What would a separate section accomplish that couldn’t be done by putting tags in posts/comments?
pcm
Karma: 289
Have you asked CFAR whether you could hire one of their instructors to give you one-on-one training over Skype? I expect it would be expensive, but they are flexible with people who are willing to pay thousands of dollars.
CritLink enabled this before the age of browser plugins.
What would motivate someone to use it when few others were using it?
Meetup : Berkeley LW meetup—CFAR test session
Berkeley meetup May 28 outdoors in Ohlone Park
I don’t think Tetlock talks about that much.
Imagine a better forecast about whether invading Iraq reduces terrorism, or about whether Saddam would survive the invasion. Wouldn’t both sides make wiser decisions?
Part of it is that deflation in the early 1930s meant that workers were overpaid relative to the value of goods they produced (wages being harder to cut than prices). That caused wasteful amounts of unemployment. WWII triggered inflation, and combined with wage controls caused wages to become low relative to goods, shifting the labor supply and demand to the opposite extreme.
The people who were employed pre-war presumably had their standard of living lowered in the war (after having it increased a good deal during the deflation).
I won’t try to explain here why deflation and inflation happened when they did, or why wages are hard to cut (look for “sticky wages” for info about the latter).
I expect faster and more reliable evaluations of Prozac-like interventions.
I also expect that emotions associated with having few cpu cycles are less strongly ingrained than those caused by lack of food.
Evidence that most ems are slaves whose copies are made at the choice of owners would seem relevant.
Making miserable workers a bit happier doesn’t seem to make them less productive today. Why should there be no similar options in an em world?
I suggest trying to find evidence about issues that made a larger difference, such as support for Mao or for fighting major wars. Maybe there’s a principled definition of “social issues” that excludes things about which the young are wrong, but I’ll guess that it’s hard to find consensus about such a definition.
Yes, wanting to live isn’t perfect evidence of a life worth living. But it sure looks like it provides some bayesian evidence.
Looking at whether the ems want more copies of themselves and want faster clock speeds should provide stronger evidence, and it seems unlikely that ems who don’t want either of those will be common.
Ems should have some ability to alter themselves to enjoy life more. Wouldn’t they use that?
supporters of cryonics happily stop looking for alternate life-extension strategies almost as soon as they discover cryonics
I see no such pattern. Among people I’ve met, there’s a high correlation between support for cryonics and practicing calorie restriction, and a moderately high correlation with attending life extension conferences.
The few people I can think of who may be using cryonics as a reason for losing interest in alternatives are the ones who think cryonics has a much greater than 50% chance of working.
the consensus is that these techniques are likely to offer a higher success rate once they are perfected
The consensus I see is more like “nobody knows whether they’ll work”.
Bankruptcy is normally means having debts that can’t be paid, and Alcor goes out of its way to avoid having anything that could be a debt, and is careful to maintain funds that can be used to continue to keep its patients preserved. This kind of conservatism comes at some cost in its ability to grow, so it doesn’t require unusually good management to have a higher than normal chance of continuing to exist.
There seem to have been two cryonics organizations that failed (CSC and CSNY). Some patients at CSNY were unharmed by that failure, so having your organization fail doesn’t automatically imply death. Plus people have learned from those failures.
By denying that having barely enough resources to live implies that life need be barely worth living. See Poor Folks do Smile for details.
Here is some info about the Robert Lecnik—Peter McCluskey wedding, also officiated by Eliezer.
But it seems more useful to me to calculate P(hypothesis | data).
That may be true if you have little influence over what data is available.
Frequentists are mainly interested in situations where they can create experiments that cause P(hypothesis) to approach 0 or 1. The p-value is intended to be good at deciding whether the hypothesis has been adequately tested, not at deciding whether to believe the hypothesis given crappy data.
Ethics ought to be Aumann-agreeable. That would only imply uFAI is a non-issue if AGI developers were ideal Bayesians (improbable) and aware of claims of uFAI risks.
Offline practice: make a habit of writing down good questions you could have asked in a conversation you recently had. Reward yourself for thinking of questions, regardless of how slow you are at generating them. (H/T Dan of Charisma Tips, which has other good tips scattered around that blog).
Wikipedia’s current events portal is relatively minimalist and low-noise. It’s not prioritized very impressively.