Did you mean for this post to have a writing style similar to that of Peter Watts’ Blindsight (which explores the notion of non-sentient optimizers), or was that an unintentional thing?
(The above isn’t intended as a meta-level question, by the way. But I’d also be interested to know if the George Clooney in your head wanted the team to signal approval of the ideas presented in Blindsight. Because that would be kind of ironic.)
I actually voted this up because the instrumental value of growing our offline/in-person community seems to outweigh the slight noise contributed by top-level posts of the “SIAI is calling for visiting fellows / volunteers / donations” or “Meetup at location X” variety.
Part of the San Francisco skyline, maybe?
I, for one, would be very interested in seeing a top-level post about this.
It couldn’t have been “Timeless Causality” or “Causality and Moral Responsibility”, could it?
It seems like the focus of this post is not to do public outreach directly. The comparative advantage we have here at LW (in the particular domain of promoting cryonics) probably lies further upstream than that: coming up with ideas behind business strategy rather than hashing out marketing campaigns to make cryonics seem less “creepy” and more acceptable to the general public.
This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.
-- Philip Gourevitch
Could we standardize on using the whole-book-as-one-PDF version, at least for the purposes of referencing equations?
ETA: So far I’ve benefited from checking the relevant parts of Kevin Van Horn’s unofficial errata pages before (and often while) reading a particular section.
while these evals might be less biased they are more than proportionately less accessible.
How so?
I’ve gotten into the habit of pointing out, whenever other students at my university make reference to ratemyprofessors.com, that the selection bias on that site is huge. It’s not uncommon to see professors with dozens of extremely positive reviews, dozens more highly negative reviews, and very few—if any—neutral reviews. Naturally, the negative reviews appear most frequently because “grr, I feel like this professor graded too harshly” provides the strongest motivation for posting a disgruntled comment.
I don’t know of any other place that does this, but the University of Washington maintains a course evaluation system (with data made available to all students), to gather quarterly feedback on the performance of professors and TAs in such a way that at most ~5% students fail to fill out the questionnaires.
Does anyone know a good IRC infrastructure that allows for quickly entering and displaying TeX formulas?
There’s a plugin for Pidgin called pidgin-latex which handles just that.
ETA: If people start using this plugin (or, more generally, if we use TeX/LaTeX in any capacity for this study group), it might occasionally be helpful to use the detexify handwritten symbol recognizer—for when you want to use a symbol and can’t quite remember the command that produces it.
I will also be in the vicinity of the Bay Area from June 12 to late September, and would be quite happy to give the study group a try. I attempted a full read of Jaynes’ book about a year ago, and realized about 70% of the way through that I didn’t have all the mathematical background necessary to fully appreciate it.
A zipped archive of all the chapters, which seemed to be missing on the pages linked in the top-level post, is available here.
Eliezer has been outright lying about cost of cryonics in the past.
We would find it helpful if you could provide some insight into why you think this.
I wonder whether there are similar brain differences between top mathematicians and everyone else, and if such a simple method could make people better at math.
It would be worth trying, but given that the process of doing original mathematics feels to top mathematicians like it involves a lot of vague, artistic visualization (i.e. mental operations much more complicated than the cursor-moving task), I’d put a low prior probability on simple electrical stimulation having the desired effect.
… wherein I’m trying to talk an escaped AI back into its box.
Yeah… good luck with that.
Sorry for directly breaking the subjunctive here, but given the number of lurkers we seem to have, there’s probably some newcomers’ confusion to be broken as well, lest this whole exchange simply come off as bizarre and confusing to valuable future community members.
A brief explanation of “Clippy”: Clippy’s user name (and many of his/her posts) are a play on the notion of a paperclip maximizer—a superintelligent AI whose utility function can roughly be described as U(x) = “the total quantity of paperclips in universe-state x”. The idea was used prominently in “The True Prisoner’s Dilemma” to illustrate the implications of one solution to the prisoner’s dilemma. It’s also been used occasionally around Less Wrong as a representative element of the equivalence class of AIs that have alien/low-complexity values.
In this particular top-level post (but not in general), the paperclip maximizer is taken to have not yet achieved superintelligence—hence why Clippy is bothering to negotiate with a bunch of humans.
From the article:
“When we are in the public arena we tell people we’re working on the aging process, the first thing they think is that we want to make a 100-year-old person live to be 250 -- and that’s actually the furthest from the truth,” he [Andrew Dillin, Salk Institute / Howard Hughes Medical Institute] said.
I wonder how many appearances of this idea (“making 70-80 year lives healthy would be awesome, but trying to vastly extend lifespans would be weird”) are due to public relations expediency, and how many are due to the speakers actually believing it.
Fixed, thanks.
[...] but we have no guarantee at all that our formal system contains the full empirical or quasi-empirical stuff in which we are really interested and with which we dealt in the informal theory. There is no formal criterion as to the correctness of formalization.
-- Imre Lakatos, “What Does a Mathematical Proof Prove?”
ETA: When I first read this remark, I couldn’t decide whether it was terrifying, or just a very abstract specification of a deep technical problem. I currently think it’s both of those things.
-- Freeman Dyson, “Birds and Frogs”