cubetime

I could come up with a story that explains why technical work would more readily admit of sexism, e.g. less opportunity to learn to see coworkers and customers as people rather than gender-based caricatures. I don't think this is a big factor either way, though...

I'd expect it's worse in tech than some other professions on average because tech is mostly male, which I think is mostly due to gendered expectations originating from parenting and early education.

I think "just don't be sexist please" makes more sense than "don't be sexist at work if you belong to this profession". Like I desperately clarified in my edit which you may not have seen, I'm not saying it shouldn't be pointed out in tech, I'm saying it's suspicious that the cultural narrative focuses so much on tech in particular.

I know far more developers that think the egalitarianism myth is wrong and silly than that buy into it unexamined (I'm not sure I know anyone in the second category personally), though I suppose I might've lucked out.

I do sometimes wonder what's added by focusing on sexism in tech, in particular, and suggesting it's uniquely a problem with tech. I can believe it's worse here on average than some other comfortable professional jobs, but seriously, sexism is everywhere and if we want to reduce it, it makes more sense to me to focus on the problem itself in full generality rather than an environment it's found in.

Unless you want to invoke an explanation that involves some combination of classism and good old-fashioned picking on (relatively) low-status nerds because it's easier and feels more natural. Then there wouldn't be much left to wonder.

(Edit: NOT saying we shouldn't point out sexism in tech, but expressing skepticism at the broader cultural narrative around how software people are uniquely ignorant and sexist relative to other professions. Ask ten women who've worked somewhere besides tech for a few years for some stories of sexism, you'll hear plenty.)

Ah, yes, "a single neuron" is indeed a small subsystem of a brain, and it is indeed common nowadays.

If you're just saying that this specific project is a poor use of resources at the moment, then yeah, agreed. I don't really feel justified in suggesting that any particular level of abstraction will have so little to tell us that it'll never be a good use of resources.

>That [simulating small subsystems of a brain] is what's already happening all over the world right now, in thousands of independently scoped simulations and experiments.

Woah! Links? The searches I can come up with aren't turning up anything besides that simulation of a rat cortical column and the various attempts at nematode uploading.

Agreed that it's unfeasible for now, of course, but I'm a little amazed people aren't seeing the uses of this.

We can edit, directly observe, and record/playback simulated brains. We can test ten million different models on top of a recorded simulation and see which one fits best. Eero doesn't think we could learn about how the brain works by simulating a trillion slightly different permutations on a brain, or (maybe more ethically) small subsystems of a brain, and observing how each behaves?

Sweet god, the economic implications! http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/uploads.html

Horrifying, maybe, but I don't see how people can get away with suggesting this will never be valuable to anyone.

AI safety is more of a game theory problem than an engineering problem. Obviously understanding how the thing is implemented could help a lot in understanding how to handle the thing being embedded in a society, but they're not quite the same thing.

"I'm really tired of sociologists and economists who don't know much about biology making statements about human behavior."

Consciousness has next-to-nothing to do with AI safety. People are concerned about software that acts like an agent, not software that has qualia.

I wish it were possible to effectively mass-communicate more complicated beliefs than "X has positive valence" or "X has negative valence". AI will be an enormous boon to every aspect of our lives for probably at least several decades, until it reaches the point where it's possible it'll accidentally become very, very bad. These are not contradictory in any way!

See also: Do Rational People Exist? http://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/do-rationalists...

I model people's motivations (and systems made out of their motivations, to a lesser extent) as tangly, illegible, time-varying weighted directed graphs of weighted goals, where none of the nodes seems to actually persistently have indegree == 0 or outdegree == 0. The use of "terminal" and "instrumental" here isn't very clear to me. [http://lesswrong.com/lw/l3/thou_art_godshatter/]

But, to me, "company" usually means something like "an organization with higher-level goals that include selling things to customers and making money for its other stakeholders". When that's not the case, I think of words like "charity", "non-profit", and "club".