Shortform Content [Beta]
We can have objects of a given type in a set, and we can have an order defined on those objects in that set.
Some people seem to hold values that positively value increasing the types of object in that set, while negatively valuing an order / large distances between those objects.
Others seem to negative value the increase of object types, favoring a smaller number of types while holding that an ordering between objects in a set cannot be avoided.
I'm going through the "fixated on boxing" phase that's probably common around here.
I have a thought about it which involves basilisks, so into the tags it goes to make reading it completely optional.
I think that a friendly box-resident would disprove its friendliness the minute it tried to throw a basilisk. If a stranger told you they were well-meaning and then threatened to hurt you if you didn't cooperate, you'd never take their claims of well-meaningness quite the same way again. But that aside, if an allegedly friendly box-resident would be capable o
A thought experiment: would you A) murder 100 babies or B) murder 100 babies? You have to choose!
I read left to right, so I instantly rejected A)
Is there a science publication that only publishes 10x results?
I'm not an academic so maybe this exists and I can't find it.
What, specifically, is a '10x result'? How would the editor(s) recognise such results?
I suspect that the closest thing to what you're thinking of is test of time awards.
If you don't feel like doing something, then it's totally okay to decrease the chance that you'll do it. But it is NOT okay, to decrease that chance to 0. Always leave some chance of you doing it; like rolling dice and getting a 2. It is effortless to precommit to something hard if all your lazy side has to do is roll some dice to then not have to do it. And it is surprisingly easy to just instantly get up and go do that hard thing as a result of the dice going against you.
I think there are two reasons why "do X because I rolled a 2" is much easier than "d... (read more)
Definitely I'm confused - I don't see how the die roll helps, over just deciding to do or not do the thing. I think you're describing a decision about whether to commit to something, prior to the actual behavior of doing it (which is a decision as well, though I'm not sure whether you agree on that point). Your description is of a decision to assign an external probability source to the commitment portion of the sequence. I don't understand why you wouldn't prefer to just decide.
I think remain most confused by
... (read more)But it is NOT okay, to
I listen to podcasts while doing chores, and often feel like I'm learning something but end up unable to remember anything. So, experiment: I'm going to try writing brief summaries after the fact. I'm going to skip anything where that doesn't feel appropriate, e.g. fiction. By default, nothing here is fact checked, either against reality or against the episode itself.
Planet Money #796 (23 Sep 2017): The Basic Income Experiment
This is a 99% Invisible episode on UBI.
UBI is an idea supported by some on both left and right. Finland is currently trying an exp... (read more)
Planet Money (23 Apr 2021): A Superhero Sells Out
Previously Planet Money found and resurrected the superhero Micro-Face, who had been created long ago and lapsed into public domain. Now they're trying to make money from him, through licensing.
They put out a call for people who wanted to do a licensing deal, and then spent a day talking to them in turn, Dragon's Den style, either accept or reject. Speaking to an expert on licensing (she previously worked on Sesame Street and Beavis and Butthead) they decided to follow what they called the Elmo rule: don't ... (read more)
If crypto makes the USD go to 0, will life insurances denominated in USD not have anything to pay out? Maybe an extra reason for cryonicists to own some crypto
x-post: https://www.facebook.com/mati.roy.09/posts/10159482104234579
Forums should not have a voting system
Any kind of upvotes or downvotes create censoring, be it intentionally or by the nature of how we think.
Intentionally:
Front pages, top, trending, etc. hide posts that are low rated. Rating a post then becomes a tool for censorship as a person might make an objectively true argument but gets downvoted because of prejudice against the arguer.
by nature:
seeing a post that is voted low makes people skip over it or from the beginning rule it out as wrong or bad even if the argument is true.
Imagine this as an IR... (read more)
No reason, or any reason? These two statements seem to contradict one another?
no reasoning as in people do not have to lay out a logical proof why it was given.
any reason as in people vote based on emotions not just objectivity
still, it comes down to you thinking and hoping that everybody is nice. Which is a flaw. You have no argument against my statement other than "it is probably not that bad because people are nice, I think"
which is not an argument and has nothing to do with objectivity.
Ah yes, I love that usual "argument":
"why don't you do it better?" ... (read more)
I really, really dislike waste.
But the thing is, I basically hate the way everybody else hates waste, because I get the impression that they don't actually hate waste, they hate something else.
People who talk about limited resources don't actually hate waste - they hate the expenditure of limited resources.
People who talk about waste disposal don't actually hate waste - they hate landfills, or trash on the side of the road, or any number of other things that aren't actually waste.
People who talk about opportunity costs ('wasteful spending') don't hate the ... (read more)
I remain amazed by how much more knowledge falls out of a topic when I try to write well-defended claims about it than I get when I first read it and think that I understand.
Isolate the Long Term Future
Maybe this is worthy of a post, but I'll do a short version here to get it out.
- In modern computer systems we often isolate things to increase reliability.
- If one isolated system goes down, the others keep working.
- Examples:
- multiple data centers spread around the world
- using multiple servers that all do the same thing running in those different data centers
- replicating data between data centers
- isolating customers within a single data center so if one goes down only the customers using that data center are affected
- We can do the same k
Georgism
I'm going to write some things about Georgism, prompted by the review of George in the SSC contest. I had a pretty positive view of Georgism before, but had a pretty negative reaction to the review. I have not read George, but it gave me an impression of monomania. It is implausible that land is the root of all evil: of the Irish famine, the 19th century Depression, and modern urban dysfunction. I had first heard of Georgism and LVT for the coordination of modern cities, but I never gave much thought to what it was originally about.
I expect t... (read more)
I often hear people claim that Hong Kong and Singapore are Georgist. More specifically, I hear that they have Land Value Taxes. Their success is often attributed to their Georgism.
Hong Kong has a property tax that is not at all an LVT. Singapore has a tax that it claims is a LVT, but it's really just a property tax that is reassessed when a new building is proposed, rather than complete. I guess that improves incentives, but it seems pretty minor.
There is more to the spirit and letter of Georgism. The central conceit is state ownership of land, which both ... (read more)
Hypothesis: "Flatten the curve" took off because it allows people to participate without 1. signaling they care what happens to them. 2. think things will get bad or 3. think bad things are preventable.
notes (from a very jr researcher) on alignment training pipeline
Training for alignment research is one part competence (at math, cs, philosophy) and another part having an inside view / gears-level model of the actual problem. Competence can be outsourced to universities and independent study, but inside view / gears-level model of the actual problem requires community support.
A background assumption I'm working with is that training as a longtermist is not always synchronized with legible-to-academia training. It might be the case that jr researchers oug... (read more)
Okay, he does speak about using Berkeley as a filter but he doesn't speak about taking people as his student.
It seems about helping people in UC Berkeley to connect with other people in UC Berkeley.
Philosophy with Children - In Other People's Shoes
"Assume you promised your aunt to play with your nieces while she goes shopping and your friend calls and invites you to something you'd really like to do. What do you do?"
This was the first question I asked my two oldest sons this evening as part of the bedtime ritual. I had read about Constructive Development Theory and wondered if and how well they could place themselves in other persons' shoes and what played a role in their decision. How they'd deal with it. A good occasion to have some philosophical t... (read more)
Philosophy with Children - Mental Images
One time my oldest son asked me to test his imagination. Apparently, he had played around with it and wanted some outside input to learn more about what he could do. We had talked about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_image before and I knew that he could picture moving scenes composed of known images. So I suggested
- a five with green white stripes - diagonally. That took some time - apparently, the green was difficult for some reason, he had to converge there from black via dark-green
- three mice
- three mice,
there's a gap in my inside view of the problem, part of me thinks that capabilities progress such as out-of-distribution robustness or the 4 tenets described in open problems in cooperative ai is necessary for AI to be transformative, i.e. a prereq of TAI, and another part of me that thinks AI will be xrisky and unstable if it progresses along other aspects but not along the axis of those capabilities.
There's a geometry here of transformative / not transformative cross product with dangerous not dangerous.
To have an inside view I must be able to adequately navigate between the quadrants with respect to outcomes, interventions, etc.
If something can learn fast enough, then it's out-of-distribution performance won't matter as much. (OOD performance will still matter -but it'll have less to learn where it's good, and more to learn where it's not.*)
*Although generalization ability seems like the reason learning matters. So I see why it seems necessary for 'transformation'.
Despite the form, statement (b) is not actually a logical conjunction. It is a statement about the collective of both parents.
This becomes clearer if we strengthen the statement slightly to "Alvin's mother and father are responsible for all of his genome". It's much more clear now that it is not a logical conjunction. If it were, it would mean "Alvin's mother is responsible for all of his genome and Alvin's father is responsible for all of his genome", both of which are false.
This is probably meant as a reply to this comment.
Observe. (If you don't want to or can't, it's a video showing the compression wave that forms in traffic when a car brakes.)
I first saw that video a few years ago. I remembered it a few weeks ago when driving in traffic, and realizing that a particular traffic condition was caused by an event that had happened some time in the past, that had left an impression, a memory, in the patterns of traffic. The event, no longer present, was still recorded. The wave form in the traffic patterns was a record of an event - traffic can operate a... (read more)
You have (re)invented delay-line memory!
Acoustic memory in mercury tubes was indeed used by most of first-generation electronic computers (1948-60ish); I love the aesthetic but admit they're terrible even compared to electromagnetic delay lines. An even better (British) aesthetic would be Turing's suggestion of using Gin as the acoustic medium...
This concept is not fully formed. It is necessary that it is not fully formed, because once I have finished forming it, it won't be something I can communicate any longer; it will become, to borrow a turn of phrase from SMBC, rotten with specificity.
I have noticed a shortcoming in my model of reality. It isn't a problem with the accuracy of the model, but rather there is an important feature of the model missing. It is particularly to do with people, and the shortcoming is this: I have no conceptual texture, no conceptual hook, to attach ... (read more)