The Seven Secular Sermons guy. Long-time ingroup member. Current occupation: applied AI in media. Divorced dad of three in Leipzig, Germany.
chaosmage
Karma: 2,833
I’ve done an extensive search of guided audio tracks on the web and can confirm these seem to be the best ones available in the English language.
To say “I’m busy” is essentially to say “I’d rather do something else”, but doesn’t make the value comparison so explicit. I guess you’re right, so I’ll try that. Thanks.
So, are you saying you’d be more inclined to fund a Rationality Institute?
How about this: An agent with a very powerful tool is indistinguishable from a very powerful agent.
has anyone considered getting a sociopath to work on FAI?
Since mild cases of ASPD are hard to distinguish from mild cases of Asperger’s, and a lot of people with Asperger’s are in programming, that doesn’t seem like an off the wall idea.
Isn’t it much more likely they were brain damaged in a more permanent way? Religious people who use psychoactives tend to openly praise their drugs much like they praise their gods (think soma, peyote, ayahuasca) - middle eastern mystics didn’t do that. And with malnutrition, rampant child abuse and almost no health care, there’s bound to have been enough brain damage around.
We don’t know for certain what it was about the culture surrounding the dawn of cities that made that particular combination of trade, writing, specialisation, hierarchy and religion communicable, when similar cultures from previous false dawns failed to spread. We can trace each of those elements to earlier sources, none of them were original to Ur, so perhaps it was a case of a critical mass achieving a self-sustaining reaction.
I suggest that the decisive ingredient was an explicit, somewhat accurate understanding of how children are conceived, and following from this, a concept of fatherhood.
Many hunter-gatherer societies didn’t have that when we contacted them. They all had figured out it had something to do with childbearing age and menstruation. Some had narrowed it down to the pregnant woman having recently had sex with a man. But you don’t need to know ejaculation inside the vagina is what counts, and that it matters who ejaculates there, unless you’re trying to domesticate mammals.
From my superficial understanding of anthropology, it appears that in hunter-gatherer societies, the men have very little responsibility for the kids. Of course they contribute food and protection, which is commonly shared among the whole group including the kids. They’ll teach the boys the essential skills, but any man will teach any boy the same set of skills; there’s no personal connection and no specialization of labor. As a man in a hunter-gatherer society, you essentially need not worry about the next generation. And we do find that in these societies, the men (as well as the kids) tend to have a lot of spare time between hunts.
I imagine a hunter-gatherer, experimenting with domestication, first realizing he could be a father. That gives him one hell of an evolutionary advantage, and he’s probably not the dumbest member of his group, so he may have good intelligence-related traits that he can now spread more effectively. But I think what’s far more important is that this realization creates a lot of new priorities for him, and for everone he tells about this. Because he’d naturally start to measure his own success by the well-being of his children, much like the success of mothers was measured before. So he starts to invest much more time (both his own and the kid’s) into teaching them skills that mothers can’t teach because they’re busy mothering. He could pass on more knowledge than a hunter-gatherer would, he’d prefer to teach his own kids over others, and boom he invents trades, family businesses, distribution of labor. Now knowledge can accumulate, inventions can be copied and spread, memetic/cultural evolution kicks in. Both the technologies that allow cities, and the refined fighting skills of the nomadic raiders, follow from intensified education.
Education increases expressed IQ. However, it also increases the value of expressed IQ in sexual selection. So I don’t think we’re quite as dumb as we were when civilization began. But I do think you won’t find significant division of labor in any society that doesn’t know about domestication of animals.
So when you ask why people accept the comparatively bad living conditions of early civilization, the answer is simple: they do it for the kids. You don’t do that when you think that being a man, you can’t have any.
The people who excel at Starcraft don’t do it because they follow explicit systems. They do it mostly by practice (duh) and by listening to the advice of people like Day[9].
Day9 is the best-known Starcraft II commenter, with many YouTube videos (here’s a random example) and many millions of views. He occasionally does explain systems (or subsystems really) for playing, but what I think he mostly does right is that
he entertains and engages his audience really well,
he evidently knows what he’s talking about,
he is relentlessly positive and has a good video about that,
he exudes total confidence that luck has almost nothing to do with your results,
he can talk way better than anyone I’ve ever heard talk about rationality and
he is easy to like, and easy to want to be like.
I may be missing something, but I think this is most of what he does so right about teaching what he teaches. Anyway, my point is clear: We don’t need systems, we need a Day[9] of rationality.
AIs may need systems. We aren’t AIs.
To say “We don’t need systems” was hyperbolic and wrong. Thanks for the correction. Otherwise, we agree.
Eliezer Yudkowsky gets hit by a bus. Do you want his unfinished ideas to be in a text file on his cellphone, in a pile of handwritten sheets, or in his head?
Good correction, thanks. Of course we shouldn’t simply maximize replaceability. After all, the most repleaceable person is also the most superfluous.
Replaceability as a virtue
Metaethics is the far younger field. It will need time to come to some widely shared and agreed-upon results.
I think controversy is more closely related to the number of people who feel qualified to participate in discussions. The hard sciences exclude idiots by the very language they use. In softer subjects like sociology, or barely academic ones like politics, anyone can pick up the standard textbooks of the field, bullshit his or her way into a passing grade and then continue to muddy the waters until retirement.
You’re mischaracterizing the quote that your post replies to. EY claims that he is attempting to comprehend morality as a logical, not a physical thing, and he’s trying to convince readers to do the same. You’re evidently thinking of morality as a physical thing, something essentially derived from the observation of brains. You’re restating the position his post responds to, without strengthening it.
My simple hack for increased alertness and improved cognitive functioning: very bright light
Thanks for the data point.
LED prices just haven’t come down enough yet.
I got halogen-buffed incandescents for the price, and because I was afraid fluorescent lights, if packed too close, might destroy each other and release that mercury.
Just my own observation, and I was only comparing the full-on white I got to the bluish light they sell for light therapy. I don’t know about those yellowish fluorescent lights.
What (probably) counts is Photosensitive ganglion cells and those do react more strongly to blue or violet wavelengths.
That’s only true if they’re built to tolerate heat as well as incandescents have to. Do you know they are?
Pruning your social network is the hardest part. How do you exclude someone who’s not valuable enough? When I get excluded, people never tell me; they just ignore my messages and don’t send any of their own. And I’ve done just the same.
But if that was good practice, HR wouldn’t bother to send rejection letters, right?
It is easy with people you have clear reason not to associate with, say a drinking problem. But if the matter is just that my time is limited and I’d rather spend it elsewhere—is there something better than silence?