pcm

• pcm 3 Apr 2009 23:28 UTC

  2 points

  on: Select­ing Ra­tion­al­ist Groups

  I’m puzzled about why people preferred the spokesman version of paranoid debating to the initial version where the median number was the team’s answer. Designating a spokesman publicly as a non-deceiver provides information about who the deceiver is. In one case, we determined who the deceiver was by two of us telling the spokesman that we were sufficiently ignorant about the subject relative to him that he should decide based only on his knowledge. That gave our team a big advantage that had little relation to our rationality. I expect the median approach can be extended to confidence intervals by taking the median of the lows and the median of the highs, but I’m not fully confident that there are no problems with that.

  I have more comments about Sunday’s game here.

• pcm 5 Dec 2009 3:39 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: mattnewport’s comment on: Ar­bi­trage of pre­dic­tion markets

  Intrade usually takes into account the fact that they’re mutually exclusive, and doesn’t require additional margin for additional candidates (I haven’t seen this documented anywhere, but it seemed to behave that way in the last election).

  Still, Intrade’s margin rules aren’t as good as those of the big commodity futures exchanges. Interest rate futures have asymmetrical risk, but that doesn’t distort prices because little margin is required and they’re liquid enough that you can cut your losses before prices change too much.

• pcm 21 Aug 2010 20:09 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: Ex­is­ten­tial Risk and Public Relations

  If “you” refers to a typical parent in the US, then it’s sensible (but hardly trivial). But it could easily be interpreted as referring to parents who are poor enough that they should give higher priority to buying a safer car, moving to a neighborhood with a lower crime rate, etc.

  Eliezer’s writings about cryonics may help him attract more highly rational people to work with him, but will probably reduce his effectiveness at warning people working on other AGI projects of the risks. I think he has more potential to reduce existential risk via the latter approach.

• pcm 21 Mar 2012 3:04 UTC

  5 points

  on: How to avoid dy­ing in a car crash

  One simple precaution is to drive a car with a light color.

• pcm 20 Jul 2012 23:49 UTC

  3 points

  on: Re­ply to Holden on The Sin­gu­lar­ity Institute

  The discussion of how conjunctive SIAI’s vision is seems unclear to me. Luke appears to have responded to only part of what I think Holden is likely to have meant.

  Some assumptions whose conjunctions seem important to me (in order of decreasing importance):

  1) The extent to which AGI will consist of one entity taking over the world versus many diverse entities with limited ability to dominate the others.

  2) The size of the team required to build the first AGI (if it requires thousands of people, a nonprofit is unlikely to acquire the necessary resources; if it can be done by one person, I wouldn’t expect that person to work with SIAI [1]).

  3) The degree to which concepts such as “friendly” or “humane” can be made clear enough to be implemented in software.

  4) The feasibility of an AGI whose goals whose goals can be explicitly programmed before AGIs with messier goals become dominant. We have an example of intelligence with messy goals, which gives us some clues about how hard it is to create one. We have no comparable way of getting an outside view of the time and effort required for an intelligence with clean goals.

  It seems reasonable to infer from this that SIAI has a greater than 90% chance of becoming irrelevant. But for an existential risk organization, a 90% chance of being irrelevant should seem like a very weak argument against it.

  I believe that the creation of CFAR is a serious attempt to bypass problems associated with assumption 2, and my initial impression of CFAR is that it (but not SIAI) has a good claim to being the most valuable charity.

  [1] I believe an analogy to Xanadu is useful, especially in the unlikely event that an AGI can be built by a single person. The creation of the world wide web was somewhat predictable and predicted, and for a long time Xanadu stood out as the organization which had given the most thought to how the web should be implemented. I see many similarities between the people at Xanadu and the people at SIAI in terms of vision and intelligence (although people at SIAI seem more willing to alter their beliefs). Yet if Tim Berners-Lee had joined Xanadu, he wouldn’t have created the web. Two of the reasons is that the proto-transhumanist culture with which Xanadu was associated was reluctant to question the beliefs that the creators of the web needed to charge money for their product, and that the web should ensure that authors were paid for their work. I failed to question those beliefs in 1990. I haven’t seen much evidence that either I or SIAI are much better today at doing the equivalent of identifying those as assumptions that were important to question.

• pcm 21 Aug 2012 2:52 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: A1987dM’s comment on: How to get cry­ocras­ti­na­tors to ac­tu­ally sign up for cryonics

  I have some aversion to phone calls and prefer skype’s visual connection. My guess is that’s because if I don’t have anything to focus my eyes on, I’m more likely to see my body language and notice I’m nervous. And noticing that might make me more nervous.

  I’m unsure whether I experience anything similar with email—I think I like email because I can take more time to reply.

• pcm 28 Aug 2012 16:35 UTC

  2 points

  on: Any­one know of em­piri­cally driven lob­by­ing efforts?

  Some weak evidence that alarmism (which activist organizations adopt for fundraising reasons) has the opposite of its claimed effect: the movie The Day After Tomorrow had this result:

  Surveys of public opinion conducted before and after the film was released found that it made people think climate change is less likely

  Apparently its obvious lack of realism caused people to associate the more respectable claims about global warming with Hollywood escapism.

• pcm 10 Sep 2012 4:58 UTC

  4 points

  on: Meetup re­port: How harm­ful is cannabis, and will you change your habits?

  I was one of the people who used the number 4 IQ points at the meeting, but we were all answering slightly different questions. Since I haven’t used cannabis in a long time and didn’t expect to use it regardless of the study, what I answered was more like “a 4 point IQ drop would significantly lower the upper bound of what cannabis use I’d consider trying”.

  I was tempted to point out the reasons to doubt the study, but I decided it’s hardly news to say that cannabis impairs short-term memory (which ought to lower IQ) over some nonobvious time period, so the conclusion ought to be taken seriously even if the study is weak. In hindsight, it would have been more interesting to discuss the strength of the study’s evidence.

• pcm 9 Oct 2012 16:43 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: aceofspades’s comment on: Fire­wal­ling the Op­ti­mal from the Rational

  When I switched to a mostly paleo diet this spring, I stopped needing willpower to prevent weight gain. I suspect I experienced other advantages, but don’t have good evidence for them.

  It will be hard to tell what fraction have benefited, because people who found it hard or ineffective are less likely to write about it.

• pcm 25 Oct 2012 0:31 UTC

  1 point

  on: Re­cov­er­ing the ‘spark’

  I’m interested in reading that kind of self-analysis. I’m fairly confident it won’t be painful for me. I suspect it would be better to set up your own blog for it.

• pcm 9 Nov 2012 2:41 UTC

  20 points

  on: Nov 16-18: Ra­tion­al­ity for Entrepreneurs

  I attended the June rationality camp, and had mixed feelings about it. But I’ve also attended parts of it (such as sessions to test new units) before and after, and I’ve seen a significant improvement over time.

  For instance, the unit that’s called Panic here is one of the best, but hadn’t been developed in June. I’ve attended two versions of it, and the second one was clearly better than the first.

  The Comfort Zone Expansion convinced me that I have irrational fears that may cause problems and that I didn’t understand well before taking it. But I’m skeptical of the “entertainment guaranteed”—I found the June version unpleasant. They’ve improved it since then, but I still don’t see how it can entertain a group of people with widely varying comfort zones.

  It’s hard to tell how much benefit I got from it, because the changes are subtle and likely to build slowly as I alter my habits. (Rereading this comment, I see that I’ve only made a little progress on the “be specific” advice).

• pcm 25 Nov 2012 18:19 UTC

  2 points

  on: Cry­onic re­s­ur­rec­tion—an eth­i­cal hypothetical

  Question 1: About 0.95.

  Question 2: Ask people who knew me? Infer a model of my mind from that and my writings? I don’t consider it more ethical to use uncertainty as a reason postpone it until some unforeseeable technology is developed.

  Question 3: I’m reluctant to enter such a lottery because I don’t trust someone who believes those assumptions. I expect the scanning part of the process to improve (without depending on human trials) to the point where enough information is preserved to make a >0.99 fidelity upload theoretically possible. I would accept a trial which took that information and experimented with a simulation of 0.5 fidelity in an attempt to improve the simulation software, assuming the raw information would later be used to produce a better upload.

• pcm 24 Dec 2012 2:02 UTC

  3 points

  on: CFAR’s Inau­gu­ral Fundrais­ing Drive

  I’m donating to CFAR but not SI because CFAR would help in a wider variety of scenarios.

  If AGI will be developed by a single person or a very small team, it seems likely that it won’t be done by someone we recognize in advance as likely to do it (for example, think of the inventions of the airplane or the web). CFAR is more oriented toward influencing large enough numbers of smart people that it will be more likely to reach such a developer.

  Single-person AGI development seems like a low probability scenario to me, but the more people that are needed to create an AGI, the less plausible it seems that intelligence will be intelligible enough to go foom. So I imagine a relatively high fraction of scenarios in which UFAI takes over the world as coming from very small development teams.

  Plus it’s quite possible that we’re all asking the wrong questions about existential risks. CFAR seems more likely than SI to help in those scenarios.

• pcm 2 Jan 2013 1:50 UTC

  7 points

  on: Gaug­ing of in­ter­est: LW stock pick­ing?

  I’ve done well at stock market speculation over the past 12 years. It took me 20 years of doing it to become good at it. If I’d had LW available when I started I expect I could have become good in around 5 years.

  One of the difficulties was that with most strategies, 1-year returns are sufficiently dominated by luck that the feedback is nearly useless.

  The contest might be valuable if it lasted close to 5 years and wasn’t a winner-take-all event. Would that attract any participants?

• pcm 7 Feb 2013 2:27 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: OrphanWilde’s comment on: How to offend a ra­tio­nal­ist (who hasn’t thought about it yet): a life lesson

  There’s a lot of variation in how aware people are of their emotions.

  You might want to look into Alexithymia.

• pcm 1 Mar 2013 21:40 UTC

  2 points

  on: Risk-aver­sion and in­vest­ment (for al­tru­ists)

  it looks like there is a big premium on risk

  Eric Falkenstein presents some strong evidence against this in his book Finding Alpha. Low risk equities outperform high risk equities. The difference between equity and bond returns probably reflects something other than risk.

  He also claims that private equity doesn’t outperform publicly traded equity (suggesting that startups aren’t a good investment, although “startup” doesn’t seem to be a well defined category).

  That still leaves an interesting question about whether it’s wise to increase risk via leverage.

• pcm 16 Apr 2013 20:15 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: RHollerith’s comment on: Risk-aver­sion and in­vest­ment (for al­tru­ists)

  Designed to grow fast is hard to observe. The supply of companies appearing to fit that description increases to satisfy VC demand. The money in VC funds exceeds what the few VCs who are able to recognize good startups are able to usefully invest.

• pcm 11 May 2013 19:10 UTC

  −1 points

  on: New re­port: In­tel­li­gence Ex­plo­sion Microeconomics

  China is experiencing very fast knowledge-driven growth as it catches up to already-produced knowledge that it can cheaply import.

  To the extent that AIs other than the most advanced project can generate self-improvements at all, they generate modifications of idiosyncratic code that can’t be cheaply shared with any other AIs.

  I say it’s at least as expensive for China to import knowledge. A fair amount is trade secrets that are more carefully guarded than AI content. China copies on the order of $1 trillion in value. What’s the value of uncopied AI content?

  We don’t invest in larger human brains because that’s impossible with current technology

  No, we have technology for that (selective breeding, maybe genetic engineering). The return on investment is terrible. In an em dominated world, the technology for building larger minds (and better designed minds) may still be poor compared with the technology for copying. How much will that change with AGI? I expect people to disagree due to differing intuitions about how AGI will work.

• pcm 11 May 2013 19:30 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: ZHD’s comment on: New re­port: In­tel­li­gence Ex­plo­sion Microeconomics

  There is speculation that brain size decreased due to loss of olfactory and maybe other sensory parts of the brain after dogs took over those functions. See here.

• pcm 15 May 2013 20:25 UTC

  10 points

  on: Crash prob­lems for to­tal futarchy

  I question whether it’s wise to make new rules during a financial crisis. I predict that a mature futarchy will set rules in advance of a crisis that will better deal with it than rules made during the crisis would. (In an immature futarchy, markets will influence deciders somewhat like how polls influence them now).