Mathematician turned software engineer. I like swords and book clubs.
magfrump
Karma: 2,553
I have not read this article, because I find it to be visually hideous. Just scrolling past it made me notice a huge amount of difference between it and most articles posted on Less Wrong; a tinted background, changed font colors, an extremely long title, and it doesn’t seem to have any references in it.
While I remain open to the possibility that this is a great post which is worth cross-posting, I would ask that when you cross-post something to Less Wrong, that you format it in a style standard fro Less Wrong.
A priori, maybe not. But it could be stifling and unpleasant, it could contradict a sense of truth, and it certainly is not how I would want to live my life.
voted up because 60% seems WAAAAAYYYY underconfident to me.
Think of the individual members of the Scooby gang not as separate people, but as separate modules in the brain. Our inner Shaggy and Scooby never stop freaking out, no matter how convinced we are that there is no actual monster. But we do stop taking them seriously and trust our inner Velmas.
The most terrifying part of the experience for me is the idea that Eliezer could have such a strongly different reaction to the story; it made me less confident that something like CEV will converge nicely.
I appreciate your posting this here, and I do agree that any information from AlphaGo Zero is limited in our ability to apply it to forecasting things like AGI.
That said, this whole article is very defensive, coming up with ways in which the evidence might not apply, not coming up with ways in which it isn’t evidence.
I don’t think Eliezer’s article was a knock-down argument, and I don’t think anyone including him believes that. But I do think the situation is some weak evidence in favor for his position over yours.
I also think it’s stronger evidence than you seem to think according to the framework you lay down here!
For example, a previous feature of AI for playing games like Chess or Go was to capture information about the structure of the game via some complex combination. However in AlphaGo Zero, very little specific information about Go is required. The change in architecture actually subsumes some amount of the combination of tools needed.
Again I don’t think this is a knockdown argument or very strong or compelling evidence—but it looks as though you are treating it as essentially zero evidence which seems unjustified to me.
Many people commute to work in businesses in San Francisco who don’t live there. I would expect GDP per capita to be misleading in such cases for some purposes.
Broadening to the San Francisco-San Jose area, there are 9,714,023 people with a GDP of $1,101,153,397,000/year, giving a GDP/capita estimate of $113,357. I know enough people who commute between Sunnyvale and San Francisco or even further that I’d expect this to be ‘more accurate’ in some sense, though obviously it’s only slightly lower than your first figure and still absurdly high.
But the city of San Francisco likely has a much smaller tax base than its putative GDP/capita would suggest, so provision of city based public services may be more difficult to manage.
“Phase change in 1960’s”—first claim is california’s prison pop went from 5k to 25k. According to wikipedia this does seem to happen… but then it’s immediately followed by a drop in prison population between 1970 and 1980. It also looks like the growth is pretty stable starting in the 1940s.
According to this prison pop in California was a bit higher than 5k historically, 6k-8k, and started growing in 1945 by about 1k/year fairly consistently until 1963. It was then fairly steady, even dropping a bit, until 1982 when it REALLY exploded, more than doubling from 28k in 1981 to 57k in 1986!
I had planned to do more follow up (for example, looking at prison murder rates) but this took longer than I wanted.
Overall these numbers are technically consistent but from the article I expected to find something more like the 1980s happening in the 1960s. I’d very much want to see how stats from the 1980s compare, and whether there were new changes in that much larger and faster period of growth.
apart from responding to external events in real time
The concept of “real time” seems like a BIG DEAL in terms of intelligence, at least to me.
If aliens come into contact with us, it seems unlikely that they’ll give us a billion years and a giant notebook to come to grips before they try to trade with/invade/exterminate/impregnate/seed with nanotechnology/etc.
So my actual question is:
Many times I’ve known people and they have simply stopped talking to me and returning my calls/texts/IMs. I am given to understand that this means they don’t want to talk to me, and that this is a generally effective strategy.
However I have never been in a position (a) where I didn’t want to talk to someone ever again, or (b) in which I wouldn’t just tell them that I wasn’t really interested in talking at the time for [Reason].
Whenever I think about this overmuch I feel like I should ask these people why they aren’t responding to me at all… but they only ever respond by (a) not talking to me or (b) getting very upset, so I have stopped asking.
Has anyone here ever purposefully stopped talking to or responding to someone they know? Can you describe the the thought process behind it?
EDIT: In particular I’m interested in why one would stop talking to a person without some kind of explanation or at least statement. For example (Warning fuzzy details) I once went on a date with someone, and we made plans for another date (there was back and forth), then never heard from the person again, even after a few prompts. While I understand what this means, I don’t understand why one wouldn’t say “I’m not interested in seeing you any more.” Or at least some common stand-in like “Sorry I can’t make it I’m busy.” My leading hypothesis is that I have an abnormal desire for closure.
There are substantially more movies recently, eyeballing it it looks like about 150 thousand movies were made in the most recent 12 years of the chart, compared to about 350 thousand made in previous years total. That would imply that recent movies are underrepresented very slightly. Removing short films might smooth that slightly, but actually these numbers are about right.
You have tortured this metaphor so hard that you have passed infinite negative utils and come back out on the positive infinity side.
We do, we just ALSO currently have the convention that someone else finds the link and posts it in a comment first.
I continue to be surprised (I believe I commented on this last year) that under “Academic fields” pure mathematics is not listed on its own; it is also not clear to me that pure mathematics is a hard science; relatedly, are non-computer science engineering folk expected to write in answers?
There is no option for Associate’s under degree earned, or even high school diploma. If we’re not interested in the dropout rate that might be forgivable but at the least an Associate’s or Trade degree is certainly not “none.”
I’m fairly sure my family background qualifies as “nonreligious,” this may be worth having as an option. (I don’t even have weird religious uncles or anything like that.)
TYPO: Under “liberal,” “moire redistribution.”
Made my first donation to SIAI today.
Since the news is so heavily inflated by both green and blue bias, I do not follow it. This is a sign of many virtues and is an example that you all should follow, but I understand that you will not as you lack the virtues that I value highest—in particular the virtues you value are clearly inferior.
Because of the path that I have chosen which lifts me above both the blues and greens, I have no idea what it is that happened and I would appreciate it if someone would inform me about The Thing.
However my immense virtue allows and requires me to only engage in discussion of The Thing which is unrelated to Blues and Greens, and even to Reds, who, while avoiding many common mistakes of blues and greens should really just wash their hands of the whole thing LIKE I DO. So if anyone says anything that I interpret to be blue or green or even red (or purple or orange, but let’s be honest who is purple or orange?) I will be totally justified in raining verbal abuse on them and leaving the discussion, and will still be the officially neutral and unbiased member of the discussion.
I feel like a more informative first sentence for this comment might be “While I agree that there is a distinction in circumstances to be made, which point to the Milgram experiment having poor methodology and questionable results, I disagree with the new interpretation of the circumstance given.”
In my mind this is almost agreement, but with a bit of a difference at the end.
I was 26 years off on Bayes’ birth and 21 feet off on the tallest redwood.
Also the first time I took the IQ test I accidentally hit the back button on my mouse, and didn’t remember how much time I was supposed to have left, so I just went through everything and submitted right away. I’m not sure how much I would have gotten out of the last 5-10 minutes or whatever but it made me feel bad.
I felt like the Big 5 test rated me lower on Openness and Conscientiousness than I remember from tests in the past, but those are from long long ago. The Myers-Briggs rated me as more F and J than I expected (or less T and P) and I think the question framing is maybe bad for someone who lives in faulty emotional hardware in a mathematical universe.
I reproduced my results from all of the tests verbatim, regardless of whether I agreed with them; I noticed at least one comment of someone who did not, and I’m wondering how common people’s responses to disagreement with personality tests was.
POLL OPTION: Upvote if you think a slutwalk is a good idea (i.e. would participate in a local slutwalk)
This is awesome. I want more articles like this. I want to read an article like this every day until every trip to the pharmacy or grocery store makes me feel full of intimate and arcane knowledge, and every aspect of my life is 10% more fulfilling.
A followup question I’d be interested in: if I bought an electric toothbrush, I would (a) have trouble bringing it during travels (I am traveling maybe two months out of the year), and (b) when my roommates’ electric brushes are plugged in, I often bump into them which I both dislike and am concerned about the effects on their cleanliness.
However, whatever the results in this case, I personally already have an extremely low rate of cavities (on the order of .05/year) and so am probably less interested in paying more for dental care than average; changes in habits should have orders of magnitude lower expected value for me. Which is to say that if nobody else cares about these questions, it’s fine if they go unanswered.