This actually isn’t true: nuclear power was already becoming cheaper than coal and so on, and improvements have been available. The problem is actually regulatory: Starting at around 1970 various reasons have caused the law to make even the same tech to become MUCH more expensive. This was avoidable and some other countries like France managed to make it keep going cheaper than alternative sources. This talks about it in detail. Here’s a graph from the article:
Andrew Vlahos
Karma: 234
I’m a tutor, and I’ve noticed that when students get less sleep they make many more minor mistakes (like dropping a negative sign) and don’t learn as well. This effect is strong enough that for a couple of students I started guessing how much sleep they got the last couple days at the end of sessions, asked them, and was almost always right. Also, I’ve tried at one point going on a significantly reduced sleep schedule with a consistent wakeup time, and effectiveness collapsed. I soon burned out and had to spend most of a day napping to catch up on sleep.
At this point I do think enough sleep is important, and have a different hypothesis that needed sleep is just different for different people.
Decisions about covid policy have been mostly political, but vaccines weren’t political before that. Consider smallpox. Smallpox was all over the world and apparently unbeatable. It was described in China in 340. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln got it, and if they died history could have gone way differently. https://rootsofprogress.org/smallpox-and-vaccines. It was just a thing that sometimes happened to people, and nothing could be done about it. Suddenly, as soon as vaccines were applied to a region. Smallpox was completely eliminated there.
A similar thing happened with Polio, Tetanus, Hepatitis A and B, Rubella, Measles, Hib, Whooping Cough, Pneumococcal Disease, Mumps, Diptheria… They are almost gone, and the only people who get them now are in places that haven’t gotten consistent and almost complete vaccination.
In fact, there’s one that most people alive remember. Chicken pox used to be seen as an inevitable childhood disease, to the point that people used to throw “pox parties” to get it over with. but when the vaccine was invented in 1995 it rapidly decreased, and I don’t know anyone my age who has gotten it (born in 1996). It’s pretty much gone now.
Zvi isn’t trying to have “fairness in a political fight”, as if the sides were equal. The “vaccines are effective” side is totally crushing the “vaccines are bad” side. And plague doesn’t care about your politics.
I didn’t say that she learned nothing of value, I said that the marginal value of reading additional books at this point is close to zero. The first few books were probably different. Also, one incompetent professor isn’t close to the only reason I have for opposing affirmative action. Finally, I didn’t simply “not think of them as different”, I didn’t even have the mindset to understand the argument that he was when I first heard it, which is clear evidence against the claim that “every white person has internalized racism against black people and these are the stages of racism awareness”. One paragraph is not my entire mindset.
Social media could be a factor, but a much bigger one is that kids are so ludicrously overcontrolled all day every day that they often get no opportunity for good experiences.
My childhood was much closer to Comazotz from A Wrinkle in Time than to a healthy upbringing.
Not really helpful for understanding the history of factory safety, but here’s a funny German workplace safety video, Forklift Driver Klaus: (note, you do not need to speak german)
woah, birth control is way more complicated than I thought. I started looking and it turns out I can’t just read a bunch of studies about each method and say what the side effect risks are. There are quite a lot of birth control methods and chemicals, each with tons of complicated chemical interactions, tons of complicated hormonal interactions, side effects, etc. Each article talks about lots of fancy biological terms like “venous thrombosis” that I have to keep looking up. I also don’t really have the medical knowledge to really put things in scale: for example, one medication treatment is said to raise a hormone level to a peak of something ng/mL, and I don’t know how much of a change that is.
Thanks for the help finding sources, everyone, but this bounty won’t be claimed until a doctor looks at it.
Can you give an example of this happening in the real world? I don’t quite see what it applies to.
You missed my main reason for avoiding spoilers. It’s not because something is intended a certain way or that I think it would train rationality better to not do something, it’s because doing things myself is way more fun than having things done for me. I found trying to figure out how to solve a rubix cube myself to be way more fun than being told would have been. (Or figuring out the villain’s plot before the monologue, or whatever).
The difference between the chess and go skill patterns is because chess and go have vastly different algorithms.
The chess skill changed linearly because the algorithm is easy to compute by point values (finding the paths with the most pieces compared to the opponent, or positions leading to this), and modern algorithms aren’t much different from early ones. In other words, taking the enemy’s queen without similar cost is always extremely good (if the computer can look far enough ahead to check for traps), and computers are mainly limited by how many turns ahead their processor can look.
Go, however, is far more subtle, with pieces being drastically different in value based on what occurs without them, and a few pieces in the wrong spot can lead to the loss of a quarter of the board 40 turns later in a subtle way, such as providing a ko threat or dead shape. Counting the territory in 5 turns is near-useless without considering how each piece interacts with all others. In this case, the limiting factor is not processing power but algorithm design, and the rapid gain happened because of insights in algorithms.
What determines whether AI development will be sudden or gradual will be which type of limiting factor it has. Self-driving cars had a big jump then a stall because it is an algorithm difficulty. Computer graphics improved gradually because it was a processing power difficulty. Sentient AI could be like one of these, or have a different limiter I haven’t thought of, but whatever the limiting factor is would determine the rate for each thing.
I’m not an expert in AI, but am very good at chess and go.
This isn’t from Christianity, but actually goes back to hunter-gatherers and had a useful function. See this description of “insulting the meat”. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201105/how-hunter-gatherers-maintained-their-egalitarian-ways
(to be clear, I’m not sure whether this still has a useful function or not)
Actually I posted a comment below the article, quoting an Alcor representative’s clarification:
“Most Members submit a Statement of Revival Preferences document to state your expectations upon revival.
Alcor cannot guarantee that it will be followed since it will be many years into the future before you are revived.
I have attached the document for your review.” (and the document was very detailed)
So Alcor says that they actually are willing to do this and are trying, although they of course can’t guarantee that society won’t in the future decide to force revive people against their will anyway.
huh?
It would help. However, Twitter makes money based on energetic engagement, and no emotion drives behavior better than rage, so they don’t want to fix it.
It’s like the situation with phone companies. There actually are effective ways to prevent spoofed phone numbers, according to my dad who works at a telecom company. However, since scammers and telemarketers are by far the biggest customers, phone companies won’t make the changes needed to do this.
But I asked Alcor specifically if something like this would be possible, and they said that it wouldn’t be. (Along with CI)
Yeah, portions are way too big now. I’m 6 feet, 4 inches tall. Having two meals per day is quite enough for me, I only order one thing when I go to restaurants and I’m always too full to eat dessert. If I was a normal height and tried eating three meals per day, I would definitely be too fat.
(To be clear, I’m in the US. It’s extreme portion sizes get commentary from visiting europeans)
There are three big problems with this idea.
First, we don’t know how to program an AI to value morality in the first place. You said “An AI that was programmed to be moral would...” but programming the AI to do even that much is the hard part. Deciding which morals to program in would be easy by comparison.
Second, this wouldn’t be a friendly AI. We want an AI that doesn’t think that it is good to smash Babylonian babies against rocks or torture humans in Hell for all of eternity like western religions say, or torture humans in Naraka for 10^21 years like the Buddhists say.
Third, you seem to be misunderstanding the probabilities here. Someone once said to consider what the world would be like if Pascal’s wager worked, and someone else asked if they should consider the contradictory parts and falsified parts of Catholicism to be true also. I don’t think you will get much support for this kind of thing from a group whose leader posted this.
No. Humans do major harm to each other, often even when they are trying to help. And that’s if things go right; an AI based on human behavior has a high chance of causing harm deliberately.
Thanks for your well explained response! I’ll keep your reasons in mind for future posts.
Really? That’s your argument? Do you really think people wouldn’t have small talk topics or understand authority figures or learn anything without these classes? If after reading this, you still think those courses are essential to learning those skills, let alone teach them efficiently, I eagerly await your reply to this.