Did you know that Rebecca Roache used to work at the FHI and even co-authored a paper with Nick Bostrom? Makes you wonder what the rest of humanity is like, doesn't it?

ETA: Although I don't think "artificial hell" is a fair description of her actual proposal, which just involves extended sentences without making them literally hell-like.

I initially doubted that the cited individual was actually advocating this atrocity, but from this post on her blog, it sounds like she's at least seriously considering doing so:

As I say at the end of the blog, it is debatable what constitutes humane treatment in relation to such technologies: perhaps it will turn out that, on reflection, some of the techniques I have suggested are inhumane, in which case I do not advocate their implementation. (But I do advocate the debate about them.)

Shades of Banks' Surface Detail ...

This seems to be just another case of journalists exaggerating and misrepresenting a scientists point in order to create attention-grabbing headlines, at least according to Anders Sandbergs blog post about the issue.

Take the warning seriously.

Definitely fascinating. It's a shame it doesn't keep track of number of moves-- the fewest number of moves needed to clog up the board might also be interesting.

Set a time/alarm. I set mine to 5min. That time was enough to get a feel for how to win (I played up to 512).

Initial strategy:

1. Xrrc n ynetre ahzore zber va gur pbearef guna fznyyre ahzoref.
2. Xrrc n ynetre ahzore zber ba gur fvqr guna fznyyre ahzoref.
3. Oevat gur fnzr ahzoref arkg gb rnpu bgure. Xrrcvat zrnaf qba'g zbir njnl sbe n fnsr cynpr hagvy arrqrq.

I've won the game several times (created a 2048 tile). As far as I can tell, this is the right strategy, which doesn't win every time but gives you a decent chance:

1) The biggest tile stays in the top right corner.

2) Other big tiles stay in the top row, waiting to be merged with the biggest. They should be roughly sorted from left to right, but that will probably happen by itself anyway.

3) Never press down. Learn to predict and avoid the situation where the top three rows are filled and you have to press down. If you get into that situation, you've lost.

4) If you have no choice except moving the biggest tile out of its corner by pressing left, then put it back in the corner on the very next move. If you can't, you've lost.

5) When there are empty spaces in the top row, get them filled as soon as possible, before doing more horizontal merges. Only when the top row is completely filled and all four tiles are different, you're completely free to play in the bottom three rows.

6) Avoid having bigger tiles below smaller ones. If you have a small tile stuck in the top row with a bigger tile below it, you're in danger of losing.

I think it was clear and good.

Created an issue and emailed Matt Fallshaw.

This was an A/B test gone awry. It has since been turned off.

Yes! I was just going to post the same thing!

Since it was during the military there's nothing I can do about this misdiagnosis

Even if the VA didn't want to give you partial disability, have you talked with veterans' advocates? They might be able to help you get compensation.

If ginger-ale doesn't work, maybe try a teaspoon of dried ginger root powder dissolved in hot water. Tastes pretty good, but its more effective for nausea than cramps.

For the runs, try immodium over tums. Tums will only help with acid reflux, and they don't even do that very well. Immodium will harden your stool.

I'd bet that the liquor helps for its muscle relaxant properties. It doesn't meet the no doctor requirement, but a good friend of mine with the same problem of horrible stomach cramps if he doesn't eat for too long was solved really well with a drug called "Donnatal". It's very low-dose phenobarbital with belladonna alkaloids. It's like a miracle cure for him. He takes it when he feels like it might be starting and it goes away. No side effects for him except slight dry mouth. Also makes it stop after it's started. Might want to try it out.

Any thoughts about arranging things so that you can eat often enough?

My wife has this exact symptom set with her removed gallbladder. She has not found any reliable treatments/habits. Not helpful but FYI.

Liquor could have an effect on your gut bacteria. Liquor gets created through fermentation. I would suggest that you try various different probiotics and see whether they have a similar effect as liquor.

It could also work through the relaxing effect of alcohol. There are various techniques for relaxation that could help, but it's not straightforward to produce relaxation when there are deep wounds because an organ is missing.

Going to an osteopath might be a good idea. An osteopath can help your body to come to terms with the wounds and relax.

Is there an RSS feed?

Letting someone know you like them and that they're cared for is a surprisingly powerful gesture. It's also something people are inclined to lose sight of when they're going through a tough time.

It probably needs tweaking to the specific social circumstances, but simply saying something to the effect of "you are awesome and people care about you; don't forget that" goes a lot further than you might expect.

Have you tried asking them if there's any way you can help, and/or expressing generic sympathy?

"Hey, you seem to be going through a lot lately, are you holding up okay? Anything I can do?"

Active listening is by far the best skill you can learn to help someone through a stressful or highly emotional period.. A "rationalist" might be more receptive to solutions than others, but will probably still appreciate the emotional catharsis of a good listener.

A rationalist would realize that emotions don't necessarily have any deeper meaning, and are often best fixed through mundane non-emotional interventions. For instance, if you're constantly in stressful situations, you might want to try an adaptogen such as rhodiola rosea. You can fix mild depression by taking cold showers. Cut back on the caffeine, get better sleep, get more exercise. And so on.

Personally, I suspect, based on armchair evopsych speculation, that softer interventions (e.g. showing people that you care and are sympathetic) are counterproductive, if your goal is for the other person to stop being in "emotional turmoil".

I was wondering about that myself after I lost a couple of hours to the damn thing. I think it's mostly that it hits exactly the right balance of complication/reward to get people into a flow state and keep them there, although its exceptional interface qualities probably help: simple, intuitive moves, immediate feedback, no menus or other abstraction layers to get between you and the game.

Your list of preferred careers reminds me of something, maybe relevant for you.

I used to teach in a high school for gifted children, when there were children with high intelligence but different skills. (As opposed to e.g. math-specialized high schools, where even without the IQ test you also get children with high intelligence, but their skills are very similar.) In this school a new computer game programming competition was started, with rules different than usual. In a typical programming competition, the emphasis is completely on the algorithm. It is a competition of students good at writing algorithms. But this competition, called Špongia, was different in two aspects: (1) it was a competition of teams, not individuals, and (2) the games were rated not only by their algorithm, but also by playability, easthetics, etc. Which in my opinion better corresponds to a possible success in the market.

I mention this, because there was an opportunity for people with various skills to participate in creating the computer game; and they did. Some of them even didn't know programming, but they composed the game music, painted pictures, writed texts, or invented the ideas. Sometimes the most important member of the teams was the one able to invent a cool idea, and motivate other people to do the technical parts of the game.

So my advice for you is: if you don't want to specialize in something, find someone who does, and cooperate with them. Find someone who can write algorithms, but doesn't have very good ideas or is bad at painting graphics, and who also has a dream of participating in creating a computer game. Then find someone who can paint, who can compose music, etc. Create the team, start with very simple projects (beware the planning fallacy) and if everything goes well, progress to more difficult ones.

If the coder asks you about why would they want to cooperate with you, if the most difficult part of work (in their opinion) will be done by them, show them Knytt -- a game with rather simple algorithm, and yet great artistic impression, because of the other components. This is your added value; to organize a team that changes an algorithm to an enjoyable game.

You can start today. Get together someone to code, someone to paint pictures, someone to compose music. If you don't know anyone with these skills who would be interested, make a poster with your e-mail address and put it somewhere in the school. Make the people meet in the same room and together plan your first game. Insist that your first game (where the team will test their skills and cooperation) should be completed in two weeks at most -- the planning fallacy will make it a few months anyway. This way you also won't have to deal with the topic of money, etc., because no one will expect a big profit from the first simple game. For inspiration you can look at the smartphone games, which are usually very simple; or make a list of random ideas (e.g. "cars", "flying", "puzzle", "Santa Claus", "elephant", whatever) and pick a random one or two of them and think about what you could do with it in two weeks. (Maybe it would be a good idea to use an existing engine, such as Unity, instead of writing the code from scratch.)

Consider reading some of Cal Newport's writing on careers. Here's a possible starting point.

A lot of what he writes boils down to: "Do what you love to do" is a bit of a fallacy. Getting really good at something pretty much always involves putting in a ton of work, not all of which will be pleasant. But if you do that and get extremely good at what you do, then you'll get lots of jobs you'll enjoy, because 1) being good at what you do is fun and 2) if you provide lots of value to other people, they will provide it back.

IOW, just going after what is the most "fun" when you start doing it probably isn't the best idea. I wouldn't take the fact that your CS courses are a bit drudge-y as a slamdunk indicator that you shouldn't do CS by a long shot.

Also, you may have heard this before, but the video game industry for programmers is kind of a shitshow, because lots of people want to do it, enough so that they're willing to be paid less and endure crappy conditions. Being an indie developer might be a better bet, if you can make it work; I have no idea what the odds of success there are.

If you want to make games, start doing it now. It's entirely possible for a single person to make great indie games. Working on that would also build skills that are useful for all 4 of the preferred careers you named.

It's okay if you find CS classes boring; the real test is whether you find working on real projects (such as your own indie games) boring.

Having lots of portfolio pieces will also help with finding a job.

Have you looked into user experience design? They're in quite high demand these days. Try making an interface (just the facade, nothing functioning) of an iPhone or Android app. You'll learn a lot and have an immediately marketable skill. Are you good with people? Technical people who communicate effectively with clients are beloved by all. Many of the best and most lucrative jobs in tech are bridging the gap between programmers and other people.

"don't try to major in something you don't enjoy" is something I've heard a few times. But that seems kind of idealistic.

I think this is realistic rather than idealistic. College typically offers plenty of chances to procrastinate and fail courses, and if you're not genuinely motivated to study something, forcing yourself to do so anyway over a period of several years seems like a recipe for either failure or burnout. Note that often people have difficulties making themselves study even the topics that they do genuinely enjoy and find interesting, once those topics get challenging enough.

Of course, it's always possible that the field does start feeling more interesting to you once you get more into it.

I think if you want to have a career in art, being able to program will help a lot. Few artists can program and good art is always about moving forward. The kind of people you want to impress as an artists generally don't know how to program. That means that it's relatively easy to impress people.

If you know how to sew, creating clothing that uses an arduino lilypad to do something shiny is relatively straightforward. If you walk dressed like that into art auctions people will start to notice you and ask you about it and then you can tell them about your art as an upcoming artist.

That said, you don't need to major in computer science to be able to program. If you do a bunch of projects with arduino, the coding isn't that complicated and you can put up the code on github to show that you can program.

As far as game programming goes, in the LW community we have people like Kaj_Sotala who works on creating a game that teaches bayesian updating. He might benefit from someone doing the necessary artwork for the game for him.

Given that I am also pretty young, I'm not exactly qualified to give career advice. That said my sort of Gladwellian position on the matter is that you don't get to be someone like Hideo Kojima or Steve Jobs, or a more local example Yudkowsky by working your way up and taking what people give you. You need to

1) Have some level of natural ability. 2) Choose the right thing to focus on that has a good chance of success. 3) Be willing to fight for your dream. This is the hardest part, because anyone who enjoys self-made success has had to overcome numerous failures, false starts, and periods of time where it just seemed too difficult or hopeless. You have to be persistent, have endurance and never be willing to settle for "just good enough".

More specifically to you, you don't seem to want to be a programmer - the guy who contributes to the behind the scenes work of a video game and perhaps creates the AI. You want to be someone whose creative vision for the game turns it into something that lots of people will enjoy. And it doesn't even have to be video games specifically. Is that about right?

In that case, start now. Don't focus on making a super fun video game. Just figure out how to make anything. Maybe start with a pong variant. Get in lots of practice. Start getting publicity for your work through maybe newgrounds. Aggressively publicize your work once you feel confident in your abilities. Develop connections with other people in the industry if you can. All of this generalizes to art in general not just video games.

Truth be told though, there are many people who share your dream. It's not easy, you can do everything right and still not succeed. Having a job as a programmer or graphics designer is a reasonable "safe" fallback. But if you are serious about desiring greatness it will take a lot of effort and initiative.

my university is making it needlessly difficult for me to choose CS as a second major

I expect that if you take enough in-major classes to learn the right skillset the lack of a degree in the field won't be a huge obstacle. Though if your major is totally non-technical this might not hold. Anyway, studying CS but not getting a full second major is an option worth considering.

A CS degree and the ability to write code are different things.

Good employers will ask you to show them the code you've written and will be entirely indifferent to your college major.

The ease of getting programming jobs seems to vary, or at least I know people who had a hard time during the recession. On the other hand, I don't know what would be better advice for staying employed during a recession.

How soon do you consider yourself getting into the industry?

Programming is unique from other high paying jobs like doctor or lawyer, in that it doesn't take a ton of time or money to get a good degree. Couple that with the fact that it's becoming an expected skill, and that there are increasingly more avenues for learning programming at increasingly younger ages, AND that it's a job that lends itself well to outsourcing. You have a recipe for an over-saturated market and declining pay as the next generation enters the workforce.

I quite like Dictionary of Numbers. It provides comparisons for e.g. lengths and amounts of money. Example: I found $200 on the street --> I found $200 [ ≈ Low-end bicycle] on the street.

I use a subset of the extensions you mentioned. I also use this bookmarklet to hide nested comments in long threaded lesswrong pages like the open thread; then I open only the interesting threads selectively to limit distractions.

It is not strictly meaningful to ask "are we in a simulation" since there are copies of us both inside simulations and outside of them. However, if it is possible to demonstrate decision problems in which the optimal decision depends on whether the problem is nested in a simulation, then it is meaningful to ask how to make the decision.

If all the copies of you that exist in a simulation either exist in complex universes (compared to the universe in which you are not in a simulation) or very late in time (so that they are strongly affected by the temporal discount in the utility function), you should behave as if you are not in a simulation.

in a simulation-argument occams razor doesn't apply to gods and super-natural effects

Occam still applies to the parent universe (I think). And predictions about the parent universe imply predictions about its child simulations.

So a variant of Occam (or at least, a prior over universes) still applies to the simulation. There are 2^100 more possible universes of description length 200 than of description length 100, so each 100-length universe is more probable than each 200-length universe, if the simulators are equally likely to simulate each length of universe. This fails if e.g. the simulators run every possible universe of length <300. It also fails if they try to mess with us somehow, e.g. by only picking universes that superficially look like much simpler universes.

Many would claim that these types of god and the supernatural don't count - a lot of definitions of "supernatural" preclude things that can be reduced and follow natural laws even if those aren't our natural laws.

Yeah, sequencing is tough, especially for creatures such as we with 3 billion mostly-repetitive nucleotides. The high-throughput methods basically throw the genome into a blender and read out billions of individual ~50-100 base pair reads in one reaction with a high enough error rate such that you need about 10x coverage of the genome before you are sure you catch most sites with enough reads to make sure you aren't making a couple million mistakes. The short read length means that repetitive sequences are particularly hard to sequence because if the read is shorter than the size of the repeat you don't know where to map your read to. Hence why in our lab (and most labs that are doing something other than cataloguing natural variation and only deal with a few kilobases at a time) we still use the old-school Sanger sequencing, because it produces 800 base pair reads one at a time for on the order of $2 each. The highest-throughput method, Illumina, also produces many terabytes of image data per run from tiny CCDs inside the sequencer that needs to go through some epic processing into the actual sequence data.

More importantly, finding a rare or unique variant via sequencing that is something other than 'this vital gene is broken and won't make a protein at all' doesn't necessarily tell you all that much. Every one of us has about 100 new mutations that were not in our parents and a mutation is likely to have many small impacts rather than one large impact. While we know that, say, height is something like 80% heritable, the best genetic screens so far have found several hundred loci that collectively account for something like 15% of the variation. There is a LOT going on, most individual differences have tiny effects, and our methods thus far only really can find common variants with relatively large impacts. Hence 23andme using microarrays that specifically find known variants rather than actually sequencing.

I like to fantasize that the future One World State will have Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man on its flag.

[...] simple [...]

I dunno if that meme package is standard enough that you could activate it with one symbol. Maybe a gif would give a little more room to work with?

An upward arrow shaped like a human looking up?

I think Knightian uncertainty is a very useful concept. Sometimes "I don't know" is the right answer. I can't estimate the probabilities, I have no evidence, no decent priors -- I just do not know. It's much better to accept that than to start inventing fictional probabilities.

Black Swan isn't a theory, it's basically a correct observation that statistical models of the world are limited in many important ways and depend on many implicit and explicit assumptions (a typical assumption is the stability of the underlying process). When an assumption turns out to be wrong the model breaks, sometimes in a spectacular way.

Nassim Taleb tried to make a philosophy out of that observation. I am not particularly impressed by it.

Scott Aaronson has a concrete example of Knightian uncertainly in his paper The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine.

I associate Knightian Uncertainty with Eliezer's description of Expected Creative Surprises.

That is to say, I am uncertain what a rival company will do, but I know they will try to achieve a goal. When achieving that goal involves surprising me, I should expect them to surprise me even though I'm using the best model I can to model them.

If it turns out I've been assuming unpredictability when I should be trusting my predictions, I'll have to reevaluate some of the choices I've made.

There only one way to find out. Write your predictions down and calibrate yourself.

A charming young woman, I'm sure. The pictures even show up with SafeSearch set to Strict. I suppose that stripping down no further than one's underwear is what passes for modesty these days. And none of them show up on Google Images. Very odd.

...a Kantian would never decide to emulate Utilitarian behavior.

"Act so as to maximize total utility" (for any specific definition of utility) is just one of the maxims a Kantian could in principle follow.

Is it not so that the set of possible actions a Kantian could perform is a subset of the set of possible actions a Utilitarian could perform?

It depends on how you want to describe actions. So, on the one hand a good Kantian will never lie while a good utilitarian might, on the other hand a good utilitarian will never minimize utility, whereas a good Kantian might.

Kant and your average utilitarian will disagree not only about on-the-ground ethical questions, but about questions like 'what is an action' and 'how are actions individuated' and 'what constitutes the "consequences" of an action'. This makes translation between the two theories difficult.

If this is true, could not a Utilitarian decide that Kantian behavior is optimal for maximizing utility, and thus emulate a Kantian's behavior in any given situation (similar to Rule Utilitarianism)?

Absolutely, though it's hard to see what sort of utility calculation would conclude that Kantianism is going to optimize for utility in any given situation. Kant is explicit that the actual consequences of an action are totally irrelevant to its moral value. So it would be one heck of a coincidence. Needless to say, the Kant-emulating utilitarian would never be fulfilling her moral obligations in the Kant's eyes, regardless of how complete the emulation is. For a Kant, it's important that actions be motivated (or at least constrained) by a respect for the moral law; returning the jacket out of respect for the moral law and returning it in order to maximize utility don't even count as the same action so far as Kant is concerned, since the maxims differ.

Yes. Study partner?

Try the LW study hall and/or find a pomodoro-esque technique that works for you. The trick is to work with your desire to check reddit rather than against it - if you have a 5 minute block where goofing off is a Totally Okay Thing That You Don't Feel Guilty About, you'll be able to get back into the flow of work once your goof-off time is up.

Use the various different browser extensions to curtail your access to time-sink websites.

Most likely: Someone has taken exception to something you wrote and decided to go back and downvote a load of your old comments. It's a thing that happens. Victims complain about it from time to time. Eliezer says he's asked someone to look at the LW database for evidence of mass-downvoting but they haven't found anything useful; make of that what you will.

There are some grounds for thinking that people who make comments supporting (in rough terms) feminist views, and more generally but also more weakly "non-Reactionary" views, are particularly likely to attract the attention of mass-downvoters. (One might respond to this by avoiding such comments, or by defiantly making more of them.)

Less likely but not impossible: Someone has disliked something you wrote, gone back through your comment history, independently assessed the quality of each comment, and happens to have found ~25 comments that they think deserved downvoting on their own (de)merits.

[EDITED to add: Hello, downvoters! If you think something is bad about the above, please do let me know what. Otherwise, my working hypothesis is that the downvotes on this comment come from mass-downvoters who don't like being talked about. and I'll adopt my usual heuristic of responding to what look like mass-downvotes by posting more.]

previous discussion also. He has been mentioned several other times without much discussion.

Articles:

http://phys.org/news/2013-04-emergence-complex-behaviors-causal-entropic.html

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/05/a-grand-unified-theory-of-everything.html

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-22261742

Paper:

http://www.alexwg.org/publications/PhysRevLett_110-168702.pdf

I'm sure he's not a crank. Which leaves the important question: is he right? I don't know, but if he is, it's highly relevant to the question of FAI, and suggests that the MIRI approach of considering an AI as a logical system to be designed to be safe may be barking up the wrong tree. From an interview with Wissner-Gross:

“The conventional storyline [of SF about AI],” he says, “has been that we would first build a really intelligent machine, and then it would spontaneously decide to take over the world.”

But one of the key implications of Wissner-Gross’s paper is that this long-held assumption may be completely backwards — that the process of trying to take over the world may actually be a more fundamental precursor to intelligence, and not vice versa.

...

“Our causal entropy maximization theory predicts that AIs may be fundamentally antithetical to being boxed,” he says. “If intelligence is a phenomenon that spontaneously emerges through causal entropy maximization, then it might mean that you could effectively reframe the entire definition of Artificial General Intelligence to be a physical effect resulting from a process that tries to avoid being boxed.”

But as I said on a previous occasion when this came up, the outside view here is that so far it's just a big idea and toy demos.

My thoughts: Yeah he's wrong. And he got a paper on this junk published in PRL? Sheesh.

He demos a program maximizing some entropy function, and claims intelligent behavior. Well, he could just as easily have made the program try to move everything to the left, and claimed intelligent behavior from that, too. The intelligence was not because of what he maximized, but because of a complex set of behaviors he paid someone to program into the agent but then glossed over.

Doesn't your visa specify an expiration date? You can call/visit/browse the Brazilian embassy in your country for that information.

Your visa itself (that piece of paper that you got) should have the expiration date (often expressed as "valid until").

We've had some attempts to hash it out (for example, comparing round-robin games of chicken to evolutionary equilibria, with niches for a whole spectrum of agents that win against more-cooperative agents but lose against more-defecting agents). Or talking about Schelling points. But I don't think there's been anything really definitive - you should share :)

I took StrengthsFinder 2.0 soon after a new manager was hired for my office. I was skeptical of it, but not negative. The Strengths it gave me were unsurprising. The most use I got out of the exercise was from insights gleaned from a roundtable discussion about these strengths from the outside view of coworkers who had known me for a few months to more than a year.

It's weeks of casual reading to go through every posting in Main since 2007 (I know, I did it), and approximately nobody is going to go through every posting in Discussion. When I've done this and had it pointed out, I tend to leave the post up but link to the previous discussion.

The nature of the discussion section and curated blog is to reward recency. Thus, reposts actually are the most elegant way to make sure interesting information is shared in those contexts. There's also the wiki, which is not organized by recent (and thus doesn't allow duplicate posts). Anything that's interesting enough to get popular twice in the discussion section should probably be posted to an "interesting rationality links" page on the wiki.