PeterMcCluskey
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I disagree with your analysis of “are we that ignorant?“.
For things like nuclear war or financial meltdown, we’ve got lots of relevant data, and not too much reason to expect new risks. For advanced nanotechnology, I think we are ignorant enough that a 10% chance sounds right (I’m guessing it will take something like $1 billion in focused funding).
With AGI, ML researchers can be influenced to change their forecast by 75 years by subtle changes in how the question is worded. That suggests unusual uncertainty.
We can see from Moore’s law and from ML progress that we’re on track for something at least as unusual as the industrial revolution.
The stock and bond markets do provide some evidence of predictability, but I’m unsure how good they are at evaluating events that happen much less than once per century.
By some strange coincidence, less than a week after posting this, I got another chance to observe the effects of being above the clouds. Technically, it was fog rather than clouds, but hiking up through and above fog has the same effect: in addition to creating the muted far-mode colors with fewer details that Josh mentions, it also enhances the impression of unusual height, by enabling my subconscious to imagine that the ground (or in this case ocean) beneath the clouds might be a half-mile below where I can see.
I wasn’t able to observe that I was more in far mode than on a typical hike. I’m pretty sure the unusual feelings were more along the lines of feeling high status, due to some correlation between being higher than my surroundings and being high status, or maybe due to the strategic advantage of having higher ground than any hostile forces. Or maybe just a feeling of accomplishment for having climbed so high.
At any rate, it feels quite good, and it seems similar to the effects from flying small aircraft.
The book is maybe 25% nostalgia, 30% blame. It seems pretty relevant to how we make long-term forecasts.
He’s talking SSTs. I’m unsure what propulsion methods he prefers for those. He claims sonic booms could have been cut in half compared to the Concorde. A good government would have set a fee for sonic booms that bore some resemblance to how much people disvalued loud noise. But the US government seems unwilling to say what conditions an SST would need to meet.
I’m unclear why I’d want undersea cities when there’s room for seasteads.
Lunar colonies would hedge against some catastrophic risks. They might be created for reasons similar to why Europeans settled the New World.
I got some good insights from the Charisma Tips website, which now seems to only be available via Wayback.
For writing a good profile, I liked: I Can’t Believe I’m Buying This Book: A Commonsense Guide to Successful Internet Dating, by Evan Marc Katz—mainly the examples in pages 36 through 39.
Authentic relating / circling workshops helped me, but they’re more oriented toward what to do when you’ve got a date.
Comsats seem to be working as predicted, based on an energy-intensive technology that stagnated in 1970 and on low energy electronics that have continued to progress well.
Asimov said in 1964:
Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence.
Josh classifies current industrial robotics as 100% of what was predicted for today, home robots as 90%, and AI as 80%.
Arthur C. Clarke said in 1964:
It will be possible in that age, perhaps only 50 years from now, for a man to conduct his business from Tahiti or Bali just as well as he could from London … I am perfectly serious when I suggest that one day we may have brain surgeons in Edinburgh operating on patients in New Zealand.
Arthur C. Clarke in 1958 said we should have fusion power and a global library now, we should be getting weather control right about now, and gravity control in 2050.
Josh classifies our global library as 150% of what was predicted.
Other predictions Josh classifies as successful: home-based videophones, robocars, translating machines.
Other predictions that didn’t come close: lunar base, “Transportation 1000 mph and one cent per mile”, undersea cities.
There are lots of hypotheses about overall changes in innovation. But neither Josh nor I are talking about a general decline in innovation. I see patterns where there are big differences between industries, with innovation slowing in some and remaining good in others. I want to explain those differences.
Where is my Flying Car?
nitrogen deficiency is one of the reasons for agricultural difficulties in Africa.
There’s no shortage of nitrogen in the air. Nitrogen-fixing bacteria exist. Getting them to do the right job does not seem particularly hard compared to the rest of what Drexler discusses.
These problems are almost all geographical constraints
With sufficiently advanced technology, that claim seems obviously wrong.
CFAR doesn’t have anything resembling a textbook that would help advertise a lecture or seminar.
Some better analogies for what they have are notes that would supplement an improv class, or a yoga class, or a meditation retreat. Unlike textbooks / lectures, this category of teaching involves a fair amount of influencing system 1, in ways that are poorly captured by materials that are directed mainly at system 2. Another analogy for what they provide is group psychotherapy—in that example, something textbook-like seems somewhat valuable, but I think there are still good reasons not to expect a close connection between a specific textbook and a specific instance of group psychotherapy.
And calling CFAR’s strategy a business model is a bit misleading—a good deal of their strategy involves focusing on free or very low cost workshops for people who show AI-related promise. They seem to get enough ordinary rationalists who pay $4000 via word of mouth that they can afford to give low priority to attracting more participants who will pay full price.
The ACA puts restrictions on buying minimalist insurance. I don’t understand the details well enough to say how much it affects these goals.
IQ has a relatively large standard deviation compared to its mean
No, the mean here is an arbitrary convention, so 15 and 100 don’t tell us anything relevant. The appropriate comparison is to what other interventions have accomplished.
That quote is from a section on history, with the context implying that “as frequently practiced” is likely to refer to an average over the 20th century, not a description of 2018.
You’re right. I was trying to summarize ideas from the book The Cult of Statistical Significance, but that book now looks slightly misleading, and my summary was more misleading.
There are some important ways in which physics rejected significant parts of Fisher’s ideas, but I guess I should describe them more as rejecting dogma than as rejecting p-values.
I meant as sophisticated as crows in terms of basic pattern recognition, and the number, diversity, and generality of the concepts they can learn. Maybe that just means throwing more cpu power at existing ML approaches. Maybe that requires better ways of integrating a more diverse set of approaches into a single system.
Maybe I don’t have a clear enough meaning of “sophisticated” to be of much value here.
Book review: Pearl’s Book of Why
See also The Institutional Revolution: Measurement and the Economic Emergence of the Modern World for ideas about why honor became less valuable in the west.
Phrasing this in terms of utility functions is misleading. I suggest thinking in terms of a Schelling Point strategy, as David Friedman describes in his account of why property rights exist. Most utility functions will generate strategies such as this under many conditions.
Your post is mostly good, but I question your claim that majoring in English discourages conformity. My impression is that English departments reward conformity to a set of norms that somewhat conflicts with mainstream norms. I can imagine this being a valuable signal for unpopular professions.
Could it be due to diminishing returns, as we pick the low-hanging/highest value fruit earlier?
It is often difficult to get people to bet in markets. This looks like a case where employees will do approximately no betting unless there are unusual incentives. It’s hard to say whether these markets would produce enough benefit to pay for those incentives.
My intuition is that there’s likely some cheaper way of improving the situation.