wolajacy

I think the case for evolution is a bit stronger than you admit here (ie significantly more than 4%).

1. It operated on a much larger ladder of cognitive power levels. Human learning is only implemented in humans who do not differ significantly in cognitive abilities. Evolution is thus closer to designing a quick-takeoff ASI as-superior-to-humans-as-humans-to-ants in comparison (leaving aside whether that scenario is plausible), and in understanding differences between cognitive level abilities by analogy with different animals.
2. Human learning by itself isn't a

Each time you can also apply this argument in reverse: I don't like X about my city, so I'm happy that in the figure, the company will relocate me to NYC. And since NYC is presumed to be overall better, there are more instances of the latter rather than the former.

It seems to me you are taking the argument seriously, but very selectively.

(I think both kinds of thoughts pretty often, and I'm overall happy about the incoming move).

Agreed. Advocacy seems to me to be ~very frequently tied to bad epistemics, for a variety of reasons. So what is missing to me in this writeup (and indeed, in most of the discussions about the issue): why does it make sense to make laypeople even more interested?

The status quo is that relevant people (ML researchers at large, AI investors, governments and international bodies like UN) are already well-aware of the safety problem. Institutions are set up, work is being done. What is there to be gained from involving the public to an even greater extent, poi... (read more)

This is potentially a naive question, but how well would the imagining deal with missing data? Say that 1% (or whatever the base rate is) of tissue samples would be destroyed during slicing or expansion - would we be able to interpolate those missing pieces somehow? Do we know any bounds on the error would that introduce in the dynamics later?

I strong downvoted, because I think public protest are not a good way of pushing for change.

1. They are a symmetric weapon.
2. They lock you in certain positions. There is a lot of momentum in a social movement that is carried through such public displays, which makes it difficult to change or reverse your position (for example, if we learned that for reason X it is much better to speed up the development of AI, which I don't think is that improbable a priori).
3. They promote tribalistic, collective mindset. Protests like this are antithetic to the deep, 1-1 dialogu

FYI, in ther answer you linked to, there is another, way easier way of doing it (& it worked for me):

tl;dr:

• have the Android command line tools installed on a development machine, and USB debugging enabled on your device. The device does not need to be rooted
• adb forward tcp:9222 localabstract:chrome_devtools_remote
• wget -O tabs.json http://localhost:9222/json/list

Interesting point of view. I don't think I agree with the sex triggers section: it seems that applying this retroactively would predict that the internet and video games would be banned by now (it is of course the case that in many instances they are stigmatized, but nowhere near the extent that would result in banning them).

Also, the essay does not touch on the most important piece of equation, which is the immense upside of AGI - the metaphore about the nuclear weapons spitting out gold, up until they got large enough. This means there is a huge incentiv... (read more)

Suppose you want to make a binary decision with a specified bias $p$. If, say, $p=1/8$ then you can throw a coin 3 times, and if you got, say, $HHH$, you take it as positive, else negative.

But if $p$ is a big number (say $1/1000$), or a weird number, say $1/\pi$, then this method fails. There is another really beautiful method I learned some time ago, which allows you to get any biased coin in a constant =2 expected number of throws! (I lost the source, unfortunately) 

It works as follows: you throw the coin until the first time you get a head - assume... (read more)

This line of reasoning, of "AGI respecting human autonomy" has the problem that our choices, undertaken freely (to whatever extent it is possible to say so), can be bad - not because of some external circumstances, but because of us being human. It's like in the Great Divorce - given an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God, would a voluntary hell exist? This is to say: if you believe in respecting human autonomy, then how you live your life now very much matters, because you are now shaping your to-be-satisfsfied-for-eternity preferences.

Of course, the answ... (read more)

I was trying to guess what the idea is before reading the post, and my first thought was: in a multi-player game, there is a problem where, say, two players are in a losing position, and would like to resign (and go play something else), two other players are in a so-so position and want to possibly resign, and the final player is clearly winning and wants to continure. But there is no incentive to straight-up resign unilaterally, as then you have to sit and wait idly until the game finishes.

So, we introduce "fractional resignations", we get something like [1, 1, 0.6, 0.6, 0.1], compare it to the pre-agreeded threshold (say, =3) - and end the game if it passes this bar.

Can you please link some of those Youtube channels you mentioned in the comment? I'd like to learn more about the topic - ideally, grasp the big ideas & what-I-don't-know (coming from the pure math angle, so not much grounding in the natural sciences).

For reference, I found Introduction to Biology - The Secret of Life (an MIT course at edX) to be very helpful in this kind of exploration.

The argument is very unclear clear to me. What does "unbounded" mean? What does it mean to "retrocausally compress 'self'"?

 Are you postulating that:
 - the notion of "an individual" does not make sense even in principle
 - there exists something like "self"/"individual" in general, but we don't know how to define rigorously
 - there exists something like "self"/"individual", but specific individuals (people, in this case) are not able to precisely define 'themselves'
 - some fourth option?

(The second and third paragraph are even less clear to me, so if they present separate lines of thought, maybe let's start with the first one)

Sorry to be blunt, but the whole post is made of unsubstaintiated claims and dubious associations. I had a very difficult time going through it.

Among many, many good reasons not to play video games, the main one is that they create invisible stress and consume large amounts of brain energy that you could be using for work, school, or moments of inspiration.

You claim that, but don't provide any evidence for this.

Don't trust any source that says video games don't stress you out; there are billions of dollars and vested interests at play.

Why should I trust yo... (read more)

Doesn't the anthropic bias impact the calculation, where you take into account not seeing nuclear war before? 

There is a great (free) online course called 'NAND to Tetris', which is built on this exact premisse. Can't recommend it enough: https://www.nand2tetris.org/

AFAIK, popular data science tools (Spark, Pandas, etc.) already use columnar formats for data serialization and network-based communication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Arrow

Similiar idea for disk storage (which is again orders of magnitude slower, so the gains in certain situations might be even bigger): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Parquet

Generally, if you're doing big data, there are actually more benefits from using this layout - data homogenity means much better compression and possibilities for smarter encodings.

Random users installing random software gives you botnets.

This is only true in case of insufficient security mechanisms. Virtualization/containerization (for example, docker model) would allow users to run independently installed applications safely.

Similarly, I guess that the motivation for centralized store (apart from the financial motive of the store owner: Apple/Google) is to provide security through the process of vetting the apps. But again, if we had proper virtualization software, there would be no reason not to allow users to add unofficial repos... (read more)

I really like the thought behind the post! But, your idea seems kind of... overengineered. For one, an important requirement for the packaging is that it should be easy to hold in your hand (e.g. eating in a car/on a couch/anywhere that you can't actually put it on a table).

Additionally, let's say there are two varieties of chips' sizes: small and large. Small ones are small and cheap, so there's no better way to package them than throw some in a bag, and it'd be too costly to package them in a more sophisticated way.

Large ones could have more complex pack... (read more)

If you don't have a given joint pobability space, you implicitly construct it (for example, by saying RV are independent, you implicitly construct a product space). Generally, the fact that sometimes you talk about X living on one space (on its own) and other time on the other (joint with some Y) doesn't really matter, because in most situations, probability theory is specifically about the properties of random variables that are independent of the of the underlying spaces (although sometimes it does matter).

Your example, by definition, P = Prob(X = 6ft AN... (read more)

Answering the last question: If you deal with any random variable, formally you are specifying a probability space, and the variable is a measurable function on it. So, to say anything useful about a family of random variables, they all have to live on the same space (otherwise you can't - for example - add them. It does not make sense to add functions defined on different spaces). This shared probability space can be very complicated by itself, even though the marginal distributions are the same - it encodes the (non-)independence among them (in case of independent variables, it's just a product space with a product measure).