I am sincerely curious about male preferences, whether the answer is something "politically correct" or that men literally only care about boob size.
Definitely not that simple. Boobs don't do much for me either. I've heard men fall into three categories—boobs men, butt men, and legs men (and more vulgar synonyms)—depending on which feature they find most arousing. If he's not a boobs man, then you don't need big boobs to arouse him.
I think the current hypothesis for the evolutionary function of boobs is that most male mammals mount the female from behin...
Now something controversial. (Heh.) I believe that higher intelligence is always a plus, for both sexes. However, many women report that men feel threatened by smart women. How is that possible? I suspect that these women are not entirely correct. What I think I observe in such situation is women using their education as a symbol of higher status. Yes, telling your man every day that he is inferior to you and your university-educated friends (including male friends) is generally a bad idea for a happy relationship.
Because you flagged it as controversial...
There has been some past trauma. I can understand a reluctance to risk opening old wounds.
I mostly agree with this.
I can only provide my opinions and best guesses, of dubious quality. Given that there are men whose preferences I do not understand at all, I certainly have many blind spots.
I expressed similar thoughts in my answer. The more men who compare notes, I think the better we can discern which preferences are idiosyncratic and which are universal, so I'll try to point out where we differ. That won't, by itself, tell us which of us is weird.
...The behavior I associate with young women is wearing light colors, especially pink, and laugh
How do you expect Yudkowsky to settle this if he's been turned into paperclips? It might distort the number a bit.
I didn't downvote either, but I can see possible reasons why others might. This probably should have been a question post. [This has been fixed.] The question is too broad to answer very succinctly. It kind of feels like it could be a culture-war trap, where you might take a good-faith, but bluntly-honest rationalist answer and use it as ammunition in extremist feminist circles to rally attacks against the community. The fact that your account has no other posts or karma is not helping. That seems totally possible, but also possible that you're an establis...
[Epistemic status: not really an expert, but I can tell you what I think I know. Also, as a heterosexual male human person with some skill at introspection, I'm sure I have some insights about how men think, but I may have trouble separating that from my own idiosyncrasies.]
Evolutionary psychology tells us that human instincts are optimized for the Stone Age. The period of written history is too short to have contributed much (although there have been some small effects noted in other areas) and the modern era (however you define that) is even shorter.
Thos...
[Epistemic status: a little out of my depth. There might be subtleties I'm missing.]
An oracle machine with a halting oracle is a type of hypercomputer that can "solve" (by fiat, the known laws of physics do not permit such a thing) the halting problem of any conventional Turing machine, but then an analogous oracle-machine halting problem would appear which is undecidable by these halting oracle machines, so this doesn't get rid of undecidable problems.
If we then suppose a second-order halting oracle, we can "solve" the oracle-machine halting problem, but ...
Lasers can be widened with optics, like curved reflectors. Fiber could potentially distribute an intense source to multiple endpoints, although UVC would require the use of special materials. I’m not an optics specialist either. I don’t know of quantum dots in the UVC range, maybe it hasn’t been done yet. For visible wavelengths they can be pretty bright, so maybe? I don’t think these alternatives exist yet, but so many approaches seem potentially viable that I’m not sure it will take ten years.
Forecasting is hard. Maybe conventional LEDs wouldn’t be that easy, but there may be other approaches superior to excimer lamps we could use for pathogen control. Only one of them has to work, making this a disjunctive claim. For example, frequency-doubling solid-state lasers can kick blue light up to the UVC range. Also, quantum dots can be tuned very precisely, even without changing the component materials.
As always, not investment advice. There are signs that a volatility spike is imminent, which often coincides with a market drop. I have reversed my usual short vol position and bought tail insurance (e.g. OTM puts). Remember vol can fall just as quickly. How long a spike lasts depends on how high it goes.
Can AI destroy modern civilization in the next 30 minutes?
Doubt it, but it might depend on how much of an overhang we have. My timelines aren't that short, but if there were an overhang and we were just a few breakthroughs away from recursive self-improvement, would the world look any different than it does now?
Can a single human being unilaterally decide to make that happen, right now, today?
Oh, good point. Pilots have intentionally crashed planes full of passengers. Kids have shot up schools, not expecting to come out alive. Murder-suicide is a th...
Reminder that "The Merge" for Ethereum is coming up soon. There are bullish signs, like call-to-put ratios. Totally not advice, and please Don't bet the farm; crypto has high volatility.
Interest on these is now between nine and ten percent. If it was a good deal then, maybe it's an even better deal now. I bought another one (not investment advice). Also, someone pointed out that if you buy multiple smaller ones, you don't have to cash them all in at once.
How did you decide which posts to include?
Normal browser bookmarks do work. Use the link icon between the date and karma to get the URL for one.
I think I'm lacking some jargon here. What's a latent/patent in the context of a large language model? "patent" is ungoogleable if you're not talking about intellectual property law.
The Eyeronman link didn't seem very informative. No explanation of how it works. I already knew sensory substitution was a thing, but is this different somehow? Is there some neural net pre-digesting its outputs? Is it similarly a random-seeming mismash? Are there any other examples of this kind of thing working for humans? Visually?
Would the mismash from a smaller text model be any easier/faster for the human to learn?
Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism. The inferential gap problem is real. Newcomers often really don't know enough, but we can't afford to re-hash the basics every time someone new shows up, or we'd never get to the interesting stuff, so when they're not up to our standards, we really do have to boo them off the stage. Sorry that had to happen to you. Fortunately, we have introductory material. Both of those linked posts are from The Sequences, and there's a lot more where that came from. It's pretty long, but you should get a lot out of it long before you f...
I'm not trying to be cruel, but this appears to be your first post and I thought you might like to know why I voted it down, rather than be left wondering about the nebulous community disapproval.
MBTI is pretty much pseudoscience. Seriously, it's a half-step up from horoscopes, in that it at least asks questions that might have something to do with personality. Except for the intraversion/extraversion axis (which has a more scientific version in the Big Five tests), I've always found it less than useless, remain appalled that it retains as much following a...
Perhaps not wacky enough, so I'll just comment, but language is something of a tool of thought. Proper math notations can be the difference between something being unthinkable and obvious. Some notations, like APL, are extremely terse, allowing one to fit entire algorithms in ones head at once that would otherwise only be understandable in smaller chunks. Perhaps learning and expanding upon such notations could be valuable.
Similarly, there are conlangs with extreme terseness, such as Ithkuil. This language is extremely difficult, and even its creator canno...
There's a tuplamancy-adjacent construct called a "servitor", which sounds like a kind of persistent hallucination that might be able to perform various automatic functions. I can't imagine such a thing being any more useful than a smartphone (probably much less), but perhaps it would have a faster direct-mental interface.
For example, I wonder if some kind of "notepad" servitor could expand one's working memory, which seems like a major bottleneck in humans. I.e. quickly offload writing/images to the persistent hallucination, and then just look at it to rel...
Trepanning. I've heard rumors that this reduces CSF pressure on the brain allowing it to expand a bit and increase intelligence. It was once common practice among many ancient cultures, but that doesn't prove they had good reasons. I find the supposed effect and proposed mechanism of action highly dubious, and, of course, brain damage/infection may well kill you if done improperly, but you asked for "risky" and "wacky".
The idea of generating and directly transferring a pre-digested latent representation is super interesting, but my prior is that this couldn't work. However a neural network trained from initially randomized weights represents concepts is likely to be highly idiosyncratic to that particular network. Perhaps this could be accomplished between AIs if we can somehow make that process and initial state less random, but how could that ever work for humans?
The highest-bandwith sensory input for humans is their eyes. Doesn't this idea just amount to diagrams of high-dimensional data?
Neanderthals had a bigger braincase than Homo Sapiens. It's not likely that they were any smarter than us, but we can't totally rule that out. They're so closely related to us that their genes for bigger heads ought to be pretty compatible if we splice them in where they belong. Would literally bigger brain volume with otherwise Sapiens neurons make us any smarter?
Could one build a whale-sized brain with fairy wasp–sized neurons?
Fairy wasp neurons are even smaller [citation needed].
Motivation is the wrong approach, because you can't control it much. Take advantage of it when you have it, but don't worry about "getting motivated". Willpower is also limited, so what you really want are habits: things that are easier to do than to not do. See my book review on how to convert limited willpower into habits.
Hypnotherapy, or self-hypnosis, may also be worth looking into, both for pain management, and for executive function/habit building. You can probably find library books on this.
If you’ve exhausted medical options, meditation may still help. Look into it.
It’s cliché, but the secret to action is taking the first step. Let’s unpack that a little though. A plan must be back-chained all the way to the present moment, or no action happens. It’s like trying to climb a ladder when you forgot to install the bottom rungs.
Break it down to the simplest possible starting action, and then form a strong intention to trigger that action based on something you were already going to do—eating breakfast, getting up, even blinking or taking your nex...
Voice recording and dictation software is probably the easiest, since it doesn't interrupt your thought process as much. It's definitely worth a try, but actually writing may slow you down too much. You might consider picking up shorthand to take notes more quickly. I also wonder if a high-gain mic next to your face could pick up a whisper well enough to be intelligible, if not for dictation software, then at least for you. Could be worth experimenting with.
Wow, even the tulpas. Autistic people don't simply lack empathy. It's more like it's undertrained and improves somewhat with experience. More exposure helps, even if it's fictional.
Anime, particularly the kind emphasizing relationships, was helpful for me. "Great" literature, which lets you get inside someone else's (fictional) head, should be helpful for the same reason. Shallower pop fiction may be less helpful. Quality varies a great deal. As for your case, I'm not qualified to diagnose it.
Theater sports or pen & paper RPGs (e.g. Dungeons and Dragon...
https://www.eleuther.ai/ released GPT-J, which is supposed to have similar or superior performance when compared to GPT-3's medium-sized models, although it can't match the largest Davinci model on some tasks. Might be worth a try, but I'm not sure what kind of hardware you need to run it.
DeepMind's Chinchilla suggests that GPT-3 was undertrained, so it's possible to get better performance with fewer parameters. This space has been rapidly evolving, so I'm not sure what the current best free options are.
Shortly after writing this answer, it occurred to me that you could dialog with GPT-3, rather than another human (or yourself). I'm not sure how accessible this is now, but there are certainly many alternatives. If even a silent rubber duck is useful, perhaps even an ELIZA-level chatbot is more useful, but I think options much better than that are freely available now.
I honestly have no idea how to think clearly. Particularly from a blank slate, without prompting or real-time communication with another person, who can dig things out of me I cannot retrieve on my own, by reminding me of things with their questions.
The Rubber-Duck Technique: Get a rubber duck (or a figurine of some kind). When working through a problem, or trying to understand a new concept, explain it to the duck. As if it were a person.
Maybe the silent duck isn't enough. At least try it before moving on. But you can be the other person digging things...
The mechanism isn't the same as for diseases, which can't be too virulent or they kill their hosts. Religions don't generally kill their hosts.
Don't drink the Kool-Aid ;)
Prevalent communicable diseases usually don't kill their hosts, because those that do (like Ebola) tend not to spread, and thus are not prevalent.
There have been multiple recorded instances of cults ending in mass suicide, as well as a gamut of other harms to adherents. Those that don't implode from their virulence may spread and survive, eventually becoming old enough to graduate and be called "religions" (i.e. prevalent cults).
Sounds like exactly the same mechanism to me.
Looks like Squish himself now considers his thesis falsified.
Did you see the new one about Slow motion videos as AI risk intuition pumps?
Thinking of ourselves like chimpanzees while the AI is the humans is really not the right scale: computers operate so much faster than humans, we'd be more like plants than animals to them. When there are all of these "forests" of humans just standing around, one might as well chop them down and use the materials to build something more useful.
This is not exactly a new idea. Yudkowsky already likened the FOOM to setting off a bomb, but the slow-motion video was a new take.
The strap on mine broke (actually one of the plastic buckles). It looks like (better?) third-party alternatives cost about as much as a replacement, but I don't know which to choose. Any recommendations?
SquishChaos made a thorough case for Ether settling well above $30k and possibly briefly hitting $150k by 2023. If that's true, the current price of ~$1k is a good deal.
However, this report was published in late April '21. Have recent events invalidated this thesis at all? Ether has lost over 90% before and still recovered.
Thank you for putting a number on it. Here's another one: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/9552/maximum-price-for-ethereum-by-2023/. Current prediction is $5,180.
As Ether is trading around $1,000 now, I'd say that's undervalued, even in the relatively short term of 2023. But how much can we trust these predictions?
I didn't realize bacitracin allergies were nearly as prevalent as neomycin. Still, better one allergen than three.
Avoid the Neosporin. Prolonged exposure to one of the active ingredients (neomycin) often causes an allergic reaction, i.e. inflammation indistinguishable from an infection. Then putting more on to treat the "infection" just makes it worse. The triple-action seems to be more marketing than science. Polysporin, plain bacitracin, or even just petroleum jelley (Vaseline) is probably a better choice. The moisturizer is helpful (because it prevents scab formation and scarring), but it's not clear that the antibacterials are helping much. There's also some concern that Neosporin may promote antibiotic-resistant bacteria, like MRSA.
Placebos can still work even when the patient knows it's a placebo. The knowledge seems to operate at a different level. I don't think the lying part is actually necessary to get the benefits. When kissing makes it better, then most of the pain was emotional, not physical, and the effective treatment was to somehow comfort the child, but this can probably be done in a variety of ways.
Risk is still elevated, and surprises are possible, but insurance is no longer worth the cost to me. The market has regained its footing. I've removed my precautions, as of today.
Sure. I was simplifying, and said as much. Tit-for-tat is an excellent strategy in Prisoner's Dilemma (which is not the same game as nuclear war). But when both players use it, it leads to death spirals as soon as one side defects, even on accident, even due to faulty intelligence. Both players continue to defect thereafter.
But this is not the same game. We know that starting down path leads to Our destruction anyway, so why not gamble on a massive strike to disarm the Enemy so there's a chance Our destruction isn't total? Maybe We can get them all, or at ...
Newcomblike problem: it feels like there are two decisions to be made, but there is only one, in advance. If the Enemy knows you will never fire your missiles, They can pick off your cities one-by-one with impunity. But if you precommit to Mutual Assured Destruction if They ever cross the line, then it would be suicidal for Them to do so, so They won't (if They are rational). If losing one city to a nuclear attack is unacceptable, then that is your line in the sand. You must precommit to full retaliation in that event, and make it known to the Enemy.
In a g...
Newcomblike problem: it feels like there are two decisions to be made, but there is only one, in advance. If the Enemy knows you will never fire your missiles, They can pick off your cities one-by-one with impunity. But if you precommit to Mutal Assured Destruction if They ever cross the line, then it would be suicidal for Them to do so, so They won't (if They are rational). If losing one city to a nuclear attack is unacceptable, then that is your line in the sand. You must precommit to full retaliation in that event, and make it known to the Enemy.
Why is ...
Market appears to have bounced as of this morning. Indicators of instability persist, however, they do lag a bit. In my estimation, risk level is still high, so my precautions remain.
I'm seeing some serious stock market instability this morning. I'm calling it. Market is crashing. I can't say how hard or for how long. The reasons should be obvious, but I'll say it: the present war in Ukraine.
I'll be taking some precautions, including going long volatility, and buying some index puts. I am not your financial advisor, but seriously, take a look at your portfolio RIGHT NOW!
These are short-term plays. Theoretically, puts will rapidly deflate in value once the market bottoms, so if one were to buy some defensively (or aggressively), one sho...
Hypothesis was invaluable for getting the Unicode munging working properly. So many edge cases.
Hissp 0.3.0 is up. Check it out.
pip install -U hissp==0.3.0
Was with you up to here. I might call that "alluring", rather than "attractive", which I use to mean "appealing to my romantic drive" (as you put it), and not just from physical features, which seems like nearly the opposite meaning, and I used it in that sense in the part you just quoted (contrasting it with "arousing", which I meant as a purely sexual turn-on). Was that your mistake or am I using a different terminology version?
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