If you’re interested in robotics, this video is a must see: https://youtu.be/EtMyH_--vnU?t=32m34s
I have to say I’m baffled. I was genuinely shocked watching the thing. Its speed is incredible. I remember writing off general robots after closely following Willow Robotics’ Work. That was only three years ago. Again, I’m pretty shocked.
This forum doesn’t allow you to comment if you have <2 karma. How does one get their first 2 karma then?
I doubt there’s much to be done. I wouldn’t be surprised if MIRI shut down LessWrong soon. It’s something of a status drain because of the whole Roko thing and no one seems to use it anymore. Even the open threads seem to be losing steam.
We still get most of the former value from the SlateStarCodex, Gwern.net, and the tumblr scene. Even for rationality, I’m not sure LessWrong is needed now that we have CFAR.
If you’re looking for a useful major, Computer science is the obvious choice. I also think statistics majors are undersupplied, though only anecdotal data there. I know a few stats majors (none overly clever) that have done far more with the degree than I would have guessed as an undergraduate. But this could have changed since, markets being anti-inductive. If your goal is effective egotism, you’re probably not in the best major. Probably the best way to go about your goal is to follow the advice of effective altruists and then donate all the money to your future self, via a Vanguard fund. If this sounds too evil, paying a small tithe, 1%, would more than make up for this at a managable cost.
After reading a biography of Hugh Everett, I checked out his son’s music and was pleasntly surprised. I especially liked this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYvj7oeIMCc
Good rec. And not just for the education—the whole show is very charming, though I agree nothing too special.
Fuzzy metrics?
If you liked the visual style,
I liked it, but I think the static textures should have been used with a bit more subtlety.
Mononoke and Ayakashi.
I’ll check those out, looks like they’re both on Crunchyroll.
Finished it last night.
Gehr, V gubhtug pnfgvat Rqjneq nf zber ivyynvabhf guna pnaaba jnf vafcverq—gur snpg gung ur jnf cbffrffrq fbeg bs ehvarq gung.
Still one of the better animes I’ve seen recently, and probably the best adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo I’ve ever seen—though I haven’t seen many.
Now I need a new animie.
I’ve been enjoying Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo
After all Eliezer’s warnings, you constructed a superintelligence in your own house.
Or is it the apparent resemblance to Pascal’s wager?
That and believing in hell is more low status than believing in heaven. Cryonics pattern matches to the a belief in a better life after death, the basilisk to hell.
I remain impressed by how much awareness one high-status academic can raise by writing a book.
Those two quotes that are dated before 2004 are the least outrageous.
This is the most outrageous one to me:
I must warn my reader that my first allegiance is to the Singularity, not humanity. I don’t know what the Singularity will do with us. I don’t know whether Singularities upgrade mortal races, or disassemble us for spare atoms. While possible, I will balance the interests of mortality and Singularity. But if it comes down to Us or Them, I’m with Them. You have been warned.
And it’s clearly the exact opposite of what present Eliezer belives.
The stuff that bothers me are Usenet and mailing list quotes (they are equivalent to passing notes and should be considered off the record) and anything written when he was a teenager. The rest, I suppose, should at least be labeled with the date they were written. And if he has explicitly disclaimed the statement, perhaps that should be mentioned, too.
Young Eliezer was a little crankish and has pretty much grown out of it. I feel like you’re criticising someone who no longer exists.
Also, the page where you try to diagnose him with narsisism just seems mean.
As far as I can tell, Yudkowsky basically grew up on the internet. I think it is more like you went through all the copies of Palin’s school newspaper, and picked up some notes she passed around in class, and then published the most outrageous things she said in such a way that you implied they were written recently. I think this goes against some notion of journalistic tact.
For the record, I genuinely object to being thought of as a “highly competent CEO.”
But that’s exactly what the Dunning-Kruger effect would lead us to expect a highly-competent CEOs to say! s/
non-natural CEO working hard and learning fast and picking up lots of low-hanging fruit but also making lots of mistakes along the way because he had no prior executive experience
To be honest, I didn’t mean much by it. Just that MIRI has been more impressive lately, and presumably a good portion of this is due to your leadership.
To be honest, I had you pegged as being stuck in a partisan spiral. The fact that you are willing to do this is pretty cool. Have some utils on the house. I don’t know if officially responding to your blog is worth MIRI’s time; it would imply some sort of status equivalence.
Also, you published some very embarrassing quotes from Yudkowsky. I’m guessing you caused him quite a bit of distress, so he’s probably not inclined to do you any favors. Mining someone’s juvenilia for outrageous statements is not productive – I mean he was 16 when he wrote some of the stuff you quote. I would remove those pages. Same with the usenet stuff – I know it was posted publicly but it feels like furtively-recorded conversations to me all these years later. Stick to arguments against positions MIRI and Yudkowsky currently hold. Personally I’ve moved from highly-skeptical of MIRI to moderately approving. I made this comment a year ago:
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.
And MIRI has stayed on course and is becoming a productive think tank with three full-time researchers and, it seems to me, a highly competent CEO. It is a very different organization now than the one you started out criticizing.
I think “P!=NPC” would have been better.
Do you have a link to Max Tegmark’s rebuttal? What I’ve read so far seemed like a confused dodge.