You know what? The government should do this. It would be a definite improvement for people who are going to buy tickets anyway, because at least they could afford a better education, and have more free time, which means that they might eventually learn not to buy lottery tickets.
rabidchicken
Karma: 397
You know what?? first i thought i knew what was going on… and then i was confused, and then i created a few new theories, and then i was confused again. This really bugs me… It sounded like you were referencing the game of life, but i cannot comprehend the connection to paperclips. Alicorn, if that IS your real name, you are a froody dude. now stop making my life surreal.
That almost goes without saying.
Hello. I found out about Harry Potter and the methods of rationality while browsing TV tropes, which eventually led me to this site. I have never thought much about how i make choices before, but after reading a couple sequences, it looks like many of the things i am most inquisitive about are discussed on this site, and for at least the last couple years i have been reinventing the wheel on some of the ideas listed here about rationality. It is convenient to be able to learn things by reading this site, that otherwise might have required me to live a long, interesting life to discover :p
You recently bought a Mac? (must control Linux and computer building evangelism...) Anyway, welcome. I look forward to your post, and seeing your reasons for doubting the possibility of singularity. With my limited research so far, I am nearly certain it is inevitable, if not imminent. Now I need to go rant on a computer hardware site to get expensive pre-built computers out of my system.…
First, the results of a wikipedia check: “There is very little data on piracetam’s effect on healthy people, with most studies focusing on those with seizures, dementia, concussions, or other neurological problems.” which seems to decrease the assurance of safety for everyday use. But otherwise, most of the sources appear to agree with your advertising. I too would like to see memory tests for these drugs, but preferably in a large and random sample of people, with a control group given a placebo, and another control group taking the tests with no aid of any kind. As well as a long term test to check for diminishing effectiveness or side effects. With my memory, I would pay a considerable amount to improve it, but first I want to see a wide scale efficiency test.
This is what happens to me whenever I start to write a difficult program in C++, start by building a innovative system which solves the problems with minimal intervention on my part, and then eventually set up a cludge using heuristics which get the same thing done in a fraction of the time.
Well, that makes sense now. As long as your utility function does not in some way involve the use of proprietary software or pre-built computers then our utility functions should not conflict in the near future. Of course, the connection between your name and a certain Microsoft product does inspire revulsion, but changing it would not advance my utility in any way. /me orders robot minions to return to collecting minerals and vespene gas for the final assault on apple headquarters.
I would say that most people I know easily fit this heuristic, but I almost never employ it, based on the way I remember people. When I have been in a conflict with someone, I can recall a categorized list of every thing I dislike about them, and a few fights we have had quite easily, and vice versa for people I like. What this means essentially is… I have a very hard time remaining angry / happy with people, because it requires constant use of resources, and it also seems to effect my ability to remember meeting people at all. Since I store memories of other people using events instead of descriptions if I have never had a particularly eventful interaction with someone, remembering their names or any other info is almost impossible.
Using your logic, I would be forced to try a large proportion of all drugs ever made. My motivation to buy this drug is close to my motivation to buy every other miracle drug out there, I want more third party tests of each one so I can make a more informed decision of where to spend my money, instead of experimenting on hundreds per month. Also, it does not have a DIN number in Canada, so I would need to import it.
Come on… Who does not love being a social outcast? I made a decision when I was about 12 that rather then trying to conform to other people’s expectations of me, I was going to do / express support for exactly what I thought made sense, even if something I supported was related to something I could not, and then get to know people who seemed to be making similar decisions. Its arrogant and has numerous flaws, but it has generally worked for me. Social status and popularity are overrated, compared to the benefits of meeting a large number of people you can interact with freely.
EY is not a cult leader, he is a Lolcat herder.
troll (){ Downvoted because it was already Upvoted. I hate being controlled by Affective death spirals. }
Hey, that’s my line.
That was a useless and stupid thing to say even if I am a troll, my apologies.
Although there are an infinite number of existential risks which might cause human extinction, I still think that AI with a utility that conflicts with human existence is the one issue we should spend the most resources to fight. Why? First, an AI would be really useful, so you can be relatively sure that work on it will continue until the job is done. Other disasters like asteroid strikes, nuclear war, and massive pandemics are all possible, but at least they do not have a large economic and social incentive to get us closer to one.
Second, we have already done a lot of preparation for how to survive other threats, once we know it is too late to stop them. We have tabs on the largest asteroids in the solar system, and can predict their future courses for decades to come fairly well, so if we discovered one with a >1% chance of hitting the earth, I think even our current space program would be enough to establish an emergency colony on Mars / a moon of Jupiter. And although there are diseases we cannot cure, we at the very least have quarantine systems and weapons to isolate people with a pandemic disease. on top of that, we have immune systems that have survived threat after threat for thousands of years by quickly adapting, and medical technology that is only getting better at diagnosis and treatment, so the fast majority of potential human-destroyers are stopped before they ever get anywhere. An unfriendly Superintelligence would be able to adapt to our defences faster than we created them, could wait as long as necessary for the ideal time to strike, and could very easily conceal any behaviours which would act as a warning to humans until it had reached the point of being unstoppable. I really cannot think of risk management system that could be put into place to stop an AI once it was fully developed and in use. [Edit: Didn’t mean to make such a long post]
Indeed. I do not know how many people are actively involved in FAI research, but i would guess that it is only in the the dozens to hundreds. Given the small pool of competition, it seems likely that at some point Eliezer will, or already has, made a unique contribution to the field. Get Multi to put some money on it, offer him 1 cent if you do not make a useful contribution in the next 50 years, and if you do, he can pay you 10 million dollars.
Read the source code, and then visualize a few levels from Crysis or Metro 2033 in your head. While you render it, count the average Frames per second. Alternatively, see how quickly you can find the prime factors of every integer from 1 to 1000.
Which is to say… Humans in general have extremely limited intellectual power. instead of calculating things efficiently, we work by using various tricks with caches and memory to find answers. Therefore, almost all tasks are more dependant on practice and interest than they are on intelligence. So, rather then testing the statement “Eliezer is smart” it has more bearing on this debate to confirm “Eliezer has spent a large amount of time optimizing his cache for tasks relating to rationality, evolution, and artificial intelligence”. Intelligence is overrated.
There is. you can look at the blueprints of a CPU or GPU, and it is quite clear that everything needs to be connected in a certain way to work.
I laughed at the last couple sentences… “Yet in my estimation, the most damaging aspect of using other authors’ imaginations is that it stops people from using their own. As Robert Pirsig said:”… :p I am assuming the irony was deliberate.