I'm not sure if this is insightful enough to share here, but I'll try anyway. A fair amount of wondering has been done about how FAI could figure out what humans actually want. A school of thought says persuasively that what we say we want is not what we actually...
I can conceive of the following 3 main types of meaning we can pursue in life. 1. Exploring existing complexity: the natural complexity of the universe, or complexities that others created for us to explore. 2. Creating new complexity for others and ourselves to explore. 3. Hedonic pleasure: more or...
I'm not sure if this is insightful enough to share here, but I'll try anyway.
A fair amount of wondering has been done about how FAI could figure out what humans actually want. A school of thought says persuasively that what we say we want is not what we actually want, so what we really want has to be extrapolated.
If we take the end-game promises of popular religions at face value, it occurs to me that Buddhism promises something between non-existence and wireheading (nirvana - "to blow out"), while Christianity promises wireheading (eternal bliss - heaven). I am not familiar enough with other religions to make statements about them.
In my anecdotal experience, it... (read 226 more words →)
Sorry, I don't check this place often.
To some extent, I think what you described does happen for snippets of code that are largely the same, and which one might write all the time. For example, I can write a "Hello world" program while maintaining conversation. However, as soon as you ask me to write something new, then I do have to start thinking about how to put pieces together, and can't continue conversation.
But this also happens with driving. Speaking for myself at least, I can only maintain conversation while driving in a way that does not require me to make any decisions: (1) a route I've driven many times before, (2) a... (read more)
Programming is one of them. Even after doing it for decades, people are still as consciously engaged in it as they did in the beginning.
My experience disagrees with this. After about 20 years of experience with C/C++, I have internalized many of the aspects of programming in this language, which allows me to write complex software factors of magnitude faster than 20 years ago, and factors of magnitude more safely.
I notice how much I have internalized when I switch to a different language that isn't "my own", and find myself immediately bogged down in all sorts of details for which I don't know how exactly they work, and what is the best way to approach them.
In my experience, programming skill, especially in a particular language, does get internalized, much like dancing.
It doesn't only work for me. It's how most people I know, who are into fitness, manage their weight. The "Calories In" part is not eating too much. The "Calories Out" part is maintaining your metabolism by eating small meals regularly, exercising, and eating lots of protein to gain and preserve muscle mass.
It works. It works for a lot of people.
In fact, aside from gastric bypass surgery, it's the only reliable way to lose weight that I know. And gastric bypass surgery is a form of CI:CO!
And then we have a bunch of people on Less Wrong, all of whom appear to be convinced that human bodies can somehow violate the rules... (read more)
In particular, adding up the numbers on the labels of the things you eat is not a sufficiently accurate method of determining caloric intake,
If that's the case, why does it work?
I agree that calorie content of any particular meal is hard to measure accurately, but over time, the calorie content of many meals should gravitate towards the average.
You're going overboard by stating, not just that CI:CO is hard, but that it's impossible.
You're saying that my positive experience with CI:CO over the past 5 years, which I was able to confirm numerous times, is a fluke.
That's you being offensive and arrogant. Yes, you should be tapping out.
Sorry for the late reply, I haven't checked this in a while.
Please don't fight the hypothetical.
Most components of our thought processes are subconscious. The hypothetical question you posed presses a LOT of subconscious buttons. It is largely impossible for most people, even intelligent ones, to take a hypothetical question at face value without being influenced by the subconscious effects of the way it's phrased.
You can't fix a bad hypothetical question by asking people to not fight the hypothetical.
For example, who wants to spend an eternity isolated in space? That must be one of the worst fears for many people. How do you disentangle that from the question? That's like asking a kid... (read more)
I haven't checked this thread for a while, so sorry for the late reply.
You make it out as though diet by CI:CO is too difficult to be practical. Maybe it is, for people who can't track stuff to save their lives.
For me, it's been easy. When I'm dieting, I have a spreadsheet where I record the calorie and protein content of everything I eat.
Yes, calculating calorie content for homemade meals is a fair amount of work, and takes dedication. It takes me up to 30 minutes of lookups and calculations to calculate calorie and protein content in a meal, and that's after my wife has weighed and recorded all the ingredients.
Because of... (read more)
Presumably the company in question could easily manufacture a whole bunch for itself and get a significant portion of the bitcoin market
They can get 100% of the mining and transaction fees market by snapping their fingers. Once they've made their initial investment into manufacturing the chip, the marginal cost of making more of them is minimal. Far below the $30k they're selling the 1 TH solution for.
They can grab 50%+ of the mining market for themselves pretty easily. Then, they can increase their capacity to keep up with the growth of the network for cheap - all while they sell their processors to others, who pay much more for the mining capacity... (read more)
Congratulations. I revived this account, which I haven't used for years, just to downvote your crazy ass.
The evidence for the general principle - that weight change tracks the difference between calories eaten and calories expended - is overwhelming.
I have seen no fitness advice that suggests it isn't true. I have seen no fit person who doesn't accept it.
For the past 6 years, I have reduced weight and controlled it very effectively based on this principle. Time and time again, I have become fatter when I stopped counting calories and ate to my heart's content. Time and time again, I got my weight under control after I resumed calorie restriction.
If you want to show that calorie restriction doesn't work, you first have to overthrow conservation of energy. And then, explain how come no one was fat in Dachau.
Then they will blast you and the pleasure machine into deep space at near light-speed so that you could never be interfered with. Would you let them do this for you?
Most people say they wouldn't choose the pleasure machine.
Well, no wonder. The way the hypothetical scenario is presented evokes a giant array of ways it could go wrong.
What if the pleasure machine doesn't work? What if it fails after a month? What if it works for 100 years, followed by 1,000 years of loneliness and suffering?
Staying on Earth sounds a lot safer.
Suppose the person you are asking is religious. Will they be forfeiting an eternity in heaven by opting for passive pleasure... (read more)
I don't think the lack of scientists is the issue. The issue is others providing all the engineering and support that scientists need - to survive in the first place, and then to get science done.
If you want to continue your example of sacrificing a child, a more effective proposal would be to have extra children and bond them into near-slavery, taxing them at some high amount so as to support those who do science.
But that would be a real sacrifice, and most would not find the idea pleasing.
I can conceive of the following 3 main types of meaning we can pursue in life.
1. Exploring existing complexity: the natural complexity of the universe, or complexities that others created for us to explore.
2. Creating new complexity for others and ourselves to explore.
3. Hedonic pleasure: more or less direct stimulation of our pleasure centers, with wire-heading as the ultimate form.
What I'm observing in the various FAI debates is a tendency of people to shy away from wire-heading as something the FAI should do. This reluctance is generally not substantiated or clarified with anything other than "clearly, this isn't what we want". This is not, however, clear to me at all.
The utility we get from exploration and creation is an... (read 334 more words →)