Mission Accomplished.
I definitely want to see the results! For reference, 2013: http://lesswrong.com/lw/jj0/2013_survey_results/
I wonder if we could get a chart with the data matched up over time? Chart community changes over time?
ancientcampus
Karma: 372
I’m not going to lie—I always find discussions at LW very intense and rather intimidating. Discussing my and other people’s ideas is bad enough - I personally would rather not expose anything highly personal to the brutally honest scrutiny here.
“and we’re back at square one”
Nice! I really hope the pendulum doesn’t swing that far, though.
I appreciate what you’re saying. Just going by the information I posted, that wasn’t nearly enough information to conclude “AMF has more money than they can use”. It merely raised the question—which I had answered here. :)
For those interested, here’s a graph of the AMF’s “recurring donation” income over time: http://www.againstmalaria.com/RecurringDonations.aspx?emailID=20130315 Take-away points: 1) It’s been in steady decline for about a year 2) they’re not nearly as big as I thought—it’s currently at $60,000, which isn’t even enough to support a decently sized staff.
Both excellent things to know, thanks!
If there’s a demand, I can post the sequence of emails I’ve received.
Donation Discussion—alternatives to the Against Malaria Foundation
Personally, I think a big way to help ensure success is to not worry too much about drawing self-identifying “effective altruists”, but primarily focus on simply drawing active altruists. Obviously, if it only recruits from LW and its handful of bosom-buddies, there’ll hardly be a large-enough population. The mere title of the forum should do 70% of the work to keep everything on topic, and friendly reminders from mods should handle the rest.
I think that’s important enough I’m going to stress it again: if the EA community is 80% LW-ians, then I think it will loose most of it’s potential. LW already discusses effective altruism. Drawing people such as full-time active workers in existing charities such as public health works, economic support, missionary work, etc, seems a far higher priority to me. LW-like people already think along those lines, and generally have less energy/money dedicated to altruism than full-time charity workers. Attracting the later group would have a greater impact on the individuals, and target more important individuals to boot.
In that vein, I’ve already scoped out the blog, because I have several friends in mind who would take to this well. Currently, the front article has math. Lots of math. Here on LW that’s almost the norm, but if the whole EA site is like that, it’ll scare off a lot of good people. That’s not to say “don’t use math because people don’t like it”—math is very important—but rather “decide what audience to target on your front page.”
I’m excited! Thanks for putting it together.
Thanks to Stuart_Armstrong for getting me thinking about narrow intelligence.
The immediate real-world uses of Friendly AI research
Regarding the “reducing mortality” example, in biostats, mortality is “death due to X, divided by population”. So “reducing cardiovascular mortality” would be dangerous, because it might kill its patients with a nerve poison. Reducing general mortality, though, shouldn’t cause it to kill people, as long as it agrees with your definition of “death.” (Presumably you would also have it list all side effects, which SHOULD catch the nerve-poison &etc.)
Best I can tell, the lesson is to be very careful with how you code the objective.
I think this sums it up well. To my understanding, I think it would only require someone “looking over its shoulder”, asking its specific objective for each drug and the expected results of the drug. I doubt a “limited intelligence” would be able to lie. That is, unless it somehow mutated/accidentally became a more general AI, but then we’ve jumped rails into a different problem.
It’s possible that I’m paying too much attention to your example, and not enough attention to your general point. I guess the moral of the story is, though, “limited AI can still be dangerous if you don’t take proper precautions”, or “incautiously coded objectives can be just as dangerous in limited AI as in general AI”. Which I agree with, and is a good point.
So, there’s a fair amount of interest here in post-singularity life-preserving things like cryogenics, uploading one’s mind to a computer system, etc. There’s a videogame on sale at the moment called “Master Reboot”, where you wake up after having uploaded your mind, and something inevitably goes wrong (because otherwise there would be no story). The general impression I’ve gathered from others is “mediocre low-budget game, interesting concept”. I figured someone here may find it their cup of tea.
If you’re interested, it’s on sale in the Humble Weekly Bundle until 2 PM on 8⁄28 - bundled with 4 other games for ~$8. You can watch the trailer here, or find an honest video review here.
Installed RescueTime to track where I spend time. I hardly never check the dashboard so I don’t think it’s very effective.
Did the same with the same result. It falls under the category of information that is easy to gather but I don’t base actions on, so it is useless in the literal sense.
I also had the same experience. I couldn’t have phrased the above better.
For what it’s worth: Though I do not claim to be a perfect user of SRS flashcards, I used them intensively for 3 years of medical school, constantly refining my technique. Many people here have suggested ways to improve my strategies. I have not yet seen an idea that I have not already tried extensively. Though I’m far from perfect, I think it’s safe to say I have a better understanding than most beginners. There certainly is room for me to improve, but not much. If someone is considering using SRS long term for high volumes in medical school, here is my advice: it is possible a Perfect SRS User could use it more effectively than I did, but if you haven’t already used SRS for years, you aren’t such a person.
I never read that article, but I figured out many of those on my own. I agree with many of them, disagree with some. My input, for those that use it:
-Cloze deletion is simple, but to me, it is far too easy to “guess the teacher’s password” using that technique, and is of limited use. It’s great for high-school level fact regurgitation, but less useful for post-graduate stuff. You will quickly become good at the deck, but it does not strongly help your understanding of the material. That’s an important point: your skill at answering questions in the deck does not necessarily translate to your skill at answering questions in real life.
-Graphic deletion—I used to do this all the time, but it is really time consuming to set up. I consider myself fast with an image-editor, but it’s still a big drain. (Again, this is more of an issue in high volume) It also runs into the Cloze deletion problem.
-Use imagery: heck yes. I highly agree, in any situation (flashcards or no)
-Any technique splitting a larger whole into many smaller flashcards (the article lists several): This is possibly the WORST suggestion for high volume. While this is certainly very useful, again, when you use it in high volume I have found mental fatigue to become an issue. If you don’t include the entire whole, you miss out on the big picture in a situation where the big picture truly is important. If you DO include the whole, you run into the cloze deletion “guessing the teacher’s password” problem. That said, it has its uses in smaller volume, but I will never again use it in a high-volume deck.
To give an example: As the article suggests, I used to take a diagram, set up graphic deletion (make a series of images where a single element was blotted out), and run through the cards.
1) this takes a lot of startup time
2) Even ignoring the time to make the cards, I found reviewing the cards to be more time consuming than simply looking at the diagram, covering up the lables, and attempting to recall.
3) You get no practice recalling the diagram from memory
4) This technique is most effective if you will later see that exact diagram in real life/on the test, I argue it is a pitfall for guessing the teacher’s password and provides less intuitive understanding of the diagram.
The strength in SRS comes from not wasting time on the easy parts and only spending time on the hard parts of the diagram. The theory is, after the first two cycles, you’re only reviewing the “hard” parts of the diagram. On the other hand, you’ve spent more time making the cards, more time for the first and second card cycles, you’re taking a big hit to the “big picture” style, and have no practice conjuring the diagram itself from memory. Ignoring the big picture and general understanding elements: if SRS provides any time benefit for the rote memorization vs going without SRS cards, i would only expect the benefit to “catch up” in 3 weeks BARE minimum; for me (for fatigue reasons in high volume) I pin the crossing point at 3 to 6 months, assuming it’s an unintuitive diagram I use infrequently enough that I will forget it without review. I also argue that it provides a weaker general understanding of the diagram as a whole.
Now that this topic is buried on page 2, I don’t know if anyone will see this post. However, I’ve begun work on my tutorial. I intend to do a “demo”, constructing a memory palace. Is there a particular list (of about 5-9 items) that people might find universally useful? Memory palaces really need to be constructed by the individual, but for the demo, I’d prefer to to something at least mildly relevant.
Some things that took me by surprise:
People here are more favorable of abortion than feminism. I always thought the former as secondary to the latter, though I suppose the “favorable” phrasing makes the survey sensitive to opinion of the term itself.
Mean SAT (out of 1600) is 1474? Really, people? 1410 is 96th percentile, and it’s the bottom 4th quartile. I guess the only people who remembered their scores were those who were proud of them. (And I know this is right along with the IQ discussion)