Open thread, Jul. 17 - Jul. 23, 2017

I expect them to be nice places to work (because they are not subject to the vulgar and demeaning necessity to turn a profit), I also don't expect them to be making much progress in the near future.

You have changed the initial conditions. The initial conditions don't speak about some external memory.

This argument is the same as Cian Dorr's version with a weaker amnesia drug. In that experiment a weaker amnesia drug is used on beauty if Heads which only delays the recollection of memory for a few minutes, just like in your case the memory is delayed until the message is checked.

This argument was published in 2002. It is available before majority of the literature on the topic is published. Suffice to say it is not convincing to halfers. Even supporter like Terry Horgan admit the argument is suggestive and could run a serious risk of slippery slope.

I agree with Thomas -- even if this proved that thirdism is right when you are planning to do this, it would not prove that it is right if you are not planning to do this. In fact it suggests the opposite: since the update is necessary, thirdism is false without the update.

I saw this same query in the last open thread. I suspect you aren't getting any responses because the answer is long and involved. I don't have time to give you the answer in full either, so I'll give you the quick version:

I am in the process of signing up with Alcor, because after ten years of both observing cryonics organizations myself and reading what other people say about them, Alcor has given a series of cues that they are the more professional cryonics organization.

So, the standard advice is: if you are young, healthy with a long life expectancy, and are not wealthy, choose C.I., because they are less expensive. If those criteria do not apply to you, choose Alcor, as they appear to be the more serious, professional organization.

In other words: choose C.I. as the type of death insurance you want to have, but probably won't use, or choose Alcor as the type of death insurance you probably will use.

You might already be aware of them / their contents, but I found these two papers useful in creating a habit workshop:

• Wood & Rünger (2016) Psychology of Habit
• Wood & Neal (in press) Habit-Based Behavior Change Interventions

How encouraging. Truly we are making great strides in respecting ever more threatened minorities. Algorithmic-Americans have much to contribute, once the biophobes cease their persecution.

What worries me is that if ransomware virus could own money, it could pay some human to install itself on others people computers, and also pay programmers for finding new exploits and even for the improvement of the virus.

But for such development legal personhood is not needed, only illegal.

A different question in the same vein:

Two Newtonian point particles, A and B, with mass 1kg are at rest separated by a distance of 1m. They are influenced only by the other's gravitational attraction. Describe their future motion. In particular do they ever return to their original positions, and after how long?

Note that your force grows unboundedly in N, so close to zero you have things that are arbitrarily heavy compared to their distance. So what this paradox really is about, is alternating series' that grow with N, and whether we can say that they add up to zero.

If we call the force between the first two bodies f12, then the series of internal forces on this system of bodies (using negative to denote vector component towards zero) looks like -f12+f12-f23+f23-f13+f13-f34..., where, again, each new term is bigger than the last.

If you split this sum up by interactions, it's (-f12+f12)+(-f23+f23)+(-f13+f13)..., so "obviously" it adds up to zero. But if you split this sum up by bodies, each term is negative (and growing!) so the sum must be negative infinity.

The typical physicist solution is to say that open sets aren't physical, and to get the best answer we should take the limit of compact sets.

The same can be said of unit masses at every whole negative number.

The arrow that points to the right is at the same place that the additional guest in Hilbert's Hotel goes. Such unintuitiveness is life when infinities/singularities such as the diverging forces acting on your points are involved.

You can justify a belief in "Induction works" by induction over your own life.

Not exactly. MIRI and others have research on logical uncertainty, which I would expect to eventually reduce the second premise to induction. I don't think we have a clear plan yet showing how we'll reach that level of practicality.

Justifying a not-super-exponentially-small prior probability for induction working feels like a category error. I guess we might get a kind of justification from better understanding Tegmark's Mathematical Macrocosm hypothesis - or, more likely, understanding why it fails. Such an argument will probably lack the intuitive force of 'Clearly the prior shouldn't be that low.'

Pm me

Not sure how relevant this is to your question, but Eliezer wrote this article on why philosophical zombies probably don't exist.

The reliable verification methods are a dream, of course, but the 'forbidden from sharing this information with non-members' is even more fanciful.

In your case, a force is needed to actually push most of organisations to participate in such project, and the worst ones - which want to make AI first to take over the world - will not participate in it. IAEA is an example of such organisation, but it was not able to stop North Korea to create its nukes.

Because of above you need powerful enforcement agency above your AI agency. It could either use conventional weapons, mostly nukes, or some form of narrow AI, to predict where strong AI is created - or both. Basically, it means the creation of the world government, design especially to contain AI.

It is improbable in the current world, as nobody will create world government mandated to nuke AI labs, based only reading Bostrom and EY books. The only chance for its creation is if some very spectacular AI accident happens, like hacking of 1000 airplanes and crashing them in 1000 nuclear plants using narrow AI with some machine learning capabilities. In that case, global ban of AI seems possible.