Can you expand on “ AI/ML capabilities research in finance” or shoot me a PM?
Alexei
Karma: 3,068
[Question] Is it worthwhile to save the cord blood and tissue?
I’m definitely not an expert, but it does sound like a few people moved the goalposts. It sounds very similar to the “AI can’t play chess” argument switching to “well, it’s not really playing chess, it’s just following rules” and then to *quietly mumbling something about it not having the True representation of chess*.
So, I agree with the core point. GPT-2 is writing! And it’s writing pretty damn well. Whatever is left has more to do with the general cognition skill than writing.
Great question! I will just say that I had such an experience, but don’t know how to share it in a way that feels adequate for me.
I think you can lead a healthy and happy life playing tennis most of your time, while avoiding the (incorrect and unhealthy, in my opinion) belief that “getting a life is finding a singular passion and pursuing it to the end”. It seems to me like a motivated reasoning used to defend what the person is doing. However the rest of the post is closer to the real truth: “I enjoy playing and teaching tennis and I find meaning in it.”
Also I think the singular/plural purpose divide is pretty smooth with plenty of people on both sides. I’ve met lots of people who say that to live your life you basically need to specialize like crazy.
My invitation to the author would be to write a similar essay to steel man the other side.
Wow, this seems huge to me! Great find! I’m not in the business of constructing tests, but if I ever do any home schooling with my children, I’ll definitely try this method.
Your decision / advice is rooted in anxiety / fear. This is much more about you than about the thing you’re talking about.
This post convinced me to watch the movies. Was not disappointed: great world building indeed.
This was back in 2013. At that point I have been developing games (as a hobby and then professionally) for 13 years. During my free time in high school and college, that’s basically all I did. And then right out of college I got a job in the game industry. I also developed and published my own game. In 2011 I moved to the bay area, joined a game startup, and it was acquired. (By Zynga, so not that exciting, but overall, I’d say things were going well.)
Around that time, I realized that there was no way making games would help with x-risk. So I left the industry. This involved letting go of the deepest passion and the most developed skill I’ve had at the time. It involved changing which circles I networked in. And it included abandoning all the knowledge I accumulated of the programming libraries and framework, game design, game lore, and all the half-baked game ideas I had and was hoping to develop some day.
I still stand by that decision. But I’ve also found a way to incorporate a bit of that old self into my present life. For example, sometimes I design a board game. Or write down and explore game ideas until I can “see” how it would be developed. Or dream about having enough money to just hire an entire studio and have them develop it.
Yes.
Found this video and it reminded me of this story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNVqRC4mcSI
I have read the entire “My big TOE” book/trilogy by Thomas Campbell. If at least three people promise to read my summary of it, I’ll write it up. Let me know how long you want the summary to be.
Super quick summary of the book: Thomas Campbell seems like a decently smart guy; he has a PhD in physics and works for the government. He claims his mind/consciousness can exist in and travel between multiple realities. In this book he explains his version of how the universe works, how it got started, why it’s here, and why we are here.
Personally, I found it mildly interesting. There are a lot of big claims, but it’s very hard to verify them. Tom is pretty upfront about it: his goal is to lay out a conceptual framework so that everyone can develop their own TOE (Theory of Everything). He doesn’t ask the reader to trust him or his version. At the same time, if you can’t trust it… it’s kind of like reading sci-fi.
I’m also happy to answer any questions about the book / author.
Kaj, first off, huge thank you for writing up all these posts on meditation. I don’t have time to read a lot of these books, but it’s good literature, so it’s perfect to get the summary from someone I can trust.
“Introspective awareness” sounds like the right object. Or, more specifically, it definitely feels like it’s describing my own experience. And my own, homegrown hypothesis was something like: consciousness is like an echo or picture-in-picture. We can get glimpses of “ourselves” because we can look at / load partial concepts of ourselves into the working memory.
Introspective awareness is its own type of mental object...
Wow, yes, yes, yes! My original fear with starting meditation was that it would remove certain experiences from my life. It felt like I’d lose something. And in the 7+ years I’ve done it, that just hasn’t happened. And now I have the precise language to describe it. That is exactly what happens for me: like, I can still see the suffering and all that, but it’s like it’s wrapped in a bubble, which still allows me to see the emotion/sensation exactly like I would before, but it loses the ability to instantly propagate its agenda to the rest of my system.
This kind of a process also teaches you to pay attention to patterns of cause and effect in your mind.
Yeah, I have seen this emphasized in various teachings, but I never actually practiced it. Probably some low hanging fruit here for me. I’ll try it out.
“first you resolve a lot of issues, but then you can get the ability to push down the rest” dynamic
One, I think the foremost goal for any type of meditation should be to learn to see what is there. (Just like with rationality.) So there’s no pushing or pulling or trying to change anything. And sometimes with bad feelings or headaches, I’ve noticed that simply paying attention to it (instead of flinching away) resolves it. It doesn’t make it “go away” or “block it”, it actually just unties the knot, so to speak.
Two, I think there are two orthogonal skills that get bucketed into “spiritual development.” One skill is insight (see MCTB for a good definition), but it’s basically the ability to see what’s going on in your mind. And that skill will eventually take you to enlightenment. The other skill is morality. And while some practices do empathize morality practice as well, I think in the classical western tradition (MCTB is a good example of this) we found paths to get to enlightenment without all other “unnecessary” stuff… like morality training. So you end up with people who are technically enlightened, but it doesn’t automatically make them good human beings. (I think this also resolves the confusion in one of the recent SSC posts.)
Use the power wisely. :)
I think some big life events fall into this category: being married, having a kid, having a close loved one pass away, dying yourself.
Welcome! Thank you for your posts!
Interesting! I’ll take a look.
You kind of lost me at the end. Isn’t part of the appeal of magic tricks that even though they are easy to learn, they still take work to master, and even if you could do it, you don’t, but you DO enjoy watching someone else perform them?
I think a related, but somewhat opposite observation is: we have more and more niches for everyone. For example, I often run into people who watch TV shows, even TV shows that are similar to what I watch (scifi, fantasy), but we still have zero overlap. That just couldn’t happen even 10 years ago. It’s not that they can’t watch my shows, or I theirs. It’s just we don’t.
Also this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XvN2QQpKTuEzgkZHY/being-the-pareto-best-in-the-world
One source I looked at was: https://parentsguidecordblood.org/en
Some highlights:
There are three public cord blood banks in CA, but non in the bay area. So donating might be hard if that’s where you’re delivering.
The expected cost of cryo preserving is a bit under $2,000 upfront and $150 / yr.
It costs about $30,000 to obtain a cord blood collection from a public bank, and that cost is charged to the patient’s health insurance.
Looks like the stem cells could be used by the family members too. (Assuming it’s a match, I’m guessing?). But actually the child might not be able to use them. (Is it only while they are a child?)
The main advantage of cord blood is that it does not have to be exactly matched to the patient like transplants from an adult donor.
In the United States, about 80% of cord blood donations are discarded.
In the United States, the net probability that a child will need any type of stem cell transplant by age 20 is 3 in 5,000 or .06%.