Quill_McGee

Karma: 47

Quill_McGee 30 Apr 2015 16:38 UTC
0 points
in reply to: CBHacking’s comment on: Meetup : MIRI paper reading group
Well, it does say ’2016′, so that seems… Yeah, that isn’t plausible, but the fact that it says 2016 makes it more plausible than it would be otherwise.

Quill_McGee 28 Apr 2015 17:42 UTC
2 points
in reply to: alicey’s comment on: 16 types of useful predictions
After a bit of thought, I believe I’ve found a basically permanent solution for this. I use word replacer (not sure how to add links without just posting them, you can google it, it is in the chrome web store) with a bunch of rules to enforce ‘they’ as default. If you put rules for longer strings at the top they match first (‘he is’ to ‘they are’ at the top with ‘he’ to ‘they’ lower down, for example)

You will have to put up with some number mismatch unless you want to add a rule for every verb in English (‘they puts’), but I feel that that is an acceptable sacrifice.

EDIT: another issue: If you are actually talking about pronouns, you will have to temporarily disable it for things to make any sense whatsoever, and it doesn’t seem to have a way to disable it on a specific page unlike the service I was using it to replace, so you have to use the extensions screen in settings.

EDEDIT: Also, and this is bothering me enough that I might actually stop using this, is ‘her’ as a pronoun versus ‘her’ as a possessive. for example in ‘Get to know her’ versus ‘I found her wallet’. The first should be ‘Get to know them’ wheras the second one should be ‘I found their wallet’, and I’m not sure what to do about that. If I find/build an extension which can interface with a list of english words with part-of-speech tagging and have rules like ‘her’->‘them’, ‘her ’->‘their ’, then that’d work, but as is it is bugging me.

Quill_McGee 27 Apr 2015 22:37 UTC
0 points
in reply to: komponisto’s comment on: For progress to be by accumulation and not by random walk, read great books
Whereas, if I am interpreting them correctly, what they are saying is

(1) People say that high IQ is the reason Newton invented calculus.

(2) High processing speed and copious amounts of RAM don’t themselves suffice to invent calculus.

(3) Therefore, “High processing speed and copious amounts of RAM” is not a good description of high IQ.

Personally, I’d say that ‘high IQ’ is probably most useful when just used to refer to whatever it is that enables people to do stuff like invent calculus, and that ‘working memory’ already suffices for RAM, and that there probably should be a term for ‘high processing speed’ but I do not know what it is/should be.

EDIT: that is, I think that Newton scored well along some metric which did immensely increase his chances of inventing calculus, which does extend beyond RAM and processing speed, which I would nonetheless refer to as ‘high IQ’

tabooing IQ would almost certainly be helpful here.

Quill_McGee 27 Apr 2015 18:44 UTC
1 point
on: Less Wrong Study Hall—Year Two
“[[ My favorite “other” referral was someone who checked the URL on tinychat entirely be coincidence, before it was passworded. ]]”

Yep, that was surprisingly successful. I also had success with that tactic on fimfiction.net, though that produced fewer useful results.

(also, unless there’s another 15-year-old, I look to be the youngest.)

Quill_McGee 19 Apr 2015 20:53 UTC
4 points
in reply to: dxu’s comment on: Schools Proliferating Without Evidence
The system for generating new fields of research? After all, if it generates other areas that are no longer philosophy reasonably regularly, then that actually creates value.

Quill_McGee 16 Apr 2015 14:27 UTC
2 points
in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Hedonium’s semantic problem
A way to communicate Exists(N) and not Exists(S) in a way that doesn’t depend on the context of the current conversation might be “”Santa” exists but Santa does not.” Of course, the existence of “Santa” is granted when “Santa does not exist” is understood by the other person, so this is really just a slightly less ambiguous way of saying “Santa does not exist”

Quill_McGee 6 Apr 2015 18:56 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Kindly’s comment on: Nash Equilibria and Schelling Points
I was thinking of the “feeling bad and reconsider” meaning. That is, you don’t want regret to occur, so if you are systematically regretting your actions it might be time to try something new. Now, perhaps you were acting optimally already and when you changed you got even /more/ regret, but in that case you just switch back.

Quill_McGee 5 Apr 2015 21:48 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Nash Equilibria and Schelling Points
In my opinion, one should always regret choices with bad outcomes and never regret choices with good outcomes. For Lo It Is Written “”If you fail to achieve a correct answer, it is futile to protest that you acted with propriety.”″ As well It Is Written “If it’s stupid but it works, it isn’t stupid.” More explicitly, if you don’t regret bad outcomes just because you ‘did the right thing,’ you will never notice a flaw in your conception of ‘the right thing.’ This results in a lot of unavoidable regret, and so might not be a good algorithm in practice, but at least in principle it seems to be better.

Quill_McGee 5 Apr 2015 2:36 UTC
3 points
in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: Rationality Quotes Thread April 2015
On the contrary, this is what the Litany of Tarski states.

Quill_McGee 27 Mar 2015 3:09 UTC
0 points
in reply to: private_messaging’s comment on: Torture vs. Dust Specks
exactly! No knock-on effects. Perhaps you meant to comment on the grandparent(great-grandparent? do I measure from this post or your post?) instead?

Quill_McGee 26 Mar 2015 14:33 UTC
1 point
in reply to: TomStocker’s comment on: Torture vs. Dust Specks
In the Least Convenient Possible World of this hypothetical, each and every dust speck causes a small constant amount of harm, with no knock-on effects(no increasing one’s appreciation of the moments when one does not have dust in ones eye, no preventing a ‘boring painless existence,’ nothing of the sort). Now it may be argued whether this would occur with actual dust, but that is not really the question at hand. Dust was just chosen as being a ‘seemingly trivial bad thing.’ and if you prefer some other trivial bad thing, just replace that in the problem and the question remains the same.

Quill_McGee 25 Mar 2015 21:43 UTC
5 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Torture vs. Dust Specks
In the Least Convenient Possible World of this hypothetical, every dust speck causes a constant small amount of harm with no knock-on effects(no avoiding buses, no crashing cars...)

Quill_McGee 25 Mar 2015 21:42 UTC
1 point
in reply to: V_V’s comment on: An Introduction to Löb’s Theorem in MIRI Research
“if I can prove that if a version of me with unbounded computational resources is consistent then this is good, do it”

In this formalism we generally assume infinite resources anyway. And even if this is not the case, consistent/inconsistent doesn’t depend on resources, only on the axioms and rules for deduction. So this still doesn’t let you increase in proof strength, although again it should help avoid losing it.

Quill_McGee 25 Mar 2015 18:31 UTC
3 points
in reply to: orthonormal’s comment on: An Introduction to Löb’s Theorem in MIRI Research
I don’t think he was talking about self-PA, but rather an altered decision criteria, such that rather that “if I can prove this is good, do it” it is “if I can prove that if I am consistent then this is good, do it” which I think doesn’t have this particular problem, though it does have others, and it still can’t /increase/ in proof strength.

Quill_McGee 25 Mar 2015 1:00 UTC
0 points
in reply to: christopherj’s comment on: The Problem with AIXI
That AI doesn’t drop an anvil on its head(I think...), but it also doesn’t self-improve.

Quill_McGee 24 Mar 2015 17:13 UTC
1 point
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Second-Order Logic: The Controversy
I think that what Joshua was talking about by ‘infinite loop’ is ‘passing through the same state an infinite number of times.’ That is, a /loop/, rather than just a line with no endpoint. although this would rule out (some arbitrary-size int type) x = 0; while(true){ x++; } on a machine with infinite memory, as it would never pass through the same state twice. So maybe I’m still misunderstanding.

Quill_McGee 24 Mar 2015 17:11 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Kutta’s comment on: An Introduction to Löb’s Theorem in MIRI Research
Wasn’t Löb’s theorem ∀ A (Provable(Provable(A) → A) → Provable(A))? So you get Provable(⊥) directly, rather than passing through ⊥ first. This is good, as, of course, ⊥ is always false, even if it is provable.

Quill_McGee 19 Mar 2015 23:51 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Mark_Friedenbach’s comment on: Rationality: From AI to Zombies
Darn it, and I counted like five times to make sure there really were 10 visible before I said anything. I didn’t realize that the stone the middle-top stone was on top of was one stone, not two.

Quill_McGee 13 Mar 2015 18:30 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Scott Garrabrant’s comment on: Rationality: From AI to Zombies
There might be one more stone not visible?

Quill_McGee 20 Feb 2015 19:02 UTC
1 point
in reply to: JonahS’s comment on: Innate Mathematical Ability
It should be noted that if measured IQ is fat-tailed, this is because there is something wrong with IQ tests. IQ is defined to be normally distributed with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of either 15 or 16 depending on which definition you’re using. So if measured IQ is fat-tailed, then the tests aren’t calibrated properly(of course, if your test goes all the way up to 160, it is almost inevitably miscalibrated, because there just aren’t enough people to calibrate it with).