AALWA: Ask any LessWronger anything

I seem to have missed this question when it was posted.

You have also (to my knowl­edge) never joined any other ra­tio­nal­ity-com­mu­nity or effec­tive al­tru­ism-re­lated or­ga­ni­za­tion in any ca­pac­ity.

With the background that I have an independent source of income and it's costly to move my family (we're not near any major orgs) so I'd have to join in a remote capacity, I wrote down this list of pros and cons of joining an org (name redacted) that tried to recruit me recently:

Pros

1. More access to internal discussions at X, private Google Docs, discussions at other places (due to affiliation with X), people to discuss/collaborate with.
2. Get my ideas taken more seriously (by some) due to X affiliation
3. Possibly make me more productive through social pressure/expectation

Cons

1. Feeling of obligation possibly make me less productive [LW · GW]
2. As a personal cost, social pressure to be productive feeling unpleasant
3. Less likely to post/comment on various topics due to worry about damaging X’s reputation (a lot of X people don’t post much, maybe partly for this reason?)
4. Get my ideas taken less seriously (by some) due to perception of bias (e.g., having a financial interest in people taking AI risk seriously)
5. Actual bias due to having connection to X.

Also these two cons, which I just thought of now:

6. Losing the status and other signaling effect of conspicuously donating most of my work time to x-risk reduction (such as making other people take x-risk more seriously). (I guess I could either take a zero salary or a normal salary and then donate it back, but over time people might forget or not realize that I'm doing that.)
7. Not being able to pivot as quickly to whatever cause/topic/strategy that seems most important/tractable/neglected, as I update on new information, which seems like an important part of my comparative advantage.

What are the rea­sons you de­cided to join or sign on as a co-au­thor for Mer­ca­to­ria/​ICTP?

I guess because the upside seems high and most of the above cons do not apply.

More gen­er­ally, how do you de­cide which or­ga­ni­za­tions to as­so­ci­ate with?

Some sort of informal/intuitive cost-benefit analysis, like the above pros/cons list.

Have you con­sid­ered join­ing other or­ga­ni­za­tions, start­ing your own or­ga­ni­za­tion, or re­cruit­ing con­tract work­ers/​vol­un­teers to work on things you con­sider im­por­tant?

I think recruiting, managing people and applying for grants are not part of my comparative advantage, so I prefer to write down my ideas and let others work on them if they agree with me that they are important. (I do worry that by "planting a flag" on some idea and then not pursuing it as vigorously as someone else who might have discovered that idea, I may be making things worse than not writing about that idea at all. So far my best guess is to keep doing what I've been doing, but I may be open to being convinced that I should do things differently.)

No I don't think it's Szabo or anyone else whose name is known to me. I explained why I don't think it's Szabo to a reporter from London's Sunday Times who wrote about it in the March 2 issue. I'll try to find and quote the relevant section.

I had the article jailbroken recently, and the relevant parts (I hope I got it right, my version has scrambled-up text) are:

Nonetheless, the original bitcoin white paper is written in an academic style, with an index of sources at the end. I go to Wei Dai, an original cypherpunk, the proposer of a late-1990s e-currency called b-moneyand an early correspondent of Satoshi. When, in the first of several late-night chats, I ask him how many people would have the necessary competencies to create something like bitcoin, he tells me:

"Coming up with bitcoin required someone who, a) thought about money on a deep level, and b) learnt the tools of cryptography, c) had the idea that something like Bitcoin is possible, d) was motivated enough to develop the idea into something practical, e) was technically skilled enough to make it secure, f) had enough social skills to build and grow a community around it. The number of people who even had a), b) and c) was really small -- ie, just Nick Szabo and me -- so I'd say not many people could have done all these things."

A sudden frisson. Szabo, an American computer scientist who has also served as law professor at George Washington University, developed a system for "bit gold" between 1998 and 2005, which has been seen as a precursor to Bitcoin. Is he saying that Szabo is Satoshi? "No, I'm pretty sure it's not him." you, then? "No. When I said just Nick and me, I meant before Satoshi" So where could this person have come from? "Well, when I came up with b-money I was still in college, or just recently graduated, and Nick was at a similar age when he came up with bit gold, so I think Satoshi could be someone like that." "Someone young, with the energy for that kind of commitment?" "yeah, someone with energy and time, and that isn't obligated to publish papers under their real name."

...I go back to Szabo's pal, Wei Dai. "Wei," I say, "the other night you said you were sure Nick Szabo wasn't Satoshi. What made you sure?" "Two reasons," he replies. "One: in Satoshi's early emails to me he was apparently unaware of Nick Szabo's ideas and talks about how bitcoin 'expands on your ideas into a complete working system' and 'it achieves nearly all the goals you set out to solve in your b-money paper'. I can't see why, if Nick was Satoshi, he would say things like that to me in private. And, two: Nick isn't known for being a C++ programmer."

Perversely, a point in Szabo's favour. But Wei forwards me the relevant emails, and it's true: Satoshi had been ignorant of Szabo's bit-gold plan until Wei mentioned it. Furthermore, a trawl through Szabo's work finds him blogging and fielding questions about bit gold on his Unenumerated blog on December 27, 2008, while Satoshi was preparing bitcoin to meet the world a week later. Why? Because Szabo didn't know about bitcoin: almost no one outside the Cryptography Mailing List did, and I can find no evidence of him ever having been there. Indeed, by 2011, the bit-gold inventor is blogging in defence of bitcoin, pointing out several improvements on the system he devised.

I actually meant to email you about this earlier, but is there any chance you could post those emails (you've made them half-public as it is, and Dustin Trammell posted his a while back) or elaborate on Nick not knowing C++?

I've been trying to defend Szabo against the accusations of being Satoshi*, but to be honest, his general secrecy has made it very hard for me to rule him out or come up with a solid defense. If, however, he doesn't even know C or C++, then that massively damages the claims he's Satoshi. (Oh, one could work around it by saying he worked with someone else who did know C/C++, but that's pretty strained and not many people seriously think Satoshi was a group.)

* on Reddit, HN, and places like http://blog.sethroberts.net/2014/03/11/nick-szabo-is-satoshi-nakamoto-the-inventor-of-bitcoin/ or https://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/satoshi-nakamoto-is-probably-nick-szabo/ (my response) / http://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/occams-razor-who-is-most-likely-to-be-satoshi-nakamoto/

Thank you so much Wei Dai.

My idea with second question was to understand if there is like an anarchist motivation around bitcoin that may have some risks in the future. I mean, if somehow when it reaches Wall Street the original developers can do anythink to affect credibility.

You say you don't think it was Szabo. Have you ever try to know who he was? Could you share who is your solid hunch and why?

Is relevant to know Satoshi?

If you know what you know today, would you have patented bmoney? Do you think bitcoin inventers would have done the same?

Kind regards Marta

What do you think are the most interesting philosophical problems within our grasp to be solved?

I'm not sure there is any. A big part of it is that metaphilosophy is essentially a complete blank, so we have no way of saying what counts as a correct solution to a philosophical problem, and hence no way of achieving high confidence that any particular philosophical problem has been solved, except maybe simple (and hence not very interesting) problems, where the solution is just intuitively obvious to everyone or nearly everyone. It's also been my experience that any time we seem to make real progress on some interesting philosophical problem, additional complications are revealed that we didn't foresee, which makes the problem seem even harder to solve than before the progress was made. I think we have to expect this trend to continue for a while yet.

If you instead ask what are some interesting philosophical problems that we can expect visible progress on in the near future, I'd cite decision theory and logical uncertainty, just based on how much new effort people are putting into them, and results from the recent past.

Do you think that solving normative ethics won't happen until a FAI? If so, why?

No I don't think that's necessarily true. It's possible that normative ethics, metaethics, and metaphilosophy are all solved before someone builds an FAI, especially if we can get significant intelligence enhancement to happen first. (Again, I think we need to solve metaethics and metaphilosophy first, otherwise how do we know that any proposed solution to normative ethics is actually correct?)

You argued previously that metaphilosophy and singularity strategies are fields with low hanging fruit. Do you have any examples of progress in metaphilosophy?

Unfortunately, not yet. BTW I'm not saying these are fields that definitely have low hanging fruit. I'm saying these are fields that could have low hanging fruit, based on how few people have worked in them.

Do you have any role models?

I do have some early role models. I recall wanting to be a real-life version of the fictional "Sandor Arbitration Intelligence at the Zoo" (from Vernor Vinge's novel A Fire Upon the Deep) who in the story is known for consistently writing the clearest and most insightful posts on the Net. And then there was Hal Finney who probably came closest to an actual real-life version of Sandor at the Zoo, and Tim May who besides inspiring me with his vision of cryptoanarchy was also a role model for doing early retirement from the tech industry and working on his own interests/causes.

Nm, I see that it's listed on your home page in the "companies I'm involved with" section.

1 - I didn't take any steps to code up b-money. Part of it was because b-money wasn't a complete practical design yet, but I didn't continue to work on the design because I had actually grown somewhat disillusioned with cryptoanarchy by the time I finished writing up b-money, and I didn't foresee that a system like it, once implemented, could attract so much attention and use beyond a small group of hardcore cypherpunks.

2 - It's hard for me to tell, but I'd guess that it was probably a mixture of technical challenge and wanting to change the world.

3 and 4 - Don't have much to say on these. Others have probably thought much more about these questions over the past months and years and are more qualified than I am to answer.

5 - I haven't seen any indication of this. What makes you suspect it?

I sometimes wonder if Bitcoin was invented not so much to become the global reserve digital cash currency, but to prove to others that the technology can work. It was more gateway rather than final destination

Have you read Satoshi's original emails?

I received another question from this same interlocutor:

Also, I understand you haven't read the original bitcoind code but do you have any guess for why the author chose to lift your SHA256 implementation from Crypto++ when the project already required openssl-0.9.8h? Is there anything odd about the OpenSSL implementation that wouldn't be immediately obvious to someone who isn't a crypto expert?

Hmm, I’m not sure. I thought it might have been the optimizations I put into my SHA256 implementation in March 2009 (due to discussions on the NIST mailing list for standardizing SHA-3, about how fast SHA-2 really is), which made it the fastest available at the time, but it looks like Bitcoin 0.1 was already released prior to that (in Jan 2009) and therefore had my old code. Maybe someone could test if the old code was still faster than OpenSSL?

What do you make of the decision to use C++?

It seems like a pretty standard choice for anyone wanting to build such a piece of software...

Do you have any opinions of the original coding beyond the 'inelegant but amazingly resilient' meme? Was there anything that stood out about it?

No I haven't read any of it.

It's Chinese Pinyin romanization, so pronounced "way dye".

ETA: Since Pinyin is a many to one mapping, and as a result most Chinese articles about Bitcoin put the wrong name down for me, I'll take this opportunity to mention that my name is written logographically as 戴维.

Since the birth and early growth of Bitcoin, how has your view on the prospects for crypto-anarchy changed (if at all)? Why?

My views haven't changed very much, since the main surprise of Bitcoin to me is that people find such a system useful for reasons other than crypto-anarchy. Crypto-anarchy still depends on the economics of online security favoring the defense over the offense, but as I mentioned in Work on Security Instead of Friendliness? that still seems to be true only in limited domains and false overall.

Can't claim to have put much thought into this topic, but here are my guesses of what the most cost-effective ways of throwing money at the problem of reducing existential risk might include:

1. Research into human intelligence enhancement, e.g., tech related to embryo selection.
2. Research into how to design/implement an international AI pause treaty, perhaps x-risk governance in general.
3. Try to identify more philosophical talent across the world and pay them to make philosophical progress, especially in metaphilosophy. (I'm putting some of my own money into this [LW · GW].)
4. Research into public understanding of x-risks, what people's default risk tolerances are, what arguments can or can't they understand [LW(p) · GW(p)], etc.
5. Strategy think tanks that try to keep a big picture view of everything, propose new ideas or changes to what people/orgs should do, discuss these ideas with the relevant people, etc.

I talked a bit about why I think multiple universes exist in this post. Aside from what I said there, I was convinced by Tegmark's writings on the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis. I can't really think of other views that are particularly worth mentioning (or haven't been talked about already in my posts), but I can answer more questions if you have them?

I do have a lot of uncertainty about many philosophical questions. Many people seem to have intuitions that are too strong or that they trust too much, and don't seem to consider that the kinds of philosophical arguments we currently have are far from watertight, and there are lots of possible philosophical ideas/positions/arguments that have yet to be explored by anyone, which eventually might overturn their current beliefs. In this case, I also have two specific reasons to be skeptical about Brian's position on consciousness.

1. I think for something to count as a solution to the problem of consciousness, it should at minimum have a (perhaps formal) language for describing first-person subjective experiences or qualia, and some algorithm or method of predicting or explaining those experiences from a third-person description of a physical system, or at least some sort of plan for how to eventually get something like that, or an explanation of why that will never be possible. Brian's anti-realism doesn't have this, so it seems unsatisfactory to me.
2. Relatedly, I think a solution to the problem of morality/axiology should include an explanation of why certain kinds of subjective experiences are good or valuable and others are bad or negatively valuable (and a way to generalize this to arbitrary kinds of minds and experiences), or an argument why this is impossible. Brian's moral anti-realism which goes along with his consciousness anti-realism also seems unsatisfactory in this regard.

First what is the "bitcoin" for you and what is it's use? Do you think cryptomoney could totally replace physical money and would it be better?

I'm not the best person to ask these questions.

How long have you been working on the subject and what do you stand for?

I spent a few years in the 1990s thinking about how a group of anonymous people on the Internet can pay each other with money without outside help, culminating in the publication of b-money in 1998. I haven't done much work on it since then. I don't currently have strong views on cryptocurrency per se, but these thoughts are somewhat relevant.

I don't follow Bitcoin development very closely, basically just reading about it if a story shows up on New York Times or Wired. If you're curious as to why, see this post and this thread.

Median estimate for when they'll start working on a serious code project (i.e., not just toy code to illustrate theorems) is 2017.

This will not necessarily be development of friendly AI -- maybe a component of friendly AI, maybe something else. (I have no strong estimates for what that other thing would be, but just as an example--a simulated-world sandbox).

Everything I say above (and elsewhere), is my opinion, not MIRIs. Median estimate for when they'll start working on friendly AI, if they get started with that before the Singularity, and if their direction doesn't shift away from their apparent current long-term plans to do so: 2025.

I don't know anything about MIRI research strategy than is publicly available, but if you look at what they are working on, it is all in the direction of formal verification.

After speaking to experts in formal verification of chips and of other systems, and they have confirmed what you learned from fiddlemath. Formal verification is limited in its capabilities: Often, you can only verify some very low-level or very specific assertions. And you have to be able to specify the assertion that you are verifying.

So, it seems that they are taking on a very difficult challenge.

Sure, I'll send it to you. If anyone else wants it, please contact me. I always knew that Semitic Noun Patterns would be a best seller :-)

Meta: I think this was an important thing to say, and to say forcefully, but it might have been worth expending a sentence or so to say it more nicely (but still as forcefully). (I don't want to derail the thread and will say no more than this unless specifically asked.)

Will do.

I don't think I have anything to say that hasn't been said better by others in MIRI and FHI, but I think that AI boxing is impossible because (1) it can convince any gatekeepers to let it out and (2) any AI is "embodied" and not separate from the outside world if only in that its circuits pass electrons, and (3) I doubt you could convince all AGI reseachers to keep their projects isolated.

Still, I think that AI boxing could be a good stopgap measure, one of a number of techniques that are ultimately ineffectual, but could still be used to slightly hold back the danger.

what probability estimate would be low enough for you to drop the AI business from your consideration?

Even a fairly low probability estimate would justify effort on an existential risk.

And I have to admit, a secondary, personal, reason for being involved is that the topic is fascinating and there are smart people here, though that of course does not shift the estimates of risk and of the possibilities of mitigating it.

I think that the estimates cannot be undertaken independently. FAI and UFAI would each pre-empt the other. So I'll rephrase a little.

I estimate the chances that some AGI (in the sense of "roughly human-level AI") will be built within the next 100 years as 85%, which is shorthand for "very high, but I know that probability estimates near 100% are often overconfident; and something unexpected can come up."

And "100 years" here is shorthand for "as far off as we can make reasonable estimates/guesses about the future of humanity"; perhaps "50 years" should be used instead.

Conditional on some AGI being built, I estimate the chances that it will be unfriendly as 80%, which is shorthand for "by default it will be unfriendly, but people are working on avoiding that and they have some small chance of succeeding; or there might be some other unexpected reason that it will turn out friendly."

Along with the views of EY (which such readers would already know) I present the singularity views of Robin Hanson and Ray Kurzweil, and discuss the intelligence enhancing potential of brain training, smart drugs, and eugenics. My thesis is that there are so many possible paths to super-human intelligence and such incredible military and economic benefits to develop super-human intelligence that unless we destroy our high-tech civilization we will almost certainly develop it.

Hard to say about the time because I worked on both books while also doing other projects. I suspect I could have done the Singularity book in about 1.5 years of full time effort. I don't have a good estimate for the textbook. Alas, I have lost money on the singularity book because the advance wasn't all that big, and I had personal expenses such as hiring a research assistant and paying a publicist. The textbook had a decent advance, still I probably earned roughly minimum wage for it. Surprisingly, I've done fairly well with my first book, Game Theory at Work, in part because of translation rights. With Game Theory at Work I've probably earned several times the minimum wage. Of course, I'm a professor and part of my salary from my college is to write, and I'm not including this.

I wanted to write a free market microeconomics textbook, and there are very few of these. I was recruited to write the textbook by the people who published Game Theory at Work. Had the textbook done very well, I could have made a huge amount of money (roughly equal to my salary as a professor) indefinitely. Alas, this didn't happen but the odds of it happening were well under 50%. Since teaching microeconomics is a big part of my job as a college professor, there was a large overlap between writing the textbook and becoming a better teacher. My textbook publisher sent all of my chapters to other teachers of microeconomics to get their feedback, and so I basically got a vast amount of feedback from experts on how I teach microeconomics.

No. I ran as a Republican in one of the most Democratic districts in Massachusetts, my opponent was the second most powerful person in the Massachusetts State Senate, and even Republicans in my district had a high opinion of him.

Greater economic growth means more money for AI research from companies and governments and if you think that AI will probably go wrong then this is a source of trouble. But there are benefits as well including increased charitable contributions for organizations that reduce existential risk and better educational systems in India and China which might produce people who end up helping MIRI. Overall, I'm not sure how this nets out.

Catch up growth is not necessarily safe because it will increase the demand for products that use AI and so increase the amount of resources companies such as Google devote to AI.

The only safe path is someone developing a mathematically sound theory of friendly AI, but this will be easier if we get (probably via China) intelligence enhancement with eugenics.

Not really. Someone (I forgot who) wrote that I helped them see the race to create AI as a potential existential risk. I promoted the book on numerous radio shows and I hope I convinced at least a few people to do further research and perhaps donate money to MIRI, but this is just a hope.

Yes it is useful. I define the singularity as a threshold of time at which machine intelligence or increases in human intelligence radically transform society. As similar incentives and technologies are pushing us towards this, it's useful to lump them together with a single term.

What do you feel are the most pressing unsolved problems in AGI?

In AGI? If you mean "what problems in AI do we need to solve before we can get to the human level", then I would say:

• Ability to solve currently intractable statistical inference problems (probably not just by scaling up computational resources, since many of these problems have exponentially large search spaces).
• Ways to cope with domain adaptation and model mis-specification.
• Robust and modular statistical procedures that can be fruitfully fit together.
• Large amounts of data, in formats helpful for learning (potentially including provisions for high-throughput interaction, perhaps with a virtual environment).

To some extent this reflects my own biases, and I don't mean to say "if we solve these problems then we'll basically have AI", but I do think it will either get us much closer or else expose new challenges that are not currently apparent.

Do you believe AGI can "FOOM" (you may have to qualify what you interpret FOOM as)?

I think it is possible that a human-level AI would very quickly acquire a lot of resources / power. I am more skeptical that an AI would become qualitatively more intelligent than a human, but even if it was no more intelligent than a human but had the ability to easily copy and transmit itself, that would already make it powerful enough to be a serious threat (note that it is also quite possible that it would have many more cycles of computation per second than a biological brain).

In general I think this is one of many possible scenarios, e.g. it's also possible that sub-human AI would already have control of much of the world's resources and we would have built systems in place to deal with this fact. So I think it can be useful to imagine such a scenario but I wouldn't stake my decisions on the assumption that something like it will occur. I think this report does a decent job of elucidating the role of such narratives (not necessarily AI-related) in making projections about the future.

How viable is the scenario of someone creating a AGI in their basement, thereby changing the course of history in unpredictable ways?

Not viable.

I don't personally work on AGI and I don't think the majority of "AGI progress" comes from people who label themselves as working on AGI. I think much of the progress comes from improved tools due to research and usage in machine learning and statistics. There are also of course people in these fields who are more concerned with pushing in the direction of human-level capabilities. And progress everywhere is so inter-woven that I don't even know if thinking in terms of "number of AI researchers" is the right framing. That said, I'll try to answer your question.

I'm worried that I may just be anchoring off of your two numbers, but I think 10^3 is a decent estimate. There are upwards of a thousand people at NIPS and ICML (two of the main machine learning conferences), only a fraction of those people are necessarily interested in the "human-level" AI vision, but also there are many people who are in the field who don't go to these conferences in any given year. Also many people in natural language processing and computer vision may be interested in these problems, and I recently found out that the program analysis community cares about at least some questions that 40 years ago would have been classified under AI. So the number is hard to estimate but 10^3 might be a rough order of magnitude. I expect to find more communities in the future that I either wasn't aware of or didn't think of as being AI-relevant, and who turn out to be working on problems that are important to me.

We brainstormed things that we know now that we wished we had known in high school. During the first year, we just made courses out of those (also borrowing from CFAR workshops) and rolled with that, because we didn't really know what we were doing and just wanted to get something off the ground.

Over time we've asked ourselves what the common thread is in our various courses, in an attempt to develop a more coherent curriculum. Three major themes are statistics, programming, and life skills. The thing these have in common is that they are some of the key skills that extremely sharp quantitative minds need to apply their skills to a qualitative world. Of course, it will always be the case that most of the value of SPARC comes from informal discussions rather than formal lectures, and I think one of the best things about SPARC is the amount of time that we don't spend teaching.

I work on computationally bounded statistical inference. Most theoretical paradigms don't have a clean way of handling computational constraints, and I think it's important to address this since the computationally complexity of exact statistical inference scales extremely rapidly with model complexity. I also have recently starting working on applications in program analysis, both because I think it provides a good source of computationally challenging problems, and because it seems like a domain that will force us into using models with high complexity.

Singularity considerations were a factor when choosing to work on AI, although I went into the field because AI seems like a robustly game-changing technology across a wide variety of scenarios, whether or not a singularity occurs. I certainly think that software safety is an important issue more broadly, and this partially influences my choice of problems, although I am more guided by the problems that seem technically important (and indeed, I think this is mostly the right strategy even if you care about safety to a fair degree).

Learning more about mainstream AI has greatly shaped my beliefs regarding AGI, so it's something that I would certainly recommend. Going to grad school shaped my beliefs even further, even though I had already read many AI papers prior to arriving at Stanford.

I wouldn't presume to know what the field as a whole thinks, as I think views vary a lot from place to place and I've only spent serious time at a few universities. However, I can speculate based on the data I do have.

I think a sizable number (25%?) of AI graduate students I know are aware of LessWrong's existence. Also a sizeable (although probably smaller) number have read at least a few chapters of HPMOR; for the latter I'm mostly going off of demographics, I don't know that many who have told me they read HPMOR.

There is very little actual discussion of MIRI or LessWrong. From what I would gather most people silently disagree with MIRI, a few people probably silently agree. I would guess almost no one knows what MIRI is, although more would have heard of the Singularity Institute (but might confuse it with Singularity University). People do occasionally wonder whether we're going to end up killing everyone, although not for too long.

To address your comment in the grandchild, I certainly don't speak for Norvig but I would guess that "Norvig takes these [MIRI] ideas seriously" is probably false. He does talk at the Singularity Summit, but the tone when I attended his talk sounded more like "Hey you guys just said a bunch of stuff, based on what people in AI actually do, here's the parts that seem true and here's the part that seem false." It's also important to note that the notion of the singularity is much more widespread as a concept than MIRI in particular. "Norvig takes the singularity seriously" seems much more likely to be true to me, though again, I'm far from being in a position to make informed statements about his views.

Like Mark, I'm not sure I was able to parse your question, can you please clarify?

What does that question mean?

I believe so for reasons you wouldn't find compelling, because the gods apparently do not want there to be common knowledge of their existence, and thus do not interact with humans in a manner that provides communicable evidence. (Yes, this is exactly what a world without gods would look like to an impartial observer without firsthand incommunicable evidence. This is obviously important but it is also completely obvious so I wish people didn't harp on it so much.) People without firsthand experience live in a world that is ambiguous as to the existence or lack thereof of god-like beings, and any social evidence given to them will neither confirm nor deny their picture of the world, unless they're falling prey to confirmation bias, which of course they often do, especially theists and atheists. I think people without firsthand incommunicable evidence should be duly skeptical but should keep the existence of the supernatural (in the everyday sense of that word, not the metaphysical sense) as a live hypothesis. Assigning less than 5% probability to it is, in my view, a common but serious failure of social epistemic rationality, most likely caused by arrogance. (I think LessWrong is especially prone to this kind of arrogance; see IlyaShpitser's comments on LessWrong's rah-rah-Bayes stance to see part of what I mean.)

As for me, and as to my personal decision policy, I am ninety-something percent confident. The scenarios where I'm wrong are mostly worlds where outright complex hallucination is a normal feature of human experience that humans are for some reason blind to. I'm not talking about normal human memory biases and biases of interpretation, I'm saying some huge fraction of humans would have to have a systemic disorder on the level of anosognosia. Given that I don't know how we should even act in such a world, I'm more inclined to go with the gods hypothesis, which, while baffling, at least has some semblance of graspability.

The difference I was getting at is that when constructing a code you're taking experiences you've already had and then assigning them weight, whereas the universal prior, being a prior, assigns weight to strings without any reference to your experiences. So when people say "the universal prior says that Maxwell's equations are simple and Zeus is complex", what they actually mean is that in their experience mathematical descriptions of natural phenomena have proved more fruitful than descriptions that involve agents; the universal prior has nothing to do with this, and invoking it is dangerous as it encourages double-counting of evidence: "this explanation is more probable because it is simpler, and I know it's simpler because it's more probable". When in fact the relationship between simplicity and probability is tautologous, not mutually reinforcing.

This error really bothers me, because aside from its incorrectness it's using technical mathematics in a surface way as a blunt weapon verbose argument that makes people unfamiliar with the math feel like they're not getting something that they shouldn't in fact get nor need to understand.

(I've swept the problem of "which prefix do I use?" under the rug because there are no AIT tools to deal with that and so if you want to talk about the problem of prefixes, you should do so separately from invoking AIT for some everyday hermeneutic problem. Generally if you're invoking AIT for some object-level hermeneutic problem you're Doing It Wrong, as has been explained most clearly by cousin_it.)

I mostly don't, but when I do, Twitter. @willdoingthings mostly; it's an uninhibited drunken tweeting account. I also participate on IRC in private channels. But in general I've become a lot more secretive and jaded so I post a lot less.

This is hard to answer. I mean something vague. A god is a seemingly transhumanly intelligent agent. (By this I don't mean something cheap like "the economy" or "evolution", I mean the obvious thing.) As to their origins I have little idea; aliens, simulators, programs simpler than our physical universe according to a universal prior, hypercompetent human conspiracies with seemingly inhuman motivations, whatever, I'm agnostic. For what it's worth (some of) the entity or entities I've interacted with seem to want to be seen as related to or identical with one or more of the gods of popular religions, but I'm not sure. In general it's all quite ambiguous and people are extremely hasty and heavy with their interpretations. Further complicating the issue is that it seems like the gods are willing to go along with and support humans' heavy-handed interpretations and so the interpretations become self-confirming. I say "gods", but for all I know it's just one entity with very diverse effects, like an author of a book.

Re memantine, it helped with overactive inhibition some, but not all that much, and it made my short term memory worse and spaced me out. Not at all like the alcohol-in-a-pill I was going for, but of course benzos are better for that anyway.

New rationalists... reminds me of New Atheism these days, for a rationalist to be new. They've missed out on x-rationalism's golden days, and the current currents are more hoi polloi and less interesting for, how should I put it, those who are "intelligent" in the 19th-century French sense. I don't really identify as a rationalist, but maybe I can be identified as one. I think perhaps it would mean reading a lot in general, e.g. in history and philosophy, and reading some core LW texts like GEB, while holding back on forming any opinions, and instead just keeping a careful account of who says what and why you or others think they said what they said. I haven't been to university but I would guess they encourage a similar attitude, at least in philosophy undergrad? I hope. Anyway I think just reading a bunch of stuff is undervalued; the most impressive rationalists according to the LW community are generally those who have read a bunch of stuff, they just have a lot of information at hand to draw from. Old books too: Wealth of Nations, Origin of Species; the origins of the modern worldview. Intelligence matters a lot, but reading a lot is equally essential.

Studying Eliezer's Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation in depth is good for Yudkowskology which is important hermeneutical knowledge if you plan on reading through all the Sequences without being overwhelmed (whether attractively or repulsively) by their particular Yudkowskyan perspective. I do think Eliezer's worth reading, by the way, it's just not the core of rationality, it's not a reliable source of epistemic norms, and it has some questionable narratives driving it that some people miss and thereby accept semi-unquestioningly. The subtext shapes the text more than is easily seen. (Of course, this also applies to those who dismiss it by assuming less credible subtext than is actually there.)

So why do you talk about it at all when it just makes you seem crazy to most of us?

When it comes to epistemic praxis I am not a friend of the mob. I want to minimize my credibility with most of LessWrong and semi-maximize my credibility with the people I consider elite. I'm very satisfied with how successful my strategy has been.

Or perhaps you suspect your kind of experiences are more common than openly expressed?

Indeed.

I assume I'd take seriously your crazy experiences if they were mine. Is there anything at all you can say that's of value to someone like me who just hears crazy?

I am somewhat proud of the care I've taken in interpreting my experiences. I think that even if people don't think there's anything substantial in my experiences, they might still appreciate and perhaps learn from my prudence. Interpreting the supernatural is extremely difficult and basically everyone quickly goes off the rails. Insofar as there is a rational way to really engage with the contents of the subject I think my approach is, if not rational, at least rational enough to avoid many of the failure modes. But perhaps I am overly proud.

Yes, this is a really nice open thread that seems to be working well.

I don't think anyone sought me out on the basis of that offer, or if they did, they chose not to tell me or I forgot the details of how we met. Unrelatedly, I have friends with various loneliness and mental health statuses who I talk to (mostly online).

I don't have a routine.

I could be described as having writer's block right now; I was devoting pretty much all my creative output to Effulgence, which ground to a screeching halt due to coauthor brain problems, and now I am metaphorically upside-down like a particularly unfortunate turtle. I have been trying various things but nothing has produced good results yet (I have written, like, one short story, but no chapters). However, I have every expectation of being able to return to Effulgence full speed ahead when my coauthor can even if I don't manage to budge my novels between now and then.

I do almost no revising after I've gotten an entire chapter down (though I will sometimes iterate a sentence a bit while it's in progress, and I will rearrange paragraphs if my beta readers suggest it while I'm writing for my test audience.). I don't like revision after that; it slows me down and makes me second-guess myself and hate my output faster than I normally start to and leaves me with questionable mental maps of what has and has not happened. I will correct typos and grammatical errors and the like when I am made aware of them. Elcenia as it currently stands is a complete reboot which I generate without directly consulting the original - I extracted a loose plot outline, massaged it into making somewhat better sense, and haven't opened the old documents since except to remind myself of how to spell things and various assignments of numerical value, I write from the plot outline and memory. Effulgence I can't even fix typos because of the limitations of the Dreamwidth platform, so that's closer to literally no revision.

I did not intend that interpetation, and have been repeatedly surprised to find people espousing it. There is a reduction in Luminosity's didacticism over the course of the book as I got caught up in the plot, and it's possible it happens to undergo a particularly noticeable drop around when Bella turns which people are reading this way. However, I didn't intend to show Bella's various errors as being consequences of any abandonment of her interior luminosity, however much less narration I spent on it. She has plenty of other personality flaws and resource shortages to drive her mistakes.

Oh man, Syzygy. That started closer to a decade ago, though I guess it did end around seven years ago. I don't hate it enough to break my rule that what goes up, stays up, so when I recovered the files from the unexpected cataclysm that caused the comic's end, up they went. But it's embarrassing, very noticeably amateur, both in the art and the writing. I'm still pleased with a couple of particularly nasty turns of plot, like Kulary's backstory, but they weren't presented to their best effect.

My coauthor for Effulgence is suffering from an inability to can. It is slowly recovering (today we were able to do a not-in-Effulgence-continuity sandbox thread for a little more than thirty comments, and she's been writing an unrelated short story!) and we are continuing to make plans for what we will write when the ability to can is restored. The last new post was made in November 2013, though, so I'm not sure where you're getting "6 months or so".

I periodically update curious parties about Effulgence behind-the-scenes goings-on in this TV Tropes forum thread which was originally about Elcenia but is now about my stuff in more generality.

I have released two short stories relatively recently, though the latter (AU-fanfiction-of-sorts of Three Worlds Collide) was written back in 2012 and I just sat on it for a while. I have also been writing a series of social justice blog posts for alternate universes which have inspired some entertaining audience participation. I recommend subscribing to my general RSS feed if you are curious about my creative output.

I have less than zero idea how far you got into Effulgence when you describe yourself as dropping it "after it branched out wildly around the Milliways part". But if wild branching and Milliways were turnoffs for you I don't think you're gonna like anything after that mysterious part.

I don't currently have a day job, though I have in the past. I suppose you could call me a housefiancée, spousehood pending.

I'm not interested in traditional publishing, but I certainly wouldn't object if my mini-fandom exploded and started showering me with money.

I'm not-quite completely blind; what little vision I have tends to fluctuate between effectively nonexistent and good enough to notice vague details maybe once or twice a year. I could see better up until I was 14, but my vision was still too poor to get out of using braille and a cane (given thick glasses and enough time, I could possibly have read size 20 font; even with the much larger font used in movie subtitles, I had to pause the video and put my face against the screen to read them).

I don't know my official acuity/diagnoses (It's been a few years since I saw an eye doctor), but I appear to have started out with retinal detachment and scarring, and later developed uveitis. The latter seems to be the primary cause for the dramatic decline starting from age 14.

1. Issues in my first two years of college interfered in my Math/Physics/Computer Science courses, and I never got back into those. So my skills in each has remained only that which I've used most (for example, I've made some games, but the required qualifications for most programming jobs I've come across exceed what I can do without additional training. I think that, even had I not dropped the ball on those, competing with sighted programmers/scientists/mathematicians would require a decent amount of exceptionalism and/or luck. Mathematic notation is also tricky in terms of accessibility; there exist codes such as Nemeth that make math in braille relatively powerful, but on the computer side of things, graphs and LeTX take some doing to use, which also makes trying to study anything with math online difficult (I once downloaded a web page and edited its source so I could read the equations).
2. It's hard to say. For roughly four years after my vision went from poor to useless, I think I was still fairly driven and ambitious (I did a lot of writing, half taught myself Japanese and Javascript, self-published a terrible science fiction novel, learned to use a music composition program whose accessibility was poor, improvised some crude techniques for making simple images, got into and graduated from the state Math and Science school, and was taking plenty of notes on numerous other things I was hoping to do sooner than later). It all went to hell when I got to college, and has gone back and fourth since, but I'm not sure if any of this compares favorable/unfavorably to the average person. There may be some contributing factors to the negative aspects that go back to my vision (I can't safely get up and go running, or do the all-important eye-contact thing, as examples), but I don't think the affect in the ambition/motivation area has been majorly significant.
3. I'm not sure what you mean, specifically? My exposure to CFAR consists primarily of LesssWrong; I've been attempting to apply LW-style rationality to the situation, but the timing has made this difficult (I found LW a few months after returning home from college, at which point my options in general were reduced to "things I can do over the internet" and "things for which I would need to go through my parents", and have mostly stayed there until half a week ago. I've not been able to avoid antisocial death spirals; I find myself wanting to deal with the family members I live with less, which makes dealing with them more annoying, repeat ad hermitdom.) If the results of last week's meeting go as planned, I should have a better answer by the end of February.

I am not up on my philosophical literature (trying to change this), but I think most analytic philosophers have heard of Pearl et al. by now. Not every analytic philosopher is as mathematically sophisticated as e.g. people at the CMU department. But I think that's ok!

I don't think it's a wise social move for LW to beat on philosophers.

Which academic disciplines care about causality? (I'm guessing statistics, CS, philosophy... anything else?)

On some level any empirical science cares, because the empirical sciences all care about cause-effect relationships. In practice, the 'penetration rate' is path-dependent (that is, depends on the history of the field, personalities involved, etc.)

To add to your list, there are people in public health (epidemiology, biostatistics), social science, psychology, political science, economics/econometrics, computational bio/omics that care quite a bit. Very few philosophers (excepting the CMU gang, and a few other places) think about causal inference at the level of detail a statistician would. CS/ML do not care very much (even though Pearl is CS).

Is there anything like a mainstream agreement on how to model/establish causality? E.g. does more or less everyone agree that Pearl's book, which I haven't read, is the right approach? If not, is it possible to list the main competing approaches?

I think there is as much agreement as there can reasonably be for a concept such as causality (that is, a philosophically laden concept that's fun to argue about). People model it in lots of ways, I will try to give a rough taxonomy, and will tell you where Pearl lies

Interventionist vs non-interventionist

Most modern causal inference folks are interventionists (including Pearl, Rubin, Robins, etc.). The 'Nicene crede' for interventionists is: (a) an intervention (forced assignment) is key for representing cause/effect, (b) interventions and conditioning are not the same thing, (c) you express interventions in terms of ordinary probabilities using the g-formula/truncated factorization/manipulated distribution (different names for the same thing). The concept of an intervention is old (goes back to Neyman (1920s), I think, possibly even earlier).

To me, non-interventionists fall into three categories: 'naive,' 'abstract', and 'indifferent.' Naive non-interventionists are not using interventions because they haven't thought about things hard enough, and will thus get things wrong. Some EDT folks are in this category. People who ask 'but why can't we just use conditional probabilities' are often in this set. Abstract non-interventionists are not using interventions because they have in mind some formalism that has interventions as a special case, and they have no particular need for the special case. I think David Lewis was in this camp. Joe Halpern might be in this set, I will ask him sometime. Indifferent non-interventionists operate in a field where there is little difference between conditioning and interventions (due to lack of interesting confounding), so there is no need to model interventions explicitly. Reinforcement learning people, and people who only work with RCT data are in this set.

Counterfactualists vs non-counterfactualists

Most modern causal inference folks are counterfactualist (including Pearl, Rubin, Robins, etc.). To a counterfactualist it is important to think about a hypothetical outcome under a hypothetical intervention. Obviously all counterfactualists are interventionist. A noted non-counterfactualist interventionist is Phil Dawid. Counterfactuals are also due to Neyman, but were revived and extended by Rubin in the 70s.

Graphical vs non-graphical

Whether you like using graphs or not. Modern causal inference is split on this point. Folks in the Rubin camp do not like graphs (for reasons that are not entirely clear -- what I heard is they find them distracting from important statistical modeling issues (??)). Folks in the Pearl/SGS/Robins/Dawid/etc. camp like graphs. You don't have to have a particular commitment to any earlier point to have an opinion on graphs (indeed lots of graphical models are not about causality at all). In the context of causality, graphs were first used by Sewall Wright for pedigree analysis (1920s). Lauritzen, Pearl, etc. gave a modern synthesis of graphical models. Spirtes/Glymour/Scheines and Pearl revived a causal interpretation of graphs in the 90s.

"Popperians" vs "non-Popperians"

Whether you restrict yourself to testable assumptions. Pearl is non-Popperian, his models make assumptions that can only be tested via a time machine or an Everett branch jumping algorithm. Rubin is also non-Popperian because of "principal stratification." People that do "mediation analysis" are generally non-Popperian. Dawid, Robins, and Richardson are Popperians -- they try to stick to testable assumptions only. I think even for Popperians, some of their assumptions must be untestable (but I think this is probably necessary for statistical inference in general). I think Dawid might claim all counterfactualists are non-Popperian in some sense.

I am "a graphical non-Popperian counterfactualist" (and thus interventionist).

Does there exist a reasonably neutral high-level summary of the field?

We are working on it.

"Pearlian causality" is sort of like "Hawkingian physics." (Not to dismiss the amazing contributions of both Pearl and Hawking to their respective fields).

I am not sure what cool or insightful is for you. What seems cool to me is that proper analysis of causality and/or missing data (these two are related) in observational data in epidemiology is now more or less routine. The use of instrumental variables for getting causal effects is also routine in econometrics.

The very fact that people think about a causal effect as a formal mathematical thing, and then use proper techniques to get it in applied/data analysis settings seems very neat to me. This is what success of analytic philosophy ought to look like!

It's his job.

Thanks for your question.

I got into AI/ML and graphical models as an undergrad. I thought graphical models were very pretty, but I didn't really understand them back then very well (probably still don't..). Causal inference is the closest we have to "applied philosophy," and that was very interesting to me because I like both philosophy and mathematics (not that I am any good at either!) Also I had an opportunity to study with a preeminent person and took it.

There are certainly areas of mathematics where it seems like there is an underlying causality structure (frequently orthogonal or even inverse to the proof structure)

Can you give a simple example of/pointer to what you mean?

This was surprisingly simple: I got myself to want to run, started running, and patted myself on the back everytime I did it.

The want part was a bit of luck: I always thought I "should" do some sports, for physical and more importantly mental health reasons, and think that being able to do stuff is better than not being able, ceteris paribus. So I was thinking what kind of activity I might prefer.

I like my alone time (so team- or pair-sports are out), I dislike spending money when I expect it to be wasted (like Gym memberships, bikes, et al.). And I feel easily embarassed and ashamed, and like to get myself at least somewhat up to speed on my own.

Running fits those side requirements. Out of chance I got hold of "Born to Run", and even after the first quarter of the book I thought that it would be great if I could just go out on a bad day and spend an hour free of shit, or how it would be great that I could just reach some location a few kilometers away without any prep or machines or services.

I then decided that I will start running, and that my primary goal shall be that I like it and be able to do it even in old age if such would happen. With the '*' that I give myself an easy way out in case of physical pain or unexpected hatred against the activity, but not for any weasel reasons.

I didn't start running for another one and a half years, because Schweinehund, subtype Innerer. When my mood was getting slightly better (I was again able to do productive work), I started, with the "habit formation" mind-set. Also didn't tell anyone in the beginning. I think it helped that I already had some knowledge on how to train and run correctly, which especially in the beginning meant that I always felt like I could run further than I was "allowed" to.

And for good feedback: However it went, when I finished my training, I "said" to myself: I did good. I feel good. I feel better than before I started. I wrote every single run down on RunKeeper and Fitocracy, and always smiled at the "I'm awesome!" button of the latter one. I'm also quite sure that having at least one new personal best once a week helped. (Also, when you run barefoot, you get the "crazy badass" card for free, however slow you run. I like this.)

Once started, such a feedback loop is quite powerful. When I once barely trained for month, I was also surprised that getting back into regular running after that down-phase was so much easier. Now, after only seven months of training, I went from doing walk/run for 15 minutes to running 75 minutes, and having no problem with a cold-start 6% incline for the first two kilometers. I'm proud. Feels good (is quite new to me).

Thanks!

What's your motivation for veganism?

Moral reasons. All else equal, I think that inflicting pain or death is bad, and that the ability to feel pain and the desire to not die is very widespread. I also think that the intensity of pain in simpler animals is still very strong (I think humans did not evolve large brains because otherwise the pain was not strong enough). I also think that our ability to manage pain slighly reduces the impact of our having the ability to suffer more strongly and with more variety. But I give, for sanity check reasons, priority to the desires of "more complex" animals, like humans.

Due to our technical ability we can now produce supplements for micronutrient which are missing or insufficently available in plants[1], and so I see health concerns resolved. So all the pain and death that I would inflict would only be there for greated enjoyment of food. Although I love the taste of meat and animal products, the comparative enjoyment is not big enough that I would kill for it. That I can enjoy plant-based foods is partly based upon my not being afraid of using my kitchen, and having a good vegan/vegetarian self-service restaurant 100m from my apartment.

And than there are the environmental reasons, and the antibiotic use, etc. etc. They count, and might be even sufficent on their own, but I'll only investigate those in case my other concerns/reasons were invalidated.

[1] There is vegan vit B12, vit D3, EPA/DHA (omega3), and creatin powder.

What do you enjoy most in software development, and why are you going to be looking for a job again soon? What's your dream SW dev job?

Cannot really answer what I enjoy most; I like almost every job that comes up, with only a few exceptions. I hate repeating myself, and I hate having to do things in a ... ... ... way against my better judgement. I prefer to work more time (as in effort and calender time) doing the architecture/design/coding parts, but I also prefer doing other stuff once in a while more than being purely a lonely coder.

I will give my notice in a few hours, so I'll than search for a new job. I will have two months time for that, though, and maybe I take some time off before starting in a new company. I'll end this job because neither one of money, project nor team is good enough to make me happy, and the job market for software developers allows for searching for improved conditions.

My dream SW job would involve writing open source software which somehow tangibly improves the lives of some people (think better medical DAq and analysis instead of the newest photo sharing app), working with a team where competence and respect is wide-spread, as is friendlyness, and pay which is not worse than I what I got when I was still failing to drop out of college. Sadly, I do not think such a job exists, especially not for people like me (who do not have the necessary skills for anything fancy).

Similar experience, and not much of real advice. I mostly solve it by setting up obligations by myself. However, I revert to this only for stuff that is important. Examples:

I've announced and discussed doing some boring accounting and controlling for the hackerspace, and people now expect some specific results.

On anothor note, instead of procrastinating about finding a better workplace, I gave my notice. Once I was out of the job, I simply had to start looking.

Finally, I do not need to be perfect. More people than I expected have the odd day or two during the workweek, and knowing this I have reset my expectations regarding my own performance to something more humane.

I'm sorry to have not answered for so long, I had some busy weeks.

Depression: I'd suffered many months from a depression bad enough that I was not able to work the hours of a part-time job, let alone achieve any acceptable performance. I was using alcohol as replacement for other diluted variants of H2O. This was also not the first time of being depressed, and needless to say, such things can fuck up your life, and are generally not very desirable.

I recovered as well as I think possible: I feel well. I can work. I enjoy, and can concentrate on stuff that piques my interest. I feel secure enough to make plans spanning more than two days, and expect to be somewhere between OK and very good for the forseeable future. For most measures, I am now better functioning, healthier (physically and emotionally) than the average person.

The sword of Damokles being that the next episode might break through my defenses so fast that I break down. Again. If I remember correctly, there is a four in five chance there will be one. I do not worry about that, though.

Therapy: The most useful part of my therapy was the judicious choice of some small things to work on, and the frequent feedback from an outsider. Also, never underestimate by how much a therapist approaches problems differently than a damaged brain.

On my own I would either not do anything, and hate myself for it, or try something, and hate myself for failing (again), or do something, and hate myself for spending energy on such a worthless, embarassingly tiny task. It was primarily option one.

It took some months, but through repeated experience I came to accept slight progress as progress nevertheless, and many of the tasks I was given to do integrate very nicely into everday activities now. I learned about saying "Well done!" to myself. I also learned about building habits, not as in 'scientist', but but applied to my own life. I also made it through some setbacks, faster and better than in the past years, so there is the chance that I actually learned something useful.

Last but not least, after a severe and sudden setback about two months or so, my therapist set me up with a psychiatrist to get some nice pills. A few days later I slept better than for the last ten years. Sleep is great. Everybody should get some.

Well, I've been on the same dose for the past 8 years (set by my original endocrinologist and carried forward by all doctors since, who've basically shrugged and said "ehh, worked so far"). Last time I had my testosterone levels checked they were on the high end of normal, which suits me fine. I have a fairly high sex drive, which you might expect, but very low aggression, which you might not - although I've always been a very passive and non-aggressive person. So I guess to answer your question, I haven't really explored different amounts. I don't particularly plan to in the future, if for no other reason than I've been on my current dose long enough to self-identify with the range of behaviours it produces.

Shortening telomeres are a red herring. You need multiple generations of a mammal not having telomerase before you get premature ageing, and all the research you've heard about where they 'reversed ageing' with telomerase was putting it back into animals that had been engineered to lack it for generations. Plus lack of telomerase in most of your somatic cells is one of your big anti-cancer defenses.

Much more of a problem is things like nuclear pores never being replaced in post-mitotic cells (they're only replaced during mitosis) and slowly oxidizing and becoming leaky, extracellular matrix proteins having a finite lifetime, and all kinds of metabolic dysregulation and protein metabolism issues.

This isn't exactly my field, but there's a few interesting actual lines of research I've seen. One is an apparent reduction in protein-folding chaperone activity with age in many animals from C. elegans to humans [people LOVE C. elegans for ageing studies because they can enter very long-lived quiescent phases in their life cycle, and there are mutations with very different lifespans]. People still aren't quite sure what that means or where it comes from.

There's lots of interest in caloric restriction still, with many organisms switching between high-fertility shorter-lifespan and loger-lifespan lower-fertility states, but with actual mechanisms quite up in the air and there being serious questions as to if it actually happens in primates at all.

That paper a year or two back where some people claimed to double mouse lifespans with buckyballs dissolved in olive oil has my attention. Nobody including me actually believes the results, not least because their experimental design and data storage/presentation was an absolute unmitigated mess, but their biological evidence of massive antioxidant effects from the buckyballs (numbers of oxidative molecules neutralized far in excess of the numbers of buckyballs) was interesting and possibly even true. You can bet there are a couple labs around Europe trying to replicate the results that we will hear back from in a few years. If it does actually have an effect I would expect far less of an effect in animals that are less metabolically frenetic than mice, which can metabolize a tenth of their body weight per day.

If I had to actually give advice though it would come from rather more prosaic sources than molecular biology. It would say get the hell up and moving fairly often, get sleep on a regular schedule and don't expose yourself to blue light after sunset, don't eat refined sugar, have friends you can rely on, and don't take strong medicines when you don't absolutely have to. And get cheap genetic tests when you can since they can tip you off about low-frequency high-impact things.

The dreaded answer: 'Well, it depends..."

The genetic code - the relationship between base triplets in the reading frame of a messenger RNA and amino acids that come out of the ribosome that RNA gets threaded through – is at least as ancient as the most recent common ancestor of all life and is almost universal. There are living systems that use slightly different codons though – animal and fungal mitochondria, for example, have a varied lot of substitutions, and ciliate microbes have one substitution as well. If you were to move things back and forth between those systems, you would need to change things or else there would be problems.

If you avoid or compensate for those weird systems, you can move reading frames wherever you want and they will produce the same primary protein sequence. The interesting part is getting that sequence to be made and making sure it works in its new context.

At the protein level, some proteins require the proper context or cofactors or small molecules to fold properly. For example, a protein that depends on disulfide bonds to hold itself in the correct shape will never fold properly if it is expressed inside a bacterium or in the cytosol of a eukaryotic cell – it has to contain the destination-tag that causes it to be secreted into the membrane-bound spaces of the ER compartment that are kept as an oxidizing environment where such bonds can form.

At the translation level, eukaryotes and eubacteria have developed divergent methods for bringing the RNA and ribosome together, and keeping the RNA stable. Eukaryotes automatically add a chemically modified 'cap' to the front end of all RNAs they make, and require the presence of a particular sequence after the reading frame that allows everything after that point to get chopped off and replaced with a bunch of As (which the ubiquitous RNA-destroying enzymes mostly ignore). Proteins coat the poly-A, interact with cap-binding proteins, and this complex massively increases the rate at which the capped end gets fed into the ribosome. Eubacteria on the other hand do neither of these things, and a ribosome will bind to any point on the RNA that a particular ribosome-binding sequence appears allowing them to have multiple reading frames in the same RNA molecule under identical genetic control. If you don't put in all the proper elements you will still get protein but less than you could have.

There's also introns to consider. Eukaryotes cut these intervening sequences within the reading frames out, but different eukaryotes have slightly different machinery for recognizing them, so what is properly sliced out in one organism might not be in another. And if you put one into a bacterium it won't be spliced at all. We solve this by any time that you are moving things around between different systems, only moving around the processed reading frame with no introns. (Though it turns out that the presence of introns actually increases the rate of export of the RNA from the nucleus to the rest of the cell for translation because export is coupled to splicing, but it's not necessary, it just speeds it up.)

Everything said so far is actually quite easy to deal with, you just need to make sure that your favorite reading frame has the right basic elements around it for its new context. The big thing is making sure that your gene is actually expressed in its new context. You need to put in the right promoter elements upstream that bind the proteins necessary to both tag the DNA as to-be-read and anchor an RNA polymerase to actually make the transcript. In my lab we mostly just use existing promoters from other genes in yeast, but one of my labmates has actually used synthetic promoters with artificial activators around the stripped-down core of a natural promoter element to make a synthetic genetic oscillator. In animal cells people love using viral promoters because they are very strong and smaller than normal animal promoters, which can get rather large and are sometimes fragmented (especially into the introns), but normal promoters can be used too. The mileu of the cell will dictate if a certain promoter element is recognized and expressed – if the cell is making the right proteins that bind to and activate it, etc. We actually use that sometimes, putting a reading frame in front of say one of the GAL gene promoters that only turn on when you feed yeast galactose. Theres lots of post-transcriptional regulation of RNA stability too.

You also have to be careful about where you put things relative to other genes and other chromosomal features. If you put a transgene too close to a eukaryotic centromere (attachment point for fibers that pull chromosomes apart during cell division) it will not be expressed because the centromere condenses and silences DNA around it for quite a distance. If you stick two small promoter elements driving genes right next to each other, they can interact and wind up affecting each other's expression (I've been having problems with this in my yeast). If you stick two genes very close to each other (second promoter right after the first reading frame) in series reading in the same direction on the DNA, unless you add a good 'terminator' element between them that makes the RNA polymerase fall off before it reads over the promoter of the second gene, the second gene's expression can be somewhat suppressed because reading through its promoter keeps knocking off the proteins necessary to launch another polymerase down it.

On top of all these things, there are all kinds of dirty tricks that are rare but existent, like a gene in yeast where the 3-base reading frame suddenly stutters one base over halfway through the gene due to a 'pseudoknot' structure the RNA folds up into combined with a very rare codon that takes a long time to translate, letting the RNA slip one base over within the ribosome to a more common faster-translating codon before it actually reads the slow one. An individual gene probably doesn't use such a dirty trick but they are around and if one exists you can bet some virus somewhere uses it – they do horrifying things with their nucleic acids to pack in overlapping genes or genes that make different things in different circumstances.

edit: that 'dirty trick' is sort of a special case of a wider-seen thing, where the relative concentration of different tRNA adapter molecules that constitute the actual mechanics of the genetic code affects how quickly different proteins are translated. Even in different organisms with the same code, two synonymous codons might have very different levels of the tRNA adapters in the cell and one could be translated a lot faster than the other in one organism. Sometimes we codon-optimize genes for particular organisms so that the gene is more efficient, but that can get expensive and sometimes it has bad side effects: our lab did that with the firefly luciferase gene that makes a luminescent protein, and it turned out that when it was translated extremely fast parts of the protein that normally folded independently one at a time interacted and folded together, screwing up its function.

In the end, what we always wind up doing is simplifying things. If you need to move things between very different contexts you strip a gene down to its uninterrupted reading frame and move that around with promoter elements and translation-enhancing elements appropriate to its new context. You make sure you have nice terminators and a little space between things. And try to insert things into known locations that you know work rather than randomly. Artificial regulation of a gene rather than using a natural promoter often leads to coarsely controlled expression because it hasn't been optimized with all the subtle tricks, but you can almost always get them to work.

There are always surprises though. Otherwise it wouldn't be research.

What are you working on at google?

ngx_pagespeed and mod_pagespeed. They are open source modules for nginx and apache that rewrite web pages on the fly to make them load faster.

How much do you earn?

$195k/year, all things considered. (That's my total compensation over the last 19 months, annualized. Full details: http://www.jefftk.com/money)

How much do you give, and to where?

Last year Julia and I gave a total of $98,950 to GiveWell's top charities and the Centre for Effective Altruism. (Full details: http://www.jefftk.com/donations)

I've added an update to that post: http://www.jefftk.com/p/citric-acid

I ended up ordering malic and fumaric acids as well. I like the malic acid a lot, but the fumaric acid is really hard to taste. Not being soluble in water it just sits on the tongue being slightly sour. I probably just haven't found the right use for it yet.

Hi Anatoly,

Initially it was a shock to my wife, but I took things very slowly as far as dropping practices. This helped a lot and basically I do whatever I want now (3.5 years later). Also transferred my kids to a good public school out of yeshiva. My wife remains nominally religious, it might take another 10 years :)

My kids don's speak Russian - my wife is American-born. I prefer English myself, so I'm not "unhappy" about them not speaking Russian in particular although I'd prefer them to be bilingual in general. They read a bit of Hebrew.

I'm happy to discuss my HFA kid via PM.

Modern NLP (Natural Language Processing) uses statistical methods quite a bit - http://nlp.stanford.edu/fsnlp/

It's still functioning to some extent-- I'll be at Arisia next weekend. As far as I can tell, I'm neglecting the website because of depression and inertia.

I'm not sure I entirely understand the question. I'll try to give a history in three stages

1) Roughly, the earliest stages of philosophy were mathematics, and attempts at reductive, systematic accounts of the natural world. This was going on pretty broadly, and only by virtue of some surviving doxographers do we have the impression that Greece was at the forefront of this practice (I'm thinking of the pre-Socratic greek philosophers, like Thales and Anaxagoras and Pythagoras). It was everywhere, and the Greeks weren't particularly good at it. This got started with the Babylonians (very little survives), and when the Assyrian empire conquered Babylon (only to be culturally subjugated to it), they spread this practice throughout the Mediterranean and near-east. Genesis 1 is a good example of a text along these lines.

2) After the collapse of the Assyrians, locals on the frontiers of the former empire (like Greece and Israel) reasserted some intellectual control, often in the form of skeptical criticisms or radically new methodologies (like Parmenides very important arguments against the possibility of change, or the Pythagorean claim that everything is number). Socrates engaged in a version of this by eschewing questions of the cosmos and focusing on ethics and politics as independent topics. Then came Plato, and Aristotle, who between them got the western intellectual tradition going. I won't go into how, for brevity's sake.

3) After Plato and Aristotle, a flurry of philosophical activity overwhelmed the Mediterranean (including and especially in Alexandria), largely because of the conquests of Alexander and the active spread of Greek culture (a rehash of the thing with the Assyrians). This period is a lot like ours now: widespread interest in science, mathematics, ethics, political theory, etc. Many, many people were devoted to these things, and they produced more work in a given year during this period than every that had come before combined. But as a result of the sheer volume of this work, and as a result of the fact that it was built on the shoulders of Plato and Aristotle, very little of it really stands out. As a result, a lot was lost.

I feel overworked, desperate, and very happy.

The desperation: This is a very hard field to work in, psychologically, because there's no reliable process for producing valuable work (this might be true generally, but I get the sense that in the sciences it's easier to get moving in a worthwhile direction). It's not rare that I doubt that anything I'm writing is valuable work. Since I'm at the (early) dissertation stage, these kinds of big picture worries play an important daily role.

The overwork: This is exacerbated by the fact that I have a family. I have much more to do than I can do, and I often have to cut something important. I grade papers on a 3 min per page clock, and that almost feels unethical. I just recently got a new dissertation advisor who wants to see work every two weeks.

The happy: I have a family! It makes this whole thing much, much easier. Most of my problem with being a grad student in the before time was terrible loneliness. Some people do well under those conditions, but I didn't. Also, I do philosophy, which is like happiness distilled. When everyone is uploaded, and science is complete, and a billion years or so have gotten all the problems and needs and video games and recreational space travel out of our system, we'll all settle into that activity that makes life most worth living: talking about the most serious things in the most serious way with our friends. That's philosophy, and I'm very happy to be able to do it even if I don't get a job out of it.

I haven't published anything, but someone recently footnoted me in an important journal. Small victories. I have a paper I'd like to publish, but it's a back-burner project. As to my career, I will take literally anything they can give me, so long as I can be around my family (my wife is a philosopher too, so we need to both get jobs somewhere close). Odds are long on this, so my work has to be good.

I see it more as introducing a trivial inconvenience which keeps people I know in real life generally away from my (often frank) online postings. In some sense it's just psychological, since by nature I am a very reticent person and it makes me feel like I can jot out opinions and get feedback without having to agonize over it. (That's also why I'm not necessarily comfortable directly listing out personal details which could probably be inferred/collected from what I write.)

As someone who feels the same way, forestalling that possibility/making it take effort to identify me is somewhat worth it. And there's a substantial possibility that it won't take that long from development of programs-which-can-recognize to development of programs-that-can-hide.

Maybe you can give some common misconceptions about how people recover from / don't recover from their addictions? That's the sort of topic you tend to hear a lot of noise about which makes it tough to tell the good information from the bad.

I'm not sure if these are misconceptions, but here are some general thoughts on recovery:

1. Neural genetics probably matters a lot. I don't know what to do with this, but I think neuroscience and genetics will produce huge breakthroughs in treatment of addiction in the next 20 years. People like me will probably be on the sidelines for this big change.
2. People who feel coerced into entering counseling will almost certainly relapse, and they'll relapse faster and harder compared to people who enter willingly. However...
3. ...this doesn't make coercion totally pointless--counselors can plant the seeds of a sincere recovery attempt, and give clients the mental tools to recognize their patterns.
4. People who willingly enter counseling still usually relapse, multiple times. The people who keep coming back after a relapse stand a much better chance of getting to a high level of functioning. People who reenter therapy every time they relapse will usually succeed eventually. (I realize this is almost a tautology.)
5. Clients with other diagnosed disorders are much less likely to fully recover.)

Do you have any thoughts on wireheading?

Wireheading is somewhat fuzzy as a term.... The extreme form (being converted into "Orgasmium") seems like it would be unappealing to practically everyone who isn't suicidally depressed (and even for them it would presumably not be the best option in a transhuman utopia in which wireheading is possible.)

I think a modest version of wireheading (changing a person's brain to raise their happiness set point) will be necessary if we want to bring everyone up to an acceptable level happiness.

Have you tried any 19th/20th century reactionary authors?

I've read a lot of excerpts and quotes, but not many full books. I read a large part of one of Carlyle's books and one late 19th Century travelogue of the United States which Moldbug approvingly linked to. (I've read a fair amount of Nietzsche's work, but I think calling him a reactionary is a bit like calling the Marquis de Sade a "libertarian.")

The one concept from Nietzsche I see everywhere around me in the world is ressentiment. I think much of the master-slave morality stuff was too specific and now feels dated 130 years later, but ressentiment is the important core that's still true and going to stay with us for a while; it's like a powerful drug that won't let humanity go. Ideological convictions and interactions, myths and movements, all tied up with ressentiment or even entirely based on it. And you're right, I would have everyone read Nietzsche - not for practical advice or predictions, but to be able, hopefully, to understand and detect this illness in others and especially oneself.

Why are you pessimistic about the future?

I worry about a regression to the historical mean (Malthusian conditions, many people starving at the margins) and existential risk. I think extinction or return to Malthusian conditions (including Robin Hanson's hardscrabble emulation future) are the default result and I'm pessimistic about the potential of groups like MIRI.

What are your practical issues about the Seasteading Institute?

As I see it, the main problem with SI is their over-commitment to small-size seastead designs because of their commitment to the principle of "dynamic geography." The cost of small-seastead designs (in complexity, coordination problems, additional infrastructure) will be huge.

I don't think dynamic geography is what makes seasteading valuable as a concept. The ability to create new country projects by itself is the most important aspect. I think large seastead designs (or even land-building) would be more cost-effective and a better overall direction.

My major issue is that even if everything else works, governments are unlikely to tolerate real challenges to their authority.

I've always thought the risk from existing governments isn't that big. I don't think governments will consider seasteading to be a challenge until/unless governments are losing significant revenues from people defecting to seasteads. By default, governments don't seem to care very much about things that take place outside of their borders. Governments aren't very agent-y about considering things that are good for the long term interests of the government.

Seasteads would likely cost existing governments mainly by people attracting revenue-producing citizens away from them and into seasteads, and it will take a long time before that becomes a noticeable problem. Most people who move to seasteads will still retain the citizenship of their home country (at least in the beginning), and for the US that means you must keep paying some taxes. Other than the US, there aren't a lot of countries that have the ability to shut down a sea colony in blue water. By the time the loss of revenue becomes institutionally noticeable, the seasteads are likely to be too big to easily shut down (i.e. it would require a long term deployment and would involve a lot of news footage of crying families being forced onto transport ships).

What political theories, if any, do you find plausible?

I like the overall meta-political ethos of seasteading. I think any good political philosophy should start with accepting that there are different kinds of people and they prefer different types of governments/social arrangements.You could call this "meta-libertarianism" or "political pluralism."

How hard it is depends on what kind of meetup you’re running, in may case it’s very easy. The Brussels group is more of a social gathering. We start of with a topic for the day but go on wild tangents/play board games and generally just have fun. The only things I ever needed to do as an organizer were: pick a topic for the meetup, post the meetup on the site, arrive on time, make new members feel welcome and manage the mailing list. When I started out I honestly didn't have any expectations on how hard it would be, I had no idea how they would turn and had decided to just run with whatever happened.

Once the meetup had a core group of regulars some of them offered to help and I could delegate the stuff I’m not very good at (like the meetup posts on LW and coming up with topics) These days the only things I feel I have to do are put in an extra effort to involve new members and keep the atmosphere friendly (which, in two years of meetups, has only once been a problem, LW’ers are generally great people) and those are things I would do anyway.

I know there are other meetups were the organizer has more responsibility. For example, if you have a system where every month another person gives a short presentation you have to manage that as well. For larger groups (Brussels rarely has more then 4 people) an official moderator type person might be handy to make sure quieter people get a chance to speak up. There is no one “right” way to run a meetup, see why people enjoy coming to yours and try and make that part as awesome as you can. Just keep an open mind about trying new things every now and then.

In short, how hard it is to run a meetup depends the type (social, exercise focused, presentations, etc.) In my case, it’s very easy especially since I have other helping me out. If you’re thinking on starting one yourself don’t worry to much about what type you want it to be, just see how the first few meeting go and it'll point itself out from there.

Improving skills is about deliberate practice, objective analysis (either by yourself or a teacher), and evaluating and fixing your weaknesses. I've been able to improve every skill I've tried with this method.

I consider myself exceptionally good at creating metal music (playing guitar, vocals, recording/mixing/production), and I'm getting pretty good at weight lifting. I am beginning to develop the skill of computer programming, which I expect to take to that level.

For most non-career and non-pleasure skills, I generally stop at the point of diminishing returns. I've learned to cook for myself better than most restaurants, but I don't care to invest the time and energy to become a real artist with it.

Yes, but incompletely. I'll track things precisely until a habit is established, at which point I stop tracking everything and check-in every once in a while to make sure I'm still on track. Some things I keep track of consistently, such as my budget, weight lifting numbers, bodyweight, etc.

The process is different for different things. I usually start with a Google Drive spreadsheet, and then experiment with other more specific apps if they're better than spreadsheets (they rarely are). If you have any more specific questions, I'd be glad to answer them.

Do you think any part of what MIRI does is at all useful?

It now seems like a somewhat valuable research organisation / think tank. Valuable because they now seem to output technical research that is receiving attention outside of this community. I also expect that they will force certain people to rethink their work in a positive way and raise awareness of existential risks. But there are enough caveats that I am not confident about this assessment (see below).

I never disagreed with the basic idea that research related to existential risk is underfunded. The issue is that MIRI's position is extreme.

Consider the following fictive and actual positions people take with respect to AI risks in ascending order of perceived importance:

1. Someone should actively think about the issue in their spare time.

2. It wouldn’t be a waste of money if someone was paid to think about the issue.

3. It would be good to have a periodic conference to evaluate the issue and reassess the risk every year.

4. There should be a study group whose sole purpose is to think about the issue. All relevant researchers should be made aware of the issue.

5. Relevant researchers should be actively cautious and think about the issue.

6. There should be an academic task force that actively tries to tackle the issue.

7. It should be actively tried to raise money to finance an academic task force to solve the issue.

8. The general public should be made aware of the issue to gain public support.

9. The issue is of utmost importance. Everyone should consider to contribute money to a group trying to solve the issue.

10. Relevant researchers that continue to work in their field, irrespective of any warnings, are actively endangering humanity.

11. This is crunch time. This is crunch time for the entire human species. And it’s crunch time not just for us, it’s crunch time for the intergalactic civilization whose existence depends on us. Everyone should contribute all but their minimal living expenses in support of the issue.

Personally, most of the time, I alternate between position 3 and 4.

Some people associated with MIRI take positions that are even more extreme than position 11 and go as far as banning the discussion of outlandish thought experiments related to AI. I believe that to be crazy.

Extensive and baseless fear-mongering might very well cause MIRI's value to be overall negative.

How should I fight a basilisk?

Every basilisk is different. My current personal basilisk pertains measuring my blood pressure. I have recently been hospitalized as a result of dangerously high blood pressure (220 systolic, mmHg / 120 diastolic, mmHg). Since I left the hospital I am advised to measure my blood pressure.

The problem I have is that measuring causes panic about the expected result, which increases the blood pressure. Then if the result turns out to be very high, as expected, the panic increases and the next measurement turns out even higher.

Should I stop measuring my blood pressure because the knowledge hurts me or should I measure anyway because knowing it means that I know when it reaches a dangerous level and thus requires me to visit the hospital?

Can you talk about your specific field in linguistics/philology?

I've mucked about here and there including in language classification (did those two extinct tribes speak related languages?), stemmatics (what is the relationship between all those manuscripts containing the same text?), non-traditional authorship attribution (who wrote this crap anyway?) and phonology (how and why do the sounds of a word "change" when it is inflected?). To preserve some anonymity (though I am not famous) I'd rather not get too specific.

what are the main challenges?

There are lots of little problems I'm interested in for their own sake but perhaps the meta-problems are of more interest here. Those would include getting people to accept that we can actually solve problems and that we should try our best to do so, Many scholars seem to have this fatalistic view of the humanities as doomed to walk in circles and never really settle anything. And for good reason - if someone manages to establish "p" then all the nice speculation based on assuming "not p" is worthless. But many would prefer to be as free as possible to speculate about as much as possible.

Do you have a stake/an opinion in the debates about the Chomskian strain in syntax/linguistics in general?

Yes. I think the Chomskyan approach is based on a fundamentally mistaken view of cognition, akin to "good old fashioned artificial intelligence". I hope to write a top-level post on this at some point. But I'll say this for Chomsky: He's not a walk-around-in-circles obscurantist. He's a resolutely-march-ahead kind of guy. A lot of the marching was in the wrong direction, but still, I respect that.

What's the best programming language to learn in order to get a job?

Eh, depends on what sort of job.

In my line of work, Python or maybe Ruby — they're both widely used by major employers, and particularly for automation tools.

But Java if you want to write for business computing; C# if you want to write for Windows; Objective-C if you want to write for the Mac or iGizmos; PHP if you want Great Cthulhu to rise from his tomb at R'lyeh. And Perl, Python, or Ruby and a smattering of shellscript if you want to do systems stuff.

it's too bad there isn't an "ask everyone who works in tech" thread or somesuch

You could start one.

I think it would be a very good idea to analyse what you're doing, and probably valuable to have some transcripts of sessions-- what you think you're do may not be what you actually do.

Do you teach in person? By phone? I'm wondering how much you use subtle clues to find out what your student is thinking.

Never tried it.

I'm not sure, but one of the techniques that seems most salient to me is breadth-first search. Partly this is to hold off on proposing solutions. Take just a little bit longer to look at the problem and gather data before generating hypotheses. The second part is to find cheap tests to disprove your hypotheses instead of going farther down the path that an early hypothesis leads. Folks who use depth-first search, building up a large tree of hypotheses first or going down a long path of possible tests and fixes, seem more likely to get stuck.

I also really like troubleshooting out loud with colleagues who aren't afraid to contradict each other. Generating lots of hypotheses and quickly disconfirming most of them can quickly narrow down on the problem. "Okay, maybe the cause is a bad data push. But if that were so, it would be on all the servers, not just the ones in New York, because the data push logs say the push succeeded everywhere. But the problem's just in New York. So it's not the data push."

becomes wildly curious

Since you posted above that you're participating in the AMA, can you give some details of this plan? (Assuming step one isn't "tell people about this plan", in which case please don't end the world just because you precommitted to answering questions.)

This post reminds me of Denethor saying the Ring was only to be used in utmost emergency at the bitter end

Insert pun on the phrase 'ignite the Singularity'.

I estimate time value of various things often, yes.

Depends on what you mean by new: I elaborated on some of my core ideas about the field in the blog posts Why edugames don't have to suck, Videogames will revolutionize school (not necessarily the way you think), and also touched upon their role in society in Doing Good in the Addiction Economy. My thoughts have gotten somewhat more precise, but off-hand I can't think of any major recent insights that I wouldn't have mentioned in those posts.

On the topic of the educational game that I'm doing for my Master's Thesis, I'm making slow but sure progress.

Hmm. I haven't really looked into any actual funding agencies or the "getting money for this" side at this point, so I don't know much about that, but I can think of some researchers who might either have an interest in collaborating, or who could know more direct sources of funding. Two groups that come to mind who might be worth contacting in this regard are GAPS and Institute of Play. I'll let you know if I think of any others. (If you do contact them, I'd be curious to hear about the response.)

What is the intended audience for this game? Why, do you think, people will play it?

At heart, utilitarianism feels like what you get when you ask yourself, "would I rather see few people hurt than many, many people happy rather than few, and how important do I think that to be", answer "I'd rather see few people hurt, rather see many people happy, and this is important", and then apply that systematically. Or if you just imagine yourself as having one miserable or fantastic experience, and then ask yourself what it would be like to have that experience many times over, or whether the impact of that experience is at all diminished just because it happens to many different people. Basically, utilitarianism feels like applied empathy.

First, I want people in computer vision and NLP to actually look at the data sets their algorithms apply to. Ask a physicist to tell you some facts about physical reality, and they will rattle off a lengthy list of concepts, like conservation of energy, isotropy of spacetime, Ohm's law, etc etc. As a vision scientist to tell you some things about visual reality, and my guess is they won't have much to say. Sure, a vision scientist can talk a lot about algorithms, machine learning techniques, feature sets, and other computational tools, but they can't tell you much about what's actually in the images. The same problem is true with NLP people to a lesser degree; they can talk about parsing algorithms and optimization procedures for finding MaxEnt parameters, but they can't tell you much about the actual structure of text.

So, yes, I expect the approach to produce new techniques, but not because it supplies some kind of new mathematical framework. It suggests a new set of questions.

I think the main reason is that basically nobody in the wider world talks about LW, and RW is the only place that talks about LW even that much. And RW can't reasonably be called very interested in LW either (though many RW regulars find LW annoying when it comes to their attention). Also, we use the word "rational", which LW thinks of as its own - I think that's a big factor.

From my own perspective: RW has many problems. The name is a historical accident (and SkepticWiki.com/org is in the hands of a domainer). Mostly it hasn't enough people who can actually write. It's literally not run by anyone (same way Wikipedia isn't), so is not going to be fixed other than organically. Its good stuff is excellent and informative, but a lot of it isn't quite fit for referring outside fresh readers to.

It surprises me how popular it is (as in, I keep tripping over people using a particular page they like - Alexa 21,000 worldwide, 8800 US - and Snopes uses us a bit) - it turns out there's demand for something that can set out "no, actually, that's BS and here's why, point for point". Raising the sanity waterline does in fact also involve dredging the swamps and cleaning up toxic waste spills. Every time we have a fundraiser it finishes ridiculously quickly ('cos our expenses are literally a couple thousand dollars a year). We have readers who just love us.

On balance, though, I do think RW makes the world a better place rather than a worse one. (Or, of course, I wouldn't bother.)

FWIW, there's a current active discussion on What RW Is For, which I expect not to go anywhere much.

I'm not sure I could reasonably steelman LW opposition to RW as if either were a monolith and there were no crossover (which simply isn't the case). I will note that RW is piss-insignificant, and if you're spending any time whatsoever worrying what RW thinks of LW then you're wasting precious seconds.

(The discussion of RW on LW actually came up on the LW and RW Facebook groups this morning too.)

Because RW sucks at actually being rational. Rather they seem to have confused being "rational" with supporting whatever they perceive to be the official scientific position. Whereas LW has a number of contrarian positions, most notably cryonics and the Singularity, where it is widely believed the mainstream position is likely wrong and their argument for it is just silly.

My answer may be a bit generic :-)

Re: Wikipedia - This is pretty well-trodden ground, in terms of (a) people coming up with explanations (b) having little evidence as to which of them hold. There's all manner of obvious systemic problems with Wikipedia (maybe the easy stuff's been written, the community is frequently toxic, the community is particularly harsh to newbies, etc) but the odd thing is that the decline in editing observed since 2007 has also held for wikis that are much younger than English Wikipedia - which suggests an outside effect. We're hoping the Visual Editor helps, once it works well enough (at present it's at about the stage of quality I'd have expected; I can assure you that everyone involved fully understands that the Google+-like attempt to push everyone into using it was an utter disaster on almost every level). The Wikimedia Foundation is seriously interested in getting people involved, insofar as it can make that happen.

As for LessWrong ... it's interesting reading through every post on the site (not just the Sequences) from the beginning in chronological order - because then you get the comments. You can see some of the effect you describe. Basically, no-one had read the whole thing yet, 'cos it was just being written.

I'm not sure it was easier for beginners at all. Remember there was only "main" for the longest time - and it was very scary to write for (and still is). Right now you can write stuff in discussion, or in various open threads in discussion.

Will have you ever had an encounter with the divine?

This has been written about by Julia Wise at Giving Gladly, and others.

Two relevant considerations are:

• Major self-sacrifice tends to be unsustainable, leading to burnout.
• If an EA makes him or herself miserable, he or she is likely to repel bystanders, reducing other people's interest in being EAs.

Giving What We Can has set donating 10% of one's income as a threshold for membership. There's a historical precedent of this level of giving being sustainable for many people, coming from tithing practices in religion.

As for higher percentages: roughly speaking, it seems that marginal returns diminish very rapidly beyond $100k/year, so that one can give everything beyond that without substantially sacrificing quality of life. There are reasons why more can help: for example, to save extra money on the contingency that one is unemployed, or to be able to take care of many children. But I think that the level of sacrifice involved would be acceptable for many people. If one is living in an area with low cost of living, or doesn't want children, one can often live on a lot less than $100k/year without sacrificing quality of life.

This really depends on the field. My experiences are probably only relevant to about 1% of software projects out there - there's a lot of software in the world.

That said, in terms of Cloud vs. Local - definitely not. Most large (and small!) companies we've worked with use AWS. We also highly recommend Heroku/AWS to all our customers as the easiest and least expensive way to get started on building a custom application.

Of course, there are a lot of places where cloud still doesn't make sense. We have one client who has custom software deployed in hospitals, where all of the infrastructure is of course local to their site, not in any kind of cloud. But for the majority of people who don't have such a use case, everyone understands that cloud makes everything easier.

So, we're what's called a "Professional Services" firm. This term is usually used when talking about e.g. Accountants, Lawyers, etc, but is just as relevant for a Software Consultancy. I'll go a little into the idea behind professional services firms in general, then get back to talking about us in particular.

There are many, many different types of Professional Services firms, but the basic business model is usually the same - you're selling your time for money, and people pay because of your expertise and experience in the field.

But here's where large firms make their real money: the firm gets projects based on the expertise and experience of the "managing partners", and then a combination of the managing partners and juniors perform the actual work. For example, a law office will win a contract because of their experience and the expertise of its "Name Partners", and they'll charge let's say $500 an hour for an hour of Partner time. But they'll also charge $450 an hour for an Associate lawyer. The firm pays huge salaries for the name partners, so they're basically not making any profit there. But they pay tiny salaried to the Associates, for a large profit.

This is called "leverage". This is how a professional services firm grows and makes a profit - leveraging the skills and reputation of key, highly payed employees, to sell the work of lower-payed employees.

Most Professional Services firms can be placed on a moving scale as to how much expertise vs. leverage they have. An example of a highly skilled "firm" - a team of brain surgeons. They're basically paid amazingly well, and have minimal leverage. An example of a consultancy with a lot of leverage - a company that builds websites for restaurants. Building a website for a restaurant is 90% repetitive work that can be given to junior employees, with senior employees focused on finding work and growing the reputation of the business.

So where do we fit in all this? In our case, as a rather small firm, we're mostly on the "expertise" side of the equation. We have a few people in the company, and we're all very experienced Software Devs. Companies hire us for consulting based on our experience, and for development because we get things done quickly and well.

Of course, the founders of our firm (myself and 2 partners) are much more experienced than most of our employees, and as we grow, that gap will continue to grow as we take on more junior programmers who need more training, but are underappreciated by the market and just need someone to give them an opportunity and teach them the ropes.

So there's an answer about the basic business model of a Professional Services firm in general. I didn't go into any of the specific of a Software shop in particular, but there's a lot to say about that as well, e.g., there are 100's of niches of Software dev shops - are you targetting large companies or small? Startups? Tech-savvy customers? People who want software projects? Putting people on-site at a customer's company? Each one of these niches is very, very different, and it's a fascinating topic for me at least, since 2 years ago before starting this company, I would never have realised how different all these niches truly are, or even that they exist.

Wandering Son (Hōrō Musuko)

Personal reasons: the story's relevant to my own and in a genre I don't normally pay much attention to, which might be why it stands out over other possible candidates (e.g. Puella Magi Madoka☆Magica). Also, by choosing an artsy show that tackles a serious dramatic subject, full of tragedy (and qbrfa'g erfbyir rirelguvat arngyl at the end), I sound more intellectual.

Psuedo-objective reasons: I feel it accurately captures the feelings of childhood and growing up. I particularly liked the portrayal of the sibling relationship, where you hate each other on a level that's superficial but no less genuine for that, but will stand by each other when you discover things the other really cares about. The conclusion also felt very true-to-life. I liked the visual style; the character designs are much more realistic than the animé norm (and for viewers who find it hard to tell them apart, serve as a demonstration of the valid reasons for the animé norm), and the whole setting and story feels like something you could do in live action. But at the same time this would be completely impossible to produce in live action, for a different reason than normal (child actors and ethical issues), so it shows off the ability of animé to do what other media can't. The slightly washed-out, watercolour visual style is distinctive, even among animé - but it's like that for a reason, the uncertain, blurry visuals aligning perfectly with the emotions this series is trying to convey. Likewise the light, childish-sounding soundtrack is distinctive - but it's not just style for the sake of style, it fits with the show as a whole.

Practical notes: I prefer the 11-episode (rather than 12-episode) release. I've avoided describing the premise because it's an episode 1 spoiler; if you think you'd like the show from this description I recommend watching it (or at least watching episode 1) rather than seeking out more information.

Yes

In general online commenting is something I do out of habit. Higher return on time than completely passive media consumption such as watching TV but not that I book under time spent with maximum returns.

I generally think that a shift to massive information consumption of content via TV/radio in the 20st century was something that's bad for the general discourse of ideas in society. Active engagment helps learning.

I also prefer it over chatting in venues such as IRC, because it provides it provides deeper engagement with ideas and leaves more of a footprint. Created content is findable afterwards.

Lesswrong is also a choice to keep me intellecutally grounded. These days I do spent plenty of time thinking in mental frameworks that are not based on reductionist materalism. I do see value of being pretty flexible about changing the map I use to navigate the world and I don't want to lose access to the intellectual way of thinking.

In total I however spent more time than optimal on LW and frequently use it to procrastinate on some other task.

The quality of discourse in Russian LJ depends almost entirely on your immediate circle of readers. Incredible stupidity and mendacity happily coexist with fantastic blogs and interesting debates. The number and density of the latter has gone down over the years, but then again, blogging as a phenomenon has.

It comes down to this: the main reason I blog on LJ in Russian because I still have lots and lots of readers there who are smarter and knowledgeable than me in the many different areas I'm interested in. There's no single place I can blog or write in English that would give me as much, and as useful, feedback (and that certainly includes LW).

Why would someone down vote me without commenting as to why? Why would my question warrant a down vote anyway?

I was born here, and I never lived anywhere else (longer than two weeks). I dislike travelling, and I feel uncomfortable speaking another language (it has a cognitive cost, so I feel I sound more stupid than I would in my language). Generally, I dislike changes -- I should probably work on that, but this is where I am now.

I could also provide some rationalization... uhh, I have friends here, I am familiar with how the society works here, maybe I prefer being a fish in a smaller pond -- okay the last one is probably honest, too.

Well, it is sometimes difficult to be me, but I'm not sure how much of that is caused by being smart, how much by lack of some skills, and how much is simply the standard difficulty of human life. :D

Seems to me that most people around me don't care about truth or rationality. Usually they just don't comment on things outside of their kitchens; unless they are parrotting some opinion from a newspaper or a TV. That's actualy the less annoying part; I am not disappointed because I didn't expect more from them. More annoying are people who try to appear smart and do so basicly by optimizing for signalling: they repeat every conspiracy theory, share on facebook every "amazing" story without bothering to google for hoaxes or just use some basic common sense. When I am at Mensa and listen to people discussing some latest conspiracy theory, I feel like I might strangle them. Especially when they start throwing around some fully general arguments, such as: You can't actualy know anything. They use their intelligence to defeat themselves. Also, I hate religion. That's a poison of the mind; an emotional electric fence in a mind that otherwise might have a chance to become sane. -- But I suspect all countries are like this, in general. And I am lucky to live in one where people won't try to hurt me just because I say something blasphemous. Still, as is obvious from this paragraph, I feel greatly frustrated about the sanity waterline here.

Okay, specifically for Slovakia: This country used to be mostly Catholic, then it was Communist for a few decades, now it's going back to catholicism again. During the communism, the Catholics were pretty successful in recruiting many contrarians to their ranks; they pretty much told them that the search for truth is the search for God, and they associated atheism with communism (which wasn't difficult at all, since Communists used it as an applause light). I was frustrated by seeing people around me look for the truth in the supernatural, and dismissing the reality almost as a propaganda. Then there was a higher level of contrarians who dismissed also the local religion, and instead embraced buddhism or whatever. Believing in "mere reality" does not work as a signal for intelligence here.

I actually don't have a good way for dealing with it. Some time I was alone. Some time I was friendly with religious people, politely participating in their rituals, believing none of that, but enjoying the company of smart contrarians. Once or twice I tried to find some reason in Mensa, always horribly disappointed.

As a child, I was a member of the mathematical club; elementary-school students who loved math and did the mathematical olympiad. That was the best part of my life; smart activities, and no bullshit. But as we grew older, the club dissolved. -- Skip almost two frustrating decades and I found LessWrong. And I was like: "Smart and sane people again!" and "Oh shit, why do they have to be on the other side of the planet?" And since then I am trying to build a local rationalist movement, progressing very very slowly.

One thing that keeps me sane is my current girlfriend, who also reads LessWrong, and attended a CFAR minicamp with me. But she is not as enthusiastic about it as I am; and she seems to prefer good relationships with other people to being right. Maybe I am just a horrible person unable to deal with people, but the thing is I am unable to unsee the bullshit; when someone speaks bullshit, it's like a painful shrieking sound in my ears, I just can't ignore it; I can keep quiet but it still feels unpleasant.

I suspect most rational people around me cope by focusing their energy into their favorite project, and ignoring the insanity of the rest of the world. (But I may be wrong at modelling other people.) They probably can be rational in their work, and social in the rest of their lives. Maybe they are happy like that. Maybe they just don't know they could expect more (if I didn't have the unique experience of the mathematical club and of LW, probably neither would I). So this year I try to make a list of smart and sane people around me, get in contact with each of them, invite them to a local LW meetup, and give them a copy of my translation of Sequences. -- I am not sure how much should I push the LW; whether having a club of smart and sane people couldn't be enough. For me, LW is simply one level more meta: before LW I approximately knew what was and what wasn't rational, but I didn't have any arguments to win a debate. It was like a matter of feeling: this seems like a correct way to approach truth, and this feels like a way to madness. I just had the general idea that the reality is out there, and that the proper way to grasp it is to adjust my map to the territory, not the other way round. (Because that's what worked for me in mathematics.) -- Maybe my role here is to join the local smart people together. But maybe I am just projecting my desires onto them, and they are actually quite happy as they are now. This will be resolved experimentally.

Depends on the situation. Do I have to kill whatever I'm fighting, or do I just have to defend myself? If it's the former, the horse-sized duck, because duck-sized horses would be too good at running away and hiding. If it's the latter, then the duck- horses, because they'd be easier to scatter.

Is this a fist-fight or can blacktrance use weapons?

Ethics, I suppose. Most of my other interests are either probably too mindkilling for LW or are written about in the Sequences already, more clearly than I could write about them.

I'm not.

However, I happen to be a Youtopia volunteer, currently working on my own Spanish translation of HPMoR:

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9971807

I was aware of the translation you cite, but I can't remember having noticed that the translator was Colombian too. I guess that forces me to update my estimation.

Also, I should meet the guy.

I am strongly for socialism. This comes from two main points of view; 1) I think the ethical thing to do is to work together and help others as opposed to 'every man for himself'. 2) I think that 'team work' achieves more and thus it's not just about what is moral but what actually works better. One way to think of it is that we can either all buy a fire hose and a ladder- or we could pool the money together to pay for a professional team with a truck to service the town.