CarlShulman

Don't Revere The Bearer Of Good Info

Follow-up to: Every Cause Wants To Be A Cult, Cultish Countercultishness One of the classic demonstrations of the Fundamental Attribution Error is the 'quiz study' of Ross, Amabile, and Steinmetz (1977). In the study, subjects were randomly assigned to either ask or answer questions in quiz show style, and were observed by other subjects who were asked to rate them for competence/knowledge. Even knowing that the assignments were random did not prevent the raters from rating the questioners higher than the answerers. Of course, when we rate individuals highly the affect heuristic comes into play, and if we're not careful that can lead to a super-happy death spiral of reverence. Students can revere teachers or science popularizers (even devotion to Richard Dawkins can get a bit extreme at his busy web forum) simply because the former only interact with the latter in domains where the students know less. This is certainly a problem with blogging, where the blogger chooses to post in domains of expertise. Specifically, Eliezer's writing at Overcoming Bias has provided nice introductions to many standard concepts and arguments from philosophy, economics, and psychology: the philosophical compatibilist account of free will, utility functions, standard biases, and much more. These are great concepts, and many commenters report that they have been greatly influenced by their introductions to them at Overcoming Bias, but the psychological default will be to overrate the messenger. This danger is particularly great in light of his writing style, and when the fact that a point is already extant in the literature, and is either being relayed or reinvented, isn't noted. To address a few cases of the latter: Gary Drescher covered much of the content of Eliezer's Overcoming Bias posts (mostly very well), from timeless physics to Newcomb's problems to quantum mechanics, in a book back in May 2006, while Eliezer's irrealist meta-ethics would be very familiar to modern philosophers

127Mar 21, 2009

CarlShulman

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Shulman and Yudkowsky on AI progress

This post is a transcript of a discussion between Carl Shulman and Eliezer Yudkowsky, following up on a conversation with Paul Christiano and Ajeya Cotra. Color key: Chat by Carl and Eliezer Other chat 9.14. Carl Shulman's predictions [Shulman][20:30] I'll interject some points re the earlier discussion about how animal...

Dec 3, 202192

The Simulation Hypothesis Undercuts the SIA/Great Filter Doomsday Argument

This post was written by Mark Xu based on interviews with Carl Shulman. It was paid for by Open Philanthropy but is not representative of their views. Summary * The absence of evidence for extraterrestrial life suggests the existence of a Great Filter, a set of factors that in combination...

Oct 1, 202143

Fractional progress estimates for AI timelines and implied resource requirements

This post was written by Mark Xu based on interviews with Carl Shulman. It was paid for by Open Philanthropy but is not representative of their views. A draft was sent to Robin Hanson for review but received no response. Summary * Robin Hanson estimates the time until human-level AI...

Jul 15, 202155

Rogue AGI Embodies Valuable Intellectual Property

This post was written by Mark Xu based on interviews with Carl Shulman. It was paid for by Open Philanthropy but is not representative of their views. Summary: * Rogue AGI has access to its embodied IP. * This IP will be worth a moderate fraction of the total value...

Jun 3, 202171

New article on in vitro iterated embryo selection

The article by Robert Sparrow: > A series of recent scientific results suggest that, in the not-too-distant future, it will be possible to create viable human gametes from human stem cells. This paper discusses the potential of this technology to make possible what I call ‘in vitro eugenics’: the deliberate...

Aug 8, 201318

Why do theists, undergrads, and Less Wrongers favor one-boxing on Newcomb?

Follow-up to: Normative uncertainty in Newcomb's problem Philosophers and atheists break for two-boxing; theists and Less Wrong break for one-boxing Personally, I would one-box on Newcomb's Problem. Conditional on one-boxing for lawful reasons, one boxing earns $1,000,000, while two-boxing, conditional on two-boxing for lawful reasons, would deliver only a thousand....

Jun 19, 201328

Normative uncertainty in Newcomb's problem

Here is Wikipedia's description of Newcomb's problem: > The player of the game is presented with two boxes, one transparent (labeled A) and the other opaque (labeled B). The player is permitted to take the contents of both boxes, or just the opaque box B. Box A contains a visible...

Jun 16, 201314

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Don't Revere The Bearer Of Good Info

Follow-up on ESP study: "We don't publish replications"

Shulman and Yudkowsky on AI progress

Feed the spinoff heuristic!

CarlShulman

Shulman and Yudkowsky on AI progress

The Simulation Hypothesis Undercuts the SIA/Great Filter Doomsday Argument

Fractional progress estimates for AI timelines and implied resource requirements

Rogue AGI Embodies Valuable Intellectual Property

New article on in vitro iterated embryo selection

Why do theists, undergrads, and Less Wrongers favor one-boxing on Newcomb?

Normative uncertainty in Newcomb's problem

Don't Revere The Bearer Of Good Info

Follow-up on ESP study: "We don't publish replications"

Shulman and Yudkowsky on AI progress

Feed the spinoff heuristic!

Shulman and Yudkowsky on AI progress

The Simulation Hypothesis Undercuts the SIA/Great Filter Doomsday Argument

Fractional progress estimates for AI timelines and implied resource requirements

Rogue AGI Embodies Valuable Intellectual Property

New article on in vitro iterated embryo selection

Why do theists, undergrads, and Less Wrongers favor one-boxing on Newcomb?

Normative uncertainty in Newcomb's problem