xamuel

23 ms·

211.
by xamuel 7y ago
How would it work if we got globalism "right"? What if instead of a virus, it was an asteroid which instantly destroyed all the factories in Country X, so there's no way for Country X to send supplies overseas even if they wa
212.
by xamuel 7y ago
Artists don't always accurately describe what their works mean. John Lennon insisted that "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" has nothing to do with LSD :)
213.
by xamuel 7y ago
"Shiny Happy People" might be more appropriate than it seems. Many consider the song to be an imitation of dystopian propaganda.
214.
by xamuel 7y ago
It runs the risk, though, of murdering the credibility of those officials. Who will trust anything they say, when they're right there on the record intentionally telling ridiculous lies? If masks should be diverted to hospitals, then t
215.
by xamuel 7y ago
What would you give as an example of political propaganda that a lot of people willingly watch regularly? Not something where some people think it's political propaganda, but something where it's objectively indisputably political
216.
by xamuel 7y ago
Semi off-topic: I can't understand why people who dislike ads make an exception for superbowl ads. I guess they're supposed to have high entertainment value? So what? Would you happily watch political propaganda, if it just had
217.
by xamuel 7y ago
That would put an interesting twist on Matthew 27:25, "All the people answered, 'His blood [i.e., responsibility for his death] be on us and on our children [i.e., descendants]!'"
218.
by xamuel 7y ago
I use C structs in the same way. I think it's fine to use classes for this purpose. The problem with classes is that certain people go crazy with inheritance and polymorphism, things which sound smart on paper but almost always lead to
219.
by xamuel 7y ago
One alternative would be for you to follow the prescription, "find out why the fence was put there, then I may allow you to remove it". Investigate what's on the other side of the fence, without tearing it down (this might in
220.
by xamuel 7y ago
Suppose you had brain damage and a doctor prescribed some tongue-twisters for you to recite in order to exercise specific parts of your brain. Would you object based on the semantic content of the tongue-twisters? If one of the tongue-twist
221.
by xamuel 7y ago
Whoops. You just removed the fence which was put in place thousands of years ago to contain radioactive waste with a million-year half-life. You couldn't read the warning signs since they were written in an ancient long-forgotten scrip
222.
by xamuel 7y ago
>It's far more arrogant to assume you're the odd one out. I didn't say you should assume that either. You shouldn't assume either one until you have some reason to do so. >A physicist won't be able to disprove
223.
by xamuel 7y ago
Until we solve the hard problem of consciousness, the door on p-zombies is wide open. It's arrogant to assume that just because you are conscious, everyone else must be conscious like you. Maybe consciousness is caused by a particular
224.
by xamuel 7y ago
As a whole, an AGI is so general that we'll probably never be able to quantify its intelligence level. But we can quantify the intelligence of various "cross sections" of an AGI. As an extremely simple example, whatever the h
225.
by xamuel 7y ago
Bonus points for mentioning Gorgias :) Re: wouldn't society race past this question without hesitation [if someone got lucky and produced what appears to be strong AI by just randomly throwing atoms together]? Yes, and in fact some peo
226.
by xamuel 7y ago
People in this debate miss a subtle issue, and it causes no end of confusion. The subtle issue is this. There is a difference between (1) accidentally building a computer which happens to think, and (2) intentionally building a computer whi
227.
by xamuel 7y ago
There's even a Platonic dialogue, the "Ion", in which Socrates converses with a rhapsode whose entire life career is reciting Homer. Seems unlikely that Plato would just make up something like that from whole cloth.
228.
by xamuel 7y ago
If you're willing to stretch things that far, a chess playing robot could be considered a DM who administers an extremely hyperspecific campaign which is isomorphic to chess. Or, tic-tac-toe for that matter. A C-RPG captures D&D in
229.
by xamuel 7y ago
>It was solved (for AI) by Stuart Russell in his new book Human Compatible Correction: it was downplayed by Stuart Russell. Stuart took simplistic strawman examples and made them look silly by assuming perfectly calibrated common sense
230.
by xamuel 7y ago
Depends on your definition of dangerous. Dangerous in the same sense that a button you could press to directly stimulate your brain's pleasure centers would be dangerous, because you'd probably end up pressing it to the exclusion
231.
by xamuel 7y ago
This is sort of like asking: If you had Star Trek replicators, what would be the optimal configuration to use those replicators as paperweights? D&D is not a game with rigorously defined rules and winning conditions, instead it's a
232.
by xamuel 7y ago
If the goal of a DM is defined like this, then a genuine AGI would be more likely to cheat: instead of playing D&D at all, the AGI would use hypnosis to manipulate the players into a pure hedonistic pleasure-trance. Whether such an unin
233.
by xamuel 7y ago
This is especially evident in e.g. third-party Python libraries. For example, say you have a pandas dataframe with a column "foo" and you accidentally try to read column "fooo". Instead of getting a useful exception like
234.
by xamuel 7y ago
What if instead of an extra $3/hr, the differential pay were an extra $10,000/hr? Obviously then the cost difference would matter. So, there must be a cutoff somewhere. Is the cutoff more than $3 or less than $3? We don't h
235.
by xamuel 7y ago
>Writing a program that writes a program? Definitely AI. So do you think the following is AI? print("print('Hello World!')") It is a program which writes a program, so by what you've just said, it's AI... As
236.
by xamuel 7y ago
Or you could have PTSD or just vanilla noise-sensitivity and just living in a quiet neighborhood could be extremely important to you. You might have made very significant personal sacrifices to afford to move to a suburb for exactly this re
237.
by xamuel 7y ago
That analogy isn't exactly accurate. To make it accurate, the kids sitting in the current seats would have to have paid a significant amount to purchase those seats. Also, throw in some kids who, for neurological reasons, become extrem
238.
by xamuel 7y ago
I find that my brain sort of automatically uses connections. The really interesting thing about SRS is that you don't have to consciously think about how you're going to remember the cards. Like, you don't consciously think,
239.
by xamuel 7y ago
The "moderation" part of journals, the editorship and peer review, is already performed virtually entirely by volunteers.
240.
by xamuel 7y ago
It seems like people so often underestimate dark age intelligence, as if everyone back then just spent their time groping around in mud pits. I'm curious how extreme you could go (in a Sokal affair kind of sense) and get away with it.

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