My interpretation of the Cactus Person post is that it was a fictionalized account of personal experiences and and an expression of frustration about not being able to gather any real knowledge out of them, which is therefore entertained as a reasonable hypothesis to have in the first place. If I'm mistaken then I apologize to Scott, however the post is ambigious enough that I'm likely not the only person to have interpreted this way.
He also wrote one post about the early psychedelicists that ends with "There seems to me at least a moderate chance that [ p...
Dusting off this old account of mine just to say I told you so.
Now, some snark:
"Leverage is a cult!"
"No, MIRI/CFAR is a cult!"
"No, the Vassarites are a cult!"
"No, the Zizians are a cult!"
Scott: if you believe that people have auras that can implant demons into your mind then you're clearly insane and you should seek medical help.
Also Scott: beware this charismatic Vassar guy, he can give you psychosis!
Scott 2015: Universal love, said the cactus person
Scott 2016: acritically signal boosts Aella talking about her inordinate drug use.
Scott 2018: promote...
Scott: if you believe that people have auras that can implant demons into your mind then you're clearly insane and you should seek medical help.
Also Scott: beware this charismatic Vassar guy, he can give you psychosis!
These so obviously aren't the same thing- what's your point here? If just general nonsense snark, I would be more inclined to appreciate it if it weren't masquerading as an actual argument.
People do not have auras that implant demons into your mind, and alleging so is... I wish I could be more measured somehow. But it's insane and you should ...
Do you think that solving Starcraft (by self-play) will require some major insight or will it be just a matter of incremental improvement of existing methods?
There is an algorithm called "Evolution strategies" popularized by OpenAI (although I believe that in some form it already existed) that can train neural networks without backpropagation and without storing multiple sets of parameters. You can view it as a population 1 genetic algorithm, but it really is a stochastic finite differences gradient estimator.
On supervised learning tasks it is not competitive with backpropagation, but on reinforcement learning tasks (where you can't analytically differentiate the reward signal so you have to est...
The utility function U(w) corresponds to the distribution P(w)∝exp(U(w)).
Not so fast.
Keep in mind that the utility function is defined up to an arbitrary positive affine transformation, while the softmax distribution is invariant only up to shifts: will be different distribution depending on the inverse temperature (the higher, the more peaked the distribution will be on the mode), while in von Neumann–Morgenstern theory of utility, and represent the same preferences for any positive .
Maximizing expected log probabil... ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
No offense, but the article you linked is quite terrible because it compares total deaths while completely disregarding the base rates of use. By the same logic, cycling is more dangerous than base jumping.
This said, yes, some drugs are more dangerous than others, but good policies need to be simple, unambiguous and easy to enforce. A policy of "no illegal drugs" satisfies these criteria, while a policy of "do your own research and use your own judgment" in practice means "junkies welcome".