Drahflow

Karma: 219

Drahflow 17 Jul 2009 0:50 UTC
23 points
on: Absolute denial for atheists
You are not living as much on the edge as you should optimally.

I estimate that most LW Readers are relatively young (i.e. < 40y old). The repair mechanism of your bodies can deal with a lot more than they currently have to handle. To increase your effectiveness multiple routes exist:
- move faster, run instead of walk
- employ polyphasic sleep
- take more stimulants

Drahflow 14 Jul 2014 17:38 UTC
13 points
on: Bragging Thread, July 2014
I usually take the minutes of the German Pirate Party assemblies. It is non-trivial to transcribe two days of speach alone (and I don’t know steno). A better solution is a collaborative editor and multiple people typing while listening to the audio with increasing delay, i.e. one person gets life audio, the next one 20 seconds delay, etc… There is EtherPad, but the web client cannot really handle the 250kB files a full day transcript needs, also two of the persons interested in taking minutes (me included) strongly prefer VIm over a glorified textfield.

Hence: On the 23rd of June I downloaded the VIm source and started implementing collaborative editing. On the 28th and 29th three people used it for hours without major problems (except I initially started the server in a gdb to get a backtrace in case of a crash and the gdb unhelpfully stopped it on the first SIGPIPE—but that was not the fault of my software).

To give you an idea of the complexity of collaborative editing, let me quote Joseph Gentle from http://sharejs.org: “I am an ex Google Wave engineer. Wave took 2 years to write and if we rewrote it today, it would take almost as long to write a second time.” It took me 5 days (and I had a full-day meeting on one of them) to deliver >80% of the goodness. Alone.

Drahflow 25 Mar 2010 10:04 UTC
13 points
on: The “show, don’t tell” nature of argument
- tl;dr: It takes too long

All communication takes time. We should minimize the time necessary to communicate our arguments. As a speaker (or writer for that matter), I cannot know which parts of my argument will be obvious to the listener and which ones won’t.

“It can be argued”/”There is evidence for” should be used whenever the speaker assumes further detailed arguments are unnecessary but would be able to supply further details if requested without undue delays. By stochastically testing whether the speaker actually can supply correct arguments/evidence if requested, we can quickly build trust—saving us a lot of time during later communication with said speaker.

In this way, these phrases could not be used for bluffing disagreeing listeners, because they would simple request more details.

Drahflow 18 Jan 2010 13:46 UTC
13 points
on: Advancing Certainty
You propose to ignore the “odd” errors humans sometimes make while calculating a probability for some event. However, errors do occur, even when judging the very first case. And they (at least some of them) occur randomly. When you believe you have correctly calculated the probability, you just might have made an error anywhere in the calculation.

If you keep around the “socially accepted” levels of confidence, those errors average out pretty fast, but if you make only one error in 10^5 calculations, you should not assign probabilities smaller than 1 / 10^5. Otherwise a bet 10000 to 1 between you and me (a fair game from your perspective) will give me an expected value larger than 0 due to the errors in your thoughts you could possibly make.

This is another advantage an AI might have over humans, if the hardware is good enough, probability assignments below 10^-5 might actually be reasonable.

Drahflow 24 Mar 2012 21:44 UTC
12 points
on: Is community-collaborative article production possible?
There should be a step 9, where every potential author is sent the final article and has the option of refusing formal authorship (if she doesn’t agree with the final article). Convention in academic literature is that each author individually endorses all claims made in an article, hence this final check.

Drahflow 15 Jul 2009 1:15 UTC
12 points
on: Good Quality Heuristics
Decisions with an utility equivalent of less than 0.50$ should be made after at most 10 seconds, by coin flip if necessary.

The time is more valuable.

Drahflow 14 Jun 2009 17:59 UTC
10 points
in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: Why safety is not safe
Technological advance is strongly dependent on “mass production for the planetary civilization”, because otherwise most people are busy doing agriculture and don’t have time to become PhDs.

Drahflow 6 Jan 2016 14:18 UTC
8 points
on: Your transhuman copy is of questionable value to your meat self.

To disagree with this statement is to say that a scanned living brain, cloned, remade and started will contain the exact same consciousness, not similar, the exact same thing itself, that simultaneously exists in the still-living original. If consciousness has an anatomical location, and therefore is tied to matter, then it would follow that this matter here is the exact matter as that separate matter there. This is an absurd proposition.

You conclude that consciousness in your scenario cannot have 1 location(s).

If consciousness does not have an anatomical / physical location then it is the stuff of magic and woo.

You conclude that consciousness in your scenario cannot have 0 locations.

However, there are more numbers than those two.

The closest parallel I see to your scenario is a program run on two computers for redundancy (like it is sometimes done in safety-critical systems). It is indeed the same program in the same state but in 2 locations.

The two consciousnesses will diverge if given different input data streams, but they are (at least initially) similar. Given that the state of your brain tomorrow will be different from the state of if today, why do you care about the wellbeing of that human, who is not identical to now-you? Assuming that you care about your tomorrow, why does it make a difference if that human is separated from you by time and not by space (as in your scenario)?

Drahflow 10 Feb 2016 1:34 UTC
7 points
on: The Fable of the Burning Branch
I, for one, like my moral assumptions and cached thoughts challenged regularly. This works well with repugnant conclusions. Hence I upvoted this post (to −21).

I find two interesting questions here:
1. How to reconcile opposing interests in subgroups of a population of entities whose interests we would like to include into our utility function. An obvious answer is facilitating trade between all interested to increase utility. But: How do we react to subgroups whose utility function values trade itself negatively?
2. Given that mate selection is a huge driver of evolution, I wonder if there is actually a non-cultural, i.e. genetic, component to the aversion (which I feel) against providing everyone with sexual encounters / the ability to create genetic offspring / raise children. And I’d also be interested in hearing where other people feel the “immoral” line...

Drahflow 10 Sep 2010 17:23 UTC
7 points
in reply to: Baughn’s comment on: Memetic Hazards in Videogames
Video game authors probably put a lot of effort into optimizing video games for human pleasure.

Workplace design, User Interfaces etc., they could all be improved if more ideas were copied from video games.

Do-it-yourself-science Wiki

Drahflow22 Jun 2011 10:25 UTC

6 points

1 comment1 min readLW link

Drahflow 3 Sep 2010 10:30 UTC
6 points
in reply to: RobinZ’s comment on: Rationality quotes: September 2010
But some thoughts are both so complex and so irrelevant that a correct analysis of the thought would cost more than an infrequent error about thoughts of this class (costs of necessary meta-analysis included).

Drahflow 2 Aug 2015 20:34 UTC
5 points
on: Ideological Turing Test Domains
- Best way to fix climate change: “Renewables / Nuclear”
- Secret Services are necessary to fight terrorism / Secret Services must be abolished
- GPL / BSD-Licences

Drahflow 21 Jul 2009 23:30 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Shut Up And Guess
Easy way out: Flip a coin for each answer.

Obviously the author of the test cannot possibly know how your coin falls, so you get a true probabilistic chance for each answer.

This is basically the same idea as for randomized quicksort: To guard against malicious data, make your algorithm unpredictable.

Drahflow 3 Jun 2015 9:08 UTC
4 points
in reply to: ahbwramc’s comment on: Stupid Questions June 2015
- Install a smoke detector
- Do martial arts training until you get the falling more or less right. While this might be helpful against muggers the main benefit is the reduced probability of injury in various unfortunate situation.

Drahflow 11 Jan 2015 14:52 UTC
4 points
on: 2015 Repository Reruns—Boring Advice Repository
Install a smoke detector (and reduce mortality by 0.3% if I’m reading the statistics right—not to talk of the property damages prevented).

Drahflow 24 Mar 2012 17:23 UTC
4 points
on: SotW: Check Consequentialism
So… how would I design an exercise to teach Checking Consequentialism?

Divide the group into pairs. One is the decider, the other is the environment. Let them play some game repeatedly, prisoners dilemma might be appropriate, but maybe it should be a little bit more complex. The algorithm of the environment is predetermined by the teacher and known to both of the players.

The decider tries to maximize utilitiy over the repeated rounds, the environment tries to minimise the winnigs of the decider, by using social interaction between the evaluated game rounds, e.g. by trying to invoke all the fancy fallacies you outlined in the post or convincing the decider that the environment algorithm actually results in a different decision. By incorporating randomness into the environment algorithm, this might even be used to train consequentialism under uncertainty.

Drahflow 15 Sep 2010 16:38 UTC
4 points
in reply to: katydee’s comment on: Intelligence Amplification Open Thread
It appears slow. In particular I seem to think more things per time, sometimes noticing significant delays between thought and action. However according to the scores, performance improvement is only marginal (but existent). The effect wears off after 10 to 15 minutes according to my experience.

I usually play Quake 3 (just in case anybody want’s to compare effects between games).

Drahflow 15 Sep 2010 12:53 UTC
4 points
in reply to: xamdam’s comment on: Intelligence Amplification Open Thread
Same goes for videos (Yay action movies at 2x).

Bonus points (for fun only): Play action games afterwards. Time sensation is a weird thing.

Drahflow 14 Jan 2010 9:56 UTC
4 points
in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: Self control may be contagious
I can recommend “The Sarah Connor Chronicles” for this purpose. It is longer than a single movie and includes quite a lot of self-controlled characters (above all Cameron of course).

When I saw the series (essentially in one go), the effect described in the study lasted for approximately 2 days.

Drahflow

Do-it-your­self-sci­ence Wiki

Do-it-yourself-science Wiki