All of WoodSwordSquire's Comments + Replies

What is the relationship between housing characteristics and the elements of flourishing?

http://lesswrong.com/lw/7am/rational_home_buying/ Does this help?

Other things that come to mind: being able to walk to places, lack of little things that take more mental energy than they should (on street alternate parking is one of those for me).

Your housing should make it easy and enjoyable to do things you value. Live near a gym or a beautiful park if you want to exercise more. Make sure the kitchen is decent if you want to eat out less. I know that socializin... (read more)

This probably isn't anything you didn't already know, but since no one else responded - you might try Hacker News, to run it by startup-interested people.

I can't up vote because I'm new, but I wanted to say that in addition to being a good insight, I really liked your use of examples. The diagrams, and the agents' human-like traits (like being in only one place at one time) made the article more accessible.

Also, do not forget how the body influences the brain. Just look back on what happened to you during puberty, when sex desire overwhelmed you, making you impossible to remain calm. This happened thanks to chemicals, but it's still very interesting to see how a single chemical can have a huge influence on your consciousness.

This sometimes falls by the wayside in discussions of whole brain emulation, but I think it's really interesting. I talked to a transgender person once, who said that she felt like a different person while taking hormones vs. not taki... (read more)

I've been thinking about alternative reasons why people living in rich neighborhoods of poor counties are happier.

Maybe the happiness-promoting physical qualities of neighborhoods (green space, lack of noise, feeling safe) correlate with income when they vary between counties, but not when they vary within counties.

I'd expect the poorest part of Pittsburgh to be about equal to the poorest part of northern New Jersey, and the same for the richest parts. (Perhaps less fancy, but I suspect granite doesn't affect happiness that much.) The New Jersey county is ... (read more)

For reference:

Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. 3 But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4 so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, wil

Would an AI that simulates a physical human brain be less prone to FOOM than a human-level AI that doesn't bother simulating neurons?

It sounds like it might be harder for such an AI to foom, since it would have to understand the physical brain well enough before it could improve on its' simulated version. If such an AI exists at all, that knowedge would probably be available somewhere, so it could still happen if you simulated someone smart enough to learn it (or simulated one of the people who helped build it). The AI should at least be boxable if it does... (read more)

I tried to brainstorm what they might be thinking.

• MIRI is making a mistake that means its' work is useless
• MIRI won't decrease AI risk unless some other intervention is done first (there is a rerequisite)
• We're doomed, resistance is futile
• Other people wll fund it if they wait (seems unlikely, if the amount required is trivial to them)
• They have political/strategic reasons not to be associated with MIRI (if they contribute anonymously, there's still the risk that other donors will disappear and they'll be stuck supporting it indefinitely)
• They'd rather work on the probem wiht their own organization, because of reasons

That's a good way of describing how the difference in my own thinking felt - when I was Christian I had enough of a framework to try to do things, but they weren't really working. (It's not a very good framework for working toward utilitarian values in.) Then I bumbled around for a couple years without much direction. LW gave me a framework again, and it was one that worked a lot better for my goals.

I'm not sure I can say the same thing about other people, though, so we might not be talking about the same thing. (Though I tend not to pay as much attention to the intelligence or "level" of others as much as most people seem to, so it might just be that.)

The one improvement that I'm fairly certain I can contribute to lesswrong/HPMOR/etc is getting better at morality. First, being introduced to and convinced up utilitarianism helped me get a grip on how to reason about ethics. Realizing that morality and "what I want the world to be like, when I'm at my best" are really similar, possibly the same thing, was also helpful. (And from there, HPMOR's slytherins and the parts of objectivism that EAs tend to like were the last couple ideas I needed to learn how to have actual self esteem.)

But as to the k... (read more)