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Have you tried this? Does it work?
I don't understand much of this, and I want to, so let me start by asking basic questions in a much simpler setting.
We are playing Conway's game of life with some given initial state. An disciple AI is given a 5 by 5 region of the board and allowed to manipulate its entries arbitrarily - information leaves that region according to the usual rules for the game.
The master AI decides on some algorithm for the disciple AI to execute. Then it runs the simulation with and without the disciple AI. The results can be compared directly - by, for example, counting the number of squares where the two futures differ. This can be a measure of the "impact" of the AI.
What complexities am I missing? Is it mainly that Conway's game of life is deterministic and we are designing an AI for a stochastic world?
The first requirement:
Even as chicks, geese cannot be handled by a human, or encounter other geese who have been.
suggests that a FAI would not tell us that it exists. In other words, the singularity may already have happened.
You can pay someone $8/hr to do menial tasks 20 hrs/ week, for a total of about $8000 / year.
With payroll taxes and insurance, I would expect this to cost at least $12000 a year.
Sure, but you could have a limit on how many rounds back they remember, or you could fill in the history with some rule.
Or just prohibit the bots from knowing which round they are playing.
It is not at all clear that the people resistant to addictive drugs are reproducing at a higher rate than those who aren't.
I think the sub-proposal is too complex and involves too many trivial inconveniences. I up-voted the original proposal.
almost every researcher in CS flaunts copyright, posting their papers on their own websites
Many journals explicitly allow you to distribute a "preprint" of your journal articles on your personal website. For example, the Elsevier policy states that authors retain:
the right to post a pre-print version of the journal article on Internet websites including electronic pre-print servers, and to retain indefinitely such version on such servers or sites for scholarly purposes
There are open access journals. I recommend supporting them.
Another way of saying this (I think - Vladimir_M can correct me):
You only have two choices. You can be the kind of person who kills the fat mat in order to save four other lives and kills the fat man in order to get a million dollars for yourself. Or you can be the kind of person who refuses to kill the fat man in both situations. Because of human hardware, those are your only choices.
There are three things you could want:
You could want the extra dollar. ($6 instead of $5)
You could want to feel like someone who care about others.
You could genuinely care about others.
The point of the research in the post, if I understand it, is that (many) people want 1 and 2, and often the best way to get both those things is to be ignorant of the actual effects of your behavior. In my view a rationalist should decide either that they want 1 (throwing 2 and 3 out the window) or that they want 3 (forgetting 1). Either way you can know the truth and still win.
Here is a presentation that was used in a similar setting before.
I recommend trying to cover less than you currently plan. Just one or two big ideas should be more than enough.
Donating to VillageReach signals philanthropic intention and affords networking opportunities with other people who care about global welfare who might be persuaded to work against x-risk
Also, donating to VillageReach saves people's lives, and those people will have agency and abilities and may very well contribute to existential risk reduction.
How did this go over with your advisor? (Serious question.)
Nowadays, however, the class system has become far harsher and the distribution of status much more skewed. The better-off classes view those beneath them with frightful scorn and contempt, and the underclass has been dehumanized to a degree barely precedented in human history.
How do you measure this kind of thing? Do you have a citation?
I'm not sure I believe you. By "non-wage costs and risks" do you mean things like health benefits, or lawsuit liability, or what? I can think of a lot of productive uses for cheap labor.
There's a bunch of trash and graffiti in my city. There's lots of unemployed people whose labor cleaning it up would be worth, say, a euro an hour.
Your (funny) comment made me realize that ubiquitous smartphones and the right software might actually make something like a karma system for in-person conversations possible.
If you have to pick one of the above ideas as most useful, which would it be?
The general idea sounds a lot like pair programming.
Parties do this. Religions do this. Universities do this. Parents do this. Lovers do this. Why should we be any different?
Um. Because we want to be different from political parties and religions?
I'm pretty sure we've talked about similar things before - the closest thing I could find after a quick search is a list of math prerequisites.
A suggestion: to make this concrete, we could identify specific courses on MIT's open coarse project. Then people could actually "get" this degree in some sense.
I'll start with the obvious: Math 18.05, Introduction to Probability and Statistics.
What do you study at Stanford? Why?
This looks very much like an ultimatum game, with Player A playing the proposer (how much of her $500,000 will she share?) and Player B as the responder (his role is to either accept or decline).
I'm not sure it's controversial, but I disagree very slightly on the margin. All your points are good. However, if
I have already read some papers from an author, and
I trust that their abstracts are honest representations of their work, and
I am not relying on their work as a basis for my own, but just pointing it out to my readers
I will cite it after just reading the abstract.
A perfectly clear, logical, honest, and readable account of your work is often ipso facto unpublishable: what is required is writing according to unofficial, tacitly acknowledged rules that are extremely hard to figure out on your own.
This has not been my experience. My experience with journal editors and reviewers has been that they want a clear and readable account, but it probably varies a great deal from field to field.
Your point about brand names and networks, however, is very well taken.
Always? Why?
This is interesting because my initial response is to disagree, but I don't think I have good reasons or evidence.
To drastically oversimplify: You seem to be saying that intelligence is primary and social skills are learned. You're born smart or dumb, and if you're smart, you over-analyze social situations and become afraid.
My initial reaction is the opposite: Social skills are primary, intelligence is learned. You are born with or without good social skills, and if you don't have them, you read a lot (by yourself) and hack computers or whatever, so that you become smart.
Why? Does this attract alumni donations? Prospective students? Why exactly do you have to project the university website image?
There are several colleges that do this, calling it the block plan. The ones I know of are Cornell College, Colorado College, and Quest University.
People are fundamentally unsolvable to me
This might be your point, but the above statement is probably not true.
Not to say it's easy to begin learning to solve people, or even that it's worth it. But it's probably possible.
Can I ask how you find "random blogs"? Is it truly random, or do you have a method for finding new stuff?
A medium-level exercise would be to find such an example, in some news article perhaps, quote it, and ask what is going on.
Chain prediction mechanisms to obtain faster feedback
I suspect that with each link in the chain, you get a much less accurate and stable result.
Overt is the key word.
When you buy a car that's cheaper than a Volvo, or drive over the speed limit, or build a house that cannot withstand a magnitude 9 earthquake, you are making a life and death decision.
I don't really know anything about your situation, your wife, your relationship. So please don't take anything I say very seriously. Desrtopa may be right, and I certainly didn't want to imply that you weren't already a good husband.
I'm really glad to hear you're in marriage counseling. That will be more helpful than anything I say.
As far as not trying to change her: you've got lots of time. If she gets thirsty, she'll let you know. What I'm advising against is trying to deconvert her so that you feel better, which is what I read (rightly or wrongly) in the line I quoted in the grandparent.
I think my emotional satisfaction would dramatically increase if she were to deconvert.
This is hard for her, too.
Your roles and responsibilities to your wife are entirely different from the responsibility you've described to your own conscience to be true and follow the evidence and so on. The strategies we're discussing on this thread, though interesting and maybe useful, are probably not things you want to use with your wife, who already knows you well and knows the story.
My advice is pretty much the opposite of Desrtopa's. Don't talk about your quest any more than necessary. You're a new person, so start a new courtship, getting to know each other again. Don't try to change her, but change yourself. Be a good husband.
There was a very interesting discussion of exactly this question (at least as it relates to the mathematics community) on mathoverflow recently.
This is a much more useful way to think about faith than just thinking of it as somehow the opposite of reason.
A couple nitpicks: The author of the book of Hebrews is not known, and this book is not normally attributed to Paul even in Christian tradition.
Also, your second quote appears to be from the New Revised Standard Version, not the New International Version that you cite.
Many teachers, in my experience, don't notice when students are confused or bored -- or maybe they notice but don't care
Or they notice, and care to some extent, but have other things to worry about. Like a pressure to cover a certain amount of material, or a fear of boring one group of students while they slow down for another, or a (maybe partly justified) belief that the students who are confused and bored just aren't trying.
They are ideas for allaying fears that SIAI is incompetent or worse. Which, since it is devoted to building an AI, would tend to allay fears that it is building an evil one.
Impostor syndrome is pretty common among men too, in my experience. It may still be more common in women, but I'm not sure.
I can accomplish a great many things, especially unfamiliar things, only when there is no help available.
This sounds like my experience, at least some of the time. I am male, for what it's worth.
Looking at your list of backgrounds, the missing thing that jumps out at me is discrete math. You might also want to think about learning some differential equations, if it wasn't included in your calculus sequence.
I can't even identify the orthodox positions in macroeconomics.
Don't trust anyone but a mathematician
I'm pretty sure you're at least half-joking. But just in case, I need to point out that mathematicians are not immune to this kind of thing.
There is an enormous (far too enormous for its value to the world, in my opinion) literature on the unexpected hanging paradox (also known as the surprise exam paradox) in the philosophy and mathematics literature. The best treatments are:
Timothy Y. Chow, The surprise examination or unexpected hanging paradox, American Mathematical Monthly 105 (1998) pp. 41-51. (ungated)
Elliot Sober, To give a surprise exam, use game theory, Synthese 115 (1998) pp. 355-373. (ungated)
I think I disagree, but I'm not sure what elitism means here.
Elitism might help prevent this error. But can it lead to other errors?
Can you give examples, either of emotion driven behaviors becoming dark arts when raised to awareness, or of dark arts being necessary to healthy interaction? I think we are using different definitions of what dark arts are.