AndrewH

Karma: 198

AndrewH 20 Mar 2009 21:02 UTC
8 points
in reply to: pjeby’s comment on: Why Our Kind Can’t Cooperate
Not only that, it becomes a glue that binds people together, the more agreement the stronger the binding (and the more that get bound). At least that is the analogy that I use when I look at this; we (rationalists) have no glue, they (religions) have too much.

AndrewH 26 Mar 2009 9:03 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Roko’s comment on: BHTV: Yudkowsky & Adam Frank on “religious experience”

In many cases, I suspect that people adopt false beliefs and the ensuing dark-side for short term emotional gain, but in the long term the instrumental loss outweighs this.

That may be one way of adopting false beliefs the first set of false beliefs. Once the base has been laid (perhaps containing many flaws to hide the falseness), then in evaluating a new belief, it doesn’t need to have short term emotional gain to be accepted, as long as it fits in with the current network of beliefs.

When I think of this, I think of missionaries, promising that having faith in God with help them through the bad times. Then after they accept that, move onto the usual discussion of Hell and if only you do what they say, you’ll be fine.

AndrewH 27 Mar 2009 21:00 UTC
2 points
in reply to: CannibalSmith’s comment on: Can Humanism Match Religion’s Output?
Ease of entry and exit is really important. I want to be able to enter the world and enter a discussion asap, but I don’t want to feel compelled to stay for long periods of time.

So I think a browser based program would be best, rather than Second Life.

But I think having a place such as Second Life would be good addition compared to what we have now with LW. Having a a place where people like ourselves can discuss things in practically real time, would, I think, be useful in helping to create this community of Rationalists.

Mechanisms that make it feel like we really are living together, such as a detailed virtual world, and even virtual houses, could help in making the community and keeping people participating in it. And of course, the added benefit of this is that we don’t need to be physically close to each other but we could get the benefits as if we were (given a detailed enough environment).

AndrewH 27 May 2009 22:37 UTC
1 point
on: This Failing Earth
WRT eugenics and other seemly nasty solutions, it is as they say: sometimes it has to get worse to get better. No option that causes, obvious to the voting population, short term harm but long term benefits, to the population as a whole, is going to be considered by politicians that want to be elected again.

It seems to me that the science and rationality that allow more than a shot in the dark probability of some social engineering project to work only came about recently (for example for Eugenics, post Darwin time). By the time that it was possible to do these sorts of projects, it was not possible to do them because of the national (and international) out-crying that would result.

So this really cuts off a great many possible projects that could benefit humanity in the long term. Is this a good or bad? depends on how far you are looking into the future, and whether or not you think AGI is possible or not!

I hope those nine guys in that basement are working hard.

AndrewH 7 Jun 2009 21:35 UTC
3 points
in reply to: wuwei’s comment on: Honesty: Beyond Internal Truth
That’s teaching for you, the raw truth of the world can be both difficult to understand in the context of what you already ‘know’ (Religion → Evolution) or difficult to understand in its own right (Quantum physics).

This reminds me of “Lies to Humans” as Hex, the thinking machine of Discworld, where Hex tells the Wizards the ‘truth’ of something, coached in things they understand to basically shut them up, rather than to actually tell them what is really happening.

In general, a person cannot jump from any preconceived notion of how something is to the (possibly subjective!) truth. Instead, to teach you tell lesser and lesser lies, which in the best case, may simply be more and more accurate approximations of the truth. Throughout, you the teacher, have been as honest as to the learner as you can be.

But when someone has a notion of something that is wrong enough, I can see these steps as, in themselves, could contain falsehood which is not an approximation of the truth itself. Is this honest? To teach a flat-Earther the world is round, perhaps a step is to consider the world being convex, so as to explain the ‘ships over the horizon disappear’.

If your goal is to get someones understanding closer to the truth, it may be rational, but the steps you take, the things you teach, might not be honest.

AndrewH 13 Jun 2009 21:59 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Daniel_Burfoot’s comment on: Let’s reimplement EURISKO!
Taking progress in AI to mean more real world effectiveness:

Intelligence seems to have jumps in real world effectiveness, e.g. the brains of great apes and humans are very similar, the difference in effectiveness is obvious.

So coming to the conclusion that we are fine based on the state of the art not being any more effective (not making progress) would be very dangerous. Perhaps tomorrow, some team of AI researchers will combine the current state of the art solutions in just the right way, resulting in a massive jump in real world effectiveness? maybe enough to have an “oh, shit” moment?

Regardless of the time frame, if the AI community is working towards AGI rather than FAI, we will likely have (eventually) an AI go FOOM or at the very least, and “oh, shit” moment (I’m not sure if they are equivalent).

AndrewH 12 Jul 2009 3:47 UTC
4 points
in reply to: MBlume’s comment on: Not Technically Lying
It is truth, but you are explicitly saying those words so that the hearer (the patient) forms a false belief about the world. So it cannot be really truthful because most people in that situation would, after hearing example 3, believe that they are being given something that has more affect than a placebo.

AndrewH 12 Jul 2009 17:24 UTC
6 points
on: Our society lacks good self-preservation mechanisms
An important consideration not yet mentioned is that risk mitigation is can be difficult to quantify, compared to disaster relief efforts where if you save a house fill of children, you become a hero. Coupled with the fact that people extrapolate the future using the past (which misses all existential risks), the incentive to do anything about it drops pretty much to nil.

AndrewH 12 Jul 2009 21:30 UTC
3 points
in reply to: PeterS’s comment on: Jul 12 Bay Area meetup—Hanson, Vassar, Yudkowsky
We are probably far more afraid of you than you are of us.

AndrewH 15 Jul 2009 16:06 UTC
5 points
on: The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You
This is so fun that I suspect that we have pushed back the date of friendly AI by at least a day—or we pushed it forward cause we are all now hyper motivated to see who guessed this question right!

AndrewH 15 Jul 2009 16:51 UTC
15 points
on: The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You
Something I would probably believe:

The AI informs you that it has discovered the purpose of the universe, and part of the purpose is to find the purpose (the rest, apparently, can only be comprehended by philosophical zombies, which you are not one).

Upon finding the purpose, the universe gave the FAI and humanity a score out of 3^^^3 (we got 42) and politely informs the FAI to tell humanity “best of luck next time! next game starts in 5 minutes”.

AndrewH 18 Jul 2009 0:18 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Paul Crowley’s comment on: Where are we?
Auckland, New Zealand

AndrewH 19 Jul 2009 23:34 UTC
2 points
on: Are You Anosognosic?
Does the absence of people around me pointing towards my arm insisting it does not move, while believing that I have done plenty of activities in which I used 2 arms mean I am an extreme Anosognosic. One who rewrites massive quantities of 1 arm experiences to 2 arm experiences on the fly?

An observation on cryocrastination

AndrewH22 Jul 2009 20:41 UTC

12 points

47 comments3 min readLW link

AndrewH 22 Jul 2009 22:30 UTC
0 points
in reply to: taw’s comment on: An observation on cryocrastination

Now the real costs are between $25,000 and $155,000 in addition to annual membership fees, signup fees, transportation fees after death etc. That’s how much you have to save during your lifetime to get cryopreserved.

The real costs per day of not bothering to optimized how you purchase food also add up over time. Most people I would be willing to bet could save quite a substantial amount of money with some careful thought and planning simply in how they purchase food. $7 a week over an average lifespan is $27,000.

The point of cryonics is that just a bit of optimization gives you a potential second chance at life if you screw up somewhere (sneeze when driving for example), given reasonable probabilities over the chances of dying, the likelihood of successful cryopreservation and revival, that amount of money is ridiculously cheap.

AndrewH 23 Jul 2009 2:21 UTC
0 points
in reply to: taw’s comment on: An observation on cryocrastination
Well, there are a great many factors I am glossing over, but if you are pessimistic about cryonics to that degree, you are probably pessimistic about other future technologies like medical and anti-aging technologies. You will die eventually unless actuarial escape velocity occurs when you are alive. Assuming this is not the case, if you don’t have cryonics you wont take advantage of the future indefinite lifespans humans will possess, old age will kill you.

You could very well be worth more than 200 million, you just need to live long enough!.

AndrewH 23 Jul 2009 4:56 UTC
0 points
in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: An observation on cryocrastination
I don’t even drink coffee so I’m going to have to think hard on what part of my life I should optimize. I picked it because many people drink starbucks coffee (we even have then in my little island country) and I presume you can do it cheaper if you buy your own.

AndrewH 23 Jul 2009 5:03 UTC
0 points
in reply to: thomblake’s comment on: An observation on cryocrastination
I reiterated the cost analysis from my perspective because it is essential to my argument of why people see cryonics is super beneficial, but still fail to do anything about it. All the while sitting on a potential gold mine of money they are wasting away which could be used to get cryonics!

AndrewH 23 Jul 2009 14:40 UTC
2 points
on: AndrewH’s observation and opportunity costs
Neat! I did not think of generalizing my arguments; we could call it the resource commit fallacy. We need techniques to help us solve this problem.

One strategy that comes to mind is precommitting to allocate the resources to the most efficient place before you optimize yourself. Then taking a bet with someone that if you fail to follow through with your commitment, you take a penalty of resources.

AndrewH 24 Jul 2009 2:32 UTC
1 point
on: Article upvoting
You could make voting a post mandatory to comment on that post, so to submit a comment you get prompted to vote it up or down (or maybe neutral)

Or maybe just by having the vote up/down/neutral buttons next to the comment submit button, right in peoples faces, would make them more likely to vote.

AndrewH

An ob­ser­va­tion on cryocrastination

An observation on cryocrastination