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Thanks for the detailed response. The link was very good, too.
Index funds have been recommended on LW before. I have a hard time understanding how it would work investing in one, though. Do you actually own the separate stocks on the index of the index fund, or do you technically own something else? Where does the dividend money go?
Took the survey. I always feel like I did the last one only recently.
One of the better AMAs I've read.
Peter is an interesting guy. Is his book worth reading?
If their ideas of friendliness are incompatible with each other, perhaps a conflict? Superintelligent war? It may be the case that one will be 'stronger' than the other, and that there will be a winner-take-all(-of-the-universe?) resolution?
If there is some compatibility, perhaps a merge, a la Three Worlds Collide?
Or maybe they co-operate, try not to interfere with each other? This would be more unlikely if they are in competition for something or other (matter?), but more likely if they have difficulties assessing risks to not co-operating, or if there is mutually assured destruction?
It's a fun question, but I mean, Vinge had that event horizon idea, about how fundamentally unpredictable things are for us mere humans when we're talking about hypothetical intelligences of this caliber, and I think he had a pretty good point on that. This question is taking a few extra steps beyond that, even.
Isn't this kind of thing a subset of the design space of minds post? Like, we don't know exactly what kind of intelligence could end up exploding and there are lots of different possible variations?
Apart from the fact that they wouldn't say anything (because generally animals can't speak our languages ;)), nature can be pretty bloody brutal. There are plenty of situations in which our species' existence has made the lives of other animals much better than they would otherwise be. I'm thinking of veterinary clinics that often perform work on wild animals, pets that don't have to be worried about predation, that kind of thing. Also I think there are probably a lot of species that have done alright for themselves since humans showed up, animals like crows and the equivalents in their niche around the world seem to do quite well in urban environments.
As someone who cares about animal suffering, is sympathetic to vegetarianism and veganism, and even somewhat sympathetic to more radical ideas like eradicating the world's predators, I think that humanity represents a very real possibility to decrease suffering including animal suffering in the world, especially as we grow in our ability to shape the world in the way we choose. Certainly, I think that humanity's existence provides real hope in this direction, remembering that the alternative is for animals to continue to suffer on nature's whims perhaps indefinitely, rather than ours perhaps temporarily.
Yeah, I was thinking of Goertzel as well.
So you don't think MIRI's work is all that useful? What probability would you assign to hard-takeoff happening of the speed they're worried about?
So is this is roughly one aspect of why MIRI's position on AI safety concerns are different to similar parties? - that they're generally more sympathetic to possibilities futher away from 1 than their peers? I don't really know, but that's what the pebblesorters/value-is-fragile strain of thinking seems to suggest for me.
All the more reason to try to only consume finished works.
I agree with the sentiment because it's frustrating not being able to complete something right away, but with AnH I really did enjoy following it month by month. I think that some pieces of entertainment are suited to that style of consumption and are fun to follow, even if they don't turn out to be very good in the end and aren't worth it for those who would go back and consume it all at once.
I really liked it. I think it's one of the best pieces of fiction I've ever read, I genuinely feel that strongly about it.
Can't wait for whatever you write next.
The Metropolitan Man is finally complete. If you still haven't read it and you're on this site, I recommend you do. You likely won't regret it.
This story was recommended in the last two media threads:
policy-makers and research funders will begin to respond to the AGI safety challenge, just like they began to respond to... synbio developments in the 2010s.
What are we referring to here? As in, what synbio developments and how did they respond to it?
I'm going to need some more examples, this sounds like it could be something but I'm not seeing how I could actually apply the concept to a situation.
I watched Shiki recently. I have no idea what I was doing to miss it back when it was airing in 2010, but I'm glad I eventually got to it. The quality of writing is unusually good for an anime, and I think it touches on a bunch of lw-relevant themes which is why I'm mentioning it here. I would hate to spoil anything for anyone so I won't go into any details, but I definitely recommend a watch.
Some things you might be glad to be forewarned of before starting: a common complaint appears to be that this show has a slow start, so being aware of this might help. I would say that this is probably not a show you can make accurate judgements about based on only having seen a few early episodes. Also, the character design is a bit wacky. I like it and it helps to distinguish each individual in what is a large cast of characters, but regardless some may find it offputting. Finally, there are 2 bonus episodes (the 'specials') that originally came with the BD/DVD releases that you wouldn't want to miss if you really liked the show proper.
p.s. I watched the coalgirls release (Japanese audio, 1080p). It was acceptable, if a bit bloated in terms of filesize.
I thought this was a wonderful post. Funny, made a bunch of lw-relevant points, and was informative in a summatory way on a particular topic. The story wasn't that great, but I guess the post as a whole worked, so maybe I'm not giving it enough credit as an important set-up piece.
It's a shame, but none of the extended strategies appeal to me very much, including for many reasons other than how dubiously viable they sounded. Then again, I'm not yet signed up for cryonics either, so that suggests I'm not as into revival strategies so much as a whole. I did take issue with the suggestion that people signed up for cryonics don't pursue other life extension strategies, but since the topic seems centred on revival-based strats then if we assume that particular comment is made in that context, then I think it's still a somewhat valid point. In any case, the people trying to meet "actuarial escape velocities" and the like would balk at the initial formulation's suggestion. There are plenty of people trying plenty of different things in the attempt to live forever, and cryonics is often but one of many of the cards in their hand.
What would you consider the "very basics"?
there are a lot of misconceptions in this regard.
What are some of the most blatant? Sorry to ask a question so similar to Squark's.
That is not my understanding.
Vote up if you think they are either overconfident or underconfident in their belief: any disagreement is valid disagreement.
I upvoted, mostly because of how low the estimate of the second claim was. I'm a bit more confident than that. The other factor was the "human-enough-way" phrasing.
It was a little difficult to choose how to vote because you put two fairly distinct claims in one post.
Many believe that the anime is a poor adaptation of the manga, or at the very least that the manga is the best medium the story is told in. What do you think about the subject?
Instead of having children as a pseudo-solution to aging and death, wouldn't it make a lot more sense to work on solving those problems much more directly via research or earning-to-give to organizations doing research? From this perspective, having children is actually explicitly wasteful due to this clear opportunity cost of valuable time, money and effort, not to mention also very defeatist.
Let's play the money as dead children game for a bit. Now, when the article was written you could plausibly save 1life for about $1000, but these days I think the number is a bit higher. Let's say $10000 just to be safe.
Essentially, you're saying that you would sacrifice the lives of 100 people in order to avoid a brief homosexual experience, using basic consequentialism. Perhaps you won't change your mind even when thinking about the proposition from this perspective, but I know personally it would be too difficult ethically for me to refuse.
It doesn't have to be lives, of course. If you're more of a preferential consequentialist, you can help pay off your mates' crippling student debt or mortgage, or donate to a longevity charity to help your chances of not dying, or even MIRI or something.
In any case, a million dollars has a lot of potential utility. Refusing because you're not 'materialistic' is a bit short-sighted, I think.
I began reading the manga on the recommendation of a friend before the first episode of the anime adaptation aired but after the promising PV for it dropped. I keenly remember not enjoying the plot at all to begin with, and the art is initially horrible, probably even worse than the rotoscoping in the anime.
I persevered with it, however, since this particular friend is yet to supply me with a poor rec, and gradually, the art has become quite pretty, and the story has also developed into an entertaining rollercoaster of events and emotion. I think it improves so much that of currently running manga, AnH is the title I anticipate new chapters of the most out of 50+ I'm following, and it has been consistently so since I first caught up, with each new monthly chapter delivering drama and excitement in spades.
Since the anime's sales were amazingly poor, there will never be a second season, and imo the story only really becomes enjoyable a fair while past where the anime stopped, so I would recommend reading the manga if you ever plan on revisiting the franchise, or for anyone else who wants to pick it up.
As it isn't finished, it could still turn to shit, but it's pretty great right now.
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Edit made months later: It turned to shit. No longer recommended.
I took the survey, and look forward to the results.
I have the same problem, although I don't think it's ever returned anything for me.
And humans, even lesswrong readers, are all varying degrees of irrational. Therefore understanding the distribution of political affiliation of people that use the site is a significant step towards understanding the site's bias.
Well, there's a Lesswrong census every year, and that includes questions on political affiliation.
Other than that, I'm not sure how you would measure political bias.
Personally, I haven't really thought of it. Might be an angle worth looking at the product from, you're right.
I haven't really been following their progress or anything, so I don't know, but it's possible they've touched on it at some point before. You could dig around on the soylent forum or even start the topic yourself if you really felt like it. I think the creators of the product are reasonably active on there.
Rice Protein, it seems.
Relevant blog posts:
Previously the only factor preventing Soylent from being vegan was the use of whey protein. Whey is attractive due to its high absorption rate and complete amino acid profile, granting it a perfect PDCAAS score of 1.0. However, it is an animal product, some whey proteins can trigger allergic responses, and concerns were raised over the potential presence of lactose.
To allay these issues we have switched to a rice protein isolate / pea protein isolate blend. Rice protein is mostly complete except for a lack of Lysine and Leucine. This is why rice and beans became such a staple food, the beans make up for the Lysine deficiency of rice. In our staple food the blend of pea and rice protein isolate provide a complete amino acid profile with minimal risk of inflammation or allergic reactions.
soylent blog, 2013-07-24
We have found that Pea Protein is not available at the scale we demand. To compensate for this, we had to source and integrate pure Lysine into the formula, so everyone will get their complete amino acid profile.
soylent blog, 2013-08-27
So it was whey, then it was rice protein and pea protein, now it's just rice protein.
Their final ingredient list hasn't been finalised yet, they seem to be getting close though. They said they'll post it once it's done.
It doesn't use whey for protein any more. Apparently the only issue for veganism (and vegetarianism) at the moment is fish oil for Omega 3s.
I was thinking recently that if soylent kicks something off and 'food replacement' -type things become a big deal, it could have a massive side effect of putting a lot of people onto diets with heavily reduced animal and animal product content. Its possible success could inadvertently be a huge boon for animals and animal activists.
Personally, I'm somewhat sympathetic towards veganism for ethical reasons, but the combination of trivial inconvenience and lack of effect I can have as an individual has prevented me from pursuing such a diet. Soylent would allow me to do so easily, should I want to. Similarly, there are people who have no interest in animal welfare at all. If 'food replacements' become big, it could mean for the incidental conversion of those who might have otherwise never considered veganism or vegetarianism to a lifestyle that fits within those bounds, for only their personal cost or convenience reasons.
This was also my experience.
I read that whole quote twice through and even thought about it for a few minutes as well, but I have no idea what I'm supposed to get out of it. Could anyone help me out?
I read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley the other day. It was pretty good, better than most 'classics' I've read. I probably liked it better than Nineteen Eighty-four as well, which it's often compared to.
I found out later that Nick Bostrom explicitly used it as an example in some of his Existential Risk related writings, like this one, specifically, to illustrate what the 'singleton' or stable oppressive world government kind of existential risk may look like. If you aren't too worried that you might generalize from fictional evidence, I'd say it's worth a read if you somehow haven't already.
Ideally, it would be nice if the world can move towards caring about the full outcome over factors like the satisfication of baseline levels of effort in more and more situations, not just exceptional ones.
Nor does it have good moderation.
I don't think this is accurate as a blanket statement, since moderation quality and policy differs between subreddit to subreddit, with significant variation.
I've also been having a few very similar worries. In relation to them, I've come up with plenty of half-formed ideas for solutions or potential ways around it, like the possible need to downgrade to current levels of intelligence temporarily to be able to enjoy current-era stories.
Here's the thing though: will there be much point in engaging in such activities? Perhaps we go through some kind of massive intelligence boost, and our current modes of fiction suddenly seem so outdated, simplistic and as you say, banal. Perhaps they will only seem that way compared to however sophisticated way we enjoy ourselves in the future? Perhaps we might have access to completely different media, with a difference in complexity comparable to that between cave-paintings and a motion picture or video game? Perhaps, like Mr Mind says, with a more intelligent brain we'll be able to appreciate more complex stories? Maybe it won't matter that the stories enjoy now won't seem so great, because our equivalent stories will be so great?
How much value do you place on still valuing current-era stories post-intelligence boost? I'm reminded of that Ghandi not wanting to swallow a pill that would make him into a person who doesn't mind committing murders.
I can only speculate. I feel like some of these kinds of concerns are touched upon at times in the fun theory sequence (possibly an understatement, you could consider the fun theory sequence to be a more generalised response to exactly these kinds of worries), among other bits and pieces.
I started reading and realised I didn't understand a lot of the things that were going on so I went back and finished season 3 which I had stopped following about midway through. I now realise that that probably wasn't necessary, and I could have read it with just the context of knowing that Twilight go turned into an alicorn, since all the other references were mostly events made up by the author or from season 1 and 2.
The comments were predictably deathist when lesswrongers get taken out of the picture, although it does appear that fiction like this works in some direction of changing people's minds. At the same time it gave people an opportunity to restate in public deathist memes as their personal philosophy which might not be so positive, considering that would help to cement it in their minds as part of their identity that they are the kind of person to hold these positions or something like that.
Some factors would have been nice to explore more fully, like the response to Celestia & Co.'s argument, and to allow for some more back and forth. I think it would have been possible to more strongly steelman the deathist arguments. Celestia also comes off as less competent in general than I would have expected of her. The progress of the alicorn community was good to show though, and more of that would have been good also.
I still enjoyed it quite a bit. I wonder why MLP is such a common target for having fanfiction centred around these topics written and links to them posted on this site?
I really enjoyed reading Three Worlds Collide back when I was first exposed to LessWrong, it's still one of those pieces of writing I often end up recommending to people. It tends to be received fairly well.
That may be the placebo effect.
Took the survey. Feels like I only very recently took the last one.
This conversation sounds a little bit to me like the conversation in disputing definitions.
Taboo transhumanism or something, perhaps? I think that these superheroes count as significant positive change at least, one of the things NancyLebovitz described in the title post.
Just realise that the overwhelming majority of people who go to gods or saints with diseases like this don't get cured in this manner; what about them? What does that say about the effectiveness of miracles?
There are plenty of situations that could have resulted in her getting better. Something to do with the travel, or perhaps the treatments started working, or perhaps for reasons current medicine doesn't know. Apparently, according to wikipedia we don't even know what the cause of lymphadema is. It could have been something she ate, who cares? People seemingly inexplicably get better from diseases all the time, and this one is no exception. These people wanting to attribute it to a saint or whatever doesn't mean anything much to me, and it seems much more likely that they are delusional or liars with regards to the events at the site and hearing the saint's voice and whatnot.
A lot of the comments take a very consequentialist point of view, and they explain themselves fairly well, which is good.
Perhaps it is because I've seen many really bad reddit comments before (even in subreddits relating to fields usually sympathetic to rationalist ideals) and what I'm seeing here is of a different standard, but I find myself hoping to some extent that some of the people commenting here were idiots before reading HPMOR, and that somehow they became more insightful and eloquent as a result of being exposed to the fic and related content.
I think I might recommend the fic to some more people...
The post you replied to is helpful advice for doing just that.
Above all, don't ask what to believe—ask what to anticipate.
When what you specifically anticipate doesn't line up with what happens, that's discovering a possible erroneuos belief.
I think it's possible that some of the comments have come from people already interested in the singularity coming to the article having been linked to it from various places, as you have done.
But it's good to see some more people thinking it's possible, in any case.
Beware of other optimising was a sequence article that this post reminded me of.
In cases like this, focusing on yourself first is a good idea. If you're a rational person and you're also a very successful person in all of your endeavours, as well as a supernice guy, people will be much more likely to swayed by what you say, moreso than cool arguments or whatever. At least they may tie the idea of rationality and success in life together in their heads.
For what it's worth though, my advice is not to force any of it. After speaking with me on the topic, a few of my friends now accept evolution and one has become agnostic. I have never raised the topic out of the blue, and I try to make my points very gently, and it has been somewhat effective. Starting arguments and debates and whatnot have been ineffective in the past, for me.
The rest of the video made me kind of uncomfortable, though, because ... you keep saying "worldview naturalism" where anyone else would have said "the naturalistic worldview" or just "naturalism".
Seconded, that felt unnatural and kinda irked me.
I think that having a site on this topic could be a good idea. We know the sanity waterline is low, so it might be very useful to have somewhere to direct people who might be interested in naturalistic points of view.
However, will that be its only use? Facing the Singularity took some work, is that getting much traffic? I'm just wondering, after creating this and putting the work in, will it get used? Who is the site targeting?
I'll try to think of some links also.
Edit: it might be way too specific as a topic to go on the site, but when it comes to death I really feel like you can't go past the Fable of the Dragon Tyrant.
The kinds of writing produced based on 'praxeology', by people like Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, I have changed my mind to think as being not very reliable. I don't think that the arguments put forth by these Austrian Economists trying to justify when they reject empiricism and make weird assumptions are very good. This actually hurts a sizable amount of writing by these people, most of which I haven't read but any that I did end up having believed I now place very little trust in. The wikipedia synopsis of one of Mises' works should give you a fairly good idea of the kinds of assumptions he makes..
The links are fairly broad because I was admittedly trying to get a better grip on this stuff after having accepted much of it for a while, having given the whole school much benefit of the doubt early because the kinds of ideas it concluded with (stuff like lassiez-faire econ, not to regulate) fitted in with my preconcieved, often political, beliefs. Politics is the mind-killer, don'tcha know. Sorry for the lack of specific propositions.
I've read some Hayek too, he seems better, but I don't really know.
edit: changed a word to make a sentence make sense