Even if I was just chooosing the “monarch” I wouldn’t pick myself. Deciding who is the right combination of trustworthy and smart is hard but the answer is surely not me (trustworthy is more important btw). I am pretty trustworthy but I am way too lazy and not nearly suffiently riisk averse in action. I “feel” like me being the president and just letting whoever is actually the best make the decisions is safer, but the base rate on this seem too low.
Princess_Stargirl
Karma: 310
My current estimates lead me to think either AI is hard, the filter is already behind us or there are implementable “mundane” solutions to existential risk. Or technological risk/progress on earth is very unusual (maybe some organisms would never be tempted to use a nuke as they are too “emotionally” connected to the pain of other members of their species).
Consider the following possibilities for how long it will take for humans to develop AI (friendly or otherwise) if we don’t kill ourselves via viruses, nuclear catastrophe etc.
30 years—In this case our chances of creating AI are way too high for this to filter specis. Earth will have had nuclear weapons less than one hundred years by the time it creates AI. And most nuclear scenarios would not actually wipe out all humans imo. If this is the normal technological path then the chance of making it to AI is wayy too high.
100 years—In this case humanity seems unlikely to reach AI imo. Viral threats will become more and more dangerous and unlike nukes they hard to control. Idk if nano risk is serious on this time frame but be. And there are other serious risks. On the other hand I don’t think the odds are so low that this would work as a filter. I am pretty confident humanity has over a one in a thousand chance to make it another 100 years without using uploads/AI. And even a one in a million chance is not enough for a filter.
200+ years—Here the odds of making it to AI are so low imo that the filter would be ahead of us. But 200+ years to AI means that AI is very hard, at least relative to many predictions on this site. This possibility is not ludicrous imo. Scott Aaronson is smart man he endorses it.
Maye there is some method of managing the risks of technological for several hundred years. Stable totalitarianism has been suggested. Another would be a zero privacy world, where anyone could spy on anyone else. And would be able to press an alarm button if they see anyone doing something dangerous (then everyone democratically votes to lynch them?). An even stronger version is if mind reading is genuine possible in real time.
But still either the filter is behind us, AI is hard, or there is some radical solution to handle existential risks.
I think there is a simple approach to handling these problems. First define a number than no one knows anything about. Say BB(10) where BB is the busy beaver function. No one knows anything much about the size of this number, whether its odd or even, etc. Then if someone yes yes to:
BB(10), BB(10) + 2, BB(10) + 4 you can infer they probably really are using rule: n, n+2, n+4.
If its not this rule they may need to say they can’t tell if the sequence follows the rules or not.
Unless they are using very general and hard to guess rules this method seems effective. An example of an absurdly hard to guess rule would be. “All numbers are less than BB(100)”
This doesn’t solve the problem. If you think the rule is n,2n,3n you could try BB(10), 2BB(10), 3BB(10) but then the rule might really be: n,kn,(k+1)n for some k. But again this method seems to me like it would give you a way to check most “easy” rules. Or at least something like this is useful in testing your theories.
I agree the majority of the damage caused by cuckolding/cheating is self created (though the pain is still real). However I do think there is a rational albeit selfish reason to be opposed to partner’s cheating. If your partner cheats on you she/he may find out she/he prefers the other person to you. Or at the very least your inadaquaces may become clearer if your partner gets involved with somoene else.
The polyamory community suggests that these issues can be manged. But there is a plausible rational argument that outside relationships reduce stability, at least for some people.
Also I agree that black people are obviously superior in several ways. Black men seem clearly the most athletic overall. Subjectively they are also the hottest imo :)
Imo this quote from her response is a pretty weak argument:
“The concept of female privilege is, AFAICT, looking at the disadvantages gender-non-conforming men face, noticing that women with similar traits don’t face those disadvantages, and concluding that this is because women are advantaged in society. ”
In order for this to be a sensible counterpoint you would need to either say “gender conforming male privilege” or you would need to show that there are few men who mind conforming to gender roles. I don’t really see why anyone believes most men are fine with living out standard gender norms and I certainly don’t see how anyone has evidence for this.
If a high percentage fo men are gender non-conforming and such men are at a disdadvantage in society then the concept of male privilege is seriously weakened. And using it is dangerous as it might harm those men to here that they are “privileged” when this is not the case (at least in terms of gender, maybe they are rich etc).
the United States prison system is a tragedy on par or exceeding the horror of the Soviet gulags. In my opinion the only legitimate reason for incarcerating people is to prevent crime. The USA currently has 7 times the OECD average number of prisoners and crime rates similar to the OECD average. 6⁄7 of the Us penial system population is a little over 2 million people. If we are unnescesarily incarcerating anywhere close to 2 million people right now then the USA is a morally hellish country.
note: Less than half of the inamtes in the USa are there for drug related charges. It is very close to 50% federally but less at the state level. Immediately pardoning all criminals primarily gets us to 3.5 times the OECd average.
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As far as I can tell Socrates was guilty of “failing to acknowledge the gods that the city acknowledges” though I am not a scholar on these issues. Unless I am badly misunderstanding the situation socrates actions don’t make a ton of sense to me. He was unwilling to flee Athens, which most accounts suggest he was somewhat expected to do. Yet he was willing to break the laws about “impeity.” I don’t quite understand his mindset, unless he didn’t mind breaking laws but was opposed to resisting enforcement? Some modern people suggest this ethic, for example viewing killing someone who is abusing your mother/daughter as ok if you then turn yourself in.
This does not seem like a suffient degree of friendliness for an AI. Even if the AI wasn’t going to resist when we tried to turn it off it could have done tremendous damage before anyone tries to shut it down. Metaphorically we want the AI to obey all our laws (so no “impeity”) not just consent to punishments.
An alternative viewing is that Socrates is friendly to the extent his actions actually helped Athens. Maybe he felt breaking the laws on impeity was helping the city but fleeing would be hurting the city. In this case his actions were friendly. For some defintions of friendly. At least he would be friendly in the sense a genie who can ask “I wish for what I should wish for” is friendly. Though this is problematic. Socrates has human values but its not clear his values are close enough to those of the Athenian population that his actions improve their wellbeing by their values.
I do not think most people consider this a problem on the par of the Soviet Gulag. Though possibly I am wrong.
If washington takes the crown he is helping set up a monarchy. And the next fellow may not be as good as him. Even very wise men/women tend to be pretty bad at picking sucessors. Marcus Aurelias is generally considered a deep thinker and a very able ruler. But all his years of good decisions were probably dwarfed by his mistake to leave the empite to comodus.
If Marcus Aurelias cannot be trusted to choose a sucessor idk who can. Even if Elizier can, can his sucessor?
(I am assuming here it will be a awhile until the singularity, if Elizier can be king until the singularity hits making him king is a very good idea).
Before dismissing blog posts keep in mind the Sequences were blog posts. And they are probably much more useful and important than all but the best academic papers. If current donations happened to lead to blog posts of that caliber the donations would be money well spent.
Agree. Here is the Heritage foundation ranking of countries by economic freedom. The Heritage foundation’s libertarian perspective views Scandanavia reasonably favorably. And they include tax rates in their analysis:
I would personally be interested in more detailed drug use questions. Examplae. In the Past year have you taken:
-Modafinil
-Amphetamine (of any sort including Adderall)
-Heroine/Other Opiates (not prescribed by a doctor as a painkiller) -Marijuanna
-Hallucinogens (LSD/DMT/Psychobillin)
-Testosterone/HGH (if you took testosterone because you are transexual do not click yes)
Maybe there is a better list of drugs?
Idk how long of a question Scott Wants this to be. If Scott is ok with a very long list than I too would prefer that. You list looks reasonably good.
Though I would include testosterone. People take this for reasons other than muscle growth.
I am an atheist. However I have personally had an experience that surely seemed like my prayers being directly answered. When I was young, from about 6 to 9, I would see these weird bright lights in my field of vision. Very often when I closed my eyes and frequently in normal daylight. Think greenish orbs superimposed over my field of vision (I could still see fine).
I was very freaked out about these lights. At 9 I prayed to god something similar to “I am not sure if you are real or not. But if you are real please makes these lights go away. If you answer my prayers I will know you are real and no longer doubt. Please help me.”
Soon thereafter the lights went away. And until I was much older I considered this very convincing proof for the existence of God. However I have since been convinced the prior of God existing is so low that I should not believe despite my personal experiences. Seeing does not always justify belief. Maybe I was hallucinating the lights or a medical condition improved by itself. But to this day I am still not sure what to make of my experience and whether I should believe in God.
Despite feeling belief in God is reasonable (even if I do not believe) I am very confused by people who are confident in a specific theory of God (say Catholicism).
When reading social science/economics papers I always makes sure to understand the details of the method used and the exact definitions the authors are using. Also important to check is the magnitude of any affect found and the sample size (though this should be in the abstract). I have found that too many times the abstracts are extremely misleading. The author’s choice of metrics matters. And many common words have no obvious precise definition (examples: “inequality” “economic growth”). In many cases I still skip alot the paper but after seeing so many social science authors use extremely misleading defintions/methods I am afraid of spreading misniformation to myself or others.
I personally wish authors made it super easy to find exactly what they did and made the exact defintiions they are using instantly visible. So I would recomend people do this in their own writing. This ordering:
Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion )
Is great if the methods and results sections are clearly labeled and well written. But sadlt many papers do not follow this model very closely :(
I used to think Narwhals were fictional animals. And people telling me they were real were just joking. It wasn’t until HS that I was convinced they actually existed. My mental process was like “No way are there aqua unicorns.”
Semi-political: I used to believe the correlation between economic freedom and economic growth was much stronger than it is. (I know there is no canonical choice of measurement for either variable). This realization had pretty important consequences for me.
My estimates of public opinion surveys were totally wrong. On almost every issue (sexuality, morality, politics, etc) I was completely wrong about the distribution of beliefs. Given my history of failure in this domain I no longer really on my own “intuitive” estimates of the distribution of group beliefs. Instead I seek explicit surveys.
One million! That is alot of words.
The following link has the word counts for a bunch of well known Novels and Series. No single book mentioned in the article is even close to a million words. http://electricliterature.com/infographic-word-counts-of-famous-books/
Notably “Les Miserable” and “War and Peace” are at approx 531,000 and 563,000 (the lengths of these works vary significantly by translation. W&P can be up to around 590K).
I don’t nescessarily agree this happens in most media. Most superheros for example just have their powers for no reason (some “earn” them but most don’t). In many stories if you are not born part-demon or a wizard you can never be something other than canonfodder. Even in stories where training is sueful people often get OP powers for no reason.
I actually think fiction overall presents being powerful as a two factor model. Hard work and unchangeable luck. In some domains the hard work dominates and in others the “genetic” stuff does. People randomly get very OP powers all the time in many anime (if you happen to eat a strong Logia or Lengendary Zoan fruit you are automatically very strong in One piece). the details might not match up but the two factor model is basically how skill works in the real world two. With the relative importance of the two factors differing per domain.
ec:
In harry Potter you cannot be “Strong” unless you are born a wizard. There is no getting around this. In the real world you cannot be a good mathematician with an IQ of 80. This is no way around this either.
The only one thing that really helps is modafinil daily. 200 mg about 3 hours after I wake up.
I also take alpha lipoic acid as I think it “might” make me feel better but I am really not sure.
Cal Newpport’s work seems relevant. His most important book is “So good they can’t ignore you.”
Here is a very good at google talk that basically covers the gist of the book in 40 minutes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwOdU02SE0w
And here is a Less Wrong Thread reviewing the book:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/k40/book_review_so_good_they_cant_ignore_you_by_cal/