Not related to the main idea, but the point of os.path.join is to combine path elements using whichever delimiter the OS requires (”/” on Unix, “\” on Windows, etc., even though Windows in particular can also handle ”/”). If you don’t care about that portability, you might as well use normal string concatenation. Or if you’re using os.path.join, you might as well omit the ”/” delimiters in your string literals to get extra portability.
purge
I haven’t seen that documentary, but I’d guess it’s about the gripping language. (If not, then there are multiple such languages in the world, even better!)
I’d like to be able to look through my list of posts and feel content that each and every one is something that I put into the world because I am really proud of it and it deserves to be there, but that mindset just leads me to the catch-22.
Another reason to be less strict about quality before publishing: you’re not a perfect judge of the quality of your own work. Sometimes your writing is better than you think it is, and filtering too hard means that some good writing won’t be published. If you don’t lose any of your bets, you’re not taking enough risks.
So “no manipulation” or “maintaining human free will” seems to require a form of indifference: we want the AI to know how its actions affect our decisions, but not take that influence into account when choosing those actions.
I think the butler can take that influence into account in making its choices, but still reduce its manipulativity by explaining to Petrov what it knows about how breakfast will affect Petrov’s later choices. When they’re on equal epistemic footing, Petrov can also take that information into account, and perhaps choose to deliberately resist the influence of breakfast, if he doesn’t endorse it. Of course, there are limits to how much explanation is possible across a substantial intelligence gap between AI and people, so this doesn’t dissolve manipulation entirely.
“shaped by their values” != “aligned with their values”. I think Stuart is saying not that China will solve the alignment problem, but that they won’t be interested in solving it because they’re focused on expanding capabilities, and translating a book won’t change that.
But the typical use of NDAs is notably different from the typical use of blackmail, isn’t it? Even though in principle they could be used in all the same situations, they’re aren’t used that way in practice. Doesn’t that make it reasonable to treat them differently?
If α is smaller it’s less than half-silvered, and if α is bigger it’s more than half-silvered.
Just a nit, but isn’t this backwards? Less silvering means less reflection and more transmission, but this first diagram labels the transmitted amplitude as α, not the reflected amplitude.
If we know that there’s a burglar, then we think that either an alarm or a recession caused it; and if we’re told that there’s an alarm, we’d conclude it was less likely that there was a recession, since the recession had been explained away.
Should that be “since the burglar had been explained away”? Or am I confused?
Edit: I was confused. The burglar was explained; the recession was explained away.
If people weren’t around, then “snow is white” would still be a true sentence, but it wouldn’t be physically embodied anywhere (in quoted form). If we want to depict the quoted sentence, the easiest way to do that is to depict its physical embodiment.
Beliefs should pay rent, check. Arguments about truth are not just a matter of asserting privilege, check. And yet… when we do have floating beliefs, then our arguments about truth are largely a matter of asserting privilege. I missed that connection at first.
I wound up with Pfizer, but I actually would have preferred to get J&J, due to the more established vaccine tech with less risk of allergic reaction. They work similarly enough (put *NA into your cells, you build the spike protein yourself, and then react to it) that it’s hard for me to believe that much of the apparent difference in effectiveness is real. J&J scored worse, but on a harder test including the newer strains. So I imagine J&J is comparable to the first shot of Pfizer/Moderna, and although the second shot does make a real difference, the obvious solution is to just get a second shot of J&J. Ideally you would wait until supply caught up with or exceeded demand, and ideally the places administering it would stop caring at that point whether you already had a shot but might charge you for it. In the (likely) worst case where they don’t allow it if you already had a shot, you could lie.