Giles

Karma: 1,759

Giles Dec 9, 2012, 9:28 PM
21 points
on: 2012 Winter Fundraiser for the Singularity Institute

As part of Singularity University’s acquisition of the Singularity Summit, we will be changing our name and …

OK, this is big news. Don’t know how I missed this one.

Giles Dec 9, 2012, 9:01 PM
0 points
on: How to incentivize LW wiki edits?
Appoint a chief editor. Chief’s most important job would be to maintain a list of what most urgently needs adding or expanding in the wiki, and posting a monthly Discussion post reminding people about these. (Maybe choosing a different theme each month and listing a few requested edits in that category, together with a link to the wiki page that contains the full list).

When people make these changes, they can add a comment and chief editor (or some other high status figure) will respond with heaps of praise.

People will naturally bring up any other topics they’d like to see on the wiki or general comments about the wiki. Chief editor should take account of these and where relevant bring them up with the relevant people (e.g. the programmers).

Meetup : Toronto THINK

GilesDec 6, 2012, 8:49 PM

7 points

0 comments2 min readLW link

Giles Nov 30, 2012, 7:40 PM
4 points
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Akrasia hack survey
Do you think “ugh” should be listed as a response to survey questions? (Or equivalently a check box that says “I’ve left some answers blank due to ugh field rather than due to not reading the question”—not possible with the current LW software, just brainstorming)

Giles Nov 30, 2012, 2:29 AM
0 points
on: Should correlation coefficients be expressed as angles?
This might be helpful—thanks.

Giles Nov 30, 2012, 2:25 AM
2 points
on: Akrasia hack survey
My answer for Exercise would be “I am trying this hack right now and so the results haven’t come in yet” (so I answered “write-in”).

I answered “I feel I should try” for lukeprog’s algorithm, but it’s really more of a “I’ll put it on my list of hacks to try at some point, but with low priority as there’s a whole bunch of others I should try first”.

I like the title too, especially as it gives no information about what the survey is going to be about. (Still might be distorted as people’s productivity experiences might correlate with how much time they spend filling in surveys on LW… but not sure there’s much that we can do about that)

Giles Nov 21, 2012, 2:07 PM
0 points
in reply to: tim’s comment on: The Evil AI Overlord List

and if the AI can tell if its in a simulation vs the real world then its not really a test at all.

The AI would probably assign at least some probability to “the humans will try to test me first, but do a poor job of it so I can tell whether I’m in a sim or not”

Giles Nov 21, 2012, 4:50 AM
1 point
in reply to: EricHerboso’s comment on: Questions from potential donors to Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours and EAA
If I understand Will’s response correctly (under “Earmarking”), it’s best to think of GWWC, 80K, EAA and LYCS as separate organizations (at least in terms of whose money will be used for what, which is what really matters). I don’t know if this addresses your concern though.

I admit it makes the actual physical donation process look slightly clunky (no big shiny donate button), but my impression is they’re not targeting casual donors so much so this may not be such a problem.

Giles Nov 21, 2012, 1:37 AM
7 points
on: Responses to questions on donating to 80k, GWWC, EAA and LYCS
This is really detailed, and exceeded my expectations! Thank you!

Giles Nov 19, 2012, 5:57 PM
6 points
in reply to: Stuart_Armstrong’s comment on: Room for more funding at the Future of Humanity Institute
Oh wow, totally wasn’t expecting you to go ahead and answer that particular list of questions. Thanks for being so proactive!

Questions 7-11 aren’t really relevant to FHI. Question 16 is relevant (at least the the “are there other orgs similar to you?” part) but I’m guessing you’d answer no to that?

The other answers are helpful, thanks!

Giles Nov 18, 2012, 11:17 PM
0 points
in reply to: Giles’s comment on: [SEQ RERUN] Surprised By Brains
Actually, the relevant thing isn’t whether it’s superlinear but whether a large AI/firm is more innovative than a set of smaller ones with the same total size. I was assuming that the latter would be linear, but it’s probably actually sublinear as you’d expect different AIs/firms to be redundantly researching the same thing.

Giles Nov 18, 2012, 3:43 AM
0 points
on: [SEQ RERUN] Surprised By Brains
Big thank you to Hanson for helping illuminate what it is he thinks they’re actually disagreeing about, in this comment:

Eliezer, it may seem obvious to you, but this is the key point on which we’ve been waiting for you to clearly argue. In a society like ours, but also with one or more AIs, and perhaps ems, why would innovations discovered by a single AI not spread soon to the others, and why would a non-friendly AI not use those innovations to trade, instead of war?

Just a thought: given a particular state-of-the-art, does an AI’s innovation rate scale superlinearly with its size? If it does, an AI could go something like foom even if it chose to trade away all of its innovations, as it would stay more productive than all of its smaller competitors and just keep on growing.

The analogy with firms would suggest it’s not like this; the analogy with brains is less clear. Also I get the sense that this doesn’t correctly describe Yudkowsky’s foom (which is somehow more meta-level than that).

Giles Nov 18, 2012, 2:39 AM
2 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: What does the world look like, the day before FAI efforts succeed?

the only person so far to actually answer the goddamn prompt

What’s worse is I wasn’t even consciously aware that I was doing that. I’ll try and read posts more carefully in the future!

Giles Nov 18, 2012, 2:34 AM
0 points
in reply to: hankx7787’s comment on: What does the world look like, the day before FAI efforts succeed?
OK—I wasn’t too sure about how these ones should be worded.

Giles Nov 17, 2012, 10:23 PM
8 points
on: What does the world look like, the day before FAI efforts succeed?
Another dimension: value discovery.
- Fantastic: There is a utility function representing human values (or a procedure for determining such a function) that most people (including people with a broad range of expertise) are happy with.
- Pretty good: Everyone’s values are different (and often contradict each other), but there is broad agreement as to how to aggregate preferences. Most people accept FAI needs to respect values of humanity as a whole, not just their own.
- Sufficiently good: Many important human values contradict each other, with no “best” solution to those conflicts. Most people agree on the need for a compromise but quibble over how that compromise should be reached.
What links here?
- What does the world look like, the day before FAI efforts succeed? by [deleted] (Nov 16, 2012, 8:56 PM; 36 points)

Giles Nov 17, 2012, 7:32 PM
7 points
on: What does the world look like, the day before FAI efforts succeed?
I like how you’ve partitioned things up into IA/government/status/memes/prediction/xrisk/security and given excellent/good/ok options for each. This helps imagine mix-and-match scenarios, e.g. “FAI team has got good at security but sucks at memes and status”.

A few quick points:

The fantastic list has 8 points and the others have 7 (as there are two “government” points). This brings me on to...

Should there be a category for “funding”? The fantastic/good/ok options could be something like:
- Significant government funding and/or FAI team use their superior rationality to acquire very large amounts of money through business
- Attracts small share of government/philanthropy budgets and/or a lot of small donations from many individuals
- Shoestring budget, succeeds anyway because the problem turns out to not be so hard after all once you’ve acquired the right insights
Does it have to be the FAI team implementing the “other xrisk reduction efforts” or can it just be “such institutions exist”?
What links here?
- What does the world look like, the day before FAI efforts succeed? by [deleted] (Nov 16, 2012, 8:56 PM; 36 points)

Giles Nov 17, 2012, 6:00 PM
6 points
on: Room for more funding at the Future of Humanity Institute
Another donation opportunity came up recently, which I responded to with a big long list of questions and I’ll put the answers up when I get them. People seemed to like this approach—can we do something similar for the FHI?

Some thoughts:
- Are the people at FHI going to be too busy to answer this kind of stuff?
- Are they likely to be limited in how candid they can be with their answers if the answers are going to be made public?
- I’m guessing Stuart or Sean would be the people you’d recommend talking to?

Giles Nov 17, 2012, 5:48 PM
0 points
in reply to: EricHerboso’s comment on: Questions from potential donors to Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours and EAA
Note that the Tides Foundation is not the same thing as CEA. I’m not sure what CEA’s exact relationship is with the Tides Foundation—I’ll add this to the list of questions.

My guess would be that the relationship to Tides is necessary in order to get US tax deductability (CEA is based in the UK), and that splitting off 80K and GWWC from each other wouldn’t help with that. I will ask though.

Giles Nov 15, 2012, 3:18 AM
0 points
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: [LINK] Steven Landsburg “Accounting for Numbers”—response to EY’s “Logical Pinpointing”
Yes—fair enough.

Giles Nov 14, 2012, 7:38 PM
5 points
in reply to: thomblake’s comment on: Simulationist sympathetic magic
How many of them wouldn’t believe it if it wasn’t working?