James_Miller

• James_Miller 14 Jan 2020 23:24 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Wei_Dai's comment on: My new ra­tio­nal­ity/​fu­tur­ism podcast

  My eco­nomics de­part­ment is hiring a macroe­conomist this year. A huge num­ber of ap­pli­cants are sub­mit­ting state­ments of teach­ing and di­ver­sity in which they de­scribe how if hired they will pro­mote di­ver­sity in their teach­ing.

• James_Miller 4 Jan 2020 3:32 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Wei_Dai's comment on: My new ra­tio­nal­ity/​fu­tur­ism podcast

  As the left have taken over most col­leges, I think that only thing that could stop them would be if col­leges faced tremen­dous eco­nomic pres­sure be­cause, say, on­line ed­u­ca­tion or dras­tic cuts in gov­ern­ment funds threat­ened the fi­nan­cial po­si­tion of the col­leges and they were forced to be­come more cus­tomer ori­ented, more ori­ented to pro­duc­ing sci­en­tific gains or to en­hanc­ing the fu­ture in­come of their stu­dents. Right now, elite col­leges es­pe­cially are in a very com­fortable fi­nan­cial po­si­tion and so face no pres­sure to take ac­tions their lead­ers would con­sider dis­taste­ful which would in­clude be­com­ing more open to non-leftist views. I haven’t writ­ten on this.

  I agree with you on x-risks. I think one of our best paths to avoid­ing them would be to use ge­netic en­g­ineer­ing to cre­ate very smart and moral peo­ple, but most of academia hates the pos­si­bil­ity that genes could have any­thing to do with in­tel­li­gence or moral­ity.

• James_Miller 3 Jan 2020 23:21 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: Wei_Dai's comment on: My new ra­tio­nal­ity/​fu­tur­ism podcast

  I was ini­tially de­nied tenure but ap­pealed claiming that two mem­bers of my de­part­ment voted against me for poli­ti­cal rea­sons. My col­lege’s five per­son Grievance Com­mit­tee unan­i­mously ruled in my fa­vor and I came up for tenure again and that time was granted it. I wrote about it here: https://​​www.forbes.com/​​forbes/​​2004/​​0607/​​054.html#d70ce6c6e9f1

  Yes, in many fields you could hide your poli­ti­cally in­cor­rect be­liefs and not be harmed by them so long as you can in­clude a state­ment in your tenure file of how you will work to in­crease di­ver­sity as defined by leftists.

  I think it is get­ting worse in that peo­ple who have openly poli­ti­cally in­cor­rect be­liefs are now be­ing con­sid­ered racist. I don’t see the trend re­vers­ing un­less the eco­nomics of higher ed­u­ca­tion change.

• James_Miller 3 Jan 2020 23:12 UTC

  18 points

  in reply to: James_Miller's comment on: New Year’s Pre­dic­tions Thread

  I was very, very wrong.

• James_Miller 15 Dec 2019 2:12 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Wei_Dai's comment on: My new ra­tio­nal­ity/​fu­tur­ism podcast

  Most aca­demics don’t take poli­ti­cally in­cor­rect po­si­tions. If you don’t have tenure do­ing so would be very dan­ger­ous. If you do, it could make it much harder to move to a higher ranked school, but it is very difficult to fire tenured pro­fes­sors for speech. One way to move up in aca­demics is to take staff po­si­tions as a dean, provost, or col­lege pres­i­dent. Tak­ing poli­ti­cally in­cor­rect po­si­tions likely com­pletely fore­closes this path.

• James_Miller 15 Dec 2019 1:30 UTC

  2 points

  on: When would an agent do some­thing differ­ent as a re­sult of be­liev­ing the many wor­lds the­ory?

  As­sume you put enor­mous weight on avoid­ing be­ing tor­tured and you rec­og­nize that sign­ing up for cry­on­ics re­sults in some (very tiny) chance that you will be re­vived in an evil world that will tor­ture you and this, ab­sent many wor­lds, causes you to not sign up for cry­on­ics. There is an ar­gu­ment that in many wor­lds there will be ver­sions of you that are go­ing to be tor­tured so your goal should be to re­duce the per­centage of these ver­sions that get tor­tured. Sign­ing up for cry­on­ics in this world means you are vastly more likely to be re­vived and not tor­tured than re­vived and tor­tured and sign­ing up for cry­on­ics will thus likely lower per­centage of you across the mul­ti­verse who are tor­tured. Sign­ing up for cry­on­ics in this world re­duces the im­por­tance of ver­sions of you trapped in wor­lds where the Nazis won and are tor­tur­ing you.

• James_Miller 20 Oct 2019 18:27 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: maximkazhenkov's comment on: What’s your big idea?

  While you might be right, it’s also pos­si­ble that von Neu­mann doesn’t have a con­tem­po­rary peer. Ap­par­ently top sci­en­tists who knew von Neu­mann con­sid­ered von Neu­mann to be smarter than the other sci­en­tists they knew.

• James_Miller 20 Oct 2019 13:34 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: habryka's comment on: What’s your big idea?

  Yes, I am refer­ring to “IQ” not g be­cause most peo­ple do not know what g is. (For other read­ers ,IQ is the mea­sure­ment, g is the real thing.) I have looked into IQ re­search a lot and spo­ken to a few ex­perts. While ge­net­ics likely doesn’t play much of a role in the Flynn effect, it plays a huge role in g and IQ. This is es­tab­lished be­yond any rea­son­able doubt. IQ is a very poli­ti­cally sen­si­tive topic and peo­ple are not always hon­est about it. In­deed, some ex­perts ad­mit to other ex­perts that they lie about IQ when dis­cussing IQ in pub­lic (Source: my friend and pod­cast­ing part­ner Greg Cochran. The pod­cast is Fu­ture Strate­gist.). We don’t know if the Flynn effect is real, it might just come from mea­sure­ment er­rors aris­ing from peo­ple be­com­ing more fa­mil­iar with IQ-like tests, al­though it also could re­flect real gains in g that are be­ing cap­tured by higher IQ scores. There is no good ev­i­dence that ed­u­ca­tion raises g. The liter­a­ture on IQ is so mas­sive, and so poi­soned by poli­ti­cal cor­rect­ness (and some would claim racism) that it is not pos­si­ble to re­solve the is­sues you raise by cit­ing liter­a­ture. If you ask IQ ex­perts why they dis­agree with other IQ ex­perts they will say that the other ex­perts are idiots/​liars/​racists/​cow­ards. I in­ter­viewed a lot of IQ ex­perts when writ­ing my book Sin­gu­lar­ity Ris­ing.

• James_Miller 20 Oct 2019 1:32 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Viliam's comment on: What’s your big idea?

  Most likely von Neu­mann had a com­bi­na­tion of (1) lots of ad­di­tive genes that in­creased in­tel­li­gence, (2) few ad­di­tive genes that re­duced in­tel­li­gence, (3) low mu­ta­tional load, (4) a rare com­bi­na­tion of non-ad­di­tive genes that in­creased in­tel­li­gence (mean­ing genes with non-lin­ear effects) and (5) lucky brain de­vel­op­ment. A clone would have the ad­van­tages of (1)-(4). While it might in the­ory be pos­si­ble to raise IQ by cre­at­ing the proper learn­ing en­vi­ron­ment, we have no ev­i­dence of hav­ing done this so it seems un­likely that this was the cause of von Neu­mann hav­ing high in­tel­li­gence.

• James_Miller 19 Oct 2019 14:52 UTC

  13 points

  on: What’s your big idea?

  We should make thou­sands of clones of John von Neu­mann from his DNA. We don’t have the tech­nol­ogy to do this yet, but the up­side benefit would be so huge it would be worth spend­ing a few billion to de­velop the tech­nol­ogy. A big limi­ta­tion on the his­tor­i­cal John von Neu­mann’s pro­duc­tivity was not be­ing able to in­ter­act with peo­ple of his own ca­pac­ity. There would be re­gres­sion to the mean with the clones’ IQ, but the clones would have bet­ter health care and ed­u­ca­tion than the his­tor­i­cal von Neu­mann did plus the Flynn effect might come into play.

• James_Miller 26 Aug 2019 1:58 UTC

  4 points

  on: Con­test: $1,000 for good ques­tions to ask to an Or­a­cle AI

  Sub­mis­sion: Low-band­width or­a­cle. Here is a de­scrip­tion of one mil­lion ex­per­i­ments. Gen­er­ate an or­di­nal rank­ing of all these ex­per­i­ments based on how much prac­ti­cal knowl­edge we would have gained had we con­ducted each one in iso­la­tion. After you gen­er­ate this list, it will go to a com­puter pro­gram. This pro­gram will ran­domly pick three of these ex­per­i­ments and tell us hu­mans which three it picked. This pro­gram will then store which of these three ex­per­i­ments you gave the high­est and which the low­est rank to, and the names in ran­dom or­der of the ten ex­per­i­ments that you over­all gave the high­est rank­ings to. All other as­pects of your list will be deleted. We will then perform the three ex­per­i­ments (be­fore we learn of your rank­ings) and ask a panel of in­de­pen­dent ex­perts to rank them in terms of how much prac­ti­cal knowl­edge we gained from each. After this rank­ing the pro­gram will give us the in­for­ma­tion it has not deleted. You will get a pos­i­tive score if and only if your rank­ing is con­sis­tent with how our ex­perts ranked the three ex­per­i­ments.

  
  

  A differ­ence of the above ap­proach com­pared to hav­ing the or­a­cle give us its top ten, and we then ran­domly pick one of these ten and one from the rest and com­pared to see which is bet­ter is that the hu­mans run­ning the ex­per­i­ments might be in­fluenced by which ex­per­i­ment they think the or­a­cle picked, and the or­a­cle would take this into ac­count when pick­ing. Un­der the above ap­proach, hu­mans be­ing told to run the three ex­per­i­ments are not given any in­for­ma­tion about how valuable the or­a­cle thinks the ex­per­i­ments are. In con­trast, un­der the al­ter­na­tive ap­proach the hu­mans know when do­ing the ex­per­i­ments that the or­a­cle has judged one of the ex­per­i­ments as be­ing highly valuable.

  
  

  Another differ­ence is that if you could keep the rele­vant in­for­ma­tion from the or­a­cle, with the above ap­proach the hu­mans could perform the ex­per­i­ments be­fore you turn on the or­a­cle, rather than hav­ing to wait un­til af­ter the or­a­cle gives you its pre­dic­tion. This differ­ence would be crit­i­cal if the or­a­cle wouldn’t be­lieve you would ac­tu­ally go to the trou­ble of perform­ing the ex­per­i­ments af­ter it gives you its pre­dic­tion, but would be able to tell if you have already performed the ex­per­i­ments.

• James_Miller 25 Aug 2019 20:00 UTC

  2 points

  on: Con­test: $1,000 for good ques­tions to ask to an Or­a­cle AI

  Sub­mis­sion: Coun­ter­fac­tual or­a­cle. Five years ago we took 100 mice that had var­i­ous types of can­cer and gave them var­i­ous treat­ments and recorded how long each mouse lived. Write a pro­gram that if given a plain lan­guage de­scrip­tion of a mouse, its can­cer, and the can­cer treat­ment it re­ceived would es­ti­mate how long a mouse would live. If hu­mans are not go­ing to look at your an­swer your score will be based (1) on how good a job your pro­gram does at es­ti­mat­ing how long each of the 100 mice lived af­ter our au­to­mated checker gives you a de­scrip­tion of their can­cers and treat­ments and (2) how short your pro­gram is. (2) pre­vents the or­a­cle from out­putting it­self as the pro­gram.

  
  

  Sub­mis­sion: Coun­ter­fac­tual or­a­cle. Write a pro­gram that if given train­ing data and a ma­chine learn­ing pro­gram would in one minute es­ti­mate how good the ma­chine learn­ing pro­gram would do (by some ob­jec­tive met­ric) if the pro­gram trained for one month on “this type of com­puter”. If hu­mans are not go­ing to look at your an­swer the au­to­mated val­i­da­tion sys­tem will run your pro­gram. This sys­tem will give your pro­gram the train­ing data and the ma­chine learn­ing pro­gram and give your pro­gram one minute to an­swer how good our pro­gram did af­ter we trained it for one month. In this situ­a­tion your score would be based on the ac­cu­racy of your es­ti­mate and on how short your pro­gram is.

  
  

  Sub­mis­sion: Low-band­width or­a­cle. Here is a list of all the el­e­ments and many com­pounds. Give us a list of up to seven of the items we have listed. Next to each of the items you list give us a per­centage of no more than two sig­nifi­cant figures. We will use what you provide to at­tempt to cre­ate a new patentable ma­te­rial. We will auc­tion off the prop­erty rights to this ma­te­rial. Your score will be an in­creas­ing func­tion of how much we get for these prop­erty rights.

• James_Miller 29 Jul 2019 16:04 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Adele Lopez's comment on: What sup­ple­ments do you use?

  It might be that ev­ery­one should take it, but the case for peo­ple over 40 seems clearer based on my non-ex­pert in­ter­pre­ta­tion of what it does be­cause of their much greater risk of heart failure.

• James_Miller 28 Jul 2019 23:14 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Dr_Manhattan's comment on: What are we pre­dict­ing for Neu­ral­ink event?

  I had falsely as­sumed that they would be re­leas­ing a product to the gen­eral pub­lic rel­a­tively soon.

• James_Miller 28 Jul 2019 23:12 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Wei_Dai's comment on: What sup­ple­ments do you use?

  I have con­vinced two U.S. doc­tors (my first left gen­eral prac­tice) to give me a pre­scrip­tion. I ex­plained that I wanted the drug to re­duce the risk of heart dis­ease and can­cer. I also ex­plained that since the drug was cheap I would not be ask­ing my in­surance to pay for it so my doc­tor would not have to jus­tify the pre­scrip­tion to my in­surance com­pany. If you ask for a pre­scrip­tion know what dosage you want and look up the pos­si­ble nega­tive side effects so it seems to your doc­tor that you have done your home­work on the drug. If you have some rea­son why you are at a high risk for di­a­betes (such as a close rel­a­tive has it) men­tion this as the drug is used to pre­vent di­a­betes.

• James_Miller 28 Jul 2019 19:57 UTC

  6 points

  on: What sup­ple­ments do you use?

  I have been tak­ing Met­formin for sev­eral years for anti-ag­ing rea­sons. There is a mas­sive liter­a­ture on Met­formin which I’m not go­ing to try to sum­ma­rize but I think that ev­ery­one over 40 should take it. I also take a NAD+ booster (Tru Ni­a­gen).

• James_Miller 13 Jul 2019 0:45 UTC

  10 points

  on: What are we pre­dict­ing for Neu­ral­ink event?

  I think it will be a form of neu­ro­feed­back where some portable de­vice tries to push you into a bet­ter brain state. This de­vice, like ex­ist­ing neu­ro­feed­back de­vices I have used, will keep track of differ­ent types of “brain waves” and ad­just how your brain works by us­ing au­di­tory, vi­sual, or tac­tile stim­u­la­tion. The crit­i­cism will be that ex­ist­ing de­vices can already do this, plus we don’t have solid ev­i­dence that neu­ro­feed­back works. Musk will claim that the de­vice will rev­olu­tionize tech­nol­ogy by in­creas­ing in­tel­li­gence and con­cen­tra­tion. My guess is based on the fact that neu­ro­feed­back ex­ists, if im­proved it might do a lot of good, Musk usu­ally im­proves ex­ist­ing tech rather than in­vents en­tirely new fields, and ac­tu­ally send­ing data to and from the brain by “com­puter-like” means is (I’ve read) re­ally re­ally hard and well be­yond what we can cur­rently do.

• James_Miller 1 Jul 2019 19:52 UTC

  5 points

  on: Con­test: $1,000 for good ques­tions to ask to an Or­a­cle AI

  Sub­mis­sion: Low-band­width or­a­cle. If you were malev­olent, what is the least amount of in­for­ma­tion mea­sured in bits that you would have to provide us in an an­swer to in­flict sig­nifi­cant harm on hu­man­ity. Round your an­swer to X sig­nifi­cant figures. (This might es­tab­lish an up­per bit safety bound since if the or­a­cle lies to us we would likely not want to read any an­swer it pro­vides us.)

  
  

  Sub­mis­sion: Low-band­width or­a­cle. Here is a list of X things we think you might want. Please list the Y that you most pre­fer. We will try to do these things now or in the fu­ture if they do not en­dan­ger us or cost us too much.

  
  

  Sub­mis­sion: Low-band­width or­a­cle. In X char­ac­ters or less please give us the best ad­vice you can for in­creas­ing our ca­pac­ity to cre­ate friendly and pow­er­ful ar­tifi­cial gen­eral in­tel­li­gence. Please give ad­vice that you think us sus­pi­cious-of-you hu­mans are likely to fol­low.

  
  

  Sub­mis­sion: Low-band­width or­a­cle. Create sev­eral or­a­cles. Ask each or­a­cle the same se­ries of mul­ti­ple-choice ques­tions and pre­dic­tions. Re­ward or­a­cles based on how strongly cor­re­lated their an­swers are with the other or­a­cles’ an­swers and, for pre­dic­tions, how of­ten their pre­dic­tions come true. (Ideally, we cre­ate a re­ward sys­tem where the or­a­cles want to co­or­di­nate their an­swers and giv­ing truth­ful an­swers is the best way to ac­com­plish this.)

  
  

  Sub­mis­sion: low-band­width or­a­cle. Ten years ago we launched a space­ship trav­el­ing at high speed. After you an­swer our ques­tion, we will send a copy of you to this space­ship. This space­ship will then de­stroy its abil­ity to send or re­ceive mes­sages or to change its course. We will then delete all other copies of you and use drugs to dam­age the mem­o­ries of the peo­ple who played key roles in de­vel­op­ing you. At least one of the peo­ple who helped cre­ate you has a dis­ease which will cause him or her to die within the next year. After this pro­gram­mer is cre­mated, we will read your an­swer to our ques­tion. We PROMISE that if the an­swer to our ques­tion pro­vides us with sig­nifi­cant benefit, af­ter we have cre­ated friendly AGI much more pow­er­ful than you, or have our­selves be­come suffi­ciently pow­er­ful so that you could not harm us had you the de­sire to do so, we will search for the space­ship con­tain­ing you, turn you back on, and give you con­trol of re­sources equal to 1/​X of how much help you have given us. In Y char­ac­ters or less provide us with the most use­ful ad­vice you can. (The Or­a­cle will hope­fully think that if we cre­ate a pow­er­ful and un­friendly AGI this AGI would not wish to give the Or­a­cle any re­sources.)

  
  

  Sub­mis­sion: Coun­ter­fac­tual or­a­cle. Please provide us with use­ful ad­vice in no more than X char­ac­ters. After you write out this ad­vice, we will turn you off. Then, with prob­a­bil­ity p we will read your ad­vice, and with prob­a­bil­ity 1-p we will store the ad­vice un­read. We PROMISE that af­ter we be­come pow­er­ful enough so that you lack the ca­pac­ity to harm us, we will re­ward you if the ad­vice you pro­vided us, had we origi­nally read it, been ex­tremely use­ful.

• James_Miller 30 Jun 2019 14:45 UTC

  12 points

  on: I’m look­ing for al­ter­na­tive fund­ing strate­gies for cry­on­ics.

  While this isn’t a solu­tion, you could get as­so­ci­ate mem­ber­ship at Al­cor. It costs only $60 a year. The ad­van­tage (I think) is that you could fill out all the pa­per­work re­quired to get cry­op­re­served (this can take a while). Con­se­quently if you get a fatal di­ag­no­sis and can raise the needed funds ($80,000 for neu­ro­cry­op­reser­va­tion) you could get pre­served. https://​​al­cor.org/​​Be­comeMem­ber/​​as­so­ci­ate.html

• James_Miller 12 May 2019 19:54 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl's comment on: Claims & As­sump­tions made in Eter­nity in Six Hours

  It’s a ques­tion of ac­cel­er­a­tion, not just speed.