Over the past year, I've noticed a topic where Less Wrong might have a blind spot: public opinion. Since last September I've had (or butted into) five conversations here where someone's written something which made me think, "you wouldn't be saying that if you'd looked up surveys where people were...
JSTOR is a massive online archive of academic journals, virtually all of which were behind a subscription wall. (JSTOR's been quite arbitrary about locking up its content; some of the papers it hosts are available at no cost elsewhere. For example, these papers from the Proceedings of the National Academy...
Upvoted for asking an interesting question, but my answer would be "probably not". Whether patents are a good idea even as is is debatable — see Michele Boldrin and David Levine's Against Intellectual Monopoly — and I expect beefing them up to be bad on the margin.
I'm unclear on whether the proposed super-patents would
be the same as normal patents except fileable before the work of sketching a plausible design has been done, or
would be even more powerful, by also allowing the filer to monopolize a market in which they carry out e.g. "market research, product development and building awareness", even if that involves no original design work,
but in any case the potential... (read more)
I believe the following is a comprehensive list of LW-wide surveys and their turnouts. Months are those when the results were reported.
And now in the current case we have "about 300" responses, although results haven't been written up and published. I hope they will be. If the only concern is sample size, well, 300 beats zero!
I found the same article on an ad-blocker-friendly website. And here's a direct link to the academic article in Complexity.
I think in January I read you as amplifying James_Miller's point, giving "tariff and other barriers" as an example of something to slot into his "Government regulations" claim (hence why I thought my comment was germane). But in light of your new comment I probably got your original intent backwards? In which case, fair enough!
Fair!
I hope this a joke.
Yeah — scurvy's no fun!
Did Kuhn (or Popper or Lakatos) spell out substantial implications of the analogy? A lot of the interest would come from that, rather than the fact of the analogy in itself.
Let's say two AIs want to go to war for whatever reason. Then they can agree to some other procedure that predicts the outcome of war (e.g. war in 1% of the universe, or simulated war) and precommit to accept the outcome as binding. It seems like both would benefit from that.
My (amateur!) hunch is that an information deficit bad enough to motivate agents to sometimes fight instead of bargain might be an information deficit bad enough to motivate agents to sometimes fight instead of precommitting to exchange info and then bargain.
Coming up with an extensive form game might not help, because what if the AIs use a different extensive form game?
Certainly,... (read more)
The amount of wastage from bitcoin mining pales compared to the GDP spent on traditional forms of trust. Think banking isn't contributing to global warming? Well all those office buildings have lights and electricity and back-room servers, not to mention the opportunity costs.
That provoked me to do a Fermi estimate comparing banking's power consumption to Bitcoin's. Posting it in case anyone cares.
Estimated energy use of banking
The service sector uses 7% of global power and produces 68% of global GDP. Financial services make up about 17% of global GDP, hence about 25% of global services' contribution to GDP. If financial services have the same energy intensity as services in general, financial services use... (read more)
Over the past year, I've noticed a topic where Less Wrong might have a blind spot: public opinion. Since last September I've had (or butted into) five conversations here where someone's written something which made me think, "you wouldn't be saying that if you'd looked up surveys where people were actually asked about this". The following list includes six findings I've brought up in those LW threads. All of the findings come from surveys of public opinion in the United States, though some of the results are so obvious that polls scarcely seem necessary to establish their truth.
JSTOR is a massive online archive of academic journals, virtually all of which were behind a subscription wall. (JSTOR's been quite arbitrary about locking up its content; some of the papers it hosts are available at no cost elsewhere. For example, these papers from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA are freely available on the PNAS website but not on JSTOR.) Two days ago JSTOR opened up part of its database by giving free access to nearly 500,000 old articles. From JSTOR's announcement:
... (read 151 more words →)I am writing to share exciting news: today, we are making journal content on JSTOR published prior to 1923 in the United States and prior to 1870
I think this post underrates two general rationalist skills, plus some assorted empirical facts. First, the two skills.
Avoiding the fallacy of the one-sided wager. The post talks about cost-benefit analysis, but in a complete cost-benefit analysis one has to consider the risks of both choices under offer, not just one. The post takes specific notice of the default course of action's risks (money, tears, side effects) but focuses less on the risks of the alternative (e.g. toddlers winding up in the ER because they're shitting themselves half to death from rotavirus).
Trying to look things up. I'll pick this point up briefly below.
The rest of this comment is going to be scattershot, as... (read 1134 more words →)