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P(Anti-Agathics) What is the probability that at least one person living at this moment will reach an age of one thousand years?
How is this to be interpreted? With or without the aid of cryonics?
The next time you give your talk, record it, and put it on YouTube.
If you type a lot, buy a mechanical keyboard.
Thanks for the info. I didn't know they were anti-vaxxers.
Can you be more specific?
No one wants to be in the control group.
Rather than spending time reading about autism you can probably better help this child by playing with him and doing stuff for his parents so they have more time to play with him, although ignore this advice if you enjoy reading about autism and so your doing so isn't a cost.
This is very good advice.
UPDATED: It has been pointed out that Autism Speaks still funds research looking for the supposed link to vaccines! People have resigned over this. Do not give your money to this organization.
Some books on autism:
- The Out-of-Sync Child (Kranowitz)
- The RDI Book (Gutstein)
- More Than Words by Sussman (The Hanen Centre)
There is also the 100 Day Kit from Autism Speaks.
The Autism Speaks 100 Day Kit and the Asperger Syndrome and High Functioning Autism Tool Kit were created specifically for newly diagnosed families to make the best possible use of the 100 days following their child's diagnosis of autism or AS/HFA.
You're right. There is a lot of mis-information out there about autism. The problem isn’t you’re a non-expert. It’s that the “experts” really don’t know.
You can't do controlled studies. You can't say to one parent, “Give Jonny OT, but don't give him speech therapy or ABA (or horse therapy), and come back in 10 years,” and tell another parent, "Just give Jonny horse therapy."
That said, a mainstream view is forming. Get speech therapy to help with pragmatics. Get some form of behavioral therapy (ABA, RDI, etc.) Get occupational therapy to help with sensory. Don’t try to do all of this on your own. You want good therapists.
A bad therapist is worse than no therapist. Until you've had a few, it can be hard to tell these apart. There are a lot of bad therapists.
Some other generally accepted good uses your of money (probably!), include:
- some form of behavioral intervention at home (ABA, RDI, etc.)
- some form of behavioral intervention at school
Depending on the part of the world in which you live, the school component might be free. You would do well to keep in mind that free is not be the same as good, or even appropriate. (Remember: No bad therapists!)
I would also get the child in to see a developmental peditrician to create a treatment plan. Your pediatrician probably knows less about autism than you do. You want a specialist.
There are lots of other things you can try, but it’s best to think of these as unproven/highly experimental. I, myself, would probably add another hour of OT or speech (or create a cash buffer) before trying anything else.
Can you elaborate on your reason for choosing CI? Was it driven by reasons other than cost?
Installing Arch Linux.
Are you planning to provide training for people who are already running meetups?
It levels the playing field for those who use non-standard layouts.
For anyone who has ever argued over mechanical-switch and buckling-spring keyboards, made the hard choice between vi and Emacs, or manually reassigned a capslock key to control: this is for you.
They are also available in EPub and Kindle.
The cryonics approach advocated by Eliezer Yudkowsky has several serious conceptual and theoretical problems, and is not accepted by most people. People have ignored it, not because it is indisputable, but because people have not bothered to criticize it.
Edit: Yeah, this was meant as a quote.
The question is whether "AGI researchers" are experts on "AI safety". If the answer is "yes", we should update in their direction simply because they are experts. But if the situation is like mine, then Pei Wang is committing argumentum ad populum. Not only should we not pay attention, we should point this out to him.
If you're serious about learning, I suggest you take an online course from Udacity. Their 101 course is a very gentle introduction.
Registration is already open. They start tomorrow. It's free.
Wouldn't it be easier to implement it as web application? Then you only need one code base and a browser and it works on all those platforms. Distribution is easy. You just email a URL. Updates would be local and wouldn't need to be distributed at all.
maxmore, since you're here, I have a question:
How much life insurance do I need?
The cost for whole body is $200,000. So do I need $200,000 or do I need what it costs at time of death? Historical data says the cost doubles every 20 years.
I think when you have a question that fits the first three criteria, it always devolves into mindkilling. (Operating systems are a good example.)
The only time this doesn't happen is when the question is not popular/important. If you want to find an example, you're going to have to let go of either #2 or #5.
It depends what you mean by 'God'.
Software Engineering for Software as a Service opened today. If anyone else is taking and wants to form a study group, let me know.
Here is the talk he gave at TED.
The Center for the Advancement of Human Reason
When I wrote that I was thinking of people like Kahneman and Tversky. But you're right. As a group, psychologists are less trustworthy.
When it comes to doctors and therapists, my general approach is:
Seek recommendations from people I trust who are in a position to know. Try them out. If it's not working, find someone else.
We're on our 8th speech therapist.
For material possessions, I plan to establish a trust and appoint a child or grandchild who is already signed up. Right now, I don't trust either option with my body but will probably go with Alcor because of where I live.
who would you trust to take care of your affairs while you're frozen, and why?
Do you mean material possessions or your body?
Here is my general heuristic:
Whenever you have a question, find out what the consensus view is. Then see what the contrarians are saying. Then see what the consensus people are saying about what the contrarians are saying. See how the contrarians respond. Then make up your own mind.
I solved vaccines and cryonics this way.
By "mainstream consensus view", I don't mean what your average man on the street thinks. I mean what the experts (usually the "right" scientists) are saying on a topic. So creationism isn't the consensus view. Evolution is.
Sometimes there isn't really a consensus view. In that case start with what the contrarians are saying. Cryonics is like that.
Some people say they trust "hard sciences" but not "soft sciences". But I think that isn't right. When I'm trying to decide who to believe, I use something like the following, from most trustworthy to least:
Mathematicians, physicists, chemists, biologists, psychologists, climatologists, economists, anthropologists, historians, medical doctors, philosophers, people who write self-help books, people who write parenting books.
This is when I don't have specific information about the person or group making the claim. The best philosopher is more reliable than the worst physicist.
The Center for the Advancement of Human Thought
The Center for Improving Human Thought
The Bayes Center for the Advancement of Human Reason
The Center for Better Thinking
The Thomas Bayes Institute for Human Thought
Short: The Bayes Institute for Human Thought
Shorter: The Bayes Institute
The question came up at the West LA LW Meetup. Only two people knew what it meant.
"What Shock Level are you?"
Upvoted purely for the Anathem reference!
I once read a book on characterization. I forget the exact quote, but it went something like, "If you want to make your villian more believable, make him more intelligent."
I thought my brain had misfired. But apparently, for the average reader it works.
I think the hardest step is deciding you just want to know what's true.
When I search for keyword: rationality, I get HPMoR for #2, yudkowsky.net for #5, and What Do We Mean By "Rationality"? for #7. Not sure how much my search history is affecting this.
Quantum mechanics can be described by a set of postulates. (Sometimes five, sometimes four. It depends how you write them.)
In the "standard" Interpretation, one of these postulates invokes something called "state collapse".
MWI can be described by the same set of postulates without doing that.
When you have two theories that describe the same data, the simpler one is usually the right one.
It took me about three weeks.
For writing, Dvorak is great. But it doesn't play nice with unix shell commands. Try typing ls -l in Dvorak and you'll see what I mean.
If you're a coder, try a modern layout like Colmak.
I suppose if you are the sort of person who has a lot of "waste".
From Scope Insensitivity:
Once upon a time, three groups of subjects were asked how much they would pay to save 2000 / 20000 / 200000 migrating birds from drowning in uncovered oil ponds. The groups respectively answered $80, $78, and $88 [1]. This is scope insensitivity or scope neglect: the number of birds saved - the scope of the altruistic action - had little effect on willingness to pay.
Now I haven't read the paper, but this implies there is only one charity doing the asking. First they ask how much you would give to save 2000 birds? You say, "$100." Then they ask you the same thing again, just changing the number. You still say, "$100. It's all I have." So what's wrong with that?
I was describing how I would respond in that situation. The amount I would give to charity XYZ is completely determined by my income. I need you to explain to me why this is wrong.
If I budgeted $100 for charity work and I decided saving birds was the best use of my money then I would just give the whole hundred. If I later hear more birds need saving, I will feel bad. But I won't give more.
Of course, I've read it. My problem isn't with scope insensitivity. Just this example.
RE: The Crazy Robot's Rebellion
We wouldn’t pay much more to save 200,000 birds than we would to save 2,000 birds. Our willingness to pay does not scale with the size of potential impact. Instead of making decisions with first-grade math, we imagine a single drowning bird and then give money based on the strength of our emotional response to that imagined scenario. (Scope insensitivity, affect heuristic.)
People's willingness to pay depends mostly on their income. I don't understand why this is crazy.
UPDATED: Having read Nectanebo's reply, I am revising my original comment. I think if you have a lot of wasteful spending, then it does make you "crazy" if your amount is uncorrelated with the number of birds. On hearing, "Okay, it's really 200,000 birds," you should be willing to stop buying lattes and make coffee at home. (I'm making an assumption about values.) Eat out less. Etc. But if you have already done these things, then I don't see why your first number should change (at least if we're still talking about birds).
Except that the question specified "God" as an ontologically basic mental entity.
You should clarify in the antiagathics question that the person reaches the age of 1000 without the help of cryonics.