Yosarian2

Karma: 561

Yosarian2 13 Nov 2017 10:28 UTC
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in reply to: Elliot Temple’s comment on: [Error communicating with LW2 server]
I was watching part of your video, and I’m really surprised that you think that LessWrong doesn’t have what you call “paths fowrard”, that is, ways for people who disagree to find a path towards considering where they may be wrong and trying to hear the other person’s point of view. In fact, that’s actually a huge focus around here, and a lot has been written about ways to do that.

Yosarian2 24 Oct 2017 22:35 UTC
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on: Time to Exit the Sandbox
I certanly think you’re right, that the conscious mind and conscious decisions can to a large extent re-write a lot of programming of the brain.

I am surprised to think that you think that most rationalists don’t think that. (That sentence is a mouthful, but you know what I mean.) A lot of rationalist writing is devoted to working on ways to do exactally that; a lot of people have written about how just reading the sequences helped them basically repogram their own brain to be more rational in a wide variety of situations.

Are there a lot of people in the rationalist community who think that conscious thought and decision making can’t do major things? I know there are philosophers who think that maybe consciousness is irrelevant to behavior, but that philosophy seems very much at odds with LessWrong-style rationality and the way people on LessWrong tend ot think about and talk about what consciousness is.

Yosarian2 22 Oct 2017 14:50 UTC
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in reply to: entirelyuseless’s comment on: Halloween costume: Paperclipperer
He’s not a superhuman intelligent paperclipper yet, just human level.

Yosarian2 12 Oct 2017 20:56 UTC
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in reply to: SquirrelInHell’s comment on: You Too Can See Suffering

Or, you know, it’s just simply true that people experience much more suffering than happiness. Also, they aren’t so very aware of this themselves, because of how memories work.

That certanly is not true of me or of my life overall, except during a few short periods. I don’t have the same access to other people’s internal state, but I doubt it is true of most people.

There certanly are a significant number people who it may be true of, people who suffer from depression or chronic pain or who are living in other difficult circumstances. I highly doubt that that’s the majority of people, though.

Yosarian2 9 Oct 2017 22:27 UTC
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in reply to: Gunnar_Zarncke’s comment on: Polling Thread October 2017
Yeah, I’m not sure how to answer this. I would do one set of answers for my personal social environment and a completely different set of answers for my work environment, to such a degree that trying to just average them wouldn’t work. I could pick one or the other.

Reference: I teach in an urban high school.

Yosarian2 8 Oct 2017 15:58 UTC
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on: HOWTO: Screw Up The LessWrong Survey and Bring Great Shame To Your Family
I didn’t even know that the survey was happening, sorry.

If you do decide to keep running the survey for a little longer, I’d take it, if that data point helps.

Yosarian2 7 Oct 2017 22:05 UTC
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on: Running a Futurist Institute.
I think you need to try and narrow your focus on exactly what you mean by a “futurist institute” and figure out what specifically you plan on doing before you can think about any of these issues.

Are you thinking about the kind of consulting agency that companies get advice from on what the market might look like in 5 years and what technologies their competitors are using? Or about something like a think-tank that does research and writes papers with the intent on influencing political policy, and is usually supported by donations? Or an academic group, probably tied to a university, which publishes academic papers, similar to what Nick Bostrom does at Oxford? Or something that raises money primarily for scientific and technological research? Or maybe an organization similar to H+ that tries to spread awareness of transhumanist/ singularity related issues, publishes newsletters, has meetings, and generally tries to change people’s minds about futurist, technological, AI, and/or transhumanist issues? Or something else entierly?

Basically, without more details about exactly what you are trying to do, I don’t think anyone here is going to be able to offer very good advice. i suspect you may not be sure yourself yet, so maybe the first step is to try to think about the different options and try to narrow your initial focus a bit.

Yosarian2 5 Oct 2017 20:45 UTC
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in reply to: SquirrelInHell’s comment on: You Too Can See Suffering

The best tradeoff is when you are well calibrated, just like with everything else.

“Well calibrated” isn’t a simple thing, though. It’s always a conscious decision of how willing you are to tolerate false positives vs false negatives.

Anyway, I’m not trying to shoot you down here; I really did like your article, and I think you made a good point. Just saying that it’s possible to have a great insight and still overshoot or over-correct for a previous mistake you’ve made, and if you think that almost everyone you see is suffering, you may be doing just that.

Yosarian2 5 Oct 2017 9:27 UTC
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in reply to: SquirrelInHell’s comment on: You Too Can See Suffering
There has to be some kind of trade-off here between false positives and false negatives here, doesn’t there? If you decide to “use that skill” to see more suffering, isn’t it likely that you are getting at least some false positives, some cases where you think someone is suffering and they aren’t?

Yosarian2 5 Oct 2017 8:58 UTC
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in reply to: SquirrelInHell’s comment on: You Too Can See Suffering
If “happiness” is too vague a term or has too many other meanings we don’t necessarily want to imply, we could just say “positive utility”. As in “try to notice when you or the people around you are experiencing positive utility”.

I do think that actually taking note of that probably does help you move your happiness baseline; it’s basically a rationalist version of “be thankful for the good things in your life”. Something as simple as “you know, I enjoy walking the dog on a crisp fall day like this”. Noticing when other people seem to be experiencing positive utility is also probably important in becoming a more morally correct utilitarian yourself, likely just as important as noting other people’s suffering/ negative utility.

Yosarian2 5 Oct 2017 1:53 UTC
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on: You Too Can See Suffering
Really interesting essay.

It also made me wonder if the opposite is also a skill you need to learn; do people need to learn how to see happiness when that happens around them? Some people seem strangely blind to happiness, even to their own.

Yosarian2 4 Oct 2017 23:01 UTC
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in reply to: Gunnar_Zarncke’s comment on: [Slashdot] We’re Not Living in a Computer Simulation, New Research Shows
To take this a step farther; while this doesn’t prove we’re not in a simulation, I think if you accept that our universe can’t be simulated from a universe that looks like ours, it destroys the whole anthro/ probability argument in favor of simulations, because that argument seems to rely on the claim that we will eventually create a singularity which will simulate a lot of universes like ours. If that’s not possible, then the main positive argument for the simulation hypothesis gets a lot weaker, I think.

Maybe there’s a higher level universe with more permissive computational constraints, maybe not, but either way I’m not sure I see how you can make a probability argument for or against it.

Yosarian2 24 Sep 2017 15:08 UTC
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in reply to: IlyaShpitser’s comment on: Intuitive explanation of why entropy maximizes in a uniform distribution?
Does the information theory definition of entropy actually correspond to the physics definition of entropy? I understand what entropy means in terms of physics, but the information theory definition of the terms seemed fundamentally different to me. Is it, or does one actually correspond to the other in some way that I’m not seeing?

Yosarian2 24 Sep 2017 14:21 UTC
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in reply to: Habryka’s comment on: LW2.0 now in public beta (you’ll need to reset your password to log in)
Yeah, that’s the issue, then. And there’s no way around that, no way to just let us temporally log in and confirm our emails later?

Yosarian2 23 Sep 2017 20:04 UTC
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in reply to: turchin’s comment on: Perspective Reasoning’s Counter to The Doomsday Argument
I guess, but it’s cheaper to observe the sky in reality then it is on youtube. To observe the sky, you just have to look out the window; turning on your computer costs energy and such.

So in order for this to be coherent, I think you have to somehow make the case that our reality is in some extent rare or unlikely or expensive, and I’m not sure how you can do that without knowing more about the creation of the universe then we do, or how “common” the creation of universes is over...some scale (not even sure what scale you would use; over infinite periods of time? Over a multiverse? Does the question even make sense?)

Yosarian2 23 Sep 2017 18:24 UTC
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on: Intuitive explanation of why entropy maximizes in a uniform distribution?
In the simplest example, when you have a closed system where part of the system starts out warmer and the other part starts out cooler, it’s fairly intuitive to understand why entropy will usually increase over time until it reaches the maximum level. When two molecule molecule of gas collide, a high-energy (hot) molecule and a lower-energy (cooler) molecule, the most likely result is that some energy will be transferred from the warmer molecule to the cooler molecule. Over time, this process will result in the temperature equalizing.

The math behind this process and how it related to entropy isn’t that complicated, look up the Clausius theorem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clausius_theorem

Yosarian2 23 Sep 2017 18:00 UTC
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on: LW2.0 now in public beta (you’ll need to reset your password to log in)
It doesn’t seem to be working for me; I tried to reset my password, and it keeps saying “user not found”, although I doublechecked and it is the same email I have on my account here on lesswrong.

Yosarian2 23 Sep 2017 17:47 UTC
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in reply to: turchin’s comment on: Perspective Reasoning’s Counter to The Doomsday Argument
It seems weird to place a “price” on something like the Big Bang and the universe. For all we know, in some state of chaos or quantum uncertainty, the odds of something like a Big Bang happening eventually approaches 100%, which makes it basically “free” by some definition of the term. Especially if something like the Big Bang and the universe happens an infinite number of times, either sequentially or simultaneously.

Again, we don’t know that that’s true, but we don’t know it’s not true either.

Yosarian2 22 Sep 2017 21:49 UTC
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in reply to: turchin’s comment on: Perspective Reasoning’s Counter to The Doomsday Argument
Yeah, I saw that. In fact looking back on that comment thread, it looks like we had almost the exact same debate there, heh, where I said that I didn’t think the simulation hypothesis was impossible but that I didn’t see the anthropic argument for it as convincing for several reasons.

Yosarian2 22 Sep 2017 21:19 UTC
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in reply to: turchin’s comment on: Perspective Reasoning’s Counter to The Doomsday Argument

But I don’t see a practical reason to run few minutes simulations

The main explanation that I’ve seen for why an advanced AI might run a lot of simulations is in order to better predict how humans would react in different situations (perhaps to learn to better manipulate humans, or to understand human value system, or maybe to achieve whatever theoretically pro-human goal was set in the AI’s utility function, ect). If so, then it likely would run a very large number of very short simulations, designed to put uploaded minds in very specific and very clearly designed unusual situations, and then end the simulation shortly afterwards. Likely if that was the goal it would run a very large number of iterations on the same scenario, each time varying the details ever so slightly, in order to try to find out exactally what makes us tick. For example, instead of philosophizing about the trolley car problem, it might just put a million different humans into that situation and see how each one of them reacts, and then iterate the situation ten thousand times with slight variations each time to see which variables change how humans will react.

If an AI does both (both short small-scale simulations and long universe-length simulations), then the number of short simulations would massively outnumber the number of long simulations, you could run quadrillions of them for the same resources as it takes to actually simulate an entire universe.