What is it? I don't remember turbocharging from CfAR.
Yes, genetics + randomness determines most variation in human behavior, but the SSC/LW stuff has helped provide some direction and motivation.
My son is winning. Although only 13 he received a 5 (the highest score) on the calculus BC, and the Java programming AP exams. He is currently taking a college level course in programming at Stanford Online High School (Data Structures and Algorithms), and he works with a programming mentor I found through SSC. He reads SSC, and has read much of the sequences. His life goal is to help program a friendly superintelligence. I've been reading SSC, Overcomming Bias, and Lesswrong since the beginning.
Thanks for the positive comment on my chapter. I'm going to be doing more work on AGI and utility functions so if you (or anyone else) has any further thoughts please contact me.
A friend does advertising for small businesses in Massachusetts. He says that his clients have trouble hiring people for low skilled jobs who are not on drugs.
I've started creating a series of YouTube videos on the dangers of artificial general intelligence.
(1) Agreed, although I would get vastly more resources to personally consume! Free energy is probably the binding limitation on computational time which probably is the post-singularity binding limit on meaningful lifespan.
(2) An intelligence explosion might collapse to minutes the time between when humans could walk on Mars and when my idea becomes practical to implement.
(3) Today offense is stronger than defense, yet I put a high probability on my personally being able to survive another year.
(4) Perhaps. But what might go wrong is a struggle for limited resources among people with sharply conflicting values. If, today, a small group of people carefully chosen by some leader such as Scott Alexander could move to an alternate earth in another Hubble volume, and he picked me to be in the group, I would greatly increase the estimate of the civilization I'm part of surviving a million years.
Because of the expansion of space I think that if you get far enough away from earth, you will never be able to return to earth even if you travel at the speed of light. If we become a super-advanced civilization we could say that if you want to colonize another solar system we will put you on a ship that won't stop until the ship is sufficiently far from earth so that neither you nor any of your children will be able to return. Given relativity if this ship can more fast enough it won't take too long in ship time to reach such a point. (I haven't read everything at the links so please forgive me if you have already mentioned this idea.)
If there was a decentralized singularity and offence proved stronger than defense I would consider moving to a light cone that couldn't ever intersect with the light cone of anyone I didn't trust.
Agreed.
Yes, but Adams explains at length how Trump is a master persuader, as with, for example, this Tweet "The day President Trump made his critics compare The Boy Scouts of America to Hitler Youth." I lot of what Adams says is P vs NP stuff where it's hard to figure out yourself but once someone explains it to you it seems obvious.
What is your evidence that he is a shill? Millions of Americans support Trump, are they all shills?
Adams makes lots of falsifiable claims, but not about Trump's character.
Matthew 22:21 Jesus said "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's".
Adams deliberately avoids commenting on Trump's character. I'm unaware of Adams changing his estimate of Trump's persuasion competence. Adams often gives evidence of why Trump is a master persuader.
"During the Saxon Wars, Charlemagne, King of the Franks, forcibly Roman Catholicized the Saxons from their native Germanic paganism by way of warfare, and law upon conquest. Examples are the Massacre of Verden in 782, when Charlemagne reportedly had 4,500 captive Saxons massacred upon rebelling against conversion, and the Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae, a law imposed on conquered Saxons in 785 that prescribed death to those who refused to convert to Christianity."
Yes, but I would rather not say in part because I don't have proof and because I don't want to falsely signal to any of my future students that I don't like them believe of their religion.
Last time I was on an airliner I looked for but could not see any evidence of the Earth's curvature. Don't religions show you can get huge numbers of people to believe things are that not true? And I bet some great religions were started as high level conspiracies to get populations to have beliefs useful for their leaders.
Adams predicting that Trump would win at a time when nearly everyone else thought Trump was a joke candidate is evidence that Adams has special insight into Trump. And this wasn't a mere prediction. Adams essentially bet his entire reputation on this claim. Adams often makes falsifiable predictions such as when he said that Obamacare would essentially never be repealed and that Snapchat had a dim future.
Sometimes it can be. For example, refute the claim that the earth is flat and there is a general conspiracy to lie about the earth's shape so you can only use information which you personally gather.
I don't think I ever claimed "We should pay attention to Adams because he uses the same kind of lies Trump does, thus illustrating what Trump does."
Not necessarily. It could be that the government is spending too much on clean tech R&D and that even without government help clean tech will improve enough so that it's worth waiting. If (as I think Harris said but I'm not sure) China is making a big push for clean tech then it would seem optimal for the U.S. to wait and to spend less on clean tech R&D.
Yes, after the Access Hollywood tape came out Adams lowered his estimate of the chance of Trump winning.
(1a) Adams never claims that Trump is a good person, and consequently this wasn't a point of disagreement between him and Harris and thus not relevant to their conversation.
(1b) Yes, that's my opinion as well. What's relevant is what we should do about climate change, and as Adams pointed out even if all the climate change stuff is true, the economics doesn't necessarily support taking immediate action.
(2) This is more two conditions have to be true than Motte and Bailey. It's like a legal argument that my client didn't do X, but even if he did do X it wouldn't have been a crime.
(3) Yes, but Adams was honest about this. I think Adams takes a consequentialist view of morality and so, for example, thinks it would be OK for Trump to lie if it helped our economy or harm ISIS. Adams wants his audience to understand the worldview of a master persuader, and from this worldview facts are often not relevant. Also, it's too simple to say that Trump lies when Trump says something that Trump knows is false, but which Trump also knows that his audience knows is false. This is more emotional signaling.
(4) Disagree. I love Sam Harris's podcasts but I think Harris has a case of Trump derange syndrome, and it was fantastic of Adams to point this out. Getting Harris to make Hitler / exorcist comparisons was very telling. Rationalist should point out when they think others are suffering from confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance.
(5a) Yes Adams makes an unfalseafiable claim, but a claim that seems theoretical reasonable.
(5b) Since Trump has made no apparent effort to lock Hillary up, this seems right. But I admit Trump's pre-election call to lock Hillary up greatly troubled me.
(5c) Trump has sacrificed a lot of time, and knowingly accepted a lot of insults to become president and at age in which he seems unlikely to be able to personally benefit much from having been president. Lots of Americans really do think that Trump is saving American civilization, and it seems reasonable that Trump is one of those people.
(6a) It's know known that the 17 agency figure was an error. I think even the NYT has admitted this.
(6b) Yes, and this seems relevant.
"He is an ethical and epistemological relativist: he does not seem to believe in truth or in morality."
Adams doesn't think that true and morality play much of a role in political persuasion. Adams thinks that most people greatly overestimate how much their own personal opinions are influenced by truth and morality. Adams is trying to correct this massive flaw in human nature by giving his readers/viewers/listeners some of the secrets of master persuaders.
Sam Harris and Scott Adams debate Trump: a model rationalist disagreement
2017-07-20T00:18:54.355Z · score: 2 (2 votes)but as a data hoard on Moon, as most probably the next civilization will appear again on Earth.
Excellent point.
We create a special black hole on LHC, that create many universes, like our own. In other words, our universe is fine-tuned in the way that civilisations self-destroy by creating many new universes
I'm not sure. Wouldn't new universes be mostly created by advanced civilizations trying to create new universes? I think your idea works only if creating a new universe requires destroying an old one.
What if the solution to the Fermi paradox is that S-risks cause all sufficiently advanced civilizations to destroy themselves and leave no trace that could be used to resurrect and then torture them?
Excellent question that might determine the medium term fate of my profession (college professors).
This relates to why online education hasn't replaced traditional schools. As I wrote for InsideHigherEd:
"But having a real-human teacher watch them causes most students to pay more attention, and this comes without any cost in rigor. Just by sitting next to my son I can increase his level of attention and I suspect the same is true with most learning. So even if online education drastically improves, and is able to present in a fascinating manner everything currently taught in college courses, having an instructor -- plus online material -- would allow courses to teach students even more than most of these students could learn from the online courses alone."
" I can't take "what my brain does" as the last word on the subject."
But what if morality is all about the welfare of brains? I think Harris would say that once you accept human welfare is the goal you have crossed the is-ought gap and can use science to determine what is in the best interest of humans. Yes this is hard and people will disagree, but the same is true of generally accepted scientific questions. Plus, Harris says, lots of people have moral beliefs based on falsifiable premises (God wants this) and so we can use science to evaluate these beliefs.
No, but he clearly would have the same definition as most of us. He thinks morality comes from the brain and by learning more about our brains we learn more about morality. He says things like scientists who think science can't answer "should" questions very often act as if should questions have objectively right answers, and our brains seem to store moral beliefs in the same way as they do factual beliefs.
You might be interested in Sam Harris's book The Moral Landscape which argues that science can be used to answer moral questions and determine how we should behave.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks about this kind of stuff.
I'm not sure, but I doubt there is a LW consensus on this issue.
For me it was at 01h5m50s where Hsu says that super rich Silicon valley guys are already using embryo selection for non-fertility reasons.
Stephen Hsu interviewed on Stefan Molyneux's YouTube show. Hsu was a guest on my podcast.
Interview on IQ, genes, and genetic engineering with expert (Hsu)
2017-05-28T22:19:23.489Z · score: 4 (4 votes)Just as Adderall can help neurotypical people better focus, I wonder if this true can help normals better connect with others.
It would mostly work on a one-on-one basis were we use connections and personal knowledge to give advice and help.
Members helping each other reach positions of power and influence so we can slightly reduce the probably of our light-cone being destroyed by a paperclip maximizer.
Thanks!
Yes, good example.
In what kind of two "person" game would a human have the greatest advantage over a computer? Let's make the game entirely self-contained with objective scoring, no manipulation of real-world objects, and no advantage for knowing real world facts. How far away is "go" from such a game?
It was going to have lots of math to signal my status but the editors said the book was for a general academic audience and so they preferred the article not be that technical.
I wrote about something similar in the first Singularity Hypothesis book. Some Economic Incentives Facing a Business that Might Bring About a Technological Singularity
It was mentioned here:
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/
If you think there is a chance that he would accept, could you please tell the guy you are referring to that I would love to have him on my podcast. Here is a link to this podcast, and here is me.
Edited thanks to Douglas_Knight
This perception problem is a big part of the reason I think we are doomed if superintelligence will soon be feasible to create.
Very good.
You might be interested in this paper on profoundly gifted children which says in part "different patterns of profound intellectual talent uncovered in their youth were predictive of qualitatively different educational, occupational, and creative outcomes"
Today I passed out written answers to my game theory problem set and then went over the answers. Students pointed out that I made a mistake in the answers I handed out, but not in the verbal explanation I was currently giving. I tried to read the answer handout but found it really hard to read at that moment. I've noticed before that when I'm lecturing my brain isn't very good at reading for even brief periods. Is this just me, or is there some general phenomenon at work? I almost never read when lecturing so this isn't a significant problem, but it is an interesting one. I don't think that lecturing reduces my ability to do math (which I do all the time when teaching) or to speak articulately.
Because of Trump's surprise victory, hundreds of books are destine to be written on the alt-right and any future scholar of such will certainly read the linked article so here would be a good place to correct the record.