Eric B

Karma: 188

Eric B Jan 21, 2017, 7:54 AM
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in reply to: Eric B’s comment on: Arbital needs a mechanism for defining terms
Seems like greenlinking to the term gets you that, minus auto-suggest which seems like it’d get unwieldy as we expand to lots of topics?

Eric B Jan 19, 2017, 7:03 AM
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in reply to: Eric B’s comment on: Arbital needs a mechanism for defining terms
Yep, that is what I meant. Create new page is less exposed now we’ve moved the Arbital math home. It’s accessible via the hamburger menu in the top right still, and you can link to it like this, but that’s not particularly easy to find. I’m pretty sure we’ll want to improve that, and generally make it easier to navigate between the wiki and discussion areas of Arbital.

Yep, I think when we’ve got good support for browsing by tag we’ll be able to tag things with #term or #definition, and it’ll work?

By splits I just meant if people disagree they could make alternate terms, maybe crosslinking with “maybe you want this term”? No special features.

Eric B Jan 15, 2017, 8:33 PM
7 points
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on: Arbital needs a mechanism for defining terms
Making a page and greenlinking to it (with comments / edits / splits available) seems fine to me?

Eric B Jan 12, 2017, 8:23 PM
6 points
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in reply to: Eric B’s comment on: Scalable ways to associate evidence (pro or con) with claims will be more valuable in elevating accuracy than complex voting and reputation systems
Reddit’s reputation system gives new arrivals equal weight to long-standing highly trusted members of the community, and does not include priors about content quality based on poster’s history. It’s the simplest thing which could barely work, and does not allow for high quality discussion to scale without relying heavily on moderators or other social things not present in all communities and not able to resist certain forms of attack. It also lacks adequate indexing and browsing by topic, making discussions temporary rather than able to produce lasting artifacts and be continued easily.

SE’s reputation system is a little better (you need to prove to the system you can productively engage with the topic before your votes have any weight), but it’s very focused on QA, which is not a great format for extended truth-seeking discussion.

Cool argument structuring seems like an optional bonus (still great to have, but not necessary for the thing to work), but features that give users reason to expect their high-quality content gets more eyeballs (particularly the eyeballs which most need that specific content) seem core and essential.

Eric B Jan 10, 2017, 8:44 PM
1 point
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on: Scalable ways to associate evidence (pro or con) with claims will be more valuable in elevating accuracy than complex voting and reputation systems
I foresee good reputation systems being extremely valuable (essentially necessary to scale while maintaining quality), with high credence on that being more important than argument structuring features.

Eric B Jan 4, 2017, 2:37 AM
1 point
on: [unknown]
Ops. link was still pointing to the wrong place. Fixed, thanks for reporting!

Eric B Dec 25, 2016, 8:25 AM
2 points
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in reply to: alexei’s comment on: Arbital claims are significantly more useful* when they are fairly well-specified and unambiguous**
Yep, there’s at least high variability. Especially if the things it could be taken to mean are things people generally have similar credence for.

And, nods, this was partly a test of trying to disambiguate a claim, and I found it harder than expected / think I did not do very well. Maybe just words would have been better rather than numbers, and more of them. Or maybe doing a simple version and having other people see where it was ambiguous rather than trying to clarify in a vacuum is easier?

Eric B Dec 24, 2016, 4:31 AM
2 points
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in reply to: Eric B’s comment on: For mitigating AI x-risk, an off-Earth colony would be about as useful as a warm scarf
It’s in the same direction, yea. Even if relocating on earth captured all the wins (I would guess in most scenarios not, due to very different selection effects), that is way better than a warm scarf.

I don’t expect the very early colony to be any use in terms of directing AGI research. The full self-sustaining million person civilization made mostly of geniuses version which it seeds is the interesting part, but the early stage is a requisite for something valuable.

Yea, that’s not obvious to me either. It’s totally plausible that this happens on Earth in another form and we get SV 2.0 with strong enough network effects that Mars ends up not being attractive. However, “better than a warm scarf” is a low bar.

If this claim is clarified to something like “For mitigating AI x-risk, an early-stage off-Earth colony would be very unlikely to help”, I would switch.

More general point: I feel like this claim (and all others we have) are insufficiently well-specified. I have the feeling of “this could be taken as a handful of claims, which I have very different credences for”. Perhaps there should be a queue for claims where people can ask questions and make sure it’s pinned down before being opened for everyone to vote on? Adds an annoying wait, but also saves people from running into poorly specified claims.

Oh, neat, I can use a claim. This is fun. Arbital claims are significantly more useful* when they are fairly well-specified and unambiguous** A clarification period for claims is net positive for Arbital

Eric B Dec 23, 2016, 10:41 PM
2 points
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on: A permanent, self-sustaining off-Earth colony would be a much more effective mitigation of x-risk than even an equally well funded system of disaster shelters on Earth.
A bunch of specifics being pinned down would help. e.g. are the shelters inhabited, or just available? are they isolated in a way that stops them being raided? seasteading-based? self-sustaining? what stops people forcing their way in if disaster strikes?

It may be easier to fund off-earth colonies to this level, because it provides directly for individuals. Few would sell their house for a spot in a disaster shelter, some would for a ticket to mars.

Eric B Dec 23, 2016, 10:01 PM
7 points
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on: For mitigating AI x-risk, an off-Earth colony would be about as useful as a warm scarf
Neat, I’m a contrarian. I guess I should explain why my credence is about 80% different from everyone else’s :)

Obviously, being off earth would provide essentially no protection from a uFAI. It may, however. shift the odds of us getting an aligned AI in the first place.

Maybe this is because I’m taking this to mean more than most, I only think it helps if well-established and significant, but by my models both the rate of technological progress and ability to coordinate seems to be proportional to something like density of awesome people with a non-terrible incentive structure. Filtering by “paid half a million dollars to get to mars” and designing the incentive structure from scratch seems like an unusually good way to create a dense pocket of awesome people focused on important problems, in a way which is very hard to dilute.

I claim that if we have long enough timelines for a self-sustaining off-earth colony to be created, the first recursively self-improving AGI has a good chance of being built there. And that a strongly filtered group immersed in other hard challenges with and setting up decision-making infrastructure intentionally rather than working with all the normal civilization cruft are more likely to coordinate on safety than earth-based teams.

I do not expect timelines to be long enough that this is an option, so do not endorse this as a sane use of funding. But having an off-earth colony seems way, way more useful than a warm scarf.

I would agree with:
- There are currently much better ways to reduce AI x-risk than funding off-earth colonies. (~96%)
- It is unlikely that off-earth colonies will be sufficiently established in time to mitigate AI x-risk. (~77%)

Eric B Dec 16, 2016, 8:37 AM
1 point
in reply to: Eric B’s comment on: [unknown]
Perhaps make it a new replacement claim, and notify everyone who marked this claim that it’s been replaced? I don’t want people to be able to edit claims to make it appear I have a credence for a statement, and I don’t want my credence wiped whenever a claim is edited.

Eric B Dec 16, 2016, 1:25 AM
2 points
in reply to: Eric B’s comment on: [unknown]
I want a clarification on the claim. How should this be handled, should it be attached to the claim? Decided by the author? Just left in the comments?

Probably not high priority. Comments seems okay.

Eric B Dec 16, 2016, 1:23 AM
2 points
on: [unknown]
Does “better” include “more like the in-group”? If yes, this seems very plausible. If no, I’d guess the crony beliefs cluster is a bigger source.

Better in a locally zero-sum way has some direct checks (because the people you’re interacting with you have an incentive to see if you’re deceiving them about your usefulness), whereas locally positive-sum biases (e.g. “my in group is the best in-group, and is right about everything”) should be selected for.

Eric B Dec 12, 2016, 8:08 AM
2 points
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in reply to: Mars nuntius.marii@gmail.com’s comment on: Funding governance filtering
nods, definitely want to encourage discussion. However, people may not want their reasons for vetoing widely known, or even the fact that it was them who vetoed someone. The structure has to be carefully designed. I have a vague plan, but best not go into that level of zoom until the team is together, I think.

Eric B Dec 9, 2016, 8:54 AM
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on: Arbital as single conversational locus
soften, perhaps talk about encouraging good epistemic norms, give details/examples so people don’t get scared? no enforcement or require.

Eric B Dec 9, 2016, 8:51 AM
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on: Arbital as single conversational locus
Perhaps this could be all in a note, with the only default-viewable thing saying we’re financially stable? Unsure about this one, but my guess is the average reader does not care about the details too much.

The current note feels kinda startup-pitchy, which is probably not a good look here.

Eric B Dec 9, 2016, 8:46 AM
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on: Arbital as single conversational locus
Repetition of scope in the note is mildly awkward.

Eric B Dec 9, 2016, 8:45 AM
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on: Arbital as single conversational locus
I’d lean towards mostly positives / integrating these two, rather than just negatives we want to avoid (not pure positive either though). Perhaps emphasize that we want a system where the staff are helpful and approachable? And where new people with valuable input are rapidly recognized and their ideas shown to more people?

Eric B Dec 9, 2016, 8:35 AM
1 point
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on: Arbital as single conversational locus
I’d add a once sentence “this is what it is / why it matters” thing. Perhaps something about efficiently bringing people to to the edge of human understanding?

Eric B Dec 9, 2016, 8:19 AM
1 point
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on: Arbital as single conversational locus
Discussions should be taggable with multiple domains, so the one place seems not quite right. Keep up with all discussion in any topic?