Viewing profile — alexilliamson

Perhaps you misundestand the Tennessee Williams quote. He's not saying that Miami is literally in Ohio, just that is has no character.

The current guy is nothing if not a documented professional wrestling fan

I have a decent grasp of theory and have seen the value of grinding scales on other instruments. With piano, I'm never sure which fingers I'm supposed to be using or when to move m…

Most likely is that the side with the army and guns turns the blue areas into an occupied police state, and sells it to the constituency as a "civil war", despite it being complete…

Well-defined goal is the big one. We wanted a big bomb. What does AGI do? AGI is up against a philosophical barrier, not a technical one. We'll continue improving AI's ability to a…

It would still need an objective to guide the evolution that was originally given by humans. Humans have the drive for survival and reproduction... what about AGI? How do we go fro…

Do you have examples?

I didn't mean for it to be inflammatory, but it's certainly not unnecessary to the conversation. We can both-sides it all day, but the fact is that one side has a militia proudly r…

Yes, but only one side has the guns.

This is the "limiting harm" part of 2.

Congrats on having good parents! However, I believe that most of this discussion applies to those less fortunate poor kids with shitty parents.

I'm very skeptical of the claim that most of the kids with good parents in your poor neighborhood ended up in the 1%. Even with good parents, kids can grow up to be dumb and poorly…

What happens more often, MSM doing culture war gymnastics? Or people accusing MSM of culture war gymnastics (an accusation which is, itself, culture war gymnastics)?

I was sort of with you until the FSD

I read all three and had enough hope at the beginning to push through. I really hated the second person, the stream of consciousness prose, the random all-caps, and the relentlessl…

Ok fine... these replies are making me feel like I should read some more NK Jimison. Broken Earth did not land for me at all, but I hear all the enthusiasm and I'll keep an open mi…

I did not initially realize the Hugos worked this way, so I really felt compelled to check out the Broken Earth trilogy. Now, I'm one of the last people to cry "woke", but those bo…

With the exception of abortion - which I think is the hardest ideological gap to bridge - I agree that the media and government keep the focus on trivial culture war issues to crea…

The end results of any statistical exercise (frequentist or Bayesian) depend on something assumed.

Why would anyone give control of air traffic or weapons to AI? That's the key step in AGI, not some tech development. By what social process exactly would we give control of nukes …

No way. That interview was a full month and half ago. Moreover, these days everyone and their brother is going on JRE to complain about "woke".

If you're looking for a complex fantasy series that will occupy you for a long time, I cannot recommend Malazan Book of the Fallen enough!

AskHistorians is one of the finest things the Internet has to offer IMO

There is some good content in the book, but beware that Matthew Walker is a bit of an intellectual fraudster https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/03/24/why-we-sle...

She bought digital and I can play it though.