The_Jaded_One

Karma: 670

The_Jaded_One 27 Apr 2018 0:43 UTC
4 points
in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: Wrongology 101
imagine you’re in a fistfight with a hungry tiger. Do you want it to be a fair fight, or would you like to try and cheat somehow?

The_Jaded_One 27 Apr 2018 0:21 UTC
2 points
on: Wrongology 101

They are irrational. … Structurally, we’re talking about a cartel, or a mob. Mob in both the “mafia” and the “riot” sense. Collusion to keep unmerited privilege

It is not irrational to want to hang on to power/privilege. A very basic property of a rational agent is to want to increase or at least not decrease its level of capability in the world. Fair competition, when you would lose, is irrational. In fact the very notion of “fair” is hard to define in a general way, but winning is less hard to define.

Similarly, it is not irrational to want to form a cartel or political ingroup. Quite the opposite. It’s like the concept of economic moat, but for humans.

all the millions of mental motions involved in trying to understand things accurately. The person who is wrong on purpose wants to just stop all of that motion, forever.

The most important thing for an agent to understand is to preserve itself and its utility function. Perhaps Satre’s antisemites, though lacking in IQ, understood this better than we do.

The_Jaded_One 4 Aug 2017 1:12 UTC
0 points
in reply to: UmamiSalami’s comment on: What Are The Chances of Actually Achieving FAI?

I don’t think it will be very difficult to impart your intentions into a sufficiently advanced machine

Counterargument: it will be easy to impart an approximate version of your intentions, but hard to control the evolution of those values as you crank up the power. E.g. evolution, humans, make us want sex, we invent condoms.

No-one will really care about this until it’s way too late and we’re all locked up in nice padded cells and drugged up, or something equally bad but hard for me to imagine right now.

The_Jaded_One 4 Aug 2017 1:08 UTC
0 points
on: What Are The Chances of Actually Achieving FAI?
I think 50% is a reasonable belief given the very limited grasp of the problem we have.

Most of the weight on success comes from FAI being quite easy, and all of the many worries expressed on this site not being realistic. Some of the weight for success comes from a concerted effort to solve hard problems.

The_Jaded_One 1 Aug 2017 21:11 UTC
1 point
in reply to: HungryHippo’s comment on: Bridging the Intention-Behavior Gap (aka Akrasia)
I guess there is a gap between the OP’s intention and his/her behaviour? Intended to link to something but actually just self-links?

The_Jaded_One 1 Aug 2017 15:28 UTC
0 points
in reply to: oge’s comment on: Tentative Thoughts on the Cost Effectiveness of the SENS Foundation
Thanks for your comment! Can you say which country?

Could you tell me how you came about the list of African backward values?

Not in particular, the human brain tends to collect overall impressions rather than keep track of sources.

I’d like the names of all the values I’d need to instil to avoid seeing preventable suffering around me.

This sounds like a seriously tough battle.

The_Jaded_One 24 Jun 2017 12:26 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Concrete Ways You Can Help Make the Community Better
Yeah, I mean maybe just make them float to the bottom?

The_Jaded_One 20 Jun 2017 20:57 UTC
4 points
on: Concrete Ways You Can Help Make the Community Better
One problem here is that we are trying to optimize a thing that is broken on an extremely fundamental level.

Rationality, transhumanism, hardcore nerdery in general attracts a lot of extremely socially dysfunctional human beings. They also tend to skew towards a ridiculously biologically-male-heavy gender distribution.

Sometimes life throws unfair challenges at you; the challenge here is that ability and interest in rationality correlates negatively with being a well-rounded human.

We should search very hard for extreme out-of-the-box solutions to this problem.

One positive lead I have been given is that the anti-aging/life-extension community is a lot more gender balanced. Maybe LW should try to embrace that. It’s not a solution, but that’s the kind of thing I’m thinking of.

The_Jaded_One 20 Jun 2017 20:47 UTC
2 points
on: Concrete Ways You Can Help Make the Community Better

agree with that isn’t just “+1 nice post.” Here are some strategies...

How about the strategy of writing “+1 nice post”? Maybe we’re failing to see the really blatantly obvious solution here....

+1 nice post btw

The_Jaded_One 14 Jun 2017 19:50 UTC
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Dragon Army: Theory & Charter (30min read)

someone was accidentally impregnated and then decided not to abort the child, going against what had previously been agreed upon, and proceeded to shamelessly solicit donations from the rationalist community to support her child

They were just doing their part against dysgenics and should be commended.

The_Jaded_One 14 Jun 2017 19:47 UTC
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Dragon Army: Theory & Charter (30min read)

word is going around that Anna Salamon and Nate Soares are engaging in bizarre conspiratorial planning around some unsubstantiated belief that the world will end in ten years

Sounds interesting, I’d like to hear more about this.

The_Jaded_One 4 May 2017 17:49 UTC
0 points
in reply to: RomeoStevens’s comment on: How I’d Introduce LessWrong to an Outsider

My impression of the appeal of LW retrospectively is that it (on average) attracted people who were or are under performing relative to g (this applies to myself). When you are losing you increase variance. When you are winning you decrease it.

This also applies to me

The_Jaded_One 18 Apr 2017 17:25 UTC
0 points
in reply to: turchin’s comment on: The map of global catastrophic risks connected with biological weapons and genetic engineering

I think that there are a multipandemic of computer viruses, but most of them now are malware which is not destroying data, and they are in balance with antivirus systems.

Well.........… I don’t know about this. If it’s “in balance” and not actually destroying the hosts then it’s not really a pandemic in the sense that you were using above. (Where it kills 99.999% of hosts!)

The_Jaded_One 16 Apr 2017 22:25 UTC
0 points
in reply to: turchin’s comment on: The map of global catastrophic risks connected with biological weapons and genetic engineering
But then why have we not seen a multipandemic of computer viruses?

Mostly (I assert) because the existence of an epidemic of virus A doesn’t (on net) help virus B to spread.

Parasites which parasitize the same host tend to be in competition with each other (in fact as far as I am aware sophisticated malware today even contains antivirus code to clean out other infections); this is especially true if the parasites kill hosts.

I think a multipandemic is an interesting idea, though, and worthy of further investigation 👍

The_Jaded_One 14 Apr 2017 21:06 UTC
2 points
in reply to: turchin’s comment on: The map of global catastrophic risks connected with biological weapons and genetic engineering
AFAIK Anthrax is not human transmissible. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthrax

In result there will be multipandemic with mortality 1- (0.5 power 100) = 0,99999

I don’t think that’s what would actually happen. Most likely, there would be a distribution over transmission rates. Some of your pathogens would be more infectious then others. The most infectious one or two of them would quickly outpace the transmission of all the others. It would be extremely hard to balance them so that they all had the same transmission rate.

The slower ones could be stranded by the deaths and precautions caused by the faster ones.

The_Jaded_One 3 Apr 2017 20:50 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: OpenAI makes humanity less safe
That world is called the planet Vulcan.

Meanwhile, on earth, we are subject to common knowledge/signalling issues…

The_Jaded_One 1 Apr 2017 9:49 UTC
0 points
in reply to: dogiv’s comment on: Elon Musk launches Neuralink, a venture to merge the human brain with AI
It has been fairly standard LW wisdom for a long time that any kind of human augmentation is unhelpful for friendliness.

I think that we should be much less confident about this, and I welcome alternative efforts such as the neural lace.

The_Jaded_One 1 Apr 2017 9:46 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: In support of Yak Shaving
I’m not 100% sure what the incentives for such people are, but it is a very small company.

Actually yesterday this came to bite them and we now have a serious problem because my “fix this underlying system” advice was rejected.

The_Jaded_One 19 Mar 2017 11:42 UTC
6 points
on: In support of Yak Shaving
We had this problem at work quite a few times. Bosses are reluctant to let me do something which will make things run more smoothly, they want new features instead.

The when things break they’re like “What! Why is it broken again?!”

The_Jaded_One 14 Mar 2017 21:57 UTC
0 points
in reply to: username2’s comment on: LessWrong Discord

no options for encryption on the community

I’ve heard the CIA, the FBI and the Illuminati are all onto us. Strong encryption is not negotiable.

Why not go for something based on the matrix protocol

Maybe not everyone is ready to take the red pill?