Hi Nate, great respect. Forgive a rambling stream-of-consciousness comment.
Without the advantages of maxed-out physically feasible intelligence (and the tech unlocked by such intelligence), I think we would inevitably be overpowered.
I think you move to the conclusion "if humans don't have AI, aliens with AI will stomp humans" a little promptly.
Hanson's estimate of when we'll meet aliens is 500 million years. I know very little about how Hanson estimated that & how credible the method is, and you don't appear to either: that might be worth investigating. But—
One million years is ten thousand generations of humans as we know them. If AI progress were impossible under the heel of a world-state, we could... (read 482 more words →)
This is a new service and it has to interact with the existing medical system, so they are currently expensive, starting at $5,000 for a research report. (Keeping in mind that a basic report involves a lot of work by people who must be good at math.)
Unrelatedly but from the same advert. I had not realized it was that expensive - this rings some alarm bells for me but maybe it is fine, it is in fact a medical service. I have been waffling back and forth and will conclude I don't know enough of the details.
Regardless, the alarm bells still made me want to survey the comments and see if anyone... (read 558 more words →)
Note: I didn't read the HPMOR advert, I read the one here on LW which is different. It starts like this:
In a world where 85% of doctors can't solve simple Bayesian word problems...
In a world where only 20.9% of reported results that a pharmaceutical company tries to investigate for development purposes, fully replicate...
In a world where "p-values" are anything the author wants them to be...
...and where there are all sorts of amazing technologies and techniques which nobody at your hospital has ever heard of...
...there's also MetaMed. Instead of just having “evidence-based medicine” in journals that doctors don't actually read, MetaMed will provide you with actual evidence-based healthcare.
You're right that he doesn't make any... (read more)
I think Constantin's postmortem is solid and I appreciate it. She says this:
But there was a mindset of “we want to give people the best thing, not the thing they want, and if there’s a discrepancy, it’s because the customer is dumb.” I learned from experience that this is just not true -- when we got complaints from customers, it was often a very reasonable complaint, due to an error I was mortified that we’d missed.
As she says in the linked thread, Zvi's postmortem is "quite different." Constantin discusses the faults of their business strategy, Zvi attributes the failure to people wanting symbolic representation of healthcare rather than healthcare.
Is there truth to Zvi's position? It... (read more)
That is a fair point! I don't think Zvi et. al are obligated and I'm not like, going to call them fraudster hacks if they're not interested.
I said this more with the hopes that people frustrated with unaccountable governance would want to seize the mantle of personal responsibility, to show everyone that they are pure and incorruptible and it can be done. My post came across as more of a demand than I meant it to, which I apologize for.
Organizations can distribute their money how they want. My concern here is more "can pillars of the rat community get funding for crappy ideas on the basis of being pillars and having a... (read 476 more words →)
I'm sorry, this may come across as very rude, but:
MetaMed, a startup both you and Vance were on, failed abjectly and then received precious little coverage or updating from the broader rat community (as far as I've seen).
I am happy to believe your skills have improved or that the cause area is better (though this one is so nebulously ambitious that I can't help but feel a cold churn of pessimism). Certainly, demanding that every project a person attempts must meet with success is too high a bar.
But this time I would like to see you and your cofounders hold yourselves accountable to keep the communities funding you informed. In practice what I'd want is a legible goalset with predictions on whether each will be met on some future date.
That is a cute idea but they'd do it right away [>95%]. Even if you just gave it to like five moderators. They are largely conflict theorists who believe rationalists are [insert the strongest politically derogatory terms imaginable] and LW being down is morally good.
Maybe if there were real stakes they would consider it, like an independent party making a donation to both MIRI and an organization of SC's choice — except on second thought, I think they would find this too objectionable: "wow, you'll donate to charity but only if you get to humiliate me by forcing me to play your idiotic game? that really shows that [insert further derogation]")
So maybe with a different group. It would be particularly cool if it were a foreign entity, but that seems difficult to arrange.
For ye sweet springborn children too young to recall — know that LW is but one small isle of a grand and august archipelago!
Immediately after our community was born, we schismed a whole bunch. And now there are rat colonies (evolved and culturally drifted and not necessarily even rats now??) in all sorts of nooks and crannies, made for people who prefer them alongside or over our birthplace!
Here you can see Scott Alexander's map from an age lost to time (2014). While outdated to the precipice of uselessness, it is a beautiful expression of our community's tendency to sprawl everywhere. And it may give you a sense of the scale here!
What I... (read more)
I tend to have trouble evaluating this sort of thing due to cherry-picking.
Sam Altman made a twitter post; you can see 20 user-submitted prompts and their output at https://twitter.com/i/events/1511763146746212353, which might help a little if you want to build a model of the thing's strength.
The surviving worlds look like people who lived inside their awful reality and tried to shape up their impossible chances; until somehow, somewhere, a miracle appeared - the model broke in a positive direction, for once, as does not usually occur when you are trying to do something very difficult and hard to understand, but might still be so - and they were positioned with the resources and the sanity to take advantage of that positive miracle, because they went on living inside uncomfortable reality.
Can you talk more about this? I'm not sure what actions you want people to take based on this text.
What is the difference between a strategy that is dignified and one that is a clever scheme?
throws a Bayes point at you