In descending order of how much I liked them, I read in October nonfiction:
Generally I hate business stuff but this book presents it really well, references modern cognitive science and avoids the bullshit management speak. Were I feeling cheesy I'd call it "a business book for rationalists" (they even quote Eleizer).
Disclaimer, since I've never read any other proper business books so I don't know how someone with more domain specific knowledge would find it.
Doom: Repercussions of Reaction
Multiheaded waited. The posts above him got downvoted and hidden from view. There were reactionaries on Less Wrong. He didn't see them, but had expected them now for years. His warnings to Konkvistador were not listenend to and now it was too late. Far too late for now, anyway. Multiheaded was a neurotic leftist for four years. When he was young he watched the internet debates and he said to dad "I want to be on the net daddy."
Dad said "No! You will BE TROLL BY REACTIONARIES!"
There was a time when he bel...
I recommend Harry Potter and the Natural 20. I noticed a recommendation for it in a thread somewhere here, then there was another recommendation at HPMoR. It's quite good, even if it requires an understanding of D&D.
I, Robot is a stupid movie, but I'll always remember what Will Smith says to one of the robots:
"You are a clever imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot take a blank canvas and turn it into a masterpiece?"
Not even a decade after the film's release and robots are already writing symponies and turning blank canvases into masterpieces.
I like the robot's response:
Can you?
Even if robots fail to reach the peak of human capability, so do most ordinary people.
I actually liked the movie quite a bit. The antagonist follows a really weird and bad strategy for the sake of creating an action movie (a much subtler take-over of humanity would have made far more sense). But I think it's a decent stab at Friendly AI difficulty, in a way the general public can understand - you can give a machine several rules that theoretically make it perfectly safe for humans, but those rules can still have ramifications you didn't expect, leading to actions you wouldn't have wanted.
Agreed that if it wasn't called "I, Robot" it would have been "better."
Lloyd, A Turing Test for Free Will:
Before Alan Turing made his crucial contributions to the theory of computation, he studied the question of whether quantum mechanics could throw light on the nature of free will. This paper investigates the roles of quantum mechanics and computation in free will. Although quantum mechanics implies that events are intrinsically unpredictable, the ‘pure stochasticity’ of quantum mechanics adds randomness only to decision-making processes, not freedom. By contrast, the theory of computation implies that, even when our decisions arise from a completely deterministic decision-making process, the outcomes of that process can be intrinsically unpredictable, even to—especially to—ourselves. I argue that this intrinsic computational unpredictability of the decision-making process is what gives rise to our impression that we possess free will. Finally, I propose a ‘Turing test’ for free will: a decision-maker who passes this test will tend to believe that he, she, or it possesses free will, whether the world is deterministic or not.
This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. I find that exposure to LW ideas makes me less likely to enjoy some entertainment media that is otherwise quite popular, and finding media recommended by LWers is a good way to mitigate this. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.
Rules: