Open thread, Oct. 19 - Oct. 25, 2015

Luke quotes from Superforecasting on his site:

"Doug knows that when people read for pleasure they naturally gravitate to the like-minded. So he created a database containing hundreds of information sources—from the New York Times to obscure blogs—that are tagged by their ideological orientation, subject matter, and geographical origin, then wrote a program that selects what he should read next using criteria that emphasize diversity. Thanks to Doug’s simple invention, he is sure to constantly encounter different perspectives."

wishing to get his hands on this program.

Does anyone know of something similiar, or who this 'Doug' may be? I wonder if this may be as simple as simply asking this man. The book gives 'Doug Lorch' as his full name. Google gives a facebook account as first result, but I have no idea if this is an actual match.

Someone created an /r/controlproblem subreddit.

If any moderator is reading this: user denature123 has posted large quantities of ugly spammy comments; if s/he and they could be blown away, that would be nice.

The scientists encouraging online piracy with a secret codeword

What if you're a scientist looking for the latest published research on a particular subject, but you can't afford to pay for it?

...

Andrea Kuszewski, a cognitive scientist and science writer, invented the tag, which uses a code phrase: "I can haz PDF" - a play on words combining a popular geeky phrase used widely online in a meme involving cat pictures, and a common online file format.

"Basically you tweet out a link to the paper that you need, with the hashtag and then your email address," she told BBC Trending radio. "And someone will respond to your email and send it to you." Who might that "someone" be? Kuszewski says scientists who have access to journals, through subscriptions or the institutions they work at, look out for the tag so they can help out colleagues in need.

Think you have a finely callibrated and important information diet? Imagine if you had the world's strongest intelligence agency tailor the news for you. Well, you don't have to imagine, because the president's daily briefs have just been declassified. If you're interested, you can collaborate with researchers to get a better handle on it. Enjoy.

What makes a good primary care physician and how do I go about finding one?

Given the absence of a boasting thread recently. Here's a little boasting:

Helped monitor and proxy for these publically/non-internet user accessible (meaning multiple people can use and post with them through me) Reddit accounts

• https://www.reddit.com/user/Magnusoz
• https://www.reddit.com/user/fruitheart

Identified a potent research interest

• http://lesswrong.com/lw/hlc/will_the_worlds_elites_navigate_the_creation_of/a2tk

Monitored and learning from responses to my LW content as appropriate

• http://lesswrong.com/user/Clarity

Just a quick dump of what I've been thinking recently:

• A train of thought is a sequence of thoughts about a particular topic that lasts for some time, which may produce results in the form of decisions and updated beliefs.

• My work, as a technical co-founder of a software company, essentially consists of riding the right trains of thought and documenting decisions that arise during the ride.

• Akrasia, in my case, means that I'm riding the wrong train of thougt.

• Distraction means some outside stimulus that compels my mind to hop to a different train of thought that my mind is currently riding or should be riding. The stimuli can be anything: people talking to me, a news story, a sexually attractive person across the street, an advertisement, etc.

• Some train rides are long: they last for hours, days or even weeks, while some are short and last for seconds or minutes. Historically, I've done my best work on very long rides.

• Different trains of thoughts have different 'ticket costs'. Hopping to a sex-related or a politics-related train of thought is extremely cheap. Caching a big chunk of a problem into my mind requires consciois effort, and thus the ticket is more expensive. In my case, the right trains of thought are usually expensive.

• Interruptions set back the distance traveled, or, in some cases, completely reset the distance to the original departure station. Or they may switch me to a different train of thought completely, while, at the same time, depleting the resource (willpower?) that I need for boarding the correct train of thought.

• My not-so-recent decision to stop reading peoplenews has greatly reduced the number and severity of unwanted / involuntary train hops.

• My "superfocus periods", during which I'm able to ride a single right train of thought for multiple days or weeks, are mostly due to the absence of stimuli that compel my mind to jump to different, cheaper trains of thought. These periods happen when I'm away from work and sometimes from my family, which means I can safely drop my everyday duties such as showing up in the office, doing errands, replying emails, meeting people etc.

• Keeping a detailed work diary is tremendously helpful for re-boarding the right train of thought after severe interruptions / "cache wipes". I use Workflowy.

• I noticed that I'm reluctant about boarding long rides when I expect interruptions during the ride. Recent examples include reluctance about reading Bostrom's Superintelligence at home, or reluctance about 'loading' a large piece of project into my head at work, because my office iss full of programmers that ask (completely legitimate) questions about their current tasks.

It's often entertained on LessWrong that if we live in some sort of a big world, then conscious observers will necessarily be immortal in a subjective sense. The most familiar form of this idea is quantum immortality in the context of MWI, but arguably a similar sort of what I would call 'big world immortality' is also implied if, for example, we live in another sort of multiverse or in a simulation.

It seems to me that big world scenarios are well accepted here, but that a lot of people don't take big world immortality very seriously. This confuses me, and I wonder if I'm missing something. I suppose that there are good counterarguments that I haven't come across or that haven't actually been presented yet because people haven't spent that much time thinking about stuff like this. The ones I have read are from Max Tegmark, who's stated that he doesn't believe quantum immortality to be true because death is a gradual, not a binary process, and (in Our Mathematical Universe) because he doesn't expect the necessary infinities to actually occur in nature. I'm not sure how credible I find these.

So, should we take big world immortality seriously? I'd appreciate any input, as this has been bothering me quite a bit as of late and had a rather detrimental effect on my life. Note that I'm not exactly very thrilled about this; to me, this kind of involuntary immortality, that nevertheless doesn't guarantee that anyone else will survive from an observers point of view, sounds pretty horrible. David Lewis presented a very pessimistic scenario in 'How Many Lives Has Schrödinger's Cat' as well.

UN climate reports are increasingly unreadable

The climate summary findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are becoming increasingly unreadable, a linguistics analysis suggests.

IPCC summaries are intended for non-scientific audiences. Yet their readability has dropped over the past two decades, and reached a low point with the fifth and latest summary published in 2014, according to a study published in Nature Climate Change1.

The study used the Flesch Reading Ease test, which assumes that texts with longer sentences and more complex words are harder to read. Reports from the IPCC’s Working Group III, which focuses on what can be done to mitigate climate change by cutting carbon dioxide emissions, received the lowest marks for readability.

Confusion created by the writing style of the summaries could hamper political progress on tackling greenhouse-gas emissions, thinks Ralf Barkemeyer, who led the analysis and works on sustainable business management at the KEDGE Business School in Bordeaux, France. The readability scores “are not just low but exceptionally low”, he says.

I've been thinking about some of the issues with CEV. It's come up a few times that humanity might not have a coherent, non-contradictory set of values. And the question of how to come up with some set of values that best represents everyone.

It occurs to me that this might be a problem mathematicians have already solved, or at least given a lot of thought. In the form of voting systems. Voting is a very similar problem. You have a bunch of people you want to represent fairly, and you need to select a leader that best represents their interests.

My favorite alternative voting system is the Condorcet Method. Basically it compares each candidate in a 1v1 election, and selects the candidate that would have won every single election.

It is possible for there not to be a Condorcet winner. If the population has circular preferences. Candidate A > Candidate B > C > A... Like a rock paper scissors thing.

To solve this there are a number of methods developed to select the best compromise. My favorite is Minimax. It selects the candidate who's greatest loss is the least bad. I think that's the most desirable way to pick a winner, and it's also super simple.

There are some differences. Instead of a leader, we want the best set of values and policies for the AI to follow. And there might not be a finite set of candidates, but an infinite number of possibilities. And actually voting might be impractical. Instead an AI might have to predict what you would have voted, if you knew all the arguments and had much time to think about it and come to a conclusion. But I think it can still be modeled as a voting problem.

Now this isn't actually something we need to figure out now. If we somehow had an FAI, we could probably just ask it to come up with the most fair way of representing everyone's values. We probably don't need to hardcode these details.

The bigger issue is why would the person or group building the FAI even bother to do this? They could just take their own CEV and ignore everyone elses. And they have every incentive to do this. It might even be significantly simpler than trying to do a full CEV of humanity. So even if we do solve FAI, humanity is probably still screwed.

EDIT: After giving it some more thought, I'm not sure voting systems are actually desirable. The whole point of voting is that people can't be trusted to just specify their utility functions. The perfect voting system would be for each person to give a number to each candidate based on how much utility they'd get from them being elected. But that's extremely susceptible to tactical voting.

However with FAI, it's possible we could come up with some way of keeping people honest, or peering into their brains and getting their true value function. That adds a great deal of complexity though. And it requires trusting the AI to do a complex, arbitrary, and subjective task. Which means you must have already solved FAI.

Autonomous Vehicles Need Experimental Ethics: Are We Ready for Utilitarian Cars?

The wide adoption of self-driving, Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) promises to dramatically reduce the number of traffic accidents. Some accidents, though, will be inevitable, because some situations will require AVs to choose the lesser of two evils. For example, running over a pedestrian on the road or a passer-by on the side; or choosing whether to run over a group of pedestrians or to sacrifice the passenger by driving into a wall. It is a formidable challenge to define the algorithms that will guide AVs confronted with such moral dilemmas. In particular, these moral algorithms will need to accomplish three potentially incompatible objectives: being consistent, not causing public outrage, and not discouraging buyers. We argue to achieve these objectives, manufacturers and regulators will need psychologists to apply the methods of experimental ethics to situations involving AVs and unavoidable harm. To illustrate our claim, we report three surveys showing that laypersons are relatively comfortable with utilitarian AVs, programmed to minimize the death toll in case of unavoidable harm. We give special attention to whether an AV should save lives by sacrificing its owner, and provide insights into (i) the perceived morality of this self-sacrifice, (ii) the willingness to see this self-sacrifice being legally enforced, (iii) the expectations that AVs will be programmed to self-sacrifice, and (iv) the willingness to buy self-sacrificing AVs.

Thanks to Turing completeness, there might be many possible worlds whose basic physics are much simpler than ours, but that can still support evolution and complex computations. Why aren't we in such a world? Some possible answers:

1) Luck

2) Our world has simple physics, but we haven't figured it out

3) Anthropic probabilities aren't weighted by simplicity

4) Evolution requires complex physics

5) Conscious observers require complex physics

Anything else? Any guesses which one is right?

what is the future of electronics technicians? Are they a good career choice? Will their skills quickly begun obsolete due to coming hardware changes?

This blog post gives a good summary of why much of the criticism of phlogiston as a bad hypothesis is not justified.

Do people take advantage of instant run-off voting to "not throw away their vote"?

What do they do in Australia? Where else do people have such systems? I suppose I could just look up Australia, but I fear it might be hard to interpret and I’d rather hear from someone with experience of it.

I ask because the recent British Labour leadership election was very different from the last. I suspect that there was a substantial portion of the electorate who preferred, say, Abbot in 2010, but didn't vote for her because she was not viable. The whole complicated system exists to allow people to simply express their preferences and not put in the strategic voting effort of determining who is viable, but maybe it isn't doing much.

(It is definitely doing something. In 2010, 28% of the vote share went to non-viable candidates. A plurality system applied to those first round votes would have chosen David over Ed.)

More spam: someone called "lucy" is posting identical nonsense about vampires to multiple threads. Less obnoxious than denature123 yesterday, but still certainly spam.

(I've been assuming that, given that we have multiple moderators, it's better to post comments like this than to PM one or more individual moderators. I will be glad of correction from actual moderators if some other approach is better.)

Yo, mods! A mop and a bucket are needed at the forums to clean up after some script!

'Zeno effect' verified: Atoms won't move while you watch

One of the oddest predictions of quantum theory – that a system can’t change while you’re watching it – has been confirmed in an experiment by Cornell physicists.

...

Graduate students Yogesh Patil and Srivatsan K. Chakram created and cooled a gas of about a billion Rubidium atoms inside a vacuum chamber and suspended the mass between laser beams. In that state the atoms arrange in an orderly lattice just as they would in a crystalline solid.,But at such low temperatures, the atoms can “tunnel” from place to place in the lattice. The famous Heisenberg uncertainty principle says that the position and velocity of a particle interact. Temperature is a measure of a particle’s motion. Under extreme cold velocity is almost zero, so there is a lot of flexibility in position; when you observe them, atoms are as likely to be in one place in the lattice as another.

...

The researchers observed the atoms under a microscope by illuminating them with a separate imaging laser. A light microscope can’t see individual atoms, but the imaging laser causes them to fluoresce, and the microscope captured the flashes of light. When the imaging laser was off, or turned on only dimly, the atoms tunneled freely. But as the imaging beam was made brighter and measurements made more frequently, the tunneling reduced dramatically.

There is significant progress in genetic modification of humans and in physical modification/augmentation of humans. It is plausible we will have genetically modified and/or physically modified human intelligence before we have artificial intelligence.

FAI is the pursuit of artificial intelligence constrained in a way that it will not be a threat to unmodified humans. Or at least that is what it seems to be to me as an observer of discussions here, is this a reasonable description of FAI?

It occurs to me that natural human intelligence has certainly not developed with any such constraints. Indeed, if humanity can develop UAI, then that is essentially proof that human intelligence is not Friendly in the sense we wish FAI to be.

Presumably we have been more worried with how to constrain AI to be friendly because AI could learn to self-modify and experience exponential growth and thus overwhelm human intelligence. But what of modified human intelligence, genetic or physical? These ARE examples of self-modification. And they both appear to be capable of inducing exponential growth.

Is the threat from unfriendly human intelligence any less or any different, or worthy of consideration as an existential risk? If an intelligence arises from modified human, is it a threat to unmodified human, or an enhancement on it? How do we define natural and artificial when our purpose in defining it is to protect the one from the other?

I notice I boast about things without even considering if they're things others will find impressive or shameful - like not attending class. it's a bad habit not to exercise my consideration, empathy and/or theory of mind more. Reckon I've identified the right failure mode here or I'm misattributing?

Reintroducing the most meta-concept I'm aware of: integrative complexity!

Munchkining real estate http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-23/this-startup-tracks-america-s-murder-houses (I'm referring to the resellers mentioned in the article, not the actual startup covered).

• MIRI's research guide is definately overkill for interpreting it's individual papers.
• So, I have reason to believe it will be overkill for interpreting it's technical research agenda.
• Has anyone done a kind of annotation of the thing that is more amateur friendly?
• Surely it's in MIRI's best interest to make it more accessible as to compel potential benefactors to support their research?

I've finally gotten to reading a bunch of MIRI papers. I don't pretend to understand as they are meant to be understood. Can it be predicted whether a maths problem is solved, solvable, unsolved or unsolvable? I feel really...dismayed and discouraged reading through MIRI's work. I feel as though they are trying to solve questions that cannot be solved. Though, many famous maths problem go from unsolved to solved, and I struggled with high school maths so I certainly would prefer to defer to some impressive reasoning from you, my peers at LessWrong before I abandon my support for MIRI.

As any other amateur who reads Eliezer’s quantum physics sequence, I got caught up in the “why do we have the Born rule?” mystery. I actually found something that I thought was a bit suspicious (even though lots of people must have thought of it, or experimentally rejected this already.) Note that I'm deep in amateur swamp, and I'll gleefully accept any "wow, you are confused" rejections.

Here is my suggestion:

What if the universes, that we live in, are not located specifically in configuration space, but in the volume stretched out between configuration space and the complex amplitude? So instead of talking about “the probability of winding up here in configuration space is high, because the corresponding amplitude is high”, we would say “the probability of winding up here is high, because there are a lot of universes here”. And here, would mean somewhere on the line between a point in configuration space and the complex amplitude for that point. (All these universes would be exactly equal.) And then we completely remove the Born rule. Of course someone thought of this, but responds: “But if we double the amplitude in theory, the line becomes twice as long, and there would be twice as many universes. But this is not what we observe in our experiments, when we double the amplitude, the probability of finding ourselves there multiplies by four!” This is true, if you study a line between the complex amplitude peak and a point in configuration space. But you are never supposed to study a point in configuration space, you are supposed to integrate over a volume in configuration space.

Calculating the volume between the complex amplitude “surface” and the configuration space, is not like taking all the squared amplitudes of all points of the configuration space and summing them up. The reason is that, when we traverse the space in one direction and the complex amplitude changes, the resulting volume “curves”, causing there to be more volume out near the edges (close to the amplitude peak) and less near the configuration space axis.

Take a look at the following image (meant to illustrate an "amplitude volume" for a single physical property): [http://www.wolframalpha.com] , type in: ParametricPlot3D {u Sin[t], u Cos[t], t / 5}, {t, 0, 15}, {u, 0, 1}

Imagine that we’d peer down from above, looking along the property axis. If we completely ignore what happens in the view direction, the volume (the blue areas) would have the shape of circles. If we’d double the amplitude, the volume from this perspective would be quadrupled.

But as it is, what happens along the property axis matters. The stretching out causes the volume to be less than the amplitude squared. It seems that, the higher the frequency is, the closer the volume is to have a square relationship with the amplitude, while as the frequency lowers, the volume approaches a linear relationship with the frequency. Studying the two extreme cases; with frequency 0 the geometric object would be just a straight plane, with an obvious linear relationship between amplitude and volume, while with an “infinite” frequency, the geometric object would become a cylinder, with a squared relationship between volume and amplitude. This means that the overall current amplitude-configuration-space ratio is important, but as far as I know, it is unknown to us.

In a laboratory environment, where all frequencies involved are relatively low, we would see systems evolving linearly. But when we observe the outcome of the systems, and entangle them with everything else, what suddenly matters is the volume of our combined wave which has a very very high frequency.

Or does it? At this point I'm beginning to lose track and the questions starts piling up.

What happens when multiple dimensions are mixed in? I’m guessing that high-frequency/high-amplitude still approaches a squared relationship from amplitude to volume, but I’m not at all certain.

What happens over time as the universe branches, does the amplitude constantly decrease while the length and frequencies remain the same? (Causing the relationship to dilute from squared to linear?)

Note that this suggestion also implies that there really exists one single configuration space / wave function that forms our reality.

So, what do you think?

How do you feel about floating posts in the Discussion section?
Like: electing a few threads that stay at top for the month/week they are active, the open threads, the monthly media thread, etc.
Is that even possible with LW code?

I have a few questions and think the guys at LW probably can help. I'm not sure LW is the best place to ask this, but I don't really know any other place.

Many people (politicians, famous, or what-have-you) have a website and have a "contact" page. How can I write a message that will have an impact? I'm assuming that:

1. They receive a large volume of email and may not respond or even read it;
2. The mail may not be delivered to them; maybe they have someone else to take care of it for them.

Those are the things that pop out of my head right now, anything else I should double-check?

Now, if those were the preperations, now we have to get the actual cooking done. How can you make an impactful message? Something that will definitely get their attention, something they might just start thinking in the middle of the day. Something that will make them stare at the screen and make them seriously think about it. Most important of all, something that gets them to reply, and a good reply that can make the exchange continue.

I'm willing to put significant effort into this, so don't be afraid to recommend a book or two, or three.

How well can you disambiguate someone's notes to the self? I'd like to calibrate my powers of mentalisation!

Here are some hypothetical goals someone may have. For those that are a unclear or odd, would you like propose what you think they may really be saying and how you came to that conclusion. Can you even infer which of them mean what they say and which mean something secret?

I'll give you feedback, cause I generated and obfuscated the writing myself!

• Complete remaining non E3 non research units
• Fight with the lions after touring Turkey
• Apply for PhD programs in Norway, Germany or UK
• Network with intelligent Africans
• Get married and have kids in the Baltic countries
• Bush tucker tour in south and central Australia
• hair silver grey then blue
• Buy €M
• Investigate Colombian prostitution tolerance zones then Investigate post auc criminal groups (see wiki) networks, organisational structures and psyops & the office of the high counsellor for reintegration.

Not really sure where to ask but is anyone in contact with Dahlen [? · GW]? We've had a cool discussion but it stopped abruptly and they haven't posted anything for a while nor replied to PMs.

What website would you suggest for looking into medical research, for someone who's not versed in reading medical literature? I'm specifically looking for any developments or studies into the treatment of urethral strictures for my own reference.

Final Kiss of Two Stars Heading for Catastrophe

Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope, an international team of astronomers have found the hottest and most massive double star with components so close that they touch each other. The two stars in the extreme system VFTS 352 could be heading for a dramatic end, during which the two stars either coalesce to create a single giant star, or form a binary black hole.

I have a Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Facebook and Facebook Messenger apps on my mobile (iphone).

Can I streamline (reduce the number of) my apps without losing functioning?

Attention everyone excellent, in one way or another!

• What are the determinants of success for an amateur on their path to expertise in an area you are exceptional at that isn't already described accurately on Lesswrong?

• Describe a rough estimate of the variance in the success of entrants to the field that can be attributed to each determinant you identify?

No time for modesty now, you're hear to teach and learn!

Ask not what LessWrong can do for you, but what you can do for LessWrong!

Is there any work on developing brain implants or similar for pain moderation in case of sudden injury and you want to down regulate pain so you can think clearly and get help and function?

I don't feel safe knowing I have to wait for an ambulance to get access to serious pain killers and such.

It's probably best, since they are often harmful and liable to abuse, but surely someone is working on solving these issues.

The Intelligence Agent's forum looks very active. I'm glad it has taken off.

Can I solicit any reviews about anyone's experience with it so far?

The content itself is beyond me. I'm curious whether I should refer to it intermittently while still learning MIRI's research syllabus or whether the expectation is to have a command of everything before starting. I suspect the latter given the caliber of posts, but that may simply be the founder effect and unintended.

It just struck me...I have no idea about the room for more funding considerations for MIRI. Googling after it suggests that question hasn't even been seriously analysed before. Surely I'm missing something...

Why do I find nasal female voices so sexy? Even languages that emphasise nasality are sexy to me, like Chinese or French, whereas their language group companions with other linguistic similarities do not (e.g. Spanish in the case of French). Is there anything I can do to downregulate my nasal voice fetish?

has anyone tried 'happiness meditation'?

Do we know whether quantum mechanics could rule out acausal between partners outside eachother's lightcone? Perhaps it is impossible to model someone so far away precisely enough to get a utility gain out of an acuasal trade? I started thinking about this after reading this wiki article on the 'Free will theorem' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem .

Critical thinking is a responsibility for every intelligent agent, just as the benefaction of the critical thought of others ought to be a right for all sufferable life. Millions of hollocaust victims were at the mercy of men just following orders. Never again

Imperialism and a defence of inequality in capitalist republics

Who was is that first articulated the argument that: Since money flows to those can anticipate and predict the need of others, those who get power are those who can do that and therefore if those people are caring then they are the best capable of looking after the rest

And, what strong critiques are available

I'm troubleshooting my ongoing failures in sustained, romantic relationships. My social cognition is impaired, and so too is the social cognition of autistic people. With some googling about feelings of inadequacy and asperges, I found a book that documents feelings of inadequacy in asperger's men as they relate to relationships with women that proposes one conditional stimuli (women 'performing' (better in relationships) than them) to explain this phenomenon:

Men (with asperg syndrome)...may suffer feelings of inadequacy if they appear to be performing less well than the women that are around them..

I appreciated this reading since it characterises a conditional that is not usually characterised in similar literature. It ampts my appreciation for primary qualitative literature in mental health. I

Another asperger like trait I have is comparable to alexthemyia but a more general deficit in self-awareness. So, if the author's hypothesis for the conditional stimulis in some aspie's feeling of inadequacy also explains my feeling of inadequacy, I have little or no intuitive feelings of whether that is the case. This makes troubleshooting cognitive biases, and by consequence, using REBT/CBT techniques highly inefficient for me as I have to test out every possible logical fallacy I may or may not be making against all possible corrections. The space is narrowed, of course, by knowledge of the kinds of fallacies similar people tend to make and interventions that tend to work. I wanted to type this out to better wrap my head around my theory about my very slow rate of progress in improving certain aspects of my mental health and social skills. I hope that it is useful for anyone else who is struggling with similar issues since I no of no one else similar enough to me that I can use them as a general point of reference and mentorship for multiple kinds of problems we may share.

My current attitude to relationship strategy given my asperger like relationship issues reflects the position given here that both aspie and (potential) partners can work together to have a successful relationship.

I'm working on other insecurities too, like insecurity around wearing nice clothes

I'm so over getting super fascinated by someone and thinking they're the sun and moon then talking to them more and realise they're just human like the rest of us...agh. I'm so bad with romance haha. I don't know how to stop idealising people who seem like perfect matches at the time, but then as I talk to them I realise their just a regular person. What can I do about this?

I would be interested to see a kind of survey where anyone can rate each active or interested LWer on their profficiency on the content of each sequence. It's somewhat annoying how my interpretation of the sequence would appear to cut down on a good deal of the questions asked and reasked in discussion comments by some very active. But perhaps it's me that's ignorant. This could be an enlightening self awareness exercise for many of us, improve the calibre of posts by shaming people who would otherwise claim profficiency when their peers may be skeptical, and raise the sanity waterline among LW ourselves.

Based on any experiences here, in real life, would you want to meet, avoid, ignore or be indifferent to me?

Intelligence Intelligence

• If AI is an existential risk, it is a national security risk
• If AI is a national security risk, it is a risk intelligence agencies would be interested in
• If intelligence (in the spook sense) communities are interested in a risk, they are likely to develop a formal or informal research agenda into that risk
• If research agenda's in friendly AI exist that are not MIRI's, MIRI may be interested in accessing said research agenda
• Thought MIRI's full technical research agenda is secret, it is plausible that they are not currently collaborating with intelligence agencies
• MIRI may stand to benefit from access to AI research agendas from intelligence communities
• If MIRI is unable to achieve collaborations on their own, LW activists may be able to assist them
• Therefore, LW activists may have an interest in 'penetrating' intelligence agencies to extricate their technical research agendas around AI pursuant to greater research excellence and collaboration on AI safety and control problems.
• If this is in MIRI's interest, it may be in a given rationalists interest
• Rationalists with AI subject matter expertise may be interested in pursuing friendly AI research at the object level instead
• Non subject matter experts may be interests in penetration with the intention of general access to an intelligence communities knowledge
• Intelligence forces actively disqualify those with open curiosity about intelligence matters:

  'Viewing or downloading information from a secure system beyond the clearance subject’s need-to-know' is cause for rejection of a security clearance in Australia

• Therefore, penetrating intelligence communities for the purposes of creating greater transparency in the friendly AI research arena without AI subject matter expertise which may improve the likelihood of being assigned to AI safety specifically may be a poor use of one's time.

Things to consider when advertising:

Problem recognition Stimulus discrimination Necessity or Problem recognition...incl situational influences All potential alternatives Decision rules: Conjunctive disjunctive elimination-by-aspect, compensatory Reference group influence Status differentiation Stimulus generation

Based on my reading of the textbook Consumer behaviours, implications for marketing strategy fifth edition by Quester, yesterday

• I got off on the thought of a chair with maximum sinking in to it factor
• The Pink sink looks a little too commfy.
• May be the hyperstimuli of the chair universe.
• May not be in my best interests as may cut productivity and inhibit exercise.
• On other hand, my impress others, reduce environmental stress and associated fatigue, and probably feels really super really good :)