lfghjkl

Karma: 321

lfghjkl Sep 5, 2014, 7:01 PM
6 points
in reply to: Matthew_Opitz’s comment on: Goal retention discussion with Eliezer
Very relevant article from the sequences: Detached Lever Fallacy.

Not saying you’re committing this fallacy, but it does explain some of the bigger problems with “raising an AI like a child” that you might not have thought of.

lfghjkl Jul 26, 2014, 10:13 PM
7 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, July 2014, chapter 102
I’ve also been thinking along these lines, anyone remember this part from the opening ceremony?

The young, thin, nervous man who Harry had first met in the Leaky Cauldron slowly made his way up to the podium, glancing fearfully around in all directions. Harry caught a glimpse of the back of his head, and it looked like Professor Quirrell might already be going bald, despite his seeming youth.

“Wonder what’s wrong with him,” whispered the older-looking student sitting next to Harry. Similar hushed comments were being exchanged elsewhere along the table.

Professor Quirrell made his way up to the podium and stood there, blinking. “Ah...” he said. “Ah...” Then his courage seemed to fail him utterly, and he stood there in silence, occasionally twitching.

“Oh, great,” whispered the older student, “looks like another long year in Defence class—”

“Salutations, my young apprentices,” Professor Quirrell said in a dry, confident tone.

It seems to imply that becoming the second victim of a Horcrux might not necessarily create a mishmash of personalities, but instead have them competing as separate (maybe “partially mixed”?) identities. This would also explain why Harry consider his “dark side” different from himself.

lfghjkl Jul 18, 2014, 4:43 PM
13 points
in reply to: Mark_Friedenbach’s comment on: [LINK] Another “LessWrongers are crazy” article—this time on Slate
Good point. To build on that here’s something I thought of when trying (but most likely not succeeding) to model/steelman Eliezer’s thoughts at the time of his decision:

This basilisk is clearly bullshit, but there’s a small (and maybe not vanishingly small) chance that with enough discussion people can come up with a sequence of “improved” basilisks that suffer from less and less obvious flaws until we end up with one worth taking seriously. It’s probably better to just nip this one in the bud. Also, creating and debunking all these basilisks would be a huge waste of time.

At least Eliezer’s move has focused all attention on the current (and easily debunked) basilisk, and it has made it sufficiently low-status to try and think of a better one. So in this sense it could even be called a success.

lfghjkl Jun 15, 2014, 12:25 AM
6 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: What resources have increasing marginal utility?

Going from 2 things to 1 gives 100% more attention to the remaining single.

The effect will be much higher than that:

Because the brain cannot fully focus when multitasking, people take longer to complete tasks and are predisposed to error. When people attempt to complete many tasks at one time, “or [alternate] rapidly between them, errors go way up and it takes far longer—often double the time or more—to get the jobs done than if they were done sequentially,” states Meyer.[9] This is largely because “the brain is compelled to restart and refocus”.[10] A study by Meyer and David Kieras found that in the interim between each exchange, the brain makes no progress whatsoever. Therefore, multitasking people not only perform each task less suitably, but lose time in the process.

Source.

So, by focusing your attention on a single task instead of trying to do two at the same time you’ll be done with that task in less than a quarter of the time (and not half as one would expect).

lfghjkl Apr 29, 2014, 10:54 AM
0 points
in reply to: bogus’s comment on: Should I take an academic class on rationality?

When we forget about these things, we end up with billions being spent in incredibly complicated experiments on supposedly ‘foundational’ particle physics at the LHC—raising existential risks, such as the possibility of creating a black hole, or a ‘strangelet’.

This is a common misconception, from Safety of high-energy particle collision experiments on wikipedia:

Claims escalated as commissioning of the LHC drew closer, around 2008–2010. The claimed dangers included the production of stable micro black holes and the creation of hypothetical particles called strangelets,[1] and these questions were explored in the media, on the Internet and at times through the courts.

To address these concerns in the context of the LHC, CERN mandated a group of independent scientists to review these scenarios. In a report issued in 2003, they concluded that, like current particle experiments such as the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), the LHC particle collisions pose no conceivable threat.[2] A second review of the evidence commissioned by CERN was released in 2008. The report, prepared by a group of physicists affiliated to CERN but not involved in the LHC experiments, reaffirmed the safety of the LHC collisions in light of further research conducted since the 2003 assessment.[3][4] It was reviewed and endorsed by a CERN committee of 20 external scientists and by the Executive Committee of the Division of Particles & Fields of the American Physical Society,[5][6] and was later published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Physics G by the UK Institute of Physics, which also endorsed its conclusions.[3][7]

The report ruled out any doomsday scenario at the LHC, noting that the physical conditions and collision events which exist in the LHC, RHIC and other experiments occur naturally and routinely in the universe without hazardous consequences,[3] including ultra-high-energy cosmic rays observed to impact Earth with energies far higher than those in any man-made collider.

lfghjkl Apr 29, 2014, 7:31 AM
3 points
in reply to: bogus’s comment on: Should I take an academic class on rationality?

And Einstein famously regretted his career as a physicist upon learning of these fateful possibilities, stating that if he had known earlier, he would have chosen to be a watchmaker.

This is a common misattribution:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein#Misattributed

Scroll down to “If only I had known, I should have become a watch-maker.”

lfghjkl Mar 23, 2014, 8:03 AM
14 points
in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: What are some science mistakes you made in college?

Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

lfghjkl Jan 15, 2014, 12:15 AM
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: AALWA: Ask any LessWronger anything
It’s his job.

lfghjkl Nov 25, 2013, 2:05 PM
1 point
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: What do we already have right?
Sorry, misread your comment and thought you referred to the law of excluded middle. The problem with reading while I should be sleeping.

lfghjkl Nov 25, 2013, 12:07 PM
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: What do we already have right?
Unless you’re dealing with Intuitionistic logic:

Semantically, intuitionistic logic is a restriction of classical logic in which the law of excluded middle and double negation elimination are not admitted as axioms.

lfghjkl Oct 25, 2013, 9:37 PM
6 points
in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: Less Wrong’s political bias
Not if you consider it the “least crazy” alternative, and with only two parties in your country there doesn’t seem to be much choice.

lfghjkl Oct 10, 2013, 10:46 PM
0 points
in reply to: Ishaan’s comment on: Superintelligence fiction—“Understand”, by Ted Chiang
Hmm, just read that story before checking your spoiler and it was interesting, even despite the author’s poor grasp of the physics he tried to explain. A light ray going from point A to point B is not taking the shortest path (measured in time) because it wants to reach B, the point B is merely a point on the geodesic curve the light ray is currently travelling along.

In other words, these light rays are taking the least time to reach the points they pass without intending to reach them, the points are just in the way.

That said, thanks for the recommendation! This story was still pretty good.

V qvfnterr gung gurfr nyvraf ner sbyybjvat GQG (be nal bgure qrpvfvba gurbel sbe gung znggre), fvapr gurl ner nyjnlf npgvat va n cerqrgrezvarq znaare naq arire npghnyyl znxr nal qrpvfvbaf. Gur jubyr pbaprcg bs n qrpvfvba gurbel jbhyq zrnavatyrff gb gurz.

What are your philosophical quibbles with TDT, if I may ask?

lfghjkl Oct 7, 2013, 2:36 PM
9 points
on: Superintelligence fiction—“Understand”, by Ted Chiang
It is clear that the ending would have been very different had the author heard about TDT.

lfghjkl Jul 9, 2013, 6:08 PM
4 points
in reply to: Caspian’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 23, chapter 94
That would require him to stay up all night, since he cannot know in advance the exact time Flitwick will arrive. It is much more likely that the Harry we saw was the first one, and that he’s now going to go back in time to pick up the body.

lfghjkl Jul 8, 2013, 6:48 PM
11 points
in reply to: elharo’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 23, chapter 94

“I very much need to visit the washroom, and I would also like to change out of these pyjamas.”

This is where he’s going to be using the time-turner to pick up Hermione’s transfigured body before Flitwick arrives.

The reason this works this time, is that he has already precommitted to doing so when he spent all those hours thinking until dinner the day before. The ring is a red herring.

lfghjkl Jul 6, 2013, 1:03 PM
0 points
in reply to: linkhyrule5’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 21, chapters 91 & 92
Well, that would depend entirely on whether or not time travel beyond 6 hours into the past is possible. So, in other words, it’s time travel arbitrarily far back in time that would make this term nonsensical.

lfghjkl Jul 6, 2013, 1:18 AM
2 points
in reply to: linkhyrule5’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 21, chapters 91 & 92
By definition, however, an information-theoretic death means that such an error-correction scheme would be impossible; such a machine would require knowledge that, by the Uncertainty Principle, cannot be attained.

Ok, now we’re just talking past each other. Just googled the term “information-theoretic death” and got the following definition from wikipedia:

Information-theoretic death is the destruction of the information within a human brain (or any cognitive structure capable of constituting a person) to such an extent that recovery of the original person is theoretically impossible by any physical means.

This is obviously the situation that Harry has to avoid. If his plan was:
1. Allow Hermione’s brain to decay so much that it becomes theoretically impossible to restore it.
2. Do something theoretically impossible.
Then his plan is just wrong.

lfghjkl Jul 5, 2013, 10:47 PM
0 points
in reply to: linkhyrule5’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 21, chapters 91 & 92

This problem is fundamentally equivalent to time travel

I agree that if you solve time travel you can also solve death, but the other implication does not hold. A possible way for Harry to “resurrect” Hermione is to scan her brain, run it through an error-correcting algorithm (to reduce/remove errors introduced from decay and it being transfigured) and then “print out” a brain that is arbitrarily similar to Hermione’s brain at the moment of her death. This will of course depend on the amount of computing power available to Harry, but since he is already “destined” to tear apart the stars, that will probably not be a problem. It’ll also require some “minor” scientific breakthroughs.

Now, I am not at all saying that this is Harry’s plan to resurrect her (In fact I suspect his plan to be very different from this), I am merely providing an example for how you can “restore” someone who is dead without being capable of time travel.

lfghjkl Jul 5, 2013, 5:30 PM
3 points
in reply to: linkhyrule5’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 21, chapters 91 & 92

Though any trick that can overcome information-theoretic death has a decent chance of allowing arbitrary time travel anyway.

I do not see how that would follow at all, could you please explain?

The latter, however, is easily dealt with: show up under the Invisibility Cloak, hit his past self with some variant of the Confundus Charm.

Dumbledore has already told Harry that he tried a variant of this once and that it didn’t work. “Time” didn’t like that. See this quote from chapter 90:

I asked the Headmaster to go back and save Hermione and then fake everything, fake the dead body, edit everyone’s memories, but Dumbledore said that he tried something like that once and it didn’t work and he lost another friend instead.

This should at the very least be considered weak evidence to not “mess with time” in the way you’re suggesting, and Harry will not go for a plan when he only has evidence against it being the best solution (this + time travel is constrained to 6 hours + not preserving her brain will make “easier” plans to save her impossible).

Since he’s watched the entire 6 hours, he can be certain this will be sufficient.

This is not how time-travel works in this story, he doesn’t need to watch her to do it. The less he knows about the situation the more he can “change” it, so the absolute smartest thing he could do if he planned this is to stay as far away from her body as possible.

lfghjkl Jul 5, 2013, 3:11 AM
7 points
in reply to: linkhyrule5’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 21, chapters 91 & 92
I highly doubt he would do that as well, given that there is no known method to travel further than 6 hours back in time. He would not base his entire “save Hermione” plan on a hope that he could somehow find a way around this constraint.

What he does at this very moment should exclude as few plans to save her as possible, and not preserving her brain would exclude almost all of them.

Alternatively, he could have simply entered the room and watched the room for six hours, perhaps while random-walking. By doing so, he ensures that the only observer he needs to worry about himself, so that far-future Harry can plan a time travel trip in security.

Also, given how time travel works in this story, the only thing he would achieve with this is making it impossible for future Harry to do any changes at all to Hermione’s body in these 6 hours (since he can only “change” what he doesn’t know).