technicalities

Karma: 995

technicalities Jun 3, 2020, 9:27 AM
10 points
on: Conceptual engineering: the revolution in philosophy you’ve never heard of

Raised in the old guard, Chalmers doesn’t understand...

This amused me, given that in the 90s he was considered an outsider and an upstart, coming round here with his cognitive science, shaking things up. (” ‘The Conscious Mind’ is a stimulating, provocative and agenda-setting demolition-job on the ideology of scientific materialism. It is also an erudite, urbane and surprisingly readable plea for a non-reductive functionalist account of mind. It poses some formidable challenges to the tenets of mainstream materialism and its cognitivist offshoots” )

Not saying you’re wrong about him in that lecture. Maybe he has socialised and hardened as he gained standing. A funny cycle, in that case.

technicalities May 22, 2020, 7:10 AM
12 points
on: What are objects that have made your life better?
I did a full accounting, including vague cost-benefit ranking:

https://www.gleech.org/stuff

Ignoring the free ones, which you should just go and get now, I think the best are:
- Sweet Dreams Contoured sleep mask. Massively improved sleep quality, without having to alter the room, close the windows, whatever. 100:1.
- Bowflex SelectTech dumbbells. A cheap gym membership is £150 a year; using these a couple times a week for 2 years means I’ve saved hundreds of pounds and dozens of hours commuting. They should last 15 years, so maybe total 30:1. (During the present lockdown, with gyms closed, the dumbbells get a temporary massive boost too.)
- [Queal, a complete food powder] once a day. Saves money (if a lunch would otherwise be £4) and time and the delivery vector means I actually use the other powders I buy (spirulina, creatine, beta-alanine). Big discount for verifiable EAs. Also a handy automatic prepper store. 10:1.
- Filco Majestouch 2 Tenkeyless mechanical keyboard. Assuming this decreases my RSI risk by 1%, it will have paid off 10 times over. But also in comfort and fun alone. 10:1

technicalities Apr 24, 2020, 10:20 PM
2 points
on: What are the relative speeds of AI capabilities and AI safety?
Some more ways:

If it turns out that capabilities and safety are not so dichotomous, and so robustness / interpretability / safe exploration / maybe even impact regularisation get solved by the capabilities lot.

If early success with a date-competitive performance-competitive safety programme (e.g. IDA) puts capabilities research onto a safe path.

technicalities Apr 14, 2020, 9:56 AM
2 points
on: The Samurai and the Daimyo: A Useful Dynamic?
My name for this Einsteins and Eddingtons.** Besides the vital testing and extension of the big ideas, the Eddington can also handle popularisation and, most important of all, the identification and nurturing of new Einsteins. This is one reason I think teaching in academia could be high-impact, despite all the notorious inefficiencies and moral mazes.

** Not totally fair to Eddington, since he was a pretty strong theorist himself.

technicalities Mar 24, 2020, 8:27 AM
3 points
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: What is the point of College? Specifically is it worth investing time to gain knowledge?
Caplan puts the signalling share of the college income premium at 50%-80%, leaving (say) 20% for the human capital share. So your sentence calling HC “mostly irrelevant” is technically true, but I wouldn’t use the word ‘irrelevant’ for a feature explaining ~ a fifth of the variance.

technicalities Feb 12, 2020, 10:09 AM
17 points
on: What are the risks of having your genome publicly available?
Ooh I know this one

https://www.gleech.org/genes-out/
- Health insurance
- Adversarial dirt
- Increased police attention, false positives
- DNA framing
- Releases info about my family members
- Probabilistic homophobia (etc)
- Mate choice
Plus a few I wouldn’t worry about even if I lived 500 years (signature bioweapons, clones)

technicalities Jan 25, 2020, 9:12 AM
36 points
0
on: Have epistemic conditions always been this bad?
The first thing that comes to mind is that there was more campus violence in the past (1960s-70s). e.g. Paris in May ’68, the Zenkyoto riots, Students for a Democratic Society, internal Black Power murders, and so on.

When, at the 1966 SDS convention, women called for debate they were showered with abuse, pelted with tomatoes.

(Though one of the most notable student movements, the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, was actually about lifting institutional restrictions on discussion specifically Vietnam War protest.)

I don’t have data, but this fear was maybe a stronger chilling effect than of being called names and disapproved of. Ideas for operationalising the culture:
- How many admin restrictions on acceptable speech? How many expulsions for speech?
- How many protests at lectures? How many successful no-platforms?
- How many students left college after cancelling?
- some measure of polarisation, of people self-sorting into their tribe’s college.

technicalities May 15, 2019, 7:28 AM
4 points
on: Epistea Summer Experiment
Will this clash with the Human-Aligned AI event?

technicalities Jul 11, 2018, 8:48 PM
1 point
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Automatic for the people
1 and 2. These are what I mean by capital distribution:
Prop up the liberal mixed economy: with a programme of mass employee stock ownership (mostly your 1); or by carving each full-time job into several part-time ones, plus heavy wage subsidies (your 2) (...); or get the government to buy every 18 year old a serious stock portfolio (your 2)
Basic income is also political in your sense (2), since it’s a large government-driven change from the status quo (and, unless we wait for >> 50 years of growth before we implement it, it will likely involve tax hikes *).
One reason to favour building up private stocks (over UBI, a flow) is that this protects people (a bit) from later nativist or populist governments cutting off parts of the population. It still goes through politicians, but only once rather than annually. Not sure what protects against revolutionary appropriation (3) though.
(ESOPs are a relatively apolitical nudge, but I don’t know how much of the problem they’d solve.)
\* World growth this year was 3.1%. Compounding that fifty times gets us $370tn GWP. It’s hard to tell what the ‘average world tax rate’ is at present, but approximate it with public expenditure, around 25% of GWP. If we could only use 25% of $370tn, we’d be roughly where the above long extreme calculation put us: nowhere near enough.

technicalities Jul 9, 2018, 9:31 PM
1 point
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Automatic for the people
That’s a fair inference; ‘foolish’ was an unhelpful thing to say.
(My actual reason for disdaining Macs is finding recently that my desired laptop—nothing crazy, i7, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD—was unavailable for any price. And that a price-matched one had about 25% those specs. Is that ideological?)

technicalities Jul 9, 2018, 6:49 PM
1 point
in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: Automatic for the people
Sorry if I was unclear; I’m not endorsing that logical extreme of the UBI, and I’m also unnerved by many of the policies I describe. (“total control of production by any entity is a terrible unnecessary risk”). The point of the calculation is to show that automation (or a similarly giant productivity gain) is necessary for a good future. Or are you saying it’s so implausible that it’s not worth thinking about?
I think the best argument against basic income is that it transfers vastly more economic power to politicians. That’s what makes me take capital distribution seriously: put it right into people’s hands, away from mob-shaped politicians and denial.

technicalities Jul 9, 2018, 6:31 PM
1 point
in reply to: Sable’s comment on: Automatic for the people
Demographics: not sure!
1) Naively, population growth should delay automation by decreasing wages. Frey and Osborne don’t account for this, let alone more realistic second-order effects (e.g. ‘more people, more demand, thus feedback...’). But they don’t commit to a real timeframe anyway.
2) Banally: “if economic growth matches or exceeds population growth, at least the downside will be bounded”. But we’re not going to get sensible macro’ predictions for a century away, so that ends that thought.
Even conditional on Frey and Osborne’s dramatic scenario, I doubt there will be a crisis (in the sense of sudden violent unrest), since automation progress isn’t that fast (e.g. takes a given public company years, not days) and can often be stalled by regulation. Things like job sharing (n part-time workers instead of one full-time worker) could be stepped-up very gradually too. (Or whatever the minimal change to the system that just averts an explosion is.)

technicalities Jul 9, 2018, 6:01 PM
8 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Automatic for the people
Yes, the piece is conditional; the “47% of jobs in the next few decades” estimate, which spurred me to write this, is more or less naive top-down extrapolation.
But many of the same considerations apply if long-term labour trends continue:
Anyway other powerful forces (e.g. global outsourcing, the decay of unions) besides robots have led to the 40-year decline in labour’s share of global income. But those will produce similar dystopian problems if the trend continues, and there’s enough of a risk of the above scenario for us to put a lot of thought and effort into protecting people, either way.

technicalities Jul 9, 2018, 5:33 PM
1 point
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Automatic for the people
Fixed, thank you.

technicalities Jul 9, 2018, 5:29 PM
1 point
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Automatic for the people
“80%” seems accurate about the UK’s media; see this (2007) study which puts original reporting at only 19% of all stories:
In short, fewer than one in five press articles (19%) appear to be based mainly on information that does not come from pre-packaged sources. Indeed, 60% of press stories rely wholly or mainly on pre-packaged information, and only 12% are entirely independent of such material
I’ve linked that and qualified the claim as about “[UK] journalism” anyway; thanks.
The slow uptake of auto-journalism is evidence that it isn’t really ready, sure. How Efficient do you take old media to be?
What links here?
- Automatic for the people by technicalities (Jul 8, 2018, 2:23 PM; 18 points)

Automatic for the people

technicalitiesJul 8, 2018, 2:23 PM

18 points

23 comments7 min readLW link

technicalities Nov 15, 2014, 11:06 PM
1 point
in reply to: bentarm’s comment on: Meetup : Glasgow (Scotland) Meetup
Hi,

Just saw this, but will sadly miss it. Would be very interested in future meetups.

technicalities

Au­to­matic for the people

Automatic for the people