Posts

Best of Rationality Quotes, 2014 Edition 2015-02-27T22:43:09.988Z
[LINK] The P + epsilon Attack (Precommitment in cryptoeconomics) 2015-01-29T02:02:16.615Z
Best of Rationality Quotes, 2013 Edition 2014-01-31T21:35:37.593Z
[link] Scott Aaronson on free will 2013-06-10T23:24:07.259Z
Best of Rationality Quotes, 2012 Edition 2013-01-26T03:03:20.330Z
[LINK] Was Intrade being manipulated? 2012-11-08T08:30:59.538Z
Best of Rationality Quotes, 2011 Edition 2011-12-28T05:32:39.839Z
Reforming rot13 2011-11-04T23:41:21.315Z
[Link] Scott Aaronson on Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity 2011-08-15T22:51:43.075Z
Isn't this sitemeter logging a bit too excessive? 2011-02-02T20:55:27.219Z
Best of Rationality Quotes 2009/2010 2010-12-18T21:36:38.434Z

Comments

Comment by DanielVarga on What’s up with LLMs representing XORs of arbitrary features? · 2024-01-05T00:56:46.055Z · LW · GW

I’ll say that a model linearly represents a binary feature f if there is a linear probe out of the model’s latent space which is accurate for classifying f

 

If a model linearly represents features a and b, then it automatically linearly represents  and .

I think I misunderstand your definition. Let feature a be represented by x_1 > 0.5, and let feature b be represented by x_2 > 0.5. Let x_i be iid uniform [0, 1]. Isn't that a counterexample to (a and b) being linearly representable?

Comment by DanielVarga on After Go, what games should be next for DeepMind? · 2016-03-16T22:28:45.276Z · LW · GW

Here is something I'd like to see: You give the machine the formally specified ruleset of a game (go, chess, etc), wait while the reinforcement learning does its job, and out comes a world-class computer player.

Comment by DanielVarga on To contribute to AI safety, consider doing AI research · 2016-01-23T09:37:41.074Z · LW · GW

Here is one reason, but it's up for debate:

Deep learning courses rush through logistic regression and usually just mention SVMs. Arguably it's important for understanding deep learning to take the time to really, deeply understand how these linear models work, both theoretically and practically, both on synthetic data and on high dimensional real life data.

More generally, there are a lot of machine learning concepts that deep learning courses don't have enough time to introduce properly, so they just mention them, and you might get a mistaken impression about their relative importance.

Another related thing: right now machine learning competitions are dominated by gradient boosting. Deep learning, not really. This says nothing about starting with deep learning or not, but a good argument against stopping at deep learning.

Comment by DanielVarga on Bragging thread, December 2015 · 2015-12-05T23:00:12.521Z · LW · GW

In the last two days I alone wrote a prototype that can take a whiteboard photo, and automatically turn it into a mindmap-like zoomable chart. Pieces of the chart then can be rearranged and altered individually:

https://prezi.com/igaywhvnam2y/whiteboard-prezi-2015-12-04-152935/

This was part of a company hackathon, and I had some infrastructure to help me regarding the visualization, but with the shape recognition/extraction, it was just me and the nasty python bindings for OpenCV.

Comment by DanielVarga on Wear a Helmet While Driving a Car · 2015-07-31T12:59:50.631Z · LW · GW

Oh my god, look at 0-4-year old assaults, both ED visits and deaths. (Assault is the leading TBI-related cause of death for 0-4-year olds.) Some of those falling 4 year olds were assaulted.

Comment by DanielVarga on Leaving LessWrong for a more rational life · 2015-05-27T22:13:24.322Z · LW · GW

There are worse fates than not being able to top your own discovery of general relativity.

Comment by DanielVarga on Best of Rationality Quotes, 2014 Edition · 2015-02-27T23:31:11.561Z · LW · GW

That's not a top-level comment, so it's excluded by my script from this version. I won't manually edit the output, sorry. There's another version where non-top-level comments are kept, too. Your quote is in there:

Comment by DanielVarga on Best of Rationality Quotes, 2014 Edition · 2015-02-27T23:01:27.857Z · LW · GW

Top quote contributors by statistical significance level:

  • 0.00000 (23.11 in 45): Alejandro1
  • 0.00007 (17.98 in 63): James_Miller
  • 0.00016 (19.02 in 43): Stabilizer
  • 0.00016 (25.25 in 16): dspeyer
  • 0.00020 (18.69 in 45): GabrielDuquette
  • 0.00052 (26.91 in 11): Oscar_Cunningham
  • 0.00142 (24.33 in 12): peter_hurford
  • 0.00183 (50.50 in 2): Delta
  • 0.00252 (68.00 in 1): Solvent
  • 0.00290 (19.35 in 23): Yvain
  • 0.00352 (66.00 in 1): westward
  • 0.00360 (24.78 in 9): Mestroyer
  • 0.00529 (29.20 in 5): michaelkeenan
  • 0.00591 (41.00 in 2): nabeelqu
  • 0.00591 (41.00 in 2): VincentYu
  • 0.00604 (60.00 in 1): RomeoStevens
  • 0.00719 (24.00 in 8): philh
  • 0.00725 (19.28 in 18): Tesseract
  • 0.00780 (57.00 in 1): Zando
  • 0.00820 (39.00 in 2): sediment
  • 0.00830 (23.62 in 8): Qiaochu_Yuan
  • 0.00871 (23.50 in 8): Maniakes
  • 0.00993 (32.00 in 3): benelliott
  • 0.01012 (15.17 in 64): Jayson_Virissimo
  • 0.01226 (26.00 in 5): Ezekiel
  • 0.01359 (49.00 in 1): Liron
  • 0.01627 (23.67 in 6): AspiringRationalist
  • 0.01711 (45.00 in 1): Mycroft65536
  • 0.01816 (34.00 in 2): summerstay
  • 0.02114 (43.00 in 1): bentarm
  • 0.02134 (16.58 in 26): Kaj_Sotala
  • 0.02265 (42.00 in 1): Andy_McKenzie
  • 0.02600 (22.17 in 6): ShardPhoenix
  • 0.03044 (30.50 in 2): gRR
  • 0.03200 (24.00 in 4): Particleman
  • 0.03435 (18.25 in 12): MinibearRex
  • 0.03523 (37.00 in 1): andreas
  • 0.03875 (36.00 in 1): NoisyEmpire
  • 0.03876 (16.23 in 22): Grognor
  • 0.04292 (28.00 in 2): roystgnr
Comment by DanielVarga on Best of Rationality Quotes, 2014 Edition · 2015-02-27T23:00:18.658Z · LW · GW

Top quote contributors by karma score collected in 2014:

  • 369 James_Miller
  • 277 dspeyer
  • 239 Jayson_Virissimo
  • 181 Stabilizer
  • 165 Alejandro1
  • 163 lukeprog
  • 146 arundelo
  • 129 Salemicus
  • 124 johnlawrenceaspden
  • 117 Kaj_Sotala
  • 117 B_For_Bandana
  • 116 NancyLebovitz
  • 110 Pablo_Stafforini
  • 107 Gunnar_Zarncke
  • 100 Eugine_Nier
  • 97 aarongertler
  • 94 shminux
  • 90 Azathoth123
  • 88 EGarrett
  • 84 elharo
  • 81 Benito
  • 79 Torello
  • 74 MattG
  • 74 AspiringRationalist
  • 73 satt
  • 73 JQuinton
  • 73 27chaos
  • 67 Tyrrell_McAllister
  • 66 Vulture
  • 65 Cyan
  • 62 michaelkeenan
  • 60 WalterL
  • 60 Ixiel
  • 58 jaime2000
  • 58 [deleted]
  • 57 Zubon
  • 55 Jack_LaSota
  • 55 CronoDAS
  • 52 Vaniver
  • 52 hairyfigment
Comment by DanielVarga on Best of Rationality Quotes, 2014 Edition · 2015-02-27T22:59:37.384Z · LW · GW

Top quote contributors by total (2009-2014) karma score collected:

  • 1394 RichardKennaway
  • 1133 James_Miller
  • 1040 Alejandro1
  • 1037 [deleted]
  • 978 gwern
  • 971 Jayson_Virissimo
  • 847 lukeprog
  • 846 Eugine_Nier
  • 841 GabrielDuquette
  • 827 Eliezer_Yudkowsky
  • 818 Stabilizer
  • 775 Rain
  • 750 MichaelGR
  • 734 NancyLebovitz
  • 628 Konkvistador
  • 590 anonym
  • 521 CronoDAS
  • 479 arundelo
  • 445 Yvain
  • 434 RobinZ
  • 431 Kaj_Sotala
  • 404 dspeyer
  • 372 Alicorn
  • 357 Grognor
  • 353 Vaniver
  • 347 Tesseract
  • 332 shminux
  • 328 DSimon
  • 296 Oscar_Cunningham
  • 296 billswift
  • 293 Pablo_Stafforini
  • 292 peter_hurford
  • 284 Nominull
  • 277 jsbennett86
  • 271 katydee
  • 263 RolfAndreassen
  • 262 Thomas
  • 237 Kutta
  • 229 roland
  • 224 Cyan
Comment by DanielVarga on Best of Rationality Quotes, 2014 Edition · 2015-02-27T22:57:44.159Z · LW · GW

Top original authors by karma collected:

  • 894 Graham
  • 603 Russell
  • 534 Pratchett
  • 489 Chesterton
  • 475 Feynman
  • 372 Dennett
  • 343 Franklin
  • 340 Munroe
  • 306 Aaronson
  • 294 Newton
  • 282 Einstein
  • 279 Nietzsche
  • 270 Pinker
  • 262 Friedman
  • 252 Shaw
  • 249 Egan
  • 240 Bacon
  • 239 Stephenson
  • 236 Aristotle
  • 235 Taleb
  • 228 Heinlein
  • 209 Kahneman
  • 201 Silver
  • 196 McArdle
  • 187 Sagan
  • 184 Voltaire
  • 183 Wilson
  • 183 Darwin
  • 182 Plato
  • 177 SMBC
  • 173 Buffett
  • 171 Milton
  • 165 Mencken
  • 162 Moldbug
  • 160 Wittgenstein
  • 160 Johnson
  • 160 Hofstadter
  • 158 Asimov
  • 156 Dawkins
  • 154 Winston
  • 147 Godin
  • 145 Marcus
  • 141 Wong
  • 140 Confucius
  • 136 Descartes
  • 133 Brandon
  • 130 Orwell
  • 129 Nielsen
  • 127 Hayden
  • 127 Georg
  • 123 Minsky
  • 123 Maynard
  • 123 Bakker
  • 121 Sowell
  • 121 Razib
  • 119 Hanson
  • 117 Kaas
  • 117 Churchill
  • 116 Vulcan
  • 112 Obama
  • 111 Jaynes
  • 107 Keynes
  • 106 Tao
  • 106 Hume
  • 102 Greene
  • 102 Deutsch
  • 101 Saul
  • 100 Screwtape
  • 98 Lessing
  • 98 Christoph
  • 98 Botton
  • 97 Watson
  • 97 Carroll
  • 96 Rollins
  • 96 Marx
  • 96 Kurt
  • 96 Isn
  • 96 Harris
  • 96 Bostrom
  • 94 Santa
  • 94 Morris
  • 93 Shera
  • 93 Neumann
  • 93 Holmes
  • 93 Gawande
  • 93 Dann
  • 92 Vonnegut
  • 92 Locke
  • 92 Futurama
  • 91 Adamek
  • 90 Hoffer
Comment by DanielVarga on Best of Rationality Quotes, 2014 Edition · 2015-02-27T22:54:34.250Z · LW · GW

Top original authors by number of quotes. (Note that authors and mentions are not disambiguated.)

  • Graham 47
  • Feynman 47
  • Russell 40
  • Taleb 39
  • Chesterton 37
  • Pratchett 35
  • Einstein 30
  • Dennett 29
  • Nietzsche 26
  • Aaronson 23
  • Heinlein 22
  • Johnson 21
  • Bacon 21
  • Shaw 19
  • Newton 19
  • Franklin 19
  • Wilson 18
  • Darwin 18
  • Kahneman 17
  • Wittgenstein 15
  • Munroe 15
  • Dawkins 15
  • Stephenson 14
  • Sowell 14
  • Silver 14
  • Pinker 14
  • Meier 14
  • Asimov 14
  • Aristotle 14
  • Sagan 13
  • Moldbug 13
  • Eliezer 13
  • Churchill 13
  • Voltaire 12
  • Minsky 12
  • Mencken 12
  • Maynard 12
  • Locke 12
  • Egan 12
  • Clark 12
  • SMBC 11
  • Plato 11
  • Orwell 11
  • Neumann 11
  • Marx 11
  • Holmes 11
  • Hofstadter 11
  • Hoffer 11
  • Descartes 11
  • Buffett 11
  • Aurelius 11
  • Turing 10
  • Screwtape 10
  • Peirce 10
  • Keynes 10
  • Jaynes 10
  • Hume 10
  • Harris 10
  • Gould 10
  • Friedman 10
  • Bakker 10
  • Schopenhauer 9
  • Huxley 9
  • Goethe 9
  • Deutsch 9
  • Wilde 8
  • Thoreau 8
  • Morgan 8
  • Montaigne 8
  • Leibniz 8
  • Greene 8
  • Godin 8
  • Crowley 8
  • Carroll 8
  • Brandon 8
  • Yudkowsky 7
  • Wong 7
  • Wolfgang 7
  • Vinci 7
  • Szabo 7
  • Munger 7
  • Mitchell 7
  • Medawar 7
  • McArdle 7
  • Lannister 7
  • Kant 7
  • Jefferson 7
  • Hobbes 7
  • Hanson 7
  • Diogenes 7
  • Dijkstra 7
  • Confucius 7
  • Carlyle 7
  • Calvin 7
Comment by DanielVarga on Best of Rationality Quotes, 2014 Edition · 2015-02-27T22:52:19.597Z · LW · GW

Top short quotes (2009-2014) by karma per character:

  • 60 A Bet is a Tax on BullshitAlex Tabarrok
  • 45 Luck is statistics taken personally.Penn Jillette
  • 35 Comic Quote Minus 37-- Ryan ArmandAlso a favourite.
  • 42 I've got to start listening to those quiet, nagging doubts.Calvin
  • 34 Nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time.Ken Wilber
  • 51 I will not procrastinate regarding any ritual granting immortality.--Evil Overlord List #230
  • 34 A problem well stated is a problem half solved.Charles Kettering
  • 26 "I accidentally changed my mind."my four-year-old
  • 27 "Most haystacks do not even have a needle."-- Lorenzo
  • 50 He uses statistics as a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support, not for illumination.G.K. Chesterton
  • 29 The greatest weariness comes from work not done.-Eric Hoffer
  • 31 Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.Voltaire
  • 32 If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid."Murphy's Laws of Combat"
  • 41 The Noah principle: predicting rain doesn’t count, building arks does.-Warren E. Buffett
  • 41 Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it.-Joel Spolsky
  • 25 What goes unsaid eventually goes unthought.Steve Sailer
  • 40 People say "think outside the box," as if the box wasn't a fucking great idea.Sean Thomason
  • 27 Procrastination is the thief of compound interest.-Venkatesh Rao
  • 21 "A problem well put, is half solved." - John Dewey
  • 38 A raise is only a raise for thirty days; after that, it’s just your salary.-- David Russo
  • 37 It’s easy to lie with statistics, but it’s easier to lie without them.-Fred Mosteller
  • 32 If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.-Seneca
  • 25 The most practical thing in the world is a good theory.Helmholtz
  • 35 It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.George Bernard Shaw
  • 30 When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?John Maynard Keynes
  • 27 Part of the potential of things is how they break.Vi Hart, How To Snakes
  • 32 Precise forecasts masquerade as accurate ones.-- Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise
  • 29 Writing program code is a good way of debugging your thinking.-- Bill Venables
  • 15 Focusing is about saying no.-- Steve Jobs
  • 34 "Working in mysterious ways" is the greatest euphemism for failure ever devised.TheTweetOfGod
  • 35 However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.-- Winston Churchill
  • 29 "Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from SCIENCE!"~Girl Genius
  • 32 There is one rule that's very simple, but not easy: observe reality and adjust.Ran Prieur
  • 32 The Company that needs a new machine tool is already paying for it.-old Warner Swasey ad
  • 34 Market exchange is a pathetically inadequate substitute for love, but it scales better.S. T. Rev
  • 22 Things are only impossible until they're not.-- Jean-Luc Picard
  • 30 Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations.— John Von Neumann
  • 26 A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.Daniel Dennett
  • 30 “Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.” - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
  • 27 Complex problems have simple, easy to understand wrong answers.— Grossman's Law
  • 25 The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off.Gloria Steinem
  • 31 It's a horrible feeling when you don't understand why you did something.-- Dennis Monokroussos
  • 29 We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it.Mark Twain
  • 27 It is easy to be certain....One has only to be sufficiently vague.Charles S. Peirce
  • 26 Shouldn't "it works like a charm" be said about things that don't work?Jason Roy
  • 12 Reality is not optional.Thomas Sowell
  • 11 Death is the gods' crime.Unsounded
  • 25 Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics.Dean Schlicter
  • 23 It is better to destroy one's own errors than those of others.Democritus
  • 22 Most people would rather die than think; many do.– Bertrand Russell
  • 28 Nature draws no line between living and nonliving.-- K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation
  • 30 Now, now, perfectly symmetrical violence never solved anything.--Professor Farnsworth, Futurama.
  • 26 The dream is damned and dreamer too if dreaming's all that dreamers do.--Rory Miller
  • 17 Statistics is applied philosophy of science.A. P. Dawid
  • 19 Luck is opportunity plus preparation plus luck.--Jane Espenson
  • 28 Nobody panics when things go "according to plan"… even if the plan is horrifying.The Joker
  • 19 Being right too soon is socially unacceptable.Robert A. Heinlein
  • 18 A sharp knife is nothing without a sharp eye.Klingon proverb.
  • 25 We are built to be effective animals, not happy ones.-Robert Wright, The Moral Animal
  • 27 Train your tongue to say "I don't know", lest you be brought to falsehood -Babylonian Talmud
  • 22 The only road to doing good shows, is doing bad shows.Louis C.K., on Reddit
  • 17 Nothing is so obvious that it’s obvious.— Errol Morris
  • 20 Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.--Mike Tyson
  • 22 Forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.Lawrence Krauss
  • 28 My brain technically-not-a-lies to me far more than it actually lies to me.-- Aristosophy (again)
  • 26 “Anything left on your bucket list?”“Not dying...”-Bill Gates in his AMA on reddit.
  • 20 Better our hypotheses die for our errors than ourselves.-- Karl Popper
  • 27 If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance we can solve them.-- Isaac Asimov
  • 23 "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."--Friedrich Nietzsche
  • 26 A man who says he is willing to meet you halfway is usually a poor judge of distance.Unknown
  • 20 I honestly don't know. Let's see what happens.-- Hans. The Troll Hunter
  • 26 Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.H.L. Mencken
  • 27 The first rule of human club is you don't explicitly discuss the rules of human club.Silas Dogood
  • 18 Good things come to those who steal them.-- Magnificent Sasquatch
  • 14 "Anything you can do, I can do meta" -Rudolf Carnap
  • 17 Mind is a machine for jumping to conclusions - Daniel Kahneman
  • 20 The singularity is my retirement plan.-- tocomment, in a Hacker News post
  • 26 If Tetris has taught me anything it's that errors pile up and accomplishments disappear.-Unknown
  • 26 A faith which cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.Arthur C. Clarke
  • 21 Know the hair you have to get the hair you want.-Pantene Pro-V hair care bottle
  • 14 I intend to live forever or die trying-- Groucho Marx
  • 26 We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.-- F. A. Hayek
  • 22 Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.-- Voltaire
  • 19 In general, we are least aware of what our minds do best.— Marvin Minsky
  • 19 He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.J.S. Mill
  • 25 A man who has committed a mistake and doesn't correct it, is committing another mistake.-Confucius
  • 20 No matter how far you've gone down the wrong road, turn back.-- Turkish proverb
  • 25 If you were taught that elves caused rain, every time it rained, you'd see the proof of elves.Ariex
  • 16 Keep your solutions close, and your problems closer.afoolswisdom
  • 15 History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.-Mark Twain
  • 11 Whenever you can, count.--Sir Francis Galton
  • 19 God created the Earth, but the Dutch created the Netherlands.-- Dutch proverb
Comment by DanielVarga on [LINK] The P + epsilon Attack (Precommitment in cryptoeconomics) · 2015-02-01T11:55:58.865Z · LW · GW

Nice. If we analyze the game using Vitalik's 2x2 payoff matrix, defection is a dominant strategy. But now I see that's not how game theorists would use this phrase. They would work with the full 99-dimensional matrix, and there defection is not a dominant strategy, because as you say, it's a bad strategy if we know that 49 other people are cooperating, and 49 other people are defecting.

There's a sleight of hands going on in Vitalik's analysis, and it is located at the phrase "regardless of one’s epistemic beliefs [one is better off defecting]". If my epistemic belief is that 49 other people are cooperating, and 49 other people are defecting, then it's not true that defection is my best strategy. Of course, Vitalik's 2x2 matrix just does not allow me to have such refined epistemic beliefs: I have to get by with "attack succeeds" versus "attack fails".

Which kind of makes sense, because it's true that I probably won't find myself in a situation where I know for sure that 49 other people are cooperating, and 49 other people are defecting, so the correct game theoretic definition of dominant strategy is probably less relevant here than something like Vitalik's "aggregate" version. Still, there are assumptions here that are not clear from the original analysis.

Comment by DanielVarga on [LINK] The P + epsilon Attack (Precommitment in cryptoeconomics) · 2015-01-30T16:00:34.904Z · LW · GW

I don't know too much about decision theory, but I was thinking about it a bit more, and for me, the end result so far was that "dominant strategy" is just a flawed concept.

If the agents behave superrationally, they do not care about the dominant strategy, and they are safe from this attack. And the "super" in superrational is pretty misleading, because it suggests some extra-human capabilities, but in this particular case it is so easy to see through the whole ruse, one has to be pretty dumb not to behave superrationally. (That is, not to consider the fact that other agents will have to go though the same analysis as ourselves.)

Superrationality works best when we actually know that the others have the same input-output function as ourselves, for example when we know that we are clones or software copies of each others. But real life is not like that, and now I believe that the clean mathematical formulation of such dilemmas (with payoff matrices and all that) is misleading, because it sweeps under the rug another, very fuzzy, hard to formalize input variable: the things that we know about the reasoning processes of the other agents. (In the particular case of the P+epsilon attack, we don't have to assume too much about the other agents. In general, we do.)

Comment by DanielVarga on LINK: Superrationality and DAOs · 2015-01-24T23:36:42.067Z · LW · GW

They're running on the blockchain, which slows them down.

They can follow the advice of any off-the-blockchain computational process if that is to their advantage. They can even audit this advice, so that they don't lose their autonomy. For example, Probabilistically Checkable Proofs are exactly for that setup: when a slow system has to cooperate with an untrusted but faster other. There's the obvious NP case, when the answer by Merlin (the AI) can be easily verified by Arthur (the blockchain). But the classic IP=PSPACE result says that this kind of cooperation can work in much more general cases.

The primary decision-making mechanisms for them are going to basically be the same as can be used for existing organizations, like democracy, prediction markets, etc.

These are just the typical use cases proposed today. In principle, their decision-making mechanism can be anything whatsoever, and we can expect that there will be many of them competing for resources.

The thing that I think makes them interesting from a FAI perspective is the "autonomous" part. They can buy and sell and build stuff. They have agency, they can be very intelligent, and they are not human.

...Okay, that sounded a bit too sensationalist, so let me clarify. Personally, I am much more optimistic regarding UFAI issues than MIRI or median LW. I don't actually argue that DAOs are dangerous. What I argue is that if someone is interested in how very smart, autonomous computational processes could arise in the future, this possible path might be worth investigating a bit.

Comment by DanielVarga on LINK: Superrationality and DAOs · 2015-01-24T11:32:28.106Z · LW · GW

An advanced DAO (decentralized/distributed autonomous organization), the way Vitalik images it, is a pretty believable candidate for an uncontrolled seed AI, so I'm not sure Eliezer and co shares Vitalik's apparent enthusiasm regarding the convergence of these two sets of ideas.

Comment by DanielVarga on [LINK] Scott Aaronson on Google, Breaking Circularity and Eigenmorality · 2014-06-23T20:43:00.492Z · LW · GW

I was unsurprised but very disappointed when it turned out there are no other posts tagged one_mans_vicious_circle_is_another_mans_successive_approximation. But Shalizi has already used the joke once in his lecture notes on Expectation Maximization.

Comment by DanielVarga on [LINK] Scott Aaronson on Integrated Information Theory · 2014-05-31T10:15:36.590Z · LW · GW

Tononi gives a very interesting (weird?) reply: Why Scott should stare at a blank wall and reconsider (or, the conscious grid), where he accepts the very unintuitive conclusion that an empty square grid is conscious according to his theory. (Scott's phrasing: "[Tononi] doesn’t “bite the bullet” so much as devour a bullet hoagie with mustard.") Here is Scott's reply to the reply:

Giulio Tononi and Me: A Phi-nal Exchange

Comment by DanielVarga on Dissolving the Thread of Personal Identity · 2014-05-29T20:30:28.117Z · LW · GW

I have no problem with an arbitrary border. I wouldn't even have a problem with, for example, old people gradually shrinking in size to zero just to make the image more aesthetically pleasing.

Comment by DanielVarga on Dissolving the Thread of Personal Identity · 2014-05-25T14:07:08.525Z · LW · GW

Wow, I'd love to see some piece of art depicting that pink worm vine.

Comment by DanielVarga on Open Thread February 25 - March 3 · 2014-02-25T22:55:49.448Z · LW · GW

No family history.

Comment by DanielVarga on Open Thread February 25 - March 3 · 2014-02-25T22:55:29.389Z · LW · GW

Can you ask the second doctor to examine you to at least the same standard as the first one?

Unfortunately, no. See my answer to Lumifer.

Comment by DanielVarga on Open Thread February 25 - March 3 · 2014-02-25T22:54:29.052Z · LW · GW

What he proposed is in fact laser iridotomy, although they called it laser iridectomy.

Comment by DanielVarga on Open Thread February 25 - March 3 · 2014-02-25T22:54:16.236Z · LW · GW

It was less than a disagreement. I'm sorry that I over-emphasized this point. The first time the pressure was Hgmm 26/18, the second time 19/17. The second doctor said that the pressure can fluctuate, and her equipment is not enough to settle the question. (She is an I-don't-know-the-correct-term national health service doctor, the first one is an expensive private doctor with better equipment, and more time for a patient.)

Comment by DanielVarga on Open Thread February 25 - March 3 · 2014-02-25T15:16:50.890Z · LW · GW

My eye doctor diagnosed closed-angle glaucoma, and recommends an iridectomy. I think he might be a bit too trigger-happy, so I followed up with another doctor, and she didn't find the glaucoma. She carefully stated that the first diagnosis can still be the correct one, the first was a more complete examination.

Any insights about the pros and cons of iridectomy?

Comment by DanielVarga on Best of Rationality Quotes, 2013 Edition · 2014-02-03T02:20:35.834Z · LW · GW

Yes. To be exact, not all capitalized words, but all capitalized words that my English spellchecker does not recognize. With all capitalized words the list would start like this:

  • 1523 I
  • 1327 The
  • 558 It
  • 428 If
  • 379 But

Of course the spellchecking method is itself a source of errors. Previous years I never felt like manually correcting these, but checking now it seems like these were the main victims:

  • Graham 43
  • Bacon 20
  • Newton 18
  • Franklin 18
  • Shaw 17
  • Silver 12
  • Pinker 10

Graham is actually number one. I added them to this list, and also to the "Top original authors by karma collected" list. Not retroactively, though, just for 2013.

Comment by DanielVarga on Best of Rationality Quotes, 2013 Edition · 2014-02-01T00:32:48.673Z · LW · GW

Those numbers are also there, in this child comment. I edited the comment to make it clear.

Comment by DanielVarga on Best of Rationality Quotes, 2013 Edition · 2014-02-01T00:05:25.025Z · LW · GW

You are #2 by karma collected from 2009 to 2013, not just in 2013. You earned an average of 8.20 karma points from 5 quotes in 2013, and an average of 11.05 karma points from 81 quotes in total, which is near to a P-value of 0.5 in my statistical test.

Comment by DanielVarga on Best of Rationality Quotes, 2013 Edition · 2014-01-31T20:44:45.622Z · LW · GW

Top short quotes (2009-2013) by karma per character:

  • 55 A Bet is a Tax on Bullshit Alex Tabarrok
  • 45 Luck is statistics taken personally. Penn Jellete
  • 42 I've got to start listening to those quiet, nagging doubts.Calvin
  • 33 Comic Quote Minus 37 -- Ryan Armand Also a favourite.
  • 34 Nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time.Ken Wilber
  • 32 A problem well stated is a problem half solved.Charles Kettering
  • 48 I will not procrastinate regarding any ritual granting immortality. --Evil Overlord List #230
  • 29 The greatest weariness comes from work not done.-Eric Hoffer
  • 26 "Most haystacks do not even have a needle." -- Lorenzo
  • 24 "I accidentally changed my mind." my four-year-old
  • 40 Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it.-Joel Spolsky
  • 31 Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. Voltaire
  • 39 People say "think outside the box," as if the box wasn't a fucking great idea.Sean Thomason
  • 38 The Noah principle: predicting rain doesn’t count, building arks does. -Warren E. Buffett
  • 37 It’s easy to lie with statistics, but it’s easier to lie without them. -Fred Mosteller
  • 30 If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.-Seneca
  • 34 It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.George Bernard Shaw
  • 15 Focusing is about saying no.-- Steve Jobs
  • 34 "Working in mysterious ways" is the greatest euphemism for failure ever devised.TheTweetOfGod
  • 18 "A problem well put, is half solved." - John Dewey
  • 34 Market exchange is a pathetically inadequate substitute for love, but it scales better.S. T. Rev
  • 12 Death is the gods' crime.Unsounded
  • 24 The most practical thing in the world is a good theory. Helmholtz
  • 29 When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir? John Maynard Keynes
  • 30 “Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.” - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
  • 28 Writing program code is a good way of debugging your thinking. -- Bill Venables
  • 28 It is easy to be certain....One has only to be sufficiently vague.Charles S. Peirce
  • 30 Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations. — John Von Neumann
  • 31 There is one rule that's very simple, but not easy: observe reality and adjust. Ran Prieur
  • 31 It's a horrible feeling when you don't understand why you did something.-- Dennis Monokroussos
  • 26 Shouldn't "it works like a charm" be said about things that don't work?Jason Roy
  • 21 Things are only impossible until they're not. -- Jean-Luc Picard
  • 30 Now, now, perfectly symmetrical violence never solved anything.--Professor Farnsworth, Futurama.
  • 24 Part of the potential of things is how they break. Vi Hart, How To Snakes
  • 26 The dream is damned and dreamer too if dreaming's all that dreamers do.--Rory Miller
  • 25 A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library. Daniel Dennett
  • 29 We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it. Mark Twain
  • 29 The Company that needs a new machine tool is already paying for it. -old Warner Swasey ad
  • 25 "Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from SCIENCE!" ~Girl Genius
  • 26 Complex problems have simple, easy to understand wrong answers. — Grossman's Law
  • 22 Most people would rather die than think; many do. – Bertrand Russell
  • 18 A sharp knife is nothing without a sharp eye.Klingon proverb.
  • 22 The only road to doing good shows, is doing bad shows.Louis C.K., on Reddit
  • 28 My brain technically-not-a-lies to me far more than it actually lies to me.-- Aristosophy (again)
  • 23 The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off. Gloria Steinem
  • 27 Nature draws no line between living and nonliving. -- K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation
  • 26 “Anything left on your bucket list?”“Not dying...”-Bill Gates in his AMA on reddit.
  • 22 It is better to destroy one's own errors than those of others. Democritus
  • 12 Reality is not optional. Thomas Sowell
  • 27 If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance we can solve them.-- Isaac Asimov
  • 17 Statistics is applied philosophy of science. A. P. Dawid
  • 26 A man who says he is willing to meet you halfway is usually a poor judge of distance.Unknown
  • 22 Forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today. Lawrence Krauss
  • 26 Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.H.L. Mencken
  • 27 The first rule of human club is you don't explicitly discuss the rules of human club.Silas Dogood
  • 23 Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics. Dean Schlicter
  • 18 Good things come to those who steal them.-- Magnificent Sasquatch
  • 24 We are built to be effective animals, not happy ones. -Robert Wright, The Moral Animal
  • 19 Being right too soon is socially unacceptable. Robert A. Heinlein
  • 14 "Anything you can do, I can do meta" -Rudolf Carnap
  • 17 Mind is a machine for jumping to conclusions - Daniel Kahneman
  • 26 If Tetris has taught me anything it's that errors pile up and accomplishments disappear.-Unknown
  • 26 A faith which cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.Arthur C. Clarke
  • 26 Nobody panics when things go "according to plan"… even if the plan is horrifying. The Joker
  • 23 "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies." --Friedrich Nietzsche
  • 14 I intend to live forever or die trying-- Groucho Marx
  • 26 We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.-- F. A. Hayek
  • 20 I honestly don't know. Let's see what happens. -- Hans. The Troll Hunter
  • 16 Luck is opportunity plus preparation plus luck.--Jane Espenson
  • 20 The singularity is my retirement plan. -- tocomment, in a Hacker News post
  • 19 Better our hypotheses die for our errors than ourselves. -- Karl Popper
  • 11 Whenever you can, count.--Sir Francis Galton
  • 22 Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all.-Charles Babbage
  • 19 In general, we are least aware of what our minds do best. — Marvin Minsky
  • 20 It is easier to love humanity than to love one's neighbor.--Eric Hoffer, on Near/Far
  • 15 Keep your solutions close, and your problems closer.afoolswisdom
  • 18 "If God gives you lemons, you find a new God."-- Powerthirst 2: Re-Domination
  • 17 Truth comes out of error more easily than out of confusion.-Francis Bacon
  • 23 Opening your eyes doesn't make a bad picture worse. http://onefte.com/2011/07/17/bully-for-you/
  • 19 Know the hair you have to get the hair you want. -Pantene Pro-V hair care bottle
  • 16 The best way to escape from a problem is to solve it. -Alan Saporta
  • 16 Not to know is bad; not to wish to know is worse. — Wolof proverb
  • 20 Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -- Voltaire
  • 18 Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it.--Bruce Lee
  • 9 AI makes philosophy honest -- Dan Dennet
  • 18 God created the Earth, but the Dutch created the Netherlands. -- Dutch proverb
  • 20 "Just because you no longer believe a lie, does not mean you now know the truth."Mark Atwood
  • 14 History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. -Mark Twain
  • 17 The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled. -- Plutarch
  • 18 The person you are most afraid to contradict is yourself. -Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  • 16 Like all dreamers, I confused disenchantment with truth. (Jean-Paul Sartre)
  • 20 Man, I'm amazing! I'm a machine that turns FOOD into IDEAS! -- T-Rex, Dinosaur Comics #539
  • 17 What good fortune for those in power that people do not think. Adolph Hitler
  • 14 We see things not as they are but as we are, ...- G. T. W. Patrick
  • 19 You don't have to believe everything you think. Seen on bumper sticker, via ^zhurnaly.
  • 19 The truth is out there, but so are the lies.-Dana Scully, The X-Files, Season 1, Episode 17
  • 13 Would anybody tell me if I was getting stupider? Mike Patton
  • 13 We're even wrong about which mistakes we're making.-Carl Winfeld
  • 13 If I close my mind in fear, please pry it open. -- Metallica
Comment by DanielVarga on Best of Rationality Quotes, 2013 Edition · 2014-01-31T20:41:36.909Z · LW · GW

Top original authors by karma collected:

  • 800 Graham
  • 564 Russell
  • 434 Chesterton
  • 428 Pratchett
  • 395 Feynman
  • 268 Franklin
  • 265 Dennett
  • 255 Friedman
  • 238 Newton
  • 238 Aaronson
  • 236 Munroe
  • 234 Nietzsche
  • 231 Egan
  • 229 Shaw
  • 210 Heinlein
  • 209 Aristotle
  • 201 Bacon
  • 193 Einstein
  • 183 Wilson
  • 183 Sagan
  • 175 Plato
  • 172 Voltaire
  • 172 Stephenson
  • 170 Pinker
  • 169 Darwin
  • 163 SMBC
  • 163 Kahneman
  • 160 Silver
  • 151 Hofstadter
  • 150 Asimov
  • 149 Mencken
  • 149 Dawkins
  • 144 Moldbug
  • 144 Godin
  • 142 Johnson
  • 136 Wong
  • 133 Buffett
  • 125 Descartes
  • 122 Orwell
  • 121 Taleb
  • 119 Bakker
  • 118 Maynard
  • 114 Minsky
  • 114 Hanson
  • 109 Hume
  • 106 Sowell
  • 102 Keynes
  • 98 Deutsch
  • 97 Churchill
  • 94 Lichtenberg
  • 91 Dijkstra
  • 90 Jaynes
  • 90 Hoffer
  • 89 Marx
  • 89 Holmes
  • 88 Wittgenstein
  • 87 Neumann
  • 87 Harris
  • 85 Jefferson
  • 79 Huxley
  • 76 Leibniz
  • 73 Wilde
  • 72 Locke
  • 70 Mitchell
  • 65 Meier
  • 62 Peirce
  • 61 Munger
  • 58 Clark
  • 57 Gould
  • 54 Aurelius
  • 48 Babbage
  • 47 Medawar
  • 46 Crowley
  • 44 Diogenes
  • 41 Carlyle
  • 40 Yudkowsky
  • 35 Turing
  • 34 Schopenhauer
  • 28 Rochefoucauld
  • 28 Goethe
  • 27 Thoreau
Comment by DanielVarga on Best of Rationality Quotes, 2013 Edition · 2014-01-31T20:38:00.524Z · LW · GW

Top original authors by number of quotes. (Note that authors and mentions are not disambiguated.)

  • Graham 43
  • Russell 41
  • Feynman 39
  • Pratchett 30
  • Chesterton 29
  • Einstein 27
  • Nietzsche 25
  • Heinlein 23
  • Dennett 22
  • Johnson 20
  • Bacon 20
  • Wilson 19
  • Newton 18
  • Franklin 18
  • Aaronson 18
  • Shaw 17
  • Darwin 17
  • Taleb 16
  • Dawkins 16
  • Voltaire 14
  • Kahneman 14
  • Wittgenstein 13
  • Sowell 13
  • Munroe 13
  • Aristotle 13
  • Silver 12
  • Meier 12
  • Maynard 12
  • Hume 12
  • Asimov 12
  • Stephenson 11
  • Sagan 11
  • Plato 11
  • Orwell 11
  • Moldbug 11
  • Mencken 11
  • Locke 11
  • Huxley 11
  • Hoffer 11
  • Egan 11
  • SMBC 10
  • Pinker 10
  • Peirce 10
  • Neumann 10
  • Keynes 10
  • Harris 10
  • Gould 10
  • Friedman 10
  • Clark 10
  • Bakker 10
  • Minsky 9
  • Marx 9
  • Leibniz 9
  • Holmes 9
  • Hofstadter 9
  • Descartes 9
  • Buffett 9
  • Thoreau 8
  • Jefferson 8
  • Jaynes 8
  • Godin 8
  • Dijkstra 8
  • Deutsch 8
  • Crowley 8
  • Aurelius 8
  • Yudkowsky 7
  • Wong 7
  • Wilde 7
  • Turing 7
  • Schopenhauer 7
  • Rochefoucauld 7
  • Munger 7
  • Mitchell 7
  • Medawar 7
  • Lichtenberg 7
  • Hanson 7
  • Goethe 7
  • Diogenes 7
  • Churchill 7
  • Carlyle 7
  • Babbage 7
Comment by DanielVarga on Best of Rationality Quotes, 2013 Edition · 2014-01-31T20:37:27.292Z · LW · GW

Top quote contributors of 2013 by statistical significance level:

  • 0.00091 (61.00 in 2): gotdistractedbythe
  • 0.00235 (34.60 in 5): philh
  • 0.00511 (31.80 in 5): Mestroyer
  • 0.00695 (21.21 in 19): James_Miller
  • 0.00882 (55.00 in 1): westward
  • 0.00882 (55.00 in 1): Zando
  • 0.01319 (21.00 in 16): Stabilizer
  • 0.01365 (30.00 in 4): Kaj_Sotala
  • 0.01471 (52.00 in 1): VincentYu
  • 0.01558 (36.50 in 2): sediment
  • 0.01923 (21.58 in 12): Alejandro1
  • 0.02115 (30.33 in 3): Particleman
  • 0.02344 (23.12 in 8): Qiaochu_Yuan
  • 0.02491 (33.50 in 2): MinibearRex
  • 0.04559 (37.00 in 1): nabeelqu
  • 0.05000 (36.00 in 1): andreas
  • 0.05000 (36.00 in 1): NoisyEmpire
  • 0.06794 (23.00 in 4): ShardPhoenix
  • 0.08824 (32.00 in 1): David_Gerard
  • 0.08824 (32.00 in 1): Dentin
  • 0.09853 (31.00 in 1): HungryHippo
  • 0.10441 (30.00 in 1): ciphergoth
  • 0.11119 (19.50 in 6): dspeyer
  • 0.11176 (29.00 in 1): roystgnr
  • 0.11176 (29.00 in 1): Turgurth
  • 0.11242 (17.91 in 11): GabrielDuquette
  • 0.12794 (27.00 in 1): JonMcGuire
  • 0.12794 (27.00 in 1): XerxesPraelor
  • 0.13156 (17.33 in 12): jsbennett86
  • 0.14339 (20.67 in 3): Nomad
  • 0.14559 (26.00 in 1): Creutzer
  • 0.14559 (26.00 in 1): curiousepic
  • 0.14559 (26.00 in 1): etotheipi
  • 0.14636 (22.00 in 2): Will_Newsome
  • 0.14978 (19.50 in 4): snafoo
  • 0.16765 (25.00 in 1): BlueSun
  • 0.16765 (25.00 in 1): Carwajalca
  • 0.16765 (25.00 in 1): pewpewlasergun
  • 0.16765 (25.00 in 1): Rubix
  • 0.16765 (25.00 in 1): SatvikBeri
Comment by DanielVarga on Best of Rationality Quotes, 2013 Edition · 2014-01-31T20:36:45.303Z · LW · GW

Top quote contributors by karma score collected in 2013:

  • 512 Eugine_Nier
  • 403 James_Miller
  • 336 Stabilizer
  • 259 Alejandro1
  • 208 jsbennett86
  • 197 GabrielDuquette
  • 195 Vaniver
  • 185 Qiaochu_Yuan
  • 180 shminux
  • 175 lukeprog
  • 173 philh
  • 165 RolfAndreassen
  • 159 Mestroyer
  • 149 Pablo_Stafforini
  • 141 NancyLebovitz
  • 140 Eliezer_Yudkowsky
  • 133 Zubon
  • 133 Jayson_Virissimo
  • 122 gotdistractedbythe
  • 120 Kaj_Sotala
  • 118 JQuinton
  • 118 BT_Uytya
  • 117 dspeyer
  • 114 cody-bryce
  • 112 satt
  • 92 ShardPhoenix
  • 91 Particleman
  • 84 katydee
  • 82 elharo
  • 78 snafoo
  • 74 Cthulhoo
  • 74 Benito
  • 73 sediment
  • 72 arundelo
  • 71 tingram
  • 67 MinibearRex
  • 63 pjeby
  • 62 Nomad
  • 62 CronoDAS
  • 60 RichardKennaway
Comment by DanielVarga on Best of Rationality Quotes, 2013 Edition · 2014-01-31T20:36:03.020Z · LW · GW

Top quote contributors by total (2009-2013) karma score collected:

  • 1283 RichardKennaway
  • 895 gwern
  • 843 Alejandro1
  • 815 GabrielDuquette
  • 777 Eliezer_Yudkowsky
  • 753 James_Miller
  • 751 Eugine_Nier
  • 735 Rain
  • 715 MichaelGR
  • 662 Jayson_Virissimo
  • 660 lukeprog
  • 619 Stabilizer
  • 599 NancyLebovitz
  • 585 Konkvistador
  • 572 anonym
  • 436 CronoDAS
  • 415 RobinZ
  • 408 Yvain
  • 358 Alicorn
  • 350 Grognor
  • 342 Tesseract
  • 316 arundelo
  • 309 Kaj_Sotala
  • 304 DSimon
  • 300 Vaniver
  • 285 Oscar_Cunningham
  • 283 peter_hurford
  • 270 Nominull
  • 270 [deleted]
  • 258 billswift
  • 245 Thomas
  • 244 katydee
  • 240 shminux
  • 240 jsbennett86
  • 235 Kutta
  • 222 roland
  • 215 RolfAndreassen
  • 215 MinibearRex
  • 199 Will_Newsome
  • 185 Qiaochu_Yuan
Comment by DanielVarga on Open Thread for January 17 - 23 2014 · 2014-01-26T21:51:14.449Z · LW · GW

Thanks!

Comment by DanielVarga on Open Thread for January 17 - 23 2014 · 2014-01-25T13:02:43.872Z · LW · GW

Is this the latest open thread? Generally, how do I find the latest open thread? The tag does not help.

Comment by DanielVarga on 2013 Less Wrong Census/Survey · 2013-12-01T20:18:05.005Z · LW · GW

Amusingly, google chrome autofill still remembered my answers from last year. This made filling the demographic part a bit faster, and allowed a little game: after giving a probability estimation I could check my answer from a year ago.

Comment by DanielVarga on AI ebook cover design brainstorming · 2013-09-28T22:10:00.451Z · LW · GW

The smaller thing could be a human, too. Giant, good looking but creepy child holding small vulnerable human in one hand, looking at it emotionlessly. But MIRI will not like this version, because they really want to avoid anthropomorphizing the AI.

Comment by DanielVarga on [LINK] Larry = Harry sans magic? Google vs. Death · 2013-09-19T02:08:21.757Z · LW · GW

I fully agree with this point, and I fully agree with Page's goals. But I think there are things here that a simple total-years-of-potential-life-lost framework can not capture. As you might have guessed even from my first comment, this issue is very personal to me. Not long ago a good friend died after terrible suffering, leaving three young children behind. That's very sad, and I really don't know for what values of N could this be balanced in a utilitarian sense by lengthening the healthy old age of N of my friends with 10 years. Obviously, such trade-offs are taboo, but even if I try to force myself into some detached outside view, I still believe that number N must be large.

Comment by DanielVarga on [LINK] Larry = Harry sans magic? Google vs. Death · 2013-09-18T20:39:18.221Z · LW · GW

“Are people really focused on the right things? One of the things I thought was amazing is that if you solve cancer, you’d add about three years to people’s average life expectancy,” Page said. “We think of solving cancer as this huge thing that’ll totally change the world. But when you really take a step back and look at it, yeah, there are many, many tragic cases of cancer, and it’s very, very sad, but in the aggregate, it’s not as big an advance as you might think.” (Larry Page as quoted in the Time article)

This is something like the ecological fallacy. In the aggregate, we lose 3 years of potential life because of cancer. No big deal. Looking at the individual level, most of us had close friends who had lost 30 years of potential life.

Comment by DanielVarga on How probable is Molecular Nanotech? · 2013-07-02T10:57:36.440Z · LW · GW

I am not a physicist, but this stack exchange answer seems to disagree with your assessment: What are the primary obstacles to solve the many-body problem in quantum mechanics?

Comment by DanielVarga on Rationality witticisms suitable for t-shirts or bumper stickers · 2013-06-18T01:44:50.002Z · LW · GW

I did exactly that after looking at this thread, and only spotted your comment when I wanted to post the results.

I skipped some obvious refinements as this was a 5 minute project.

  • 55 A Bet is a Tax on Bullshit. Alex Tabarrok
  • 45 Luck is statistics taken personally. Penn Jellete
  • 33 Comic Quote Minus 37 -- Ryan Armand Also a favourite.
  • 34 Nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time.Ken Wilber
  • 32 A problem well stated is a problem half solved.Charles Kettering
  • 48 I will not procrastinate regarding any ritual granting immortality. --Evil Overlord List #230
  • 29 The greatest weariness comes from work not done.-Eric Hoffer
  • 26 "Most haystacks do not even have a needle." -- Lorenzo
  • 24 "I accidentally changed my mind." my four-year-old
  • 31 Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. Voltaire
  • 39 People say "think outside the box," as if the box wasn't a fucking great idea.Sean Thomason
  • 38 The Noah principle: predicting rain doesn’t count, building arks does. -Warren E. Buffett
  • 37 It’s easy to lie with statistics, but it’s easier to lie without them. -Fred Mosteller
  • 30 If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.-Seneca
  • 34 It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.George Bernard Shaw
  • 34 "Working in mysterious ways" is the greatest euphemism for failure ever devised.TheTweetOfGod
  • 12 Death is the gods' crime. Unsounded
  • 24 The most practical thing in the world is a good theory. Helmholtz
  • 29 When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir? John Maynard Keynes
  • 28 Writing program code is a good way of debugging your thinking. -- Bill Venables
  • 28 It is easy to be certain....One has only to be sufficiently vague.Charles S. Peirce
  • 30 Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations. — John Von Neumann
  • 31 There is one rule that's very simple, but not easy: observe reality and adjust. Ran Prieur
  • 21 Things are only impossible until they're not. -- Jean-Luc Picard
  • 24 Part of the potential of things is how they break. Vi Hart, How To Snakes
  • 25 A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library. Daniel Dennett
  • 29 We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it. Mark Twain
  • 29 The Company that needs a new machine tool is already paying for it. -old Warner Swasey ad
  • 25 "Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from SCIENCE!" ~Girl Genius
  • 26 Complex problems have simple, easy to understand wrong answers. — Grossman's Law
  • 22 Most people would rather die than think; many do. – Bertrand Russell
  • 22 The only road to doing good shows, is doing bad shows.Louis C.K., on Reddit
  • 28 My brain technically-not-a-lies to me far more than it actually lies to me.-- Aristosophy (again)
  • 23 The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off. Gloria Steinem
  • 27 Nature draws no line between living and nonliving. -- K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation
  • 22 It is better to destroy one's own errors than those of others. Democritus
  • 12 Reality is not optional. Thomas Sowell
  • 17 Statistics is applied philosophy of science. A. P. Dawid
  • 22 Forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today. Lawrence Krauss
  • 23 Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics. Dean Schlicter
  • 24 We are built to be effective animals, not happy ones. -Robert Wright, The Moral Animal
  • 19 Being right too soon is socially unacceptable. Robert A. Heinlein
  • 14 "Anything you can do, I can do meta" -Rudolf Carnap
  • 17 Mind is a machine for jumping to conclusions - Daniel Kahneman
  • 26 A faith which cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.Arthur C. Clarke
  • 26 Nobody panics when things go "according to plan"… even if the plan is horrifying. The Joker
  • 23 "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies." --Friedrich Nietzsche
  • 20 I honestly don't know. Let's see what happens. -- Hans. The Troll Hunter
  • 16 Luck is opportunity plus preparation plus luck.--Jane Espenson
  • 20 The singularity is my retirement plan. -- tocomment, in a Hacker News post
  • 19 Better our hypotheses die for our errors than ourselves. -- Karl Popper
  • 22 Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all.-Charles Babbage
  • 19 In general, we are least aware of what our minds do best. — Marvin Minsky
  • 20 It is easier to love humanity than to love one's neighbor.--Eric Hoffer, on Near/Far
  • 15 Keep your solutions close, and your problems closer.afoolswisdom
  • 18 "If God gives you lemons, you find a new God."-- Powerthirst 2: Re-Domination
  • 17 Truth comes out of error more easily than out of confusion.-Francis Bacon
  • 23 Opening your eyes doesn't make a bad picture worse. http://onefte.com/2011/07/17/bully-for-you/
  • 19 Know the hair you have to get the hair you want. -Pantene Pro-V hair care bottle
  • 16 The best way to escape from a problem is to solve it. -Alan Saporta
  • 16 Not to know is bad; not to wish to know is worse. — Wolof proverb
  • 20 Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -- Voltaire
Comment by DanielVarga on After critical event W happens, they still won't believe you · 2013-06-14T09:37:24.277Z · LW · GW

unrestricted Turing test passing should be sufficient unto FOOM

I tend to agree, but I have to note the surface similarity with Hofstadter's disproved "No, I'm bored with chess. Let's talk about poetry." prediction.

Comment by DanielVarga on [link] Scott Aaronson on free will · 2013-06-11T19:59:22.962Z · LW · GW

I was trying to position the paper in terms of LW opinions, because my target audience were LW readers. (That's also the reason I mentioned the tangential Eliezer reference.) It's beneath my dignity to list all the different philosophical questions where my opinion is different from LW consensus, so let's just say that I used the term as a convenient reference point rather than a creed.

Comment by DanielVarga on Naturalism versus unbounded (or unmaximisable) utility options · 2013-02-02T17:59:12.810Z · LW · GW

If it really has only finitely many utility levels, then for a sufficiently small epsilon and some even smaller delta, it will not care whether it ends up in Hell with probability epsilon or probability delta.

Comment by DanielVarga on Best of Rationality Quotes, 2012 Edition · 2013-02-02T17:51:01.455Z · LW · GW

I removed the broken index.html, sorry. Now you can see the whole (messy) directory. The README is actually a list of commands with some comments, the source code consists of parse.py and convolution.py.

Comment by DanielVarga on Best of Rationality Quotes, 2012 Edition · 2013-01-25T22:29:57.231Z · LW · GW

When I stated that the middle is roughly exponential, this was the graph that I was looking at:

d <- density(karma)

plot(log(d$y) ~ d$x)

I don't do this for a living, so I am not sure at all, but if I really really had to make this formal, I would probably use maximum likelihood to fit an exponential distribution on the relevant interval, and then Kolmogorov-Smirnoff. It's what shminux said, except there is probably no closed formula because the cutoffs complicate the thing. And at least one of the cutoffs is really necessary, because below 3 it is obviously not exponential.

Comment by DanielVarga on Best of Rationality Quotes, 2012 Edition · 2013-01-25T21:06:02.432Z · LW · GW

I am afraid I don't understand your methodology. How is a rank versus value function supposed to look like for an exponentially distributed sample?

Comment by DanielVarga on Best of Rationality Quotes, 2012 Edition · 2013-01-25T19:59:58.193Z · LW · GW

It is roughly exponential in the range between 3 and 60 karma.

You can find the raw data here.

Edit: I didn't spot gwern's more careful analysis. I am still digesting it. gwern, you should use the above link, it contains the below-10 quotes, too.