All of outofculture's Comments + Replies

The new student data already have house entries. Is that a mistake?

I believe one of your assumptions could stand to be examined; the final risk to others should be multiplied by the chance that the immunity typically conferred by having antibodies will hold true for this variation of corona and any mutations that now or will then exist. Antibody effectiveness is probably the case, and I haven't heard anything about this virus being an especially rapid mutator, but I'm personally not more than 90% certain of all this.

A variant on this topic:

1. Notice when providing evidence X for a position P you believe in.
   1. Bonus points for reviewing recent memories to see if you have supported P repeatedly, especially to the exclusion of evidence to the contrary.
2. Feel revulsion at having become the puppet of P.
3. Introduce a nudge away from P. Some examples:
   1. Provide some good evidence counter to P.
   2. If you cannot point to specific counter evidence, try to at least describe what counter evidence would look like.
   3. State just how surprised you would be to see the evidence X if the positio

I did it. Where's my cookie?

Eliezer's comment describes the importance of Jumping Out Of The System, which I attribute to the "cross-domain" aspect of intelligence, but I don't see this defined anywhere in the formula given for intelligence, which so far only covers "efficient" and "optimizer".

First, a quick-and-dirty description of the process: Find an optimization process in domain A (whether or not it help attain goals). Determine one or many mapping functions between domains A and B. Use a mapping to apply the optimization process to achieve a goa... (read more)

Eliezer: "It makes you more moral (at least in my experience and observation) because it gives you the opportunity to make moral choices about things that would otherwise be taken for granted, or decided for you by your brain."

I have to take specific issue with this (despite being further down in the comments than I think will attract anyone's attention). This post and its comments discuss a process by which a mind can modify its behavior through reflection, but while Eliezer and many others may use this power to strengthen their morality, it ca... (read more)

Hyperbole as a perversion of projection, arguments like: "...and next you'll be killing AI developers who disagree with FAI, to prevent them posing an existential threat." that contain both sufficient clear reasoning and sufficient unknowable elements as to sound possible, sure, plausible, even. This is used to discredit the original idea, not the fantastical extrapolation.

A particular flavor of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" that points to established traditions as "having worked for ages". Playing off the fear of the unknown? The meme of traditions in general adds weight to many of these.

I second "cultural relativity" as being an extension of "everyone having a right to their opinion", but in both cases point to them as also being tools to find things in one's own life that are arbitrary and in need of evaluation on a more objective basis.

Beside the point, but you can calculate arbitrary digits of pi with the formula explained in this article.