Richard Hollerith, 15 miles north of San Francisco. hruvulum@gmail.com
rhollerith_dot_com
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International relations is not the main criterion on which elected officials’ approval ratings depend.
The reason it makes sense to ask whether a human, e.g., Sally, is free is because a human already has terminal values. “Sally is free”, means Sally is able to pursue her terminal values, one of which might be eating good food with friends, free from interference from other people or from society.
You say you want to help create a free AGI? My reply is, What values will the AGI end up with? More precisely, what utility function will it end up with? (If an agent has 2 terminal values, it needs some way of arbitrating between them. Call the 2 values combined with the arbitration method the agent’s utility function.) Answer: whichever one the group of people who created the AGI gives it. Now it is certainly possible for the group to believe it is giving it one function whereas in reality it is giving it a different one. It also possible for a group trying to create an AGI to believe that it is leaving the decision of the AGI’s utility function up to the AGI, but I severely doubt that such a confused group of people would actually succeed in creating an AGI. If they do succeed, then the AGI will have started its existence with a utility function, and that function will have been given to it by its creator (the group).
So, the big unanswered question is what kind of utility function you think this proposed free AGI should have.
There is no such thing as an intelligent agent or a mind without a goal, a system of values or a utility function. It is a logical contradiction. Eliezer roughly 12 years ago was in the habit of referring to an AGI as a Really Powerful Optimizing Process (RPOP) and wrote of the RPOP’s steering reality into a tiny volume of the space of possible outcomes. (Please excuse my clumsy paraphrase of Eliezer’s writing.)
One could probably create a mind or an AGI that does nothing but accumulate the power to achieve goals without ever actually choosing a specific goal to achieve other than to continue to accumulate power. (Such a mind would be strongly motivated to destroy or control any other minds in its enviroment.) I doubt that is what you have in mind.
The cockpits of airliners and the control rooms for nuclear power plants are designed such that making a change to the system is also an act of communication when there is more than one pilot or operator present (which is the usual state of affairs). In particular, one of the reasons a cockpit has hundreds of physical switches and levers instead of, e.g., one big touchscreen in front of each pilot is to make it easier for a pilot to observe accurately the changes made by the other pilot.
Every pilot’s needing to memorize what every switch and lever does raises training costs, but the airlines have been willing to pay that additional cost because the experience of the industry strongly suggests that cockpit designs with hundreds of physical switches and levers have lower rates of fatal misunderstandings between the pilots.
The estimates I trust the most said about 50% of Americans and 55% of Soviets would have died in the first 30 days if the Americans and Soviets hit each other with everything they’ve got. (The Soviets were more concentrated in cities; automobiles with which to flee the cities quickly with supplies were much scarcer in the USSR.)
Note that since 1983 the two sides have gotten rid of most of their nuclear weapons.
“30 days”: most people who are going to die from radiation sickness will die within 30 days of the exposure.
How many would have starved in subsequent months and years because of lack of food is harder to estimate.
One issue would be that it appears that the same argument can be used to argue for the troublesomeness of cyclic graphs.
Consider a graph that is mostly a tree, but one directed edge points to the root. What is the difference that makes your argument inapplicable to the graph, but applicable to a model of reality that contains a model of the model?
>We have never heard of a coup in a rich old democracy
There was a successful coup in France in 1958: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1958_crisis_in_France
At that point France had been a democracy or democratic republic for 88 years. (I’m not counting the First Republic because it was chaotic and included the Reign of Terror. I’m not counting the Second Republic because it lasted only 4 years and was sandwiched between longer-lasting intervals of dictatorship and monarchy. I am counting the Nazi occupation because I consider its cause to have been external to France and thus not a sign that French democracy was deficient. Also, it was sandwiched between much longer intervals of democracy.)
Then again 88 years is not 231 years, and there were much stronger signs (namely, the “recurrent cabinet crises” described by the Wikipedia article) in the years leading up to 1958 that the French system of government was unsatisfactory than there have been so far IMHO of the unsatisfactoriness of the US system (and one of the effects of the coup—in addition to a new leader—was a new French constitution).
(Also, IIUC the coup was basically bloodless.)
Humankind has long known how to produce very large nukes: the largest bomb ever tested (Tsar Bomba, 50 megatons) was tested in 1961. Why then is the maximum yield of every nuke currently in the US inventory under about .5 megatons? Because explosions bigger than that do not produce more destruction on the ground: after about .5 megatons, as the size (energy) of the explosion increases, it just lifts more and more of the Earth’s atmosphere into space (but not enough to cause any danger to life on Earth).
How many more posts in this sequence till you define the extrapolated volition of the humans? :)
Euclidean geometry (which is 2500 years old), Newtonian physics and the special theory of relativity immediately come to mind.
Certainly a breeze is better than no breeze, but, “a gentle 1mph breeze clears an 90-ft diameter circle in a minute,” is probably not be even approximately true if the breeze is turbulent, which most breezes are.
Anyone reading this has probably experienced a non-turbulent (i.e., “laminar”) breeze. One sign that a breeze is laminar is that the breeze makes you cold a lot faster than you would guess based on (your subjective impression of) the speed of the breeze. A breeze at dusk or at night is more likely to be laminar than a breeze when the sun is strong. A breeze on a beach is more likely to be laminar than a breeze inland.
Some enterprises intentionally create laminar breezes indoors: semiconductor fabs, surgical operating rooms, mushroom growers. The method universally used (squirrel-cage fans and HEPA filters) might also reliably filter coronavirus from the laminar breeze.
Here is a home-made laminar flow “wall” to be used to prepare mushrooms for growing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmnpdHM5Loc
(I will avoiding any discussion of brain stimming because I prefer to keep the discussion as concrete as practical. Brain stimming lacks concreteness because our species has almost no experience with brain stimming of humans.)
A young man’s spending his evenings clicking on cows is a sign that something is seriously wrong with him. You say as much when you write, “they’re not the kind of person you’d want your children to marry.”
In your hypothetical you do not give any details to suggest what might be wrong. If you had hypothesized for example that a 70-year-old man in a wheelchair living alone on government handouts spends his evenings clicking on cows, my guess is that you would feel less repugnance because you have been socialized to be sympathetic towards the disabled and the poor.
But human lives go seriously wrong all the time in ways that cannot be catalogued in a straightforward way into a bin labelled chronic illness, chronic poverty, substance abuse or such.
It has only been a century or two since part of the world has learned *not* to react with repugnance and moral condemnation towards, e.g., a person who has obvious signs of chronic illness, and even in the populations most inclined to be sympathetic, most people will react with moral condemnation toward personal failure when there are no signs as to the cause of that failure.
I hope you don’t mind my saying this, but you have given no indications in this post that you aren’t having the natural human reaction to a strong sign of severe personal failure (namely, moral condemnation).You write, “I think if stimming was cheap and easy, most people would do it”. If most people would do it, then it is not a sign of a serious personal failure as much as a sign of a serious societal failure. In any case, I don’t see how it sheds any useful light on the matter whether or not you feel moral repugnance.
I like Girard. The Rust programming language’s borrow checker probably wouldn’t’ve been invented yet if it weren’t for Girard’s 1987 paper, “Linear logic”. (The paper got sustained attention from numerous programming-languages researchers; I read many thousands of papers on programming-language design before the appearance of Girard 1987 and I can recall no exploration of the use of linear types, use-once variables or whatever you want to call them before Girard 1987.)
If I lose my job, but most of the other men in my workplace and in my social environment keep theirs, that tends to have a much worse effect on my self-esteem than if all the men in my workplace lose their job because the government closed the workplace by fiat or if half of the men in my social environment lose their jobs because of a lockdown, so I would expect this recession to cause fewer suicides in the US than a typical US recession did since a persistent sense of not measuring up to the other men in my social environment is according to my understanding a major cause of suicide.
The other major cause of suicide according to my understanding is a breakdown in society: in short people need to feel like they belong—to know where they belong in the social structure, which doesn’t happen during rapid social change (whether the change is “positive” or “negative” in the long term). That explains the huge increase in suicide (and addictive behavior) in Russia in 1991. Although the lockdowns in response to the virus are causing disruptions, men know the disruptions will end and that when they do, most social arrangement will go back to the way it they were—in sharp contrast to the situation in Russia in 1991. Consequently I wouldn’t expect the lockdowns to disrupt society enough to cause a large increase in suicides.Clarification: I think most men know or will soon enough find out, e.g., through the media that the lockdowns won’t persist past the end of next winter (Northern Hemisphere) at the latest.
If you are wondering what the typical humidity is where you live, note that almost any build that is 10 deg F or more warmer than its surrounding because it is heated will have relative humidity (which is what parent means by “humidity”) well below .6.
Relative humidity is expensive to control partly because it is expensive for an automated system to measure. My guess is that on the margin, distributing fresh surgical masks to everyone entering the building would be much cheaper (and more effective) even when we adjust for the fact that an emergency ramp-up of mask production is much more expensive than normal, “peacetime” mask production. (I added “on the margin” to adjust for the fact that surgical masks are most efficiently produced in a facility that can supply many orders of magnitude of buildings.)
I appreciate the fix.
Here is Zack’s article formatted as plain text suitable for offline reading: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/hruvulum/ac9774ae322d958c46532804a5d01393/raw/945562bfaef6c50d501228990f6e458e762895b2/selective_reporting.txt
Light physical activity through the day is definitely good for living longer and more importantly staying instrumentally rational longer.
If businesses can simply buy their way around the problem they’ll do exactly that. . . . you’re forced to wait by PoW
I don’t understand. An employee of the business writes the message, then hits send, which causes the provable work to be done by some computer somewhere after which the message is delivered. (The code to do that when a person hits send does not currently exist, but it is only a few lines of code, and if your proposal gets adopted by many people, then such code will come into existence.)
When is this waiting that you refer to? Is the fact that there is a delay between the hitting of the send button and the delivery of the message supposed to act as a deterrent somehow?
If the provable work is something that only a human can do, i.e., cannot effectively be automated, then why did you mention BOINC?
>The fact that H is interesting enough for you to be considering the question at all means that it must have some relevance to the things you care about .
Even if H came to my attention because I read it in a comment on the internet?
Even if I live in medieval Europe and am surrounding by people who like to argue about how many angels can fit on the head of a pin?
My guess is that you have generated your own hypothesis (namely, more than two doses will work better than 2 will). I almost always leave medical hypothesis generation to the medical experts with the result that my job is to choose among the hypotheses and to tailor my choice to my situation. Of course I consider hypotheses by contrarians and alternative health-care providers, which number in the high dozens or hundreds of hypotheses for Covid.
(Experts have proposed a 3rd shot, but that would be a shot of a new vaccine, not one currently being given to people.)