MarsColony_in10years

I was surprised to see mention of MIRI and Existential Risk. That means that they did a little research. Without that, I'd be >99% sure it was a scam.

I wonder if this hints at their methodology. Assuming it is a scam, I'd guess they find small but successful charities, then find small tight-knit communities organized around them and target those communities. Broad, catch-all nets may catch a few gullible people, but if enough people have caught on then perhaps a more targeted approach is actually more lucrative?

Really, it's a shame to see this happen even if no one here fell for it, because now we're all a little less likely to be... (read more)

Although compressing a complex concept down to a short term obviously isn't lossless compression, I hadn't considered how confusing the illusion of transparency might be. I would have strongly preferred that "Thinking Fast and Slow" continue to use the words "fast" and "slow". As such, these were quite novel points:

• they don't immediately and easily seem like you already understand them if you haven't been exposed to that particular source

• they don't overshadow people who do know them into assuming that the names contain the most important features

The notion of using various examples to "triangulate" a precise meaning was also a new concept to me too. It calls to mind the image of a... (read more)

I've always hated jargon, and this piece did a good job of convincing me of its necessity. I plan to add a lot of jargon to an Anki deck, to avoid hand-waving at big concepts quite so much.

However, there are still some pretty big drawbacks in certain circumstances. A recent Slate Star Codex comment expressed it better than I ever have:

One cautionary note about “Use strong concept handles”: This leans very close to coining new terms, and that can cause problems.

Dr. K. Eric Drexler coined quite a few of them while arguing for the feasibility of atomically precise fabrication (aka nanotechnology): “exoergic”, “eutactic”, “machine phase”, and I think that contributed to his difficulties.

If

Meta note before actual content: I've been noticing of late how many comments on LW, including my own, are nitpicks or small criticisms. Contrarianism is probably the root of why our kind can't cooperate, and maybe even the reason so many people lurk and don't post. So, let me preface this by thanking you for the post, and saying that I'm sharing this just as an FYI and not as a critique. This certainly isn't a knock-down argument against anything you've said. Just something I thought was interesting, and might be helpful to keep in mind. :)

Clearly it was a moral error to assume that blacks had less moral weight than whites.... (read more)

As I understand it, Eliezer Yudkowski doesn't do much coding, but mostly purely theoretical stuff. I think most of Superintelligence could have been written on a typewriter based on printed research. I also suspect that there are plenty of academic papers which could be written by hand.

However, as you point out, there are also clearly some cases where it would take much, much longer to do the same work by hand. I'd disagree that it would take infinite time, and that it can't be done by hand, but that's just me being pedantic and doesn't get to the substance of the thing.

The questions that would be interesting to answer would be how... (read more)

I like this idea. I'd guess that a real economist would phrase this problem as trying to measure productivity. This isn't particularly useful though. Productivity is output (AI research) value over input (time), so this begs the question of how to measure the output half. (I mention it mainly just in case it's a useful search term.)

I'm no economist, but I do have an idea for measuring the output. It's very much a hacky KISS approach, but might suffice. I'd try and poll various researchers, and ask them to estimate how much longer it would take them to do their work by slide-rule. You could ask older generations of researchers the same... (read more)