The general patterns is
Systems in general work poorly or not at all.
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
Which also has lots of examples but needs to be taken not too serious.
Gunnar_Zarncke
Karma: 4,077 (LW), 0 (AF)
Well, can’t disagree with such an abstract approach. Must be true somewhere.
But I do. The world must look like that if you run a fast strategy. From here where I am with a slow strategy in the upper middle of the range where it looks mostly flat and the ends far away and the strategy is mostly to keep it that way.
As usual Scott Alexander explains it much better:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/12/03/book-review-evolutionary-psychopathology/
I tend to agree with this view. I think that is also one of the aspects implied (sic) by the implicit and explicit communication post: The value of maintaining a highly cohesive and committed team may be a higher value (for a military force) than the risk of loss of life—because in a real war many more lives will be lost (at least that is the reasoning of the military I guess).
I don’t think fortnightly will work. That’s why I left that out. Adding a tags rule without tags makes no sense either.
Ask a lesswronger.
That’s a bit difficult if there is no place to ask. I like the posts on LW 2.0 but I miss the open discussions.
I think MIT’s new AlterEgo headset still falls into the category “Devices and Gadgets” of When does technological enhancement feel natural and acceptable? But it’s still a pretty nice step forward.
The device, called AlterEgo, can transcribe words that wearers verbalise internally but do not say out loud, using electrodes attached to the skin.
“Our idea was: could we have a computing platform that’s more internal, that melds human and machine in some ways and that feels like an internal extension of our own cognition?”
An interesting though somewhat bizarre prediction on the difficulty of building AI by Scott Adams in a recent Periscope session of him (paraphrased from memory):
“The perception that building human intelligence seems so difficult results from a perceptual distortion. Namely that human intelligence is something great when in fact we humans do not possess superior rationality. We only think we do. We just bounce around randomly and try to explain that as something awesome after the fact. Building artificial intelligence then is hard because we try to build something that doesn’t exist. On the other hand building e.g. a robot that moves around arbitrarily based on some complex inner mechanism and generates explanations why it does so would be easy and appear very intelligent.”
The thing is that this is a testable approach and prediction. I want to document it here partly because he claims that he has said that for some years now.
Open Thread April 2018
Does something like Open Threads exist in LW 2.0? When I create one how would anybody get to know about it?
The only reason I persisted was because I was interested in the cryptography aspect and wanted to be a part of an up-and-coming technology.
And that is a reward I guess a very high fraction of the people actually ‘investing’ in Bitcoin had. Those hackers, nerds, tech enthusists didn’t need high fractions of likelihood times payoff.
And maybe the true lesson to draw from this is not to look at an abstract payoff but at the social dynamic: Are there enough people attracted to something.
I think this goes beyond math and is really a general pattern about learning by system 1 and 2 interacting. It’s just more clearly visible with math because it is neccessarily more precise. I once described it here (before knowing about system 1 and 2 terminology): http://wiki.c2.com/?FuzzyAndSymbolicLearning
That sounds very close to the meta rule of being only allowed to change the rule to more precise rule. So you have the rule of not eating cookies and come across a very special cookie. Making an exception opens the door to arbitrary exceptions. But what about changing the rule to allow only cookies that you have never eaten before? That is clearly a rule that allows this special cookie and also future special cookies, satisfies the culinary curiosity without noticaby impacting the calories.
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (there was a post about this explaining it at the example of contructing a simple wooden ladder which I can’t find, but I bet there are a lot comparable descriptions out there). Or take a candle. I guess you have used one recently. Looks pretty simple, right? Just use some wax and a wick. Turns out that people have used candles since ages. They were frequently used in rome for example. But the easy to use candles of our time are pretty recent. Recent as in last century. Before that
they didn’t have wicks that burned themselves away and you had to cut them all the time
there was no good wax. Most candles were made of fat with lots of residue that stank and smoked. Bees wax was much better but harder to get
To fix these things you need much better raw materials and production processes...
See this article about candle history (German, but I guess Google translate is good enough).
And you can look at any kind of thing we take for granted and it is basically not posible to grasp all of it. The classical example is I, Pencil: My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read Most things depend on the presence of a whole environment—and take part in bringing it about. You could see it as a co-evolution of lots of inventions. Something just hinted at in the comment about roads needed for wheels (and actually you benefit from having wheels when building roads...).
I think this is one of the main overlooked points when talking about the possibility of space travel, esp. interstellar one. Even if you assume AIs. But let’s not. As mentioned in another comment we not really know what kind of coordination problems it comes with. Scaling isn’t automatic. Just look at Moore’s law. Sure we continue to scale, but we pile technology on technology on technology to do so, And we can’t just invent the last one. And neither can a future AI. You need the whole stack (OK granted, you might be able to simplify, but still). And it will keep growing and might become inherently unmanageable. Remember: The price of a chip factories also continues to grow and that might be the limiting factor. See e.g. McKinsey on Semiconductors 2013.
Added: I wonder whether this is a kind of niche need of our kind of folks. Or maybe it is the other way around and I project, because I had also trouble of understanding other people especially people my age. On the other had I could always relate well to older (adults when I was young) and younger, esp. children.
Wow. That’s almost exactly the same as what I offerered in a discussion about the love languages. I also couldn’t relate to either of the 5 strongly. I all see all of them of kind of having their place. But I was also missing point 6: making an effort to understand the other person. At least that was I have been desperately missing for most of my life and which I got mostly from basically one (male) friend only. Except for recently when a date turned out to not be a partner but the person being able to give me the feeling of bein understood and related to closely.
This kind of illustrates the point, right? We only profess to strive for happiness, but actually don’t care that much. Just kidding. I guess proper estimates of likelihood of success vs cost I probably also wouldn’t make the travel. But what you could do is try meditation. A rationalist starter can be found e.g. here.
TL;DR Extracted quotes of what I see as the key points:
[The] human activity [of] “pursuing happiness” [...] seems to be in the same category as other common activities such as “acquiring education”, “helping people”, “talking to friends” (or should I say “talking” to “friends”) and so on. Which is to say, people do them in a way which is outwardly convincing enough to allow everyone to keep up the social pretenses. This is way different from what you’d see people do if they actually cared. The simple matter of fact is that the human brain is a kludge, [...]. Almost anything they claim to be doing isn’t for real. This is true even when they themselves know about this. The best you can do is gradually nudge yourself in the right direction, gaining new footholds in consistency and consequentialism painstakingly and precariously.
[...] I have felt levels of happiness which are far above the upper limit of your mental scale. I know exactly how to be happy. And yet I find myself not consistently applying my own methods. Do you realize how impossibly mind-twisting this situation is? What happens in reality is that I enjoy and see great value in happiness when it happens, but when it doesn’t I only work on it grudgingly. It’s like with exercise, which is great but I’m rarely enthusiastic about starting it. The problem is not that I don’t value happiness enough. The problem is rather that there is no gut-level motivational gradient to get actual happiness. There are gradients for all sorts of things which are crappy, fake substitutes. Once you know the taste of the real thing, they aren’t fun at all. But you still end up optimizing for them, because that’s what your brain does.
From a former post of him I trust that he actually figured it out for real. It’s mainly about meditation. I have made a comparable experience (actually with much less effort than even learning swimming, though not teachable but basically by luck). And I can tell you it is true. I can also make myself happy by small mental effort. But what for? All the complexity of human experience gets lost if you just switch on one part of it without the rest.
At least the first two chapter links are broken (currently). It says
Sorry, we couldn’t find what you were looking for.
My first though was whether this might be applied to organisations (cells correspond to individuals and (multi-celled) organisms correspond to organisations). And what the differences are. Companies seem to change but not so much to age. My guess is that the assumption in the article doesn’t hold there:
A central assumption of our work is that the distinction between c and v represents a natural categorization of cellular traits; that is, somatic mutations or other cellular degradation events tend to primarily affect only one of the two traits: cellular cooperation in the case of mutations to tumor suppressors and oncogenes and vigor in the case of basic cellular metabolism and other internal housekeeping functions.
And considering AI I think it would be quite possible to engineer it such that it wouldn’t either.
I would have liked some links to definitions of terms used as they come along, e.g. the colors and meditative levels (the former I could google the latter less so).