All of akvadrako's Comments + Replies

In any case, are you making the claim that if a neural net were able to figure out the rules of the game by examining a few million games, you would accept that it's a universal knowledge creator?

If it could figure out the rules of any game that would be remarkable. That logic would also really help to find bugs in programs or beat the stock market.

Not true. Most financial markets are prediction markets. They seem to be popular.

That may be technically true, but only in a superficial sense. Stocks prices have a very complicated relationship to real world events, except in the very long term. That's very different from markets like https://www.predictit.org which have clear connections to things like who will win elections and objective criteria.

You should add a "None of the above" option. If I saw an app with these names, I'd be hard pressed to give it a chance.

You might want to try https://www.namingforce.com ; crowd sourced names; pay the winner $100.

Also like username2, I'm happy to hear of others with a view along this direction. A couple years ago I made a brief attempt at starting a modern religion called noendism, with the sole moral of survival. Not necessarily individual survival; on that we may differ.

However since then my core beliefs have evolved a bit and it's not so simple anymore. For one, after extensive research I've convinced myself that personal immortality is practically guaranteed. For another, one of my biggest worries is surviving, but imprisoned in a powerless situation.

Anyway, those details aren't practically relevant for my day to day life; these similar goals all head in the same direction.

+1

Sorry, but the idea that Esperanto is somehow only easy for French speakers is plainly wrong. I don't think you'll find anyone who has learned it and another language who'll disagree.

Actually Esperanto is in the same language family as many Asian ones:

http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/europeanorasiatic.htm

You should better look at the wikipedia page I linked:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto

Also it's not about being similar to French and I don't know why you think that. I've learned Esperanto and French and didn't notice any similarities. Actually the Chinese were one of the biggest supporters, though that may be trending down.

It would be easy to grow Esperanto quickly. It would require some concerted effort, but there is a solid though small base around the world and there only needs to be some push to make it happen. Becoming ... (read more)

I think you're being too pessimistic about Esperanto:

• There are about 2 million speakers worldwide [4]. For a language only 100 years old.
• It was recently added to Duolingo [5], a great resource for learning.
• The Esperanto wikipedia is ranked #32 in terms of number of articles. [1]
• It's taught in 69 universities in 24 countries, several offering bachelors or PhD degrees. [7]
• Prominent people are fluent in Esperanto, like the president of Austria [8]
• After Britain leaves, only Ireland will speak English in the EU, giving Esperanto an opening. [11]
• Esperant

I think you are missing the point. If I have a random variable between 0 and 10, than "random" changes will cause a regression to the mean. Thus, if the current state is bad, say 1, a many "random" changes are likely to be an improvement.

More simply, if our state is bad, we should take more risks.

The argument rests on that assumption, mostly clearly shown in the quote:

"People who voted for Trump are unrealistically optimists, thinking that civilization is robust, the current state is bad, ..."

If we are stuck in a locally optimal valley, then a high-variance candidate is more likely to push us out of it and into another valley. Whether that's a good idea depends on if our current state is overall good or bad.

Personally I think we should be taking more chances and trying to find a better equilibrium. That means occasionally rocking the boat, but if you never do it you're condemning yourself to stagnation.

You could publish it as GPL3 or something more restrictive. If someone else has a plugin that has commercial potential, they'll need a more permissive license.

Just post it on github with no effort. If you start getting pull requests or issues logged, you'll have your answer.

It doesn't really matter if it's immediate according to empty individualism. Instead the chance of survival in the branches where you try to die must be much lower than the chance of choosing that world.

You can never make a perfect doomsday device, because all kinds of things could happen to make it fail at the moment or during preparation. Even if it operates immediately.

I think we agree but I was trying to make a bigger point than your reply captures. I doubt that you will even experience the terminal illness assuming there are many more possible futures where you stay healthy and anti-aging science advances than ones where you are miraculously saved at the last minute, by aliens or luck.

That makes the roulette scenario relevant to our experience. Because if you have the conviction to pull the trigger if something doesn't go your way you have the three options I laid out. So most likely you don't even have to try - assuming you are sure you will.

In that case the only outcome the participant can expect to experience, and that they will experience with certainty, is that the gun didn't fire

Yes, that's the point. Every future version of you will of course call themselves "you".

Note that playing quantum roulette successfully depends crucially on the speed with which you can kill yourself. With this I agree, which is why I think the quantum Russian roulette or quantum suicide scenarios are mostly interesting as a thought experiment, as they're intended to be.

Although I don't want to ... (read more)

Hi lisper,

I found your paper easy to follow and maybe insightful (I'll have to read it more carefully the second time) but like qmotus, I don't understand your reasoning in this thread. I'm assuming MWI is just an interpretation of unitary QM, so makes all the same mathematical predictions as other non-collapse theories. And the roulette story is just one way of looking at it, from the perspective of what I consider my (classical) self and what I call the future.

Since you are not claiming that QIT makes different mathematical predictions than MWI, how can you claim they make different predictions at all?

I am one of those proponents of stopping all AI research and I will explain why.

(1) Don't stand too close to the cliff. We don't know how AGI will emerge and by the time we are close enough to know, it's probably too late. Either human error or malfeasance will bring us over the edge.

(2) Friendly AGI might be impossible. Computer scientists cannot even predict the behavior of simple programs. The halting problem, a specific type of prediction, is provably impossible in non-trivial code. I doubt we'll even grasp why the first AGI we build works.

Neither of t... (read more)

This sounds like an excellent idea if you can get good number of countries represented. Could you clarify a couple things?

• Is that €70 per night or for the whole weekend (and with 2 breakfasts)?
• How many participants can attend?
• How many are signed up already?

I'm going to have to pass on this one, but I'd like be interested to see comments about how it went. Hopefully this becomes a regular thing in Amsterdam / Utrecht.

Would this be the first Less Wrong meetup in Amsterdam? Sounds worth a try.

First of all, thanks for running the contest Alex and congrats to the winners.

Random behaviour was obviously a good strategy, but I don't feel it teaches us much about making better bots. If I had suspected so much random behaviour, defecting whenever it's detected would have been a good additional test.