Kawoomba

... and there is only one choice I'd expect them to make, in other words, no actual decision at all.

Replying toHow I'd Introduce LessWrong to an Outsider

How I'd Introduce LessWrong to an Outsider

If this were my introduction to LW, I'd snort and go away. Or maybe stop to troll for a bit -- this intro is soooo easy to make fun of.

Well, glad you didn't choose the first option, then.

Replying toCFAR’s new focus, and AI Safety

Kawoomba9y

CFAR’s new focus, and AI Safety

The catch-22 I would expect with CFAR's efforts is that anyone buying their services is already demonstrating a willingness to actually improve his/her rationality/epistemology, and is looking for effective tools to do so.

The bottleneck, however, is probably not the unavailability of such tools, but rather the introspectivity (or lack thereof) that results in a desire to actually pursue change, rather than simply virtue-signal the typical "I always try to learn from my mistakes and improve my thinking".

The latter mindset is the one most urgently needing actual improvements, but its bearers won't flock to CFAR unless it has gained acceptance as an institution with which you can virtue-signal (which can confer status).... (read more)

Replying toYudkowsky vs Trump: the nuclear showdown.

Kawoomba9y

Yudkowsky vs Trump: the nuclear showdown.

Climate change, while potentially catastrophic, is not an x-risk. Nuclear war is only an x-risk for a subset of scenarios.

Replying toGratitude Thread :-)

Kawoomba10y

Gratitude Thread :-)

The scarier thought is how often we're manipulated that way when people don't bungle their jobs. The few heuristics we use to identify such mischief are trivially misled (for example, establishing plausibility by posting on inconsequential other topics (at least on LW that incurs a measurable cognitive footprint, which is however not the case on, say, Reddit), and then there's always Poe's law to consider). Shills man, shills everywhere!

As they dictum goes, just cuz you're paranoid ...

Reminds me of Ernest Hemingway's apparent paranoid delusions of being under FBI surveillance ... only eventually it turned out he actually was. Well, at least if my family keep playing their roles well enough, from a... (read more)

Replying toThe Thyroid Madness : Core Argument, Evidence, Probabilities and Predictions

Kawoomba10y

The Thyroid Madness : Core Argument, Evidence, Probabilities and Predictions

Disclaimer: Only spent 20 minutes on this, so it might be incomplete, or you may already have addressed some of the following points:

At first glance, John Lowe authored 2 pubmed-listed papers on the topic.

The first of which in an open journal with no peer review (Med. Hypotheses) which has also published stuff on e.g. AIDS denialism. From his paper: "We propose that molecular biological methods can provide confirmatory or contradictory evidence of a genetic basis of euthyroid FS [Fibromyalgia Syndrome]." That's it. Proposing a hypothesis, not providing experimental evidence, paper ends.

The second paper was published in a somewhat controversial low impact journal (at least peer-reviewed). However, this apparently one and only peer... (read more)

Replying toOpen Thread March 7 - March 13, 2016

Kawoomba10y

Open Thread March 7 - March 13, 2016

I wonder if / how that win will affect estimates on the advent of AGI within the AI community.

Replying toThe Fable of the Burning Branch

Kawoomba10y

The Fable of the Burning Branch

You got me there!

Replying toRationality Merchandise - First Set

Kawoomba10y

Rationality Merchandise - First Set

Please don't spam the same comment to different threads.

Replying toHow could one (and should one) convert someone from pseudoscience?

Kawoomba10y

How could one (and should one) convert someone from pseudoscience?

Hey! Hey. He. Careful there, a propos word inflation. It strikes with a force of no more than one thousand atom bombs.

Are you really arguing for keeping ideologically incorrect people barefoot and pregnant, lest they harm themselves with any tools they might acquire?

Sounds as good a reason as any!

maybe we should shut down LW

I'm not sure how much it counts, but I bet Chief Ramsay would've shut it down long ago. Betting is good, I've learned.

Farewell Aaron Swartz (1986-2013)

Kawoomba

13y

Link

One of us is no more.

Computer activist Aaron H. Swartz committed suicide in New York City yesterday, Jan. 11.

The accomplished Swartz co-authored the now widely-used RSS 1.0 specification at age 14, was one of the three co-owners of the popular social news site Reddit, and completed a fellowship at Harvard’s Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption. In 2010, he founded DemandProgress.org, a “campaign against the Internet censorship bills SOPA/PIPA.”

He deserves a eulogy more eloquent than what I am capable of writing. Here's Cory Doctorow's, one of his long time friends.

It's a sad world in which you are being arrested and grand jury'd for downloading scientific journals and papers with the intent to share them.

117

120

Implications of an infinite versus a finite universe

Kawoomba

13y

Hi gang,

for the last several months, I've intermittently been wondering about a curious fact I learned.

You see, I was under the impression that the universe (as opposed to just the currently observable universe or our Hubble volume) must be finite in its spa[t|c]ial dimensions. I figured that starting with a finite area of space, expanding with a finite (even if accelerating) expansion rate, could only yield a finitely sized volume of space (from any reference frame), a fraction of which constitutes our little Hubble bubble.

Turns out - honi soit qui mal y pense - my layman's understanding was wrong: "This [WMAP data] suggests that the Universe is infinite in extent (...)"

Now, most... (read 208 more words →)

Musk, Mars and x-risk

Kawoomba

13y

Article on space.com

Elon Musk, the billionaire founder and CEO of the private spaceflight company SpaceX, wants to help establish a Mars colony of up to 80,000 people by ferrying explorers to the Red Planet for perhaps $500,000 a trip.

Relevant Sagan quote:

(...) we've put all our eggs in one basket. If we were on many worlds and were to mess up down here, there's a way for the human species to continue. I don't for a moment propose that the Earth is a disposable planet, and we have to put enormous efforts into making sure we don't muss up down here. But there is a chance.

This should also at least somewhat reduce the

Kawoomba

13y

Video here, illustrated transcript here.

Contains a good sketch of Schmidhuber's Formal Theory of Fun and Creativity.

One TEDx passage in particular stuck with me, quoted with context:

In a few decades, such [creative] machines will have more computational power than human brains.

This will have consequences. My kids were born around 2000. The insurance mathematicians say they are expected to see the year 2100, because they are girls.

A substantial fraction of their lives will be spent in a world where the smartest things are not humans, but the artificial brains of an emerging robot civilization, which presumably will spread throughout the solar system and beyond (space is hostile to humans but nice to robots).

This will

Kawoomba

13y

The "intuitive" (fast) interaction heuristic is predisposed towards selflessness, while the "calculated" (slow) decision making process favors greedier behavior: review of game studies.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22996558

Sidenote: Strange to have a Nature paper conflate a faster-payoff / 'egoistic' approach with being 'rational', and to contrast intuition with calculation, of all things. As if not being consciously aware of the calculation implicit in fast "intuitive" decision algorithms implied a lack of cognitive processing.

[LINK] Cryonics - without even trying

Kawoomba

14y

(Title is tongue-in-cheek, "preservation" would've been more appropriate but less catchy)

With [news like that](http://news.discovery.com/history/preserved-brain-bog-england-110406.html), how hard can it be when you actually do want to preserve a brain:

> A human skull dated to about 2,684 years ago with an "exceptionally preserved" human brain still inside of it was recently discovered in a waterlogged U.K. pit, according to a new Journal of Archaeological Science study.

> The brain is the oldest known intact human brain from Europe and Asia, according to the authors, who also believe it's one of the best-preserved ancient brains in the world. (...) Scientists believe that submersion in liquid, anoxic environments helps to preserve human brain tissue.

Unfortunately for the... (read 385 more words →)

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

Farewell Aaron Swartz (1986-2013)

Musk, Mars and x-risk

[LINK] Different heuristics at different decision speeds

[LINK] Cryonics - without even trying

Kawoomba

Kawoomba

Farewell Aaron Swartz (1986-2013)

Implications of an infinite versus a finite universe

Musk, Mars and x-risk

[LINK] TEDx "When creative machines overtake man"

[LINK] Different heuristics at different decision speeds

[LINK] Cryonics - without even trying

Kawoomba

Farewell Aaron Swartz (1986-2013)

Musk, Mars and x-risk

[LINK] Different heuristics at different decision speeds

[LINK] Cryonics - without even trying

Kawoomba

Kawoomba

Farewell Aaron Swartz (1986-2013)

Implications of an infinite versus a finite universe

Musk, Mars and x-risk

[LINK] TEDx "When creative machines overtake man"

[LINK] Different heuristics at different decision speeds

[LINK] Cryonics - without even trying