Basically, AI professionals seem to be trying to manage the hype cycle carefully.
Ignorant people tend to be more all-or-nothing than experts. By default, they'll see AI as "totally unimportant or fictional", "a panacea, perfect in every way" or "a catastrophe, terrible in every way." And they won't distinguish between different kinds of AI.
Currently, the hype cycle has gone from "professionals are aware that deep learning is useful" (c. 2013) to "deep learning is AI and it is wonderful in every way ...
Re: 2: nonprofits and academics have even more incentives than business to claim that a new technology is extremely dangerous. Think tanks and universities are in the knowledge business; they are more valuable when people seek their advice. "This new thing has great opportunities and great risks; you need guidance to navigate and govern it" is a great advertisement for universities and think tanks. Which doesn't mean AI, narrow or strong, doesn't actually have great opportunities and risks! But nonprofits and academics aren't imm...
Some examples of valuable true things I've learned from Michael:
Thanks! Here are my reactions/questions:
Being tied to your childhood narrative of what a good upper-middle-class person does is not necessary for making intellectual progress, making money, or contributing to the world.
Seems right to me, as I was never tied to such a narrative in the first place.
Most people (esp. affluent ones) are way too afraid of risking their social position through social disapproval. You can succeed where others fail just by being braver even if you’re not any smarter.
What kind of risks is he talking about here? Also does he
...I'm not actually asking for people to do a thing for me, at this point. I think the closest to a request I have here is "please discuss the general topic and help me think about how to apply or fix these thoughts."
I don't think all communication is about requests (that's a kind of straw-NVC) only that when you are making a request it's often easier to get what you want by asking than by indirectly pressuring.
That's flattering to Rawls, but is it actually what he meant?
Or did he just assume that you don't need a mutually acceptable protocol for deciding how to allocate resources, and you can just skip right to enforcing the desirable outcome?
I'm struck by the assumption in this essay that you have a clear distinction between your own values and other people's.
I think that having a clear sense of personal identity can be difficult and not everyone may be able to hold on to their own perspective. I am concerned that this might be especially hard in an era of social media, when opinions are shared almost as soon as they are formed. Think of a blog/tumblr/fb that consists almost entirely of content copied from other sources: it is nominally a space curated/created by "you", bu...
Note that the examples in the essay of mechanisms that produce inefficiency are union work rules, non-compete agreements between firms, tariffs, and occupational licensing laws. The former three are not federal regulations on industries, and so would not show up in a comparison of industry dynamism vs. regulatory stringency.
Ok, this is a counterargument I want to make sure I understand.
Is the following a good representation of what you believe?
When you divide GDP by a commodity price, when the commodity has a nearly-fixed supply (like gold or land) we'd expect the price of the commodity to go up over time in a society that's getting richer -- in other words, if you have better tech and better and more abundant goods, but not more gold or land, you'd expect that other goods would become cheaper relative to gold or land. Thus, a GDP/gold or GDP/land value that d...
I agree that Carnegie's US Steel is not the type of "monopoly" that I consider socially harmful. I seem to remember that there is empirical evidence (though I don't know where) that monopolies due to superior product quality/price are actually fragile, and long-term monopolies must be maintained by legal privileges to survive. (If anybody remembers where, I'd appreciate a reference.)
In this context, thinking about whether you are "good" is not "constructive."
Thinking about whether you're doing something "constructive" is, by contrast, extremely constructive.
Here's my trajectory:
1.) Worry a lot about "I'm not good"
2.) Improve in some dimensions, also refactor my moral priorities so that I no longer believe some of my 'bad traits' are really bad
3.) Still worry a lot about "I'm not good" where "good" refers to some eldritch horror that I no longer literally endorse
4.) Learn the mental motion of going "fuck it", where I just rest my brain and self-soothe. Do that until I deeply do not give a fuck whether I'm good or not.
5.) Notice a mild but c...
In this context, thinking about whether you are "good" is not "constructive."
Thinking about whether you're doing something "constructive" is, by contrast, extremely constructive.
I'm a little more optimistic about calorie restriction mimetics than Aubrey, but I think everybody sensible has pretty low confidence about this.
Practical constraints. The main contributor to the cost of a lifespan study is the cost of upkeep for the mice -- so it's proportional to number of mice and length of the study. Testing 50 compounds at once means raising 50x the money at once (which is out of reach at the moment) and may also run into constraints of the capacity of labs/CROs.
Yep, that is my position.
(I've talked a bunch with Aubrey de Grey and he is very much supportive of the LRI's program. We're complements, not substitutes.)
This is not normal behavior on her part. This is domestic violence. The standard advice is to leave people who hit you. Possibly after clearly stating that you are not okay with being hit and you will leave if it continues, and giving her a chance to change her ways. Maybe she should work with a professional to help with her anger problems. But there is a significant risk that a person who regularly attacks you will escalate.
Vaniver is right.
The mainstream biogerontology perspective is that there's an evolutionarily conserved "survival program", probably developed for surviving famines, that can slow the aging process somewhat. This is the stuff you'll find in Cynthia Kenyon's research, for instance. The hope is that you can find drugs that stimulate these pathways, and thereby slow down the incidence of age-related diseases. This is the approach LRI is taking.
The SENS position, as I understand, is that this won't work. As you go up from yeast t...
I really don't relate to the externalization people use about "lotus-eating", like, "Facebook is making me addicted, even though I want to be productive." Implicitly that means the "real" me is into "good" meaningful stuff. And that's not how it feels. It feels like I have very strong drives towards the bad stuff (like "contacting exes to annoy them") and Facebook is just a tool that enables me to do what I want, which is why I deleted my account a year ago, because some of my wants harm other pe...
I can usually tailor the level of jargon correctly. What I can't do that well is figure out how to not make my presence burdensome -- I can feel that I need to "come up with something to say" that makes it worth talking to me, and I'm not great at coming up with those quickly. (When a kid says "tell me a story", I can't do that either. I'm great at discussions, where you have to speak off the cuff in relation to some subject, but open-ended improv is hell.)
I really like this.
Let me try to apply it to an example in my own life. I'm frequently telling people about a project I'm working on. I'd like it to be well received, to make a good impression, and also to enlist help or advice.
This is probably consultation, collaboration, or delegation, depending on whom I'm talking to, right?
And "how to win people to your way of thinking" clearly seems to apply.
"Never say you're wrong" confuses me -- yes, there are people you can't afford to flatly contradict, but what d...
And...yep, 33% objective response rates, which is great. https://www.google.com/amp/s/immuno-oncologynews.com/2018/04/20/dynavax-immunotherapy-and-keytruda-fight-head-and-neck-cancer-trial-shows/%3famp
You took the update “subjective emotional states aren’t very important, because they can happen when objectively everything is fine.” From the same observation, I took the update “objective conditions aren’t very important, because I can still feel lousy when objectively everything is fine, or great when it isn’t.” Is there a reason you took the former approach?
"You can't pick winners in drug development" rhymes with a cluster of memes that are popular in the zeitgeist today:
Once you clari...
I don't believe so (at least I've never heard of a public one; sometimes large companies have internal prediction markets).
Yes, I think this absolutely does count as rhetoric in the classical sense (being concise, expressing the right points, good body language and good delivery.)
See here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Oratore https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric
It’s not meaningless if you view rhetoric as “how to speak well” rather than “how to speak artificially and misleadingly.”
The best persuasive speakers I’ve ever seen in person are, unsurprisingly, lawyers. I saw Robert P. George speak once and thought “This is an atom bomb in the form of a man; I want that power.”
It’s not mere demagoguery. There’s structure to the arguments. And I’m pretty sure the same places that trained him to make arguments also trained him to speak effectively.
This matches my experience.
I think academic math has a problem where it's more culturally valorized to *be really smart* than to teach well, to the point that effective communication actually gets stigmatized as catering too much to dumb people.
Having left academic math, I am no longer terrified of revealing my stupidity, so I can now admit that I learned intro probability theory from a class in the operations research department (that used an actual syllabus and lecture notes! unlike most math classes!), that I learned more about solving ODEs from m...
I did update away from believing Dragon Army was dangerous after visiting there.
It was all people whom I’d expect to be able to hold their own against strong personalities. And they clearly didn’t have a strongly authoritarian culture by global or historical standards.
Thanks.
I'll explicitly note that I felt extremely fairly treated by your criticisms at the time of the original post, and found constructive value in them. You are not in the reference class I was snarking at above.
I do wish more of the people who had strong concerns had taken steps such as investigating who else was involved; the list was known to within a few people even back when the charter first went up, but as far as I can recall no one publicly stated that they thought that might be crucial.
The gland thing seems weird to me. Most internet sources associate the first chakra with the adrenals, which sit on top of the kidneys and aren’t physically anywhere near the usually pictured location of the first chakra (at the base of your spine.) Most sources associate second chakra with the ovaries (which are in the right place) or testes (which aren’t, afaik, in anyone’s lower belly area.) I’d been thinking of second chakra as basically my uterus, but altering hip posture is relevant for e.g. relieving uterine pain.
Chakra stuff that seems empirically true to me:
*The pelvic floor (first chakra) is connected to the emotional sense of safety. You instinctively tighten it when nervous and relax it when secure.
Learning to feel and move your pelvic floor is useful; the correct way to push in childbirth is to tense your abs but relax your pelvic floor, and having practiced this a lot beforehand was helpful for me since it's counterintuitive for most people.
*Your abs (roughly third chakra) are obviously connected to willpower and strength, since you use them for all f...
I'd really love a friendly, narrative-style introduction to military history or space travel. (Audio, video, book, blog, in-person infodumping, all welcome.)
I have simple questions like "what are the parts of a rocket and how do they work?" and "what actually made Napoleon a great general?" and would like a level of depth that's higher than children's books but lower than Wikipedia.
Can you clarify what you mean by "renunciation of the self"?
In David Chapman's writing, I think he makes the claim that selves do not exist, and he's a Tantra practitioner. (My perspective is that he has a different definition of "exist" than me, but that we're pointing at the same observations.) He doesn't believe in, and Tantra doesn't preach, a renunciate lifestyle -- they think it's okay to eat meat, have sex, earn money, and so on.
Things I've learned over the years related to this:
I'm not sure exactly what "weird" is made of, on a gears level.
I do have a guess, taken from personal experience. I remember recently being in the orientation session for a new job, and I resolved to fit in and get along with people. Within a few days, though, I was "out of step" with the group and was very clearly more isolated than others.
It wasn't that I had done something especially shocking or unconventional, though. I decided that I wanted to get up early and exercise, so I went to the gym one morning; as a result,...
The problems with believing in fate or Providence start to become real when bad things happen to you.
If you imagine that the universe is conspiring to help you when things go right, you can also imagine that the universe is conspiring to hurt you when things go wrong, and that’s terrifying. Ordinary failure and misfortune is easier to recover from than the creeping fear that you’ve angered God. I’ve been there; it sucks.
That seems to depend on the nature of the belief, though. Some people with a belief of fate seem to gain strength from it even during misfortune, thinking not "the universe is out to get me", but something like "well I guess this was the universe's way of [setting me on a better path / reminding me not to take for granted what I have / insert-some-other-benefit-here]".
If you have sufficiently strong faith in the universe being benevolent, you can probably find some positive angle from any event and focus on that.
Ok, here’s a 2x2 that captures a lot of the variation in OP:
abstract/concrete x intuitive/methodical.
Intuitive vs. Methodical is what Atiyah, Klein, and Poincare are talking about. Abstract vs Concrete is what Gowers, Rota, and Dyson are talking about.
Abstract and intuitive is like Grothendieck.
Concrete and intuitive is like geometry or combinatorics.
Concrete and methodical is like analysis.
Abstract and methodical — I don’t know what goes in this space.
The chakra thing sounds right; another way of putting it is that algebra is more verbal & geometry is more visual/spatial. (IMO, analysis is visual/spatial too.)
I eat corn like an an analyst, and I am an analyst. I also use vim over emacs, like Lisp, and find object-oriented programming weirdly distasteful.
However I don’t think analysis and algebra are usually lumped together and opposed to geometry; my understanding was that traditionally algebra, analysis, and geometry were the three main fields of math.
I tend to think of the distinctions within math as about how much we posit that we know about the objects we work with. The objects of study of mathematical logic are very general and thus can be very “pervers...
Okay, I think that’s a difference between us. I hear that kind of language not as saying something denotatively, but as more like “casting a spell” on the audience. It doesn’t throw up the “error: that doesn’t make sense/seem fair” response because I’m not expecting it to be communication in the first place.
Someone who wants me to relax, say, and is putting verbal and nonverbal optimization pressure into getting me to relax, is going to cause me to relax, just because I want to be compliant in general. For me, only a totally expressionless and artificial...
Ah!
You aren’t in fact charmed (or overawed) by people who use feelings-heavy, mystical, or salesy talk — you instead hear it as an explicit/denotative request for you to be charmed, which you think is unjustified. Is that right?
I’m trying to pinpoint where you think asking leading questions like “how do you feel” is different from smiles, dance, and poetry. They do seem different, but I’m not sure why.
Just posting to record that this post successfully alarmed me, by raising the possibility that I might be missing really important things.
Yeah, to me it feels like "sure, you can do 'magic' and make me cry and hug and shudder, but that has very little to do with my long-term behavior patterns, it's just a transient effect." It feels like being flipped onto the mat by a skilled martial artist; I'm being a guinea pig for someone to demonstrate a cool trick.
Yep!
You can prompt someone to "open up" about their desires or inner experiences in order to know them better, and knowing them better allows you to more precisely and smoothly do nice things for them.
Can this feel scary and vulnerable? Yep! I totally feel uncomfortable when someone is learning all about me in order to, unprompted, do me favors. Somebody who wanted to hurt me could definitely use that knowledge maliciously. It's just that sometimes that fear is unfounded.
My current theory is that self-esteem isn't about yourself at all!
Self-esteem is your estimate of how much help/support/contribution/love you can get from others.
This explains why a person needs to feel a certain amount of "confidence" before trying something that is obviously their best bet. By "confidence" we basically just mean "support from other people or the expectation of same." The kinds of things that people usually need "confidence" to do are difficult and involve the risk of public failure and blame, even if they're clearly the best option from an individual perspective.
This makes a lot of sense to me. It fits in with my sense that:
In future I will model surprising low self-esteem as failing to accurately read signals about their level of respect/power. And that people with appropriately low levels of low self-esteem should focus on being useful to the people and communities around them.