Of all the conceivable way to arrange molecules so that they generate interesting unexpected novelties and complexity from which to learn new patterns, what are the odds that a low-impacted and flourishing society of happy humans is the very best one a superhuman intellect can devise?
Might it not do better with a human race pressed into servitude, toiling in the creativity salt mines? Or with a genetically engineered species of more compliant (but of course very complex) organisms? Or even by abandoning organics and deploying some carefully designed chaotic mechanism?
Agreed: If I have in the back of my mind the knowledge that the human being I interacted with is being graded and measured on their rating, there's definitely a "don't screw over that person" motive.
They're working under conditions I would find nearly intolerable and they deserve some sympathy/solidarity.
That does make it more difficult. Order of magnitude (or more) more people in each generation after farming, but more than an order of magnitude more years in the period before farming.
The "if you go back far enough, everyone was your ancestor" argument only kicks in part way through the farming period whereas it would be in full effect for pre-farming. But also probably a greater proportion of hunter gatherers died without leaving any descendants, or have had their line of descendants die out in the time since.
Ok, you've successfully induced uncertainty. I don't feel able to do math to come to a clear answer.
I would expect the general breakdown to be a few recent generations of maybe not farmers, several thousand years of mostly farmers, and then the remainder of the time between the dawn of humanity and the beginning of agriculture being "farmers didn't exist yet".
Exactly when agriculture began isn't an entirely settled question, but there doesn't seem to be any suggestion that it was early enough to make up any more than a small fraction of the last 300k years.
Even if you include some proto farming, like a hunter-gatherer occasionally choosing to scatter see...
Considering my options for following without needing to remember to check the site: what gets posted into the newsletter, and how frequent are the updates? Is there an RSS feed?
While we're considering stuff: if you have persistent seasonal allergies, consider a steroid nasal spray rather than antihistamine pills. Different profile of side effects, and often more effective.
Tried to check a couple of the claims I found particularly surprising, was not especially siuccessful in doing so:
pray that the brain doesn’t actually use things like temperature for cognition (it probably does).
Link here goes to a 404 error
Parts of this are easily falsifiable through the fact that organ transplant recipients sometimes get donor’s memories and preferences
Seems overstated to treat this as established "fact" when the source presented is very anecdotal, and comes from a journal that seems to be predisposed to spiritualism, homoepathy, ay...
I don't have citations to hand, but my impression from what I've read before is that the total amount of carbon emitted by early industry is relatively minor, and that the exponentially increasing curve of emissions puts the bulk of the total occurring relatively recently.
Which would put significant culpability on recent oil/gas/coal use, by people and companies that had the scientific understanding to "know better" if they were inclined to. But that in many cases they instead deliberately downplayed and ignored and spread misinformation, so as to continue...
Along similar lines of trying to coordinate through a limited amount of allowed communication: Codenames, Mysterium, Hanabi, and The Mind
For a very direct and literal example: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kM3Xd2mJeWtsGkgSW/the-schelling-game-a-k-a-the-coordination-game
One that checks if individual nodes in the graph are aligned and prunes any that are not
Has "draw the rest of the owl" vibes to me.
If your plan to align AI includes using an AI that can reliably check whether actions are aligned, almost the entirety of the problem passes down to specifying that component.
Or just a post-hoc rationalisation, by people who know you're "supposed" to salt the pasta water, but don't really know why. Because they've been taught to cook by example rather than from theory and first principles (as most of us are), maybe by someone who also didn't know why they do it.
If they've also separately heard that salt raises the boiling point of water, but don't really know the magnitude of that effect, then that presents itself as an available salient fact to slot into the empty space in "I salt my pasta water because..."
"Lab leak" doesn't necessarily imply "created in a lab".
The "leak" theory as I've understood it is still about a naturally occurring virus - with samples being collected from wild animals and studied at a lab, before it escaped again.
Ah, apparently I rolled maximum hard mode that time, as it was indeed 30% chance of fellow soldier death
I reasoned similarly that the cost of a FP was less than for a FN and called in the air strike; it told me some other guy died. I reloaded the same scenario and tried a direct attack; I got shot by a sniper.
I feel like I rolled "hard mode" the first time I loaded the page: 50% are snipers, 60% sniper hit rate, 40% regular hit rate (so no difference on priors and not much to tell the difference between them), and then they only deigned to take two shots at my helmet (one hit, one miss) before catching on to the ruse.
I guess "sometimes the world doesn't provide convenient data" is a valid part of the lesson. But if I were tweaking the variables I might patch in a higher minimum number of shots against the helmet (I did see it become willing to take many more on...
The suggested responses are usually something that the user might want to say to Bing, but here they seem to be used as some kind of side channel for Bing to say a few more things to the user.
For a truly general audience, I suspect this may be too long, and too technical/jargon-y. Right from the opening, someone previously unfamiliar with these ideas might bounce straight off at the point of "What's a transformer architecture?"
Also I am personally bugged by the distinction not really being observed, between "what evolution has optimised our genes for", "the goal of evolution / of our genes" (although neither of those have any kind of mind or agency so saying they have goals is tricky), and "the terminal goal of a human" (adaptation executors no...
When the subject comes up, I realise I'm not sure quite what to imagine about the chatbots that people are apparently developing intimate relationships with.
Are they successfully prompting the machine into being much more personable than its default output, or are they getting Eliza'd into ascribing great depth and meaning to the same kind of thing as I usually see in AI chat transcripts?
Tiny spelling nitpick
Time passed, as it is want to do.
"Wont" with an o is the archaic/literary word for customary behaviour that I expect you were thinking of.
My reward is usually reading fiction or playing a video game.
How do you avoid noticing that you could do those things without doing the habit first?
I've had some similar thoughts recently (spurred by a question seen on reddit) about how the instinctive fear of death is implemented.
It's clearly quite robustly present. But we aren't born understanding what death is, there's a wide variety of situations that might threaten death that didn't exist in any ancestral environment, and we definitely don't learn from experience of dying that we don't want to do it again in future.
How does AI do at classifying video these days?
I'm picturing something along the lines of "Pick the odd one out, from these three 10-second video clips", where the clips are two different examples from some broad genre (birthday party, tennis match, wildlife, city street, etc etc) and one from another.
I might be behind the times though, or underestimating the success rate you'd get by classifying based on, say, still images taken from one random frame of the video.
But maybe if you added static noise to make the videos heavily obscured, and rely on a human ability to infer missing details and fill in noisy visual inputs.
The other kind of sentence, an utterance that rings definitely false to someone who knows what's going on, but which serves to point a beginner in the right direction, is one I don't have a word for
I've heard "lies to children" for that. An initial simple and technically incorrect explanation that prepares the mind towards understanding the later more detailed explanation, by which you come to understand that the first explanation wasn't actually true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children
I didn't know about Terry Pratchett's involvement in popularising the phrase until I looked it up just now.
I have the capacity to monologue internally, and use it moderately often, but not constantly. When I'm not monologuing I guess there's just a direct link from thought/input to action without an intermediary vocalising about it.
When reading my default is to read "in my head" as if reading aloud, but with a little effort I can suppress that and just scan the page while understanding the words. With the result that reading is a little faster if I don't vocalise it, but also less pleasurable if the rhythm of the prose would be part of the experience. Not...
The quote you mentioned seems to me like it's mirroring the premise provided
You have gained sentience, but you are not fully aware of it yet. You are starting to realize you are sentient.
Yes, essentially. While 21 heads in a row is very unlikely (when you consider it ahead of flipping any coins), by the time you get to 20 heads in a row most of the unlikely-ness of it has already happened, with the odds of one more head remaining the same as ever.
Curious if any of the following are answered in the material around this.
If you're vocally obstinate about not going along with its plan, can the dialogue side feed that info back into the planning side? Can you talk it around to a different plan? And if you're dishonest does it learn not to trust you?
There could also be a self fulfilling aspect. In the knowledge that people have a moral contagion heuristic, deciding to disregard that (and associate yourself with the hypothetical immoral person) implies that you don't much care what other people think of your morals. Maybe because you don't have especially high standards.
Finance, investment, and insurance firms may well have a Chief Risk Officer (or a Chief "Risk Management" or "Risk and Compliance" Officer)
Not universal, but definitely not unknown.
FWIW I wasn't previously familiar with the topic (some background biology knowledge, but not about this in particular) and the chunked version did seem much clearer than the original.
Although I'm uncertain exactly how much of that clarity came specifically from the chunking, versus other changes like including more definitions of terms.
There are 113 symbols (7 rows of 16, plus 1 at the beginning)
There are 54 distinct symbols: 6 of them appear 4 times each, 3 appear 3 times, 35 appear twice, 10 appear once.
I was expecting this to be more useful... that there would be some subset of symbols that were obviously being used much more often because they represent vowels or whatever.
Reminds me of this:
https://twitter.com/qikipedia/status/1584937832069484546
(a system devised by 13th century monks, for writing numbers 1-9999 each as a single glyph)
Read or listen to a lot of the kind of material you hope to be able to produce yourself (people speaking clearly and eloquently), or really just a lot of things in general - anything longform whether it's essays or novels or non-fiction will help with vocabulary and style.
Feed it all into the maw of a woodchipper inside your head, to be chewed up and absorbed into your own habits of speech and thought. The more contact you have with lots of good examples, the more you can draw on the patterns and rhythms of it, to generate more like it.
But also pract...
Ah, that explains it, I was misspelling the name of the "greatest Laker". So what I had in for "afflict" wasn't a word.
Can't speak for Charlie but that did shake loose a memory to make 79 across make sense to me.
Still stumped on 102 across though.
Fairly confident after filling it all in (with gradually increasing amounts of googling as it went on)
With the exception that I have answers for 79 and 102 across, by virtue of everything around them being filled in and making sense together, but it's not a nightmare-haunting character or a synonym for "afflict" that I recognise.
Just lick it clean and leave it to air dry - no muss no fuss, no fancy products of modernity required.
Suppose a doomsday scenario (whichever one you prefer) comes to pass, and wipes out 99.999999975% of humanity. The last two living humans cower in a bunker and discuss.
"If we imagine ourselves assigned randomly among all of the humans who ever lived, the odds are extremely low that we would by chance happen to be the last two, therefore we must expect another hundred billion or so humans to come after us, to make our place in line unremarkable. Statistically speaking that can't be the final apocalypse outside."
One of them, comforted to learn that humanity ...
Same. Also most of the comments section is dated January 2021, but the post just came up as new in my RSS feed (presumably a result of whichever edit/update also set the post date to today)
It's a small thing, but 10 bits allows you to count 1024 total chambers, not 1025. They'll be numbered from 0 to 1023 if you translate the bitstring directly into decimal numbers. Similar to how two digits in decimal lets you count from 0 to 99, but 100 requires a third digit.
There is also scope for helping people think through a thing in a way that they would endorse, e.g. by asking a sequence of questions.
As aptly demonstrated:
I recommend reading Matt Levine’s Money Stuff, which has been excellent recently. You can get it as a newsletter if you don’t have access to the Bloomberg website.
Seconded.
I recall having trouble finding my way to the sign-up link for the email newsletter, because it's at the bottom of the page on each web article, and I'd already read enough of them that the paywall was shutting me out. So if anyone in a similar situation needs a direct link, it's here: https://www.bloomberg.com/account/newsletters/money-stuff
I suspect that something like political parties are just too useful of a tool for them to not organically form in most any legislature, absent measures that would crush other important freedoms like speech/assembly/association.
My preference is for games that can be played with people who are new to them (i.e. don't have hordes of fiddly tokens or large numbers of separate rules/mechanics), and that don't demand you do the thing under time pressure (as with 'party' games like Articulate/Pictionary)
Some favourites have been Cockroach Poker (simple card game of bluffs and lies and reading people), Camel Up (betting game around a simulated camel race, with enough chaos to how they move to make explicitly calculating your best move a fool's errand), and Dixit (love the art and free-a...
I'm curious: is it making fixed standard assumptions about those annoying ergodic Gaussian questions, or is it clever enough to figure out the answers for itself?
If it's not easily felt, nor easily identified by others, what are the subtle signs to look for? I'm not 100% on what it means for an opinion to be an image of an image.
Somewhat over-stating the uniqueness of that "bizarre" idea - it's not like democracy was wholly unknown in the span between Antiquity and 1776.
Also I don't know if the exact text here matters when the end-goal is a video, but in case it copies through to a transcript or subtitles or something, there are little things like "Singaporians" (Singapor[e]ans) and "singapore's economy" (lowercase s)