Pablo

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Pablo — LessWrong

Replying toDario Amodei – The Adolescence of Technology

Dario Amodei – The Adolescence of Technology

What Amodei actually says:

However, there is a more moderate and more robust version of the pessimistic position which does seem plausible, and therefore does concern me. As mentioned, we know that AI models are unpredictable and develop a wide range of undesired or strange behaviors, for a wide variety of reasons. Some fraction of those behaviors will have a coherent, focused, and persistent quality (indeed, as AI systems get more capable, their long-term coherence increases in order to complete lengthier tasks), and some fraction of those behaviors will be destructive or threatening, first to individual humans at a small scale, and then, as models become more capable, perhaps eventually to humanity as

Pablo17d

Dario Amodei – The Adolescence of Technology

What would you do and say if you were in Amodei's position?

Replying toUnknown Knowns: Five Ideas You Can't Unsee

Pablo2mo

Unknown Knowns: Five Ideas You Can't Unsee

One indirect piece of evidence is an anecdote recounted by Thomas Shelling in the preface to the 1980 edition of The Strategy of Conflict. The anecdote suggests that we may overestimate people’s familiarity with seemingly obvious concepts.

The book has had a good reception, and many have cheered me by telling me they liked it or learned from it. But the response that warms me most after twenty years is the late John Strachey’s. John Strachey, whose books I had read in college, had been an outstanding Marxist economist in the 1930s. After the war he had been defense minister in Britain’s Labor Government. Some of us at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs

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Replying toCFAR update, and New CFAR workshops

Pablo5mo

CFAR update, and New CFAR workshops

The problem is that organizations generally do not include the article used to refer to them in their names. For example, the name of the Council on Foreign Relations is not ‘The Council on Foreign Relations’, but ‘Council on Foreign Relations’. For this reason, one should always use the definite article ‘the’ to refer to CFAR, because one’s intention is to refer to the entity so named. Saying “a Center for Applied Rationality” would invite questions like, “Wait! Are there other orgs also called ‘Center for Applied Rationality’?”

Alternatively, you could change ‘Center for Applied Rationality’ to ‘A Center for Applied Rationality’, but this would also be very strange. As mentioned, entities do not generally include the article as part of their names, but when they do, it is, to my knowledge, always the definite article (e.g., The New York Times).

My humble advice is to drop this idea. You can communicate that you are not trying to be the one canonical org on this topic in other ways.

Pablo7mo

Meta: gjm’s comment appears at the same level as comments that directly reply to Kaj’s original shortform. So until I read your own comment, I assumed they, too, were replying to Kaj. I think deleting a comment shouldn't alter the hierarchy of other comments in that thread.

Pablo10mo

I think there is a vast difference between Gerard and Kruel, not just in the damage each has caused but also in their intellectual honesty and responsiveness to argument (null in the case of Gerard, decent in the case of Kruel, at least from my recollection).

Pablo10mo*Quick Take

One of the biggest online threats to rational discourse, “RationalWiki”, just reached a settlement with all but one of the eight plaintiffs suing them, and deleted the corresponding biographical entries. They are also considering pre-emptively removing all their other hit pieces—countless articles that have ruined careers, stifled research, and brought entire fields of inquiry into undeserved disrepute.

Replying toTail SP 500 Call Options

Pablo1y

Tail SP 500 Call Options

I agree this looks promising and is the reason I bought long-dated SPY calls a few weeks ago (already up by 30%). But I would feel more reassured if I felt I could understand why such an opportunity persists. What is the mental state of the person on the other end of this trade?

Replying toTail SP 500 Call Options

Pablo1y

Tail SP 500 Call Options

Can you share the spreadsheet/code on which the calculations are based?

Replying toActualism, asymmetry and extinction

Pablo1y

Actualism, asymmetry and extinction

Yeah, that makes sense, especially if combined with the feature that allows users to disagree with specific parts of the post, as Michael notes. (Though note that the disagree vote is anonymous, whereas disagreeing with a selection is public, so the two aren’t fully comparable.)

Audible has just released an audio version of Nick Bostrom’s Deep Utopia.

I was delighted to learn that the audiobook is narrated by David Timson, the English actor whose narrations of The Life of Samuel Johnson and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire I had enjoyed so much. I wonder if this was pure chance or a deliberate decision by Bostrom (or his team).

Silver’s model and most other lines of evidence indicate that the US presidential race is as close to a tossup as it gets. But, as of this writing, you can buy Harris contracts on Polymarket for 38 cents. The explanation for this apparent mispricing seems to be that, over the past few days, a single pro-Trump trader has poured tens of millions of dollars into the platform. “Domer”, the author of the linked tweet and Polymarket’s most successful trader to date, claims that this effect has depressed Harris’s contract price by around five cents, though I am unable to independently confirm this claim.

Pablo's Shortform

Pablo

This is a special post for quick takes (aka "shortform"). Only the owner can create top-level comments.

Is there something like a "meta-encyclopedia"?

Pablo

With Wikipedia showing increasing signs of ideological uniformity, I thought I should try to diversify my consumption of reference material. A potentially very useful tool for this purpose would be a "meta-encyclopedia", i.e. a place where users can find a list of all existing encyclopedia entries on a given topic. Questions:

1. Does something like this exist?

2. If not, what are the closest substitutes?

My current method is to simply do a Google search for the topic of interest followed by the word 'encyclopedia', e.g. 'comparative advantage encyclopedia'. This method is already quite useful, with a much lower false-positive rate than I would have expected, though I feel there's still considerable room for improvement.

Meetup : Fifth Buenos Aires LessWrong meetup

Pablo

12y

Discussion article for the meetup : Fifth Buenos Aires LessWrong meetup

WHEN: 09 August 2014 04:00:00PM (-0300)

WHERE: Roseti 1380, Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Argentina

This will be our fifth Buenos Aires LessWrong meetup.

On this occasion, Pablo will give a brief introductory presentation about effective altruism, followed by discussion. Optional reading material:

Luke Muehlhauser: Four Focus Areas of Effective Altruism
Will MacAskill: What is Effective Altruism
Holden Karnofsky: Effective Altruism
Ben Kuhn: A Critique of Effective Altruism

The meeting will take place at GarageLab.

To stay informed about future meetups, please subscribe to our Google group.

Hope to see you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Fifth Buenos Aires LessWrong meetup

[link] Why Psychologists' Food Fight Matters

Pablo

12y

Why Psychologists’ Food Fight Matters: Important findings” haven’t been replicated, and science may have to change its ways. By Michelle N. Meyer and Christopher Chabris. Slate, July 31, 2014. [Via Steven Pinker's Twitter account, who adds: "Lesson for sci journalists: Stop reporting single studies, no matter how sexy (these are probably false). Report lit reviews, meta-analyses."] Some excerpts:

Psychologists are up in arms over, of all things, the editorial process that led to the recent publication of a special issue of the journal Social Psychology. This may seem like a classic case of ivory tower navel gazing, but its impact extends far beyond academia. The issue attempts to replicate 27 “important findings in

... (read 2471 more words →)

[link] [poll] Future Progress in Artificial Intelligence

Pablo

12y

Vincent Müller and Nick Bostrom have just released a paper surveying the results of a poll of experts about future progress in artificial intelligence. The authors have also put up a companion site where visitors can take the poll and see the raw data. I just checked the site and so far only one individual has submitted a response. This provides an opportunity for testing the views of LW members against those of experts. So if you are willing to complete the questionnaire, please do so before reading the paper. (I have abstained from providing a link to the pdf to create a trivial inconvenience for those who cannot resist temptaion. Once you take the poll, you can easily find the paper by conducting a Google search with the keywords: bostrom muller future progress artificial intelligence.)

[link] Nick Beckstead on improving disaster shelters to increase the chances of recovery from a global catastrophe

Pablo

12y

Nick Beckstead just published a post on disaster shelters over at the Effective Altruism Blog. Summary:

What is the problem? Civilization might not recover from some possible global catastrophes. Conceivably, people with access to disaster shelters or other refuges may be more likely to survive and help civilization recover. However, existing disaster shelters (sometimes built to ensure continuity of government operations and sometimes built to protect individuals), people working on submarines, largely uncontacted peoples, and people living in very remote locations may serve this function to some extent.
What are the possible interventions? Other interventions may also increase the chances that humanity would recover from a global catastrophe, but this review focuses on disaster

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[link] Psychologists strike a blow for reproducibility

Pablo

12y

Link

A large international group set up to test the reliability of psychology experiments has successfully reproduced the results of 10 out of 13 past experiments. The consortium also found that two effects could not be reproduced.

To tackle this 'replicability crisis', 36 research groups formed the Many Labs Replication Project to repeat 13 psychological studies. The consortium combined tests from earlier experiments into a single questionnaire — meant to take 15 minutes to complete — and delivered it to 6,344 volunteers from 12 countries.

Project co-leader Brian Nosek, a psychologist at the Center of Open Science in Charlottesville, Virginia, finds the outcomes encouraging. “It demonstrates that there are important effects in our field that

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[Link] "A Long-run Perspective on Strategic Cause Selection and Philanthropy" by Nick Beckstead and Carl Shulman

Pablo

12y

A philanthropist who will remain anonymous recently asked us about what we would do if we didn’t face financial constraints. We gave a detailed answer that we thought we might as well share with others, who may also find our perspective interesting. We gave the answer largely in hope of creating some interest in our way of thinking about philanthropy and some of the causes that we find interesting for further investigation, and because we thought the answer would be fruitful for conversation.

Link

[link] "The Survival of Humanity"

Pablo

12y

The Survival of Humanity, by Lawrence Rifkin (September 13, 2013). Some excerpts:

An existential catastrophe would obliterate or severely limit the existence of all future humanity.
As defined by Nick Bostrom at Oxford University, an existential catastrophe is one which extinguishes Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently destroys a substantial part of its potential. As such it must be considered a harm of unfathomable magnitude, far beyond tragedy affecting those alive at the time. Because such risks jeopardize the entire future of humankind and conscious life, even relatively small probabilities, especially when seen statistically over a long period of time, may become significant in the extreme. It would follow that if such risks are non-trivial,

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[video] "Transhuman", featuring Sandberg and Bostrom

Pablo

13y

Transhuman, a 20-minute Dutch documentary about Anders Sandberg, is now available online. From Sandberg's blog:

Here is the chance of see my beetle collection, my grubby kitchen, and an absolutely stunning combination between a supercomputer center and an oxford library. Oh, and some discussion about transhumanism and the meaning of life too.

The documentary features Nick Bostrom at 9:23-10:32 and at 19:28-19:37. There's also a cameo appearance of Eliezer Yudkowsky, Carl Shulman, Anna Salamon, Toby Ord, William MacAskill, David Pearce and Stuart Armstrong.

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Anki decks by LW users

[link] Psychologists strike a blow for reproducibility

[link] Why Psychologists' Food Fight Matters

[link] Join Wall Street. Save the World

Pablo

Pablo's Shortform

Is there something like a "meta-encyclopedia"?

Meetup : Fifth Buenos Aires LessWrong meetup

[link] Why Psychologists' Food Fight Matters

[link] [poll] Future Progress in Artificial Intelligence

[link] Nick Beckstead on improving disaster shelters to increase the chances of recovery from a global catastrophe

[link] Psychologists strike a blow for reproducibility

Pablo

Anki decks by LW users

[link] Psychologists strike a blow for reproducibility

[link] Why Psychologists' Food Fight Matters

[link] Join Wall Street. Save the World

Pablo

Pablo's Shortform

Is there something like a "meta-encyclopedia"?

Meetup : Fifth Buenos Aires LessWrong meetup

[link] Why Psychologists' Food Fight Matters

[link] [poll] Future Progress in Artificial Intelligence

[link] Nick Beckstead on improving disaster shelters to increase the chances of recovery from a global catastrophe

[link] Psychologists strike a blow for reproducibility

Discussion article for the meetup : Fifth Buenos Aires LessWrong meetup

Discussion article for the meetup : Fifth Buenos Aires LessWrong meetup