Open Thread, June 1-15, 2012

Following JoshuaZ, I also don't think this remark should stand unchallenged.

Why shouldn't he be attacking his cancer in 30 ways at the same time?

Off-target effects, which are difficult to predict even for a single, well-understood drug. Also, the CYPs in your liver can turn a safe drug into a much scarier metabolite. And the drugs themselves can also modify the activity of the CYPs. Combined with dynamic dosing ("keep doubling the dose until the patient feels side effects") the blood levels of the 30 drugs will be all over the place.

But if you do this for enough billionaires, the common elements in the problem will start repeating and the researchers will learn a repertoire of common hacks.

What are the common elements present when the patient has been dosed with varying amounts of 30 different drugs? If the cancer is cured, how should the credit be split among the teams? If the patient dies, who gets the blame?

The anti-quackery property of the current research regime is not just to prevent patients from being hoodwinked. It's epistemic hygiene to keep the researchers from fooling themselves into thinking they're helping when they're really doing nothing or causing active harm.

I'm wondering if the comparison with a dogfight is fair, though. With only the conservative treatment Steve has months or years to live, while a single wrong move kills him quickly. Dogfights are the opposite: the conservative approach (absence of a single right move) has a significant chance of doing you in.

In other words, the expected lifetime is reversed in a fight vs treatment between doing something and doing nothing.

A doctor in australia has wanted to use the product our company makes to try in vivo treatment of cancer, and we are unable to let him because of how insanely liable we would be and the high cost of having a GMP facility (that would in no actual way improve the product) means it's unlikely to ever be a thing.

The ethical principles of experimenting on human beings are pretty subtle. It's not just about protecting from quackery, though he is right that there is a legacy of Nuremburg involved. Read, for example, the guides that the Institutional Review Boards that approve scientific research must follow.

*Respect for persons involves a recognition of the personal dignity and autonomy of individuals, and special protection of those persons with diminished autonomy.

*Beneficence entails an obligation to protect persons from harm by maximizing anticipated benefits and minimizing possible risks of harm.

*Justice requires that the benefits and burdens of research be distributed fairly.

The most relevant principle here is "beneficience". Unless the experimenter can claim to be in equipoise, about which of two procedures will be more beneficial, they're obligated to use the presumed better option (which means no randomization). You can get away with more in pursuit of practice than you can in pursuit of research, but practice is deliberately restricted to prevent obtaining generalizable knowledge.

Roughly put, society has decided that it would rather that the only experiments that we perform are ones where there's no appreciable possibility of harm to the participants, than allow that it is sometimes necessary for the progress of science that noble volunteers try things which we can't be sure are good, and might be expected to be a bit worse, so that society can learn when they turn out to be better, or when they teach us things that suggest the better option. In a more rational society, everyone would have to accept that their treatment might not be the best possible for them (according to our current state of ignorance), but would require that the treatment be designed in order to lead to generalizable knowledge for the future.

I'm going to be a heretic

Shocking! Why, who'd expect it from such a pillar of society!

(Sure, he's 110% right in this isolated argument, and the medical industry is indeed a blatant, painfully obvious mafia. But one could make a bit of a case against this by arguing disproportionately risky outliers: e.g. what if we try to make AIDS attack itself but instead make it air- and waterborne, and then it slips away from the lab? What if we protect the AI industry from intrusive regulation early on when it's still safe, then suddenly it's an arms race of several UFAI projects, each hoping to be a little less bad than the others?)

As a medical student, this quote has significantly perturbed how I think about the epistemology of the field, though I'm still processing it. Well done!

I see he's commented about LessWrong, also.

Have you read Eugene Volokh's writings on the right to medical self-defense?

He's not right. He's marginally correct: First, he ignores that even under current circumstances a lot of people die from quackry (and in fact, the example he uses of Steve Jobs is arguably an example since he used various ineffective alternative medicines until it was too late). Moreover, cancer mortality rates are declining, so the system isn't as ineffective as he makes it out to be. His basic thrust may be valid- there's no question that the FDA has become more bureaucratic, and that some laws and regulations are preventing research that might otherwise go ahead. But he is massively overstating the strength of his case.

I feel like the mechanism probably goes something like:

1. People are generally pretty risk-averse when it comes to putting themselves out in public in that way, even when the only risk is "Oh no my post got downvoted"
2. Consequently, I'm only likely to post something to main if I personally believe that it exceeds the average quality threshold.

An appropriate umeshism might be "If you've never gotten a post moved to Discussion, you're being too much of a perfectionist."

The problem, of course, is that there are very few things we can do to reverse the trend towards higher and higher post sophistication, since it's not an explicit threshold set by anyone but simply a runaway escalation.

One possible "patch" which comes to mind would be to set it up so that sufficiently high-scoring Discussion posts automatically get moved to Main, although I have no idea how technically complicated that is. I don't even think the bar would have to be that high. Picking an arbitrary "nothing up my sleeve" number of 10, at the moment the posts above 10 points on the first page of Discussion are:

• Low Hanging Fruit -- Basic Bedroom Decorating
• Only say 'rational' when you can't eliminate the word
• Short Primers on Crucial Topics
• List of underrated risks?
• [Link] Reason: the God that fails, but we keep socially promoting….
• A Protocol for Optimizing Affection
• Computer Science and Programming: Links and Resources
• The rational rationalist's guide to rationally using "rational" in rational post titles
• Funding Good Research
• Expertise and advice
• Posts I'd Like To Write (Includes Poll)
• Share Your Checklists!
• A Scholarly AI Risk Wiki

Which means that in the past week (May 25 - June 1) there have been 13 discussion posts gaining over 10 points. If all of these were promoted to Main, this would be an average post rate of just under 2 per day, which is potentially just around the level which some might consider "spammy" if they get the Less Wrong RSS.

Personally, though, I would be fully in favor of getting a couple of moderately-popular posts in my feed reader every morning.

Can you give a specific example of recent posts that you object to, because that is not the impression I've been getting.

I'm not convinced his criticism is wrong. Lukeprog listed lots of substantive recent articles, but I question whether they were progress, given the current state of the community (for example, I'd like more historical analysis a la James Q Wilson)

Given the karma, it appears that the community is not convinced the criticism is wrong. Even if Konkvistador is wrong, he isn't trivially wrong.

Apologies for the harsh language gwern. I shouldn't have used it. I will edit and retract to correct that.

Yes; his criticism was trivially wrong, as could be seen just by looking at posts systematically.

I didn't think so. Neither did the many posters who publicly endorsed the post.

Actually, I laid out exactly what was wrong with the post: was a good idea which hadn't been developed anywhere to the extent that it would be worth reading or referring back to, and I gave pointers to the literature he could use to develop it.

Also Lukeprog thought the article you found so clearly deficient worthy of inclusion on his productivity list. Either you are wrong and his article isn't crap. Or Luke's standards on what counts as productivity are too low in which case your argument on this criticism of his notion that we aren't making proper progress is that much weaker.

Also we have different styles of writing. Have you noticed how people are getting bored of Main? Guess what maybe that's because its becoming a wannabe Academic ghetto dominate with only your style where new posters don't dare contribute.

it may seem natural to a natural systematizing archiving outlier like you to spend a whole lot of time on your stuff polishing it to perfection, but all this will result in is a whole bunch of a small bag of boring posts of uniformly decent but not extraordinary quality. Isn't it funny that nearly any old Eliezer sequence post dosen't live up to such citation heavy, research made explicit standards you set? Such an article would be upvoted by the common poster make no mistake, but l33t busybodies like you would home in on the technicalities.

The reason I told Konk that his contributions were slightly net negative

First of the community obviously disagrees aside from positive comments on his contributions that I could dig up, he has received more karma in the past 30 days than any other single poster and ~7k overall isn't bad at all. And no this wasn't due to mass spamming. His average post has like 5 karma or something. Fracking Nerdling on a stick he's even currently like 50 points ahead of Eliezer HPMOR Yudkowsky who descended down from his throne to write an article answering criticism threatening his funding.

The reason I told Konk that his contributions were slightly net negative - when he specifically asked for my opinion on the matter

If Konkvistador flat out asked you if it would be overall better than the current situation to stop posting at all, and you responded with a yes, then you either lack a social brain, because the right answer is not "yes" but "no, but you should work harder on improving." especially since he apparently hero worships you.

I suggested he simply develop his ideas better and post less; Konk was the one who decided that he should leave/take a long break, saying that he had a lot of academic work coming up as well.

Have you heard about "saving face"? There is probably an added language and cultural barrier, misunderstandings are common even with those superficially well versed in English.

Also you dark artsily referring to him as "Konk" with faux affection to manipulate the crowd dosen't impress me.

Edit:

2nd Edit: Toned it down.

Maybe you need to pay more attention to the ceteris paribus. When you include that, it seems perfectly sensible to me.

Consider a world in which in 1945 Adolf Hitler will either choke to death on a piece of spaghetti or will be poisoned by a survivor of the death camps that bribed his way into Hitler's bunker...

All else being equal, a murder is better than an accidental death, because a murder at least satisfies someone's preferences.

I was very tempted to take this as a reductio ad absurdum of consequentialism, to find all the posts where I advocated consequentialism and edit them, saying I'm not a consequentialist anymore, and to rethink my entire object-level ethics from the ground up.

It can't be a reductio ad absurdium of consequentialism because the quoted claim isn't even implied by consequentialism. It is implied by some forms of utilitarianism. Consequentialism cares (directly) only about one set of preferences and the fact that the murderer has a preference for successfully murdering doesn't get a positive weighting unless the specific utility function arbitrarily happens to do so. It is just as easy to have a consequentialist utility function that prefers the accident to the murder as the reverse.

3) I allot a reasonable-seeming amount of time to think before deciding to drastically change something important. The logic is that the argument isn't evidence in itself - the evidence is the fact that the argument exists, and that you're not aware of any flaws in it. If you haven't thought about it for a while, the probability of having found flaws is low whether or not those flaws exist - so not having found them yet is only weak evidence against your current position.

So basically, "Before you've had time to consider them".

3) I can't seem to figure out when not to change my mind in response to reasonable-looking arguments. Help

See this quote. Presumably you already had strong arguments in favour of consequentialism. So when you came across a knock-down counterexample your first reaction should have been confusion. When you encounter a convincing argument against a position you hold strongly, bring to mind the arguments that first convinced you of that position and try to bring the opposing arguments into direct conflict with them. It should then be clear that one of the arguments has a logical flaw in it. Find out which one.

Hmmm. Murder decreases the 'expected utility' (cfg. life expentancy), so I think it would still be considered bad in some forms of consequentialism. The corner case - where expected utility would not change (much) would be e.g. shooting somebody who is falling off a cliff who will certainly not survive.

More general, it seems ethical systems are usually post-hoc organizing principles for our messy ethical intuitions. However, those intuitions are so messy, that for every simple set of rules, we can find some exception. Hence we get things like the trolley problem...

I'm curious if other consequentialists will find the same knockdown for the reductio that I did

Since I'm not a consequentialist, will you just tell me?

Subscribe to the smaller subreddits, and also Depthhub. This will drastically improve your procrastination experience.

I consider them useful and roughly agree with the time interval you suggest.

I too, enjoy Open Threads, and I feel that they should occur with higher frequency, around every week or so.

The only suggestion I've heard is self-sustaining space colonies, which obviously is not doable anytime soon. Depending on the specifics, buried bunkers might work, as long as they're not on the same continent to be buried in the ash or lava.

Feel free to PM me about this sort of thing.

Could someone involved with TDT justify the expectation of "timeless trade" among post-singularity superintelligences?

People (with the exception of Will) have tended not to be forthcoming with public declarations that the extreme kinds of "timeless trade" that I assume you are referring to are likely occur.

Why can't they just care about their individual future light-cones and ignore everything else?

(There are a few reasons of various levels of credibility, but allow me to speak to the most basic application.)

If an agent really doesn't care about everything else then they can do that. Note that just caring about their individual future light-cones and ignoring everything else means:

• You would prefer to have one extra dollar than to have an entire galaxy just on the other side of your future light cone transformed from being tiled with tortured humans to being a paradise.
• If the above galaxy were one galaxy closer - just this side of your future light cone - then you will care about it fully.
• Your preferences are not stable. They are constantly changing. At time t you assign x utility to a state of (galaxy j at time t+10). At time t+1 you assign exactly 0 utility to the same state of (galaxy j at time t+10).
• Such an agent would be unstable and would self modify to be an agent that constantly cares about the same thing. That is, the future light cone of the agent at time of self modification.

Those aren't presented as insurmountable problems, just as implications. It is not out of the question that some people really do have preferences that literally care zero about stuff across some arbitrary threshold. It's even more likely for many people to have preferences that care only a very limited amount for stuff across some arbitrary threshold. Superintelligences trying to maximize those preferences would engage in no, or little acausal trade with drastically physically distant superintelligences. Trade - including acausal trade - occurs when both parties have something the other guy wants.

If you will need to convince a professor to someday give you a passing grade on this work I hope you are taking into account that most professors would consider what you are doing to be evil. Never, ever describe this kind of work on any type of graduate school application. Trust me, I know a lot about this kind of thing.

I'm pretty sure that one could extract a full sequence from Patrick McKenzie's blog.

I found Charlie Stross' recent blog post endorsing Carrico strange. Carrico has his baggage, but why is Stross suddenly so intent on painting transhumanism as a the evil mutant enemy?

Not really either, it's a neat way of saying that a hypothesis doesn't actually explain anything: it doesn't provide a deeper explanation for the phenomenon in question (this explanation is the "moving parts").

A hypothesis allows you to make predictions; a good one will clearly express how and why various factors are combined to make the prediction, while a bad one will at best give the "how" without providing any deeper understanding. So a bad hypothesis is a little like a black box where the internal mechanism is hidden (sometimes, "no moving parts" might be better expressed as "unknown moving parts").

This idea occurs in the sequences, but the best explanation of the meaning I can find there is (source):

[...] the hypothesis has no moving parts—the secret sauce is not a specific complex mechanism, but a blankly solid substance or force.

(The "secret sauce" refers to the deeper explanation.)

http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/88818-philosoraptor

Questions: Is the argument valid?

Only with a usage of "immortal" that abandons the cached thinking and preferences that we usually associate with the term.

I think if you fully taboo the concepts of "personal identity" and "existence", the argument evaporates. Before tabooing, your argument looks like this:

1. Alternate universes, containing persons psychologically continuous with me, exist.
2. Persons psychologically continuous with me are me.
3. Therefore I am immortal.
4. Therefore I should anticipate never dying.
5. Therefore I should make plans that rely on never dying.

On the face of it, it seems sound. But after tabooing, we're left with something like:

1. Our best, most parsimonious models of reality refer to unseen alternate universes and unseen persons psychologically continuous with each other.
2. In such models, alternate futures of a person-moment have no principled way of distinguishing one of themselves as "real".
3. Therefore, our models of reality refer to arbitrarily long-lived versions of each person.
   ...
4. Therefore I have reason to anticipate never dying.
5. Therefore I have reason to act as if I will never die.

Edit: My #4 and #5 were nonsense.

A while back John_Maxwell linked me to this OB post and this post on halfsigma.

It occurred to me that on this forum QM/MWI discussions are a mind-killer, for the same reasons as religion and politics are:

Not particularly. To the extent that it is a mind killer it is a mind killer in the way discussions of FAI, SIAI capabilities, cryonics, Bayesianism or theories like this are. Whenever any keyword suitably similar to one of these subjects appears one of the same group of people can be expected to leap in and launch into an attack of lesswrong, its members, Eliezer, SingInst or all of the above - they may even try to include something on the subject matter as well.

The thing is most people here aren't particularly interested in talking about those subjects - at least they aren't interested in rehashing the same old tired arguments and posturing yet again. They have moved on to more interesting topics. This leads to the same abysmal quality of discussion - and belligerent and antisocial interactions - every time.

I'm not sure I agree with Graham on the exact mechanics there. There are a number of mindkilling topics where empirically supportable answers should in principle exist: the health effects of obesity, for example. Effects of illegal drugs. Expected outcomes of certain childrearing practices.

Expertise exists on all these topics, and you can prove people wrong pretty conclusively with the right data set, but people -- at least within certain subcultures, and often in general -- usually feel free to ignore the data and expertise and expound their own theories. This is clearly not because these questions lack definite answers. I think it's more because social approval rides on the answers, and because of the importance of the social proof heuristic and its relatives.

QM interpretation may or may not fall into that category around here.

In other words, you want to write essays on how people can have political conversations without being mindkilled?

I don't think it would violate the "no politics" rule. Just please keep it sufficiently meta to avoid mindkilling people reading the essay. So if you give an example of a non-mindkilling political conversation, don't talk about a current day issue. Instead, talk about 17th century France and it's use of mercantilism. How might a king and his advisers come to the best policy decision regarding whether or not to allow free trade with England? If they so choose, people can apply those principles to actual political discussions somewhere other than LW.

That said, I don't think I'd read the essay. I try to avoid politics, meta or otherwise. It does sounding interesting, though. Best of luck with it.

( I hope it's obvious, but just in case... This is just my view, not necessarily an expression of LW policy or consensus.)

I'm definitely interested. It's probably worth distinguishing between avoiding getting mind-killed oneself and trying to get other people out of mind-killed mode.

I have. I had something like 50-30% adherence to it during June-September, something like adherence 4 days out of a week from October until the start of December, one month off during December because of family obligations and then mostly bulletproof from the new year onwards, with me ordering the coffee and everything. I would say that I go "off" the diet about one meal per two weeks, but as much as possible "slightly" (for example, a single meal with enough rice in it to take me out of ketosis).

Since I've started the diet, I've also made other adjustments, such as striving for at least seven hours per night, scheduling my time better to reduce stress and not going hungry because I'm too unmotivated to make food. Keep these in mind on top of all the other 'wacky' self experiment biases. (Alternatively I CAN PRIME YOU TO ASSOCIATE ME WITH LOW STATUS BY TYPING IN ALL CAPS!!!1)

1. Last year, I weighed about 177 +/-3 pounds. Now I weigh about 145 +/- 2 lb (Edit: actually 135 at the time of the post. Reweighed myself and that was the new weight.). I reached 145lb during late September while not fully on the diet and maintained it, except for an unknown period in late December - mid January where I went up to about 152lb, I think that implies something back home caused me to gain weight, although whether it's food or vacation loafing is hard to say.
2. I used to have consistent problems staying awake in morning classes, and large amounts of brain fog after meals. These problems have largely vanished, except when I take a meal off the diet or have had insufficient sleep for other reasons such as (see 3).
3. I, unlike wmorgan, have been food poisoned. I think I narrowed the likely causes down to either eating factory eggs from chickens without antibiotics used on them or improperly preparing chicken livers. Since then, I have replaced the factory eggs with pastured ones with cooked whites (which also happen to taste better) and replacing chicken livers with beef.
4. I feel a lot more focused on days where I have bulletproof coffee to pull me through, until the coffee wears off anyway. Note that days where I take the coffee are also days where I feel I've had insufficient sleep.
5. I took a blood test during the latter part of December, which indicates that my numbers are stellar. Now, I realize that I was off the diet by then and not adhering particularly well before, but at the very least, short term consumption of this diet wouldn't damage you more than half a month's worth of a standard diet could fix you. At most, it can heal you for more than half a month's worth of a standard diet!
6. On occasions where I deviate from the diet (social events, dashing out without breakfast, cravings for pizza), the effect is very noticeable: About 20 minutes after eating, I get steadily increasing brain fog, then get nearly knocked out for the next 15 minutes. A headache then persists for two hours after. Sometimes I wake up with headaches the next day. This is either an effect of the diet, or me simply noticing I have a gluten allergy (I haven't been tested yet). Either way, if you value gluten products, pizza and soda more than you expect to gain from this diet, it's something you should be aware of.

Notes: My meals consist of one of the following: 5 cups of steamed broccoli + 3-4tbs grassfed butter, 4 softboiled eggs / Sunny side up + Bulletproof coffee. ~2/3rds a pound of liver + 2 sunny side up eggs + 2-3tbs butter, two baked sweet potatoes + 4tbs butter. Carb cravings are stopped with a handful of berries at night when I get them (once a month). I eat only twice per day, with no substantial pangs from hunger unless I skip breakfast or I end up staying 8+ hours at school (ah, the wonderful experience of a physics undergraduate on a quarter system.) It's not hard to stick to the diet when you know you lose two hours of the day to it and feel terrible to boot.

The one weekend where I made the bulletproof ice cream was a pretty damn decadent weekend of my life. If time and the spirit of adventure are available, I'd say it's a go.

I drink a concoction loosely based on Bulletproof Coffee almost everyday and have been following a mostly Paleo Diet for over half a year now. I don't want to oversell it, but these kinds of dietary changes have been extremely valuable to me. I originally planned to run a series of about 3-5 diet experiments, but I had so much improvement on the first one I tried, I just stuck with it and made it a life-style change (although, I still make minor tweaks here and there). I made much of my data publicly available here. Let me know if you have any questions.

I've been trying to adhere to it for a year or so. My main point of departure is that I drink a lot of diet soda and beer. My results:

1. I lost five pounds in the first two months and the weight didn't come back, despite consuming slightly more calories, and a lot more calories from fat.
2. It's easy for me not to graze on simple carbohydrates, because I feel fuller. Regardless of your nutritional philosophy, most of us agree that potato chips and cookies do nothing for you.
3. I haven't gotten or given anyone food poisoning or any other indication that my food is too undercooked. Especially for beef and lamb, I strongly suspect that I could eat it raw and be OK. Similarly, but not so much, for eggs, fish, and pork. I still cook the pink out of chicken, but I'm eating much less chicken anyway.

I can say that grass-fed roast beef is hugely tastier than regular grocery store sandwich meat, and is a big boon to my low carb diet. I started out doing the 4 hour body diet in december and lost 15 or so pounds fairly fast, and then started to stagnate. I ended up cutting beans also and am now going back down again. I don't strictly follow the bulletproof diet but mine may be a data point for similar diets.

Anything non-obvious in job searching?

This depends on what you consider obvious. (Many things that seem obvious to me now, would be a great advice 10 or 15 years ago; sometimes even 1 year ago.) Also there is a difference between knowing something and feeling it; or less mysteriously: between being vaguely aware that something "could help" and having an experience that something trivial and easy to miss did cause 50% improvement in results. So at the risk of saying obvious things:

Don't be needy. Search for a job before you have to; that is before you run out of money. Some employers will take a lot of time; first interview, a week or two waiting, second interview, another week or two, third interview... be sure you have enough time to play this game. If a month later you get an offer that is not what you wanted, be sure to have a freedom to say "no".

Speak with more companies. If you get two great offers, you can always take one and refuse the other. If you get two bad offers (or one bad offer and one rejection), your only choices are to take a bad offer, or start the whole process again, losing a month of your time. How many companies is enough? You probably don't want to make repeated interviews in 50 companies; but if you contact 10 companies, and only 4 respond, then 2 of them reject you and 2 of them give you a bad offer, that's also not what you want. This may depend on the region where you live and a position you seek, but I would recommend getting to the first interview (not just sending job application) with 7 or 10 companies. (Alternatively, if you are satisfied with your current job and don't mind staying there, and you are just curious whether there is a better opportunity, then contacting just 1 company is OK.)

Make a good CV. An afternoon or a weekend well spent with CV can bring you years of increased income. Try to get a feedback what kind of information do your employers want. -- For example as a programmer, I used to write a list of companies I have previously worked at; which is almost worthless to the next employers. My next iteration was focused on the technologies I have used, because this is what they often asked me at interviews. This is better, but only for junior positions; for senior positions it is also necessary to focus on my responsibilities in given projects. Essentially, your CV should describe why you are perfect for the position you apply for; it should make your whole life seem like a track towards this goal. You have enough time to describe things from the angle that shows them in the best light.

Know what you want (and what you want to avoid). There comes a moment in interview where you are supposed to ask questions. Be prepared for this moment (prepare your questions in advance). -- For example I would ask how many testers the company has, if people work in open spaces (how many in one room; I might want to see it), who will give me commands (one person or more?), whether I am supposed to work on more projects at the same time (how many?), what is the company policy for overtime, and what benefits does company provide: could I get more vacation days, or work from home? I want to know exactly, in a near mode, what will happen to me if I accept that job. Know your utility function, so you can make reasonable trade-offs, e.g. money for overtime.

Write down everything. Memory is unreliable.

Listen to your intuition, and if something feels bad, don't ignore the feeling and try to find out why you have it. -- For example in one interview the employer's first question was "What is your opinion about overtime?". It's a legitimate question, but it still felt weird that they started with this question. I responded diplomatically, but later I turned down the offer. Then I met an employee from that company, desperately searching for another job, and their description confirmed my suspicions: total chaos in the company, high-ranking employees neglecting their responsibilities, leading to a lot of overtime for low-ranking employees.

Know what you are worth. Try to find out salaries and benefits of people in similar positions. Yes, there is a taboo about sharing this information; and it is no accident that this taboo hurts your negotiating position. Find a way to overcome it (rich people are those who know when and how to bend rules). For example you could ask people about their salary in their previous job. Or you could use someone else (not working in the same sector) to ask this information for you; they will not feel like a competitor. If you absolutely have no way to get this info, just ask 50% more than you are making now, in 10 different companies (to avoid making statistics from 1 data point).

Have a long-term strategy and choose your job according to it. Some jobs only give you money. Some jobs give you money and increase your long-term worth at a job market. (You at least get the money even if you are wrong about the long-term consequences.) The strategy should fit to your personality traits. Also try to get a long-term perspective on what makes you happy; it's not as obvious as it seems. Beware of advice of other people: they don't know what makes you happy. (For example some people love work-related travelling, I hate it. But even after I tell them, they recommend me a job which seems cool to them, because it includes a lot of travelling.) Sometimes they even don't know what makes them happy; they only tell you what they think they are supposed to tell you.

Think out of the box. Is "having a job" your only way to make money? And even if today it is, what about tomorrow? In addition to choosing between a few jobs, it might be useful to also have an opportunity to choose something else.

Don't be afraid to ask too much. There are some things you would (almost) never do, such as things morally unacceptable to you. Then there are things that you wouldn't like to do under normal circumstances, but if someone offered you $1,000,000 a month, you would be happy to take them (if only for doing them for one month or one year, and then quitting). In the latter situations, try to estimate the amount of money that would make you satisfied. It is too high? Ask anyway. You lose nothing by being rejected. And you might be surprised. Generally, most of "no" answers can be replaced by asking a very high number.

I notice you have a STEM degree. Since the job market is in your favor, I'll assume you will find multiple employers interested in hiring you. Learn about salary negotiation now, before you go into an interview. If you're as clueless as I was when I got my first job, then you can pick up thousands of dollars for a few hours of research.

Recommended reading: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

If you intend to donate income acquired via job to reducing x-risk, there is a network thing.

Network. Write down the names and numbers of all the adults you know in a notebook. Call each and ask if they know of anyone who might be helpful to you in a job search. Iterate until employed.

See also the Job Search Advice thread for some suggestions.

I've heard good things about the book What color is your parachute. The section on negotiating and asking for a raise seemed pretty useful.

Does a Tegmark Level IV type Big World completely break algorithmic probability?

No. Why would it?

Another quote:

By these standards, the ontological commitments of the multiverse or the many-worlds interpretation are actually quite thin. This is most clear with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which says that the world is described by a state in a Hilbert space evolving according to the Schrodinger equation and that’s it. It’s simpler than versions of QM that add a completely separate evolution law to account for “collapse” of the wave function. That doesn’t mean it’s right or wrong; but it doesn’t lose points because there are a lot of universes. We don’t count universes, we count elements of the theory, and this one has a quantum state and a Hamiltonian. A tiny number!

I agree with all that (except for "and that’s it" part for MWI, given that the Born rule is still a separate assumption).

Counting worlds or universes towards complexity of a quantum theory is as silly as counting species towards complexity of the theory of evolution.

This would mess horribly with jurisprudence constante, the principle that the legal system must above all be predictable, so that people can execute contracts or choose behaviors knowing the legal implications. But since we are already, despite our claims to the otherwise, ok with using things like retroactive laws, how problematic this would be in practice is hard to ascertain.

My Playstation Network name is Thomas_Bayes. One of my goals for the year was to learn Chess, but I've been very busy recently and haven't allocated much time to it.

"Should I buy now or wait for the new models?" is a refrain so often heard from the panicky first-timer, who forgets that the number of sledgehammer innovations in the last three thousand years can be counted on one finger.

-Steve Martin

Well, as Robin Hanson said, coordination is hard.

The edit button used to be almost impossible for me to push, but now seems to be working. I don't know what changed, so have no idea how to help. Sorry. BTW, what version of Android are you using?

until further notice.

You should note this on a calendar or something: two months from now you should re-evaluate your position. It seems to me like there's a chance you'll change to the point you're net positive; re-evaluation is cheap; that small chance should be allowed for, not discarded.

I'm sorry to see you go.

I do agree with gwern that your recent critical lamentations have been a negative contribution. Particularly because I find it is too easy to be influenced towards cynicism. However your recent dissatisfaction aside your contributions in general are fine, making you a valuable community member. I never see the name "Konkvistador" and think "Oh damn, that moron is commenting again", which puts you ahead of rather a lot of people and almost constitutes high praise!

I can perhaps empathise with becoming disgruntled with intellectual standards on lesswrong. People are stupid and the world is mad - including most people here and everywhere else I have interacted with humans. I recently took a whole 30 days off, getting my score down to '0', weakening the addiction and also relieving a lot of frustration. I enjoy lesswrong much more after doing that. Hopefully you decide to return some time in the future as well.

I find your style of commenting both fun to read and interesting. I think your posts are valuable even if they're more "thinking out loud" than "I have studied ALL THE LITERATURE". As a community I think we can and SHOULD be able to talk about things in ways that don't involve 50 citations at the bottom of the page, even though I think those posts are valuable. I don't know who you're scaring away with your amount of commenting, but I don't miss them.

Jeez.

You've been the top contributor in the past 30 days.

This departure of yours is the most harmful thing you've ever done to the community. I wish you'd stay.

This is bloody stupid.

Please don't go. If someone from my cluster of ideaspace told you that you detracted from the community - they are wrong.

It's somewhat plausible that 20 comments a day may be too much (in someone's perception), or that it's better to develop certain kinds of posts more carefully, maybe even to avoid certain topics (that would shift the focus of conversations on LW in an undesirable direction), but it's not a case for not posting at all.

(That is, the questions of whether Konkvistador's posts are slightly harmful for the community (in what specific way) and whether the best intervention in response to that hypothetical is to discontinue posting entirely don't seem to me clearly resolved, and low rate of posting seems like a better alternative for the time being, absent other considerations.)

Slowing down is called-for, stopping is not. You're a valued member of the community.

I'm not sure why Gwern's and Nesov's replies are being downvoted to the point that they are hidden. Surely there is disagreement, but I see the quality of their posts as high. I urge voters to vote on the quality of the posts, not whether you agree/disagree with them.

Ok this didn't work. Please down vote parent and this comment to punish me for posting.

Edit: Ok who up voted this. Not funny. :/

In my opinion this kind of undefensive humility is something to be celebrated. Good job, Konk!

What sort of help do you want?
Or, put a different way: how would you recognize something as helpful, if such help were provided?

IA is likely to go up in big steps, but IA FOOM makes even less sense than for AI because of the human in the loop. Also, it would probably give humans a lot of improvements before solving the problem of low number of independent simultaneous attention threads. So it is not clear that any IA direction would produce a situation of single unstoppable entity.

If IA simply greatly increases the thinking power of a thousand people by different amount, I would not be sure that medium-term existential threat of this field is greater than overall short-term existential threat created by something existing here and now like Sony...

My sense is that explicit technological modifications of humans are already heavily concerned with the question "Will we still be human after this modification" which at least gestures at the problems you identify. It is exact the lack of this type of concern in the AI field that motivates SIAI's Friendliness activism. But the sorts of technological advances you are pointing towards seem more likely to arise in part from medical researcher methodologies, which seem more concerned with potential negative psychological and sociological effects than some other forms of technological research.

In short, if every AI researcher was already worried about safety to the extent that medical researchers seem to be worried, then there would be no need for SIAI to exist - all AI researchers worrying about the Friendliness problem is what winning looks like for SIAI. Since medical researchers are already worried about these types of problems, an SIAI-equivalent is not necessary. Consider all the different medical ethics councils - which are much more powerful than their institutional equivalents in AI research.

From Earth it's in 2117. From a high orbit around the Earth, there will be many transits of Venus in a few next decades.

We should not see that in 2117, since we should turn our Solar system to some useware before then.

As commenter Unknown pointed out in 2008, there must then exist two events A and B, with B only worse than A by an arbitrarily small amount, such that no number of As could be worse than some finite number of Bs.

Many find that sort of discounting to be contrary to intuition and desired results, e.g. the suffering of some particular person is more or less significant depending on how many other people are suffering in a similar enough way.

To rationalize dust specks over torture, one can construct a utility function where utility of dust specks in n people is of the Zeno type, -(1-1/2^n), and the utility of torture is -2. Presumably, something else goes wrong when you do that. What is it?

Nothing. If that is your actual preferences then that is the choice you should make. Not because you can rationalize it but because that is, in fact, what you want to do all things considered.