This implies your timelines for any large impact from AI would span multiple future generations, is that correct?
PipFoweraker
Karma: 77
Dropping my plans of earning to give, which only really made sense before the recent flood of funding and the compression of timelines.
Increasing the amount of study I’m doing in Alignment and adjacent safety spaces. I have low confident I’ll be able to help in any meaningful fashion given my native abilities and timelines, but not trying seems both foolish and psychologically damaging.
Reconsidering my plans to have children—it’s more likely I’ll spend time and resources on children already existing (or planned) inside my circle of caring.
Relatively small behavioural changes on your end may address some of the causes of these frustrations. It sounds like you might be overstocked with things of relatively low long-term utility, which is why it’s hard to immediately pass them on. Have you scanned your spending patterns for hyperbolic discounting, for example?
Comics are a great example—if you have the willpower to hold off until you can but a TPB, they’re cheaper, more economic, more durable, take up less storage space, and are much easier to pass on or pass around than individual comics. If you have friends who also enjoy comics, it’s easier to pass around books of them than individual issues, and you can probably read a broader range. Alternately, if you find a way to read comics online or through an app, you can enjoy getting stories as they come out but through digital distribution instead of dead trees. If you’re not collecting dead tree stories for long-term value, and don’t re-read, then that may be a positive trade-off for you.
You’re correct in that throwing things away is one of the least useful things you can do with them. Each low-utility spare object is probably not worth a huge effort in disposing of appropriately individually, so why trap yourself into that situation by virtue of your own lifestyle choices?
Do you have municipal recycling facilities or charities that you could donate things to?
For the entrepreneur—I’d pay some marginally low cost to have comics delivered from MrMind’s house to mine once they’re done with them :-)
Today’s SMBC will drag a smile out of many people here if thy haven’t read it already.
Whoah. That gets many points. What an excellent layout! We need to know what boots are for it to translate, but that’s a lot closer to an ideal solution than I’ve worked through.
Edit—I thought the diagram looked familiar!
In your situation, in Australia, it’s mostly about forward planning. Do you have any foreknowledge of likely changes in your health or family situation?
The insurance market in Australia has historically been pretty poor in terms of transparency and easy comparisons. I’m sure you’ve found the various compare-policy tools online. I’m assuming you don’t want to piggyback on a family policy.
Are you looking for more data, or a list of considerations for insurance planning? If it’s the latter, try browsing around insurance industry planner websites for their policy documents. I can probably get some friends in the industry to email me more comprehensive things if you want to work of their approaches.
Thanks! I’ve been playing around with it for a week or so but can’t elegantly find a way to do it that meets my arbitrary standards of elegance and cool design :-)
Becomes easier when using non-circular shapes for Venn-ing, but my efforts look a little hacky.
Reminiscing over one of my favourite passages from Anathem, I’ve been enjoying looking through visual, wordless proofs of late. The low-hanging fruit is mostly classical geomety, but a few examples of logical proofs have popped up as well.
This got me wondering if it’s possible to communicate the fundamental idea of Bayes’ Theorem in an entirely visual format, without written language or symbols needing translation. I’d welcome thoughts from anyone else on this.
In any particular geographical or topical area?
I ran into this issue as well, being relatively well credentialed professionally and through the TAFE / AQF framework. It’s hard to know where to put the scale, so I normally do an equivalence of hours-studied-full-time-loading in my head and use that.
Unfortunately, this. I did coverage work for WoTC for a few years and my custom dictionary is ridiculous.
For bonus points, I’ve also reviewed 200+ Spec Fic novels, so the amount of weird pronouns in the list is spectacular.
I have a non-specific recollection that, generally speaking, phrasing directions in the positive imperative (“Treat dogs well”) rather than a negative imperative (“Do not treat dogs badly”) leads to better rates of recall / compliance.
If it interests you I’ll ask around and find a proper reference.
There is a continuum that moves from complete dream-obliviousness (not being aware one has dreamed upon waking) all the way up to comprehensively lucid dreaming, where a dreamer is able to create and control their dream environment at will and then retain an accurate memory upon waking.
There are obvious problems with the self-reporting of dreams and dream recall, so the exact definitions of the continuum are fuzzy, but I’m not aware of anyone seriously disputing the continuum exists.
Also making matters more interesting is the mechanics of dreaming in terms of what frames of reference the brain uses to create the imagery of the dream. It’s not surprising that people dream about places similar to their environments if we think about terms of raw data in the brain as it dreams.
You may want to spend some time thinking about how you can give your dog the best end of life experience that you can.
Losing a dog is painful. However, and I’m only speaking from personal experience here, you will probably have the opportunity to control to a great extent how your dog dies, its relative level of pain / discomfort, and in what situation and setting the death takes place.
Knowing that my dog—who my parents found abandoned a few weeks before I was born, who I grew up with, and who died in my early adulthood—died at home, surrounded by her family, having spent her last days lovingly attended and not in great physical pain, makes remembering her whole and relatively joyful life more pleasant for me now. It may help you too.
Following simple ideas or explanations that are mostly right will still give me good outcomes in a plurality of iterations.
I don’t have infinite time to carefully consider those ideas. Being a standardly incompetent human at many things, my ability to discern truthiness by looking is subject to error.
What options do I have for differentiating between simple explanations that are correct and simple explanations that are only mostly correct, and then figuring out whether the latter are worth investigating for corner-casery / quackery / etc?
The thought intrigued me enough to check with a native Korean speaking friend, and they said that cloning doesn’t necessarily translate well and it could have been a question about the size of AlphaGo (in terms of copying it or the datasets) or its reproducability / iterations (i.e. are there v1.01, v1.02′s floating around).
The recently posted Intelligence Squared video titled Don’t Trust the Promise of Artificial Intelligence may be of interest to LW readers, if only because of IQ2′s decently sized cultural reach and audience.
When animals are created and destroyed solely for a purpose attributed to them by their human overlords, that reduces their utilisable preferences to zero or near zero. Unless a meat producer had reason to believe that inflicting pain on an animal improved the resulting meat product, that pain would almost certainly be a by-product of whatever the farmer chose rather than an exclusive intent. I personally know no farmers that inflict ‘pointless’ injury on their livestock.
Given any amount of suffering in the animal stock needed to feed, say the US compared to a zero amount of suffering of the in-vitro meat needed to feed the US, if we were basing decisions solely on the ethics of the situation the choice would be clear-cut. As it stands it is simply one amongst many trade-offs, the numbers and data of which I agree would be laborious to define.
The inability to communicate or even experience a preference for the concept of non-existence compared to an experienced or ongoing pain does not invalidate the experience of the pain. In this field of thought I am happy to start from a non-rigorous framework and then become more so if needs be. At a simple level, my model says [for SolvePorkHunger: ‘no pig’ > ‘happy pig + surprise axe’ > ‘sad pig + surprise axe’].
The practical ways to improve such lives as already exist are, broadly speaking, answered by practitioners of veganism, vegetarianism, cooperative existence with animals (raising chooks, goats for milk, etc etc).
If I’m exclusively limiting myself to animals that are raised in an organised fashion for eventual slaughter, I don’t think I need too much data to assign broadly negative values to lives that are unusually brutish, nasty and short compared to either non-existence or a hypothetical natural existence.
In my consideration, simple things like the registering of a pain stimulus and the complexity of behaviour to display distress are good enough indicators.
I’m not sure that this mental line of defence would necessarily hold, us humans are easily manipulated by things that we know to be extremely simple agents that are definitely trying to manipulate us all the time: babies, puppies, kittens, etc.
This still holds true a significant amount of the time even if we pre-warn ourselves against the pending manipulation—there is a recurrent meme of, eg, dads in families not ostensibly not wanting a pet, only to relent when presented with one.