931–940 of 952 posts
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Math PhDs are also a dime a dozen
Yes, they are, but remember the point I was responding to, namely, Eliezer should be ignored because he has no academic credentials.
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I wish I could live in a world as simple as yours.
Is that your way of acknowledging you don't know anything about this? Because trust me, this is not simple at all, and since you think it is, it just means you don't know anything about it. This is understandable, a lot of people don't. But you should avoid posting about it, there are some VERY motivated people who post about this in every thread, and downvote, and flag. Don't be one of them, they are motivated by ha…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Math PhDs are also a dime a dozen
Yes, they are, but remember the point I was responding to, namely, Eliezer should be ignored because he has no academic credentials.
That's not the full claim you were responding to.
You were responding to me, and I was arguing that Yudkowsky has no academic credentials, but also no background in the field he claims to be an expert on, he self-publishes and is not peer-reviewed by mainstream AI researchers or the scientific community, and he has no practical AI achievements either.
So it's not just lack of academic credentials, there's also no achievements in the field he claims to research. Both facts together present a damning picture of Yudkowsky.
To be honest he seems like a scifi author who took himself too seriously. He writes scifi, he's not a scientist.
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To be fair it did work out suprisingly well in the early days, even the really weird comment chains attracted only a small minority of the bizarrely deranged. Probably because back then the median LW commentator was noticeably smarter than the median HN commentator. Pascal’s mugging was even coined there I believe, but then as it grew… whatever communal anti-derangement protections existed gradually declined. And it…
I am not against rationalism at all despite my quoting of Hume. Reason is essential and has done much good to the world. It's just that things tend to get kooky at the tail end of any distribution. The rationalist community have some of the smartest people and the best blogs, and they think through things much more thoroughly and are much less prone to biases and fallacies than most online communities.
Are you actually smart if you spend any significant amount of time thinking through things in order to be rational?
I have a good friend that is by all reasonable metrics incredibly smart. Graduated high school and college at the same time at age 16. Doctorate at 22. Professor at a top university for several years. But lives in absolute squalor and spends his time and brain power on rational thinking and philosophy to understand life.
But, it is life, and if you don't experience it how can you understand it, and if you do understand it, what is gained?
His life is the inside of his house and a daily trip to Dollar general to buy mountain dew, cigarettes and frozen burritos.
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Yes, they are, but remember the point I was responding to, namely, Eliezer should be ignored because he has no academic credentials.
Personally I think the lack of actual output in the field is more relevant than the academic credentials.
Your comment is like dismissing someone who is opposed to human cloning on the grounds that he hasn't published any papers that advance the enterprise of human cloning and hasn't worked in a cloning lab.
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Yes, they are, but remember the point I was responding to, namely, Eliezer should be ignored because he has no academic credentials.
> [...] remember the point I was responding to, namely, Eliezer should be ignored because he has no academic credentials. That's not the full claim you were responding to. You were responding to me, and I was arguing that Yudkowsky has no academic credentials, but also no background in the field he claims to be an expert on, he self-publishes and is not peer-reviewed by mainstream AI researchers or the scientific com…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjH2B_sE_RQ
His book _Rationality: A-Z_ is widely admired including by people you would concede are machine-learning researchers: https://www.lesswrong.com/rationality
Anyway, this thread began as an answer to a question about the community of tens of thousands of people that has no better name than "the rationalists". I didn't want to get in a long conversation about Eliezer though I'm willing to continue to converse about the rationalists or on the proposition that AI is a potent extinction risk, which proposition is taken seriously by many people besides just Eliezer.
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Gwen, not Gwern. Gwen Danielson, if he is still alive, is wanted for his possible involvement in multiple homicides related to the Ziz cult. Not Gwern. And unihemispheric sleep (Gwen’s word for what they do; they like to invent their own terms) is one of the techniques the Ziz cult uses.
Thanks for correcting that mixup! So there's no source whatsoever for this bizarre notion other than the Zizian death cult itself. That makes it even crazier that some people (whether here or in the news media) seem to be taking it at face value, though.
There are many strange altered states of consciousness found by experimentation, and I can totally believe that some form of auto-hypnosis + sleep deprivation - which would parallel many well-attested mind-altering practices in many different cultures & religions - could have bizarre effects or induce psychosis and hallucinating demonic entities, and turn an activist vegan into a murderer. (Their specific interpretation of 'unihemispheric' sleep may or may not be true. I would say that it's worth checking... except I'm not sure how one could either prudently or ethically investigate it, given the apparent consequences.)
And it would answer the question many people have been asking about how these unlikely-seeming murderers were made, in a way that the rest of it all does not.
[Former member of that world, roommates with one of Ziz's friends for a while, so I feel reasonably qualified to speak on this.] The problem with rationalists/EA as a group has never been the rationality, but the people practicing it and the cultural norms they endorse as a community. As relevant here: 1) While following logical threads to their conclusions is a useful exercise, each logical step often involves some…
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> Humanity long time ago decided that infinity * 0 = 0 for very good practical reasons. Among them being that ∞ × 0 = ∞ makes no mathematical sense. Multiplying literally any other number by zero results in zero. I see no reason to believe that infinity (positive or negative) would be some exception; infinity instances of nothing is still nothing.
The problem is that infinity is neither a real nor a complex number, nor an element of any algebraic field, and the proposition that "x * 0 = 0" only holds if x is an element of some algebraic field. It is a theorem that depends on the field axioms. The real numbers can be extended to include two special elements ∞ and -∞, but this extension does not constitute a field, and the range of expressions in which these sym…
Or, if you really insist on speaking in mathematician-ese, an infinite series of zero is zero, and a zero-bounded summation is zero regardless of the summand:
x · y ≡ Σ(y, i = 1) x = y times { x + x + … + x } ≡ Σ(x,i=1) y = x times { y + y + … + y }
∞ · 0 ≡ Σ(0, i = 1) ∞ = 0 times { ∞ + ∞ + … + ∞ } = 0
0 · ∞ ≡ Σ(∞, i = 1) 0 = ∞ times { 0 + 0 + … + 0 } = 0
Or, if you prefer programmer-ese:
julia> i = 0
0
julia> while true
println(i)
global i += 0
end
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
Either way, seems pretty straightforward to define if you have a clear definition of what multiplication is in the first place (and what either zero or infinite iterations of that definition will produce).
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The problem is that infinity is neither a real nor a complex number, nor an element of any algebraic field, and the proposition that "x * 0 = 0" only holds if x is an element of some algebraic field. It is a theorem that depends on the field axioms. The real numbers can be extended to include two special elements ∞ and -∞, but this extension does not constitute a field, and the range of expressions in which these sym…
Infinity doesn't need to be in some "algebraic field" for it to be patently true that an infinite amount of nothing is still nothing, and that adding zero to itself over and over again for an infinitely long time will never give you a result other than zero. It's only impossible to define if you overthink it, and/or maintain a needlessly narrow definition of what a "number" is. Or, if you really insist on speaking in…
By Definition 3.15 as provided in my last post, sₙ ⟶ +∞, and you will have to take it for granted that tₙ ⟶ 0 [0]. Intuitively we can see that the terms of {sₙ} are 1, 2, 3, ... tending to +∞; for {tₙ} we have 1, 1/2, 1/3, ... tending to zero, for progressively larger values of n.
Now I ask what happens if we multiply the "infinite'th" terms of both sequences together. The first few terms of this product would be 1 · 1, 2 · 1/2, 3 · 1/3, and so on; I ask what the value x is in the limit sₙ · tₙ ⟶ x as we evaluate further and further "nth" terms of both sequences.
You may have observed from the first three terms evaluated that sₙ · tₙ = n(1/n) = 1. Thus, as we continue to increase the value of n, it's always the case that sₙ · tₙ ⟶ 1 and the product tends to 1, because the product is constant and irrespective of n; we've "cancelled it out."
The limit of the product is the product of the limits [1]; that is, sₙ · tₙ ⟶ +∞ · 0, as we first established that sₙ ⟶ +∞, tₙ ⟶ 0.
If we thus take your supposition that +∞ · 0 = 0 for granted, we obtain sₙ · tₙ ⟶ 0, which contradicts our previous result that sₙ · tₙ ⟶ 1.
Thus we can either dispense with the cited established theorems of analysis used to deduce that sₙ · tₙ ⟶ 1, or conclude that the supposition +∞ · 0 = 0 must be false.
It might be the case that Σ(∞, i = 1) 0 = 0, but you can't extend this to conclude +∞ · 0 = 0 in general. Lots of intuitions from informal mathematics and even calculus start to break down once you examine the lower-level "machine code" of proof and analysis, especially once you start talking about concepts like infinity.
[0] See Theorem 3.20 (a) in Rudin: https://archive.org/details/principles-of-mathematical-analy...
[1] See Theorem 3.3 (c) in Rudin: https://archive.org/details/principles-of-mathematical-analy...