lmnop

Karma: 170

lmnop 24 Jul 2013 15:57 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Alejandro1’s comment on: low stress employment/ munchkin income thread
Is the pay strictly by hours or by work produced? Is it possible to make more than $10-$12/hr by e.g. reading the essays faster?

lmnop 16 Jul 2013 21:01 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Qiaochu_Yuan’s comment on: “Stupid” questions thread
No, but I read it just now, thank you for linking me. The example takeover strategy offered there was bribing a lab tech to assemble nanomachines (which I am guessing would then be used to facilitate some grey goo scenario, although that wasn’t explicitly stated). That particular strategy seems a bit far-fetched, since nanomachines don’t exist yet and we thus don’t know their capabilities. However, I can see how something similar with an engineered pandemic would be relatively easy to carry out, assuming ability to fake access to digital currency (likely) and the existence of sufficiently avaricious and gullible lab techs to bribe (possible).

I was thinking in terms of “how could an AI rule humanity indefinitely” rather than “how could an AI wipe out most of humanity quickly.” Oops. The second does seem like an easier task.

lmnop 16 Jul 2013 20:34 UTC
0 points
in reply to: bramflakes’s comment on: “Stupid” questions thread
Government orders the major internet service providers to shut down their services, presumably :) Not saying that that would necessarily be easily to coordinate, nor that the loss of internet wouldn’t cripple the global economy. Just that it seems to be a different order of risk than an extinction event.

My intuition on the matter was that an AI would be limited in its scope of influence to digital networks, and its access to physical resources, e.g. labs, factories and the like would be contingent on persuading people to do things for it. But everyone here is so confident that FAI --> doom that I was wondering if there was some obvious and likely successful method of seizing control of physical resources that everyone else already knew and I had missed.

lmnop 16 Jul 2013 14:41 UTC
0 points
in reply to: bramflakes’s comment on: “Stupid” questions thread
Worst case scenario, can’t humans just abandon the internet altogether once they realize this is happening? Declare that only physical currency is valid, cut off all internet communications and only communicate by means that the AI can’t access?

Of course it should be easy for the AI to avoid notice for a long while, but once we get to “turn the universe into computronium to make paperclips” (or any other scheme that diverges from business-as-usual drastically) people will eventually catch on. There is an upper bound to the level of havoc the AI can wreak without people eventually noticing and resisting in the manner described above.

lmnop 15 Jul 2013 22:35 UTC
0 points
on: “Stupid” questions thread
What are concrete ways that an unboxed AI could take over the world? People seem to skip from “UFAI created” to “UFAI rules the world” without explaining how the one must cause the other. It’s not obvious to me that superhuman intelligence necessarily leads to superhuman power when constrained in material resources and allies.

Could someone sketch out a few example timelines of events for how a UFAI could take over the world?

lmnop 15 Jul 2013 16:44 UTC
0 points
in reply to: MalcolmOcean’s comment on: Writing Style and the Typical Mind Fallacy
Could you elaborate on the difference between continual and ongoing growth? Dweck-style growth mindset seems similar to LW-style life optimization on a practical level to me.

lmnop 27 Nov 2010 4:08 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 5
I’m guessing it’s that Albus’s own father was committed to and died in Azkaban.

lmnop 30 Oct 2010 2:04 UTC
0 points
in reply to: topynate’s comment on: (Virtual) Employment Open Thread

whereas for an uncoached entrant it’s almost purely wealth --> ability --> score.

And coaching can’t make up a large part of the score difference, either. There’s more than 100 points discrepancy on Critical Reading or Math alone between the lowest and highest income groups, whereas coaching only creates improvements of 30 points in Reading and Math combined.

lmnop 28 Oct 2010 2:58 UTC
4 points
in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 4
In book 7, Voldemort visits Grindelwald at Nurmengard in order to interrogate him about the location of the Elder Wand, and then kills him. So Grindelwald was definitely alive in book 1.

lmnop 3 Oct 2010 3:11 UTC
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: The Irrationality Game
Short term or long term? If long, how long?

lmnop 21 Sep 2010 5:26 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Relsqui’s comment on: [Error communicating with LW2 server]

Eliezer’s points about equality and symmetry may be true across the population

I don’t even think it’s true across the population. How many women do you know who primarily read books, watch movies, read news articles and listen to music created by men? And how many of the opposite? For the 100 top grossing films of 2007, there were 3 female directors and 109 male directors involved. (Off the top of my head) the ratio of news articles written by men vs women is something like 7:1. Women probably have a better understanding of the “male perspective” than men have of the “female perspective,” just from the different levels of exposure.

lmnop 18 Sep 2010 19:41 UTC
9 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Less Wrong: Open Thread, September 2010

But if we can’t measure the cultural factors and account for them

We can’t directly measure them, but we can get an idea of how large they are and how they work.

For example, the gender difference in empathic abilities. While women will score higher on empathy on self report tests, the difference is much smaller on direct tests of ability, and often nonexistent on tests of ability where it isn’t stated to the participant that it’s empathy being tested. And then there’s the motivation of seeming empathetic. One of the best empathy tests I’ve read about is Ickes’, which worked like this: two participants meet together in the room and have a brief conversation, which is taped. Then they go into separate rooms and the tape is played back to them twice. The first time, they jot down the times at which they remember feeling various emotions. The second time, they jot down the times at which they think their partner is feeling an emotion, and what it is. Then the records are compared, and each participant receives an accuracy score. When the test is run is like this, there is no difference in ability between men and women. However, a difference emerges when another factor is added: each participant is asked to write a “confidence level” for each prediction they make. In that procedure, women score better, presumably because their desire to appear empathetic (write down higher confidence levels) causes them to put more effort into the task. But where do desires to appear a certain way come from? At least partly from cultural factors that dictate how each gender is supposed to appear. This is probably the same reason why women are overconfident in self reporting their empathic abilities relative to men.

The same applies to math. Among women and men with the same math ability as scored on tests, women will rate their own abilities much lower than the men do. Since people do what they think they’ll be good at, this will likely affect how much time these people spend on math in future, and the future abilities they acquire.

And then there’s priming. Asian American women do better on math tests when primed with their race (by filling in a “race” bubble at the top of the test) than when primed with their gender (by filling in a “sex” bubble). More subtly, priming affects people’s implicit attitudes towards gender-stereotyped domains too. People are often primed about their gender in real life, each time affecting their actions a little, which over time will add up to significant differences in the paths they choose in life in addition to that which is caused by innate gender differences. Right now we don’t have enough information to say how much is caused by each, but I don’t see why we can’t make more headway into this in the future.

lmnop 13 Sep 2010 5:54 UTC
8 points
in reply to: HughRistik’s comment on: More art, less stink: Taking the PU out of PUA

You may not be aware that lots of people who criticize women’s preferences seem to consider themselves, or men in general, entitled to female sexual attention, and they show insufficient regard for women’s body sovereignty and self-determination. If you want to evaluate women’s preferences, could you explain how we can do this in a way that respects women’s autonomy? What kind of benefits might women accrue from attempting to change their preferences, and if not, they why should they attempt to do so merely to satisfy men’s preferences?

I like this response! While I expect that in the heat of the moment most people (on all sides) won’t always be able to word themselves this carefully and explicitly, it’s a good general outline for future comments on controversial topics. Upvoted for thoughtfulness.

lmnop 13 Sep 2010 2:22 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Vladimir_M’s comment on: More art, less stink: Taking the PU out of PUA

However, the idea that the general standards of discussion here represent a threatening and hostile environment for women, which is supposedly the main reason why they’re few in number, seems to me completely disconnected from reality.

Not the general standards of discussion, no. But the standards of discussion for some of the speculation on sex relations, especially when related to the PUA subculture, seem to create an unpleasant environment for women who are otherwise quite happy with the general standards of discussion. Therefore, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that without that specific subset of the discussion, the site as a whole would be more attractive to women.

The question is whether the usual standards of discourse practiced here are harsh and insensitive enough to qualify as “unwelcoming to hostile.” It seems quite clear to me that only extraordinarily fearful, brittle, or paranoid personalities could honestly answer yes to this.

It’s fairly hyperbolic to say that only an “extraordinarily fearful, brittle, or paranoid person” could answer yes to the question of whether this site is an unwelcoming to hostile environment at times. Forget hostile, you can’t see why the label “unwelcoming” could be used by a reasonable—or at least not extraordinarily fearful, brittle, and paranoid—person to describe some subsets of discussion here?

lmnop 13 Sep 2010 2:09 UTC
0 points
in reply to: HughRistik’s comment on: More art, less stink: Taking the PU out of PUA

That’s just not the kind of belief a decent person would hold, so concluding that he might consider women’s safety unimportant communicates that he is a bad person. Now he’s been made to feel he’s such a bad person that he can’t even emotionally participate in this topic anymore.

At least two people on the other side of the discussion have assured komponisto that they don’t consider him a “bad person” here and here. Besides saying this upfront before each criticism, can you think of some other ways that we might minimize the real or perceived implication that harsh judgment on someone’s ideas implies harsh judgment on his/her character?

lmnop 13 Sep 2010 1:49 UTC
1 point
in reply to: HughRistik’s comment on: More art, less stink: Taking the PU out of PUA
I’m confused. The data you present shows that women are more picky about personality, and men are more picky about looks. But what (of your data) indicates that “the difference between minimum or maximum percentile attractiveness of the mates you are aiming for, and your own percentile attractiveness, is greater for women”? You can break personality into several separate traits, yes, but you can break looks into several separate traits too, so it isn’t clear that women have more requirements on more traits.

lmnop 13 Sep 2010 0:55 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Vladimir_M’s comment on: More art, less stink: Taking the PU out of PUA

You write as if women were some unspeakably fearful, brittle, and paranoid creatures who undergo apoplectic shocks at the slightest whisper that interferes with their delicate sensibilities. Frankly, if I were a woman, I would take offense at that. You’re basically proclaiming women congenitally incapable of rationally addressing claims they find unpleasant, instinctively reacting with a shock-and-offense emotional ploy instead.

I think people generally dislike and avoid spending time in environments they perceive as anywhere on the scale from unwelcoming to hostile. That’s not a trait that makes someone fearful, brittle, paranoid, or delicate, and I’m confused as to why you’d think I was implying any such thing—quite the opposite.

lmnop 13 Sep 2010 0:32 UTC
2 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: More art, less stink: Taking the PU out of PUA
Thank you for the pointer! Yes, I started using the site after reading HP:MoR, although I’d read some articles from it before that.

lmnop 13 Sep 2010 0:26 UTC
3 points
in reply to: HughRistik’s comment on: More art, less stink: Taking the PU out of PUA

I doubt komponisto feels that great right now, and I don’t think he deserves to continue to be villified after clarifying his original problematic comment.

From the karma scores on his clarifying comments, I think many people here understand his perspective and support it. To say that he’s been villified is a pretty severe exaggeration.

lmnop 13 Sep 2010 0:19 UTC
0 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: More art, less stink: Taking the PU out of PUA

That doesn’t seem to be an accurate or appropriate dichotomy to construct here. No comments here advocate the incidence of rape or other actions which ignore female agenthood. Is the advocacy of such atrocities a crime so abhorrent that even innocence is no excuse?

“Perpetuating ideas that increase the social acceptability” of ignoring female agenthood isn’t the same as “advocating” ignoring female agenthood. To clarify: I don’t think anyone on this site wants to advocate ignoring female agenthood. I don’t think most people in the PUA community want to advocate that either. Perhaps not even Roissy wants to advocate that—although I’m less certain in his case. But to use him as an extreme example: is it not possible that people exposed to his ideas become less likely to respect female agenthood than they were before, even if he didn’t intend that to be the message? It’s a conjecture about possible causation, not about intent to harm.