A4FB53AC

• A4FB53AC 1 Apr 2012 15:48 UTC

  37 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes April 2012

  A faith which cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.

  Arthur C. Clarke

• A4FB53AC 14 May 2012 18:48 UTC

  13 points

  on: How many peo­ple here agree with Holden? [Ac­tu­ally, who agrees with Holden?]

  Suppose that SI now activates its AGI, unleashing it to reshape the world as it sees fit. What will be the outcome? I believe that the probability of an unfavorable outcome—by which I mean an outcome essentially equivalent to what a UFAI would bring about—exceeds 90% in such a scenario. I believe the goal of designing a “Friendly” utility function is likely to be beyond the abilities even of the best team of humans willing to design such a function. I do not have a tight argument for why I believe this.

  My immediate reaction to this was “as opposed to doing what?” In this segment it seems like it is argued that SI’s work, raising awareness that not all paths to AI are safe, and that we should strive to find safer paths towards AI, is actually making it more likely that an undesirable AI /​ Singularity will be spawned in the future. Can someone explain me how not discussing such issues and not working on them would be safer?

  Just having that bottom line unresolved in Holden’s post makes me reluctant to accept the rest of the argument.

• A4FB53AC 6 May 2012 11:53 UTC

  8 points

  on: [Er­ror com­mu­ni­cat­ing with LW2 server]

  The mind I’ve probably gained the most by exploring is Eliezer’s, both because so much of his thinking is available online, and because out of many useful habits and qualities I didn’t have, he seemed to have those qualities to the greatest extent. I’m not referring to the explicit points he’s made in his writing (though I’ve gained by those as well), but the overall way he thinks and feels about the world.

  Well, as Eliezer said

  I have striven for a long time now to convey, pass on, share a piece of the strange thing I touched, which seems to me so precious. And I’m not sure that I ever said the central rhythm into words. Maybe you can find it by listening to the notes. I can say these words but not the rule that generates them, or the rule behind the rule; one can only hope that by using the ideas, perhaps, similar machinery might be born inside you.

• A4FB53AC 25 Feb 2014 20:37 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Is IQ what we ac­tu­ally need to know?

  I think this misses the point of the OP, which wasn’t that IQ or intelligence can accurately be guessed in a casual conversation, but rather that intelligence can be guessed more accurately than other important parameters such as “conscientiousness, benevolence, and loyalty”, for which we don’t have tools nearly as good as those we have for measuring IQ. The consequence of which being, since we can’t assess these as methodically, people can fake them more easily, and this has negative social consequences.

More in­tu­itive pro­gram­ming languages

• A4FB53AC 18 Aug 2015 10:54 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Does ran­dom re­ward evoke stronger habits?

  You could in principle very easily ignore the dice and eat the chocolate regardless. You need to take it upon yourself to follow through with the scheme and forfeit the chocolate 3 times out of 4. If you start with the understanding that chocolate is a possibility 4 times out of 4 if you followed a more permissive scheme, then you are effectively punishing yourself ³⁄₄ of the time, which I expect would work as negative reinforcement for said task or the reward scheme in general. And it would also require enough willpower, which some people won’t have.

• A4FB53AC 26 Mar 2014 12:01 UTC

  5 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ist fic­tion: a Slice of Life IN HELL

  Please do note the delicious irony here :

  I don’t see much good in associating rationality with extreme caution.

  I don’t think that teaching people to expect worse case scenarios increases rational thinking.

  Which in essence looks suspiciously like cautiously assuming a bad case scenario in which this story won’t help the rationality cause, or even a worst case scenario in which it will do more wrong than right.

  If you want to go forth and create a story about rationality, then do it. Humans are complex creatures, not everyone will react the same way to your story, and anybody who thinks they can accurately predict the reaction of all the different kinds of people who’ll read your story (especially as this story hasn’t even been written yet) is either severely deluded as to their ability, or secretly running the world behind curtains already.

  When you are older, you will learn that the first and foremost thing which any ordinary person does is nothing.

• A4FB53AC 14 May 2012 18:52 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: [LINK] In­ter­na­tional vari­a­tion in IQ – the role of parasites

  comes with nifty bonuses like ‘increases the IQ of females more than males’.

  Why is that a bonus?

• A4FB53AC 6 Apr 2012 13:52 UTC

  5 points

  on: Cry­on­ics with­out freez­ers: re­s­ur­rec­tion pos­si­bil­ities in a Big World

  Is the amount of bits necessary to discriminate one functional human brain among all permutations of matter of the same volume greater or smaller than the amount of bits necessary to discriminate a version of yourself among all permutations of functional human brains? My intuition is that once you’ve defined the first, there isn’t much left needed, comparatively, to define the latter.

  Corollary, cryonics doesn’t need to preserve a lot of information, if any, you can patch it up with, among other things, info from what a generic human brain is, or better what a human brain derived from your genetic code is, and correlate that with information left behind on the Internet, in your writings, the memories of other people, etc., about what some of your own psychological specs and memories should be.

  The result might be a fairly close approximation of you, at least according to this gradation of identity idea.

• A4FB53AC 31 May 2014 3:43 UTC

  4 points

  on: Against Open Threads

  Interesting opinion. I rarely browse open threads, mainly because I find them a mess, and it takes a longer time to find if there’s anything which would interest me in there. Discussion posts have their own page with neatly ordered titles, you get an idea at a glance, and can on a first filter sort through around 20 topics in around 2 seconds.

• A4FB53AC 24 May 2012 8:48 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Re­s­ur­rec­tion through simu­la­tion: ques­tions of fea­si­bil­ity, de­sir­a­bil­ity and some implications

  I know I prefer to exist now. I’d also like to survive for a very long time, indefinitely. I’m also not even sure the person I’ll be 10 or 20 years from now will still be significantly “me”. I’m not sure the closest projection of my self on a system incapable of suffering at all would still be me. Sure I’d prefer not to suffer, but over that, there’s a certain amount of suffering I’m ready to endure if I have to in order to stay alive.

  Then on the other side of this question you could consider creating new sentiences who couldn’t suffer at all. But why would these have a priority over those who exist already? Also, what if we created people who could suffer, but who’d be happy with it? Would such a life be worthy? Is the fact that suffering is bad something universal, or a quirk of terran animals neurology? Pain is both sensory information and the way this information is used by our brain. Maybe we should distinguish between the information and the unpleasant sensation it brings to us. Eliminating the second may make sense, so long as you know chopping your leg off is most often not a good idea.

• A4FB53AC 6 Apr 2012 13:43 UTC

  4 points

  on: Cry­on­ics with­out freez­ers: re­s­ur­rec­tion pos­si­bil­ities in a Big World

  suppose that a Friendly AI fills a human-sized three-dimensional grid with atoms, using a quantum dice to determine which atom occupies each “pixel” in the grid. This splits the universe into as many branches as there are possible permutations of the grid (presumably a lot)

  How is that a Friendly AI?

• A4FB53AC 4 Mar 2012 0:05 UTC

  4 points

  on: [LINK] Why You Should Keep Your Goals Secret

  For what it’s worth I had already observed this effect. I am less likely to carry on with some plan if I talk about it to other people. Now I tend to just do what I have to, and only talk about it once it’s done.

  Part of the problem is I hate feeling pressured into doing something. Social commitment will, if anything, simply make me want to run away from what I just implicitly promised I’d do. Perhaps because I can never be sure whether I can achieve something : if I fail silently and nobody knows, it’s ok. Less so if I told people about it. It feels better to run away from something (failing by choice) than failing for other reasons.

  Also in some cases, just saying you plan to do something already feels like you’ve done something. Either because you count it as a step towards doing the whole thing (a step after which it feels more acceptable to take a break, which can last indefinitely long), either because you fantasized about it enough that you don’t feel the need to implement it for real anymore.

• A4FB53AC 21 Apr 2012 19:04 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: khafra’s comment on: How can we get more and bet­ter LW con­trar­i­ans?

  Actually, not against. I was thinking that current moderation techniques on lesswrong are inadequate/​insufficient. I don’t think the reddit karma system’s been optimized much. We just imported it. I’m sure we can adapt it and do better.

  At least part of my point should have been that moderation should provide richer information. For instance by allowing for graded scores on a scale from −10 to 10, and showing the average score rather than the sum of all votes. Also, giving some clue as to how controversial a post is. That’d not be a silver bullet, but it’d at least be more informative I think.

  And yes, I was also arguing this idea thinking it would fit nicely in this post.

  I guess I was wrong since it seems it wasn’t clear at all what I was arguing for, and being tactless wasn’t a good idea either, contrarian intolerance context or not. Regardless, arguing it in detail in comments, while off-topic in this post, wasn’t the way to do it either.

• A4FB53AC 3 Mar 2012 14:05 UTC

  2 points

  on: Peo­ple who “don’t ra­tio­nal­ize”? [Help Ra­tion­al­ity Group figure it out]

  I feel like I can relate to that. It’s not like I never rationalize, but I always know when I do it. Sometimes It may be pretty faint, but I’ll still be aware of it. Whether I allow myself to proceed with justifying a false belief depends on the context. Sometimes it just feels uncomfortable enough to admit to being wrong, sometimes it is efficient to mislead people, and so on.

• A4FB53AC 4 Apr 2015 14:24 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: estimator’s comment on: Against the in­ter­nal lo­cus of control

  The only factor under your control may be to realize that the only factor under your control is to obtain and use better methods and processes to think, gather information, act in the real world, generate feedback and adjust yourself.

  Illustratively, no matter how innately intelligent a native English speaker might be, if he never had any experience with Japanese, he won’t be able to read and understand kanji. Is that a failure of intelligence, or a failure of knowledge and method? If you’ve never had any experience in any science, and don’t know the specialized vocabulary, then it is likely you won’t be able to understand a technical paper. Again, is that a failure of intelligence, or is it just that you’ll need some time to grow familiar with the field? A lot of intelligence and rationality is like that. Including understanding your own intelligence and capabilities to better yourself.

  You’ll ned to assess where you stand now, then iteratively improve yourself. You’ll need to look outside, for information and help, to get better at it. Depending on your starting point, your incremental improvements may be slow at first, until you learn how to get better at improving yourself. You may have more terrain to cover too.

  “I vow to always do my best to make my best become even better.”

  Your end point may still be determined by your IQ or working memory, but the starting realization that you can ameliorate yourself, can be as simple as a few words. It’s still an external factor, but one that, depending on your sensitivity to such ideas, you could encounter regularly enough that it will eventually sink in, and start changing you. Frequenting places where such ideas are more prevalent (like here), may help bootstrap this process earlier.

• A4FB53AC 24 Feb 2015 21:28 UTC

  1 point

  on: An alarm­ing fact about the anti-ag­ing community

  This is consistent with my experience with European life-extension movements. Generally speaking we just don’t have a clear idea of where we should be going. Neither do we even always agree an what research or project is even relevant. So we have a collection of people sharing a vaguely defined goal of life-extension, all pushing for their pet projects and hypotheses. No one is really willing to abandon what they came up with because no clear evidence-based project under which they could assemble exists (or is perceptible)(this therefore of course includes all such personal pet projects and ideas). Additionally, few if any really seem to believe strongly in life extension (as a way of life or something important enough to take precedence over other projects in their life), and newly interested people turnover is very high with little retention beyond a few months.

• A4FB53AC 17 May 2012 20:00 UTC

  1 point

  on: Be­ing a Real­ist (even if you be­lieve in God)

  First off, I’d like to say, I have met Christians who similarly were very open to rationality and applying it to the premises of their religion, especially the ethics. In practice, one of these was the only person who directly recognized me as an immortalist a few sentences into our first discussion, where no one else around me even knew what that is. I find that admirable, and fascinating.

  I also think it likely that human beings as they are now need some sort of comfort, reassurance, that their universe is not that universe of cold mathematics.

  So I’m not sure I should point this out, but, in the end, you’re still trying to find a God of the gaps. In the end, you’re still basing your view of the universe on a very special premise, that is, God.

  Eventually, this can only be resolved in a few ways : either God exists, or He doesn’t, or using its existence as a premise doesn’t make a difference, and a theist would eventually come to the same understanding of the universe as a down-to-earth, reductionist atheistic rationalist.

  But I also began to feel depressed, and then sort of hollow inside. I had no attachment to young-earth creationism, but I suppose I was trying to keep a sort of “God of the gaps” with regard to the beginning and development of intelligent life on Earth. Having seen why there were considerably fewer gaps than I had thought, I couldn’t un-see it. A little part of me had been booted out of Eden.

  I don’t think God exists, and I’m still puzzled by how anyone could come to believe it does. Here I mean believe in that sense where you don’t just “like to pretend something is real for the comfort it brings”, which I do too, but rather in the sense where you think “stop kidding yourself now, you need a real, practical, useable answer now”.

  Both are different, the first is fine and necessary for many people, but if you use God in the latter I’m worried you’re going to be up for a few disappointing experiences for the next few decades.

• A4FB53AC 13 May 2012 23:04 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: loup-vaillant’s comment on: A wild the­ist pla­ton­ist ap­pears, to ask about the path

  Also, see How to Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3.

• A4FB53AC 19 Apr 2012 8:05 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Bugmaster’s comment on: How can we get more and bet­ter LW con­trar­i­ans?

  True, except you don’t know how many people didn’t vote (i.e. we don’t keep track of that : a comment at 0 could as well have been read and voted as “0” by 0, 1, 10 or a hundred people and is the default state anyway.)(We similarly can’t know if a comment is controversial, that is, how many upvotes and downvotes went into the aggregated score).