UPDATE: It seems our booking got lost. Still managed to get the large table in the corner, but we will have to move to a smaller tables after 4PM.
Hi everyone,
We are planning the next meetup on the 18th from 2 PM at Sirius Teahouse (Bródy Sándor u. 13). I have booked a table for us under my name (Horvath Richard).
Similar to recent events, we plan to take this poll strongly in consideration, so you can vote on the topmost topic as well as others and we'll set the agenda according to your votes:
https://forms.gle/yfEG5a5GivjHNTu98
If there aren't much preferences expressed (otherwise), by default we are planning to start with discussing the possibility of human disempowerment even with successful AI alignment and which factors increase/decrease the probability of such an outcome. This video is a good primer, please watch it if you have the time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0D5X9dk5K0
See you there!
"...isn't the experience of me or women I know. Asking men out leads to boyfriends who are generally passive and offload a bunch of work onto you (even when they're BSDM tops). "
This is very interesting and a perspective I haven't considered. Now that I think about it, the women I know who are asking man out have a mixture of outcomes, and while tend to move towards high quality partners long term (especially if they are polyamorous), they indeed complain about having had very passive exes. I suspect asking out removes the filter for proactivity and they are falling back to the base rate with higher chance of getting passive partners... (read more)
"Usually people who do this much model building in this way, and say these things about it, turn out to be concerning, but sometimes they don't."
By this do you mean that:
John asserting that nonconsent is the baseline cis female preference in dating resembles to what is stated in openly misogynistic areas of the internet (redpilled/incel/altright), hence you feel he might be in the same category?
"John, I worry you're going to take bad models too seriously because you're systematically unable to see some kind of disconfirming evidence."
Would you be able give some more specific examples about the kind of disconfirming evidence you reckon John is missing? I think that would be the quickest way to show the weakness of his model.
I suppose one important difference is that people usually don't read assembly/compiled binaries but they do proofread AI generated code (at least most claim to). I think it would be easier to couple manual code with LLM generated, marking it via some in line comment to force the assistant to ignore it or ask for permission before changing anything there compared to inserting assembly into compiled code (plus non-assembly code should be mostly hardware independent). This suggests human level enhancements are going to stay feasible and coding assistants have larger gap to close than compilers did before removing 99.99% of lower level coding.
If the piece of knowledge is not actionable, probably bemoaning it is not a good use time either.
"Yet, Japanese wages are (on a per-hour basis) much lower than US ones, and I think that's largely because the management culture is overall even worse than in America. (And partly because of some large-scale embezzlement from Japanese corporations involving corrupt contracts to private companies, but that's beyond the scope of this post.)" - this is the first time I hear about this. Could you please share some information regarding why you think this is the case?
Hey everyone!
We are planning another meetup on the 13th of December at Tim's place.
Address:
66/b/1 Üllői út
Ring 27
floor #6, door #3
Similar to last events, you can register your topic/discussion/article preferences here:
https://forms.gle/yfEG5a5GivjHNTu98
Edit: Adding Tim's e-mail:
... (read more)This month we'll have Gabor Dobos give a talk about what he is working on. He leads a small Budapest-based techno-optimist nonprofit that is dedicated to research, education, and public outreach on future technologies.
Here is his explanation of what he is doing: "The Prometheus Society was founded out of a desire to better understand the technologies shaping our future. Relying solely on news reports makes it easy to misjudge their significance, and difficult to distinguish real progress from hype. To
You could build an app that blocks scammers or a service that connects scammed people and pursues class action lawsuit to help them. You could also scam scammers themselves. You can recognize before other people that a company is a scam instead of the productive business it pretends to be and get rich by shorting it or gain fame and influence by proving it to the rest of the world.
I think the general message of the quote is that if one believes that they see the world much more accurately than (almost) anyone else, and yet they do not use this supposedly superior knowledge to make their own life better, they are actually not smart, but losers shifting blame.
At first I did not understand your comment, so almost downvoted it. However, GPT helped me understand the point, and just want to post what I think is the core of idea to make it easier for others:
... (read more)-If rationalists want to address the social and epistemic issues postmodernism highlights (power, context, narrative, knowledge construction), they may need a stripped-down, formal version of postmodernism—just as decision-theory formalizations reduce existentialism to operational decision rules, at a cost.
-One of postmodernism’s central concerns is making sense of power, coercion, and violence—especially sexual violence—at a level of psychological and social realism that allows actual prediction and explanation. Three Worlds Collide and HPMOR handled these themes in a
I am myself thoroughly confused on this point (and for what its worth, a lot of our experience seem to overlap), but I can provide some competing hypotheses:
Another way of pointing to the same concept is how a chain as a whole is a resilient thing, but this is because each link has enough give to absorb strain. So a system is made durable not by its components being unbreakable, but by ensuring that individual parts can bend/fail/adapt. A society can hence be enduring only if its parts can be sacrificed for the whole. If a single specific part is worth you more than anything else, the system/society may be traded away for it.
(I think this thought is from Nassim Taleb, but I am paraphrasing a lot and cannot pinpoint the exact source, likely it is Antifragile)
Hey everyone!
We are planning another meetup on the 15th of November, now at Tim's place.
Address:
66/b/1 Üllői út
Ring 27
floor #6, door #3
Similar to last events, you can register your topic/discussion/article preferences here:
https://forms.gle/yfEG5a5GivjHNTu98
See you there!
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FVXF3R7+6G7
Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/rationality-budapest
In case of rain, we will gather in California Coffee Company nearby.
... (read more)This time I thought we could talk about the ways some of our preferences often don’t line up with our other preferences.
For example: imagine you compare how much you’d enjoy a nice meal at a restaurant to how much you value a good night’s sleep. Then compare a night’s sleep to getting ten thousand forints. And then compare those ten thousand forints back to the restaurant meal. Chances are the numbers you come up with don’t actually fit together—they’ll show some kind of inconsistency.
That inability to keep our preferences fully consistent seems to suggest a kind of irrationality.
We'll be meeting again in muzeumkert behind the playground, at 1 pm on Sunday July 27.
So here's a poll to decide what we're going to do for the next meet up, and I'll announce a day or two before the meetup what the most popular answers were:
I hope to see lots of you there!
Timothy Underwood
We'll again be doing the location at muzeum kert right by the playground. Even though the benches couldn't be moved around, it worked pretty well last time (and was of course very convenient for me, since I could send off the monster I have created to climb off her excess energy while still keeping an eye on her).
Instead of running a poll for the June meetup, we'll be just being a topic around an essay I recently read which I wanted to talk about. However, here is a poll for the July meetup:
For this month's meetup we're going to talk about the way that people can end up having totally different models and... (read 205 more words →)
Another month, another meeting.
Except this time I may or may not be there.
May 24th, Saturday, at 1pm.
We'll do Muzeumkert again as the plan, with meeting in the Costa Coffee as the heavy rain backup plan.
However, I'd like it if we did the meeting around the section of benches near the playground, so I can just unleash my child-spawnling into it.
As for what we'll talk about this time, you get to decide (even if you aren't coming, you get a vote).
Here's is the meeting topic poll: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfy9h-YmEc5NGEMvbdBDpkUgI5XFHeAC3tojVWQugFuVnKHIQ/viewform?pli=1
Feel free to stick something into the 'other' bracket, and while we probably won't do it this month, if it sounds cool we'll maybe do it next time.
Tim
Dear Friends who Have Ascended the Mountains of Rationalism,
Our next meetup will be Saturday, March 15th from 1-4 pm at my apartment:
66/B/1 Ulloi Ut
6th floor, door 3
Ring 27
This meetup coincides with the Hungarian National Day, commemorating the 1848 Revolution – one of Hungary's many celebrated military defeats (but perhaps all of them were spiritual victories?)
For this session, we'll be discuss genetic engineering and intelligence enhancement:
"How to Make Superbabies" contends that creating babies far smarter than present humans is far more achievable than many believe.
"Statistical Challenges with Making Super-IQ Babies" is a much shorter response that argues for significant practical limitations.
As a bonus topic: "Why I Don't Believe in the Placebo Effect," which says there is no placebo effect.
I look forward to a lively discussion where we go around in circles but still have fun thoughtfully examine these contrasting perspectives.
Hope to see many of you there!
Best regards,
Tim
So the meetup place will be at my apartment again, on Saturday 8th from 1-4 pm:
66/B/1 Ulloi Ut
6th floor, door 3
Ring 27
Sorry for not having a meeting in January, I've been a bit busy with income generating projects + taking care of the toddler.
We're going to be talking next time about the question of if it makes sense for us to put point estimates on the probabilities and then use them for expected value calculations for events that are not drawing from a clearly understood probability distribution.
Does it make sense to say your P(Doom) is 50%, or should you be saying that it is between 10 and 90 percent? Or should you be saying... (read more)
Location: My apartment
Time: Sunday, November 10, 2pm-5pm
Address:
66/b/1 Üllői út
Ring 27
floor #6, door #3In honor of the American holiday about giving thanks for things, we're going to have a meetup where we talk about ideas that make us grateful. My plan is for everyone to get a chance to describe a favorite idea, thing they know, book they've read or something they just like to talk about.
Also, in honor of the holiday season I'll bake up a bunch of sweet potatoes and pumpkin with sugar and cinnamon as a snack.
I hope to see lots of you here, especially those of you who I met at the start of the month at Muzeum kert.
Tim
I wonder if this may have been true a (couple of) decade(s) ago, when ordering food was less common and there were fewer pizza alternatives. It is possible that Pentagon guys indeed order more food at such events, but nowadays baseline is so high that it does not bump stats meaningfully.
"However, a Pentagon spokesperson has denied this, telling Newsweek, “There are many pizza options available inside the Pentagon, also sushi, sandwiches, donuts, coffee, etc.”"
In my experience food vendors within office buildings close by the end of official work hours and if you work late you have to order from outside.