This article was originally on the FHI wiki and is being reposted to LW Discussion with permission. All content in this article is credited to Daniel Dewey. In value loading, the agent will pick the action: Here A is the set of actions the agent can take, e is the...
In Defense of Ayn Rand WARNING: Do not read the footnotes if have not read Atlas Shrugged, they contain primarily quotes from the book. They don't reveal much in terms of plot (except for #6) so read them if you feel daring. Preface: This is NOT a defense of objectivism...
Also discovered bone conduction headphones and I am impressed with the quality.
Do you have a recommendation? Constantly on the look out for new headphone styles, I have weird ear holes that nothing fits in.
Taking my place in history - one of my first tasks as an intern at MIRI was to write some ruby scripts that dealt with some aspects of that donation.
Not only did that experience land me my first programming job, but just realizing now that it was also the impetus that led me to grab more bitcoin (I had sold mine at the first peak in 2013) AND look into Stellar. Probably the most lucrative internship ever.
(Shoutout to Malo/Alex if you guys are still lurking LW)
I'm feeling nostalgic.
Is there any interest in having a monthly thread where we re-post links to old posts/comments from LW? Possibly scoped to that month in previous years? i.e, each comment would look like
(2013) link
brief description / thoughts or something.
It's pretty easy to go back and look through some of the older, more popular posts - but I think there were many open thread comments or frontpage posts not by Yvain / Eliezer that are starting to slip through the cracks of time. Would be nice to see what we all remember.
This is the kind of content I've missed from LW in the past couple of years. Reminded me of something on old LW a while back that is a nice object level complement to this post. I saved it and look at it occasionally for inspiration (I don't really think it's a definitive list of 'things to do as a superhuman', or even a good list of things to do at all, but just as a nice reminder that ambitious people are interesting and fun):
For anyone interested in vipassana meditation, I would recommend checking out Shinzen Young. He takes a much more technical approach to the practice. This pdf by him is pretty good.
Oh my god if we can get this working with org-mode and habitrpg it will be the ultimate trifecta. And I've already got the first two (here).
Seriously this could be amazing. Org-mode and habitrpg are great, but they don't really solve the problem of what to do next. But with this, you get the data collection power of org mode with the motivational power of habitrpg - then Familiar comes in, looks at your history (clock data, tags, agendas, all of the org mode stuff will be a huge pool of information that it can interact with easily because emacs) and does its thing.
It could tell habitrpg to give you more or... (read more)
I've been surprised by people's ability to avert bad outcomes. Only two nuclear weapons have been used since nuclear weapons were developed, despite the fact that there are 10,000+ nuclear weapons around the world. Political leaders are assassinated very infrequently relative to how often one might expect a priori.
Why would a good AI policy be one which takes as a model a universe where world destroying weapons in the hands of incredibly unstable governments controlled by glorified tribal chieftains is not that bad of a situation? Almost but not quite destroying ourselves does not reflect well on our abilities. The Cold War as a good example of averting bad outcomes? Eh.
... (read 869 more words →)AI risk
focus@will is pretty useful for me - I've never been into movie music, but the cinematic option was very inspiring for me. There is some science behind the project too.
For the GTD stuff, I use emacs + org-mode + .emacs based on this configuration + mobile org.
Since I try to work exclusively in emacs, I can quickly capture notes and "things that need to get done" in their proper context, all of which is aggregated under an Agenda window. The Agenda window manages a collection of ".org" files which store the specific details of everything. MobileOrg syncs all these .org files to my phone. Combined with the GTD philosophy of never having anything uncategorized bouncing around in my mind, this system works very well for me.
Example workflow (a better and more complete example is in the configuration I linked above):
This article was originally on the FHI wiki and is being reposted to LW Discussion with permission. All content in this article is credited to Daniel Dewey.
In value loading, the agent will pick the action:
Here A is the set of actions the agent can take, e is the evidence the agent has already seen, W is the set of possible worlds, and U is the set of utility functions the agent is considering.
The parameter C(u) is some measure of the 'correctness' of the utility u, so the term p(C(u)|w) is the probability of u being correct, given that the agent is in world w. A simple example is of an AI that... (read 330 more words →)
WARNING: Do not read the footnotes if have not read Atlas Shrugged, they contain primarily quotes from the book. They don't reveal much in terms of plot (except for #6) so read them if you feel daring.
Preface: This is NOT a defense of objectivism nor is it a defense of the cultish nature of followers of objectivism. This is a defense of Ayn Rand the woman and a response to her portrayal in the essay The Guardians of Ayn Rand. I realize that the essay was making a point about cults and not primarily a criticism of Ayn Rand, but since she was the focal point of the
I re-read Atlas Shrugged once or twice a year. One of my first posts on LW was this (and you even commented on it!):
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7s5gYi7EagfkzvLp8/in-defense-of-ayn-rand
Not necessarily proud of it, but it's interesting to re-read it after fully reconciling the book with my own internal principles. I can see how much I struggled with the fact that I really resonated with the idea of hero-worship, while also feeling so fragile in my own judgments, simultaneously. It really is a wonderful book, and I no longer feel the need to defend anything about it - I just get a little sad when it gets brushed off (the lord of the rings comparison joke really gets me), as an honest reading will always reveal something fundamental, even in criticism.