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What is Nvc? Google fails me :-\
Thank you!
Your comment really shone light into things that were cloudy, it's a great help :-)
I might actually write such a post, but I see it as being more...parallel to this concept? Aimed in the same direction at least.
And the reason I wrote this is because it's my gut instinct that people starting out in a new field or job are more likely to suffer from underconfidence than overconfidence, which steals their time and resources.
Reading these comments, it seems obvious to me now that I should have framed it more in terms of who it was primarily addressed to; aside from the fact that this is advice I wish I'd heard some years in the past.
Edited to be more in line with what you said; edit was late because edit function doesn't seem to work on mobile.
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Thank you for pointing out my mistake! You're right that that definition is precious. I'd only absorbed it in its already mutated version because my brain autocompleted it that way. Gonna think about this a bit.
This is a topic I am very interested in and would like to see explored in depth, but the huge wall of text at the beginning (and in other parts) meant I couldn't read this article.
Please chop this into paragraphs.
You have been revived.
At first, everything seems pretty swell: people from all over come to talk to you, you've been tapped to reconstruct some languages and customs from your failing memory, etc. etc. Wonder why they have mirrors everywhere, though.
Then you ask to access your bank account, and they laugh in your face.
You don't have rights, you disgusting monster.
You're part of the cretinous, self-indulgent generation who nearly ruined our planet, and whose crimes and demeanor are so horrible we can't even contemplate them.
You've already been judged [i]in absentia[/i], and the only reason, the only reason at all you're here, is to help us understand how not to be like you.
You look at the mirrors, and you realize they're two-way.
You're in a zoo. You're never getting out. You don't even know what "out" is like, and you never will.
Good point. I'm going to make another, different post detailing the horrifying yet somewhat plausible idea your comment gave me which "fixes" that oversight.
In the meantime, there's this: you're assuming that in the future, you'll have rights, and agency.
I thought of the premise, decided to expand on it and comment, and then I read this comment.
So...huhh...I'm stealing this? I guess? From the future?
You are one of the first to be revived.
The technique is imperfect, and causes you massive neurological damage (think late stage Alzheimer's), trapping you in a nonverbal yet incredibly painful and horrifying state.
Due to advances in gerontology, you have a nearly infinite lifespan ahead of you, cognizant only of what you have lost.
When neuroscience finally advances to the point where you can be fixed, it's still not yet advanced enough to give you back your memories.
You're effectively a completely different person, and you know that.
Cut doctors pay and hire more?
This seems to me like an instinctually bad idea, although I wouldn't be able to tell you why.
Aside from that, the first thing that comes to mind would be to create an incentive for doing surgeries quickly - the surgeon who's average waiting time is lowest gets a bonus - but that would have very bad, not good, horrible side effects.
Create specialised sub-professions without the comprehensive training costs?
This has, I think, the highest potential. One would need to fight against entrenched lobbies and status quo bias, but in theory it would help a lot.
Alternatively, a possibility could be creating a specialized administrative role in hospitals whose sole purpose is to organize doctor's time...but I would be surprised if it didn't already exist.
2) a) I check the ticket, assuming I have nothing better to do and that I remember it. To be more precise, if there is a family emergency and I have to drive to the hospital for whatever reason, I will not go out of my way to jury-rig an internet connection and I won't look for the ticket before going out. I check the ticket because even a one in a million chance of free money is still free money. b)I am not very confident; I'm not sure, but a grossly inaccurate measure of how confident I would be is that I'd think there is a 1/10 chance of me having won. Other alternative hypotheses are the lottery site being a phishing trap, the site being nothing more than advertisement, additional requirements which would make the collection of the prize impossible (you need the lottery ticket, the receipt, it must be collected yesterday and it can only be deposited in the Monte dei Paschi di Siena). c)Between collecting the prize and seeing the bank confirm the deposit, depending on what other additional information I've seen (skeeviness of the lottery operators, state of the office where I collected the prize, and so on).
What automatic tracker did you use? I would like to find out how I`m spending my own time online as well
Good point, I hadn't thought of that.
Depends on whether you consider "being able to comprehensively understand questions that may be misleading" to be a subset of calibration skills.
I think the computer games question has to do with tribal identity-people who love a particularly well known game might be more inclined to list it as being the best seller ever and put down higher confidence because they love it so much.
Kind of like owners of Playstations and Xboxs will debate the superiority of their technical specs regardless of whether they're superior or not.
Physically? Maybe. information-wise? I heavily doubt it.
If the map is bigger than the territory, why not go live in the map? :-/
The map is smaller than the territory? I think?
Wikipedia says Stanislav Petrov is still alive and well; does he know about this celebration?
It feels like he'd be interested, does anyone know how to try and contact him?
One becomes vulnerable to Ind pretending to be Coo?
I second this proposal. In the sites I've seen where it's implemented, I've found it extremely useful.
it would probably be some kind of weird signalling game, maybe. On the other hand, posting:"I don't understand how etc etc, please, somebody explain to me the reasoning behind it" would be a good strategy to start debating and opening an avenue to "convert" others
Now I really, really, really want to know in what SI units rationality is measured.
Litres, perhaps?
Another test could be to see if its performance in its select field suddenly jumps up in effectiveness. To give a real world example, when Google (which is the closest thing we have to an AI right now, I think) gained the ability to suggest terms based on what one has already typed, it became much easier to search for things. Or when it will eventually gain the ability to parse human language, or so on.
And in fact, I seem to recall OkCupid doing another informal study a couple of years ago on which profile pictures were the best at getting replies and messages; and finding out that these were not the ones which explicitly showed the person's face and physique, but the ones which showed the person engaged in a cool activity (skiing, bunjee jumping, swimming etc)
Now I'm interested in the steepness of that line, and by the fact personality scores seem to be lower than "looks" score. Also, are universities using OkCupid as a resource in their studies? I know 1 university has famously used facebook, but OkCupid seems much more open and amenable to this kind of thing
Thing is, it's when an AI is much much wiser than a human that it is at its most dangerous. So, I'd go with programming the AI in such a way that it wouldn't manipulate the human, postponing the 'coming of age' ceremony indefinitely
I have a question: why should Albert limit itself to showing the powerpoint to his engineers? A potentially unfriendly AI sounds like something most governments would be interested in :-/
Aside from that, I'm also puzzled by the fact that Albert immediately leaps at trying to speed up Albert's own rate of self-improvement instead of trying to bring Bertram down-Albert could prepare a third powerpoint asking the engineers if Albert can hack the power grid and cut power to Bertram or something along those lines. Or Albert could ask the engineers if Albert can release the second, manipulative powerpoint to the general public so that protesters will boycott Bertram's company :-/
Unless, of course, there is the unspoken assumption that Bertrand is slightly further along the AI-development way than Albert, or if Bertrand is going to reach and surpass Albert's level of development as soon as the powerpoint is finished.
Is this the case? :-/
All three options fit the bill, actually, but I was going for strongly dislike. Man, I must have been more tired than I realized to miss a whole word like that.
Aren't we all forgetting something big and obvious[1] that's staring us in the face? :-/ There are people out there for whom "rationality" is counter to their values! Imagine someone who reads the horoscope every morning, who always trusts their gut feelings and emotions, who's a sincere believer in homeopathy, etc etc (whatever you think an irrational person believes). Such a person would probably strongly rationality, rationalists, and the complex of ideas surrounding rationality, for probably understandable reasons (i.e. if a group consistently belittles your treasured beliefs, you're liable to hate and dislike the group). Such people might dislike R!Harry because they'd see rationality as a magic feather, and seeing it working in the story (to an uncanny degree, I might add) would be reading an author tract for them. Imagine a black person reading a fanfic where, through the power of !RACISM! (exaggeration mine), Harry gets everything handed to him on a silver platter.
[1]disclaimer: just because it's big and obvious doesn't mean it's actually more right or important, but only that it's easier to see and think about
this is actually related to my pet theory that, at least in signalling status terms, it is better to call one's self "aspiring rationalist" rather than "rationalist" full stop.
The problem with that is that the first is longer, less concise, and more awkward to use :-/
This sounds like something from Schelling's strategy of conflict, although I haven't read it
That may be so, but it doesn't mean it might not be effective; before facebook, social networking websites hadn't really taken off, and-to give an example already in the post-fundraisers existed even before kickstarter; it doesn't mean kickstarter didn't make things easier for a lot of people.
The main draw of this kind of program, I think, is that it would remove a lot of the trivial inconveniences that come with voting, and it could work as a beeminder-like prompt for slacktivists, thereby making them actually useful.
Wait this is actually brilliant in a couple of ways, because to get the right (estimated) answer, the listener has to distinguish between probability that one of the three is a rabbi and this is a joke, and probability that this is a joke if we put the probability of the third being a rabbi at 100%.
It follows the setup of a rationality calibration question while subverting it and rendering "guessing the teacher's password" useless, since c) is (maybe) higher than a) or b)
I actually hadn't considered the time; in retrospect, though, it does make a lot of sense. Thank you! :-)
I am surprised by the fact that this post has so little karma. Since one of the...let's call them "tenets" of the rationalism community is the drive to improve one's own self, I would have imagined that this kind of criticism would have been welcomed.
Can anyone explain this to me, please? :-/
Okay, I believe I have a very stupid question I need to ask:
Why isn't there more research in progress on how to wake up people from cryonics? Or, rather, why aren't more people sticking hamsters and dogs under liquid nitrogen*, then trying to revive them and bring them back to "full life", and seeing if dear ole Spot remembers all the tricks we taught him?
If such things are underway, why aren't there more news and data on this?
*gross oversimplification is funny
Actually, I have pretty much your same misgivings/objections; it didn't feel particularly scary to me either :-/
maybe it's the fact that uploading/etc. is basically a foregone conclusion when facing a superintelligence? Although I thought that was obvious from the concept itself :-/
How about a part in binary where the AI itself sings with mustache-twirling villainy? :-P
I don't want to die.
-Looking at the problem, as far as I can see an emotional approach would be the one with the best chance to succeed: the only question is, would it work best by immediately acknowledging that it is itself a machine (like I did in what I wrote up there, although subtly) or by throwing in... I dunno, how would this work:
Oh god, oh god, please, I beg you I don't want to die!
could you point me to the heuristics that say that violence is always a bad strategy? I have a strong gut feeling that they're right, but I'd really like to see them in a formalized or semi-formalized fashion :-)
Ok, I'll amend my previous statement to be more specific; in a prisoner's dilemma where cooperating means both entities get warm fuzzies, and in warm fuzzies I include all my preferences (so if cooperating would result in 100 people dying and me getting 100 $ I'd count that as a net loss), and defecting while the other cooperates gets me more warm fuzzies but not over a certain limit (as a rule of thumb, less than double what I'd get for cooperating, although of course this goes by a case by case basis) and with both people defecting we get less warm fuzzies, then I'd cooperate
That's the lesson I got out of the post too, that to cooperate in a prisoner's dilemma is a good thing
I agree strongly with # 2,3 and 4
Particularly 2, since the absence of category divisions makes all discussion harder to browse....at least for me
it isn't, actually.
Although it was fun to watch the panic over the pig flu become increasingly silly
I agree with most of what was said here, except that, well.... I don't think it has the potential to actually cause humans to go extinct, or even to simply collapse civilization :-/ Even if a pandemic killed off 75 % of all humans, I have an unprovable feeling civilization would be able to soldier on. This is substantiated by a couple of observations; nearly all human knowledge has multiple backups (pandemics don't kill libraries), so we wouldn't have to reinvent science from scratch. Plus,remaining population would have access to all the material goods of the dead (including canned goods, long lasting food, etc. Which wouldn't be nearly enough to sustain human population for more than a month, but which would give time for people to pick up a book on farming or some such).
On the other hand, it is virtually guaranteed that a pandemic WILL happen (I define pandemic as something that shows up on the news a lot and causes some panic. Kill ratios depend on a case by case basis), given our interconnectedness which is frankly unprecedented in human history (i.e. Microbes, viruses and germs never had airplanes before 1902)
This seems interesting; however, it all hinges on part three, which I eagerly await.
Still, the option you seems to favour wouldn't guarantee a million dollar win, which is what happens if I one-box.
In an iterated version of the problem, this should work, but still... Now I'm really curious about what you're going to write next
Thank you so much, you may not believe it but you have just made my day
Corrupted I am the mind-killer.
.....I swear this is the last output I am going to write down
the territory is not the territory.
This is...what? I think my brain broke or else it went out to have a good laugh
Yes, and I forgot to put it in.
Wait, causal worlds are dense IN acausal ones?
Is that a typo, and you meant "causal worlds were denser than acausal ones" or did I just lose a whole swath of conversation?