brilee

Karma: 571

brilee 21 Mar 2012 14:13 UTC
30 points
on: AI Risk and Opportunity: Humanity’s Efforts So Far
I laughed out loud as I was scrolling down, and the third major section item was “Eliezer Yudkowsky”. And you even included a little biography, “According to “Eliezer, the person,” Eliezer Yudkowsky (born 1979) was an exceptionally bright kid”

I’m not sure if that was honestly intended to be a joke, or if I’m completely missing it.

Elevating him to the pantheon of history seems a bit premature as of yet; why not retitle the section with a summary of his contributions to thinking on AI risk? The same goes for Robin Hanson. I’m just picking on Eliezer because people accuse us of worshipping Eliezer, and this is exactly why.

brilee 7 Aug 2012 10:13 UTC
29 points
on: Natural Laws Are Descriptions, not Rules
This seems to be taking down a straw man, and far from “challenging a central tenet of LW: reductionism”, you perfectly describe it and expound on it, if a bit wordily. At least in my mind, it’s very obvious that physical ‘law’ is a map-level concept. Physicists themselves have noticed that for a map-level concept, physical ‘law’ fits the territory so amazingly well, that they have written articles such as “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html

brilee 28 Mar 2012 3:54 UTC
26 points
on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 13, chapter 81
After this chapter, a lot of people are going to deduce that Harry was in fact the person who broke out Bellatrix. Including, probably Dumbledore.

Quirrell will likely be forced to show his hand when Dumbledore accuses him of having engineered the escape. Somehow, this turns into Quirrell leaving his post. End of story seems imminent :(

brilee 15 Apr 2012 2:49 UTC
25 points
on: Our Phyg Is Not Exclusive Enough
[meta] A simple reminder: This discussion has a high potential to cause people to embrace and double down on an identity as part of the inner or outer circles. Let’s try to combat that.

In line with the above, please be liberal with explanations as to why you think an opinion should be downvoted. Going through the thread and mass-downvoting every post you disagree with is not helpful. [/meta]

brilee 18 May 2013 20:04 UTC
22 points
on: [LINK] Evidence-based giving by Laura and John Arnold Foundation
“But as the Arnolds’ profile grows, of course, not everyone is a fan of this science of giving, especially since it comes at a cost to the many individuals and local organizations who need direct help now and could benefit from their billions. The answer to the most asked question may not be known for years: Will their plan work?”″

I chuckled at this. All of a sudden, people are asking “will it work?”, but they never asked the same questions of the charities they regularly donate to.

brilee 21 Mar 2012 14:08 UTC
21 points
0
on: Social status hacks from The Improv Wiki
Why do I feel that the LW community is getting defensive about these things by trying to discredit the post by attacking it indirectly? (e.g. proposing that high status isn’t all that great, saying that it’s plagiarized, accusing it of being fictional evidence) I find them to be, for the most part, quite correct.

We should instead be investigating /why/ it might be that each of these items is high/low status, or perhaps thinking about how we can subtly use these items in real life. For example, the perception of arrogance arises when a person tries to be higher status than he actually is. If LW as a community offends newcomers by seeming arrogant, then we should be trying to identify where we might be inadvertently blaring high-status. (Of course, respecting the truth should remain the highest priority).

brilee 14 May 2012 20:46 UTC
19 points
in reply to: AlanCrowe’s comment on: Petition: Off topic area
To put it bluntly, HPMoR threads contribute a very non-trivial fraction of karma GDP. Shouldn’t you be worried about that?

brilee 6 Nov 2012 4:19 UTC
18 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Voting is like donating thousands of dollars to charity
You have, in a nutshell, just explained why lobbyists exist.

brilee 22 Sep 2012 18:45 UTC
16 points
on: [link] Betting on bad futures
Alice, believing that the world will end, will spend all her money by her predicted end-of-the-world date. She will then be unable to pay back. Bob, knowing this, would never lend her the money.

brilee 15 Feb 2014 6:13 UTC
14 points
on: Rethinking Education
Excuse me if I’m misunderstanding your ideas here, but isn’t this, almost bullet for bullet, exactly what Khan academy is doing?

brilee 24 Jun 2012 15:46 UTC
14 points
on: Minimum Viable Workout Routine is Dangerously Misinformative
Seems like a good post on its own; no need to bring down its apparent quality by making it appear to be an emotionally heated response to another post of lesser quality

brilee 15 Apr 2012 14:55 UTC
13 points
on: Our Phyg Is Not Exclusive Enough
From Shirky’s Essay on online groups: “The Wikipedia right now, the group collaborated online encyclopedia is the most interesting conversational artifact I know of, where product is a result of process. Rather than “We’re specifically going to get together and create this presentation” it’s just “What’s left is a record of what we said.”

When somebody goes to a wiki, they are not oging there to discuss elementary questions that have already been answered; they are going there to read the results of that discussion. Isn’t this basically what the OP wants?

Why aren’t we using the wiki more? We have two modes of discussion here: discussion board, and wiki. The wiki serves more as an archive of the posts that make it to main-page level, meaning that all the hard work of the commenters in the discussion boards is often lost to the winds of time. (Yes, some people have exceptionally good memory and link back to them. But this is obviously not sustainable.) If somebody has a visionary idea on how to lubricate the process of collating high-quality comments and incorporating them into a wiki-like entity, then I suspect our problem could be solved.

brilee 23 Mar 2012 17:16 UTC
13 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 11
Upvote for Singuharrity

brilee 19 Jan 2012 15:59 UTC
12 points
on: The Singularity Institute’s Arrogance Problem
To be honest, I’ve only ever felt SI/EY/LW’s “arrogance” once, and I think that LW in general is pretty damn awesome. (I realize I’m equating LW with SI, but I don’t really know what SI does)

The one time is while reading through the Free Willhttp://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Free_will page, which I’ve copied here: “One of the easiest hard questions, as millennia-old philosophical dilemmas go. Though this impossible question is fully and completely dissolved on Less Wrong, aspiring reductionists should try to solve it on their own. ”

This smacks strongly of “oh look, there’s a classic stumper, and I’m the ONLY ONE who’s solved it (naa naa naa). If you want to be a true rationalist/join the tribe, you better solve it on your own, too”

I’ve also heard others mention that HP from HPMoR is an unsufferable little twat, which I assume is the same attitude they would have if they were to read LW.

I’ve written some of my thoughts up about the arrogance issue here. The short version is that some people have strongly developed identities as “not one of those pretentious people” and have strong immune responses when encountering intelligence. http://moderndescartes.blogspot.com/2011/07/turn-other-cheek.html

brilee 12 Jul 2012 18:42 UTC
11 points
in reply to: A1987dM’s comment on: What Is Signaling, Really?
I am also a really fast speed-reader, and my mind tends to ignore these sorts of words.

I remember one time I opened a fortune cookie, glanced at the slip, laughed, and repeated it to my friend, with perfect grammar. He grabbed the slip, actually read the slip (which apparently had had horrible grammar mistakes), and demanded to know how I had managed to read the slip while unintentionally correcting all the grammar mistakes in it.

brilee 6 Jul 2012 4:23 UTC
11 points
on: Negative and Positive Selection
The concepts of positive and negative selection are not quite well defined in your essay, I think.

Imagine that you have one test, with a gaussian distribution of outcomes. Let’s arbitrarily set a threshold, and if people are above this threshold, they have passed this test. Call the sets of passing A and not passing ~A

Would you call this a positive or negative selection? It is neither, in my opinion.

Now, imagine you have two tests, A and B.

A positive test is one where A U B are selected. A negative test is one where ~(~A ^ ~B) are selected.

In other words—the operative difference between positive and negative selection is OR vs. AND.

brilee 16 Mar 2012 4:24 UTC
11 points
on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 10
An important hint: “Obliviation cannot be detected by any known means, but only a Professor could have cast that spell upon a student without alarm from the Hogwarts wards.”

This means no Lucius, no Sirius, no Lupin, etc.

brilee 28 Nov 2011 5:55 UTC
11 points
in reply to: DanielLC’s comment on: Log-odds (or logits)
What you’ve described is in fact, exactly the same thing as log-odds—they’re simply separated by a logarithm/exponentiation. Thus, all the multiplications you describe are the counterpart of the additions I describe. I agree, we could work with odds ratio, without taking the logarithm—but using logarithms has the benefit of linearizing the probability space. The distance between 1 L% and 5 L% is the same as the distance between 10 L% and 14 L%, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at 2.72:1 and 150:1 versus 22,000:1 and 1,200,000:1.

brilee 5 Jul 2012 23:24 UTC
10 points
on: On the Care and Feeding of Young Rationalists—Revisited[Draft] [Request for Feedback]
It would seem to me that parenting is one of those fields of knowledge where you don’t know what you don’t know until you’ve actually had kids yourself. If you find this hard to believe, then imagine how seriously you’d take your younger self if ey were to talk about how to be in a good relationship, before having had a significant other.

So, while I generally dislike discouraging people who are enthusiastic about getting something done, I would like to suggest that perhaps you are not the right person to write this post (or not yet). This is based on my reading of the rubber-ducking sentence as meaning that you have not yet had kids.

brilee 21 Aug 2012 23:54 UTC
9 points
on: [LINK] Strong AI Startup Raises $15M
Would be nice to have details of their algorithmic approach, instead of some nebulous buzzword like ‘Recursive Cortical Network’. I suppose it does hint somewhat at neural networks...

Their website also seems to emphasize the wrong thing—emphasizing the potential of visual processing algorithms and such. I would be more worried about whether their team is smart/visionary/revolutionary enough to make significant headway on such a difficult problem. Because they’re emphasizing the ‘wrong’ things, it sets off my ‘Solyndra’ alarms.