Arran_Stirton

Karma: 351

Arran_Stirton Mar 27, 2013, 8:57 AM
8 points
0
in reply to: MixedNuts’s comment on: Boring Advice Repository
Preemptive Solution: Leave a line of retreat, make sure that there is little/no cost for them if they choose to refuse; thus reducing the likelihood that they will help you out of compulsion.

Arran_Stirton Jun 19, 2012, 5:01 PM
6 points
on: Suggest alternate names for the “Singularity Institute”
It’s quite likely you can solve the problem of people miss-associating SI with “accelerating change“ without having to change names.

The AI researcher saw the word ‘Singularity’ and, apparently without reading our concise summary, sent back a critique of Ray Kurzweil’s “accelerating change” technology curves.

What if the AI researcher read (or more likely, skimmed) the concise summary before responding to the potential supporter? At least this line in the first paragraph, “artificial intelligence beyond some threshold level would snowball, creating a cascade of self-improvements,” doesn’t necessarily make it obvious enough that SI isn’t about “accelerating change”. (In fact, it sounds a lot like an accelerating-change-type idea.)

In my opinion at least, you need to get any potential supporter/critic to make the association between the name “Singularity Institute” and what SI actually does(/it’s goals) as soon as possible. While changing the name could do that, “Singularity Institute” has many useful aesthetic qualities that a replacement name probably won’t have.

On the other hand doing something like adding a clear tag-line about what SI does (e.g. “Pioneering safe-AI research”) to the header, would be a relatively cheap and effective solution. Perhaps rewriting the concise summary to discuss the dangers of a smarter-than-human AI before postulating the possibility of an intelligence explosion would also be effective; seeing as a smarter-than-human AI would need to be friendly, intelligence explosion or no.

Arran_Stirton Jun 6, 2012, 9:43 AM
0 points
in reply to: Paul Crowley’s comment on: Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 2
Interesting, thanks!

Have you come across any analysis that establishes cryonics as something that prevents information-theoretic death?

Arran_Stirton Jun 1, 2012, 8:31 PM
2 points
in reply to: avichapman’s comment on: A digitized belief network?
Sounds like a plan. Really what you want to do is contact everyone who’s shown interest in helping you (including myself) in order to collude with them via email and then hold a discussion about how to move on at a scheduled time in an irc channel or somesuch.

Arran_Stirton May 25, 2012, 2:16 PM
4 points
on: A digitized belief network?
At the moment I’m using yEd to create a dependency map of the Sequences, which is roughly equivalent to creating what I guess you could call an inferential network. Since embarking on this project I’ve discovered just how useful having a structured visual map can be, particularly for things like finding the weak points of various conclusions, establishing how important a particular idea is to the validity of the entire body of writing, and using how low a post is on the hierarchy as a heuristic for establishing the inferential distance to the concepts it contains.

So I’m thinking that the use of a belief network mapping tool might not necessarily be mainly in allowing updates to propagate though a personal network, but creating networks representing bodies of public knowledge. Like for example, the standard model of physics. As you can imagine this would be immensely useful for both research and education. For research such a network would point to the places where (for example) the standard model is weak, and for education it would lay out the order in which concepts should be taught in order for students to let them form an accurate internal working model without getting confused.

TL;DR: Yes, I’d love to help you design and build such a tool.

Arran_Stirton May 22, 2012, 2:57 PM
0 points
in reply to: Emile’s comment on: Irrational hardware vs. rational software
Heh, well I’ve got dyslexia so every now and then I’ll end up reading things as different to what they actually say. It’s more my dyslexia than your wording. XD

It seems like I failed at being concise and clear :P

Hmm, I wonder if being concise is all it’s cracked up to be. Concise messages usually have lower information content, so they’re actually less useful for narrowing down an idea’s location in idea-space. Thanks, I’m looking into effective communication at the moment and probably wouldn’t have realized the downside to being concise if you hadn’t said that.

Arran_Stirton May 22, 2012, 1:16 PM
4 points
in reply to: Emile’s comment on: Irrational hardware vs. rational software
Ah, I misread your comment, my apologies. I’ll retract my question.

Arran_Stirton May 22, 2012, 9:18 AM
−2 points
in reply to: Emile’s comment on: Irrational hardware vs. rational software
Can you evidence that?

Arran_Stirton May 18, 2012, 2:53 AM
2 points
in reply to: Thomas’s comment on: Neuroimaging as alternative/supplement to cryonics?
I agree, yet none of that changes the fact that conditions in the womb have a large impact on brain development. Hence information about the conditions in the womb is required to generate a specific new-born’s brain. Sure when an adult takes a stimulating drug there’s not a large data flow, but when the brain is actually forming drugs can fundamentally alter its final structure.

Arran_Stirton May 17, 2012, 8:50 PM
0 points
on: Singularity Ruined by Lawyers
I feel like I should be dedicating part of my resources to reducing the likelihood of something like that ever happening.

Arran_Stirton May 15, 2012, 5:14 PM
3 points
in reply to: Thomas’s comment on: Neuroimaging as alternative/supplement to cryonics?
So are you saying that the conditions in the womb doesn’t have any effect on brain structure?

By the way, try to aim higher than DH3 because it’s hard for me to understand what exactly you’re disagreeing with if you don’t provide me with a counterargument. Sorry for the bother.

Arran_Stirton May 15, 2012, 2:34 PM
5 points
on: Neuroimaging as alternative/supplement to cryonics?

A newborn’s brain can be specified by about 10^9 bits of genetic information

While the brain of a new-born baby can be generated by 10^9 bits of genetic information, it’s not true that this is enough to suitably specify a particular new-born’s brain. This is because of the large impact that conditions in the womb have on brain development (e.g. drugs&alcohol) and the limited extent to which brain structure is inherited.

However it’s quite likely that specific sections of the genome contribute to brain development, meaning that your lower bound for how much information it takes to generate a new-born’s brain is (*probably!) much lower than 10^9 bits. Though this still won’t be enough information to specify a particular new-born’s brain, just enough to considerably narrow-down the region of brain-structure-space that the new-born’s brain can occupy.

*Don’t take my word for this – I don’t know nearly enough to substantiate that claim.

Also, on a tentative note, it might be worth comparing scans of a brain before and after it’s been cryogenically preserved in order to see if it’s possible to tell the difference (and subsequently if the data from the pre-freezing brain can be approximated from the post freezing brain data).

Arran_Stirton May 10, 2012, 6:11 AM
0 points
0
in reply to: Douglas_Reay’s comment on: Logical fallacies poster, a LessWrong adaptation.
From reading the other comments, this poster makes a three-way top level distinction.

Along similar-ish lines, it might be possible to use the hierarchy to score the quality of an argument. Essentially you’d assign a score from −4 to +4 for DH0 to DH7, then score an argument based on it’s content. Although once you know it contains (say) a DH4 argument, you wouldn’t keep on adding points for more DH4 arguments (otherwise an argument that was purely lots of DH4 statements would get a higher score than one DH7 statement).

It depends.

Usually you don’t make use of a fallacy, it’s more that you unknowingly commit one. If that’s the case then the bias is in both you and the person who is persuaded by it.

On the other hand if you intentionally use a fallacy in order to persuade someone, you’re a) dabbling in the dark arts and b) not actually biased (as you’re not convinced by your own fallacy). However if you succeed in persuading someone with this method then that person would be the one with bias.

Arran_Stirton May 10, 2012, 4:14 AM
0 points
in reply to: bramflakes’s comment on: Betrand Russell’s Ten Commandments
Not sure that quite counts as an opinion, but what the hey. Close enough.

The particular quote should be ammended to something like:

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for eccentricity is a poor measure of falsehood.

Arran_Stirton May 8, 2012, 9:48 AM
10 points
0
on: Logical fallacies poster, a LessWrong adaptation.
At least in my ideal poster-space this hierarchy would be included. Considering that knowing about biases can hurt people having a general theme of how to resolve arguments better rather than “here are some fallacies, avoid them/point them out” can’t hurt.

Arran_Stirton May 8, 2012, 12:45 AM
0 points
in reply to: bramflakes’s comment on: Betrand Russell’s Ten Commandments
However within a good deal western media (at least in England) xenophobic ideals are portrayed as to the “far right”, and essentially eccentric. Whereas back in the day racism/nationalism was normal, and to not conform to that was considered eccentric.

Also I was looking for something a little less general than just xenophobia, a lot of opinions fall under that category.

Arran_Stirton May 8, 2012, 12:32 AM
2 points
in reply to: prase’s comment on: Betrand Russell’s Ten Commandments

every opinon had once to be at least a bit eccentric by definition.

I’m having trouble parsing that, could you re-phrase?

Also it’s not so much about what I’m defining “opinion” to be, but rather about what the quote means when it says “opinion”. If we’re going to say that the quote is wrong, we should at least aim to attack what the quote is intended to mean, rather than what we can interpret it to mean.

Arran_Stirton May 7, 2012, 2:28 AM
2 points
in reply to: Alejandro1’s comment on: Betrand Russell’s Ten Commandments

(e.g. “clouds lead to rain”, “fire is hot”, et cetera).

I suspect the kind of opinion the quote is talking about is as defined here; a belief or judgment that rests on grounds insufficient to produce complete certainty. Neither “Fire is hot” nor “Clouds lead to rain” count as examples of this as most people have a fair amount of evidence on hand to back those beliefs up.

In light of this, could you please provide alternative examples of conventional opinions that were also held in the past?

Arran_Stirton May 6, 2012, 3:21 AM
6 points
on: No Value
I wouldn’t worry too much about it if I were you. Around your age I experienced the same kind of lack-of-feeling, a year or so later so did a friend of mine. However it passed for both of us. Retrospectively I suspect a great deal of the problem was that neither me nor my friend had invested time or effort into anything. Try working on something or executing a plot, also read http://lesswrong.com/lw/bq0/be_happier/ .

Also, reading good books works.

Arran_Stirton Apr 22, 2012, 8:17 PM
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 2
Thanks!

I’m starting to suspect that my dream of finding an impartial analysis of cryonics is doomed to be forever unfulfilled…