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Showing posts from April, 2018

Grief at the end of history

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Epistemic status: emotional ranting and grief (and, I'm aware of the structural incentives of capitalism and not deluded that it's all about individuals; allow me to indulge anyway) My days are absolutely filled with reading about and discussing AI x-risk. How to think about it. What to do. How to think about what to do. Of course, this is nothing new, but — again and again, I encounter arguments in the style of, well, "us safety-concious, responsible people need to keep having a seat at the table. So we need to stay in the race, or get in the race." And I just keep coming back to that it feels really wrong to yield to this logic. The best thing we can do is to join everyone else in the thing that is causing our destruction! And it's quite likely that that's not a strategic response given the situation we now find ourselves in. But my thoughts keep coming back to the root cause: why the fuck did we start an AI race in the first place? We could have avoided so...
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Never Tell Me The Stats!

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Note: it may be that I happen to lie somewhere on the right side of the bell curve when it comes to this very particular skill of memorising statistics, such that it proves less actionable for most: nonetheless, I think it may be worth trying. "Never memorize something that you can look up" —  Albert Einstein To be honest, I've always found this quote rather stupid. Of course, it's meant to be hyperbolic. But human memory capacity is not particularly zero sum, and one suffers a much greater time delay in the procurement of relevant information through manually looking it up. In addition, in the age of Google, this sentiment would suggest that one should remember almost nil. I will make the case that storing a somewhat large amount of specific statistical information that most people don't try to remember, namely, the population, GDP and GDP per capita figures for most at least semi-important countries, and the population counts of the world's...
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