Rank: #10 out of 4859 in peer accuracy at Metaculus for the time period of 2016-2020.
ChristianKl
Karma: 37,042
To the extend that it’s true that light should match the natural environment, a logical conclusion would be that light should differ depending on the time of day. We do have Philips Hue lands that allow quite a bit of configuration so that it’s possible to change the color.
Do you have a reason to believe that time-independent lighting is better?
I doubt IP geo-blocking is strong enough to deal with weapon export control legislation.
Not everyone in the administration has the same agenda.
There are likely people who want export controls on all models and people who wants them on no models and putting on on Anthropics model was the easiest to get consensus for at this point in time.
That does not mean that OpenAI is safe in the future as those people who want more export controls can leverage the win.
However, scientific epistemology has mostly been described informally—e.g. by Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, etc.
Isn’t both a key aspect of Kuhn and Feyerabend that there’s not one scientific epistemology but that different fields use different epistemology and that this is fine?
I think it’s pretty bad idea to call your idea of epistemology “scientific epistomology” as it suggests there a single one used more broadly.
When we face difficulties in defining a concept like degrees of truth, a useful question is “what do we want to use the concept for?” One answer is that traders whose models are more true should get more influence over our actions (given some mechanism for hooking up a logical inductor’s outputs to actions, which I’ll leave unspecified here).
This seems to ignore that there are many true models that are useless. Generally, in science you need not only to say something true but also something that’s seen as valuable by the readers of the journal in which you want to publish. While a findings that both novel and surprising is more likely to be valuable to readers, I don’t think it’s sufficient.
When Turing was written there were a lot of new discoveries in physics, while today we think that we understand physics well enough to rule out forces unknown forces through which telepathy might work. (and scorn those people who think it might work through some crazy quantum entanglement)
After experimenting with him for eight days the CIA concluded
That seems like a strange reading of what happened. The CIA gave the former laser physicist and later paranormal researcher Russell Targ (the person who coined the phrase “remote viewing”) money to run a study on Uri Geller and Russel Targ concluded in his report on the study that Uri Geller demonstrated his abilities.
This does not mean that the CIA overall believed that Uri Geller had abilities.
You could just as well say that Nature concluded that Uri Geller has abilities given that Targ published in it as well a year later. The fact that the CIA let Targ publish the experiment they funded in a journal suggests to me that they didn’t thought it was useful enough to classify the experiments.
I will add in passing that the CIA requires a polygraph screening for all employees until today despite all the research showing it to be ineffective at telling the truth from lies[1]
That’s not a claim that’s true. Polygraph screening isn’t perfect at telling truth from lies but it’s better than chance. Just because they are used does not automatically mean that the people who use them are overvaluing it. They might very well be overvaluing the results of the test, but that’s not something that’s shown.
The professional lobbyists have those relationships, but they are absolutely for sale; going in on your own carries risk, but if you have the money and the plan, hiring a firm isn’t that big of a hurdle.
Your above example suggests that you would not need to hire a firm and can just offer the money directly. I would expect that you do either need to hire a firm or first just do a personal donation and have a conversation to build up a relationship before a bigger support for a specific objective is an available move.
I’m doubtful that this is how it works. I think lobbying is much more about having relationships than your approach suggests.
Otherwise, what evidence do you have for things working the way you propose?
SpaceX is under a legal regime where it’s forbidden to export rocket technology without permission. I would expect that the US government would not want give the permission to escape it’s cone of influence.
I think a rational strategy is one that’s robust and will work in the constraints you are operating under instead of one that works in the ivory tower.
The fact that it did not provide convincing evidence in this case is a clue for it not being extremely strong evidence given how evidence gets evaluated in dreams.
But it’s not evidence with a very high information content. The lucid dreaming literature does list which things actually provide high evidence.
What does this have to do with rationalist skills? It seems about running dream checks in a way that doesn’t really work. You want something like a clock, where a physical clock keeps it’s own state in a way that clocks in dreams don’t.
I don’t think so in this context. There’s a huge difference between appeal to “I don’t like X” and providing rational arguments.
There are plenty of arguments that might be made in an attempt to convince beyond just trying to shut off conversation with social pressure.
It’s a task for which there’s good training data. I think it’s plausible that one way to train AGI is to try to train for as many independent tasks with good training data you can think of and hope that it at least partly generalizes.
On LessWrong, if you want to say that something is negative, you should provide a rational argument for why you think something is negative, if you want another person to listen.
I do want a LessWrong that’s primarily about rational argumentation, where we might agree what’s rational but where we strive to convince each other with rational arguments.
I gave her safewords up front
You say this phrase multiple times. I think it would be great if you would be more explicit about the exact mechanics you go through when doing that.
I’m not exactly sure I know what you mean with “fixing a bunch of cases exhaustively” in the current state of medicine. It sounds similar to me like “cure a bunch of cancers exhausively”. It seems quite far outside of what mainstream medicine is equipped to do.
Yeah I didn’t want to imply all chronic pain is psychosomatic
I don’t think that’s a useful way to look at it. Pain arises as a complex interaction between the body and the mind. The pain that patients have at the dentist certainly isn’t psychosomatic, that doesn’t mean that you can shut it off psychologically if you want to do that. It’s just pain.
On the other side, you do need a sense of safety to get acetylcholine release in fascia. Without that you won’t get certain bodily tension released.
If someone has sensor motor amnesia downstream from suppressing an emotion like anger, just shutting of the pain might not solve the psychosomatic issue at it’s base level.
Read jimmy’s sequence. Stopping pain is something that the brain can easily do. It’s just not something the brain usually does because pain is a valuable signal.
If you take RSI, it’s common that people who suffer from it have tight fascia around their nerves that prevent the nerves from moving in their nerve sheets unimpeded. Doing nerve sliding exercises helps address that problem, I wouldn’t go for convincing the brain to just ignore the signal as the first order of business.
some people are just really good at this suggestion business and we just need to teach them how to stop lying and how to scale their work in order to heal chronic pain at scale
There are plenty of hypnotists who are good at what they do and while some hypnotists do lie, there are many that don’t. There are a lot of institutional reasons why hypnosis doesn’t scale in the current system for pain expect for dentists who offer it as an additional services for pain free dentistry instead of pain killers.
Implementing prediction-based medicine would be helpful to get this to scale.
Duels are a way to punish your enemies that requires high personal sacrifice. I think we have plenty of ways in today’s society where a person can take actions to be annoying to people they dislike. Some of them legal others like squatting aren’t legal but hard to prosecute and probably less risky then asking someone to a duel to the death.
The main thing that our society does, is that it doesn’t make it a honorable course of action to go to extreme length to punish your enemies, the power to punish is still there.