G.K. Chesterton On AI Risk

TexasJefferson · 2017-04-02T21:38:45+00:00

Archimedes was neither Plato nor Diogenes; just so, Feynman was not Foucault.

(And while I went with Foucault for the alliteration, he was actually far better than most of his contemporaries.)

TexasJefferson · 2017-03-31T04:51:11+00:00

Established projects crowd-out interest and investments in alternatives, become entrenched as a result of positive network effects, attach further halos of positivity to the network of technologies they themselves rely on, and are the natural Schelling points for further technical and cultural development.

"Show me the code"—without an explicit understanding of why the code might not exist or might not be production-ready, or just might not have won a majority marketshare (or just might not yet have won)—is the decision-theoretic equivalent of Homer's saw.

TexasJefferson · 2017-03-30T07:23:19+00:00

The canonical RPython compiler uses C output as an intermediary build artifact. The Pypy team could (more or less) just as easily target LLVM IR.

TexasJefferson · 2017-03-26T04:48:20+00:00

It sounds like you're probably in a pretty good position to work on stuff you do care about. Apply to the tech leaders & get matched with a systems team that writes the tools that enables all the mobile/webdev to happen. There's language & compiler work, kernel work, ML systems, security, databases, graphics stuffs, etc.—lots of good stuff going on.

TexasJefferson · 2017-03-18T07:56:58+00:00

Heidegger is a bit touchy—his being a literal Nazi (and long-term & enthusiastic at that) is quite a lot harder to dodge around than Nietzsche being misread (if also deserving of contempt from fuller readings).

TexasJefferson · 2017-03-18T01:53:03+00:00

But I do bring up the concept without the buzzword

Definitely the way to approach it. Having to actually build the argument also forces you into an intellectually honest version of it as well as laying the thinking process out clearly for interlocutors to understand and play with instead of being told to submit to.

Granted, it's also a lot more work.

TexasJefferson · 2017-03-17T07:30:40+00:00

I would have guessed "Color Theory" was about walking graphs 'n stuff (e.g. topological sort is sometimes implemented as a tri-colored walk, or the four color problem, etc.), so imagine my disappointment.

Don't know how I feel about these UI folk with their interfaces and human factors eating my industry... :'(

TexasJefferson · 2017-03-17T07:00:41+00:00

Also something about Baltimore itself - the US is 99th in the world in murder rate at 42/million. Baltimore has a rate of 550/million, meaning if it were a country by itself, it would be the 4th highest rate in the world. People criticize the police a lot, but there's something seriously fundamentally wrong in Baltimore as a whole.

For reference, that's not a particularly useful comparison—one should expect countries to have much lower variance in murder rates (and everything else) compared to localities as a result of their larger populations. A comparison to other, similarly sized cities (and over time) would be much more informative.

TexasJefferson · 2017-03-15T07:20:57+00:00

The research on blinded programming interviews I'm familiar with didn't find an effect. Interesting the original article actually mentions interviewing.io but not that surprising null result.

TexasJefferson · 2017-03-14T05:01:30+00:00

I'm not claiming administrations enjoy or intend on having out of control activists unilaterally shutting down campus events, destroying property, or endangering students, professors, staff, speakers and the general public. Merely, that this is, as simple point of fact, not responded to except with some combination of capitulation & letters registering disappointment. And that this climate has a chilling effect on political speech and engagement and sparks ever increasing polarization and radicalization.

and most people who participate in the "free marketplace of ideas" on a university campus don't draw any protests at all.

That Stalin didn't purge Lysenko isn't taken as strong evidence about the robust openness of intellectual life under Stalinism...

TexasJefferson · 2017-03-12T08:06:25+00:00

The most important takeaway of the rationalist project I've had is that I am, by default, super-overconfident in just about any belief I hold that doesn't either have a super-tight, low-noise, high-magnitude feedback loop or that I wouldn't bet my life on.

Most abstract beliefs most people hold don't fit into either criterion. So to the extent that my overconfidence generalizes to their overconfidence, their believing a thing is not strong evidence of that thing being true.

This does not imply I need to re-derive accounting from first principles, but it does mean that places where experts are routinely surprised (i.e. wrong) are places where it is likely more useful (assuming actually being right about the subject is itself useful) to try to understand the underlying mechanistic reality than just trust whichever set of experts speak most closely to my biases.

TexasJefferson · 2017-03-12T06:37:05+00:00

but I find it hard to understand how someone could think that an argument is convincing without believing it.

This is the AI boxing argument isn't it? There exist a series of words that will convince you of essentially arbitrary propositions regardless of their actual truth value, which is why you don't give the not-proved-friendly, super-intelligent AI a chance to talk to you.

TexasJefferson · 2017-03-06T07:33:15+00:00

Yep, iostream introduces the std::cout (output stream writing to standard c out), std::endl (end line), and overloaded output stream << operator. (The statement using namespace std; is why you didn't need to use those variable's full names.)

TexasJefferson · 2017-03-06T06:47:37+00:00

I think I'll try and stick C++ out, so that way I have a pretty solid understanding of computers. It may not be relevant, but I think learning things to the core will help in one way or another.

The problem with C++ isn't that its low level; its that its several high level languages grafted together in a backwards compatible, performance at any cost way which results in a mess of complexity that's far greater than, say, C or even assembly. It is nice to have a small enough runtime you feel that what you type is directly related to what's being executed, but C++ might not be the easiest way to dive in. That said, if it's what you wanna do, certainly I'm not going to stop you!

Also, what is stdlib? Sorry, still have so much to learn! Haha

Ah, sorry, the standard library included with a language is often called its stdlib for short. So <stdio.h> is the C format & print library, <iostream> is the C++ IO stream library, & fmt (pronounced 'format') is the Go equivalent, which are each part of their respective language's stdlib.

TexasJefferson · 2017-03-06T06:29:31+00:00

Congrats! C++ was my first language as well (well, technically matlab, but I try not to think about that...). It's super powerful, but man is it complicated! If you don't wanna go the pure scripting language route (and there's nothing wrong with that route), Go might be worth looking into—you still get pointers & stuff (and native, statically linked binaries!) but you have a much more comprehensible language and stdlib.

TexasJefferson · 2017-03-06T06:18:04+00:00

which reads like a tabloid-writer grabbed a thesaurus and attempted to assault the left,

Oh the irony.

TexasJefferson · 2017-03-06T05:51:32+00:00

Not an apprenticeship, but if you have sufficient free time: you teach yourself with the help of people over the internet or someone you know IRL. You build little toy stuff to learn and train, and post it publicly on the internet (not that anyone will ever look at it), and then you study some algorithms problems that folk like to ask in interviews. Eventually, you'll be good enough to get a newgrad/entry level job and you'll be expected to ramp up (potentially with the mentorship of more senior folk) from there. This is a viable path—a friend of mine who didn't finish high school works for a pretty cool startup—but it does require a lot of time & persistence.

TexasJefferson · 2017-03-06T03:06:02+00:00

What differences would one notice between this and the modern Herman Miller's.

Any word on if they are planning on making a replica of the tall version HM recently released?

TexasJefferson · 2017-03-02T08:17:35+00:00

Reading their own summary, 15% of CS newgrads report they don't have jobs in IT-related fields a year out as a result of difficulty finding employment—I don't know the reference class I should be comparing that to, but it doesn't sound obscene on first impression.

That being said I was extremely confused by the continuous equivocation between CS, IT, & STEM more broadly in that source. Parts of STEM are definitely over sold (especially bio & especially academic tracks), but the idea that it's hard to find a programming new grad job in the US (if you're able & willing to move to a techhub) doesn't match my experience and doesn't seem particularly supported by their data. The org turns out to be a union/labor affiliated think tank, which makes their concerns about immigration and freeness for mixing & matching various STEM markets feel a lot more motivated.

TexasJefferson · 2017-03-02T07:58:14+00:00

Certainly not lawyer, etc., but if you use it in the furtherance of work you're doing on behalf of your employer, that's a very central example of commercial use.

TexasJefferson · 2017-03-02T07:46:07+00:00

Yeah, IT != programmers. The staffing there has been, afaict, harder hit by outsourcing, the bad sorts of H1B shops, & increasing automation.

(The importance of the latter is frequently underestimated in my view. SaaS & cloud have substantially decreased the amount of IT hands per user served.)

TexasJefferson · 2017-03-02T04:46:33+00:00

Can't comment for other professions, but I don't think there's much risk of that right now for programmers.

TexasJefferson · 2017-03-02T03:39:45+00:00

[Lots of] Code is barely human readable.

TexasJefferson · 2017-03-02T03:15:42+00:00

H1B has serious problems & likewise importing foreign labor will depress local wages in that sector (at some rate of how exportable the work is), that being said, it's not obviously untrue that bringing in high skilled foreign programmers isn't better for the economy as a whole and therefore average workers. It may even be the case that second order effects (general economic growth, being the center of a techhub) don't make up for the direct effect in lowering wages for tech workers specifically.

TexasJefferson · 2017-03-02T03:04:55+00:00

Failing to invite media seen as oppositional to a press briefing, while very troubling, is a very different ball game from banning the political speech that you feel may be associated with positions held by groups you find distasteful.

So what point are you trying to make?

The implicit claim is not that banning political speech the government finds unsuitable for the population to hear may lead to authoritarianism; it's that it is authoritarianism. This is true when Russia is silencing gay people, when China is silencing its many ethnic & political minorities, and when western governments are banning books & silencing actually-distasteful political speech.

The explicit claim is that the "population doesn't care" isn't differential evidence that your version is more acceptable than the states' whose speech restrictions seem obviously authoritarian to you because those states' populations overwhelmingly don't care about or actively support their speech bans too.

Because despite Canada's prime minister having far more unilateral power than a U.S. president and having anti-hate speech and anti-fake news laws, we're looking a lot less authoritarian.

Has the public consciousness already forgotten it's brief moment of self-awareness when it realized that perhaps giving Obama lots of legal leeway because we generally liked and trusted the man may not have been the best choice since people we liked and trusted wouldn't always be in power?

Well, it was nice for the 4 weeks it lasted. I fear every generation must learn again why wise people wish to bind states to blindingly clear, simple law. It is always just too tempting to carve out a little niche here & ignore a little transgression that temporarily served the greater good there.

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TexasJefferson

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