Louie

• LouieDec 11, 2011, 4:10 PM

  9 points

  on: An akra­sia case study

  It sounds like you’ve almost hit upon the same solution that I eventually found to procrastination: Structured Procrastination

• LouieDec 11, 2011, 12:24 PM

  3 points

  in reply to: taw’s comment on: 5 Ax­ioms of De­ci­sion Making

  Subjective probabilities are inconsistent in any model which includes Peano arithmetic by straightforward application of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.

  Did you mean to say incomplete (eg, implying that some small class of bizarrely constructed theorems about subjective probability can’t be proven or disproven)?

  Because the standard difficulties that Godel’s theorem introduces to Peano arithmetic wouldn’t render subjective probabilities inconsistent (eg, no theorems about subjective probability could be proven).

• LouieDec 2, 2011, 9:29 AM

  32 points

  in reply to: Vladimir_M’s comment on: Hack Away at the Edges

  It is delusional for most people to believe that they can contribute usefully to really hard problems.

  It’s damaging to repeat this though, since most bright people who are 1 in 10,000+ think they are 1 in 10 due to Dunning-Krugger effects.

  Except in trivial ways, like helping those who are capable of it with mundane tasks in order to free up more of their time and energy.

  Mundane work is not trivial. For instance, I’ve watched lukeprog spend more of his days moving furniture at Singularity Institute in the past 6 months than anyone else in Berkeley… including dozens of volunteers and community members in the area all of whom could have have done it, none of whom considered trying. For most tasks, hours really are fungible. If otherwise smart people didn’t think mundane work was trivial, we’d get so much more done. Nothing is harder for me to get done at Singularity Institute than work that “anybody could do”.

  As another example, I’ve had 200 volunteers offer to do work for Singularity Institute. Many have claimed they would do “anything” or “whatever helped the most”. SEO is clearly the most valuable work. Unfortunately, it’s something “so mundane”, that anybody could do it… therefore, 0 out of 200 volunteers are currently working on it. This is even after I’ve personally asked over 100 people to help with it.

  What links here?

  • [deleted]'s comment on The Sin­gu­lar­ity In­sti­tute’s Ar­ro­gance Problem by lukeprog (Jan 18, 2012, 11:50 PM; 79 points)
  • Mo­ti­va­tors: Altru­is­tic Ac­tions for Non-Altru­is­tic Reasons by Ruby (Jun 21, 2014, 4:32 PM; 26 points)

• LouieNov 24, 2011, 6:11 PM

  −1 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: The ethics of ran­dom­ized com­pu­ta­tion in the multiverse

  I’m willing to consider that this quantum computer could be a novel situation that demands real consideration.

  The vector space of your coffee is basically flat whereas the vector space of the algorithm Deutsch is describing is unimaginably vast. The fact that both are embedded in quantum physics is somewhat besides the point.

• LouieNov 20, 2011, 9:34 AM

  −17 points

  in reply to: komponisto’s comment on: Ex­is­ten­tial Risk

  I personally find “the SIAI” sound ridiculous to me. Do you log on to the Facebook while you read the Less Wrong? How many alumni from the MIT work at the NASA? How about that story on the CNN about the record profits at the PEPSI?

  Notice a pattern? Well marketed concerns all drop “the” in their product or company name. Marketing science has demonstrated again and again that shorter names are more memorable and strictly better. Since English is not airtight on this matter, I say Science > English.

• LouieNov 18, 2011, 11:21 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: komponisto’s comment on: Ex­is­ten­tial Risk

  Dropping “the” is a conscious, intentional decision by everyone at Singularity Institute as of several months ago and pre-dates Luke’s involvement (but post-dates your visit last summer).

• LouieNov 3, 2011, 6:45 AM

  4 points

  on: An­thropic de­ci­sion the­ory I: Sleep­ing beauty and selflessness

  I read the full pre-print Monday and today. I commented to a friend that I was happy to see that you had solved anthropics. Thanks for that!

  Actually, I do think Anthropic Decision Theory resolves much of the confusion in the most well-known anthropic problems—which is very exciting—but I am still curious what you think are the most interesting remaining open problems or confusions in anthropics left to tackle?

• LouieNov 1, 2011, 6:50 AM

  5 points

  in reply to: pragmatist’s comment on: Great Explanations

  I doubt Tim Maudlin’s (2011) explanation of Bell’s theorem is the best available.

  Skimming his chapter, I was troubled by his incorrect assertion that the GHZ state hasn’t been experimentally demonstrated(!?). This is the kind of error you should only witness if a book was published back when that was true (in the 1990s) or if the author was an aging professor who was divorced from the experimental physics literature for the past ten years. Maudlin’s effort is the latter.

  See:

  2000: First experimental demonstration of GHZ state (with photons)

  2010: More recent experiment (with fully characterized, physical qubits)

  If you want to learn quantum physics, I recommend skipping all textbooks written by career physics professors. Go straight to: Quantum Computation and Quantum Information by Nielsen and Chuang. They are experimentalists who actually needed to build quantum computers… so they had to write their textbook to make sense since most quantum physics texts are variously incomprensible and/​or wrong. As with most fields, quantum physics textbooks only got good once there was a terminal application beyond “teaching”.

• LouieOct 23, 2011, 11:32 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: atucker’s comment on: The Pro­tag­o­nist Problem

  I just tried to fix it for you, but it disappears for me as well when I open it in the LW editor or the LW HTML editor!!

  Wow. What an impressive heisen-bug! I’ll tell Matt + Wes about it.

• LouieOct 23, 2011, 12:12 PM

  10 points

  in reply to: kilobug’s comment on: Bet­ter Disagreement

  It’s much the same concept, but I will point out that I prefer to build people new temples instead of helping them construct lines of retreat.

• LouieOct 23, 2011, 11:50 AM

  5 points

  in reply to: PhilGoetz’s comment on: The Cog­ni­tive Science of Rationality

  I heard you bring this up in person a few times last weekend too. I wanted to follow up with you because I think I’m starting to understand the reason for your disagreements with others on this matter. It is not the case that you’re fighting the good fight and we are all just off in crazy land on this issue. I think instead, you’re conflating “rationality” with “deliberation”.

  Naive “perfect rationality”—being infinitely deliberate—is of course a mistake. But that’s not what Yudkowsky, Omohundro and other careful thinkers are advocating when they discuss wanting to build an AI that is rational. They mean things like having a deliberate rational process that won’t knowably violate the axioms of choice or other basic sanity checks that our kludgey, broken minds don’t even try to do on their own.

  Also, it’s possible to design algorithms that are ideally rational within time and resource constraints (ie, AIXItl, Godel Machines). There isn’t a false dichotomy between “quick and dirty” heuristic kludges and infinite rationality. You can use “quick and clean” methods which converge towards rationality as they compute, rather than “type 1 processes” which are unrelated to rational deliberation.

  Basically, I completely disagree with your first two sentences and would agree with your second two if you replaced “perfectly rational” with words closer to what you actually mean, like “infinitely deliberate”.

• LouieOct 18, 2011, 4:02 PM

  −5 points

  on: Is quan­tum physics (eas­ily?) com­putable?

  No.

• LouieOct 1, 2011, 7:51 AM

  6 points

  in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: $100 off for Less Wrong: Sin­gu­lar­ity Sum­mit 2011 on Oct 15 − 16 in New York

  Care to give your 50% confidence interval on how many registrants are using the above, “public”, discount code?

$100 off for Less Wrong: Sin­gu­lar­ity Sum­mit 2011 on Oct 15 − 16 in New York

• LouieJul 27, 2011, 10:53 AM

  8 points

  on: SIAI Logo In SVG For­mat?

  There is no SVG. I’ve posted a publicly accessible copy of the largest JPG available.

Last day to reg­ister for Fore­sight@Google—Moun­tain View, California

• LouieMay 23, 2011, 3:37 PM

  1 point

  on: Ra­tion­al­ist horo­scopes: A low-hang­ing util­ity gen­er­a­tor.

  Thanks for creating this new service! I’ll definitely check it out. Another service in this space that I’d also recommend is SmartUp.

  They offer productivity/​effectiveness/​motivational tips designed to match what you’re most likely to need given what time of day it is!

  It’s not perfect yet, but it’s good and has been getting better the past few months. Also, I met the founder last year and was impressed with his overall vision.

• LouieMay 9, 2011, 9:49 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Ex­per­i­ment Idea Thread - Spring 2011

  the right response is to try to do better

  Agreed. Better is better.

  and nail down our results with more precision, not less

  I disagree. For example, you can rule out Dual N-Back as a possible Intelligence Amplification intervention with less precision than Jaeggi used to repeatedly mis-prove it as one. Depends on what you mean by precision I suppose. If you mean more time, effort, people, and statistical significance then precision is not needed. If by precision, you just mean being more right… well, I agree, we should be more right.

  Most bogus science is very precise: That’s why it looks stronger than it is. Poor methodology and experimental design will still allow someone to prove any correlation with p < 0.05 significance. If I want to disprove someone who published an incorrect result, should I have to expend more time, people, and resources than they used just to over-prove the counter-claim with “more precision”—even though their claim was never wrong due to “lack of precision” in the first place?

  Calling for “more precision” is like calling for “more preparation”. It has 100% applause appeal and costs nothing for people to call for. But it costs people actually doing research a lot of time. When you advocate for smarter people to use “more precision”, you’re also advocating for smarter people to do “less research”… the extra precision comes from somewhere.

  Are you actually in favor of smarter people doing less research than they currently do?

• LouieMay 9, 2011, 6:10 PM

  2 points

  on: [Altru­ist Sup­port] Fix the SIAI’s web­site (EDIT: or not. I’ll do it)

  I would welcome specific suggestions for improvements. If you email me updates, I would be open to making them. louie.helm AT singinst.org

  You are correct that the website is out-of-date in spots. It’s unfortunate… can you help me fix these inconsistencies since it’s easier for you to spot them as an outsider?

  Please list the URL of the pages you want to change, then list what you want replaced, and please suggest new version that is consistent with Singularity Institute’s actual values.

  Thanks for your help Giles!

• LouieMay 8, 2011, 10:12 PM

  −5 points

  in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Ex­per­i­ment Idea Thread - Spring 2011

  The opinion of folks at Singularity Institute is VERY relevant when discussing the methodology of studies done at Singularity Institute. They laughed at the thought of going through the motions of collecting the extra evidence and doing the extra rituals with statistics to impress journal editors. They did the Bayesian version instead.

  If you want an enormous, controlled, statistically-significant study that’s been published in a high-quality, peer reviewed journal, check out this study of brain training software in Nature.

  I actually just found this study in the past hour. Their conclusion: Brain Training software doesn’t work. But you get better at the games!

  They cover Lumosity too which is funny because I was just looking into them myself. I was a bit concerned when I tried to look up the evidence for how “scientifically proven” Lumosity was (since they claim it ALL OVER THEIR SITE) and I later realized that the extent of their published findings were 2 conference posters, that aren’t available anywhere online, and that were accepted to conferences I’ve never even heard of.

  I think I’m gonna go with the researchers from Nature and Singularity Institute on this one.