An AI capable of programming might be able to reprogram itself smarter and smarter, soon surpassing humans as the dominant species on the planet.
jimv
Karma: 269
The first moderately smart AI anyone develops might quickly become the last time that that people are the smartest things around. We know that people can write computer programs. Once we make an AI computer program that is a bit smarter than people, it should be able to write computer programs too, including re-writing its own software to make itself even smarter. This could happen repeatedly, with the program getting smarter and smarter. If an AI quickly re-programs itself from moderately-smart to super-smart, we could soon find that it is as disinterested in the wellbeing of people as people are of mice.
(Also not medically trained.)
Something missing from this analysis is that the expected probability of these conditions for any given pregnancy is not the same as the incidence in the population at large. The factor that I’ve most often heard about is increasing age being highly associated with increasing incidence of Down syndrome, though there may be others, and I’m not sure whether there are known correlates with the other conditions you mention.
That might also relate to the last point about incidence of these conditions in the wider population and the incidences that study reported. It could be that older pregnant people are more likely to opt for the test, knowing that they are at elevated probability.
You finish by suggesting people think about prevalence differences shifting by a factor of two, but from a quick Google, it looks like age can shift prevalences by orders of magnitude. The first table that popped up suggested 1 in 2000 at age 20, increasing to 1 in 100 at age 40 and 1in 10 at age 49.
A prior isn’t the termination.
That sounds like you’re thinking of priors in terms of beliefs. As Gelman recently quoted:
The prior distribution. In general, the prior distribution represents all previously available information regarding a parameter of interest. . . .
I really like that they express this in terms of “evidence” and “information” rather than “belief.”
(First sentence is something Gelman is quoting from Deke et al, p4, second sentence is Gelman’s agreement with that.)
Why is xyz your prior? The termination is the information you’ve drawn on to come to that prior.
I felt like this classification system is potentially helpful.
But I felt that the title of the article could do with being refined. I read it as meaning that there were types of akrasia that could actually be beneficial for you in some surprising way, rather than it being beneficial to categorise akrasia by this typology.
“sass” becomes “cacc” …
… “kick” becomes “xix”...
Any reason why sass would need a double c at the end, but the ck in kick just becomes one x?
cepelling
Typo here too, perhaps?
Upvoted because I really appreciated the intro test at the start that let me know that this wasn’t the post for me. Thanks!
My suggestion isn’t really aligned with your initial hypothesis, about the potential for LW to be more efficient than the efficient market because of comparative advantages at spotting niche things. I don’t know much about cars, about car manufacturers, or about investment. So I’m not using some expert niche knowledge that I would realistically expect to be more efficient than the market.
Really, my reasoning is just that it doesn’t seem that feasible that Tesla is worth more than car companies that are selling many, many times more vehicles than it.
From first principles, it seems high probability that most vehicles in the future are going to be electric vehicles. I suspect that incumbent car manufacturers forecast this too, and therefore expect that they are investing heavily in developing electric vehicles. These are large companies with very well-established dealership networks, large cashflows from sales of internal combustion engine vehicles, etc., so should have substantial capacity to pursue that development. I don’t know whether Tesla claims a technical advantage in electric vehicles, but if they do, I don’t see it as being likely to persist.
For the autonomous-driving parts of the technology, I could envisage there being more secret sauce than the electric vehicle parts. But for similar reasons I would expect the other vehicle companies to be investing heavily in it. And — this is really anecdote time now — I’ve seen some videos online that are suggestive of Tesla’s self-driving abilities seeming outright dangerous.
Suggestion: a short position on Tesla (TSLA)
Reason: Tesla sold about 900k cars in 2021. This is about 1-2% of the global car market. Even in electric vehicle sales, Tesla only represents about 1⁄7 of global sales. [1] And yet TSLA is valued at as much as the combined value of the next 5 car companies combined. [2] Musk has been claiming since 2015 that self-driving Teslas are a year or two away [3] so it’s hard to believe that they are particularly close now. It seems that Tesla’s current self-driving features are not particularly more advanced than those of competitors. [4]
Personal thoughts: I have low confidence that this would be a good trade over a 12 month timescale. Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent and all that. And TSLA trades high based on Musk’s personal appeal, which might have years left to run (see Matt Levine’s Money Stuff newsletters on the Elon Market Hypothesis). But longer-term, some trade structured to represent the relative values of TSLA vs. the next, say, 5-10 largest car makers, seems like it should pay off. Either TSLA is currently over-valued or the other car makers are currently under-valued. Unless Tesla can capture, say, 50%+ of car sales globally, either its value will have to fall substantially or other makers’ value will have to rise substantially, if investors realise that they have the same benefits as Tesla represents.
[3] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/14/cars/tesla-cruise-control/index.html
[4] https://www.cars.com/articles/which-cars-have-autopilot-430356/
Are the time limits enforced via parental settings for different apps? If so, I’d be interested in hearing what technical solution you use and how well they work out. Do you have to have them working across different machines / operating systems, for example?
On the question of finance, there was historically a prohibition on usury in Christianity. This was worked around by the triple contract / Contractum trinius.
I have been told that something comparable happens in currently existing Islamic finance: people devise clever schemes that are technically acceptable, though not really in the spirit of what was intended, so they replicate lending-at-interest without technically doing so. (I believe there may also be some regulatory flexibility in choosing which religious scholar you submit your scheme to, being able to select one that is known for looking favourably on such proposals.)
I believe that there are circumstances in which financial services that are in tune with the spirit of some of these rules (rather than just within the letter of them) could be desirable. But people do seem to have a habit of finding ways around them.
Re your question about whether the Zoe or official numbers are likely to be correct in the UK.
It seems likely that it’s Zoe, based on other data and on the physical situation.
The other data source is the Office for National Statistics. They’ve been running a sampling study, going out and testing the population. They are finding very high levels of infection. It’s about 1 in 16, or 3.4 million people in England who would have tested positive a week or two back. (Plus some more for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.) That seems very compatible with Zoe saying 340k cases per day across the whole UK.
The relevant information about how things are going is that there has been a massive change in testing. People in the UK used to be able to request a free pack of 7 lateral flow tests to be delivered by post every day. As of today, those are no longer available. Officially, over the last few weeks you could still order them every 3 days, but in practice they have been almost completely out of stock.
The guidance and general tone has also changed, with much less attention to COVID in general and on testing in particular.
Given that tests are so much less available, it’s almost surprising that as many cases are being detected as are.
Likely typos: “debiasing” became “debaising” twice, once in the title and once in the body text.
,
Are these slips or am I misunderstanding the notation?
I don’t think the statement implies that Russian POWs would be treated inhumanely.
I think it implies that if Russian POWs are saying things like “we didn’t know we were aggressors”, you cannot distinguish between whether they are saying that because it is true or the fact that they are saying it because they fear inhumane treatment.
And even in the second case, you may not be able to distinguish between Russian POWs who have correct fears of possible inhumane treatment if they are non-compliant and Russian POWs who have unfounded fears (i.e., the situation where their Ukrainian captors have no intention of mistreating them, but the captives comply out of fear of mistreatment nonetheless).
As an external viewer, the implication is that you should presumably place less weight on the probability that such videos are providing robust evidence of what they purport on their face to present, unless you have other reasons to believe both that the Ukrainians would not mistreat Russians who don’t comply with requests to phone their mothers saying what the Ukrainians want them to say, and that the Russians know that they would not be mistreated.
So it’s not making an assertion of mistreatment if non-compliant, but rather making an assertion that you the viewer might not be able to distinguish between the different reasons that this particular conversation might have occurred, with only some of the possible reasons being “it’s approximately the truth”.
“Expelliarmus!*”
Is there a rogue asterisk there?
“All our secrets will be yours. You will know all that is known about the Mind and Body, Time and Space, Prophecy and History, Love and the Divine,” said Memnuela.
“That’s ten divisions, plus the entrance door. The Entrance Chamber has twelve doors. What did you leave out?” said Luna.
Did you miss a pair of divisions out?
Nit-pick: if Luna is supposed to be linguistically similar to real British people (or British people in canon Harry Potter), she’s unlikely to say “Mom”. It would be “Mum”.
I’m not even American, so treat this thought accordingly, but might the military recruitment numbers you’re seeing be influenced by race / ethnicity at all?
As in, if the bottom quintile has a lower-than-average proportion of white people in it (I guess this is the case in the USA), and if the military disproportionately recruits white people (I’ve no idea whether this is the case), maybe bottom-quintile white people could be over-represented, even while that quintile is a little under-represented.