I am the co founder of and researcher at the quantitative long term strategy organization Convergence (see here for our growing list of publications). Over the last sixteen years I have worked with MIRI, CFAR, EA Global, and Founders Fund, and done work in EA strategy, fundraising, networking, teaching, cognitive enhancement, and AI safety research. I have a MS degree in computer science and BS degrees in computer science, mathematics, and physics.
JustinShovelain
Karma: 572
COVID-19: An opportunity to help by modelling testing and tracing to inform the UK government
I think virus inactivation is a normal vaccination approach and is probably being pursued here? The hardest part is probably growing it in vitro at scale and perhaps ensuring that all of them are inactive.
[Question] Testing and contact tracing impact assessment model?
COVID-19: List of ideas to reduce the direct harm from the virus, with an emphasis on unusual ideas
Nice deduction about the relationship between this and conflict vs mistake theory! Similar and complementary to this post is the one I wrote on Moloch and the Pareto optimal frontier.
Memetic downside risks: How ideas can evolve and cause harm
Information hazards: Why you should care and what you can do
Mapping downside risks and information hazards
How so? I don’t follow your comment’s meaning.
Using vector fields to visualise preferences and make them consistent
AI alignment concepts: philosophical breakers, stoppers, and distorters
Edited to add “I” immediately in front of “wish”.
Safety regulators: A tool for mitigating technological risk
FAI Research Constraints and AGI Side Effects
Minneapolis Meetup: Saturday May 28, 3:00PM
Minneapolis Meetup: Saturday May 14, 3:00PM
By new “term” I meant to make the clear that this statement points to an operation that cannot be done with the original machine. Instead it calls this new module (say a halting oracle) that didn’t exist originally.
Are you trying to express the idea of adding new fundamental “terms” to your language describing things like halting oracles and such? And then discounting their weight by the shortest statement of said term’s properties expressed in the language that existed previously to including this additional “term?” If so, I agree that this is the natural way to extend priors out to handle arbitrary describable objects such as halting oracles.
Stated another way. You start with a language L. Let the definition of an esoteric mathematical object (say a halting oracle) E be D in the original language L. Then the prior probability of a program using that object is discounted by the description length of D. This gives us a prior over all “programs” containing arbitrary (describable) esoteric mathematical objects in their description.
I’m not yet sure how universal this approach is at allowing arbitrary esoteric mathematical objects (appealing to the Church-Turing thesis here would be assuming the conclusion) and am uncertain whether we can ignore the ones it cannot incorporate.
Interesting idea.
I agree that trusting newly formed ideas is risky, but there are several reasons to convey them anyway (non-comprehensive listing):
To recruit assistance in developing and verifying them
To convey an idea that is obvious in retrospect, an idea you can be confident in immediately
To signal cleverness and ability to think on one’s feet
To socially play with the ideas
What we are really after though is to asses how much weight to assign to an idea off the bat so we can calculate the opportunity costs of thinking about the idea in greater detail and asking for the idea to be fleshed out and conveyed fully. This overlaps somewhat with the confidence (context sensitive rules in determining) with which the speaker is conveying the idea. Also, how do you gauge how old an idea really is? Especially if it condenses gradually or is a simple combination out of very old parts? Still… some metric is better than no metric.
I’ve decided to try modelling testing and contact tracing over the weekend. If you wish to join and want to ping me my contact details are in the doc.