power over ballot access.  Having a system where an incumbent who loses a primary can't appear on the ballot means that the benefit of protecting incumbents from extremist primary challenges disappears. Another alternative would be to allow the top two candidates from each party primary ballot access for the general election. 

In my model, we got AI in large part because we couldn’t get flying cars, or build houses where people want to live, or cure diseases

 

Would enjoy reading more about that. How does it work? Talent and investment for AI would be doing other cool things, if those cool things were allowed, moreso than the talent and investment for AI would be increased as a result of more people doing more cool things?

I enjoyed it, almost want to go for the ubercop idea. A serious alternative way to increase emergency vehicle utilization (by weight, size, cost or similar) is to make them smaller. They're unnecessarily monster sized, in the US anyway. #DefundPoliceSUVs

Same. Aging is bad, don't expect it to be solved (escape velocity reached) in my lifetime.

I also agree that nearish AGI excites and whether deemed good (I'd welcome it, bet worth taking, though scary) or doom, far AGI is relatively boring, and that may psychologically contribute to people holding shorter timelines.

Third "fact" at the top of the original post "We've made enormous progress towards solving intelligence in the last few years" is somewhat refuted by the rest: if it's a math-like problem, we don't know how much progress toward AGI we've made in ... (read more)

1niknoble
Yeah, it crossed my mind that that phrasing might be a bit confusing. I just meant that * It's a lot of progress in an absolute sense, and * It's progress in the direction of AGI. But I believe AGI is so far away that it still requires a lot more progress.

I know this is an estimate for imminent global nuclear war (for which I'd give a lower estimate, but even if it were 100x lower, 0.17% -- and it isn't -- that would be wholly unacceptable) but I don't want global nuclear war in my lifetime.

So it's necessary to also consider how various outcomes of the current war may have on the liklihood of global nuclear war in the next decades. In this vein, the best argument for ensuring that Ukraine wins in spite of Russian nuclear threats, is that allowing Russia to achieve a relatively favorable outcome on the basis... (read more)

mlinksva1710

Security strikes me as a better word than safety, ethics, or responsibility. More prestigious, and the knowledge and methods of the existing security research field is probably more relevant to addressing AI x-risks than are those of existing safety, ethics, etc fields.

3niplav
"Security" for me has the connotation of being explicitely in relation to malicious adversaries, while "safety" carries the connotation of heavy industrial machinery that must be made as accident-free as possible. As an example, "boat security" would be preventing people from stealing the boat, while "boat safety" would be measures intended to prevent people from falling off the boat. AI alignment (which I consider a very good term!) strikes me to be more about the latter than the former (if you have a superintelligent adversary, it might already be too late!).

a new, updated booster...won’t make much difference even to those who take advantage of it at this point

I'm planning to take advantage, but would enjoy reading an analysis of how much/little difference it can be expected to make. I guess this has been done by many people, pointers idly wanted/appreciated.

I wonder if using the title research software engineer, posting on RSE job boards, networking in their communities, adhering to their norms, might help with matching. Idle/uninformed speculation; I only have become aware of the self-identified field/title in the last year, and gather it is only about 10 years old.

Answer by mlinksva10

Not an alternative, but an add-on: subsidize the market. This does require someone who wants the info badly enough to pay the subsidy. Robin Hanson recently blogged about how one might focus subsidy on trades one is most interested in.

I did not know about the subjects of the last two other news items. It appears https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusnano should be updated; the Russian version seems to have updates about financial difficulties pending review. I guess https://research.nu.edu.kz/en/organisations/laboratory-of-human-microbiome-and-longevity is a relevant page for the last? Is there any overall writeup?

2avturchin
About Kazakh thing it was common knowledge on longevity conferences, but I don’t have a review in hand.

Sure, here's a version using truthy birth and death dates, though still very imperfect https://w.wiki/4q4Q

How long have heads of state lived relative to almost heads of state? I recall several years ago hearing about https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/34077/1/543282147.pdf which finds that Nobel prize winners gained approximately two years over mere nominees. Concluding paragraph:

It might be argued that an approximately two- year gain in lifespan from winning a Nobel Prize is a small number of extra years. However, the controls here are extraordinarily successful scientists. By any usual standard, all are high-status individuals. If the idea that social s

... (read more)
3ChristianKl
That query seems to include deprecated (by Wikidata to be judged as wrong) dates of death. A better query would only look at truthy values (those values with the best rank). 
1Bezzi
Good question. Unfortunately, "almost head of state" is a quite fuzzy reference class. Who would you include in this list?

The LWO has and can bend a lot without breaking. Great power war risks actually breaking the LWO, and more.

Great power war risks destruction of the LWO. The LWO can and does take a whole lot of mockery (including from the US) and keep on ticking in the most important respects: peace and continued technical progress.

Anyway the EEZ conflicts are between jurisdictions in the region, not the US. Freedom of commercial navigation will continue in the absence of military conflict. I expect the oceans to be more and more governed by states, and if it doesn't destroy itself in unnecessary conflict, US power will benefit, as will the UK and France due to their massive he... (read more)

China's interests have been basically unchanged since 1978. Its primary objective is to maintain internal domestic stability i.e. prevent regime change.
...

China has prospered under the [Liberal World Order]. Rather than establishing broad international coalitions, China tends to pursue its interests bilaterally. With a few exceptions (like the dispute over the South China Sea) China is content to play according to the rules of the LWO.

...

Of all the potential points of conflict, the obvious ones are Taiwan and the South China Sea.

 

Great, there's no rea... (read more)

1jmh
So the whole EEZ rights that these other nations are recognized as having should just be ignored? We should just toss the entire UN bath water out? I think giving into China on SCS and its claims that conflict with international rules it has agreed with and signed on to necessarily make a mockery of any claims to supporting a LWO or a USA commitment to any such order.
2lsusr
China's secondary objective is to secure resources and trade routes, even if that means breaking the LWO.

My understanding is that Czech citizenship by descent is aimed at people who have parents or grandparents who were citizens of Czechia or Czechoslovakia, ruling out most (a guess; me anyway) US people with Czech ancestry, whose ancestors were citizens of Austria-Hungary. Even this is a fairly recent liberalization (sorry, I can't turn up a reference quickly, though I looked into it sometime during 2020, in part out of jealousy of friends with Irish or Italian ancestors).

I did not know about the Slovak Living Abroad program, thanks for noting that ! Based o... (read more)

2Josh Jacobson
Thanks for the Czechia info. There's some legislative interest in Slovak Living Abroad becoming a citizenship (rather than permanent residency) program. Check out the FB group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1454484788071370

optimal philanthropy starts around $10

What does this mean, assuming it isn't joke? I skimmed the articles linked from http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/3a2/100_for_the_best_article_on_efficient_charty_the/ and don't see an obvious argument that optimal philanthropy starts at some amount.

There is a failure mode in which people will identify a cause they think is important, and, expecting some future increase in income, say they will donate lots of money when they can afford it, but never seem to decide that now is the time to start giving. The solution is that if you think you should give a lot when you can afford it, you should give a small amount that you can afford now, like around $10, and form the habit of giving what you can at any time, while you can still be working to increase your income and the amount you give.

0MBlume
Well, it seems like if I wanted to donate, say, a quarter to Singinst (and I couldn't just hand it to Jasen next time I saw him), it probably wouldn't be worth our time to transfer the money. Collecting money in one place that people are congregating at anyway would seem to obviate that, though, so I'm still confused.