All of NeroWolfe's Comments + Replies

Probably even negatively correlated. If you think you're protected, you're going to engage in sex more often without real protection than you would if you knew you were just 15 minutes away from being a parent.

I think the point by the OP is that while YOU might think NYC is a great place, not everybody does. One of the nice things about the current model is that you can move to NYC if you want to, but you don't have to. In the hypothetical All-AGI All Around The World future, you get moved there whether or not you like it. Some people will, but it's worth thinking about the people who won't like it and consider what you might do to make that future better for them as well.

Your black table of income levels and taxes paid has something wrong with it. I looked at the Tax Foundation link you provide, and it says something rather different from what you report.

Here is how I read their numbers compared to yours

Top 5%: 23.3% rate vs. your 18.9%

Top 10%: 21.5% rate vs. your 14.3%

Top 25%: 18.4% rate vs. your 10.3%

Top 50%: 16.2% rate vs. your 7.2%

I also note that your row for School Teachers has the same bracket as truck drivers and police officers, but the rate for teachers is from the next bracket up.

I hope you market it under the name Soylent.

Why do you think that the space colonists would be able to create a utopian society just because they are not on earth? You will still have all the same types of people up there as down here, and they will continue to exhibit the Seven Deadly Sins. They will just be in a much smaller and more fragile environment, most likely making the consequences of bad behavior worse than here on earth.

So, does this mean that you have descended past "We need to eliminate the suffering of fruit flies" and gone straight for "We need to eliminate the suffering of atomic nuclei that are forced to fuse together?" This seems like a pretty wildly wrong view, and not because rectifying the problem is beyond our technological abilities. It seems like there is plenty of human suffering to attend to without having to invent new kinds of suffering based on atoms in the sun.

I saw that too and I don’t think it’s a nitpick. All of that was raised in support of the idea that human limits are much greater than we think, so having a couple of examples that are off by a factor of two is not a small difference. In addition to the wild claims about a human with 350 kg of muscle mass, I know the world record for unequipped deadlift is just shy of 1,100 pounds/500kg. “Lifting a car” can’t mean picking it off the ground entirely no matter how small it is; my Miata weighs about 2,400 pounds and other than something like a Lotus Elise it’... (read more)

I may have used too much shorthand here. I agree that flying cars are impractical for the reasons you suggest. I also agree that anybody who can justify it uses a helicopter, which is akin to a flying car.

According to Wikipedia, this is not a concept that first took off (hah!) in the 1970s - there have been working prototypes since at least the mid-1930s. The point of mentioning the idea is that it represents a cautionary tale about how hard it is to make predictions, especially about the future. When cars became widely used (certainly post-WWII), futurist... (read more)

I gather from the recent census article that most of the readers of this site are significantly younger than I am, so I'll relay some first-hand experiences you probably didn't live through.

I was born in 1964. The Cuban Missle Crisis was only a few years in the past, and Kennedy had just been shot, possibly by Russians, or The Mob, or whomever. Continuing through at least the end of the Cold War in 1989, there was significant public opinion that we were all going to die in a nuclear holocaust (or Nuclear Winter), so really, what was the point in making lon... (read more)

I see a problem with this approach when the speaker does not know the answer to the question:

Under Abs-E, binary questions ("yes"-or-"no") are less obvious to answer. If your answer would ordinarily be "no", you must instead reply as if the question was open-ended. For example, your reply to "will you be here tomorrow?" may be "yes", or "I will be in the office tomorrow", or "I will stay home tomorrow". This forces you to speak with more information.

How do you respond when you don't know what you will be doing tomorrow? This could be a case where you haven... (read more)

But the big caveat is the exception "with the consent of both parties." I realize that Eliezer doesn't want to play against all comers, but presumably, nobody is expecting Ra and Datawitch to defend themselves against random members of the public.

I'm willing to believe that the "AI" can win this game since we have multiple claims to have done that, so knowing the method seems like it would benefit everybody.

[edited to fix a misspelling of Eliezer's name]

In what way is rugby wildly different from combat :-)

I'm skeptical that the government regulation will amount to much that addresses the main problems. Highly profitable industries have routinely engaged in regulatory capture, often for decades, before things are bad enough that the population as a whole demands change. Oil and gas companies, pharmaceutical companies, etc., all come to mind as current examples of "regulated" industries that do pretty much what they like. Before that we had examples like tobacco, asbestos, narcotics-laced health tonics, etc., that took decades before they were really impeded ... (read more)

Don't underestimate the value of a red-headed woman...

And we knew it is the plural form of "medium," which is isomorphic to the message.

This is a good presentation of the idea. However, I think there are a few important things missing from the discussion:

• Divisibility of goods for barter. You mention it briefly, but this seems like a big reason to pick an arbitrary accounting unit that can be subdivided at will.
• Portability. Theoretically, we could agree on grains of wheat as the accounting unit since they are sufficiently fine-grained(hah!) to avoid the divisibility problem. However, having to haul 100 tons of grain down to the auto dealer is pretty inconvenient.
• Time-shifting. Again, you to

Given that it's been a while since @Kat Woods and @Emerson Spartz claimed they had "incontrovertible proof" that warranted a delay in publishing, I'm hoping it's coming out soon. If not, a simple "we goofed" response would seem appropriate.

The "give us a week" message appears either misleading or overly optimistic. Unless there have been replies from Nonlinear in a separate thread, I don't think they have explained anything beyond their initial explanation of getting food. Coupled with the fact that it's hard to imagine a valid context or explanation for some of the things they confirm to have happened (drug smuggling, driving without a license or much experience), I have to conclude that they're not likely to change my mind at this point. I realize that probably doesn't matter to them since... (read more)

I'm going to have to work the phrase "delusions of grandeur without the substance to back that up" into my repertoire. Sort of like Churchill's comment about Clement Atlee: "A modest man with much to be modest about."

I'm not sure if this will improve or harm your understanding, but I appear to have taken a slightly different route to the problem. Rather than having two simultaneous equations, I reasoned as follows:

1. We're trying to figure out how much the ball costs, so that's our X
2. We know the bat is X + 1
3. So we know (X) + (X+1) = 1.1, becomes 2X +1 = 1.1, 2X = 0.1, X is 5 cents

That seems simpler to me than the two simultaneous equations, even though it's essentially the same math. I'm also not sure if I would have gotten this correct as the first time I saw this, it had the giveaway clue "Note: the answer is NOT 10." I suspect I would have come up with 10 without the warning, but I can't be sure.

I think it would be good to word this as "and intends to publish a detailed point-by-point response by September 15th," or whatever the correct date turns out to be.

So, I'm new here, and apparently, I've misunderstood something. My comment didn't seem all that controversial to me, but it's been down-voted by everybody who gave it a vote. Can somebody pass me a clue as to why there is strong disagreement with my statement? Thanks.

How complicated is providing context for that without a week of work on your side? The only plausible exculpatory context I can imagine is something akin to: "If somebody sent me a text like this, I would sever all contact with them, so I'm providing it as an example of what I consider to be unacceptable." I fail to see how hard it is to explain why the claims are false now and then provide detailed receipts within the week.

I don't know any of the parties involved here, but the Nonlinear side seems pretty fishy so far.

I don't share your optimistic view that transnational agencies such as the IAEA will be all that effective. The history of the nuclear arms race is that those countries that could develop weapons did, leading to extremes such as the Tsar Bomba, a 50-megaton monster that was more of a dick-waving demonstration than a real weapon. The only thing that ended the unstable MAD doctrine was the internal collapse of the Soviet Union. So, while countries have agreed to allow limited inspection of their nuclear facilities and stockpiles, it's nothing like the level ... (read more)

I'm a new member here and curious about the site's view on responding to really old threads. My first comment was on a post that turned out to be four years old. It was a post by Wei Dai and appeared at the top of the page today, so I assumed it was new. I found the content to be relevant, but I'd like to know if there is a shared notion of "don't reply to posts that are more than X amount in the past."

Long-time listener, first-time caller here! I think this is an interesting viewpoint, and I wonder how you decide if you're making forward progress. With standard publications, media presentations, or whatever, you can identify that you've contributed Idea X to Field Y when you're published, but it seems harder to know that for yourself when the main contribution is forum posts. I'm interested in your views on this.