Shortform Content [Beta]
Someone wanted to know about the outcome of my hair loss research so I thought I would quickly write up what I'm planning to try for the next year or so. No word on how well it works yet.
Most of the ideas are from this review: https://www.karger.com/Article/FullText/492035
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I'm planning to replace oral caffeine consumption with caffeinated shampoo/conditioner: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B076FHJ3K5/ (In my experience caffeine is absorbed through the skin just fine)
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Gonna start taking this as a source of procyanidin B2 and zinc: https://www.amazo
According to Fedex tracking, on Thursday, I will have a Biovyzr. I plan to immediately start testing it, and write a review.
What tests would people like me to perform?
Tests that I'm already planning to perform:
To test its protectiveness, the main test I plan to perform is a modified Bittrex fit test. This is where you create a bitter-tasting aerosol, and confirm that you can't taste it. The normal test procedure won't work as-is because it's too large to use a plastic hood, so I plan to go into a small room, and have someone (wearing a respirator themselve... (read more)
Explanation for why displeasure would be associated with meaningfulness, even though in fact meaning comes from pleasure:
Meaningful experiences involve great pleasure. They also may come with small pains. Part of how you quantify your great pleasure is the size of the small pain that it superceded.
Pain does not cause meaning. It is a test for the magnitude of the pleasure. But only pleasure is a causal factor for meaning.
This fits with the idea that meaning comes from pleasure, and that great pleasure can be worth a fair amount of pain to achieve. The pain drains meaning away, but the redeeming factor is that it can serve as a test of the magnitude of pleasure, and generate pleasurable stories in the future.
An important counter argument to my hypothesis is how we may find a privileged “high road” to success and pleasure to be less meaningful. This at first might seem to suggest that we do inherently value pain.
In fact, though, what frustrates people about people born with ... (read more)
I'm quite baffled by the lack of response to my recent question asking about which AI-researching companies are good to invest in (as in, would have good impact, not necessarily most profitable)- It indicates either A) most LW'ers aren't investing in stocks (which is a stupid thing not to be doing), or B) are investing in stocks, but aren't trying to think carefully about what impact their actions have on the world, and their own future happiness (which indicates a massive failure of rationality)
Even putting this aside, the fact that nobody jumped at the c... (read more)
On the contrary, I aspire to the clarity and honesty of Thiel's style. Schmidt seems somewhat unable to speak directly. Of the two of them, Thiel was able to say specifics about how the companies were doing excellently and how they were failing, and Schmidt could say neither.
I'm grateful for MIRI etc and their work on what is probably as world-endy as nuclear war was (and look at all the intellectual work that went into THAT).
The thing that's been eating me lately, almost certainly mainly triggered by the political situation in the U.S., is how to manage the transition from 2020 to what I suspect is the only way forward for the species--genetic editing to reduce or eliminate the genetically determined cognitive biases we inherited from the savannah. My objectives for the transition would be
- Minimize death
- Minimize physical
It just feels like "biases" are such a high level of abstraction that are based on basic brain architecture. To get rid of them would be like creating a totally different design.
SlateStarCodex, EA, and LW helped me get out of the psychological, spiritual, political nonsense in which I was mired for a decade or more.
I started out feeling a lot smarter. I think it was community validation + the promise of mystical knowledge.
Now I've started to feel dumber. Probably because the lessons have sunk in enough that I catch my own bad ideas and notice just how many of them there are. Worst of all, it's given me ambition to do original research. That's a demanding task, one where you have to accept feeling stupid all the time.
But I still look down that old road and I'm glad I'm not walking down it anymore.
I started out feeling a lot smarter. I think it was community validation + the promise of mystical knowledge.
Too smart for your own good. You were supposed to believe it was about rationality. Now we have to ban you and erase your comment before other people can see it. :D
Now I've started to feel dumber. Probably because the lessons have sunk in enough that I catch my own bad ideas and notice just how many of them there are. [...] you have to accept feeling stupid all the time. But I still look down that old road and I'm glad I'm not walking down it anymore.
Yeah, same here.
Master post for ideas about infra-Bayesianism.
There is a formal analogy between infra-Bayesian decision theory (IBDT) and modal updateless decision theory (MUDT).
Consider a one-shot decision theory setting. There is a set of unobservable states , a set of actions and a reward function . An IBDT agent has some belief [1], and it chooses the action .
We can construct an equivalent scenario, by augmenting this one with a perfect predictor of the agent (Omega). To do so, define , where the semantics of is "the unobservable state is and Omega predic... (read more)
1) There was this famous marshmallow experiment, where the kids had an option to eat one marshmallow (physically present on the table) right now, or two of them later, if they waited for 15 minutes. The scientists found out that the kids who waited for the two marshmallows were later more successful in life. The standard conclusion was that if you want to live well, you should learn some strategy to delay gratification.
(A less known result is that the optimal strategy to get two marshmallows was to stop thinking about marshmallows at all. Kids who focused ... (read more)
This seems likely to me, although I'm not sure "superstimulus" is the right word for this observation.
It certainly does make sense that people who are inclined to notice the general level of incompetence in our society, will be less inclined to trust it and rely on it for the future
Is there a reason warfare isn't modeled as the production of negative value?
The only economic analyses I have seen are of the estimating-cost-of-lost-production type, which I can only assume reflects the convention of converting everything to a positive value.
But it is so damned anti-intuitive!
But the bottom line is that the value of weapons is destruction
The bottom line is protection, expansion, and/or survival; destruction is only an intermediate goal
[researcher positions at FHI]
(I'm not affiliated with FHI.)
FHI recently announced: "We have opened researcher positions across all our research strands and levels of seniority. Our big picture research focuses on the long-term consequences of our actions today and the complicated dynamics that are bound to shape our future in significant ways. These positions offer talented researchers freedom to think about the most important issues of our era in an environment with other brilliant minds willing to constructively engage with a broad range of ideas. Applications close 19th October 2020, noon BST."
Can we agree on a tag for posts that show some product that might be of interest to LWers? (Similar to https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)
Example posts:
I'm thinking "project [/product] announcement". I encourage you to add a tag you think works, if anyone comes up with a better name, we can always change the name later
What is "real"? I think about myself as a computation embedded in some other computation (i.e. a universe-history). I think "real" describes hypotheses about the environment where my computation lives. What should I think is real? That which an "ideal embedded reasoner" would assign high credence. However that works.
This sensibly suggests that Gimli-in-actual-Ea (LOTR) should believe he lives in Ea, and that Ea is real, even though it isn't our universe's Earth. Also, the notion accounts for indexical uncertainty by punting it to how embedded reasoning sho... (read more)
I remember someone in the LessWrong community (I think Eliezer Yudkowsky, but maybe Robin Hanson or someone else, or maybe only Rationalist-adjacent; maybe an article or a podcast) saying that people believing in "UFOs" (or people believing in unproven theories of conspiracy) would stop being so enthusiastic about those if they became actually known as true with good evidence for them. does anyone know what I'm referring to?
ah, someone found it:
... (read more)If You Demand Magic, Magic Won't Help" where he says at one point: "The worst catastrophe you could visit upon the New Age community would be for their rituals to start working reliably, and for UFOs to actually appear in the skies. What would be the point of believing in aliens, if they were just there, and everyone else could see them too? In a world where psychic powers were merely real, New Agers wouldn't believe in psychic powers, any more than anyone cares enough about gravity to believe in it. https://www.lesswrong.com/s/6BFkm
An AI progress scenario which seems possible and which I haven't seen discussed: an imitation plateau.
The key observation is, imitation learning algorithms[1] might produce close-to-human-level intelligence even if they are missing important ingredients of general intelligence that humans have. That's because imitation might be a qualitatively easier task than general RL. For example, given enough computing power, a human mind becomes realizable from the perspective of the learning algorithm, while the world-at-large is still far from realizable. So, an al... (read more)
Another thing that might happen is a data bottleneck.
Maybe there will be a good enough dataset to produce a sideload that simulates an "average" person, and that will be enough to automate many jobs, but for a simulation of a competent AI researcher you would need a more specialized dataset that will take more time to produce (since there are a lot less competent AI researchers than people in general).
Moreover, it might be that the sample complexity grows with the duration of coherent thought that you require. That's because, unless you're training directl... (read more)
Adblockers have positive externalities: they remove much of the incentive to make websites addictive.
If the adblockers become too popular, websites will update to circumvent them. It will be a lot of work at the beginning, but probably possible.
Currently, most ads are injected by JavaScript that downloads them from a different domain. That allows adblockers to block anything coming from a different domain, and the ads are blocked relatively simply.
The straightforward solution would be to move ad injection to the server side. The PHP (or whatever language) code generating the page would contact the ad server, download the ad, and inject it into the generat... (read more)
If I got to pick the moral of today's Petrov day incident, it would be something like "being trustworthy requires that you be more difficult to trick than it would be worth", and I think very few people reliably live up to this standard.
Reasoning about learned policies via formal theorems on the power-seeking incentives of optimal policies
One way instrumental subgoals might arise in actual learned policies: we train a proto-AGI reinforcement learning agent with a curriculum including a variety of small subtasks. The current theorems show sufficient conditions for power-seeking tending to be optimal in fully-observable environments; many environments meet these sufficient conditions; optimal policies aren't hard to compute for the subtasks. One highly transferable heuristic would therefore... (read more)
Mods are asleep, post pictures of mushroom clouds.
Whelp... that's scary:
Chip Huyen
@chipro
Replying to
@chipro
4. You won’t need to update your models as much One mindboggling fact about DevOps: Etsy deploys 50 times/day. Netflix 1000s times/day. AWS every 11.7 seconds. MLOps isn’t an exemption. For online ML systems, you want to update them as fast as humanly possible. (5/6)
https://twitter.com/chipro/status/1310952553459462146