Thomas

Karma: 776

Thomas 1 Mar 2014 16:29 UTC
40 points
on: Rationality Quotes March 2014
He says we could learn a lot from primitive tribes. But they could learn a lot more from us!
- Jeremy Clarkson

Thomas 13 Jan 2012 15:33 UTC
40 points
on: The Noddy problem

JERRY (SEINFELD): I never get enough sleep. I stay up late at night, cause I’m Night Guy. Night Guy wants to stay up late. ‘What about getting up after five hours sleep?’, oh that’s Morning Guy’s problem. That’s not my problem, I’m Night Guy. I stay up as late as I want. So you get up in the morning, you’re ….. (?), you’re exhausted, groggy, oooh I hate that Night Guy! See, Night Guy always screws Morning Guy. There’s nothing Morning Guy can do. The only Morning Guy can do is try and oversleep often enough so that Day Guy looses his job and Night Guy has no money to go out anymore.

You can punish and intimidate your future self, as you can see.

Thomas 4 May 2010 19:25 UTC
39 points
on: But Somebody Would Have Noticed
Like this old joke. Two economists are walking down the street.

Look! There is an 100 bill on the floor!

No it isn’t. Somebody would noticed it before and picked it up!

Thomas 16 Jul 2015 11:12 UTC
36 points
on: Examples of AI’s behaving badly
We had some similar situations.
- A user (wrongly) attributed a school music room (studio) to a teacher (Marko). The scheduling program left the studio empty, every time Marko had classes in a school 10 kilometers away. Which was quite difficult to notice.
- elsewhere, the same program was instructed to minimize student travelings between two buildings 1 kilometer apart. Each buildings had several rooms and the distances between each of them were given by the user, who forgot to count the cafeteria in one of the buildings into the list. So the program concluded that the distance from the cafeteria to anywhere is 0 and managed to build a schedule with no student transfers at all. They have been always “teleported” through the cafeteria into another building. This one was spotted soon enough.

Thomas 4 Jul 2011 19:57 UTC
35 points
on: Rationality Quotes July 2011

A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.

Daniel Dennett

Thomas 18 Jun 2011 8:46 UTC
29 points
on: Rationality Quotes: June 2011
Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.
- Laurence J. Peter

Thomas 3 Aug 2022 10:29 UTC
22 points
13
on: Open & Welcome Thread—August 2022
If and only if a month has exactly two characters in its Roman numeral, then it has less than 31 days. No exception.
Save your knuckles!

Thomas 1 Feb 2011 22:45 UTC
22 points
on: Rationality Quotes: February 2011
Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Give a man a fishing rod and he’ll sell it for a fish.
- ???

[META] Karma, its positive and negative component

Thomas25 Jan 2012 21:31 UTC

21 points

22 comments1 min readLW link

Thomas 2 Jun 2013 8:18 UTC
21 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Open Thread, June 2-15, 2013
It would be too costly to spoil another business day. Sunday is all right.

Thomas 2 May 2011 19:36 UTC
21 points
on: Rationality Quotes: May 2011

Nature is fucked up, and anyone who argues otherwise has not actually seen nature in action.

Michael Anissimov

Thomas 4 Apr 2022 9:42 UTC
20 points
on: MIRI announces new “Death With Dignity” strategy
After nearly 300 years of not solving the so-called Fermat’s last problem, many were skeptical that’s even (humanely) possible. Some, publicly so. Especially some of those, who were themselves unable to find a solution, after years of trying.
Now, something even much more important is at stake. Namely, how to prevent AI to kill us all. The more important, but maybe also even (much?) easier problem, after all.
It’s not over yet.

Thomas 2 Jun 2014 11:40 UTC
20 points
in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: Rationality Quotes June 2014
It looks like that ANY advice from highly successful people might be dangerous, since they are only a small minority of those, who also tried those same things. Most of them much less successfully.

Thomas 15 Mar 2013 15:43 UTC
20 points
in reply to: Kawoomba’s comment on: Risks of downloading alien AI via SETI search
A near light speed and the actual light speed may be a significant difference where the universal dominance is the price.

Thomas 24 Dec 2011 20:08 UTC
20 points
in reply to: Nymogenous’s comment on: Just another day in utopia
Unfortunately, the physics can’t be left to humans—it is too important. I am not sure if it’s too difficult also, but it is surely too important.

Thomas 2 Oct 2011 9:38 UTC
20 points
on: Rationality Quotes October 2011
If the Coyote orders all those gizmos then why doesn’t he just order food?
- Unknown

Thomas 2 Apr 2010 16:52 UTC
20 points
on: Rationality quotes: April 2010
Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: ‘My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.’ The stranger is a theologian.
- Denis Diderot

Automatic programming, an example

Thomas1 Feb 2012 20:55 UTC

19 points

36 comments2 min readLW link

Thomas 5 Sep 2011 13:25 UTC
19 points
on: Rationality Quotes September 2011
The investor who finds a way to make soap from peanuts has more genuine imagination than the revolutionary with a bayonet, because he has cultivated the faculty of imagining the hidden potentiality of the real. This is much harder than imagining the unreal, which may be why there are so many more utopians than inventors
- Joe Sobran

Thomas 7 Sep 2012 22:11 UTC
17 points
on: Jews and Nazis: a version of dust specks vs torture
It is just a logical conclusion from “dust specks”. You can/must do horrible things to a small minority, if a large majority members benefit a little from that.

Another part of the Sequence I reject.