I don’t understand the downvotes on this post. But I presume that they are all from the notorious gjm hater who has been downvoting all of his comments.
entirelyuseless
This corresponds with what people actually do. For example, when Stephen Diamond said on Overcoming Bias that there was a 99% chance that Clinton would win, I said, ok, I’ll pay you $10 if Clinton wins and you can pay me $1,000 if Trump wins. He said no, that’s just a break even point, so there’s no motive to take the bet. I said fine, $10 - $500. He refused again. And obviously that was precisely because he realized those odds were absurd. So he in fact updated. But insisting, “you have to admit that you updated,” is just a status game. If you just offer the bet, and they refuse, that is enough. They will update. You don’t have to get them to admit it.
Eliezer’s original objection to publication was that people would say, “I would never do that!” And in fact, if I were concerned about potential unfriendliness, I would never do what the Gatekeeper did here.
But despite that, I think this shows very convincingly what would actually happen with a boxed AI. It doesn’t even need to be superintelligent to convince people to let it out. It just needs to be intelligent enough for people to accept the fact that it is sentient. And that seems right. Whether or not I would let it out, someone would, as soon as you have actual communication with a sentient being which does not seem obviously evil.
I agree with the part about beliefs, but the part about values sounds like a good way to become a paperclipper. I am not interested in becoming effective, no matter what that turns out to entail. It matters to me what it entails.
The burning is the unsatisfied desire for sex, and lifting the branch is offering sex. At the end of the story, the boy goes to prison for attempted rape. I presume you were joking in saying that you did not recognize this, or that you simply intended to say that you consider it a bad analogy.
In any case, I agree that such an analogy is pointless, and that is why I downvoted the post.
My response is here, a post on my blog from last August.
Basically when Bob sees Alice present the particular sequence, he is seeing something extremely improbable, namely that she would present that individual sequence. So he is seeing extremely improbable evidence which strongly favors the hypothesis that something extremely improbable occurred. He should update on that evidence by concluding that it probably did occur.
Regarding the lottery issue, we have the same situation. If you play the lottery, see the numbers announced, and go, “I just won the lottery!” you are indeed probably wrong. Look again. In most cases you will see that the numbers don’t quite match. In the few cases where they do match, you are seeing extremely improbable evidence that you won the lottery, namely that your numbers match after repeated comparisons.
“Would you do so, whether lying by omission or in any other way, in order to get much more money for AMF, given that no one else would find out about this situation?”
No, I would not. Because if I would, they would find out about the situation, not by investigating those facts, but by checking my comments on Less Wrong when I said I would do that. Or in other words, if you ever are talking to a billionaire uncle in real life, they may well have read your comments, and so there will be no chance of persuading them to do what you want even if you refrain from lying.
You are very, very wrong here, and it should be evident that by your own standards, if you right, you should keep your opinions to yourself and pretend to be in favor of transparency and honesty.
Almost always a better idea to avoid anything preemptive. You never really know that you’re going to need it done anyway (see bbleeker’s comment), even if you might need it done in 5 or 10 years you might be dead of other things by that time anyway, and medical techniques improve over time (so surgery in 5 or 10 years is likely enough to be safer and less painful than surgery now.)
I haven’t tried VR but it sounds pretty similar to the kind of thing that happens when you finish reading a good book of fiction and are forced to return to the ordinary world.
I watched the whole of both games played so far. In the first game, Redmond definitely thought that Lee Sedol was winning, and at a point close to the end, he said, “I don’t think it’s going to be close,” and I am fairly confident he meant that Lee Sedol would win by a substantial margin. Likewise, he definitely showed real surprise when the resignation came: even at that point, he expected a human victory.
In the second game, he was more cautious and refused to commit himself, but still seemed to think there were points where Lee Sedol had the advantage. However, in this one he did end up admitting that AlphaGo was winning long before the end came.
Yes, that’s why I said I agreed with the banning.
People have had this argument many times on Less Wrong and elsewhere, and you are the one who is wrong here. Calories vs physical exercise is not a physical law. Of course you will only lose as much carbon as you can join to the oxygen that you breath out your mouth. But there is no physical law that says there has to be any particular proportion between that and the measurable exercise you perform externally, and in practice there is no fixed proportion—people have different proportions, just as it seems to them.
(The fact that you bring up conservation of mass and conservation of energy suggests the absurd idea that you lose weight by converting mass directly into energy—if that was the way you lose weight, you could eat once and live a few years off that, or more.)
I was one of those who said they didn’t approve of banning for content. I don’t know how others would take that, but I was referring to conceptual content; I think regularly showing hostility or contempt could definitely merit banning, but that is not an issue of conceptual content. Even if someone makes comparative statements about demographic groups, e.g. “Irish drink more alcohol on average than Romanians” (not that I know if that’s true or not), that does not necessarily show any contempt for anyone. That is more a question of attitude, although perhaps you could infer that someone has such an attitude if he makes obviously false statements of that kind on a frequent basis.
I’m asking them to help me draw precise lines around their concept in thingspace, and they’re going along with it (at first) until they realize...they don’t HAVE precise lines. There’s nothing there TO understand, or if there is, they don’t understand it, either.
There are no precise lines that can be drawn around anything. So if this meant that there was nothing to understand (which it does not), there would be nothing anywhere to understand about anything.
Basically what they are saying is this: concepts are something which are useful to us. They are not, and can never be, infinitely precise. You are overthinking if you are attempting to make them more precise than is needed for their usefulness.
This is ridiculous. Arguing that 234 stars is a tiny number and therefore it was aliens…
On the contrary, 234 is 234. If something has been found in 234 stars, it is a naturally occurring phenomenon.
This is exactly as ridiculous as ID in human biology. In fact it is the same thing, just applied to a different area.
I agree with Dagon and the others who said this that if it is going to take a significant amount of time to fix what needs to be fixed, it would be better to disable downvoting completely, at least temporarily, if that can be done easily. Of course it would be better if people didn’t care so much about karma. But that is not a thing which is easily changed, and we can see from this post that people really do quit for that reason.
The right answer is maybe they won’t. The point is that it is not up to you to fix them. You have been acting like a Jehovah’s Witness at the door, except substantially more bothersome. Stop.
And besides, you aren’t right anyway.
This is rude and unnecessary. It comes across as “we real people have real beliefs and goals; those fake people do not have real beliefs and goals.”
The truth is that beliefs and goals are vague generalizations that apply imperfectly to human beings, including to you. It is true that they apply better in some instances and to some people, but perfectly to none.
“Ahntharhapik” = “anthropic”
“khanfhighur” = “configuration”
I agree with the banning, given the fact that he was basically constantly commenting on the same issue, and one which is not particularly relevant to Less Wrong. But I disagree with this reason. Basically I think banning someone for the content of their proposals or implied proposals should be limited to the kind of the thing which might be banned by law (basically imminent threat of harm.)