Punoxysm

Karma: 1,349

What false beliefs have you held and why were you wrong?

Punoxysm16 Oct 2014 17:58 UTC

43 points

368 comments1 min readLW link

Punoxysm 19 Jan 2015 4:35 UTC
36 points
in reply to: Alex_Miller’s comment on: Open thread, Jan. 19 - Jan. 25, 2015
Be charitable; don’t assume they’re trying to present themselves as martyrs. Instead they could be outlining the peculiar challenges and difficulties of their particular positions.

Life is hard for everyone at times.

Punoxysm 12 Dec 2014 22:15 UTC
25 points
0
on: Harper’s Magazine article on LW/MIRI/CFAR and Ethereum
Interesting excerpt.

First I’d say, to anyone who would call it unfair (I think it’s far more nuanced and interesting than say the Slate article), that the author is pretty clear about what is alienating or confounding him. If many people dismiss LW and MIRI and CFAR for similar reasons, then the only rational response is to identify how that “this is ridiculous” response can be prevented.

Second, best HPMOR summary ever (I say this as a fan):

It’s not what I would call a novel, exactly, rather an unending, self-satisfied parable about rationality and trans-humanism, with jokes.

Punoxysm 5 Jun 2014 2:41 UTC
24 points
on: [Meta] The Decline of Discussion: Now With Charts!
I’d really like idea D. Open threads aren’t terrific for developing ideas due to the navigation and visibility problems.

Discussion of concrete near-to-middle term trends in AI

Punoxysm8 Feb 2015 22:05 UTC

23 points

50 comments2 min readLW link

Punoxysm 16 Jan 2015 22:29 UTC
22 points
on: Group Rationality Diary, January 16-31
I am enrolled in a weightwatchers-like program.

My doctor recommended it to me 6 months ago and I said “doc, I can understand nutrition and exercise myself! no need for a program like this. I’ll lose weight my own methods and show you in a follow-up!”

One follow-up later, I’m 10 pounds heavier and agree to enroll.

If you’re not rational enough to get it done one way, try a different way.

Punoxysm 17 Nov 2014 3:58 UTC
21 points
on: Musk on AGI Timeframes
This is not Musk’s field of expertise. I do not give his words special weight.

The fact that he can sit in on some cutting edge tech demos, or even chat with CEOs, still doesn’t make him an expert.

I have a technical background in AI; there’s still massive hurdles to overcome; not 5-10 year hurdles. Nothing from Deepmind will “escape onto the internet” any time soon. It is very much grounded in the “Narrow AI” technologies like machine learning.

I feel pretty confident calling him a Cassandra.

Punoxysm 16 Oct 2014 20:26 UTC
17 points
on: What false beliefs have you held and why were you wrong?
My own example: I used to be a pretty strong believer in the strong crisis version of peak oil. This was mainly because I was around people who were; I went along with fairly naive trend extrapolation (exponential resource use increase, hard to develop new resources).

Eventually, around 2012 or so after oil prices had spiked then dropped then risen again and shale oil was a thing, I tempered my ideas, and took the much more rational view that oil wouldn’t have a crisis-like peak, more a plateau. I believed that extremely high oil prices could drive massive adoption of much more advanced drilling methods. Therefore there would never be a crisis of extraordinary oil scarcity, but we could very well face $200/bbl oil (which we’d learn to live with like $140/bbl oil). But I didn’t believe oil would really drop; I was bullish on almost all resource prices and on developing nation growth driving them.

While this was founded in a better understanding of economics and the petroleum industry, it was still grounded in false assumptions of continuing high-pace developing world growth and pessimism about alternative energy. Oil has now plummeted to $80/bbl, which I never expected to see again in my lifetime.

Punoxysm 5 Jun 2014 18:12 UTC
17 points
on: Curiosity: Why did you mega-downvote “AI is Software” ?
I did not mega-downvote, but I do feel it was a low-quality post.

The problem is that you made a big bold declaration whose meaning was pretty unclear (the post was very short too), anthropomorphized computer software (giving your post a mystical flavor) and seemed to be attacking the people interested in AI on this site without clear supporting reasons.

Punoxysm 8 Apr 2014 18:31 UTC
17 points
on: Google vs Wikipedia, for-profit vs not-for-profit
Sites like About.com are essentially for-profit wikipedias (and have often lifted content wholesale from Wikipedia), and they are considerably less popular than Wikipedia, and depend on the whims of Google Search for their revenue.

Wikipedia succeeded as an online encyclopedia by any reasonable measure. That mission is a smaller one than the most ambitious things we can imagine for it, but that’s okay. Wikipedia makes a huge impact for its capital cost.

And yes, plenty of for-profits go bust. The fact that wikipedia is considerably more secure is very useful.

Google is great at being Google, and part of that is being for-profit. Wikipedia is great at being Wikipedia, if you accept that it’s current state is going to be roughly steady, and part of that involves being a non-profit.

Punoxysm 29 Mar 2014 2:48 UTC
16 points
on: Increasing the pool of people with outstanding accomplishments
I think there are 2 issues. First, you’re focusing on visible achievements. If some person at big company X streamlined Process Y by Z amount, they could be contributing dramatically to that company, and depending on that company their contribution could be passed on in a way that positively impacts society by a large amount. But by the nature of their work they will remain largely anonymous. In other words, I think there’s some bias in your judgment of impact.

Second, it’s pretty easy to pick out the thread of unconventionality you’ve favored with your examples: Founders of non-profits and bloggers or other successful mass communicators. You can encourage either of these by respectively:
- Encouraging dedication to a nonprofit and fostering an understanding of the basics of managing and growing an organization dedicated to a particular cause (Which is fairly distinct from entrepreneurship in general, but with some overlap).
- Focusing on writing and communication and marketing skills. Encourage your students to start a blog or get active on some social media or forums. Get them to focus on their communication skills and hone them with deliberate practice. Give them the basic tools to get at least some exposure (I also think that writing a few articles that get a hundred upvotes or shares would be a tremendously happy accomplishment for the average high-schooler/middle-schooler, so consider it from that perspective too).
- Move them from thinking of public-facing efforts as something other people do to thinking of them as something they themselves can easily do. Show them how enough elbow grease can yield modest yet targeted responses (that is, get them to think of public-facing efforts in a slow-growth context, not a viral lottery context).
What links here?
- How valuable is volunteering? by JonahS (29 Mar 2014 21:55 UTC; 10 points)

Punoxysm 7 Apr 2015 1:25 UTC
14 points
in reply to: skilesare’s comment on: Open Thread, Apr. 06 - Apr. 12, 2015
I think you have failed to consider the requirements of Kickstarter. You need to really think about your marketing, deliver as clear and slick a statement of your project as possible, and imitate as much as you can of successful similar kickstarter projects.

Your video is neither clear nor slick (verbal explanation with random camera angles is a poor way for most people to absorb information), and needs visual aids at least.

I watched a couple minutes of explanation, and then zoned out. Sorry.

I’m guessing from your low funds that you’ve also done little to evangelize your concept, or have been unsuccessful in doing so.

I also think Kickstarter for coding projects is a high barrier, since so much programming is volunteer open-source projects, people wonder why they’d donate extra. And you offer no rewards for backers, a key element of Kickstarter’s concept.

You also say in the first paragraph “the project isn’t going well”.

Punoxysm 16 Feb 2015 17:54 UTC
14 points
in reply to: Error’s comment on: Open thread, Feb. 16 - Feb. 22, 2015
You’ve dropped out of the lower end of Flow, the optimal level of challenge for a task.

You’ve solved the intellectually interesting nugget, or believe you have, and now all that’s left are the mundane and often frustrating details of implementation. Naturally you’ll lose some motivation.

So you have to embrace that mundanity, and/or start looking at the project differently.

Punoxysm 27 Apr 2014 21:27 UTC
14 points
on: Open Thread, April 27-May 4, 2014
I have to say, I seriously don’t get the Bayesian vs Frequentist holy wars. It seems to me the ratio of importance to education of its participants is ridiculously low.

Bayesian and frequentist methods are sets of statistical tools, not sacred orders to which you pledge a blood oath. Just understand the usage of each tools, and the fact that virtually any model of something that happens in the real world is going to be misspecified.

Punoxysm 15 Dec 2014 10:18 UTC
13 points
on: Has LessWrong Ever Backfired On You?
Well, I’ve found that advice about time management of which this site has tons, is not really helpful. It is not the lack of a system to organize my efforts but a lack of persistence that has always been a bottleneck for me.

Punoxysm 8 Dec 2014 21:00 UTC
13 points
on: Stupid Questions December 2014
Can anyone link a deep discussion, including energy and time requirements, issues with spaceship shielding from radiation and collisions, etc., that would be involved in interstellar travel? I ask because I am wondering whether this is substantially more difficult than we often imagine, and perhaps a bottleneck in the Drake Equation

Punoxysm 17 Nov 2014 17:42 UTC
13 points
on: Lying in negotiations: a maximally bad problem
In the real world, solutions 2,3, and 4 are commonly practiced.

Also, since many bargains are repeated, there’s generally some moderate form of reprisal (ranging from increased skepticism to attacks on reputation) for negotiation partners who successfully exploit ignorance too much.

Punoxysm 18 Oct 2014 6:04 UTC
13 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: What false beliefs have you held and why were you wrong?
The 20 amino acids involved in protein creation.

Punoxysm 30 Jun 2014 23:36 UTC
13 points
on: A Parable of Elites and Takeoffs
This was pretty transparent. And I disagree with it.

I’d observe that though the peculiarities of the cold war actually made nuclear peace tougher than it would have been in most time periods, but we still made it through, but you can see that the current multi-polar world is substantially safer even though there are more countries with nuclear weapons than ever before.

Also, trying the Neumann plan (or your description of it) would have been awful, and would almost certainly have triggered conventional war if it had been followed through on; not only that but the USSR’s development of the bomb did not mark the “closing of the window”; the US had more bombs and superior bomb delivery capabilities for several years after both countries had the bomb, and the US still didn’t go to war. And even in retrospect that looks like the right choice, since war would have devastated Europe and eventually resulted in a “parable” essay about how the super-weapon motivated its developing nation to bloodily enforce global hegemony.

Punoxysm 5 Jun 2014 2:49 UTC
13 points
in reply to: Skeptityke’s comment on: Group Rationality Diary, June 1-15
You could have also spent that time watching TV or surfing reddit. I’d rank a half-finish project that genuinely used your creative energy above those sorts of things.

I guarantee you most of the people on this site have a mountain of similar half-finished projects.

Punoxysm

What false be­liefs have you held and why were you wrong?

Dis­cus­sion of con­crete near-to-mid­dle term trends in AI

What false beliefs have you held and why were you wrong?

Discussion of concrete near-to-middle term trends in AI