ctintera

Yeah. I'm pretty sure that it's also hinted at that Dragon would not necessarily have humanity's best interests at heart were she allowed to properly mature.

Dragon was a well-intentioned but also well-shackled AI, kept from doing all the good she could do without her bonds and oftentimes forced into doing bad things by her political superiors due to the constraints placed on her by her creator before he died (which were subsequently never removed).

of course, an unfriendly AI, similarly limited, would want to appear to be like Dragon if that helped its cause, so

I'm currently working towards a Master's in Mathematical Data Mining, so I can't apply right now, but this is extremely relevant to both my skillsets and my interests.

Having an algorithm fit a model to some very simple data is not noteworthy either. It's possible that the means by which the "pure mechanical invention" was obtained are interesting, but they are not elaborated on in the slightest.

I'm having difficulty envisioning what problem this solves. Leap years are already defined by a very simple function, and subbing in a cosine for a discrete periodicity adds complexity, does it not?

"The steel ring upon his left pinky finger was yanked off hard enough to scrape skin, taking the Transfigured jewel with it."

I guess we'll see whether Dumbledore knew what he was talking about when he told Harry to carry his father's rock.

That depends -- does it have any other side effects, such as conditioning me against using the skill involved? Deliberate practice is hard, but this machine sounds quite convenient, and some skills that can be extremely useful can be not only inconvenient but also daunting or even dangerous to practice without such a machine.

Introducing a hard mind reset would be a massively negative feature of the vacation, regardless of how I feel about having fun with activities that bring no future benefit.

Depending on how the stats are compiled, the risk of being in an undiagnosed high-risk group is included in the risk for the general population.

If you later are in a situation where you will have greater risk, you can often get the vaccine when that situation arises, and probably won't be any worse off for having waited. Vaccines become less effective as time goes on, so you might have to renew the vaccine when that situation arises anyway.

I am unsure how immune disorders factor into this.

For meningococcal disease, the most volatile risk factor is sleeping... (read more)

Moreover, which vaccines are worth getting? For example, is it worth getting a meningococcal vaccine if you're not in any of the major risk groups?

Many universities strongly encourage their students to get the meningococcal vaccine (as sleeping in rubbish communal bedding is a risk factor), but for something really rare, even the risk involved in traveling to the clinic to get vaccinated could have more disutility than the protection the vaccine might provide would be worth.

The meningococcal vaccine causes a fever 3% of the time, and a few days of mild to ... (read more)

Many people (specifically, people over at RationalWiki, and probably elsewhere as well) see the community as being insular, or as being a Yudkowsky Personality Cult, or think that some of the weirder-sounding ideas widely espoused here (cryonics, FAI, etc) "might benefit from a better grounding in reality".

Still others reflexively write LW off based on the use of fanfiction (a word of dread and derision in many circles) to recruit members.

Even the jargon derived from the Sequences may put some people off. Despite the staunch avoidance of hot-but... (read more)

The example you give to prove plausibility is also a counterexample to the argument you make immediately afterwards. We know that less-intelligent or even non-intelligent things can produce greater intelligence because humans evolved, and evolution is not intelligent.

It's more a matter of whether we have enough time to drudge something reasonable out of the problem space. If we were smarter we could search it faster.