betterthanwell

Karma: 728

betterthanwell 23 Feb 2018 13:40 UTC
2 points
on: June 2012: 0/33 Turing Award winners predict computers beating humans at go within next 10 years.
Hopefully, AGI is at least “90 years” out.

betterthanwell 23 Feb 2018 12:57 UTC
2 points
on: June 2012: 0/33 Turing Award winners predict computers beating humans at go within next 10 years.
AlphaGo’s victory over World Champion Lee Sedol made a (seemingly) deep impression on me at the time.
I had just NOT expected that. I had expected the game to remain intractable for decades. But the initial excitement and mild sense of doom that followed soon faded. I’m not a computer scientist, just a civilian interested for philosophical reasons.
But many people in attendance at the Alan Turing centenary celebration were World Champions of computer science. And either none of them knew any better, or if any did, or even suspected. Then, it seems that any suspicion that humans would be, uh, defeated at go, in the next decade, was defeated by subtle snickering and mild peer pressure.

betterthanwell 5 Apr 2015 20:49 UTC
12 points
on: How has lesswrong changed your life?
I discovered the idea of Bitcoin early, made a life-changing amount of money.

betterthanwell 14 May 2014 23:39 UTC
2 points
on: [LINK] No Boltzmann Brains in an Empty Expanding Universe
FQXi 2014 — Sean Carroll: “Quantum Fluctuations in de Sitter Space (do not happen)”

betterthanwell 30 Mar 2014 17:48 UTC
2 points
in reply to: fubarobfusco’s comment on: What is the most anti-altruistic way to spend a million dollars?

Thus, I maintain the attacks were a huge failure at accomplishing the attackers’ political agenda.

Osama Bin Laden (2004):

...All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two Mujahedin to the farthest point East to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qa’ida in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human economic and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits to their private companies. This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers as we alongside the Mujahedin bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat. All Praise is due to Allah.

So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah is willing and nothing is too great for Allah. That being said, those who say that al-Qa’ida has won against the administration in the White House or that the administration has lost in this war have not been precise because when one scrutinizes the results, one cannot say that Al-Qa’ida is the sole factor in achieving these spectacular gains. Rather, the policy of the White House that demands the opening of war fronts to keep busy their various corporations—whether they be working in the field of arms or oil or reconstruction—has helped al-Qa’ida to achieve those enormous results. And so it has appeared to some analysts and diplomats that the White House and us are playing as one team towards the economic goals of the United States even if the intentions differ. And it was to these sorts of notions and their like that the British diplomat and others were referring in their lectures at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (when they pointed out that) for example, al-Qa’ida spent $500,000 on the event, while America in the incident and its aftermath lost—according to the lowest estimates—more than 500 billion dollars, meaning that every dollar of al-Qa’ida defeated a million dollars by the permission of Allah besides the loss of a huge number of jobs. As for the size of the economic deficit, it has reached record, astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars. And even more dangerous and bitter for America is that the Mujahedin recently forced Bush to resort to emergency funds to continue the fight in Afghanistan and Iraq which is evidence of the success of the bleed-until-bankruptcy plan with Allah’s permission.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16990-2004Nov1.html

betterthanwell 2 Dec 2013 22:28 UTC
12 points
in reply to: ArisKatsaris’s comment on: December 2013 Media Thread
Gwern Branwen plays a notable part in this recent story about the demise of one ill-fated black market:

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/did-one-of-the-silk-roads-successors-just-commit-the-perfect-bitcoin-scam

betterthanwell 17 Jun 2013 18:10 UTC
6 points
on: Open Thread, June 16-30, 2013
Aaron Winborn: Monday was my 46th birthday and likely my last. Anything awesome I should try after I die?

Just over two years ago, I was diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. In short, that means that my mind will increasingly become trapped in my body as the motor neurons continue to die, and the muscles atrophy and waste away, until my diaphragm dies, bringing me with it.

...

But yes, there is a silver lining to this all, such as it is. Kim Suozzi made a similar plea to the Internet a year ago today, and came up with the brilliant idea of freezing her body in the hopes of a distant advanced technology being able to revive her someday. Her body now rests at liquid nitrogen temperatures.

...

betterthanwell 10 May 2013 4:33 UTC
3 points
in reply to: shminux’s comment on: Justifiable Erroneous Scientific Pessimism
“I think there should be a law of Nature to prevent a star from behaving in this absurd way!” (Eddington, 1935)

Eddington erroneously dismissed M_(white dwarf) > M_limit ⇒ “a black hole” , but didn’t he correctly anticipate new physics?
Do event horizons (Finkelstein, 1958) not prevent nature from behaving in “that absurd way”, so far as we can ever observe?
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_censorship_hypothesis

betterthanwell 18 Mar 2013 18:04 UTC
10 points
on: Recent updates to gwern.net (2012-2013)
With some awe and much respect, I would say that you are an inspiration, but that has already been said. I’ll upvote that and say something else instead. For whatever reason, some part of my brain tells me; “Yeah, this is pretty much what I would expect the research interests of of a “supervillain”-in-training to look like”. I don’t pretend to know exactly what awesomeness is, but you have grown a lot of it.

betterthanwell 12 Jan 2013 19:29 UTC
11 points
in reply to: A1987dM’s comment on: Farewell Aaron Swartz (1986-2013)

EDIT: OTOH, there’s this… What person makes a will at 26?

It seems he published “If i get hit by a truck” in 2002, at age 16. Sad. Also, perhaps, awe-inspiring. Eliminating the problem of one’s bus-factor would ordinarily be admirable… if you do it for the contingency where you simply get hit by a bus. I want, but can’t, quite make myself believe that he didn’t write this, at that time, in anticipation of an end like this. In that case; not awe-inspiring, only sad.

betterthanwell 21 Dec 2012 14:11 UTC
1 point
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Notes on Psychopathy
Almost no chance at all. Keep in mind, the most important thing, when it comes to dealing with this, this… insidious threat, is to be intensely careful in avoiding any false negatives. There must be none what so ever. And besides, who cares, really — about a few — or a few million false positives. Oh, and this condition, it’s really quite heritable, and, as head of the program, you would need to… well, deal with the children, in a like manner as that of the parents. Not that this would be a problem, of course.

Joe Stalin, the NKVD, the Moscow Trials, and the Great Purge sort of came to mind.

betterthanwell 21 Dec 2012 13:42 UTC
2 points
in reply to: alanog’s comment on: [Link] ‘Something feels wrong with the state of philosophy today.’
Neat. Upvote delivered, as promised.

betterthanwell 21 Dec 2012 12:35 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Pablo’s comment on: [Link] ‘Something feels wrong with the state of philosophy today.’

In the future, please consider adding a paragraph that provides a summary, or at least a snapshot, of the article’s contents.

Yes. However, I would suggest not to wait for next time to do it right. Do it right, now.

I will downvote the top post, but I promise to upvote it, if and when benthamite’s suggestion is followed.

Sorry for the carrot and stick, but doing so shouldn’t take more than a minute.
(Which would be less than was spent on writing this.)

betterthanwell 20 Dec 2012 14:16 UTC
16 points
in reply to: buybuydandavis’s comment on: Notes on Psychopathy

Maybe they need better treatments. Has anyone asked psychopaths—“How would you convince a psychopath like you to stop doing X?” Has anyone let psychopaths try? Aren’t they the master manipulators? They even have a readily available model of a psychopath to test out the theory on. How convenient! Sufficiently motivating a psychopath with rewards for changing the mind of another psychopath might be an effective treatment for the first psychopath. Did they try that treatment?

Something like it was tried in Canada, in the sixties, with LSD, in a four year experiment where a group of 30 psychopaths were, at least apparently, temporarily reformed through unconventional means.

This strange and unique program was obliquely referenced in the top post:

...operated for over a decade in a maximum security psychiatric hospital and drew worldwide attention for its novelty. The program was described at length by Barker and colleagues…The results of a follow-up conducted an average of 10.5 years after completion of treatment showed that, compared to no program (in most cases, untreated offenders went to prison), treatment was associated with lower violent recidivism for non-psychopaths but higher violent recidivism for psychopaths.

The Insane Criminal as Therapist
E.T. Barker, M. H. Mason, The Canadian Journal of Corrections, Oct. 1968.

Here’s an account from a recent pop-psychology book, The Psychopath Test:

In the late 1960s, a young Canadian psychiatrist believed he had the answer. His name was Elliott Barker and he had visited radical therapeutic communities around the world, including nude psychotherapy sessions occurring under the tutelage of an American psychotherapist named Paul Bindrim. Clients, mostly California free-thinkers and movie stars, would sit naked in a circle and dive headlong into a 24-hour emotional and mystical rollercoaster during which participants would scream and yell and sob and confess their innermost fears. Barker worked at a unit for psychopaths inside the Oak Ridge hospital for the criminally insane in Ontario. Although the inmates were undoubtedly insane, they seemed perfectly ordinary. This, Barker deduced, was because they were burying their insanity deep beneath a facade of normality. If the madness could only, somehow, be brought to the surface, maybe it would work itself through and they could be reborn as empathetic human beings.

And so he successfully sought permission from the Canadian government to obtain a large batch of LSD, hand-picked a group of psychopaths, led them into what he named the “total encounter capsule”, a small room painted bright green, and asked them to remove their clothes. This was truly to be a radical milestone: the world’s first ever marathon nude LSD-fuelled psychotherapy session for criminal psychopaths.

Barker’s sessions lasted for epic 11-day stretches. There were no distractions – no television, no clothes, no clocks, no calendars, only a perpetual discussion (at least 100 hours every week) of their feelings. Much like Bindrim’s sessions, the psychopaths were encouraged to go to their rawest emotional places by screaming and clawing at the walls and confessing fantasies of forbidden sexual longing for each other, even if they were, in the words of an internal Oak Ridge report of the time, “in a state of arousal while doing so”.

...

Barker watched it all from behind a one-way mirror and his early reports were gloomy. The atmosphere inside the capsule was tense. Psychopaths would stare angrily at each other. Days would go by when nobody would exchange a word. But then, as the weeks turned into months, something unexpected began to happen.

The transformation was captured in an incredibly moving film. These tough young prisoners are, before our eyes, changing. They are learning to care for one another inside the capsule.

We see Barker in his office, and the look of delight on his face is quite heartbreaking. His psychopaths have become gentle. Some are even telling their parole boards not to consider them for release until after they’ve completed their therapy. The authorities are astonished.

Several of the 30 participants of the experiment went on to commit violent homicides some years after release.

An internal memo from the experiment: “LSD in a Coercive Milieu Therapy Program” (E.T Barker)

Intriguing.

betterthanwell 1 Dec 2012 13:31 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Paul Crowley’s comment on: Musk, Mars and x-risk

“On the Earth, the IPCC states that “a ‘runaway greenhouse effect’—analogous to Venus—appears to have virtually no chance of being induced by anthropogenic activities.”
http://www.ipcc.ch/meetings/session31/inf3.pdf

Hmm, the IPCC asserts this statement without providing any argument to support it.

Some quick thoughts: In the beginning, there were no oceans. The earth was molten and without form. Now, assume venusian-runaway is a possibility for for this planet’s climate. Why has it not already occurred, much, much earlier in the planet’s history?

The planet was very much hotter and more humid in the very distant past. The CO2 in the oceans and the methane in the permafrost was captured from the atmosphere. The O2 in the atmosphere is a biogenic waste product of photosynthesis.

I do think the oceans will boil eventually, not because of global warming, but because of solar warming, after the sun has depleted it’s hydrogen.

betterthanwell 27 Nov 2012 22:46 UTC
7 points
in reply to: Sean_o_h’s comment on: Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at Cambridge makes headlines.
Welcome, and thanks for the comments.

Even the term getting out there is a positive!

Agreed.

If journalism demands that you stick to Hollywood references when communicating a concept,
it wouldn’t be so bad if journalists managed to understand and convey the distinction between:
- The wholly implausible, worse than useless Terminator humanoid hunter-killer robot scenario.
- The not completely far-fetched Skynet launches every nuke, humanity dies scenario.

betterthanwell 27 Nov 2012 11:30 UTC
12 points
in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at Cambridge makes headlines.

Yudkowsky seemed to me simplistic in his understanding of moral norms. “You would not kill a baby,” he said to me, implying that was one norm that could easily be programmed into a machine.
“Some people do,” I pointed out, but he didn’t see the full significance. SS officers killed babies routinely because of an adjustment in the society from which they sprang in the form of Nazism. Machines would be much more radically adjusted away from human social norms, however we programmed them.

Wow. This particular mistake seems to be an unlikely and even difficult mistake to make in good faith,
as opposed to, for example, by outright dishonesty.

Update: I told Appleyard of his mistake, and he simply denied that his article has made a mistake on this matter.

Never mind, it seems they don’t even try to be honest.

betterthanwell 25 Nov 2012 13:38 UTC
12 points
in reply to: Kyre’s comment on: Musk, Mars and x-risk

Which catastrophic risks does a mars colony mitigate? … Climate change : yes

If a Mars colony mitigates catastrophic risk (extinction risk?) from climate change,
then climate change is not an existential risk to human civilization on earth.

If humans can thrive on Mars, Earth based humanity will be able to cope with any climate change less drastic than transforming the climate of Earth to something as hostile as the current climate of Mars.

betterthanwell 21 Oct 2012 3:21 UTC
8 points
on: Causal Reference
Mainstream status points to /Eliezer_Yudkowsky-drafts/ (Forbidden: You aren’t allowed to do that.)

betterthanwell 17 Oct 2012 20:52 UTC
10 points
on: Request for sympathy; frustrated with Dark Side

It is really quite frustrating to discuss the intersection of physics and free will with a man who is capable of posting this (...)

So… Don’t?