HN user
The example Thiel used in the original "seriously but not literally" argument was the wall. Of course Trump wasn't talking about a literal wall, he said, it was more of a metaphor for, you know, something.
This argument was always embarrassingly stupid, but anyone still making it after Trump shut down the government for a month over literal wall construction has forfeited their right to be taken seriously at all.
They settled on Condorcet, a method almost unheard of outside of electoral/political theory, and your criticism is that they didn't make use of political theory?!
Facebook is a corporation, what Zuckerberg wants to do as an individual isn't even relevant
Zuck is a majority shareholder, so what he wants to do as an individual can actually be fairly significant here.
Brave has built-in support for multiple third-party password managers.
Chrome profiles - I dunno.
Alexander Wales' rationalist take on Superman, "The Metropolitan Man", is great.
Text: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10360716/1/The-Metropolitan-Man
Free audiobook: http://www.hpmorpodcast.com/?page_id=1705
"Renters should have no say in what people are allowed to build - only the landed gentry have that right!"
It's training data. There's 17 suicidal and 17 non-suicidal scans, for a total of 34 scans. They trained 34 models, leaving one scan out each time. Of those 34 models, 31 correctly predicted the left-out scan.
IANAStatistician, but this seems like a trash result.
Letting people make mistakes is important. Letting people be altruistic is important.
More specifically: I'm 0% worried about sending money overseas, since I expect that the few people who do so that will be making the world a better place on net.
Nothing is free - someone is paying for it. When you give people specific things instead of money, you're taking choices away from them, insisting that you know what they need better than they do.
If you give people money, they can decide what they need most and go do that. Maybe I don't need housing because I can live with relatives and use my money for education. If you insist on free housing instead, you take that option away from me.
"IQ" is a scalar semi-objectice well-defined metric that predicts some things about the much more complicated and less-well-defined concept of problem solving.
The most important features on Facebook are hide, unfollow, and block.
That post is a remarkable example of victim blaming. "Do you know how hard it is for ME now that you've gone and gotten people violently angry at you? People want to punch you in the face for something they think you said, and that's your fault!"
Yes, so the rule is slightly misstated. Assuming that your messages are all under n bits and you always use an n-length pad, you will reuse the same pad approximately once every 2^n messages. Not coincidentally, 2^n is also the number of possible one-time pads there are, so your adversary gains no information from this fact.
Yup!
I routinely pay for things with ethereum - and if the target only accepts btc, then I can just shapeshift.
The "Halting Problem" is a red herring here - eth transactions are technically not Turing complete since they automatically halt when they run out of the finite supply of ether attached to the transaction. Saying that ethereum isn't feasible because of the halting problem is like saying cars aren't feasible because an object in motion stays in motion - there are countless practical ways to manage it, and if nothing else stops you, in the end you'll definitely run out of gas.
Moreover, to add further context, the whole basis of Holden's effective altruism work has been around the idea that philanthropic dollars ought to be focused on charities with extremely rigorous proof behind how much they improve people's lives per dollar donated, and how much they need the money.
This isn't quite true; SCI, a charity that treats parasitic disease in the third world, is the subject of massive uncertainty and conflicting reports of effectiveness. It might turn out that it has very little impact at all. But it's still a recommended EA charity because it looks like there's a decent chance they're doing a ton of good. GW has written extensively about this.
And then there's the next paragraph:
The Open Philanthropy Project typically recommends grants to the Open Philanthropy Project fund, a donor advised fund at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. Support for the Open Philanthropy Project fund comes primarily from Good Ventures, though other donors have contributed as well. In some cases, the Open Philanthropy Project makes grant recommendations directly to Good Ventures.
It's basically all GV money - that is to say, Dustin and Cari's money.
It would be really useful if there were some historical example of a sudden increase in intelligence leading to a new class of agents taking over the Earth and determining it's future.
Or maybe if there were any evidence that AI capabilities are increasing, like becoming dominant at Chess or Go, driverless cars, or a slew of recent papers on transfer learning.
Maybe if one of the co-authors of the leading AI textbook, Stuart Russell, voiced concerns, we could count that as evidence.
But you're right, it's better to wait until we know for a fact that someone's built an agent smart enough to end civilization before we commit any resources to the problem.
This isn't a GiveWell rec, it's an OPP grant. OPP literally exists to give away Dustin's money.
Go to OPP's (or Good Ventures') site and notice the glaring lack of a donate button.
Fun fact: You can apply this template to anyone worried about any potential disaster.
"Behold the cult of global warming, who believe that the unclean practices of man will anger the sky gods and bring down furious vengeance. Sad to see so many otherwise-smart climatologists drawn in by this drivel."
"'Antibiotic resistance'? Oh my god, you must be one of those 'biosecurity cultists'. Do you really believe that magical microscopic beings are going to grow strong because we're feeding farm animals the wrong food, and that those same invisible creatures will destroy human civilization? Oh man, do you have chants? What a nutjob."
"Seriously, you're really afraid of 'nuclear weapons'? You really believe that people will somehow cast some magic spell that will turn rocks into fire and destroy entire cities, that this same magic will cause 'mutations' and a 'nuclear winter'? Can't you see that you're part of a doomsday cult?"
I'm old enough to remember when "cult" didn't just mean "people who have high confidence in ideas that seem weird to me".
"Running an organization" is not the same thing as "owning an organization". Maybe at a company the CEO might have shares, but there's no equivalent at a non-profit. It's just a job that pays below market rates. If money was the goal, there's a plethora of readily-available much-higher-value opportunities that won't get sneering Internet comments.
It's not Holden's money - he works for OPP, he doesn't fund it. The money comes from Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna, and it's already in a trust.
I want to make sure I fully understand the accusation here.
You're saying that the Open Philanthropy Fund - which is funded by an $8.3 billion grant from Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna, also close associates - is funneling $30M money to an organization that pays below market rates (https://www.quora.com/What-is-compensation-like-at-the-non-p...), run by people who have dedicated their professional careers and millions of dollars to philanthropic causes despite being surrounded by way more lucrative opportunities for anyone with their skillsets.
If this were the scheme, there are countless better ways to do it.
They could just give them the money without any pretense. Dustin and Cari didn't have to tie up this money in OPP. They could have skipped the years of working with Holden and others for years to identify the best giving opportunities, avoided any blowback, and just used their money the way every other billionaire does. Or, instead of just giving it away, they could have made him an absurdly compensated CEO of a new startup.
And none of that would have attracted any attention, no sneering condemnation, just business as usual.
But that's not what they did.
They've spent years painstakingly identifying the best causes they could find - anti-malarial nets, poverty relief via direct cash transfers, biosecurity, intestinal work treatment, Schistosomiasis, prison reform, and yes, AI safety. They've oriented their entire lives around this project, so of course many of the people they're close to are working on similar projects. So it really, really shouldn't be a shocking twist that one of the people they're close to might be in a position to use a small fraction of their available funds for a lot of potential good. There are fewer than 100 people working full-time on AI safety today. If you've concluded that it's an important cause area, there really aren't many options.
And even then, they didn't have to disclose their personal connection. They really could have just left well enough alone. But because they're dedicated to transparency even in the face of stupidity, they made their personal connection prominent and obvious. So now anyone on the Internet can cruise on by and - ignoring the millions donated to third-world poverty and health causes, ignoring the multitude of ways the money could have been quietly and selfishly used, ignoring the fact that non-profits invariably pay below-market rates, ignoring the copious public writing and research that's gone into these decisions - can simply gawk and say "unbelievable".
When people say "No good deed goes unpunished", this is what they're talking about.
"We have to defuse this bomb or it will destroy the city in one hour!"
"But there are people suffering right now!"
Holden's dedicated a huge chunk of his career to moving hundreds of millions of dollars to alleviating poverty and disease. He's one of the founders of the effective altruism movement. You may disagree with his decision here, but to dismiss his efforts, saying it "sucks" and isn't "effective, or even altruistic", while ignoring the extensive public writing he's done on the subject that led him to these views and strawmanning his position as nepotism, is just awful.
"I disagree with the arguments presented, for these reasons" - cool. If you think the grant isn't a good idea, make an argument for that.
"This person who has dedicated their life to doing as much good as possible is close to other people who also want to do as much good as possible, and their work has led to convergent viewpoints, therefore this isn't altruism" is cheap character assassination.
What about person-years?
Focus on the fundamentals. How do you find the write tools and libraries? How do you translate requirements into projects? How can you communicate with other people effectively? How can you learn what you need to know when you need to know it? How do you recognize sunk costs? What makes good code good code, regardless of language? What compromises should you make, and when? How do you ask the right questions?