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All of servy's Comments + Replies

How would you build Dath Ilan on earth?
servy10

The cool thing about prediction markets is that if you disagree with them, you can just bet against them and win money. Put up or shut up.

Suppose, there is a prediction market for a question like:

"If Alice is elected president, will GDP grow more than 20% by the end of the next 4 years?"

Current bets are 10 to 1 against Alice succeeding if elected. I strongly disagree, so I would like to bet $5000 on Alice and win a lot of money. Alice does not end up being elected, the prediction market probably being largely responsible for this outcome. So, the outc... (read more)

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2dkirmani
I expect future iterations of prediction market platforms to allow your money to accrue interest over the course of longer-term bets. You don't have to convince the whole country. Not even close. As long as you get New Hampshire to legalize prediction markets, New Hampshire can tell the federal government to go fuck itself. Weed is still federally illegal, remember?
Open Thread August 2018
servy70

As a non-native English speaker, it was a surprise that "self-conscious" normally means "shy", "embarassed", "uncomfortable", ... I blame lesswrong for giving me the wrong idea of this word meaning.

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6Alicorn
The more naive interpretation of the phrase is instead represented by "self-aware", if that's helpful.
2Jayson_Virissimo
The use of 'self-conscious' to refer to having knowledge of yourself as a conscious being isn't unique to LW, but is borrowed from philosophy. Blame the philosophers I say! Anyway, they could have chosen to come up with a new term instead of using the not-most widely (but still commonly) used definition of 'self-conscious', but that would mean even more LW-specific jargon (which is also heavily criticized). It's not at all clear to me whether pushing towards greater jargon usage would be an improvement in general.
Open Thread August 2018
servy60

If there are side effects that someone can observe then the virtual machine is potentially escapable.

An unfriendly AI might not have a goal of getting out. A psycho that would prefer a dead person to a live person, and who would prefer to stay in a locked room instead of getting out, is not particularly friendly.

Since you would eventually let out the AI that won't halt after a certain finite amount of time, I see no reason why unfriendly AI would halt instead of waiting for you to believe it is friendly.

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Hammertime Day 8: Sunk Cost Faith
servy60

I'm curious what are the "ejector seats" that you mention in this post and in Day 1 post, that can help with the time sinks and planning. While other concepts seem familiar, I don't think I heared about the ejector seats before. I can guess that those are something like TAP's with the action of "adandoning current project/activity". Looking forward to your Day 10 post on planning that will hopefully have an in depth explanation and best practices of building those.

Thanks for the sequence that focuses on instrumental every-day rationality.

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9alkjash
Thanks for asking! This is one of the topics I planned to cover in the later cycles. Briefly, I use "ejector seats" to refer to building into your plan rules for when you're allowed to give up or modify it. For example, you can read Eight Studies on Excuses and try to develop and precommit to meta-rules for what kinds of excuses you accept for yourself; i.e. "Super Bowl Sunday is not a valid excuse for skipping leg day, but grandma's funeral is." In individual plans, you should take a moment to think about what kinds of happenings and new information you would allow to influence them, i.e. "I will make the preliminary decision to attend MIT, except if Harvard accepts me or another school gives much better financial aid; I have considered all the other factors already and will not think about changing my mind for them." The point is that every time you break your own rules or plans without having pre-committed to allowing the excuse, you might be left with the nagging suspicion and guilt that you were looking for excuses to give up, or that you're not the kind of person who keeps promises. Ejector seats allow you to minimize the number of times this happens. I will have to think and practice this a bit before writing about it, probably in the second cycle.