If you have worked your way through most of the sequences you are likely to agree with the majority of these statements: * When people die we should cut off their heads so we can preserve those heads and make the person come back to life in the (far far)...
The sequences cover the virtue of admitting you've made a mistake. We all make mistakes and when we do we ought to say oops and move on. I was taught this at an early age and I grew up in an environment where admitting error had no social stigma and...
That comic is my source too. I just never considered taking it at face value (too many apparent contradictions). My bad for mind projection.
Does Mount Stupid refer to the observation that people tend to talk loudly and confidently about subjects they barely understand (but not about subjects they understand so poorly that they know they must understand it poorly)? In that case, yes, once you stop opining the phenomenon (Mount Stupid) goes away.
Mount Stupid has a very different meaning to me. To me it refers to the idea that "feeling of competence" and "actual competence" are not linearly correlated. You can gain a little in actual competence and gain a LOT in terms of "feeling of competence". This is when you're on Mount Stupid. Then, as you learn more your feeling of competence and actual... (read more)
I don't think so, because my understanding of the topic didn't improve -- I just don't want to make a fool out of myself.
I've moved beyond mount stupid on the meta level, the level where I can now tell more accurately whether my understanding of a subject is lousy or OK. On the subject level I'm still stupid, and my reasoning, if I had to write it down, would still make my future self cringe.
The temptation to opine is still there and there is still a mountain of stupid to overcome, and being aware of this is in fact part of the solution. So for me Mount Stupid is still a useful memetic trick.
Macroeconomics. My opinion and understanding used to be based on undergrad courses and a few popular blogs. I understood much more than the "average person" about the economy (so say we all) and therefore believed that I my opinion was worth listening to. My understanding is much better now but I still lack a good understanding of the fundamentals (because textbooks disagree so violently on even the most basic things). If I talk about the economy I phrase almost everything in terms of "Economist Y thinks X leads to Z because of A, B, C.". This keeps the different schools of economics from blending together in some incomprehensible mess.
QM. Still on mount
[a "friendly" AI] is actually unFriendly, as Eliezer uses the term
Absolutely. I used "friendly" AI (with scare quotes) to denote it's not really FAI, but I don't know if there's a better term for it. It's not the same as uFAI because Eliezer's personal utopia is not likely to be valueless by my standards, whereas a generic uFAI is terrible from any human point of view (paperclip universe, etc).
Game theory. If different groups compete in building a "friendly" AI that respects only their personal extrapolated coherent violation (extrapolated sensible desires) then cooperation is no longer an option because the other teams have become "the enemy". I have a value system that is substantially different from Eliezer's. I don't want a friendly AI that is created in some researcher's personal image (except, of course, if it's created based on my ideals). This means that we have to sabotage each other's work to prevent the other researchers to get to friendly AI first. This is because the moment somebody reaches "friendly" AI the game is over and all parties except for one... (read more)
If you're certain that belief A holds you cannot change your mind about that in the future. The belief cannot be "defeated", in your parlance. So given that you can be exposed to information that will lead you to change your mind we conclude that you weren't absolutely certain about belief A in the first place. So how certain were you? Well, this is something we can express as a probability. You're not 100% certain a tree in front of you is, in fact, really there exactly because you realize there is a small chance you're drugged or otherwise cognitively incapacitated.
So as you come into contact with evidence that contradicts what... (read more)
Looks great!
I may be alone in this, and I haven't mentioned this before because it's a bit of a delicate subject. I assume we all agree that first impressions matter a great deal, and that appearances play a large role in that. I think that, how to say this, ehm, it would, perhaps, be in the best interest of all of us, if you could use photos that don't make the AI thinkers give off this serial killer vibe.
I second Manfred's suggestion about the use of beliefs expressed as probabilities.
In puzzle (1) you essentially have a proof for T and a proof for ~T. We don't wish the order in which we're exposed to the evidence to influence us, so the correct conclusion is that you should simply be confused*. Thinking in terms of "Belief A defeats belief B" is a bit silly, because you then get situations where you're certain T is true, and the next day you're certain ~T is true, and the day after that you're certain again that T is true after all. So should beliefs defeat each other in this manner? No. Is... (read more)
If you have worked your way through most of the sequences you are likely to agree with the majority of these statements:
The sequences cover the virtue of admitting you've made a mistake. We all make mistakes and when we do we ought to say oops and move on. I was taught this at an early age and I grew up in an environment where admitting error had no social stigma and where correcting somebody (even in public) was commended. Good times were had by all.
Needless to say, I eventually came into contact with the real world and I had to change my behavior. For instance, correcting somebody's pronunciation used to result in immediate repetition of the correct pronunciation followed by "thanks" and the discussion would continue without interruption. Or just a simple nod to acknowledge... (read 481 more words →)
I think "strategy" is better than "wisdom". I think "wisdom" is associated with cached Truths and signals superiority. This is bad because this will make our audience too hostile. Strategy, on the other hand, is about process, about working towards a goal, and it's already used in literature in the context of improving one's decision making process.
You can get away with saying things like "I want to be strategic about life", meaning that I want to make choices in such a way that I'm unlikely to regret them at a later stage. Or I can say "I want to become a more strategic thinker" and it's immediately obvious that I care about... (read more)