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The chances of the LLM being able to do this depend heavily on how similar the subjects discussed in the alien language are to things humans discuss. Removing areas where there is most likely to be similarity would reduce the chance that the LLM would find matching patterns in both. Indeed, that we're imagining aliens for the example already probably greatly increases the difficulty for the LLM.
Agreed. An AI powerful enough to be dangerous is probably in particular better at writing code than us, and at least some of those trying to develop AI are sure to want to take advantage of that to have the AI rewrite itself to be more powerful (and so, they hope, better at doing whatever they want the AI for, of course). So even if the technical difficulties in making code hard to change that others have mentioned could be overcome, it would be very hard to convince everyone making AIs to limit them in that way.
Logicians still can't agree whether the symbol for if and only if should be a triple bar or a double arrow. Odds that they'd all sign up for this, rather than having it be, at best, yet another competing standard, seem low.
Some components of experience, like colors, feel simple introspectively. The story of their functions is not remotely simple, so the story of their functions feels like it must be talking about a totally different thing from the obviously simple experience of the color. Though some people try to pretend this is more reasonable than it is by playing games and trying to define an experience as consisting entirely of how things seem to us and so as being incapable of being otherwise than it seems, this is just game playing; we are not that infallible on any subject, introspective or otherwise. The obvious solution, that what seems simple just turns out to be complicated and is in fact what the complicated functional story talks about, is surely the correct one. Don't let Chalmers' accent lull you into thinking he has some superior down under wisdom; listen to the equally accented Australian materialists!
Looking at the listed philosophers is not the best way to understand what's going on here. The category of rationalists is not "philosophers like those guys," it is one of a pair of opposed categories (the other being the empiricists) into which various philosophers fit to varying degrees. It is less appropriate for the ancients than for Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz (those three are really the paradigm rationalists). And the wikipedia article is taking a controversial position in putting Kant in the rationalist category. Kant was aware of the categories (indeed, is a major source of the tradition of grouping philosophers into those two categories), and did not consider himself to belong to either of them (his preferred terms for the categories were "dogmatists" for the rationalists and "skeptics" for the empiricists, which is probably enough on its own to give you a sense for how he viewed the two groups). There is admittedly a popular line of Kant interpretation which reads him as a kind of crypto-rationalist, but there are also those of us who read him as a crypto-empiricist, and not a few who take him at his word as being outside both categories.
In any event, the empiricist tradition has at least as much, if not more, influence on the LW wrong crowd as the rationalist tradition, and really both categories work best for early moderns and aren't fantastic for categorizing most in the present era. So anybody familiar with the philosophical term is likely to find the application to this community initially confusing.
The healthcare system capacity shouldn't be a flat line, though I admit that the reports I've seen suggest that not nearly enough effort has been devoted to ramping up to deal with the emergency. But obviously if there is an upward slope to capacity (and there are efforts to increase production of ventilators, to pick one of the most troublesome restrictions), that increases the benefit of curve flattening efforts.
Your requirements are very slightly too strong. If you have more than 6 cards in a suit, the amount of them that have to be top cards is reduced. In your second example, a spade suit of A,K,Q,8,7,6,5,4,3,2 would have served just as well, as even if all the opposing spades were in one hand, playing out the A,K,Q would force them all out, making the remaining spades also winners.
Hmmm, thanks, but that research doesn't seem to make any effort to distinguish people with diagnosable dementia conditions from those without, and does mention that the rates can be quite different for different people, so I can't tell whether there's anything about it which contradicts what I thought I remembered encountering in other research.
I'm curious about your claim that at 60-70 years old people start rapidly becoming stupider for reason we don't know. I thought that I recalled reading that while the various forms of dementia become immensely more common with age, those who are fortunate enough to avoid any of them experience relatively little cognitive decline. Unless you mean only to say that our present understanding of Alzheimer's and the other less common dementia disorders is relatively limited, so you're counting that as a reason we don't know (it is certainly something we don't know how to fix, so you win on that point).
It certainly becomes stranger when you drop a word. But either way, strangeness is rarely evidence of very much.
I suppose I am denying that they are just appearances.
The research indicates that most people's responses to any social science result is "that's what I would have expected," although that doesn't actually seem to be true; you can get them to say they expected conflicting results. Have there really been no studies of when people say they think studies are surprising, comparing the results to what people actually predicted beforehand (I know Milgram informally surveyed what people expected before his study, but I don't think he did any rigorous analysis of expectations)? Perhaps people are as inaccurate in reporting what they find surprising as they are in reporting what they expected. It would certainly be interesting to know!
Over the course of a month? The reasons you give for thinking these stocks might go up aren't things that would reliably manifest in such a short time frame, and the market generally has been down recently. I don't think what you've described here is evidence of much of anything. Probably you're no good at active investing, because the evidence seems to suggest that nobody is (the winners are just the ones who get lucky), but the reason to think that is because of the general evidence for that, not because of your personal experience over the past month.
A lot of biological research is inherently slow, because you have to wait to observe effects on slow processes in living things. Probably the only way to get rapid research progress on immortality is with vastly superior computer models running on vastly superior computers substituting for as much as possible of the slow observing what really goes on in humans research. Though there would probably still be a lot of slow observing what goes on in humans going on in the course of testing the computer models for accuracy. Anyway, making more powerful computers, and making better computer models of biochemistry, are already areas that get huge amounts of research spending. It seems likely that still more spending would encounter diminishing returns, such that no amount of concerted effort would further speed things up very dramatically (certainly not to the level you're asking for). Though you might get the impression around here that everyone who isn't a rationalist is a death lover, in fact most people want to live longer, including very rich people, and so a lot of money gets spent on pursuing that goal; lack of progress has a lot more to do with it being hard than with lack of effort.
I was under the impression that the research into biases by people like Kahneman and Tversky generally found that eliminating them was incredibly hard, and that expertise, and even familiarity with the biases in question generally didn't help at all. So this is not a particularly surprising result; what would be more interesting is if they had found anything that actually does reduce the effect of the biases.
It is almost completely uncontroversial that meaning is not determined by the conscious intentions of individual speakers (the "Humpty Dumpty" theory is false). More sophisticated theories of meaning note that people want their words to mean the same as what other people mean by them (as otherwise they are useless for communication). So, bare minimum, knowing what a word means requires looking at a community of language users, not just one speaker. But there are more complications; people want to use their words to mean the same as what experts intend more than they want to use their words to mean the same as what the ignorant intend. Partly that may be just to make coordination easier, but probably an even bigger motive is that people want their words to pick out useful and important categories, and of course experts are more likely to have latched on to those. A relatively uncontroversial extension of this is that meaning needn't precisely match the intentions of any current language speaker or group of language speakers; if the intentions of speakers would point to one category, but there's a very similar, mostly overlapping, but much more useful and important category, the correct account of the meaning is probably that it refers to the more useful and important category, even if none of the speakers know enough to pick out that category. That's why words for "fish" in languages whose origins predate any detailed biological knowledge of whales nonetheless probably shouldn't be thought to have ever included whales in their reference.
So, people can use words without anybody knowing exactly what they mean. And figuring out what they mean can be a useful exercise, as it requires learning more about what you're dealing with; it isn't just a matter of making an arbitrary decision. All that being said, I admit to having some skepticism about some of the words my fellow philosophers use; I suspect in a number of cases there are no ideal, unambiguous meanings to be uncovered (indeed, there are probably cases where they don't mean anything at all, as the Logical Positivists sometimes argued).
I thought it got off to a great start, dragged a bit in the middle (too many standard anime extremely long battles), but had a decent ending.
Because those countries also have lower labor costs, so executives can report that they're saving money on labor costs and their company's stock will go up. More cynically, international operations require more management (to keep on top of shipping issues and deal with different government circumstances in the different countries where operations are going on), and the managers who make such decisions may approve of an outcome where more is spent on management and less on labor. Most of the research I've heard of suggests that it is not because such relocations are overall more profitable; that's very rarely the case.
Indeed. A more plausible alternative strategy for Germany would be to forget the invading Belgium plan, fight defensively on the western front, and concentrate their efforts against Russia at the beginning. Britain didn't enter the war until the violation of Belgian neutrality. Admittedly, over time French diplomats might have found some other way to get Britain into the war, but Britain was at least initially unenthusiastic about getting involved, so I think Miller is on the right track in thinking Germany's best hope was to look for ways to keep Britain out indefinitely.
Socrates initially offered as an alternative punishment that he be given free meals for the rest of his life; he never suggested that he should be paid money, though that's a quibble. More importantly, the final proposal he made (under pressure from his friends) was that he (well, his friends) pay a whopping huge fine. This may have partly backfired because it also reminded people that he had rich and unpopular friends, but it was a substantial penalty. Though you are right that exile would have been more likely to be acceptable to the jury, especially as you are also correct that he never promised to behave differently in the future (which exile, unlike a fine, would have made irrelevant).
Neither Plato nor Xenophon describe Socrates as someone who fails to acknowledge the gods that the city acknowledges. Even in Plato, any criticism of the traditional Greek religion is veiled, while in Xenophon Socrates' religious views are completely orthodox.
On why Socrates didn't choose exile, what Plato has Socrates say in Crito makes it sound like he thought fleeing would be harming the city. But I'm not sure that Socrates really makes a compelling case for why fleeing is bad anywhere in Plato's account. In Xenophon's version of the trial, Socrates also seems to think that a 70 year old only has a few more years of declining health left anyway, so it's silly to go to any effort for such a meager "reward."
I'm torn. There are definitely differences between the way Less Wrong operates and the situation the article describes, but that's always going to be the case. It would be nice to see more studies, of course, examining how the details of the system matter, but no such seem to be available. Absent that it kind of seems like special pleading to say "we do things slightly differently, so obviously it won't apply to us." On the other hand, only one study is rather weak evidence, and the differences do exist, even if we don't have any actual evidence that they matter. I really don't know if it makes sense to consider changing our system in light of this.
I agree that an AI with such amazing knowledge should be unusually good at communicating its justifications effectively (because able to anticipate responses, etc.) I'm of the opinion that this is one of the numerous minor reasons for being skeptical of traditional religions; their supposedly all-knowing gods seem surprisingly bad at conveying messages clearly to humans. But to return to VAuroch's point, in order for the scenario to be "wildly inconsistent," the AI would have to be perfect at communicating such justifications, not merely unusually good. Even such amazing predictive ability does not seem to me sufficient to guarantee perfection.
As I said, I'm sympathetic to pragmatism. But I guess I'd turn the question around, and ask what you think pragmatism will improve. Serious researchers are pretty good at rationalizing how procedures that work fit into their paradigm (or just not thinking about it and using the procedures that work regardless of any conflicting absolutist principles they might have). I'm sure removing the hypocrisy would be of some benefit, but given the history it would also likely be extremely difficult; in what cases do you think it is clear that this would be the best place to apply effort, and why?
Oh, and on reductionism (and to some extent truth absolutism generally), trying to give a unified account of everything requires thoroughly exploring the connections between different realms, and there are definitely tendencies to view realms as much more isolated than they are for purposes of simplification. To take what is admittedly a small scale reductionist project rather than a global reductionist project, there seems to be a strong tendency to sharply separate the physiological from the psychological when looking at behavior, in ways that seem to hinder understanding, not to mention the ability to deal with serious problems. For example, the pointless disputes about drugs for psychological therapy that focus on the bogus question of whether the psychological disorders have a biological base (how could they not, unless perhaps we're Cartesians?) rather than the much more pertinent questions of whether they work and how they compare to alternatives. While reductionist projects that try to fit everything into a single framework are sometimes guilty of ignoring phenomena that are too complicated or insufficiently well understood to fit into the framework, it is equally true that sharply separating projects into distinct categories can drastically underestimate how much influence there is from factors outside a particular narrowly defined sphere.
Pragmatists from Pierce through the positivists to Rorty have agreed with you that the goal is to avoid wasting time on theories of truth and meaning and instead focus on finding practical tools; they've only spoken of theories of truth when they thought there was was no other way to make their points understandable to those too firmly entrenched in the philosophical mainstream (or, even more often, had such theories attributed to them by people who assumed that must be what they were up to despite their explicit disavowals). I'm not saying all of those people agreed with you about everything (the positivists, for example, thought the fact/value distinction was a useful tool, although of course they didn't think it represented any fundamental truth about reality), but I think you greatly exaggerate your originality here. Of course, one might reasonably insist that originality is not as important as whether the theories actually are useful, but while I tend to be in sympathy with the pragmatist tradition, the fact that it has been around for quite a while without seeming to have radically triumphed over all rivals does provide some reason for doubt about the extent of its world-beating potential.
Because that ends the discussion. I think a lot of people around here just enjoy debating arguments (certainly I do).
I don't have time to re-read the whole book to come up with examples, and there is unhelpfully no index in my copy, but checking through the footnotes quickly, I found exactly two references to actual positivists (or close enough); a quick dismissive paragraph on Ernest Nagel's use of probability theory, and a passing reference to Philipp Frank's biography of Einstein. No references to Reichenbach or Hempel or Carnap. The closest he comes is perhaps the (one) reference to Goodman, who was heavily influenced by Carnap, but Kuhn cites Goodman favorably, while apparently being unaware of how positivist-influenced the ideas he was agreeing with were. There's also a citation of Wittgenstein, which seems vaguely favorable but complains about Wittgenstein's lack of development of an idea, which is surely fair enough; I won't mark anyone down for complaining about that problem in Wittgenstein. But I do have to give low marks for talking so much about "the positivist" while citing only one major positivist philosopher of science (Ernest Nagel) and attributing many views to "the positivist" which are far more simplistic than that positivist would ever have endorsed. Also no references to Duhem. Quine doesn't get mentioned until the postscript, although it's quite plausible that the enthusiasm for Kuhn at the time was part of the same broader phenomenon that turned Quine and Putnam and Goodman into huge stars in philosophy around the same time (all three of those were also to varying degrees prone to denial about the extent of their influence from positivism, but at least they were generally better about citing actual positivists when criticizing them).
Maybe he's referring to Comte or Mach? But I saw no references to them at all, and criticizing 19th century figures in 1962 doesn't sound very revolutionary. The most charitable I can be is that there may have been some confused historians of science employing some positivist ideas without understanding them (I don't know much about history of science in Kuhn's time), and Kuhn's "positivist" may be an assembly of such characters. But that's just speculation. It still seems to me that Kuhn is part of the depressing philosophical tradition of ignoring and misrepresenting previous philosophers in order to appear more original and insightful.
Which is not to say that the book is worthless. I do find the idea of a paradigm very fruitful, and it seems a lot of scientific progress involves the discovery of new ways of making observations, and these are issues that perhaps hadn't gotten sufficient emphasis prior to Kuhn. But a lot of the radical claims that he is most famous for are either not as radical or original as he claimed, or not as well supported by his examples as his very slick writing might lead one to believe, or both.
Kuhn certainly knew physics better than he knew philosophy. The frequently mentioned "positivist" in his narrative is entirely made of straw. He discusses a lot of interesting ideas, and he wrote better than many people who had discussed similar ideas previously, but most of the ideas had been discussed previously, sometimes extensively; he was apparently simply not very aware of the previous literature in the philosophy of science.
The biggest problem is that twins raised apart are actually pretty rare, so almost any study of them goes to desperate lengths to just get enough of them for the study. This often involves fudging what they're willing to accept as "raised apart" to a degree no unbiased observer would be comfortable with, just to get sufficient numbers.
Also, from the same background, it is striking to me that a lot of the criticisms Less Wrong people make of philosophers are the same as the criticisms philosophers make of one another. I can't really think of a case where Less Wrong stakes out positions that are almost universally rejected by mainstream philosophers. And not just because philosophers disagree so much, though that's also true, of course; it seems rather that Less Wrong people greatly exaggerate how different they are and how much they disagree with the philosophical mainstream, to the extent that any such thing exists (again, a respect in which their behavior resembles how philosophers treat one another).
I'm pretty sure I was also a victim, if a rather recent and relatively small scale one, and I'm glad to see something was done. However much I told myself it wasn't really important, that karma's a horribly noisy measure, with a few slightly funny comments gaining me the majority of my karma while my most thoughtful contributions usually only gathered a handful, the block downvoting really did make me feel disinclined to post new comments. Banning seems like an extreme measure, and I guess I can see where people who think there should have been warnings are coming from, but I'm actually kind of surprised that it was all or nearly all one person, and given the amount of distress it seems to have caused, I think we can do without a person like that around here, even if he did sometimes contribute good comments.
The reviews are fairly critical. Anything in the book that struck you as particularly compelling? What do you think about the discussion of the A vs. B theory debate, or was there another issue you thought she discussed in a particularly interesting way?
It looks like this has been an unpopular suggestion, but I wouldn't discount motivation completely. A lot of early 20th century economists thought centrally planned economies were a great idea, based on the evidence of how productive various centrally planned war economies had been. Presumably there's some explanation for why central planning works better (or doesn't fail as badly) with war economies compared with peacetime economies, and I've always suspected that people's motivation to help the country in wartime was probably one of the factors.
2 wouldn't surprise me. A non-relativistic universe seems to have hidden incoherence (justifying Einstein's enormous confidence in relativity), so while my physics competence is insufficient to follow any similar QM arguments, it wouldn't shock me if they existed.
I am inclined to believe that the more recent controversy may be a factor. It's the first time I've been block downvoted, so I'm inclined to believe that there's been an increase in that kind of activity.
The Logical Positivists were mostly pretty far left, but they mostly didn't engage in much political advocacy; though this was controversial among members of the movement (Neurath thought they should be more overtly political), most of them seemed to think that helping people think more clearly and make better use of science was a better way to encourage superior outcomes than advocating specific policies. They were also involved in various causes, though; many members of the Vienna Circle were involved in adult education efforts in Vienna, for example. The more I think about it, the more I think it's pretty accurate to say they had a lot in common with the Less Wrong crowd in their approach to politics (though they were almost certainly further left, even taking into account that the surveys suggest Less Wrong itself is further left than many people seem to realize).
Cool! I've looked for that manifesto on line before, and failed to find it; thanks for the link! Too many people seem to get all of their knowledge of the Vienna Circle and Logical Positivism from its critics. It's good to look at the primary sources. The translation is a little clunky (perhaps too literal), but so much better than not having it available at all.
You make a lot of assumptions. When I said the grad student population was "racially diverse" I was not trying to give a more impressive sounding name to the fact that it included a decent number of Asians. It did, of course, but it also included plenty of people from Africa, the West Indies, the Middle East, and, well, pretty much everywhere.
Which I said nothing about. I referred to the undergraduate population (I wasn't an undergrad, but university campuses aren't particularly segregated between grad and undergrad populations). Actually, the grad student population generally was more racially diverse than the undergraduate population (mostly due to lots of international students among the grad students).
One reason for thinking that a measure of talent is poor might be that it is outperformed by other measures. There may not be genuinely good measures of talent. It does occur some sort of retrospective measure based on results is probably better than what the admissions office uses, but that is surely still not a perfect measure, and is also obviously not a practical option to replace what the admissions office uses (unless someone invents a time machine). Another reason to think a measure of talent is poor, though, and this is probably more applicable here, is that a measure may be considered suspect if there is reason to think it is really measuring something else entirely, perhaps because it correlates suspiciously strongly with factors regarded as independent of talent.
This would only be true if affirmative action were carried to the point where the percentage of black students in the elite schools exceeded the percentage of blacks in the general population. I don't have the numbers handy, but I did go to grad school at an Ivy, not terribly long ago, and that does not match my recollection of the racial make-up there. The undergraduate ranks seemed to be dominated by rich white kids.
I wouldn't be surprised if you disagreed with his point, but I'm a little surprised that you just don't understand it. The cutoff you speak of is in the admissions criteria, not in talent (there being no way to measure talent directly). VAuroch is pretty obviously of the opinion that admissions criteria are poor measures of talent, and that in particular minorities are more likely to score poorly on the admissions criteria for reasons other than talent. Again, not surprised if you disagree, but I'm very surprised you couldn't figure out that that was what he meant.
Mostly the first two. I don't watch much TV news or read many newspapers any more.
As far as I can tell, the far left position on sex is that most of the stereotypical sex differences are exaggerated, and most of the genuine differences are more the result of socialization rather than biology. I don't encounter anyone who goes further than that; I've never encountered anyone who would replace either "most" with an "all," or who would replace the "more" with an "entirely," in the case of sex, and I encounter a lot of people who are pretty far left (being fairly far left myself these days). The situation with race is a little different; some people would replace the second "most" with an "all," and the second "more" with an "entirely." But then, the evidence is also different with respect to race. People who think there's just no difference at all in the case of sex I only encounter as straw characters in conservative rants.
I admit that I encounter people who make a big deal of how edgy and contrarian they are for speaking out about innate differences in the face of the stifling politically correct consensus that race and sex don't matter at all. It's pretty amazing how they seem to be everywhere, given the supposedly universal consensus rejecting and supressing such edgy, contrarian views.
Differences in the rate of absorption can definitely be important to addiction; oral amphetamines are not particularly addictive, but amphetamines taken in other ways that increase absorption rate are very addictive. And the last I checked the research on that, there wasn't much understanding of exactly why the line there is where it is. Perhaps alcohol just works completely differently, but it is also possible that drinking on an empty stomach, or drinking carbonated drinks, doesn't increase absorption enough to make a difference. Or perhaps it does make a difference, but not enough to have turned up in any research yet; this isn't an area where small effects would be easy to detect.
I'm not sure about the usefulness of grouping the kind of vague spirituality and religion mentioned in the first paper with the discussions of meditation in the other papers. As the last paper argues, I also would think it would be worthwhile to distinguish different forms of meditation. My general understanding of the state of the literature was that studies of the benefits of "spirituality and religion" were all over the place (it being an incredibly vague category). I also was under the impression that there have been a lot of studies of meditation specifically, and that it was common for them to find substantial benefits, but that there remained controversy over why, over whether some methods were better than others, and over whether meditation was superior to relaxation exercises. I'm certainly interested in all of that research on meditation myself, but it seems to me to be in a different category from other kinds of "spirituality and religion" research.
Yeah, Worm is pretty bleak. I tend to find that a bit overwhelming at times myself; I like the series because of its other strengths (diverse and interesting characters, intelligent plotting, deep and rich setting) with the oppressive tone being a small strike against it for me.
The modern West treats marriage as being primarily about romantic love, which is an idea not shared by earlier cultures. A culture which does not see romantic love as the essential component of marriage would be unlikely to come up with the idea of gay marriage. There may be some convoluted connection between Christianity and the Western ideal of love-based marriage, but it seems likely that if there were a culture that had the same overriding love-marriage association without any religious objections to homosexuality, that culture would endorse gay marriage.
Slate Star Codex, Scott Alexander's blog, is a little like this; he tolerates and engages in a lot more political discussion than Less Wrong, but he is a Less Wronger, as are some of those who comment there. The overlap with the Less Wrong community is far from total, and obviously as Scott's personal blog it emphasizes his views, and it also doesn't only only talk about politics (it just doesn't avoid politics the way Less Wrong does), so it's probably not exactly what you're looking for, but it might be close enough for you to find it interesting, if you didn't already know about it. And I guess if there are any other blogs like Scott's with a similarly high level of political discussion, I'm interested in hearing about them myself.