joaolkf(Joao Fabiano)

• joaolkf 4 Nov 2013 3:10 UTC

  27 points

  on: The Ineffi­ciency of The­o­ret­i­cal Discovery

  I vastly disagree. I will just state it for now, and hopefully this will be a commitment to explain it further when I have the time. Here are my unjustified assertions about the nature of philosophy regarding OP’s topics:

  1. Philosophy has the most huge search space known to man, it encompasses everything (a) without a good clear-cut solution and (b) which has any hope to be solved (this rules out two extremes: science and religion).

  2. Philosophy, by its very nature, has few systematized methods for efficient search. Seems like we discovered logical and clear thinking recently, but that’s almost about it.

  3. Because it is so difficult, philosophy is wrong 99,9% of the time.

  4. When philosophy is right, major breakthroughs are made, sciences are created, new reasoning tools, higher moral standards and so on.

  5. There’s a massive and astronomical hindsight bias. Once solved a problem is no longer on the realm of philosophy and the solution tend to seem extremely obvious after 1 or 2 generations.

  Thus, low hanging fruits in philosophy are nowhere to be found. Most of your examples were already found, they just need to be worked on. I chalenge you to present a yet unknown low hanging fruit, one all your peers don’t know it already, one which would knock Nick’s socks off.

• joaolkf 28 Nov 2014 14:52 UTC

  26 points

  in reply to: Dallas’s comment on: Break­ing the vi­cious cycle

  At least now when I cite Eliezer’s stuff on my doctoral thesis people who don’t know him—there are a lot of them in philosophy—will not say to me “I’ve googled him and some crazy quotes came up eventually, so maybe you should avoid mentioning his name altogether”. This was a much bigger problem to me than what is sounds. I had to do all sort of workarounds to use Eliezer’s ideas as if someone else said it because I was advised not to cite him (and the main, often the only, argument was in fact the crazy quote things).

  There might be some very small level of uncertainty as whether Alex’s behaviour had a positive or negative overall impact(maybe it made MIRI slightly update in the right direction, somehow). But I can say with near certainty it made my life objectively worse in very quantifiable measures (i.e. I lost a month or two with the workarounds, and would continue to lose time with this).

• joaolkf 5 Mar 2010 13:05 UTC

  21 points

  on: Ba­bies and Bun­nies: A Cau­tion About Evo-Psych

  A cognitive module for cuteness only needs to make us find babies a nice thing and enhance the probability of parental care. It simply doesn’t matter if, besides doing that, the same cognitive module make us find bunnies or orthorhombic sulfur crystals at low temperature cute, so long this doesn’t have any deleterious effects. Probably a cognitive module that can find cute only human babies and not bunnies is more evolutionary improbable and developmental costly having the same relevant behavioral results of a more cheap and universal cognitive module for cuteness. Evolution only needs to shape cognition in order to generate, more or less, the right type of behavior. It DOESN’T have to, and in most cases it doesn’t, shape cognition nicely, in a way we would look at it and say “nice work”.

• joaolkf 28 Dec 2013 22:43 UTC

  16 points

  in reply to: Sean_o_h’s comment on: Donat­ing to MIRI vs. FHI vs. CEA vs. CFAR

  Frankly, I prefer to get funding from companies that sponsor rugby teams when they’re not sponsoring FHI

  Given if all goes really well I will be part-time researching for FHI for three years funded by the Brazilian government, I can share that sentiment. The money will be going from researching Descartes’s lost letters to Spinoza to X-Risks. It will feel like I’ve just used a cheat code in utility space.

  EDIT: After stating the above my motivation increased about omega-fold. I will print it and affix it on my fridge!

• joaolkf 2 Dec 2013 2:35 UTC

  16 points

  in reply to: benkuhn’s comment on: A cri­tique of effec­tive altruism

  I don’t have time to explain it now, so I will state the following with the hope merely stating it will be useful as a data point. I think Carl’s critique was more compelling, more relevant if true (which you agree), and also not that much less likely to be true than yours. Certainly, considering the fact of how destructive they would be if true, and the fact they are almost as likely to be true as yours, I think Carl’s is the best critique.

  In fact, the 2nd main reason I don’t direct most of my efforts to what most of the EA movement is doing is because I do think some weaker versions of Carl’s points are true. (The 1st is simply that I’m much better at finding out if his points are true and other more abstract things than at doing EA stuff).

How to choose a coun­try/​city?

• joaolkf 21 Mar 2015 16:03 UTC

  15 points

  in reply to: orthonormal’s comment on: New fo­rum for MIRI re­search: In­tel­li­gent Agent Foun­da­tions Forum

  I don’t currently have a facebook account and I know that a lot of very productive people here in Oxford that decided not to have one as well (e.g., Nick and Anders don’t have one). I think adding the option to authenticate via Google is an immediate necessity.

• joaolkf 5 Dec 2014 16:44 UTC

  15 points

  on: Could you be Prof Nick Bostrom’s side­kick?

  Haven’t seen a deal so sweet since I was Pascal mugged last year!

• joaolkf 27 Dec 2013 15:57 UTC

  15 points

  on: Donat­ing to MIRI vs. FHI vs. CEA vs. CFAR

  Nick, Anders and Toby have been consulted by government agencies in the past, particularly Nick has done that several times (even by the Thailand’s government apparently). If your concern is influence over government, FHI wins, given I don’t think movement building would get us as far as having a Prime Minister meeting with FHI staff. It would have to be one serious movement to match just one or two meetings. It’s likely that there aren’t even enough eligible brains for a “AI-risks movement” of such scale.

  However, it is not the case “influence over the government” should be the most important criteria. Mainly, because right now we wouldn’t even know exactly what to tell them, and it might take decades until we do. Hence, the most important criteria is level of basic research. The mere fact your question hasn’t any clear answers means we need more basic research, and thus that MIRI/​ FHI have preference. I couldn’t know whether FHI or MIRI would be better. As a wild guess, I would say FHI does more research but that it somehow feeds from MIRI non-academic flexibility and movement building. Likely, whichever had the preference over resources would lose this preference relatively fast as it outgrew the other.

  On the other hand, I have heard MIRI/​FHI/​CEA staff claiming they are much more in need of qualified people than money. So, if CFAR is increasing qualification then they ought to have priority. But it’s not clear if they are really doing that yet.

• joaolkf 17 Feb 2015 19:16 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: diegocaleiro’s comment on: An alarm­ing fact about the anti-ag­ing community

  As the person who first emailed Rudi back in 2009 so you could finally stop cryocrastinating, I’m willing to seriously dig up whether/​how this is feasible and how much it would cost iff:

  (1) You disclose to me what all the responses you got (which are available to you); (2) I get more than five of those responses which aren’t variants of “No, I didn’t do that.”; and (2) Overall, there is no clear evidence, among the responses or elsewhere, that this wouldn’t be cost-effective.

  The minimal admissible evidence is things like a scientific paper, a specialist in the relevant area saying it’s not cost-effective, or a established fact in the relevant area which has as a clear conclusion this is not cost-effective.

  Thank me later.

• joaolkf 4 Nov 2013 14:16 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: The Ineffi­ciency of The­o­ret­i­cal Discovery

  After a paper published in 2011: “[Original draft was available in 2003. Hurrah for academic publishing. One journal reviewed the manuscript for nearly two years before determining that it was too long. No wonder philosophy has not advanced farther in the past 2,500 years.] ”

  What links here?

  • joaolkf's comment on The Ineffi­ciency of The­o­ret­i­cal Discovery by lukeprog (4 Nov 2013 14:00 UTC; 2 points)

Cross-tem­po­ral de­pen­dency, value bounds and superintelligence

• joaolkf 5 Jan 2015 18:43 UTC

  11 points

  on: Com­part­men­tal­iz­ing: Effec­tive Altru­ism and Abortion

  It’s a nice post with a sound argumentation towards an unconformable conclusion to many EA/​rationalists. We certainly need more of this.However, this isn’t the first time someone has tried to sketch some probability calculus in order to account for moral uncertainty when analysing abortion. In the same way as the previous attempts, yours seems to be surreptitiously sneaking in some controversial assumptions into probability estimates and numbers. This is further evidence to me that trying to do the math in cases where we still need more conceptual clarification isn’t really as useful as it would seem. Here are a few points you have sneaked/​ignored:

  • You are accepting some sort of Repugnant Conclusion, as mentioned here

  • You are ignoring the real life circumstances in which abortion takes place. Firstly, putting your kid for adoption isn’t always available. Additionally, I believe that in practice people are mostly choosing between having an abortion and raising an unwanted child with scare resources (which probably has a negative moral value).

  • You are not accounting for the fact that even if adoption successfully takes place, adopted children have very low quality of life.

  Overall, I think you are completely ignoring the fact that abortion can (perhaps more correctly) be characterized by the choice between creating a new life of suffering (negative value) or creating nothing (0 value). At the very least there is a big uncertainty there as well, so not aborting would perhaps have a value ranging from −77 to +77 QUALYs. The moral value of aborting would then depend on the expected quality of life of the new life being created (and on the probability that not aborting would preclude having a wanted child later on). Therefore, it would be determined case by case. I would expect that wealth and the moral value of abortion are inversely correlated. This would mean abortion is permissible in countries were it should’t, and impermissible in countries were it should be permissible.

[LINK] Lec­tures on Self-Con­trol and the myth of Willpower

• joaolkf 12 Sep 2013 15:27 UTC

  10 points

  on: Com­mon sense as a prior

  Data point: I have emailed the top ~10 researchers of 3 different fields in which I was completely naive at the time (social psychology, computational social simulation, neuroscience of morality) - giving a ~ 30 total -, and they all tend to engage my questions, with a subsequent e-mail conversation of 5 to 30 emails. I had no idea how easy it was to make a top researcher engage in a conversation with a naive person. Knowing this made me much more prone to apply the prescription of this post—one I am in agreement. (I understand that what this post prescribes is far more complex than actually engaging in a conversation with the top researchers of an area.)

• joaolkf 5 Jan 2015 17:59 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: shminux’s comment on: Com­part­men­tal­iz­ing: Effec­tive Altru­ism and Abortion

  Pretty much what I was going to comment. I would add that even if he somehow were able to avoid having to accept the more general Repugnant Conclusion, he would certainly have to at least accept that if abortion is wrong in these grounds, not having a child is (nearly) equally wrong on the same grounds.

  What links here?

  • joaolkf's comment on Com­part­men­tal­iz­ing: Effec­tive Altru­ism and Abortion by Dias (5 Jan 2015 18:43 UTC; 11 points)

• joaolkf 5 Dec 2013 3:15 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: ThrustVectoring’s comment on: Ethics of Brain Emulation

  It would be a weird criteria indeed to hold that about this post, while often people constantly post links to videos/​papers while solely copy-pasting the summary. I don’t understand why you would say this. I definitely wouldn’t have found this paper if it were posted on open thread, which I never read since I do not expect to find anything relevant to my research, other than some social interaction motivation. I do plan on commenting it further later.

• joaolkf 8 Apr 2015 17:48 UTC

  5 points

  on: Even when con­trar­i­ans win, they lose: Jeff Hawkins

  Worth mentioning that some parts of Superintelligence are already a less contrarian version of many arguments made here in the past.

  Also note that although some people do believe that FHI is some sense “contrarian”, when you look at the actual hard data on this the fact is FHI has been able to publish in mainstream journals (within philosophy at least) and reach important mainstream researchers (within AI at least) at rates comparable, if not higher, to excellent “non-contrarian” institutes.

• joaolkf 31 Mar 2015 10:01 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: joaolkf’s comment on: Sta­tus—is it what we think it is?

  This also reminded me of this study, which found that “wealthy individuals report that having three to four times as much money would give them a perfect “10″ score on happiness—regardless of how much wealth they already have.”

• joaolkf 28 Mar 2015 0:23 UTC

  5 points

  on: Slate Star Codex: al­ter­na­tive com­ment threads on LessWrong?

  I would be more in favour of pushing SSC to have up/​downvotes than to linking its posts here. I find that although posts are high quality the comments are generally not, so this is a problem that definitely needs to be solved on its own. Moreover, I read both blogs and I like to have them as separate activities given that they have pretty different writing styles and mildly different subjects. I tend I to read SSC on my leisure time, while LessWrong is a gray area. I would certainly be against linking every single post here given that some of them would be decisively off topic.