2009: “Extreme Rationality: It’s Not That Great”
2010: “Self-Improvement or Shiny Distraction: Why Less Wrong is anti-Instrumental Rationality”
2013: “How about testing our ideas?”
2014: “Truth: It’s Not That Great”
2015: “Meta-Countersignaling Equilibria Drift: Can We Accelerate It?”
2016: “In Defense Of Putting Babies In Wood Chippers”
Yes. I assume this is why she’s collecting these ideas.
Katja doesn’t speak for all of MIRI when she says above what “MIRI is interested in”.
In general MIRI isn’t in favor of soliciting storytelling about the singularity. It’s a waste of time and gives people a false sense that they understand things better than they do by incorrectly focusing their attention on highly salient, but ultimately unlikely scenarios.
Than you should reduce your confidence in what you consider obvious.
So MIRI is interested in making a better list of possible concrete routes to AI taking over the world.
I wouldn’t characterize this as something that MIRI wants.
To clarify, One Medical partnered with us on this event… but are not materially involved with expanding MIRI themselves. They’re simply an innovative business nearby us in Berkeley who wanted to support our work. I know it’s somewhat unprecedented to see MIRI with strong corporate support, but trust me, it’s a good thing. One Medical’s people did a ton of legwork and made it super easy to host over 100 guests at that event with almost no planning needed on our part. They took care of everything so we could just focus on our work. A perfect partnership in our opinion.
Also, we still have $149 credits for the free 1-year memberships to One Medical’s service. If you live in Berkeley, SF, NY, Boston, Chicago, LA, or DC and are looking for a good primary care doctor, check out their website and if you think it’s a good fit for you, take them up on their promotional offer with this link: http://bit.ly/1fnRHrH (expires 4/9/14).
Thanks. That was what I thought, but I haven’t read Causality yet.
Do you think Causality is a superior recommendation to Probabilistic Graphical Models?
Fixed. Thanks.
The unreasonably low estimates would suggest things like “I’m net reducing factory-farming suffering if I eat meat and donate a few bucks, so I should eat meat if it makes me happier or healthier sufficiently to earn and donate an extra indulgence of $5 .” There are some people going around making the claim, based on the extreme low-ball cost estimates.
Correct. I make this claim. If vegetarianism is that cheap, it’s reasonable to bin it with other wastefully low-value virtues like recycling paper, taking shorter showers, turning off lights, voting, “staying informed”, volunteering at food banks, and commenting on less wrong.
Yep, you’re right. I’ve never used the Open Threads so I didn’t know that. Thanks.
Americans can only report their health derivative (dx/dt) :)
A lot of the most unhealthy groups in the US are also poor and somewhat outside te reach of casual academic sampling.
I assumed that at first too. It turns out even removing the poor or minorities from the sample doesn’t fix this gap.
I guess the study used the modifier “wealthy” along with developed to explain their choice of reference class. I looked at the list and it didn’t seem obviously cherry picked. What countries would you add?
The guts of the study lists one (of many) possible causes:
“getting health care depends more on the market and on each person’s financial resources in the U.S. than elsewhere”.
Insurance companies should point out to their detractors that they provide a valuable service by making healthcare so inaccessible that Americans no longer have any idea how they’re doing. And that given this absence of knowledge, Americans assume they’re doing great.
I received a letter telling me on no uncertain terms that if [US Customs] found another shipment of modafinil addressed to me, they would prosecute me as a drug smuggler.
You mean something like this? That’s not really as meaningful as it seems. There is always some legal risk associated with doing anything since there are so many US laws that no one has even managed to count them, but a pretty serious search through legal database turns up no records of people being prosecuted for modafinil importation, ever. So that letter is 100% posturing by US Customs.
You should probably conclude from this that you’re more likely to be prosecuted for illegally downloading music or jay walking.
And it’s obviously everyones’ personal choice to decide what level of legal risk they are comfortable with. But a rational person who wanted modafinil should be willing to order it from an online pharmacy at least as often as they’re willing to pirate music or jaywalk without fear of prosecution. Otherwise their preferences for assuming legal risk are inconsistent.
Yeah, don’t be discouraged. LW is just like that sometimes. If you link to something with little or no commentary, it really needs to be directly about rationality itself or be using lots of LW-style rationality in the piece. This was a bit too mainstream to be appreciated widely here (even in discussion).
Glad to see you’re posting though! You still in ATL and learning about FAI? I made a post you might like. :)
Just to clarify, I recommend the book “Probability and Computing” but the course I’m recommending is normally called something along the lines of “Combinatorics and Discrete Probability” at most universities. So the online course isn’t as far off base as it may have looked. However, I agree there are better choices that cover more exactly what I want. So I’ve updated it with a more on-point Harvard Extension course.
The MIT and CMU courses both cover combinatorics and discrete probability. They are probably the right thing to take or very close to it if you’re at those particular schools.
Thanks again for the feedback Klao.
Fixed. Thanks.
That’s cool. Where did you hear that?