arbimote

• arbimoteJan 12, 2010, 12:11 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: billswift’s comment on: Savulescu: “Ge­net­i­cally en­hance hu­man­ity or face ex­tinc­tion”

  That claims of this type are sometimes made to advance agendas does not mean we shouldn’t make these claims, or that all such claims are false. It means such claims need to be scrutinised more carefully.

  I agree that more often than not there is not a simple solution, and people often accept a false simple solution too readily. But the absence of a simple solution does not mean there is no theoretical optimal strategy for continually working through the difficulty.

• arbimoteJan 12, 2010, 5:32 AM

  1 point

  on: No One Knows What Science Doesn’t Know

  I agree with the message of the article, but I do not think it is forever going to be impossible to query what science currently knows.

  Improvements in search technology cause a decrease in the time taken to do a reasonable search for any existing knowledge on a topic. Before the internet you might have had to read dozens of journals to have a vague idea of whether a field had discovered something in particular. Now you can do an online search. Conceivably, a future search engine could be good enough that it could take some imprecise (non-jargon) search terms, and bring up the most relevant and up-to-date research on the topic.

  This would be great for public perception of science. Consider your uncle typing “How does gravity work?”, and being presented not only with a pop-science description (as you would today), but also with the latest peer-reviewed work and a list of prerequisite reading, should he want a more thorough understanding. It’d be harder for people to worship ignorance if there was less of a barrier between them and knowledge.

• arbimoteJan 12, 2010, 4:15 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: billswift’s comment on: Savulescu: “Ge­net­i­cally en­hance hu­man­ity or face ex­tinc­tion”

  … seems to have this belief that there is some perfect cure for any problem.

  There may not be a single strategy that is perfect on it’s own, but there will always be an optimum course of action, which may be a mixture of strategies (eg dump $X into nanotech safety, $Y into intelligence enhancement, and $Z into AGI development). You might never have enough information to know the optimal strategy to maximise your utility function, but one still exists, and it is worth trying to estimate it.

  I mention this because previously I have heard “there is no perfect solution” as an excuse to give up and abandon systematic/​mathematical analysis of a problem, and just settle with some arbitrary suggestion of a “good enough” course of action.

• arbimoteJan 12, 2010, 1:26 AM

  2 points

  on: Refer­ence class of the unclassreferenceable

  For some things (especially concrete things like animals or toothpaste products), it is easy to find a useful reference class, while for other things it is difficult to find which possible reference class, if any, is useful. Some things just do not fit nicely enough into an existing reference class to make the method useful—they are unclassreferencable, and it is unlikely to be worth the effort attempting to use the method, when you could just look at more specific details instead. (“Unclassreferencable” suggests a dichotomy, but it’s more of a spectrum.) ETA: I see this point has already been made here.

  Humans naturally use an ad-hoc method that is like reference class forecasting (that may not be perfect or completely rational, but does a reasonable job sometimes). It is useful when we first encounter something and do not yet have enough specific details to evaluate it on its own terms. Once we have those details, the forecasting method is not needed. We use forecasting to get a heuristic on which things are worth us investigating further, so we can make that more detailed evaluation. Often something that is unclassreferencable is more worth investigating—we are curious about things that do not fit nicely into our existing categories.

  There are a couple of ways promoters of a product/​idea can exploit humans’ natural forecasting habits. Sometimes the phrase “defies categorisation” or “doesn’t fit into the normal genres” is applied to a new piece of music, to suggest that it is unclassreferencable and therefore worth checking out (which is better than a potential listener lumping it into a category that they don’t like). On the other hand, sometimes promoters purposefully put themselves into a reference class, hoping that noone investigates finer details—like a new product claiming to be “environmentally friendly”, or people wearing certain clothes to appear to have higher status.

  Let me know if I’m suffering from man-with-hammer syndrome here, but it seems reference class forecasting is a useful way to think about many promotional strategies in a more systematic way.

• arbimoteJan 10, 2010, 11:42 AM

  1 point

  on: Wel­come to Less Wrong!

  • Handle: arbimote

  • Gender: Male

  • Age: 22 (born 1987)

  • Location: Australia

  • Occupation: Student of computer science

  I’ve been lurking since May 2009. My views on some issues that are often brought up on LW are:

  • It’s a good idea to sign up to cryonics if you have the money, due to a Pascal’s Wager type argument. I have not signed up, since I do not yet have the money (and AFAIK there are further complications due to being in Australia).

  • It is possible and desirable for humans to create AGI.

  • MWI seems intuitive to me, but I have not read enough about the subject to form an decent estimate on its correctness.

  I feel like I should pad out this intro with more information, but that’ll have to do for now.