What you are observing is part of the phenomenon of meta-contrarianism. Like everything Yvain writes, the aforementioned post is well worth a read.
I don't know. Metacontrarianism, as I understand it, involves taking specific positions solely for the sake of differentiating oneself from others, whereas many of the status quo explanations (e.g. Yvain's recent post on weak men) seem like they actually have definite intellectual merit as well.
My explanation would be more something like "LW was originally quite dominated by Eliezer's ideas, but over time and as people have had the time to think about them more, people have started going off in their own directions and producing new kinds of thoughts ...
or they could even restrict options to typical government spending.
JoshuaFox noted that the government might tack on such restrictions
That said, it's not so clear where the borders of such restrictions would be. Obviously you could choose to allocate the money to the big budget items, like healthcare or the military. But there are many smaller things that the government also pays for.
For example, the government maintains parks. Under this scheme, could I use my tax money to pay for the improvement of the park next to my house? After all, it's one of ...
Even formalisms like AIXI have mechanisms for long-term planning, and it is doubtful that any AI built will be merely a local optimiser that ignores what will happen in the future.
As soon as it cares about the future, the future is a part of the AI's goal system, and the AI will want to optimize over it as well. You can make many guesses about how future AI's will behave, but I see no reason to suspect it would be small-minded and short-sighted.
You call this trait of planning for the future "consciousness", but this isn't anywhere near the defini...
No, no, no: He didn't say that you don't have permission if you don't steal it, only that you do have permission if you do.
What you said is true: If you take it without permission, that's stealing, so you have permission, which means that you didn't steal it.
However, your argument falls apart at the next step, the one you dismissed with a simple "etc." The fact that you didn't steal it in no way invalidates your permission, as stealing => permission, not stealing <=> permission, and thus it is not necessarily the case that ~stealing => ~permission.
You could use some sort of cloud service: for example, Dropbox. One of the main ideas behind of Dropbox was to have a way for multiple people to easily edit stuff collaboratively. It has a very easy user interface for such things (just keep the deck in a synced folder), and you can do it even without all the technical fiddling you'd need for git.
I have some rambling thoughts on the subject. I just hope they aren't too stupid or obvious ;-)
Let's take as a framework the aforementioned example of the last digit of the zillionth prime. We'll say that the agent will be rewarded if it gets it right, on, shall we say, a log scoring rule. This means that the agent is incentivised to give the best (most accurate) probabilities it can, given the information it has. The more unreasonably confident it is, the more it loses, and the same with underconfidence.
By the way, for now I will assume the agent fully kn...
In this writup of the 2013 Boston winter solstice celebration, there is a list of songs sung there. I would suggest this as a primary resource for populating your list.
As I mentioned to you when you asked on PredictionBook, look to the media threads. These are threads specifically intended for the purpose you want: to find/share media, including podcasts/audiobooks.
I also would like to reiterate what I said on PredictionBook: I don't think PredictionBook is really meant for this kind of question. Asking it here is fine, even good. It gives us a chance to direct you to the correct place without clogging up PredictionBook with nonpredictions.
Right. Many people use the word "utilitarianism" to refer to what is properly named "consequentialism". This annoys me to no end, because I strongly feel that true utilitarianism is a decoherent idea (it doesn't really work mathematically, if anyone wants me to explain further, I'll write a post on it.)
But when these terms are used interchangeably, it gives the impression that consequentialism is tightly bound to utilitarianism, which is strictly false. Consequentialism is a very useful and elegant moral meta-system. It should not be shouldered out by utilitarianism.
In a sense, most certainly yes! In the middle ages, each fiefdom was a small city-state, controlling in its own right not all that much territory. There certainly wasn't the concept of nationalism as we know it today. And even if some duke was technically subservient to a king, that king wasn't issuing laws that directly impacted the duke's land on a day to day basis.
This is unlike what we have today: We have countries that span vast areas of land, with all authority reporting back to a central government. Think of how large the US is, and think of the fac...
Could the article you had in mind be this?
In any case, Eliezer has touched on this point multiple times in the sequences, often as a side note in posts on other topics. (See for example in Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate.) It's an important point, regardless.
Yes. What I wrote was a summery, and not as perfectly detailed as one may wish. One can quibble about details: "the market"/"a market", and those quibbles may be perfectly legitimate. Yes, one who buys S&P 500 indices is only buying shares in the large-cap market, not in all the many other things in the US (or world) economy. It would be silly to try to define a index fund as something that invests in every single thing on the face of the planet, and some indices are more diversified than others.
That said, the archetypal ideal of an...
Not an economist or otherwise particularly qualified, but these are easy questions.
I'll answer the second one first: This advice is exactly the same as advice to hold a diversified portfolio. The concept of an index fund is a tiny little piece of each and every thing that's on the market. The reasoning behind buying index funds is exactly the reasoning behind holding a diversified portfolio.
For the second question, remember the idea is to buy a little bit of everything, to diversify. So go meta, and buy little bits of many different index funds. But actual...
This is a very appropriate quote, and I upvoted. However, I would suggest formatting the quote in markdown as a quote, using ">".
Something like this
In my opinion, this quote format is better: it makes it easier to distinguish it as a quote.
In any case, I'm sorry for nitpicking about formatting, and no offence is intended. Perhaps there is some reason I missed that explains why you put it the way you did?
Yeah, I agree, it is weird. And I think that Hofstadter is wrong: With such a vague definition of being "smart", his conjecture fails to hold. (This is what you were saying: It's rather vague and undefined.)
That said, TDT is an attempt to put a similar idea on firmer ground. In that sense, the TDT paper is the exploration in mathematical language of this idea that you are asking for. It isn't Hofstadterian superrationality, but it is inspired by it, and TDT puts these amorphous concepts that Hofstadter never bothered solidifying into a concrete form.
Agreed. But here is what I think Hofstadter was saying: The assumption that is used can be weaker than the assumption that the two players have an identical method. Rather, it just needs to be that they are both "smart". And this is almost as strong a result as the true zero knowledge scenario, because most agents will do their best to be smart.
Why is he saying that "smart" agents will cooperate? Because they know that the other agent is the same as them in that respect. (In being smart, and also in knowing what being smart means.)
Now, ...
Let's not pat ourselves on the back too much.
That was never my intention. I actually initially meant to stress this more, but I cut it as it didn't really fit.
The most important note that it is not necessarily a good thing to ignore social cues. They exist for good reasons. Discourse flows a lot better when it is polite and well presented. Those who ignore that do so at their own peril.
Some do, however. Including us, to some exten. You cannot deny that the population of Less Wrongers is weighted heavily towards the type of people that might be known as...
Perhaps people on Less Wrong are less attuned to the nuances of social norms, and rather upvote/downvote based only on the content of the post in question?
The ideal of upvoting/downvoting based only on value is one that has appeal to many of the sort of people who hang around here. We are all still human, but I would not be surprised to be told that many or most Less Wrongers are atypical in this way. (Pay less attention to social contexts, and more to content.)
Karma points count as "last 30 days karma" if they are votes on a post you made within the past month. If someone upvotes/downvotes/removes a previously made upvote/removes a previously made downvote from an older comment, you get/lose karma, but not 30 day karma. I assume that is what happened here.
I see what you are saying, but the whole point behind anti-fragility is that change is for good, not bad. By default, in fragile things, change is bad. But in antifragile things, that change is harnessed for good.
Hm. The best way to clearly demarcate that would probably to move the word "bad" from describing the word "change", and put it as part of the first sentence.
Things sometimes break, and that is a bad thing that you do not want happening. It happens when outside forces cause changes to it and to the world it acts in. ...
That's a fun challenge. It was hard to try to summarize the motivation behind the idea of antifragility in such a restricted vocabulary. Here is my attempt:
...Things sometimes break. This happens when outside forces cause bad changes to it and to the world it acts in. Things that this can happen to are not things you can put much trust in. It would be a lot better to have something that does not change because of things happening to it, or even better, one that gets better the more those bad things happen to it. It is a good idea to make the things you have
Very well put. I agree entirely with what you are saying, and I think you said it very well.
I want to add though an emphasis that the line specifically between libertarianism and reactionary-ism is a very narrow one. Both philosophies come from the same background, with similar axioms. It is surprising, so it bears emphasis.
I am in the same boat as Apprentice when it comes to these matters, and whenever I read a reactionary post I feel a certain familiarity, along the lines of: "this may not be fully valid, but the people arguing it are very smart, an...
Look into memrise.
It has an app, it has a lot of the bells and whistles that Anki lacks (like a scoring/gamification system) that could be helpful with the population you are teaching, and it is all around a solid SRS system. The only thing I think it lacks are those Easy/Good/Hard buttons that Anki has to differentiate between how well you know the answer, but that's something I can live without. I use both it and Anki on a day to day basis.
Evangelion is... Evangelion. It's the kind of work that is very hard to apply adjectives to. That said, it's very good.
Just be sure that you watch The End of Evangelion after watching all the episodes. I have a friend who watched all the episodes of Evangelion, then went around for quite some time thinking he had finished watching the whole show. Only months later did he find out that there was more, and that he had in fact missed out on the entire climax of the show.
This is a long and well presented comment: I will chime in with army1987 that you could certainly write this up as a top level discussion post.
My response to it is that I think you are overestimating the value of our current form of government. This could be taken the wrong way, so let me be clear: It is a very good thing that w have a government. Without it, our lives would be nasty, brutish and short. Despite this, government-as-we-know-it (nationalism) is a very recent invention, and while it does some great things (and some not-so-great things), it (in...
The answer to that is "But maybe the parents are misinformed about the tooth fairies' abilities?" You can go on and on like this, but at this point I would stop praisuing the child for pursuing the ratinal method for solving problems, and strat educatting the child in the next lesson of rationality: 0 and 1 are not probabilities, all knowledge is probibalistic, and you need to do VoI calculations before rushing off to try to rule out narrow and increasingly unlikly options.
Yes...
But seriously, there are simpler tests to do, or to do first. Try telling your parents not out loud, but in a written note. That would rule out audio bugging. Try telling an empty room, when no one else is around. That could rule out your parents. Try telling someone you know won't understand you. (Like a younger sibling.) Try miming it to your parents without using words. Try falsely telling your parents that a tooth fell out, when none did. Try telling your parents about your tooth that fell out, but not putting it under your pillow that night. Try...
Oh, but the money did keep on flowing in! My parents may not have handled the situation perfectly, but they most certainly didn't cut off the money just because I uncovered their lies. To do so would be punishing me for finding out, which was certainly not their intention.
After that point, whenever a tooth fell out, I'd just hand it to my mother and she would dig out the cash for me, without the whole ritual of putting the tooth under the pillow and having it be replaced by an imaginary being who collects teeth for some reason.
That's a good rationalist success story. You remind me of my own story with the tooth fairy: I will not relate it in detail here, as it is similar to yours, just less dramatic. At a certain point, I doubted the existence of the tooth fairy, so the next time a tooth fell out I put it under my pillow without telling anyone, and it was still there the next day. I confronted my parents, and they readily admitted the non-existence of the tooth fairy.
In fact, it went off as a perfect experiment, which kind of ruins its value as a story, at least when compared w...
Huh. Maybe it wasn't a reference to what I thought it was. Let's just say that a while ago I had the rather annoying habit of answering people who asked the time by repeating their question back to them. I assumed that whoever this was drew from the same source, although I now relize I may have been mistaken. (It really is that obscure...)
The thing I was thinking of was this really obscure RPG from more than a decade ago called Continuum (Tvtropes page Wikipedia page Official (semi-abandoned) website) in which time travveler's identify one another by one ...
I often find myself reading PDF material on my Kindle, and I think I found some pretty decent workarounds. My three workarounds are:
If possible, try to find an epub or mobi version. For the more obscure, technical stuff, this is impossible, but for the more popular stuff, this is doable.
Try to use calibre to convert the PDF to a mobi. For some PDFs, this comes out with a good quality mobi, but often the PDF is formatted so that it does not.
But what often end up doing is a lot simpler: I turn the screen rotation sideways. Rather than the height of the
I think you are wrong in saying that no one claims benefits from it: claiming benefits is practically all the linked article does. (BTW, your link goes to page two of the article. You may want to fix that. [Edit: Fixed.])
The article gave one viewpoint (and left out the other), and so everyone else is trying to give the counterpoint. (Not that I'm saying it's wrong for the article to only give one side: maybe debates work better for transmitting information than balanced pieces. But it certainly is the correct response to try to steelman the other viewpoint when you see an article in favour of one side.)
And it even gives a mostly accurate description of the relevant risk factors!
...These researchers are not exactly thinking about a Battlestar Galactica-type situation in which robots resent their enslavement by humans and rise up to destroy their masters out of vengeance—a fear known as the “Frankenstein complex,” which would happen only if we programmed robots to be able to resent such enslavement. That would be, suffice it to say, quite unintelligent of us. Rather, the modern version of concern about long-term risks from AI, summarized in a bit more deta
Shminux's point is definitely valid about the different levels, but there is more than that: You have not shown that the contents of the registers etc. are not visible from within the program. If fact, quite the opposite: In a good programing language, it is easy to access those other (non-source code) parts from within the program: Think of, for instance, the "self" that is passed into a Python class's methods. Thus, each method of the object can access all the data of the object, including all the object's methods and variables.
5 In either case, we shouldn't be surprised to see Cai failing to fully represent its own inner workings. An agent cannot explicitly represent itself in its totality, since it would then need to represent itself representing itself representing itself ... ad infinitum. Environmental phenomena, too, must usually be compressed.
This is obviously false. An agent's model can most certainly include an exact description of itself by simple quining. That's not to say that quining is the most efficient way, but this shows that it certainly possible to have a complete representation of oneself.
Stupid mathematical nitpick:
Actually, it is more correct to say that .95 ^ 39 = 0.14.
If we calculate it out to a few more decimal places, we see that .95 ^ 39 is ~0.135275954. This is closer to 0.14 than to 0.13, and the mathematical convention is to round accordingly.