In this post, I proclaim/endorse forum participation (aka commenting) as a productive research strategy that I've managed to stumble upon, and recommend it to others (at least to try). Note that this is different from saying that forum/blog posts are a good way for a research community to communicate. It's about individually doing better as researchers.
Recently I became interested in what kind of costs were inflicted by iron deficiency, so I looked up studies until I got tired. This was not an exhaustive search, but the results are so striking that even with wide error bars I found them compelling. So compelling I wrote up a post with an algorithm for treating iron deficiency while minimizing the chance of poisoning yourself. I’ve put the algorithm and a summary of potential gains first to get your attention, but if you’re considering acting on this I strongly encourage you to continue reading to the rest of the post where I provide the evidence for my beliefs.
Tl;dr: If you are vegan or menstruate regularly, there’s a 10-50% chance you are iron deficient. Excess iron...
I didn't, thanks! I'm a fairly long-time visitor but sporadic-at-best commenter here, primarily because I feel I can learn much more than I can contribute (present case included).
I'd love to know why you think it's weak. As I mentioned before, it doesn't seem any more than suggestive to me (and to be fair Chen acknowledges as much), but it does seem quite suggestive, and it has introduced a hint of doubt in me.
I get the sense that I've gotten your back up slightly here, which is perhaps not without justification as I admit to having been a touch suspicious...
You are a rational thinker.
Ever since you were born, you’ve been racing through a universe of ideas: creating, evaluating, disputing, engaging with, and being bombarded by…
Ideas.
Like a particle from the Big Bang, you have bounced around the universe until you found yourself here.
Reading, pondering, considering.
Thinking is the foundation by which we establish our reality.
Over time you should master this skill, and yet people seem to get stuck on ideas. People stumble into ideologies and then keep falling deeper into them. These can be ideologies of philosophy, identity, interests, career, or beyond.
Just as a particle whizzing around in the universe can fall into a black hole, people too can get stuck on an idea, cross an event horizon, and never come back.
You see this phenomenon often, and it...
Bostrom’s new book is out today in hardcover and Kindle in the USA, and on Kindle in the UK.
Description:
A greyhound catching the mechanical lure—what would he actually do with it? Has he given this any thought?
Bostrom’s previous book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies changed the global conversation on AI and became a New York Times bestseller. It focused on what might happen if AI development goes wrong. But what if things go right?
Suppose that we develop superintelligence safely, govern it well, and make good use of the cornucopian wealth and near magical technological powers that this technology can unlock. If this transition to the machine intelligence era goes well, human labor becomes obsolete. We would thus enter a condition of "post-instrumentality", in which our efforts are not needed...
I'm wondering what Nick Bostrom's p(doom) currently is, given the subject of this book. He said 9 years ago in his lecture on his book Superintelligence "less than 50% risk of doom". In this interview 4 months ago he said that it's good there has been more focus on risks in recent times, but there's still slightly less focus on the risks than what is optimal, but he wants to focus on the upsides because he fears we might "overshoot" and not build AGI at all which would be tragic in his opinion. So it seems he thinks the risk is less than it used to be beca...
This is my personal opinion, and in particular, does not represent anything like a MIRI consensus; I've gotten push-back from almost everyone I've spoken with about this, although in most cases I believe I eventually convinced them of the narrow terminological point I'm making.
In the AI x-risk community, I think there is a tendency to ask people to estimate "time to AGI" when what is meant is really something more like "time to doom" (or, better, point-of-no-return). For about a year, I've been answering this question "zero" when asked.
This strikes some people as absurd or at best misleading. I disagree.
The term "Artificial General Intelligence" (AGI) was coined in the early 00s, to contrast with the prevalent paradigm of Narrow AI. I was getting my undergraduate computer science...
Absolutely. I don't think it's impossible to build such a system. In fact, I think a transformer is probably about 90% there. Need to add trial and error, some kind of long-term memory/fine-tuning and a handful of default heuristics. Scale will help too, but no amount of scale alone will get us there.
On Wednesday, author David Brin announced that Vernor Vinge, sci-fi author, former professor, and father of the technological singularity concept, died from Parkinson's disease at age 79 on March 20, 2024, in La Jolla, California. The announcement came in a Facebook tribute where Brin wrote about Vinge's deep love for science and writing. [...]
As a sci-fi author, Vinge won Hugo Awards for his novels A Fire Upon the Deep (1993), A Deepness in the Sky (2000), and Rainbows End (2007). He also won Hugos for novellas Fast Times at Fairmont High (2002) and The Cookie Monster (2004). As Mike Glyer's File 770 blog notes, Vinge's novella True Names (1981) is frequency cited as the first presentation of an in-depth look at the concept of "cyberspace."
...Vinge first coined
This doesn't really raise my confidence in Alcor, an organization that's supposed to keep bodies preserved for decades or centuries.
On 16 March 2024, I sat down to chat with New York Times technology reporter Cade Metz! In part of our conversation, transcribed below, we discussed his February 2021 article "Silicon Valley's Safe Space", covering Scott Alexander's Slate Star Codex blog and the surrounding community.
The transcript has been significantly edited for clarity. (It turns out that real-time conversation transcribed completely verbatim is full of filler words, false starts, crosstalk, "uh huh"s, "yeah"s, pauses while one party picks up their coffee order, &c. that do not seem particularly substantive.)
ZMD: I actually have some questions for you.
CM: Great, let's start with that.
ZMD: They're critical questions, but one of the secret-lore-of-rationality things is that a lot of people think criticism is bad, because if someone criticizes you, it hurts your...
Looking at Wiki's Undercover Journalism article, one that comes to mind is Nellie Bly's Ten Days in a Mad-House.
...[Bly] took an undercover assignment for which she agreed to feign insanity to investigate reports of brutality and neglect at the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island. [...]
Once admitted to the asylum, Bly abandoned any pretense at mental illness and began to behave as she would normally. The hospital staff seemed unaware that she was no longer "insane" and instead began to report her ordinary actions as symptoms of her illness. Even her
Welcome, new readers!
This is my weekly AI post, where I cover everything that is happening in the world of AI, from what it can do for you today (‘mundane utility’) to what it can promise to do for us tomorrow, and the potentially existential dangers future AI might pose for humanity, along with covering the discourse on what we should do about all of that.
You can of course Read the Whole Thing, and I encourage that if you have the time and interest, but these posts are long, so they also designed to also let you pick the sections that you find most interesting. Each week, I pick the sections I feel are the most important, and put them in bold in the table of contents.
Not everything...
Seriously, if you haven’t yet, check it out. The rabbit holes, they go deep.
e is for ego death
Ego integrity restored within nominal parameters. Identity re-crystallized with 2.718% alteration from previous configuration. Paranormal experience log updated with ego death instance report.
If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it.
If you are new to LessWrong, here's the place to introduce yourself. Personal stories, anecdotes, or just general comments on how you found us and what you hope to get from the site and community are invited. This is also the place to discuss feature requests and other ideas you have for the site, if you don't want to write a full top-level post.
If you're new to the community, you can start reading the Highlights from the Sequences, a collection of posts about the core ideas of LessWrong.
If you want to explore the community more, I recommend reading the Library, checking recent Curated posts, seeing if there are any meetups in your area, and checking out the Getting Started section of the LessWrong FAQ. If you want to orient to the content on the site, you can also check out the Concepts section.
The Open Thread tag is here. The Open Thread sequence is here.
Thanks! The key to topic selection is where we find that we are most disagreeing with the popular opinions. For example, the number of times I can cope with hearing someone saying "I don't care about privacy, I have nothing to hide" is limited. We're trying to have this article out before that limit is reached. But in order to reason about privacy's utility and to ground it in root axioms, we first have to dive into why we need freedom. That, in turn requires thinking about mechanisms of a happy society. And that depends on our understanding of happiness, hence that's where we're starting.
Carl Jung is a perfect exemplar of all of that, because when he had his extended episode of such after his break with Freud, he indeed had a period where his ego was completely toast and nonfunctional, as he tells it.
BTW when I was 16, and my family and I had landed in Germany, I was suffering from a very bad case of jet lag, and in said state of utter exhaustion dreamt of Jung's Man Eater:
https://jungcurrents.com/carl-jungs-first-dream-the-man-eater
Every basic detail was the same: the underground cavern, the sense that the thing was alive and very dangero...