PeterMcCluskey

Karma: 3,410

PeterMcCluskey 29 Sep 2017 18:27 UTC
4 points
on: The Outside View isn’t magic
Most of your post is good, but you’re too eager to describe trends as mysterious.
Also, your link to “a previous post” is broken.
Moore’s law appears to be a special case of Wright’s law. I.e. it seems well explained by experience curve effects (or possibly economies of scale).
>Secondly, we have strong reasons to suspect that there won’t be any explanation that ties together things like the early evolution of life on Earth, human brain evolution, the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and future technology development. These phenomena have decent local explanations that we already roughly understand
I don’t see these strong reasons.
Age of Em gives some hints (page 14) that the last three transitions may have been caused by changes in how innovation diffused, maybe related to population densities enabling better division of labor.
I think Henrich’s The Secret of our Success gives a good theory human evolution which supports Robin’s intuitions there.
For the industrial revolution, there are too many theories, with inadequate evidence to test them. But it does seem possible that the printing press played a role that’s pretty similar to Henrich’s explanations for early human evolution.
I don’t know much about the causes of the agricultural revolution.

PeterMcCluskey 4 Oct 2017 19:38 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Stuart_Armstrong’s comment on: The Outside View isn’t magic
>Do you expect this to shift our view of the agricultural revolution and of future tech development?
A sufficiently large trove might well shift my view of those.
>Or, if we make uploads earlier or later than expected, will that shift our view of the industrial revolution?
A large surprise would shift my view a bit.
>All these changes seem fully explained by trends that are local to the change (in terms of time and geography).
You repeat your conclusion without pointing to strong reasons. I take that as evidence that you don’t have strong reasons.

PeterMcCluskey 23 Oct 2017 23:39 UTC
8 points
on: AlphaGo Zero and the Foom Debate
I’ve become substantially more confident in the past two years about Robin’s position on the differences between humans and chimps.
Henrich’s book The Secret Of Our Success presents a model in which social learning is the key advantage that caused humans to diverge from other apes. This model is more effective than any other model I’ve seen at explaining when human intelligence evolved.
To summarize chapter 2: Three year old humans score slightly worse than three year old chimpanzees on most subsets of IQ-like tests. “Social learning” is the only category where the humans outperform chimpanzees. Adult humans outperform chimpanzees on many but not all categories of IQ-like tests.
If humans have an important improvement in general intelligence over chimpanzees, why are its effects hard to observe at age 3?

PeterMcCluskey 29 Oct 2017 3:05 UTC
7 points
in reply to: evolution-is-just-a-theorem’s comment on: Inadequacy and Modesty
Scott Sumner suggests here that central banks worry about small risks that they’ll need to be bailed out if their balance sheets get too large. (http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2017/04/what_were_the_c.html)

PeterMcCluskey 13 Nov 2017 19:47 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Blind Empiricism
I think Eliezer may have been too modest(!) in describing the treatment as unfair. I think I recognize Startup Founder 1, and that looks very much like a conversation I’d expect the two of them to have.
I expect that Eliezer had more evidence than he conveys for the hypothesis that Startup Founder 1 was engaging in blind empiricism. But I have doubts about whether Eliezer was wise to reject hypotheses about why Startup Founder 1′s advice might be right. Here are some mistakes that can be avoided by the “release early, release often” attitude:
- creating overly elaborate hypotheses, rather than looking for hypotheses that can be tested cheaply.
- being overconfident in one’s ability to model users.
- identifying with one’s announced plans in a way that leads to them becoming a substitute for implementing the plans; I suspect this sometimes creates an aversion to exposing the plans to possible falsification.
I imagine that Startup Founder 1 suspected that Eliezer was making at least one of these mistakes, but couldn’t articulate strong evidence for those suspicions.

PeterMcCluskey 22 Nov 2017 0:22 UTC
4 points
on: Project proposal: Rationality Cookbook
See curetogether.com—it seems like that would be what you want if they changed their categories a bit.

PeterMcCluskey 24 Nov 2017 18:00 UTC
7 points
in reply to: Chris Hibbert’s comment on: Gears Level & Policy Level
We’re not systematically bad forecasters. We’re subject to widespread rewards to overconfidence.

PeterMcCluskey 27 Nov 2017 17:59 UTC
7 points
on: Security Mindset and the Logistic Success Curve
Coral isn’t trying very hard to be helpful. Why doesn’t she suggest that the company offer $10,000,000 for each security hole that people can demonstrate? Oh, right, she wants to use this as analogy for AGIs that go foom.

PeterMcCluskey 29 Jan 2018 19:01 UTC
9 points
on: Biological humans and the rising tide of AI
Has Robin ever claimed property rights will never get trampled? My impression is that he’s only saying it can be avoided in the time period he’s trying to analyze.

PeterMcCluskey 10 Feb 2018 0:12 UTC
1 point
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Monthly Meta: Referring is Underrated
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/72997602-peter-mccluskey

PeterMcCluskey 12 Feb 2018 22:33 UTC
3 points
in reply to: quanticle’s comment on: “Just Suffer Until It Passes”
With colds, I expect that waiting is roughly the best strategy. See https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/81788.Why_We_ Get_Sick. Our bodies are already evolved to have good defenses against pathogens, and most things we do to fight colds are ineffective, but sometimes look good because they address symptoms (those symptoms are often part of our bodies defenses) or because of regression to the mean.

PeterMcCluskey 8 Apr 2018 2:14 UTC
5 points
on: Survey: Help Us Research Coordination Problems In The Rationalist/EA Community
The survey lists CFAR under “Raising The Sanity Waterline”. I donate to CFAR because it’s an AI risk charity. I don’t donate to charities that aim at “Raising The Sanity Waterline”.

PeterMcCluskey 10 Apr 2018 14:47 UTC
6 points
in reply to: namespace’s comment on: Survey: Help Us Research Coordination Problems In The Rationalist/EA Community
It was clear to me as a donor in 2013 that CFAR was primarily motivated by AI risk, but I got that impression mainly from talking to the people involved.
The 2013 date marker was only on one of the two references to CFAR when I took the survey. That was confusing.

PeterMcCluskey 2 May 2018 18:01 UTC
1 point
on: Does Thinking Hard Hurt Your Brain?
It sure feels like I use more energy when I’m thinking hard (but it usually doesn’t give me headaches).

I’m having trouble reconciling this with the evidence that the brain uses a constant amount of energy.

The “wasted motion” explanation sounds close, but I sometimes feel drained after a long period of writing code that seemed to involve unusually little wasted motion.

I expect that part of the explanation is my S1 telling me I’m reaching diminishing returns to spending more time on this task.

Thinking hard correlates with feelings of stress, but I suspect they’re both caused by having difficult problems, rather than thinking hard causing stress.

PeterMcCluskey 3 May 2018 0:26 UTC
1 point
on: Decoding, Not Encoding
I’m unsure how much of this post I understand.

For a clear but long explanation of why compression provides a good measure of understanding, see Dan Burfoot’s book draft.

PeterMcCluskey 1 Jun 2018 14:52 UTC
3 points
on: Monopoly: A Manifesto and Fact Post
The Elephant in the Brain has some relevant points—for some important industries such as medicine and schooling, consumers don’t prefer low prices.

PeterMcCluskey 3 Jun 2018 1:11 UTC
5 points
on: Why kids stop asking why
Could it be due to diminishing returns, as we pick the low-hanging/highest value fruit earlier?

PeterMcCluskey 12 Jun 2018 0:38 UTC
5 points
on: The Case Against Education: Why Do Employers Tolerate It?
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.

PeterMcCluskey 21 Jun 2018 1:27 UTC
12 points
on: Loss aversion is not what you think it is
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.

PeterMcCluskey 26 Jun 2018 2:25 UTC
5 points
on: Book Review: Why Honor Matters
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.