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So, I think the correct answer to the question "I have a 5-figure sum of money to invest" is to just go with Betterment/Wealthfront rather than Vanguard, so that you get diversification between asset classes (whereas a specific index fund will get you diversification within an asset class). If I'd known this when I'd asked the question, I would have picked a better mix of Vanguard index funds, and not hesitated as much with figuring out where to put the money. To be fair, Vaniver basically said this, I just think the links below explain it better, so I could feel certain enough to make a decision rather than let the money burn away through inflation.
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/02/17/book-review-the-intelligent-asset-allocator/
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2014/11/04/why-i-put-my-last-100000-into-betterment/
A good paper!
I'm curious how you found the paper. I asked myself how I would find such a paper (rather than just stumbling on it here). I first checked Tenenbaum's homepage, but it's out of date. Then I checked the CBMM publications page and found it.
Another interesting paper from that page: "Foveation-based Mechanisms Alleviate Adversarial Examples"
My parents were similarly irrational.
I think you could still take the GED and apply to colleges right now. I think it sometimes can help to discuss things concretely "I have my GED and have been accepted to XYZ Uni to study ABC" v. "I could get my GED and apply to colleges.".
If you can't graduate 2 years early with a GED, you could try graduating 1 year early by just earning all the necessary credits. My school offered credits for passing AP exams, and I just self-studied for several of them and passed them.
OP said:
it's very hard to socialize when you don't board at the school,
I'm saying it's very easy to socialize on a college campus. Not necessarily drinking and fucking your way through college. To give one example, Just hanging around and chatting with people after class if you don't have a class immediately afterward.
If I could re-do high school, I would get my GED as early as possible, and then do something useful with my time instead of gong to high school. For example, you could self-study a bunch of APs exams, test out of all the general education requirements at many universities, and then graduate from college early too.
Then, when you get to college, you can spend a bunch of your time socializing, on campus.
I really like your knowledge maps.
I found a small typo: "Luck of ability to see consequences". I think you meant "lack".
I'll add some sub-points:
1) AI risk is important
- ToolAI: http://lesswrong.com/lw/cze/reply_to_holden_on_tool_ai/
- Ng's position: "Worrying about AGI is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars"
- MIRI's actual effectiveness.
- item 1
2) Everybody should be vegan.
- Veganism is healthier than other diets (e.g. paleo, keto)
- Even if veganism is less healthy, it is still morally superior to other diets.
Other people have mentioned:
- Cryonics
- Relationships / PUA
Political topics:
- Free Market Policies
- Social Justice Movement
- The importance of environmentalism
It could be also be casein intolerance. I actually feel fairly okay when I drink milk, but consuming a casein protein powder makes me bloated.
Probably people have seen this before, but I really like it:
People often say that motivation doesn't last. Well, neither does bathing, that's why we recommend it daily.
I realized this about my own mood swings.
I tend to do a lot of "writing therapy" in workflowy. Thus, if I'm ever at a high, or a low, I record a lot of my thoughts into workflowy so that I can refactor/combine them later.
I like model this as "emotional retrograde amnesia". I like the movie "Memento" by Nolan because the protagonist writes lots of notes to himself because he has actual retrograde amnesia; similarly, I have emotional retrograde amnesia, so I write lots of notes to myself, so that I can piece together the "puzzle" later.
Just click on his username.
So, it seems like lots of people advise buying index funds, but how do I figure out which specific ones I should choose?
Another thing I've heard recently, but not looked into much is living in a house boat off of the coast of San Francisco, and then paddling in on a Kayak.
Umm, would anybody here have invites for torrent trackers for textbooks (e.g. BitMe, The Geeks, Bibliotik)? PM me.
I have some questions about step 1 (find a flexible program):
My understanding is that there are two sources of inflexibility for PhD programs: A. Requirements for your funding source (e.g. TA-ing) and B. Vague requirements of the program (e.g. publish X papers). I'm excluding Quals, since you just have to pass a test and then you're done.
Elsewhere in the comments, someone wrote:
"Grad school is free. At most good PhD programs in the US, if you get in then they will offer you funding which covers tuition and pays you a stipend on the order of $25K per year. In return, you may have to do some work as a TA or in a professor's lab."
So, there are two types of jobs you can have to fund your PhD (TA-ing and being a RA/Research Assistant to a professor). How time-consuming is TA-ing generally? I imagine it varies based on the school/class. How do you find a TA-ing gig that isn't time consuming? Can you generally TA during your entire PhD? I think I vaguely recall a university that only would let you TA for so many semesters.
You could also fund your PhD by getting a fellowship. Philip Guo has written about applying for the NSF, NDSEG, Hertz fellowships. I'm poorly calibrated about how hard it is to get one of these fellowships. I've also heard that certain schools will offer fellowships to some of their students. How hard are these to get relative to the fellowships mentioned above? There are ~33K science PhDs awarded each year. I wonder what distinguishes the ~4% who get fellowships from the median science PhD student.
Let's say that you were really frugal and/or financially independent already. My impression is that many schools would still require you to TA in order to have your tuition waved.
Let’s assume you have the financial aspect of your PhD taken care of (e.g. You have an easy/enjoyable TA job). What other requirements are there other than passing Quals? Could I read interesting books indefinitely until I find something interesting to publish?
I'd like to believe that achieving step 1 is possible, but as eli_sennesh pointed out, this is hard.
Tools can be used to build agents.
Introduction to Connectionist Modelling of Cognitive Processes. Reviewed on LW here.
I have a question:
In your post, "A Workable Solution to the Problem of Other Minds", you talk about solving the problem by connecting and disconnecting minds (i.e. doing mind-coalescing and decolescing). I also had this idea, but I didn't really develop it much. Do you know where I could read more about this proposed solution to the problem of other minds?
So, I did a bit of googling for counter-arguments. Here's what I found:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/women-who-stray/201307/your-brain-porn-its-not-addictive
http://www.dailydot.com/lifestyle/porn-addiction-healthy-research/
http://www.dailydot.com/opinion/5-reasons-you-need-watch-porn/
There were a few different studies that showed that it wasn't as bad as people thought.
I did use it on my phone more than anything when I did use it. I just don't have much information I want to memorize at the moment.
Also, I've discovered the CoqIDE theorem-proving assistant is about as addictive to me now as Legend of Zelda games used to be.
So, what you're saying is that you're addicted to Coq. :)
Another question I find interesting about animal consciousness I have is whether or not they can recognize cartoons. Cartoons are abstractions/analogies of the real-world. I'm curious if this abstract visual pattern recognition is possessed by animals, or if it requires human-level abstract pattern recognition. There are also some computer vision papers about classifying cartoons, and using artificially generated data-sets (since you mentioned it had to involve humans, animals, and robots).
I recently re-read Gwern's Drug Heuristics, and this jumped out at me:
....In other words, from the starting point of those wormlike common ancestors in the environment of Earth, the resources of evolution independently produced complex learning, memory, and tool use both within and without the line of human ancestry....
...The obvious answer is that diminishing returns have kicked in for intelligence in primates and humans in particular5354. (Indeed, it’s apparently been argued that not only are humans not much smarter than primates55, but there is little overall intelligence differences in vertebrates56. Humans lose embarrassingly on even pure tests of statistical reasoning; we are outperformed on the Monty Hall problem by pigeons and to a lesser extent monkeys!) The last few millennia aside, humans have not done well and has apparently verged on extinction before...
...The human brain seems to be special only in being a scaled-up primate brain41, with close to the metabolic limit in its number of neurons...
If I had more time, I'd try to look more into the intelligence tests that are given to animals. Assuming animals are smarter (in some sense of the word), then why are humans dominant? I think the answer to this might be something like "Humans evolutionarily stumbled upon language, then encoded this in our genes, and language allows us to reason about the world, which is something raw animal intelligence/pattern-matching cannot do."
I think it's an interesting hypothesis, but I don't know where I'd start trying to evaluate it, or how likely I think it's true.
I expect that in vitro selection for IQ is an easier problem to solve and will have greater impact on the population's IQ.
I overcame depression a few years ago and have been meaning to write about how I did it, but honestly, the current me is so different from the old me, that I don't even remember how being depressed felt.
I do remember some of the things that got me out of the depression:
Coming independently to the insight that I should "Avoid Misinterpreting my Emotions". One day, I was sitting there thinking the same old depressed thoughts I'd usually thought. Something like "what's the purpose of doing anything." But, I realized that when those words went through my head that day, I didn't feel depressed thinking them. Then, I realized that whatever words were going through my head were not the cause of my emotions. In general, it's true that we can unlike our emotions from our thoughts. By doing this we can optimize feeling better and resolving whatever epistemic issue you think is the cause of your emotions separately.
Discovering LW helped in a lot of ways.
Doing lots of mind mapping / writing therapy, using GTD for managing stress/productivity, and to a lesser extent CBT.
EDIT: Also, getting out of high-school.
Pickup basketball games require some coordination once you get to the gym (getting a game going can be somewhat difficult, but is usually pretty easy), but, you can just go whenever you want.
I've not finished reading either book, but Tanenbaum's OS book seemed very dry to me compared to "Operating System Concepts" (which has just been delightful to read!).
See also: "The Perfect/Great is the enemy of the Good"
Thank you for writing this series Jonah. I'm don't have the time now to think deeply about this topic, so I thought I'd add to the discussion by mentioning a few related interesting anecdotes.
I doubt what made the Polgar sisters great was innate intelligence.
Another interesting anecdote is von Neumann not (initially?) appreciating the importance of higher-level programming languages:
John von Neumann, when he first heard about FORTRAN in 1954, was unimpressed and asked "why would you want more than machine language?" One of von Neumann's students at Princeton recalled that graduate students were being used to hand assemble programs into binary for their early machine. This student took time out to build an assembler, but when von Neumann found out about it he was very angry, saying that it was a waste of a valuable scientific computing instrument to use it to do clerical work. http://worrydream.com/#!/dbx
EDIT: Apparently, von Neumann's attitude toward assembly was common among programmers of that era. http://worrydream.com/quotes/#richard-hamming-the-art-of-doing-science-and-engineering-2
I'm not qualified to say judge the accuracy of these claims, but I was speaking with a PhD in physics who said that he thought that only ~50 people in theoretical physics were doing anything important.
In general, they're called continued fractions.
This is how I did it. My first instinct was to decompose the problem into the shapes {dots, circles, diamonds, square, +, X} and then plot which cells the shapes appear in. It's pretty easy to see the rectangles after that. Though, I didn't make the connection to XOR.
I recently found out that Feynmann only had an IQ of 125.
This is very surprising to me. How should I/you update?
Perhaps the IQ test was administered poorly.
I think that high g/IQ is still really important to success in various fields. (Stephen Hsu points out that more physicists have IQs of 150 than 140, etc. In other words, that marginal IQ matters even past 140.).
Stephen Hsu estimates that we'll be able to have genetically enhanced children with IQs ~15 points higher in the next 10 years.
Bostrom and Carl Schulman's paper on iterated embryo selection roughly agrees.
It seems almost too good to be true. The arguments/facts that lead us to believe that it will happen soon are:
- we do pre-screening for other traits. The reason we can't do it for intelligence at the moment is that we don't know what genes to select for.
- We will get that data soon, as the cost of genetic sequencing falls faster than Moore's law.
I still "alieve" that it's too good to be true. Does anybody have any reason to doubt the claims made above?
Also, the ~15 point estimate is based on the assumption that we don't do iterated embryo selection (which can't be done in humans yet).
I think this is relatively common. I was talking about this with a friend a while back.
How many gigabytes of text is LW? I guess it'd probably be under a terabyte, and therefore, fairly cheap for even a lay person to backup.
I think that I have the capacity to be genuinely happy on a day-to-day basis.
There are times when I'm generally on top of things. I've got my GTD system functioning, I've got an exercise/food/sleep routine that I like. I've "goal-factored" and feel like I know what I'm doing with my life. ETC. All that really remains for me to do in times like these is to DO things.
Though, I would say that I don't feel like this too often. For the past few months, I've felt somewhat anxious/uncertain about what my life plans were. So, I wasn't as happy on a day to day basis. But, I feel like in the long-run, I'll be able to get into the "on top of things" state more consistently.
Actually, most modern AI applications don't involve human input, so it's not obvious that AGI will develop along Tool AI lines.
I'm not really sure what's meant by this.
For example, in computer vision, you can input an image and get a classification as output. The input is supplied by a human. The computation doesn't involve the human. The output is well defined. The same could be true of a tool AI that makes predictions.
Many leading AGI thinkers have their own pet idea about what AGI should do. Few to none endorse Tool AI. If it was obvious all the leading AGI thinkers would endorse it.
Both Andrew Ng and Jeff Hawkins think that tool AI is the most likely approach.
Debatable how measurable progress in meditation feels, but when I've stuck with it in the past, I've subjectively felt noticeable progress.
Tutoring is a general one. I was just talking to somebody the other day who independently was excited by the idea of paying a PhD student to privately tutor them in advanced math.
What is Ember Associates? I did a quick google search, and when I clicked on their site, I got a page that said "Website Expired". What other groups do you have in mind?
If it's in Main, why does the article's Karma Bubble look like it's in Discussion? (i.e. it's not a filled in with green).
[Meta]
I noticed that this recent lw post showed up on the "recent comments" side-bar, but that it doesn't show up in the list of "discussion" posts. Is this just me? Do other people have this show up in "discussion"? (Also, this is not the first time that I've noticed that there are posts in the side-bar that I can't find in Discussion).
[Cross-posted from So8res's, recent guide to MIRI's research]
Just thought add links to these other "guides":
"Atoms of Neural computation": List of promising research directions for neuro-inspired AI (IOW, tries to answer the question "Deep Learning is just regression, so what could we possibly do next?")
"Physical Principles for Scalable Neural Recording": List of promising research directions for developing tools to do live recording of the brain (a separate issue from connectomics).
Just thought add links to these other "guides":
"Atoms of Neural computation": List of promising research directions for neuro-inspired AI (IOW, tries to answer the question "Deep Learning is just regression, so what could we possibly do next?")
"Physical Principles for Scalable Neural Recording": List of promising research directions for developing tools to do live recording of the brain (a separate issue from connectomics).
Highly secretive sounds cooler (to most of their audience). Personally, I find open science exciting.
I'd appreciate suggestions for resources on open relationships / polyamory.
Bayesianism and Causality, or, Why I am only a Half-Bayesian (Judea Pearl)
“The bulk of human knowledge is organized around causal, not probabilistic relationships, and the grammar of probability calculus is insufficient for capturing those relationships.”