C-4 can explode; undecided voters think this makes C-4 better than B-4.
benjamincosman
Karma: 407
Similar opinion here—OP is surely doing somebody a useful service by creating a cleaner and more easily available transcript, but LW does not seem the right place for it.
I am not at all doubting your unpleasant experiences with some EA men. But when I read this, one thing I wonder is how much this is actually correlated with EA, vs just being a ‘some men everywhere are jerks’ thing? (I am not at all condoning being a jerk—saying it might be common does not mean I’m also saying it’s ok!) But e.g. I would not at all be surprised to find there are (to pick some arbitrary groups) some female doctors writing on their doctor forum that
From experience it appears that, a ‘no’ once said is not enough for many male doctors.
and that there are female chess players writing on their chess forum that
So how do these men find sexual novelty? Chess meet ups of course.
I do agree that the polyamory thing is definitely correlated with EA, but I’m not actually sure it’s very relevant here? E.g. would it be any better if the jerks aggressively propositioning you were serial monogamist jerks rather than poly jerks?
To be clear though, I certainly don’t have any evidence that it’s not an EA-specific problem; I am legitimately asking for your (and others’) thoughts on this.
EA is an optimization of altruism with “suboptimal” human tendencies like morality and empathy stripped from it
I so utterly disagree with this statement. Indeed I think one can almost summarize EA as the version of altruism that’s been optimized for morality, instead of solely empathy (though it includes that too!).
we need some mechanism between them—the system of ball, hill, and their dynamics.
A brain seems to be full of suitable mechanisms? e.g. while we don’t have a good model yet for exactly how our mind is produced by individual neurons, we do know that neurons exhibit thresholding behavior (‘firing’) - remove atoms one at a time and usually nothing significant will happen, until suddenly you’ve removed the exact number that one neuron no longer fires, and in theory you can get arbitrarily large differences in what happens next.
A ball sitting on this surface:
has a direction of travel given by this:
In other words, continuous phenomena can naturally lead to discontinuous phenomena. At the top of that curve, moving the ball by one Planck length causes an infinite divergence in where it ends up. So where does that infinite divergence “come from”, and could the same answer apply to your brain example?
So if you rejected mind-body continuity, you’d have to admit that some non-infinitesimal mental change can have an infinitesimal (practically zero) effect on the physical world. So basically you’d be forced into epiphenomenalism.
I don’t think there’s a principled distinction here between “infinitesimal” and “non-infinitesimal” values. Imagine we put both physical changes and mental changes on real-valued scales, normalized such that most of the time, a change of x physical units corresponded to a change of approximately x mental units. But then we observe that in certain rare situations, we can find changes of .01 physical units that correspond to 100 mental units. Does this imply epiphenomenalism? What about 10^(-3) → 10^4? So it feels like the only thing I’m forced to accept when rejecting the continuity postulate is that in the course of running a mind on a brain, while most of the time small changes to the brain will correspond to small changes to the mind, occasionally the subjective experience of the mind changes by more than one would naively expect when looking at the corresponding tiny change to the brain. I am willing to accept that. It’s very different from the normal formulation of epiphenomenalism, which roughly states that you can have arbitrary mental computation without any corresponding physical changes, i.e. a mind can magically run without needing the brain. (This version of epiphenomenalism I continue to reject.)
I don’t know if there are ‘natural’ events with irrational probabilities, but I think we can construct an artificial one? Roughly, let X be the event that a uniformly-random number in [0,10) is < pi; then P(X)=pi/10.* So if you were forced to give X a rational probability, what probability would you choose?
*One can’t actually produce a uniformly-random real number, but here’s a real-world procedure that should be equivalent to X: start generating an infinite string of digits v_i one at a time using a d10. For each digit, if it is less than the i’th digit of pi return YES, if it is greater return NO, if it is equal continue to rolling the next digit. So e.g. a roll of 2 is an immediate YES; a roll of 3 → 1 → 7 is a NO. This procedure takes unbounded time, but with probability 1 it terminates eventually.
I ran a very small Petrov Day gathering this year in Champaign-Urbana. (We had 5-6 people I think?) I put a Staples “Easy” button on the table and said if anyone presses it then the event ends immediately and we all leave without talking. (Or that I would do so anyway, obviously I couldn’t make anyone else.) No one pressed the button.
Typo: yolk → yoke
Possibly people overall are just better calibrated than I thought.
Note that the relevant reference class is not “people overall”; at the risk of overfitting, I’d say it should be something closer to “people who are mathematically literate, habitually make tons of predictions, and are at least aware of the concept of calibration”. It is far less surprising (though still surprising, I think) that a member of this group is this well calibrated.
The nuclear famine paper I analyzed earlier lied about this
I think it pays to have a higher bar for calling something a “lie”. The paper does explicitly state their assumption that stores last only one year. You provide good evidence that this is a bad assumption, and it’s possible that it was made in bad faith (i.e. the authors maybe knew it was a bad assumption), but I think calling it a lie based on current evidence causes more heat than light.
One key challenge will be both a) being nonpartisan, and also b) appearing nonpartisan. If you’re not actually aiming for (a), then for honesty’s sake you should not aim for (b) either. But if you are actually aiming for (a) as you claim, then I would avoid including “stopping Donald Trump” in your stated goals as that hurts your (b). I know from personal experience that there are at least some people who’d support a nonpartisan version of your effort but also voted for Trump as (what they saw as) the lesser of two lizards; there is no reason to alienate those people like this.
I think secrecy is rarely a long-term solution because it’s fragile, but it can definitely have short-term uses? For example, I’m sure that some insights into AI have the capacity to advance both alignment and capabilities; if you have such an insight then you might want to share it secretly with alignment researchers while avoiding sharing it publicly because you’d rather Facebook AI not enhance its capabilities. And so the secrecy doesn’t have to be a permanent load-bearing part of a system; instead it’s just that every day the secrecy holds up is one more day you get to pull ahead of Facebook.
Excellent story; thank you! The Susan arc was very much a Black Mirror episode :)
Typo: “subsided” → “subsidized”
I think that ‘non-mana’ makes a bad development plan (“ok, but what should we have instead of mana?”) and possibly a bad official marketing strategy (“ok, but why should I trust that you found something actually good to replace it with?”). However in other contexts I think ‘non-mana’ style descriptions can be very useful, primarily for their brevity. One of my favorite games is Epic Card Game (despite the terrible name), and my one-sentence description of it is that it’s similar to Magic except that I like it better, in large part because they drastically improved Magic’s mana system and Magic’s distribution model and (unlike Magic) created a great 2-player draft format. And sure, I haven’t actually told you how it accomplishes any of those things—what specific features instantiate those antifeatures. But you can always ask for the details if you want to hear more, or if you trust me for whatever reason (which may be easier than trusting the company’s marketers) then you can just take my word for it, and so this quick description is enough for my friend to go try the game.
All I can see on this page are the (sub)section headers but no other content??
I am getting identical emails every couple hours with subject “[LessWrong] Event updated: Guild of the ROSE 1 year anniversary mixer”. Any idea what’s causing this? I’d rather not mark LW stuff as spam...
If your dishwasher is the goggles, then you should first try switching detergents and then try replacing your dishwasher. I am all the way at #5 from Jeff’s list (“Just dump the whole thing in there, food and all.”) and the dishes come out clean and it’s so convenient.
Devil’s Advocate in support of certain CVS-style recoup-our-commitment donations:
Suppose that all the following are true:
CVS giving to charity in some form is reasonable, and a classic donation-matching drive would have been one reasonable method
CVS internal predictions suggest that a matching drive would generate ~$5m of customer donations, which they’d then have to match with ~$5m of their own
A donation of exactly $10m is more useful to the recipient than the uncertainty of a donation drive with EV $10m, because the recipient can confidently budget around the fixed amount
In this case, instead of running the drive and donating ~$10m at the end, it seems pretty reasonable to donate $10m up front and then ask for customer donations afterward? And while a CDT agent might now refuse to donate because the donation goes to CVS and not to the charity, an LDT agent who would have donated to the matching drive should still donate to this new version because their being-and-having-been the kind of agent who would do that is what caused CVS to switch to this more useful fixed-size version.
(Though even if you buy the above, it would still behoove the retailer to be transparent about what they’re doing; that plus the “retailers take a massive cut” argument seems like pretty good reasons to avoid donating through retailers anyway.)