whpearson

Karma: 2,177

whpearson 28 Feb 2009 0:37 UTC
10 points
on: The Most Important Thing You Learned
Taboo very useful in discussion I believe.

whpearson 5 Mar 2009 17:04 UTC
1 point
on: The ethic of hand-washing and community epistemic practice
The trouble with only passing on verified ideas is that it stops you being able to pass on ideas you wish to get verified that need significant resources to do so, and need the help of others. E.g. higgs boson, an AI theory, a new low level computer design.

So perhaps a way of coding ideas, e.g in need of testing, tested myself, tested second hand, publicly available test data.

Colour coding comments on a forum might be a good place to test this kind of scheme. Then people can easily discriminate what is verified and what is speculative.

whpearson 20 Mar 2009 10:33 UTC
2 points
on: Why Our Kind Can’t Cooperate
“Those who had nothing to give, stayed silent; those who had objections, chose some later or earlier time to voice them. That’s probably about the way things should be in a sane human community”

Personally I think that you were speaking to the wrong crowd when trying to fund raise. Or perhaps I should say too wide a crowd. Like trying to fundraise for tokamak fusion in a mailing list where people are interested in fusion in the generality. People who don’t believe that tokamaks will ever be stable/usable are duty bound to try and convince the other people of that so they won’t waste their money (also it means less money in the pot for their projects).

Geek cooperative projects can work, but generally only if there is a mathematical or empirical way to get everyone on the right page, or you have to filter the group you are trying to work with by philosophical position.

With regards to signaling agreement, I think part of the problem is that agreements tend to give little information. If everyone on a certain mailing list said I agree and here is how much money I am donating, I would consider it spam, too much bandwidth for not enough new information… Polls would probably be better, or the organiser of the fund raiser could give running updates (which I believe you did, IIRC).

whpearson 25 Mar 2009 21:56 UTC
2 points
on: Spock’s Dirty Little Secret
Damisio’s view of the brain is very interesting stuff. His book Descartes’ Error is a fairly easy introduction to it.

This is my view of why the brain and reasoning works off usefulness and emotion.

Consider the genes eye view of the brain. You want to control what a very complex and changeable system does so that it will propagate more of you, so you find a way to hook what and how that system behaves into signals from the body such as hunger, discomfit and desire. Because you can directly control those signals, you can get it do what you want. The genes don’t want to directly control what the brain does, its purpose is to adapt on their behalf.

whpearson 26 Mar 2009 12:11 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Open Thread: March 2009
I choose option C, I don’t think your current posts are as important worth discussing as much as some other current posts.

The sequence on getting people to work together is only interesting if you are trying to form a specific type of fractious group. A group that cares about the world in 20-30 years will be very fractious because predicting the future is hard and has no particular methodology (and most people get it wrong) so most people will have different ideas of the future and hence different strategies for what should be done now.

Edit: You seem to be in a filler arc at the moment where as other people are starting their main sequences, to put it in anime terms.

whpearson 27 Mar 2009 22:15 UTC
2 points
in reply to: MBlume’s comment on: Can Humanism Match Religion’s Output?
Faces and voices are also not needed. I’ve played browser based games such as pardus and felt committed, if only briefly before realising real life is more important.

What I need is to be mentally committed to a project. Someone says we need to do X and asks how do we go about doing X. Discussion ensues. If the discussion ends up we need to raise Z amount of money or Y people to be on at a certain time I am likely to contribute to that or try and be that person.

Contributing to an anonymous pot won’t get people committed as a specific project.

A bit like what pjeby talks about with envisaging actions, push and all that.

whpearson 28 Mar 2009 0:06 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Can Humanism Match Religion’s Output?
The young idealistic people don’t have enough money to devote large chunks of time.

I’m not sure what the organisation that must not be named actually needs to be done at the moment, why it needs more funding.

If you are looking for people to do things you might be able to get people newly out of university to work for you for a couple of years for a living allowance. Which would be the equivalent of donating the difference between the living allowance and the market rate for their skills. People do sacrifice potential earnings for experience all the time, PhDs for example or getting minimal wage working somewhere exotic, What people don’t like doing so much is going backwards...

whpearson 28 Mar 2009 9:59 UTC
2 points
in reply to: JulianMorrison’s comment on: Can Humanism Match Religion’s Output?
Is one or two years not large enough blocks of time or are graduates not professional enough?

I agree that donating an hour or two a week is not efficient, I was trying to point out that there are groups of people that can donate large amounts of time/skills, iff they are given minimal money to support themselves.

whpearson 29 Mar 2009 22:39 UTC
1 point
in reply to: RobinHanson’s comment on: Deliberate and spontaneous creativity
Well if you want to make immortality a reality and hence have fewer young people (unless we find ways to exist more cheaply or more resources), then if we want to carry on busting paradigms at a decent lick we need to solve this problem.

whpearson 31 Mar 2009 22:15 UTC
8 points
on: Degrees of Radical Honesty
If the wise are truly wise they wouldn’t judge your honesty as a binary choice. They would allow you to run more complex algorithms that were scrupulously honest in some situations but dishonest in others and see them as separate clusters in person-honesty-given-situation space.

whpearson 1 Apr 2009 15:42 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Roko’s comment on: Introducing CADIE
In this case it is used fairly freely in an April fool. Not the place you want it to be used if you want people to take “the institute that must not be named” seriously.

whpearson 3 Apr 2009 8:11 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Paul Crowley’s comment on: Where are we?
Devon, UK. London meets are a bit far at the moment, but I may be moving.

Winning is Hard

whpearson3 Apr 2009 17:02 UTC

−10 points

11 comments1 min readLW link

whpearson 3 Apr 2009 20:41 UTC
2 points
on: Open Thread: April 2009
Anyone care to comment on why they voted down on my post? At least 6 people did, and none of them left a comment.

Not all down votes need a comment why. But it would be useful for me and probably others in a similar situation when trying to figure out why people thought it was bad,

whpearson 3 Apr 2009 22:04 UTC
2 points
in reply to: orthonormal’s comment on: Winning is Hard
I’m making a few points,

1) We need information not to die horribly.

2) Not all utility functions are equal in determining how effective you are in the real world. If you had a utility function that disliked fugu (by its nature not because you expected it to lead to death) then you would do better. For example pebble sorters might all die out because they don’t have the knowledge that eating is required to function and thus be able to sort more pebbles which is good. Lacking that knowledge they might all die out. Evolved Utility functions provide information about the world. We instinctively chew things and find chewing things that taste nice and fill our bellies good, so we don’t die out.

These have implications on what we should expect of AI and how powerful we should expect bayesian updating to be.

whpearson 3 Apr 2009 22:16 UTC
1 point
in reply to: hhadzimu’s comment on: Winning is Hard
Sorry I wasn’t clear, the expected value of oysters is not 1, that is the value you discover after eating. It is unknown, you haven’t had it before either. You have had other shell fish which have been dodgy.

Whether getting killed by fugu is a failure of rationality or not, it is a failure. It is not hitting a small target in the optimization space.

If you want modern examples of these sorts of problems not solvable by web phone, it is things like should we switch on the LHC, or create AI.

whpearson 3 Apr 2009 22:50 UTC
2 points
on: First London Rationalist Meeting upcoming
Actually I can make this,

whpearson 4 Apr 2009 9:07 UTC
1 point
in reply to: whpearson’s comment on: First London Rationalist Meeting upcoming
I’m probably going to be half an hour or so late, though.

whpearson 5 Apr 2009 19:35 UTC
1 point
in reply to: orthonormal’s comment on: Winning is Hard
Is protein folding a basic problem? People have suggested it is akin to being NP complete.

With regards to political policies, how will the AGI know which of the political data is good data for basing political planning. Also I don’t think we have enough data for making policy to improve what really matters, We probably have enough make policies to improve GDP or somesuch, but enough to make sure that father’s can spend enough time with their kids to provide a decent role model, I’m sceptical.

whpearson 5 Apr 2009 20:45 UTC
1 point
in reply to: robzahra’s comment on: Winning is Hard
My point is slightly different from NFL theorems. They say if you exhaustively search a problem then there are problems for the way you search that mean you will find the optimum last.

I’m trying to say there are problems where exhaustive search is something you don’t want to do. E.g. seeing what happens when you stick a knife into your heart or jumping into a bonfire. These problems also exist in real life, where as the NFL problems are harder to make the case that they exist in real life for any specific agent.

whpearson

Win­ning is Hard

Winning is Hard