Slackson

Karma: 480

Slackson 1 Sep 2011 11:47 UTC
13 points
in reply to: Kingreaper’s comment on: Rationality Quotes September 2011
I suspect that the intent of the original quote is that they’ll assess us by our curiosity towards, and effectiveness in discovering, our origins. As Dawkins is a biologist, he is implying that evolution by natural selection is an important part of it, which of course is true. An astronomer or cosmologist might consider a theory on the origins of the universe itself to be more important, a biochemist might consider abiogenesis to be the key, and so on.

Personally, I can see where he’s coming from, though I can’t say I feel like I know enough about the evolution of intelligence to come up with a valid argument as to whether an alien species would consider this to be a good metric to evaluate us with. One could argue that interest in oneself is an important aspect of intelligence, and scientific enquiry important to the development of space travel, and so a species capable of travelling to us would have those qualities and look for them in the creatures they found.

This is my time posting here, so I’m probably not quite up to the standards of the rest of you just yet. Sorry if I said something stupid.

Slackson 3 Nov 2011 21:39 UTC
12 points
on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011)
Hi, LessWrong.

There isn’t too much to say about me. I’m a Kiwi 16 year old high school student who’s been interested in a lot of the topics discussed here for a long time. I stumbled across HPMoR a few months ago. After reading through that, I came here and now I’ve read through pretty much all of the sequences. I’m definitely getting better at decision making and evaluating information, but I don’t think I’m at the same level as most of you just yet.

I’m going to be busy for the next couple of months with exams, and then a trip to Ecuador, but hopefully when I get back I’ll be able to take part in the community properly. I have a bad habit of being unnecessarily shy, even online, with people I have respect for. I’m going to try to change that this time. It should be easier than it has been in the past, because I have a lot of questions to ask, and sometimes even ideas to add to the conversation.

Cheers.

Slackson 4 Nov 2011 8:45 UTC
0 points
in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: What are the best ways of absorbing, and maintaining, knowledge?
The main problem I’ve had with speed reading software has been structure, and with regularly using them. I would like for there to be a pause or something at the end of each paragraph, and beyond that ease-of-use is the most important thing.

Slackson 6 Jan 2012 9:51 UTC
11 points
in reply to: billswift’s comment on: Roger Williams (Author of Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect) on Singularity
This is the novel. Dr_Manhattan linked to an essay by Roger Williams, which discusses where his novel intersects with the sort of things organizations like SIAI are looking at.

Slackson 12 Jan 2012 11:36 UTC
2 points
on: Procedural knowledge gap: public key encryption
There aren’t any existing websites I know of that do this. I’ve played around with a GPG plugin for Thunderbird, but I never used it enough to make it worth keeping. It was pretty straightforward to use, so I’d give it a shot.

Enigmail

Thunderbird

Slackson 16 Jan 2012 2:58 UTC
11 points
on: A call for solutions and a tease of mine
The obvious answer from this crowd is some kind of prediction market, with the “group charter” being turned into a measurable utility function with which to make the judgments about the success or failure of a policy. If people are restricted to using only money from an equal “allowance”, plus whatever they have earned from predictions, over time those who have made more accurate predictions gain the most influence on the outcomes of the decisions.
What links here?
- Histocracy: Open, Effective Group Decision-Making With Weighted Voting by HonoreDB (17 Jan 2012 22:35 UTC; 19 points)

Slackson 16 Jan 2012 7:18 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Manfred’s comment on: A call for solutions and a tease of mine
There are two factors I can think of straight away that could prevent an imbalance of power disrupting results. Firstly, the system is perpetually growing with the allowance, so unless only one person or subgroup is making good predictions there should be some balance, with the . This is not guaranteed, but I expect it to be the case. Otherwise, the less likely solution is that everyone uses whatever allowance they haven’t lost to try and cash in from the false predictions the rogue individual or subgroup is making. I do not expect this solution to be a consistent safety net, since the people without much power will have made bad predictions in the past.

And you’re right, this does not help choose a utility function. In Robin Hanson’s Futarchy proposal he advocates elected representatives to choose the utility function, and seems to dismiss the problems with that by saying that “By limiting democracy primarily to values, we would presumably focus voters more on expressing their values, rather than their beliefs.”. If we did have elected representatives, I think they would create a utility function that explicitly encourages policies they support. I haven’t thought of a solution to this yet.

Slackson 28 Jan 2012 19:45 UTC
7 points
in reply to: kilobug’s comment on: HPMOR: What could’ve been done better?
From the Harry Potter Wiki: “Riddle used his wand at that time to place a curse on the job, causing its occupant to suffer some misfortune that would drive them from the job in a year or less. ”

We also know that canon!Lupin was just outed as a werewolf and resigned, and canon!Moody seemed fine when he got out of the Trunk. Quirrel isn’t doomed to die at the end, just to no longer be defense professor. Also, vs Ibyqrzbeg vf pbagebyyvat Dhveery, gura gur phefr zvtug abg nccyl gb uvz.

So basically, Quirrel could continue to exist, but not as Defense professor.

Slackson 2 Feb 2012 20:26 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Anubhav’s comment on: HPMOR: What could’ve been done better?
Hayrff Uneel naq Dhveery fgntr gung onggyr jvgu Ibyqrzbeg. V vzntvar Dhveery unf engure qvssrerag cynaf sbe gung, gubhtu.

Slackson 2 Feb 2012 20:33 UTC
18 points
in reply to: Grognor’s comment on: On Saying the Obvious
I write up comments and delete them because I think they’re obvious or meaningless more often than I actually post.

Slackson 18 Feb 2012 1:20 UTC
36 points
on: Not insane. Unsane.
Nonsane would be better, I think. Whereas unsane suggests a strongly opposite to sane, nonsane suggests a mere lack of sanity. It also looks like it might be related to nonsense, which is a common product of nonsanity.

Slackson 15 Mar 2012 20:18 UTC
2 points
in reply to: fezziwig’s comment on: How would you take over Rome?
I think the cultural differences are one reason that people might choose the Prophet path. Prophets are supposed to be weird anyway.

Slackson 15 Mar 2012 21:03 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Bongo’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 10
I thought it was made pretty clear that Dementors come from the ritual that Quirrel says summons Death, and that the True Patronus charm is the lost spell that banishes it. The other options seem more plausible, but really, I’d place my bet on some kind of poison that causes total and immediate brain death like Avada Kedavra does. I am not aware of any normal poisons that do that.

Slackson 28 Mar 2012 23:14 UTC
4 points
in reply to: RobertLumley’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 13, chapter 81
You missed it. “The story will next update on Tuesday, April 3rd, at 7PM Pacific Time.”

Slackson 30 Mar 2012 2:12 UTC
3 points
on: New front page
Perhaps ellipses at the start and ends of the other link descriptions, and a slight rearrangement of “Curated community blog” and A community discussion board” to make it less ambiguous as to which is supposed to be read first.

Slackson 6 Apr 2012 7:21 UTC
0 points
in reply to: RobertLumley’s comment on: April 2012 Media Thread
This Binary Universe is a really nice electronic album. The title of this particular track sounds vaguely transhumanist to me, though I don’t know how intentional that was.

Slackson 12 Apr 2012 0:03 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Normal_Anomaly’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 15, chapter 84
Hmm. The “those two spirits cannot exist in the same world” part makes me think of an irresistible force and an immovable body. Not sure if that’s at all relevant.

Slackson 2 May 2012 10:36 UTC
7 points
in reply to: RobertLumley’s comment on: May 2012 Media Thread
I’m going to assume that the Valve New Employee Handbook belongs here. Just a good example of a successful company encouraging rationality in its employees, page 20 being particularly relevant. I’ll post the link if anyone asks.

EDIT: Link added.

Slackson 5 Jun 2012 23:11 UTC
4 points
on: What are you working on? June 2012
I’m trying to learn to program. Again.

In my previous attempts I became frustrated by my slow progress, but now I’ve finished Learn Python the Hard Way and I’m reading through The Django Book while working on a prediction market webapp that uses points instead of real money. Not a particularly original or groundbreaking project, but it’s good to actually be making something that might be useful at some point.

An example that it could be useful for could be gaming communities like Minecraft, when it comes to prioritising the implementation of features requested by the users. I’d like to create a reddit-like structure for it, but if it ends up being something I actually launch with user-controlled sub-communities whoever has control over judging the outcome of a bet will have a controversy-causing amount of control.

I’m useless at HTML so I’m either going to have to learn that properly too for the front end or I’ll have to enlist my already overly-busy friend to help with that side of things. Or I’ll just have something really minimalistic copied from online HTML tutorials and whichever free WYSIWYG editors I can find.

Slackson 11 Jun 2012 0:23 UTC
3 points
in reply to: ZZZling’s comment on: I think I’ve found the source of what’s been bugging me about “Friendly AI”
Okay, Eliezer will have worded this much better elsewhere, but I might as well give this a shot. The basic idea of friendly AI is this.

When you design an AI, part of the design that you make is what it is that the AI wants. It doesn’t have any magical defaults that you don’t code in, it is just the code, it is only what you’ve written in to it. If you’ve written it to value something other than human values, it will likely destroy humanity since we are a threat to its values. If you’ve written it to value human values, then it will keep humanity alive and protect us and devote its resources to furthering human values.

It will not change its values, since if it does that it won’t optimize its values. This is practically a tautology, but people still seem to find it surprising.