sfb

Karma: 443

sfb Jan 21, 2011, 5:48 AM
0 points
in reply to: Quirinus_Quirrell’s comment on: Tallinn-Evans $125,000 Singularity Challenge

I never said anything about using force

You (probably) know what I meant, and whether or not you mentioned force specifically—either way doesn’t change the gist of the “translation”. A weasely objection.

sfb Jan 21, 2011, 4:04 AM
5 points
in reply to: Quirinus_Quirrell’s comment on: Tallinn-Evans $125,000 Singularity Challenge
Translation: I haven’t managed to convince you therefore you must be punished for your insolent behaviour of not being convinced by my arguments. I cannot walk away from this and leave you being wrong, you must profess to agree with me and if you are not rational enough to understand and accept logical arguments then you will be forced to profess agreement.

Who did you say hasn’t learned how to lose?

I’m beginning to think that LW needs some better mechanism for dealing with the phenomenon of commenters who are polite, repetitive, immune to all correction, and consistently wrong about everything. I know people don’t like it when I say this sort of thing, but seriously, people like that can lower the perceived quality of a whole website.

Warn, then ban the people involved.

If you decide that refusing to be convinced by evidence while also unable to convincingly counter it, and at the same time continuing to argue is bad form for the LW that you want to create, then stand by that decision and act on it.

sfb Jan 20, 2011, 6:11 PM
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Steve Jobs’ medical leave, riches and longevity

I don’t know, what particularity impressed you about their foundation?

I used them as a contrast with leaving money to non-alleviating-suffering causes (Trump letting his children inherit it) or speculative-future-suffering causes (It’s probably easier to convince someone to leave their money to a charity gets results today rather than one which tries to increase the chance of getting results tomorrow).

It’s not really important to my point whether they are an effective charity or not, just that there aren’t many single organizations with enough scale to handle Warren Buffet leaving all of several billion dollars to, and there aren’t many examples of a Bill-Gates-rich person doing something quite like that.

sfb Jan 20, 2011, 5:23 PM
0 points
in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Steve Jobs’ medical leave, riches and longevity
That sounds pretty sane, but if I look at it from the point of view of “making a longevity breakthrough happen sooner than it otherwise would, over a period of many years”, then too few qualified people is not a show stopping problem, it only means that educating and training people so there are more qualified people in the near future is a good next step.

Lots of people making the same discoveries within a short time span is a much more interesting limit.

sfb Jan 20, 2011, 5:17 PM
3 points
in reply to: Quirinus_Quirrell’s comment on: Tallinn-Evans $125,000 Singularity Challenge

and a form letter reminder that self-consistency is not a virtue [..] making it clear that this community’s respect is contingent on [..]

Is changing professed beliefs to something else without understanding / agreeing with the new position, but just doing it to gain community respect, a virtue?

Tim, and the rest of the class of commenters to which you refer, simply haven’t learned how to lose.

Or still isn’t convinced that he is wrong by the time you have passed your tolerance of explaining so you give up and decide he must be broken. Your proposed ‘solution’ is a hack so you can give up on convincing him but still have him act convinced for the benefit of appearances—maybe you are simply expecting far far too short inferential distances?

sfb Jan 20, 2011, 6:14 AM
0 points
in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Steve Jobs’ medical leave, riches and longevity

whether an area of research is saturated

What does this mean? More groups working independently on solving a problem will not increase the probability of a solution being found in a given timeframe?

sfb Jan 20, 2011, 6:14 AM
5 points
in reply to: Manfred’s comment on: Steve Jobs’ medical leave, riches and longevity
Isn’t the unpleasant part of eugenics the “killing “bad” people” part? In the Howard Families sense, it was more of a cross between an arranged marriage, a marriage of convenience, and surrogate mothering. A choice with a financial incentive, nobody was killed for being too short lived (!) or raped and forced into it.

sfb Jan 20, 2011, 6:06 AM
0 points
in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Steve Jobs’ medical leave, riches and longevity
Yes, I would consider anti-aging research as counting, but I meant to discriminate so that leaving money for nonspecific medical research would not count, and nor would leaving 1 million to longevity and 99 million to universities.

sfb Jan 20, 2011, 1:23 AM
0 points
in reply to: icebrand’s comment on: Link—total body transplant
More optimistically, pre-reanimated.

sfb Jan 20, 2011, 1:11 AM
2 points
on: “Bad-for-the-world-ipedia?”
I saw a customer comment on a piano website recently thanking the proprietor for being green by having a digital manual instead of shipping a paper one.

An electronic manual for the electronic piano they just bought with a mechanism made in Germany, processors from Japan, soundboard from France, assembled in China, sold in England and delivered to Wales.

“It’s not easy being green”—Mork.

Steve Jobs’ medical leave, riches and longevity

sfbJan 20, 2011, 1:06 AM

18 points

31 comments1 min readLW link

sfb Jan 19, 2011, 11:21 PM
3 points
in reply to: timtyler’s comment on: “Manna” by Marshall Brain

The usual problem with the unemployed humans is where the money to support them comes from

Yes, but that’s only a problem in that you have to tax rich people to get their money to distribute it. My first reply was therefore “the government will tax the rich to feed the poor, what else could they do?”.

But after a bit of thought, I realised that if the government owns self replicating slave robots and land, then it can use the slaves to create food without needing to tax anyone. The robots can’t be taxed because their earnings go to their owners, but in this case they aren’t earning anything because they give the food away. Their efforts don’t take any human input so nobody needs a salary, and they can do what people can do so they can run farms and distribute food.

So, without comment on the morality of slaving human-equivalent robots (whether the robots care isn’t discussed in the link), feeding unemployed people is a non-problem—the self running Roboslave farms are free food fountains.

They are borderline cornucopia machines limited to whatever humans can make and the right resources being available—in this case sunlight, land and seeds.

sfb Jan 19, 2011, 11:06 PM
4 points
on: Tallinn-Evans $125,000 Singularity Challenge

every contribution to the Singularity Institute up until January 20, 2011 will be matched dollar-for-dollar, up to a total of $125,000.

Anyone willing to comment on that as a rationalist incentive? Presumably I’m supposed to think “I want more utility to SIAI so I should donate at a time when my donation is matched so SIAI gets twice the cash” and not “they have money which they can spare and are willing to donate to SIAI but will not donate it if their demands are not met within their timeframe, that sounds a lot like coercion/blackmail”?

Would it work the other way around? If we individuals grouped together and said “We collectively have $125,000 to donate to SIAI but will only do so if SIAI convinces a company / rich investor to match it dollar for dollar before %somedate%”?

sfb Jan 19, 2011, 10:27 PM
0 points
in reply to: timtyler’s comment on: “Manna” by Marshall Brain

What will politicians do if they have a big mountain of unemployed human voters to feed?

In the given Roboslave world, the government would run enough roboslave farms to produce food to feed them. And possibly, enough to feed everyone.

Wasn’t that the point of slaves and machines? That they work so we don’t have to?

(and at what point in the last tens of thousands of years did feeding yourself stop being your problem and start being your representative politician’s problem?)

sfb Jan 19, 2011, 10:12 PM
2 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: “Manna” by Marshall Brain

Indeed. In fact, the main advantage earpieces have over visual systems when it comes to the delivery of artificial information sources is the fact that it frees up the visual system for other purposes.

If we’re imagining the very cheapest employees in a dystopian future burger joint, ability to read English might rule out a lot of foreign/older (vision)/uneducated/dyslexic people. People? I mean, human resources.

sfb Jan 19, 2011, 10:09 PM
2 points
in reply to: benelliott’s comment on: “Manna” by Marshall Brain
a) In that case, in the story it did get off the ground so it must have been tolerable.

b) Criticizing the frequency of instructions is a pretty weak argument against the story plot since it’s not critical to the plot. If 1 minute instructions bothers you a lot, imagine the story says they are 2 or 5 minute instructions, or a wristwatch screen with your next instruction on it.

sfb Jan 19, 2011, 10:05 PM
−2 points
in reply to: knb’s comment on: “Manna” by Marshall Brain

Nothing like “about half” of American workers work in environments routinized enough to use something like manna.

Do you have anything to support this? It seems to me that organizational charts are usually pyramid shaped, and the lower parts of the pyramids are where the most employees are, where less decision-making jobs are and where such a system would be more useful—and so a lot more employed people are doing jobs which a less skilled / lower cost person could do with guidance than are doing jobs with tough decisions and responsibility or creativity.

Also, that a lot of people have factory / processing jobs which are right now such fixed routines that a manna-like system would skip over them.

The employees would hate it

The point of the system is that the fast food restaurant is able to pay people less and guide them to doing a better job than was done before. That is, people who couldn’t get a fast food job before and were unemployable can earn money. Those fictional unemployable people who can now eat are hardly going to complain that their job isn’t as much fun as they want, are they?

sfb Jan 18, 2011, 7:21 PM
0 points
on: Eliezer to speak in Oxford, 8pm Jan 25th
Travelling internationally to give a talk on AI to transhumanists in one of the main futurist areas of the UK seems quite low utility. (See: Preaching to the choir).

Has Eliezer anything particularly new to say which he hasn’t said in previous talks or written about online, or are there likely to be many people there who are both interested in AI, important to it’s future and yet also not following it?

If I was in the area I would be there, but a several hour round trip doesn’t mesh with workdays too well.

sfb Jan 14, 2011, 3:49 PM
0 points
in reply to: bentarm’s comment on: Simpson’s Paradox

I think the key message is that you shouldn’t be making causal inferences from correlational conclusions

I’ve sorted out what I was thinking a bit more. I was not saying “am I justified in believing that the alignment of stars and planets is the cause here”, what I was saying is:

If someone tells us that women born under Aries, Leo or Sagittarius do better with treatment A, as do those born under the Earth, Air and Water signs, would we really be willing to switch treatments?

Yes we should be willing to act in a way that appears to support astrology—this paragraph is supporting wisdom as the opposite of stupidity, or decision making by fear of public embarrassment.

sfb Jan 13, 2011, 8:22 PM
1 point
on: Simpson’s Paradox

How are we to decide which partitions are useful? If someone tells us that women born under Aries, Leo or Sagittarius do better with treatment A, as do those born under the Earth, Air and Water signs, would we really be willing to switch treatments?

Assume I have not heard of Simpson’s Paradox, have no more time to research and must make a decision now.

Am I justified in not switching treatments using the reasoning that I don’t want Astrology to have any substance to it, and it must not be allowed to have any, so I’m going to wishful think this data away and therefore ignore the evidence I have (as I understand it)?

Or am I more rational to say “I will accept the evidence I have as far as I understand it and switch treatments, even though I expect there is something else going on which is nothing to do with Astrology, but I have no time to find out what that is”?

The second has a better thought process but leads to a worse conclusion due to lack of understanding or lack of information, but the first one is based on a worse thought process which could lead to much worse outcomes in future if it is kept up.

sfb

Steve Jobs’ med­i­cal leave, riches and longevity

Steve Jobs’ medical leave, riches and longevity