Hmm, one way to maybe get around this would be to start an intrinsically motivating project but limit oneself to the tools one has to learn for extrinsic reasons.
Halfwit
Karma: 193
Then my advice is this: talk to someone who has the entry-level job you want and ask him or her what skills he/she needs to do it and what skills whoever hired him or her thinks one needs. Then learn them. As for the “oddly unable” thing, I suggest reflecting on how you learned what you are good at in the first place. If there’s anything different about your current, ineffective approach to learning new techniques stop doing it. Unless you’ve recently suffered brain trauma, it’s likely just some weird ugh field-like effect.
Yeah, that does sound pretty awful, not something you’d want to induce. For me it was just this: pressure on my chest, inability to move my limbs, and the feeling that some entity was observing me. There was no gnashing of teeth.
You’re asking me for advice? That was the first time I’ve looked at code in my life. I’m sure the textbook recommendation thread has something on programming. From what I understand, though, halfway-decent programmers are very employable at the moment, so either you’re overestimating your ability, there’s some other factor you haven’t shared, or my intuition on the employment prospects of halfway-decent programmers (I assume this means close to, if slightly below, the level of the average pro) is incorrect.
I was lucky enough to have read about that before the one time it happened to me. So I wasn’t scared. I just thought, So this is sleep paralysis. Since then I’ve read that lucid dreamers often try to force themselves into sleep paralysis, as it’s the first stop to the sandman’s brooding realm. The next time it happens to you, you should try for a Feynman-style lucid dream. It could be fun.
I edited because the code I looked at seemed to be atypical, comparing it to what others have posted. No, I don’t think I’m M3 at all—though my father probably is, as he picked up programming in his twenties and knows many languages. As I had expected the code to look like nonsense, I was merely surprised I could get some idea about what was going on. My prior for being able to get a programming job with <300 hours of dedicated practice is low, but it could be something to investigate as a hobby.
quickly check to see if you are a natural computer programmer by pulling up a page of Python source code and seeing whether it looks like it makes natural sense, and if this is the case you can teach yourself to program very quickly and get a much higher-paying job even without formal credentials.
I just did this. And I was surprised; this seemed far less inscrutable than I intuitively expected, having never read any code. My father is a computer programmer, so I may have it in my DNA. He is more intelligent than me though. Example, I once told him the three gods puzzle and he had it solved in ~20 minutes; he didn’t even use paper.
P/S/A: If your work involves writing and you often find yourself procrastinating on the internet, buy an old laptop, rip out the wifi card and use it as your dedicated writing laptop.
P/S/A: When you need to get a large amount of writing done outside of office hours, go to some non-home location (a coffee shop not a library, as books are the ultimate distractions) and commit yourself to not leaving until you reach a specific word count—I find two thousand words is reasonable and achievable; at least it is for non-creative writing.
Also, If there is some fact that you need to research use the TK method to mark it down for later.
Some early science fiction isn’t so much about conflict as it is a relation of an unlikely experience. But then, the stories I have in mind weren’t exactly that great. So that’s not exactly evidence against the assumption. Still, I think a sufficiently skilled writer could create an enjoyable story without conflict, but it would be like a painter throwing out a primary color.
One of my favorite of OP’s short posts is Building Weirdtopia. (Yudkowsky’s no spoilers approach to scientific pedagogy is such an intriguing one, I’m a quite sad he hasn’t spun it into a novel yet. I’d seriously love to read a Neal Stephenson-length epic about a child in such a society recapitulating modern science, but maybe I’m just weird that way.) It strikes me that one could write a novel about a Weirdtopia that has no conflict, featuring only exploration of a counter-intuitive, yet highly intriguing, world. Conversations within, and descriptions of, this strange world (so long as the writer is very, very clever) would keep my interest. But then, this would be more like speculative anthropology than a story.
By “the term” do you mean something Ben Ben Goertzel said once on SL4, or is this really a thing?
I do tend to think that Aubrey de Grey’s argument holds some water. That is, it’s not so much general society that will be influenced as wealthy elites. Elites seem more likely to update when they read about a 2x mouse. I suppose the Less Wrong response to this argument would be: how many of them are signed up for cryonics? But cryonics is a lot harder to believe than life extension. You need to buy pattern identity theory and nanotechnology and Hanson’s value of life calculations. In the case of LE, all you have to believe is that the techniques that worked on the mouse will, likely, be useful in treating human senescence. And anyway, Aubrey hopes to first convince the gerontology community and then the public at large. This approach has worked for climate science and a similar approach may work for AI risk.
I think we’re past the point where it matters. If we had a few lost decades in the mid-twentieth century, maybe, (and just to be cognitively polite here, this is just my intuition talking) the intelligence explosion could have been delayed significantly. We are just a decade off from home computers with >100 teraflops, not to mention the distressing trend of neuromorphic hardware (Here’s Ben Chandler of the SyNAPSE project talking about his work on HackerNews)With all this inertia, it would take an extremely large downturn to slow us now. Engineering a new AI winter seems like a better idea, though I’m confused about how this could be done. Perceptrons discredited connectionist approaches for a surprisingly long time, perhaps a similar book could discredit (and indirectly defund) dangerous branches of AI which aren’t useful for FAI research—but this seems unlikely, though less so than OP significantly altering economic growth either way.
The mathematician John von Neumann, born Neumann Janos in Budapest in 1903, was incomparably intelligent, so bright that, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Eugene Wigner would say, “only he was fully awake.” One night in early 1945, von Neumann woke up and told his wife, Klari, that “what we are creating now is a monster whose influence is going to change history, provided there is any history left. Yet it would be impossible not to see it through.” Von Neumann was creating one of the first computers, in order to build nuclear weapons. But, Klari said, it was the computers that scared him the most.
Konstantin Kakaes
The fact that MIRI is finally publishing technical research has impressed me. A year ago it seemed, to put it bluntly, that your organization was stalling, spending its funds on the full-time development of Harry Potter fanfiction and popular science books. Perhaps my intuition there was uncharitable, perhaps not. I don’t know how much of your lead researcher’s time was spent on said publications, but it certainly seemed, from the outside, that it was the majority. Regardless, I’m very glad MIRI is focusing on technical research. I don’t know how much farther you have to walk, but it’s clear you’re headed in the right direction.
I think you’re an important guy to have around for reasons of evaporative cooling.
The line I came up with, when asking the question to myself, was this: If the singularity is a religion, it is the only religion with a plausible mechanism of action.
“Why do people worry about mad scientists? It’s the mad engineers you have to watch out for.”—Lochmon
I believe you can live off Boost for an indefinite period of time.
I’ve never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive, - Randall Munroe.
5% is pretty high considering the purported stakes.
A lot of people got this from shuttle launches, and so reacted negatively to the the (in my opinion good) arguments for focusing NASA’s budget on robotic space exploration.