Buck

• Buck 25 Feb 2019 1:12 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Wei_Dai's comment on: “Other peo­ple are wrong” vs “I am right”

  I’m con­fused about what point you’re mak­ing with the bike thief ex­am­ple. I’m read­ing through that post and its com­ments to see if I can un­der­stand your post bet­ter with that as back­ground con­text, but you might want to clar­ify that part of the post (with a reader who doesn’t have that con­text in mind).

  Can you clar­ify what is un­clear about it?

“Other peo­ple are wrong” vs “I am right”

• Buck 10 Nov 2018 4:40 UTC

  25 points

  on: Cur­rent AI Safety Roles for Soft­ware Engineers

  I be­lieve they would like to hire sev­eral en­g­ineers in the next few years.

  We would like to hire many more than sev­eral en­g­ineers—we want to hire as many peo­ple as en­g­ineers as pos­si­ble; this would be dozens if we could, but it’s hard to hire, so we’ll more likely end up hiring more like ten over the next year.

  I think that MIRI en­g­ineer­ing is a re­ally high im­pact op­por­tu­nity, and I think it’s definitely worth the time for EA com­puter sci­ence peo­ple to ap­ply or email me (buck@in­tel­li­gence.org).

• Buck 21 Apr 2018 1:04 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Buck's comment on: Weird ques­tion: could we see dis­tant aliens?

  My main con­cern with this is the same as the prob­lem listed on Wei Dai’s an­swer: whether a star near us is likely to block out this light. The sun is about 10^9m across. A star that’s 10 thou­sand light years away (this is 10% of the di­ame­ter of the Milky Way) oc­cu­pies about (1e9m /​ (10000 lightyears * 2 * pi))**2 = 10^-24 of the night sky. A galaxy that’s 20 billion light years away oc­cu­pies some­thing like (100000 lightyears /​ 20 billion lightyears) ** 2 ~= 2.5e-11. So galax­ies oc­cupy more space than stars. So it would be weird if in­di­vi­d­ual stars blocked out a whole galaxy.

• Buck 21 Apr 2018 1:04 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Buck's comment on: Weird ques­tion: could we see dis­tant aliens?

  Another piece of idea: If you’re ex­tremely techno-op­ti­mistic, then I think it would be bet­ter to emit light at weird wave­lengths than to just emit a lot of light. Eg emit­ting light at two wave­lengths with ra­tio pi or some­thing. This seems much more un­mis­tak­ably in­tel­li­gence-caused than an ex­tremely bright light.

• Buck 20 Apr 2018 18:50 UTC

  15 points

  on: Weird ques­tion: could we see dis­tant aliens?

  My first idea is to make two re­ally big black holes and then make them merge. We ob­served grav­i­ta­tional waves from two black holes with so­lar masses of around 25 so­lar masses each lo­cated 1.8 billion light years away. Pre­sum­ably this force de­creases as an in­verse square times ex­po­nen­tial de­cay; ig­nor­ing the ex­po­nen­tial de­cay this sug­gests to me that we need 100 times as much mass to be as promi­nent from 18 billion light years. A galaxy mass is around 10^12 so­lar masses. So if we spent 2500 so­lar masses on this each year, it would be at least as promi­nent as the grav­i­ta­tional wave that we de­tected, and we could do this a billion times with a galaxy. To be safe, I’d 10x the strength of the waves, so that we could do it 100 mil­lion times with a galaxy.

  Cur­rently our in­stru­ments aren’t sen­si­tive enough to de­tect which galaxy was emit­ting these bizarrely strong grav­i­ta­tional waves. So I’d com­bine this with Wei Dai’s sug­ges­tion of mak­ing an ex­tremely bright bea­con us­ing the ac­cre­tion disks re­sult­ing from the cre­ation of these black holes.