Does anyone else, other than me, have a problem with noticing when the discussion they’re having is getting more abstract? I’m often reminded of this fact when debating some topic. This is relating to the point on “Narrowing the scope”, and how to notice the need to do this.
negamuhia
Karma: 78
I signed up for a CFAR workshop, and got a scholarship, but couldn’t travel for financial reasons. Is there a way to get travel assistance for either WAISS or the MIRI Fellowship program? I’ll just apply for both.
What reaches your attention when you see is not ‘reality’ but a mix of light measurements with cryptotheories that were useful for making snap judgments in the environment of ancestral adaptation.
Eric S. Raymond here: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7076
Meetup : Rationality Nairobi mini-Meetup #1: Double Crux
Ethereum does this
See my above point about how reasoning by analogy at its best is reasoning from a weak reference class. (Do people think this is worth a toplevel post?)
Yes, I do. Intuitively, this seems correct. But I’d still like to see you expound on the idea.
If you practice mindfulness meditation, you’ll realize that your sense of self is an illusion. It’s probably true that most people believe that their “self” is located in their head, but if you investigate it yourself, you’ll find that there’s actually no “self” at all.
The core ideas in LW come from the Major Sequences. You can start there, reading posts in each sequence sequentially.
Sergey Levine’s research on guided policy search (using techniques such as hidden markov models to animate, in real-time, the movement of a bipedal or quadripedal character). An example:
Sergey Levine, Jovan Popović. Physically Plausible Simulation for Character Animation. SCA 2012: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~svlevine/papers/quasiphysical.pdf
The text of [the parts I’ve read so far of] Superintelligence is really insightful, but I’ll quote Nick in saying that
“Many points in this book are probably wrong”.
He gives many references (84 in Chapter 1 alone), some of which refer to papers and others that resemble continuations of the specific idea in question that don’t fit in directly with the narrative in the book. My suggestion would be to go through each reference as it comes up in the book, analyze and discuss it, then continue. Maybe even forming little discussion groups around each reference in a section (if it’s a paper). It could even happen right here in comment threads.
That way, we can get as close to Bostrom’s original world of information as possible, maybe drawing different conclusions. I think that would be a more consilient understanding of the book.
It’s tempting to think of technical audiences and general audiences as completely different, but I think that no matter who you’re talking to, the principles of explaining things clearly are the same. The only real difference is which things you can assume they already know, and in that sense, the difference between physicists and the general public isn’t necessarily more significant than the difference between physicists and biologists, or biologists and geologists.
Reminds me of Expecting Short Inferential Distances.
Thanks! Wow, that was simple :)
I’m hand-typing the code from the pdf. I know it would be easier if I used the .lhs file from github, but I’d like to make sure I read and understand the code first. Reading the .lhs file hurts my eyes due to formatting issues in Emacs.
This is great, thanks. I’ll implement a rudimentary spam filter with this sometime next week.
I’m not sure about “day-to-day life”, but this application of general abstract nonsense certainly did make my day better when I read it: link
Language in Thought and Action, by S. I. Hayakawa. It goes without saying that this book is highly recommended. To those who’ve read the sequences, and have therefore had just a bite of the hearty meal, you should really get it. An anecdote about how I came to find this gem: My grandfather is a retired linguist, and in his library, in a house I grew up in, he keeps, and still has, a gigantic collection of books. A member of that distinguished class of “books older than me”, this book is a part of his linguistics collection, and I didn’t even know he had it until a few weeks ago when I was having a conversation with my uncle in said library. The title jumped out at me, and I haven’t been this happy about finding a book in that room since I found my mother reading Kahneman.
Chillstep : I’ve found this online collection to be quite relaxing, as the genre name suggests.
The Art Of Noise—The Seduction of Claude Debussy : I hadn’t listened to any music by this super-group before this year, and now they’re one of my favourite groups...I’m either fickle or these guys are awesome, and I’m not fickle. There’s one song I liked in particular, Metaforce, and its remixes. It’ll show you just how versatile this group is, with the rest of the album as a backdrop.
Likewise, thank you for your suggestion.
Sorry for the delayed reply.
This seems useful and simple enough to try. I’ll set up an implementation intention to do this next time I find myself in a long conversation. It also reminds me of the reversal test, a heuristic for eliminating status-quo bias.
Bostrom, Ord (2006)