Dre

• Dre 22 Jan 2014 5:14 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: KnaveOfAllTrades’s comment on: Tell Culture

  I’m coming to this party rather late, but I’d like to acknowledge that I appreciated this exchange more than just by upvoting it. Seeing in depth explanations of other people’s emotions seems like the only way to counter Typical Mind Fallacy, but is also really hard to come by. So thanks for a very levelheaded discussion.

• Dre 9 Sep 2013 4:52 UTC

  0 points

  on: Course se­lec­tion based on instructor

  Going off of what others have said, I’ll add another reason people might satisfice with teachers.

  In my experience, people agree much more about which teachers are bad than about which are good. Many of my favorite (in the sense that I learned a lot easily) teachers were disliked by other people, but almost all of those I thought were bad were widely thought of as bad. If you’re not as interested in serious learning this might be less important.

  So avoiding bad teachers requires a relatively small amount of information, but finding a teacher that is not just good, but good for you requires a much larger amount. So people reasonably only do the first part.

  What links here?

  • Satis­fic­ing ver­sus op­ti­miz­ing in in­struc­tor selection by VipulNaik (9 Sep 2013 19:43 UTC; 7 points)

• Dre 14 Aug 2013 17:54 UTC

  10 points

  on: [LINK] Hyper­loop offi­cially an­nounced — pre­dic­tions, any­one?

  I thought this was an interesting critical take. Portions are certainly mind-killing, eg you can completely ignore everything he says about rich entrepreneurs, but overall it seemed sound. Especially the proving-too-much argument; the projections involve doing multiple revolutionary things, each of which would be a significant breakthroughs on its own. The fact that Musk isn’t putting money into doing any of those suggests it would not be as easy/​cheap as predicted (not just in a “add a factor of 5” way, but in a “the current predictions are meaningless” way).

  Also, the fact he’s proposing it for California seems strange. There are places with cheaper, flatter land where you could do a proof of concept before moving into a politically complicated, expensive, earthquake-prone state like California. I’ve seen Texas (Houston-Dallas-San Antonio) and Alberta (Edmonton-Calgary) proposed, both of which sound like much better locations.

• Dre 9 Aug 2013 2:26 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: How to Mea­sure Anything

  If there are generally decreasing returns to measurement of a single variable, I think this is more what we would expect see. If you’ve already put effort into measurement of a given variable it will have lower information value on the margin. If you add in enough costs for switching measurements, then even the optimal strategy might spend a serious amount of time/​effort pursuing lower value measurements.

  Further, if they hadn’t even thought of some measurements they couldn’t have pursued them, so they wouldn’t have suffered any declining returns.

  I don’t think this is the primary reason, but may contribute, especially in conjunction with reasons from sibling comments.

• Dre 1 Aug 2013 4:26 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Rukifellth’s comment on: More “Stupid” Questions

  I don’t know if this is exactly what you’re looking for, but the only way I’ve found to make philosophy of identity meaningful is to interpret it as about values. In this reading questions of personal identity are what you do/​should value as “yourself”.

  Clearly you-in-this-moment is yourself. Do you value you-in-ten-minutes the same as yourself-now? ten years? simulations?, etc. Then Open Individualism (based on my cursory googling) would say we should value everyone (at all times?) identically as ourselves. Then it’s clearly descriptively false, and, at least to me, seems highly unlikely to be any sort of “true values”, so it’s false.

• Dre 10 Jul 2013 21:59 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: rocurley’s comment on: Es­ti­mat­ing the kol­mogorov com­plex­ity of the known laws of physics?

  First not: I’m not disagreeing with you so much as just giving more information.

  This might buy you a few bits (and lots of high energy physics is done this way, with powers of electronvolts the only units here). But there will still be free variables that need to be set. Wikipedia claims (with a citation to this John Baez post) that there are 26 fundamental dimensionless physical constants. These, as far as we know right now, have to be hard coded in somewhere, maybe in units, maybe in equations, but somewhere.

• Dre 9 May 2013 0:59 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: Locaha’s comment on: Googling is the first step. Con­sider adding schol­arly searches to your ar­se­nal.

  Professionals read the Methods section.

  Ok, but I am not a professional in the vast majority of fields I want to find studies in. I would go so far as to say I’m a dilettante in many of them.

• Dre 7 Mar 2013 17:24 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Error’s comment on: Don’t Get Offended

  My strategy in situations like that is to try to get rid of all respect for the person. If to be offended you have to care, at least on some level, about what the person thinks then demoting them from “agent” to “complicated part of the environment” should reduce your reaction to them. You don’t get offended when your computer gives you weird error messages.

  Now this itself would probably be offensive to the person (just about the ultimate in thinking of them as low status), so it might not work as well when you have to interact with then often enough for them to notice. But especially for infrequent interactions and one time interactions I find this to be a good way to get through potentially offensive situations.

• Dre 22 Feb 2013 17:21 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: handoflixue’s comment on: Why Poli­tics are Im­por­tant to Less Wrong...

  The problem is that we have to guarantee that the AI doesn’t do something really bad while trying to stop these problems; what if it decides it really needs more resources suddenly, or needs to spy on everyone, even briefly? And it seems (to me at least) that stopping it from having bad side effects is pretty close, if not equivalent to, Strong Friendliness.

• Dre 19 Jan 2013 6:59 UTC

  5 points

  on: Ban­ish the Clippy-cre­at­ing Bias De­mon!

  I worry that this would bias the kind of policy responses we want. I obviously don’t have a study or anything, but it seems that the framing of the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism have encouraged too much violence. Which sounds like a better way to fight the War on Terror, negotiating in complicated local tribal politics or going in and killing some terrorists? Which is actually a better policy?

  I don’t know exactly how this would play out in a case where no violence makes sense (like the Cardiovascular Vampire). Maybe increased research as part of a “war effort” would work. But it seems to me that this framing would encourage simple and immediate solutions, which would be a serious drawback.

• Dre 22 Dec 2012 22:51 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: ChrisHallquist’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 18, chap­ter 87

  This feels like reading too much into it, but is

  and each time the inner light pulsated, the assembly made a vroop-vroop-vroop sound that sounded oddly distant, muffled like it was coming from behind four solid walls, even though the spinning-conical-section thingy was only a meter or two away.

  supposed to be something about the fourth wall?

• Dre 19 Dec 2012 4:01 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: That Thing That Happened

  How about a news show?. Best watched without sound.

• Dre 16 Dec 2012 23:00 UTC

  3 points

  on: Ask LW: ω-self-aware systems

  I think you need to start by cashing out “understand” better. Certainly no physical system can simulate itself with full resolution. But there are all sorts of things we can’t simulate like this. Understanding (as I would say its more commonly used) usually involves finding out which parts of the system are “important” to whatever function you’re concerned with. For example, we don’t have to simulate every particle in a gas because we have gas laws. And I think most people would say that gas laws show more understanding of thermodynamics than whatever you would get out of a complete simulation anyway.

  Now the question is whether the brain actually does have any “laws” like this. IIRC, this is a relatively open question (though I do not follow neuroscience very closely) and in principle it could go either way.

  I guess I don’t really understand what the purpose of the argument is. Unless we can prove things about this stack of brains, what does it gets us? And how far “down” the evolutionary ladder does this argument work? Are cats omega-self-aware? Computing clusters?

• Dre 4 Nov 2012 14:39 UTC

  30 points

  on: 2012 Less Wrong Cen­sus/​Survey

  Took most of it. I pressed enter accidentally after the charity questions. I would like to fill out the remainder. Is there a way I can do that without messing up the data?

• Dre 10 Sep 2012 19:06 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: DanArmak’s comment on: How to deal with some­one in a LessWrong meet­ing be­ing creepy

  Though I don’t think its that simple because both sides are claiming that the other side is not reporting how they truly feel. One side claims that people are calling things creepy semi-arbitrarily to raise their own status, and the other claims that people are intentionally refusing to recognize creepy behavior as creepy so they don’t have to stop it (or being slightly more charitable, so they don’t take a status hit for being creepy).

• Dre 8 Apr 2012 6:23 UTC

  −4 points

  in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Peter Singer and Tyler Cowen transcript

  But all we want is an ordering of choices, and affine transformations (with a positive multiplicative constant) are order preserving.

• Dre 4 Sep 2011 19:40 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Polyhacking

  I don’t think this is the right place to report this, but I don’t know where the right place is, and this is closest. In the title of the page for comments for the deleted account (eg) the name of the poster has not been redacted.

• Dre 6 Nov 2010 21:18 UTC

  −1 points

  in reply to: MichaelGR’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes: Novem­ber 2010

  Wouldn’t this be a problem for tit for tat players going up against other tit for tat players (but not knowing the strategy of their opponent)?

• Dre 5 Oct 2010 3:31 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Jordan’s comment on: The Ir­ra­tional­ity Game

  In the sense that there are multiple equilibriums or that there is no equilibrium for reflection?

• Dre 21 Aug 2010 21:43 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: simplicio’s comment on: Con­scious­ness of simu­la­tions & up­loads: a reductio

  Not necessarily. See Chlamer’s reply to Hilary Putnam who asserted something similar, especially section 6. Basically, if we require that all of the “internal” structure of the computation be the same in the isomorphism and make a reasonable assumption about the nature consciousness, all of the matter in the Hubble volume wouldn’t be close to large enough to simulate a (human) consciousness.