The smaller thing could be a human, too. Giant, good looking but creepy child holding small vulnerable human in one hand, looking at it emotionlessly. But MIRI will not like this version, because they really want to avoid anthropomorphizing the AI.
DanielVarga
Karma: 1,781
I fully agree with this point, and I fully agree with Page’s goals. But I think there are things here that a simple total-years-of-potential-life-lost framework can not capture. As you might have guessed even from my first comment, this issue is very personal to me. Not long ago a good friend died after terrible suffering, leaving three young children behind. That’s very sad, and I really don’t know for what values of N could this be balanced in a utilitarian sense by lengthening the healthy old age of N of my friends with 10 years. Obviously, such trade-offs are taboo, but even if I try to force myself into some detached outside view, I still believe that number N must be large.
“Are people really focused on the right things? One of the things I thought was amazing is that if you solve cancer, you’d add about three years to people’s average life expectancy,” Page said. “We think of solving cancer as this huge thing that’ll totally change the world. But when you really take a step back and look at it, yeah, there are many, many tragic cases of cancer, and it’s very, very sad, but in the aggregate, it’s not as big an advance as you might think.” (Larry Page as quoted in the Time article)
This is something like the ecological fallacy. In the aggregate, we lose 3 years of potential life because of cancer. No big deal. Looking at the individual level, most of us had close friends who had lost 30 years of potential life.
I am not a physicist, but this stack exchange answer seems to disagree with your assessment: What are the primary obstacles to solve the many-body problem in quantum mechanics?
I did exactly that after looking at this thread, and only spotted your comment when I wanted to post the results.
I skipped some obvious refinements as this was a 5 minute project.
55 A Bet is a Tax on Bullshit. Alex Tabarrok
45 Luck is statistics taken personally. Penn Jellete
33 Comic Quote Minus 37 -- Ryan Armand Also a favourite.
34 Nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time.Ken Wilber
32 A problem well stated is a problem half solved.Charles Kettering
48 I will not procrastinate regarding any ritual granting immortality. --Evil Overlord List #230
29 The greatest weariness comes from work not done.-Eric Hoffer
26 “Most haystacks do not even have a needle.” -- Lorenzo
24 “I accidentally changed my mind.” my four-year-old
31 Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. Voltaire
39 People say “think outside the box,” as if the box wasn’t a fucking great idea.Sean Thomason
38 The Noah principle: predicting rain doesn’t count, building arks does. -Warren E. Buffett
37 It’s easy to lie with statistics, but it’s easier to lie without them. -Fred Mosteller
30 If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.-Seneca
34 It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.George Bernard Shaw
34 “Working in mysterious ways” is the greatest euphemism for failure ever devised.TheTweetOfGod
12 Death is the gods’ crime. Unsounded
24 The most practical thing in the world is a good theory. Helmholtz
29 When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir? John Maynard Keynes
28 Writing program code is a good way of debugging your thinking. -- Bill Venables
28 It is easy to be certain....One has only to be sufficiently vague.Charles S. Peirce
30 Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations. — John Von Neumann
31 There is one rule that’s very simple, but not easy: observe reality and adjust. Ran Prieur
21 Things are only impossible until they’re not. -- Jean-Luc Picard
24 Part of the potential of things is how they break. Vi Hart, How To Snakes
25 A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library. Daniel Dennett
29 We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it. Mark Twain
29 The Company that needs a new machine tool is already paying for it. -old Warner Swasey ad
25 “Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from SCIENCE!” ~Girl Genius
26 Complex problems have simple, easy to understand wrong answers. — Grossman’s Law
22 Most people would rather die than think; many do. – Bertrand Russell
22 The only road to doing good shows, is doing bad shows.Louis C.K., on Reddit
28 My brain technically-not-a-lies to me far more than it actually lies to me.-- Aristosophy (again)
23 The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off. Gloria Steinem
27 Nature draws no line between living and nonliving. -- K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation
22 It is better to destroy one’s own errors than those of others. Democritus
12 Reality is not optional. Thomas Sowell
17 Statistics is applied philosophy of science. A. P. Dawid
22 Forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today. Lawrence Krauss
23 Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics. Dean Schlicter
24 We are built to be effective animals, not happy ones. -Robert Wright, The Moral Animal
19 Being right too soon is socially unacceptable. Robert A. Heinlein
14 “Anything you can do, I can do meta” -Rudolf Carnap
17 Mind is a machine for jumping to conclusions—Daniel Kahneman
26 A faith which cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.Arthur C. Clarke
26 Nobody panics when things go “according to plan”… even if the plan is horrifying. The Joker
23 “Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.” --Friedrich Nietzsche
20 I honestly don’t know. Let’s see what happens. -- Hans. The Troll Hunter
16 Luck is opportunity plus preparation plus luck.--Jane Espenson
20 The singularity is my retirement plan. -- tocomment, in a Hacker News post
19 Better our hypotheses die for our errors than ourselves. -- Karl Popper
22 Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all.-Charles Babbage
19 In general, we are least aware of what our minds do best. — Marvin Minsky
20 It is easier to love humanity than to love one’s neighbor.--Eric Hoffer, on Near/Far
15 Keep your solutions close, and your problems closer.afoolswisdom
18 “If God gives you lemons, you find a new God.”—Powerthirst 2: Re-Domination
17 Truth comes out of error more easily than out of confusion.-Francis Bacon
23 Opening your eyes doesn’t make a bad picture worse. http://onefte.com/2011/07/17/bully-for-you/
19 Know the hair you have to get the hair you want. -Pantene Pro-V hair care bottle
16 The best way to escape from a problem is to solve it. -Alan Saporta
16 Not to know is bad; not to wish to know is worse. — Wolof proverb
20 Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -- Voltaire
unrestricted Turing test passing should be sufficient unto FOOM
I tend to agree, but I have to note the surface similarity with Hofstadter’s disproved “No, I’m bored with chess. Let’s talk about poetry.” prediction.
I was trying to position the paper in terms of LW opinions, because my target audience were LW readers. (That’s also the reason I mentioned the tangential Eliezer reference.) It’s beneath my dignity to list all the different philosophical questions where my opinion is different from LW consensus, so let’s just say that I used the term as a convenient reference point rather than a creed.
[link] Scott Aaronson on free will
If it really has only finitely many utility levels, then for a sufficiently small epsilon and some even smaller delta, it will not care whether it ends up in Hell with probability epsilon or probability delta.
I removed the broken index.html, sorry. Now you can see the whole (messy) directory. The README is actually a list of commands with some comments, the source code consists of parse.py and convolution.py.
Best of Rationality Quotes, 2012 Edition
When I stated that the middle is roughly exponential, this was the graph that I was looking at:
d ← density(karma)
plot(log(d$y) ~ d$x)
I don’t do this for a living, so I am not sure at all, but if I really really had to make this formal, I would probably use maximum likelihood to fit an exponential distribution on the relevant interval, and then Kolmogorov-Smirnoff. It’s what shminux said, except there is probably no closed formula because the cutoffs complicate the thing. And at least one of the cutoffs is really necessary, because below 3 it is obviously not exponential.
I am afraid I don’t understand your methodology. How is a rank versus value function supposed to look like for an exponentially distributed sample?
It is roughly exponential in the range between 3 and 60 karma.
You can find the raw data here.
Edit: I didn’t spot gwern’s more careful analysis. I am still digesting it. gwern, you should use the above link, it contains the below-10 quotes, too.
Fixed, thanks!
Top original authors by karma collected.
454 Russell
392 Chesterton
365 Pratchett
322 Feynman
214 Nietzsche
196 Friedman
190 Heinlein
190 Dennett
183 Sagan
172 Voltaire
169 Wilson
162 Friedrich
157 Egan
149 Darwin
144 Moldbug
138 Plato
137 Einstein
134 Dawkins
133 Buffett
129 Aristotle
127 Aaronson
125 Marcus
124 Kahneman
123 Mencken
123 Asimov
122 Orwell
119 SMBC
119 Johnson
117 Hitler
117 Descartes
113 Kaas
110 Taleb
109 Hume
108 Confucius
103 Godin
102 Keynes
99 Stephenson
98 Munroe
Top original authors by number of quotes. (Note that authors and mentions are not disambiguated.)
Feynman 28
Russell 26
Pratchett 18
Nietzsche 18
Heinlein 18
Einstein 15
Dawkins 14
Chesterton 12
Wilson 11
Johnson 11
Asimov 11
Taleb 10
Dennett 10
Darwin 10
Voltaire 9
Meier 9
Hume 9
Clark 9
Buffett 9
Neumann 8
Thoreau 7
Rochefoucauld 7
Peirce 7
Medawar 7
Keynes 7
Huxley 7
Gould 7
Dijkstra 7
Aristotle 7
Yudkowsky 6
Plato 6
Orwell 6
Munroe 6
Mencken 6
Marx 6
Marshall 6
Lichtenberg 6
Kant 6
Jaynes 6
Holmes 6
Hitler 6
Egan 6
Drexler 6
Descartes 6
Carlyle 6
Binmore 6
Top quote contributors by statistical significance level:
0.00003 (20.14 in 29): Alejandro1
0.00005 (19.31 in 32): GabrielDuquette
0.00014 (28.11 in 9): Oscar_Cunningham
0.00020 (25.45 in 11): peter_hurford
0.00119 (47.50 in 2): Delta
0.00127 (18.55 in 22): Yvain
0.00136 (17.06 in 31): Jayson_Virissimo
0.00219 (62.00 in 1): Solvent
0.00394 (18.00 in 19): Tesseract
0.00544 (22.25 in 8): Maniakes
0.00620 (56.00 in 1): RomeoStevens
0.00777 (30.00 in 3): benelliott
0.00882 (35.00 in 2): michaelkeenan
0.00936 (24.40 in 5): Ezekiel
0.01276 (45.00 in 1): Mycroft65536
0.01296 (33.00 in 2): summerstay
0.01563 (15.91 in 22): James_Miller
0.01713 (43.00 in 1): alex_zag_al
0.01713 (43.00 in 1): Liron
0.01968 (41.00 in 1): Andy_McKenzie
0.02114 (40.00 in 1): bentarm
0.02350 (13.61 in 54): Rain
0.02414 (29.50 in 2): gRR
0.02435 (19.57 in 7): fortyeridania
0.02727 (19.29 in 7): Unnamed
0.02733 (15.63 in 19): DSimon
0.02850 (15.88 in 17): Nominull
0.02851 (15.72 in 18): Stabilizer
0.03630 (18.00 in 8): wallowinmaya
0.03746 (19.17 in 6): Mark_Eichenlaub
0.03938 (13.24 in 54): MichaelGR
0.04005 (23.00 in 3): cata
0.04005 (23.00 in 3): tingram
0.04309 (22.67 in 3): Oligopsony
0.04394 (14.76 in 21): Grognor
0.04752 (17.86 in 7): VKS
0.04766 (25.00 in 2): Automaton
0.04922 (19.20 in 5): Lightwave
0.05288 (16.09 in 11): J_Taylor
0.05729 (21.33 in 3): Miller
Top quote contributors by karma score collected in 2012:
452 GabrielDuquette
451 Alejandro1
396 Konkvistador
339 Jayson_Virissimo
309 gwern
306 lukeprog
289 NancyLebovitz
259 Grognor
243 Stabilizer
200 Alicorn
181 James_Miller
179 peter_hurford
175 arundelo
174 Eugine_Nier
151 Oscar_Cunningham
143 katydee
137 fortyeridania
136 [deleted]
128 Will_Newsome
125 VKS
117 J_Taylor
112 Stephanie_Cunnane
111 Mark_Eichenlaub
110 army1987
109 wallowinmaya
103 Ezekiel
101 RichardKennaway
97 Eliezer_Yudkowsky
95 Delta
88 Yvain
87 baiter
85 MBlume
82 Nominull
79 chaosmosis
78 roland
72 Vaniver
72 paper-machine
71 taelor
70 scmbradley
69 tingram
Amusingly, google chrome autofill still remembered my answers from last year. This made filling the demographic part a bit faster, and allowed a little game: after giving a probability estimation I could check my answer from a year ago.