Just to clarify, with this sentence:
Christianity was also unusual in other potentially key dimensions—it dramatically promoted outbreeding (by outlawing inbreeding far beyond the typical), which plausibly permanently altered the european trajectory.
are you proposing that Christian Europe was historically successful in significant part due to inbreeding less than non-Christian-European civilizations? Is there somewhere I can read more about that thesis? I’m not familiar with it.
I appreciate the clarification, at first #1 seemed dissonant to me (and #2 and #3 following from that) given the trope of highly inbred European nobility, but on further reflection that might be mostly a special case due to dispensations. I hadn’t thought of worldwide consanguination/marriage norms as a potential X factor for civilizational development, but it’s an interesting angle.
Is that link safe to click for someone with Arachnophobia?
I wish the cuteness made a difference. Interesting reading though, thanks.
It’s possible you’re in Ease Hell. It has been a while since I got into the weeds with my settings but there are pretty good reasons to change the default ease settings and reset the ease on old cards, as I recall. I’m also in the camp of only using the “again” and “good” buttons, since the other ones affect ease iirc. Anyway you’ve been at it longer than I have but maybe the ease hell thing is new info for you or other anki users.
These are just one native speaker’s impressions, so take them with a grain of salt.
Your first two examples, to me, scan as being about abstract concepts; respectively: the emotion/quality of curiosity and the property of being in context.
This quora result indicates that it’s a quality of “definiteness” that indicates when articles get dropped (maybe as a second language learner you’re likely to already have this as knowledge, but find it difficult to intuit).
In those examples, the meaning doesn’t rely on pointing at two specific “curiosity” and “context” objects that have to be precisely designated, it relies on set phrases “out of curiosity” and “in context” that respectively describe an unmentioned action or object.
I think the article in the last example is dropped for a completely different reason. The “definiteness” argument doesn’t apply, but my instinct is that this is simple terseness in the communication from UI to user. Describing every UI element with precise language would result in web pages that resemble legal documents.
In practice, leading thinkers in EA seem to interpret AGI as a special class of existential threat (i.e., something that could effectively ‘cancel’ the future)
This doesn’t seem right to me. “Can effectively ’cancel’ the future” seems like a pretty good approximation of the definition of an existential threat. My understanding of why A.I. risk is treated differently is because of a cultural commonality between said leading thinkers such that A.I. risk is considered to be a more likely and imminent threat than other X-risks. Along with a less widespread (I think) subset of concerns that A.I. can also involve S-risks that other threats don’t have an analogue to.
I suspect that massive destabilization following the precipitous fall of most of the great powers (NATO + Russia at the least) would result in war on every continent (sans Antarctica). If Asian countries don’t get nuked in this scenario like you suppose, I think it’s quite plausible general war in Asia would follow shortly as the surviving greatest powers jockey for dominance. If we posit the complete collapse of U.S. power projection in the Pacific, surely China is best positioned to fill the void, and I don’t think it’s clear where they’d draw the new lines.
You imply that you understand it’s a metaphor, but your other sentences seem to insist on taking the word “wrestling” literally as referring to the sport. The sentence in bold
“This was no passive measure to confirm a hypothesis, but a wrestling with nature to make her reveal her secrets.”
Makes it pretty clear I think. Do you simply not like the metaphor?
I think it’s useful to point out that training muscles for strength/size results in a well documented phenomenon called supercompensation. However, training for other qualities like speed doesn’t really work the same way. There’s lots of irrational training done because people make an inferential leap from the supercompensation they see in strength training and apply it to cases which intuitively seem like they might be analogues (e.g., weighted sprints don’t make you faster).
I think counterexamples are relevant because sometimes intuition points out real analogues, and sometimes fake ones, so we should value evidence and mechanistic explanation over analogies and cultural beliefs.
Sorry if this is a little incoherent, I wrote it when I was really sleepy.
Not every occupation is the same, but nations occupied by military force are often denied the ability to run their own affairs with regard to legal proceedings, defence, etc. In particular not being allowed to have final authority over legal matters on their own soil seems to historically be a great sticking point: see the Austro-Hungarian demands of Serbia leading to WW1.
This is one of the key domains which defines the authority of a sovereign nation, whereas it doesn’t seem that uncommon in history for there to be foreign military assets in a nation as a non-occupying force that does not damage the sovereignty of that nation. Auxiliary troops, mercenaries, allied soldiers.
From this perspective, U.S. bases look like occupation insofar as they damage the sovereignty of the occupied nation, and look like anything but occupation to the degree that they protect or abide by that sovereignty. Russian propaganda would of course claim, that the former dramatically outweighs the latter.
Conceptually I like the framing of “playing to your outs” taken from card games. In a nutshell, you look for your victory conditions and backchain your strategy from there, accepting any necessary but improbable actions that keep you on the path to possible success. This is exactly what you describe, I think, so the transposition works and might appeal intuitively to those familiar with card games. Personally, I think avoiding the “miracle” label has a significant amount of upside.
It seems like you’ve retreated fully from your bailey:
“at the risk of being the Captain Obvious, I must remind the readers that mountain climbing is stupid”
to your motte:
“There is no greatness in being the 5001th man who climbed Everest”
I suspect most people responding take greater issue with the former position, so maybe if you still stand by it you could defend that one.
To me, it seems like the standard of “if it increases your chances of dying, it’s a stupid recreational activity” is one that is unlikely to be applied evenly by just about anyone.
E.G., if you want to apply that consistently, you should probably have a very restrictive diet, and definitely not play video games for moderate to long periods of time (risk of death from blood clots, sedentariness, etc)
Would you be willing to summarize the point you’re making at the object level? Is it something like “the Soviets had to make the Molotov Ribbentrop pact, and that doesn’t say anything meaningful about their cultural approach to the interaction of world religions”? I don’t want to put words in your mouth or anything, I just want to understand the “extremely low-epistemics” bit.
One would expect a Prime Minister to be Prime over Ministers. I don’t see the need to rename everything Ministry of This or That, so Prime Minister doesn’t really seem appropriate.
I’m not persuaded at all by the attempt to classify people into the two types. See: in your table of examples, you specify that you tried to include views you endorse in both columns. However, if you were effectively classified by your own system, your views should fit mainly or completely in one column, no?
The binary individual classification aspect of this doesn’t even seem to be consistent in your own mind, since you later talk about it as a spectrum.
Maybe you meant it as a spectrum the whole time but that seems antithetical to putting people into two well defined camps.
Setting those objections aside for a moment, there is an amusing meta level of observing which type would produce this framework.
It seems like you might be reading into the post what you want to see to some extent(after reading what I wrote, it looked like I’m trying to be saucy paralleling your first sentence, just want to be clear that to me this is a non valenced discussion), the OP returns to referring to K-type and T-type individual people after discussing their formal framework. That’s what makes me think that classifying people into the binary categories is meant to be the main takeaway.
I’m not going to pretend to be more knowledgeable than I am about this kind of framework, but I would not have commented anything if the post had been something like “Tradeoffs between K-type and T-type theory valuation” or anything along those lines.
Like I said, I don’t think the case has remotely been made for being able to identify well defined camps of people, and I think it’s inconsistent to say that there are K-type and T-type people, which is a “real classification”, and then talk about the spectrum between K-type and T-type people. This implies that K-type and T-type people really aren’t exclusive camps, and that there are people with a mix of K-type and T-type decision making.
I’d be interested in someone with legal expertise weighing in on whether the farm example is in violation of child labor laws. There are special regulations and exemptions for farms, especially run by a parent or person standing for the parent, but a nine year old driving that tractor seems very likely to be illegal to me. I broadly agree with all the stuff about letting children roam, and it comports well with my own experience, but tractors in particular can be very dangerous and 9 seems very young to be doing genuinely independent ag work like this. Would be interested in other people’s thoughts.
From what I’ve heard, SBF was controlling, and fucked over his initial (EA) investors as best he could without sabotaging his company, and fucked over parts of the Alameda founding team that wouldn’t submit to him. This isn’t very “EA” by the usual lights.
It’s not immediately clear to me that this isn’t a No True Scotsman fallacy.
Without even getting into whether your specific reward heuristic is misaligned, it seems to me that you’d just shifted the problem slightly out of the focus of your description of the system, by specifying that all of the work will be done by subsystems that you’re just assuming will be safe.
“paperclip quality control” has just as much potential for misalignment in the limit as does paperclip maximization, depending on what kind of agent you use to accomplish it. So, even if we grant the assumption that your heuristic is aligned, we are merely left with the task of designing a bunch of aligned agents to do subtasks.