I don't follow Bitcoin development very closely, basically just reading about it if a story shows up on New York Times or Wired. If you're curious as to why, see this post and this thread.

I received another question from this same interlocutor:

Also, I understand you haven't read the original bitcoind code but do you have any guess for why the author chose to lift your SHA256 implementation from Crypto++ when the project already required openssl-0.9.8h? Is there anything odd about the OpenSSL implementation that wouldn't be immediately obvious to someone who isn't a crypto expert?

Hmm, I’m not sure. I thought it might have been the optimizations I put into my SHA256 implementation in March 2009 (due to discussions on the NIST mailing list for standardizing SHA-3, about how fast SHA-2 really is), which made it the fastest available at the time, but it looks like Bitcoin 0.1 was already released prior to that (in Jan 2009) and therefore had my old code. Maybe someone could test if the old code was still faster than OpenSSL?

It's Chinese Pinyin romanization, so pronounced "way dye".

ETA: Since Pinyin is a many to one mapping, and as a result most Chinese articles about Bitcoin put the wrong name down for me, I'll take this opportunity to mention that my name is written logographically as 戴维.

What do you make of the decision to use C++?

It seems like a pretty standard choice for anyone wanting to build such a piece of software...

Do you have any opinions of the original coding beyond the 'inelegant but amazingly resilient' meme? Was there anything that stood out about it?

No I haven't read any of it.

No I don't think it's Szabo or anyone else whose name is known to me. I explained why I don't think it's Szabo to a reporter from London's Sunday Times who wrote about it in the March 2 issue. I'll try to find and quote the relevant section.

I had the article jailbroken recently, and the relevant parts (I hope I got it right, my version has scrambled-up text) are:

Nonetheless, the original bitcoin white paper is written in an academic style, with an index of sources at the end. I go to Wei Dai, an original cypherpunk, the proposer of a late-1990s e-currency called b-moneyand an early correspondent of Satoshi. When, in the first of several late-night chats, I ask him how many people would have the necessary competencies to create something like bitcoin, he tells me:

"Coming up with bitcoin required someone who, a) thought about money on a deep level, and b) learnt the tools of cryptography, c) had the idea that something like Bitcoin is possible, d) was motivated enough to develop the idea into something practical, e) was technically skilled enough to make it secure, f) had enough social skills to build and grow a community around it. The number of people who even had a), b) and c) was really small -- ie, just Nick Szabo and me -- so I'd say not many people could have done all these things."

A sudden frisson. Szabo, an American computer scientist who has also served as law professor at George Washington University, developed a system for "bit gold" between 1998 and 2005, which has been seen as a precursor to Bitcoin. Is he saying that Szabo is Satoshi? "No, I'm pretty sure it's not him." you, then? "No. When I said just Nick and me, I meant before Satoshi" So where could this person have come from? "Well, when I came up with b-money I was still in college, or just recently graduated, and Nick was at a similar age when he came up with bit gold, so I think Satoshi could be someone like that." "Someone young, with the energy for that kind of commitment?" "yeah, someone with energy and time, and that isn't obligated to publish papers under their real name."

...I go back to Szabo's pal, Wei Dai. "Wei," I say, "the other night you said you were sure Nick Szabo wasn't Satoshi. What made you sure?" "Two reasons," he replies. "One: in Satoshi's early emails to me he was apparently unaware of Nick Szabo's ideas and talks about how bitcoin 'expands on your ideas into a complete working system' and 'it achieves nearly all the goals you set out to solve in your b-money paper'. I can't see why, if Nick was Satoshi, he would say things like that to me in private. And, two: Nick isn't known for being a C++ programmer."

Perversely, a point in Szabo's favour. But Wei forwards me the relevant emails, and it's true: Satoshi had been ignorant of Szabo's bit-gold plan until Wei mentioned it. Furthermore, a trawl through Szabo's work finds him blogging and fielding questions about bit gold on his Unenumerated blog on December 27, 2008, while Satoshi was preparing bitcoin to meet the world a week later. Why? Because Szabo didn't know about bitcoin: almost no one outside the Cryptography Mailing List did, and I can find no evidence of him ever having been there. Indeed, by 2011, the bit-gold inventor is blogging in defence of bitcoin, pointing out several improvements on the system he devised.

I actually meant to email you about this earlier, but is there any chance you could post those emails (you've made them half-public as it is, and Dustin Trammell posted his a while back) or elaborate on Nick not knowing C++?

I've been trying to defend Szabo against the accusations of being Satoshi*, but to be honest, his general secrecy has made it very hard for me to rule him out or come up with a solid defense. If, however, he doesn't even know C or C++, then that massively damages the claims he's Satoshi. (Oh, one could work around it by saying he worked with someone else who did know C/C++, but that's pretty strained and not many people seriously think Satoshi was a group.)

* on Reddit, HN, and places like http://blog.sethroberts.net/2014/03/11/nick-szabo-is-satoshi-nakamoto-the-inventor-of-bitcoin/ or https://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/satoshi-nakamoto-is-probably-nick-szabo/ (my response) / http://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/occams-razor-who-is-most-likely-to-be-satoshi-nakamoto/

Thank you so much Wei Dai.

My idea with second question was to understand if there is like an anarchist motivation around bitcoin that may have some risks in the future. I mean, if somehow when it reaches Wall Street the original developers can do anythink to affect credibility.

You say you don't think it was Szabo. Have you ever try to know who he was? Could you share who is your solid hunch and why?

Is relevant to know Satoshi?

If you know what you know today, would you have patented bmoney? Do you think bitcoin inventers would have done the same?

Kind regards Marta

Since the birth and early growth of Bitcoin, how has your view on the prospects for crypto-anarchy changed (if at all)? Why?

My views haven't changed very much, since the main surprise of Bitcoin to me is that people find such a system useful for reasons other than crypto-anarchy. Crypto-anarchy still depends on the economics of online security favoring the defense over the offense, but as I mentioned in Work on Security Instead of Friendliness? that still seems to be true only in limited domains and false overall.

What do you think are the most interesting philosophical problems within our grasp to be solved?

I'm not sure there is any. A big part of it is that metaphilosophy is essentially a complete blank, so we have no way of saying what counts as a correct solution to a philosophical problem, and hence no way of achieving high confidence that any particular philosophical problem has been solved, except maybe simple (and hence not very interesting) problems, where the solution is just intuitively obvious to everyone or nearly everyone. It's also been my experience that any time we seem to make real progress on some interesting philosophical problem, additional complications are revealed that we didn't foresee, which makes the problem seem even harder to solve than before the progress was made. I think we have to expect this trend to continue for a while yet.

If you instead ask what are some interesting philosophical problems that we can expect visible progress on in the near future, I'd cite decision theory and logical uncertainty, just based on how much new effort people are putting into them, and results from the recent past.

Do you think that solving normative ethics won't happen until a FAI? If so, why?

No I don't think that's necessarily true. It's possible that normative ethics, metaethics, and metaphilosophy are all solved before someone builds an FAI, especially if we can get significant intelligence enhancement to happen first. (Again, I think we need to solve metaethics and metaphilosophy first, otherwise how do we know that any proposed solution to normative ethics is actually correct?)

You argued previously that metaphilosophy and singularity strategies are fields with low hanging fruit. Do you have any examples of progress in metaphilosophy?

Unfortunately, not yet. BTW I'm not saying these are fields that definitely have low hanging fruit. I'm saying these are fields that could have low hanging fruit, based on how few people have worked in them.

Do you have any role models?

I do have some early role models. I recall wanting to be a real-life version of the fictional "Sandor Arbitration Intelligence at the Zoo" (from Vernor Vinge's novel A Fire Upon the Deep) who in the story is known for consistently writing the clearest and most insightful posts on the Net. And then there was Hal Finney who probably came closest to an actual real-life version of Sandor at the Zoo, and Tim May who besides inspiring me with his vision of cryptoanarchy was also a role model for doing early retirement from the tech industry and working on his own interests/causes.

I sometimes wonder if Bitcoin was invented not so much to become the global reserve digital cash currency, but to prove to others that the technology can work. It was more gateway rather than final destination

Have you read Satoshi's original emails?

1 - I didn't take any steps to code up b-money. Part of it was because b-money wasn't a complete practical design yet, but I didn't continue to work on the design because I had actually grown somewhat disillusioned with cryptoanarchy by the time I finished writing up b-money, and I didn't foresee that a system like it, once implemented, could attract so much attention and use beyond a small group of hardcore cypherpunks.

2 - It's hard for me to tell, but I'd guess that it was probably a mixture of technical challenge and wanting to change the world.

3 and 4 - Don't have much to say on these. Others have probably thought much more about these questions over the past months and years and are more qualified than I am to answer.

5 - I haven't seen any indication of this. What makes you suspect it?

I left before completing my degree, but I retain the option of returning. The lifestyle and culture of academia, the chance to do research, and the possibility of entering a research career are the advantages of academia over industry. At the time I left, none of those were as compelling to me as the career I've entered.

I'm glad I gave academia a shot, and I left not too long after I had figured out my priorities weren't well-satisfied by staying in grad school.

I am sorry if that's not very helpful. It was just a natural move for me at the time.

I'm not.

However, I happen to be a Youtopia volunteer, currently working on my own Spanish translation of HPMoR:

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9971807

I was aware of the translation you cite, but I can't remember having noticed that the translator was Colombian too. I guess that forces me to update my estimation.

Also, I should meet the guy.

This has been written about by Julia Wise at Giving Gladly, and others.

Two relevant considerations are:

• Major self-sacrifice tends to be unsustainable, leading to burnout.
• If an EA makes him or herself miserable, he or she is likely to repel bystanders, reducing other people's interest in being EAs.

Giving What We Can has set donating 10% of one's income as a threshold for membership. There's a historical precedent of this level of giving being sustainable for many people, coming from tithing practices in religion.

As for higher percentages: roughly speaking, it seems that marginal returns diminish very rapidly beyond $100k/year, so that one can give everything beyond that without substantially sacrificing quality of life. There are reasons why more can help: for example, to save extra money on the contingency that one is unemployed, or to be able to take care of many children. But I think that the level of sacrifice involved would be acceptable for many people. If one is living in an area with low cost of living, or doesn't want children, one can often live on a lot less than $100k/year without sacrificing quality of life.

I am strongly for socialism. This comes from two main points of view; 1) I think the ethical thing to do is to work together and help others as opposed to 'every man for himself'. 2) I think that 'team work' achieves more and thus it's not just about what is moral but what actually works better. One way to think of it is that we can either all buy a fire hose and a ladder- or we could pool the money together to pay for a professional team with a truck to service the town.

My rules, in rough order of priority:

1) Take advantage of any employer matching and any tax shelters. These are the only places in all of finance where you will ever find a sure source of free money.

2) Build a reserve fund of liquid and stable assets, sufficient for 3-6 months unavoidable expenses. Nothing exotic here - bank accounts, money market funds, or conservative mutual funds. This is for covering you if you lose your job, if your furnace breaks and needs replacing in January, or the like.

3) Invest a substantial proportion of your income, like 10-15%, unless you're truly destitute. If you're not, there are people who are living just fine on 85-90% of your current income, so live like them. You can count a proper pension against that number, but I mean this should be over and above government pension taxes. Most national pension schemes are primed for detonation not long after the Boomers retire, and for the same reason I expect significant reductions in growth rates over the long term. You're not going to be able to do what someone who retired in 1997 could do of just saving a big chunk after their kids graduated school and wind up with a giant nest egg from 20%+ growth every year, we're going to have to work for our retirement. It's much easier to get used to living on 90% of your income now than it is to have to live on 40% of it when you're too old to work. And this should go without saying, but you actually need to live within your means on the other 85-90% - don't go earning $50k, spending $50k, and saving $7k on top of that, or you'll wind up in Consumer Debt Hell.

4) Get disability insurance unless either your income is so low that it could be replaced by government benefits if you were unable to work, or you have good coverage from work(If you have mediocre coverage, top-up plans are fairly cheap). If you have dependants(including a partner), get term life insurance to replace your contributions to the household as well, plus a proper will and power of attorney. Other forms of insurance(critical illness, long-term care, whole life, child life, etc.) are luxuries, but those two are both very important.

5) Match your assets to your liabilities. If you're saving for a house next year, keep it in low-risk investments, and try to minimize up-front costs(or back-end costs) while worrying less about ongoing costs. If you're saving for retirement in 2057, invest riskier, and worry less about short-term fees but more about higher ongoing costs.

6) Try to diversify your portfolio as much as you reasonably can - index funds are a classic choice for doing so cheaply, but they're not perfect. Remember that "your portfolio" doesn't just include things where you get a quarterly report in the mail, it also includes things like your house and your career - don't be one of those Enron employees who lost both their job and their pension when the company tanked. Likewise, if you rent an apartment then a real estate investment may be much more suitable for you than it would be for a homeowner who already has the bulk of his net worth tied up in a real estate investment. Remember also that one stock index is not full diversification - the world is bigger than the S+P 500. Get some of your money overseas, and don't be afraid to put a bit into things like small-cap, emerging markets, commercial real estate, and commodities.

7) Know your risk tolerance, and invest accordingly. If you're the sort of person who will pull their money out when its value tanks, you shouldn't be in anything volatile - people like that lost their shirts in 2008-09, while the more placid investors made their money back pretty easily. If you can't handle a 30% drop, find an investment that won't lose 30%. Fortunately, this is pretty easy right now, because we have a very nice stress test of investment performance that's recent enough that it still shows up on performance charts. If you're a conservative investor, take a look at your investment's performance in 2008, and make sure you could handle seeing that on your next quarterly statement without panicking.

8) Don't be afraid to find an expert to help you. Some people treat finance as a hobby and do just fine, but if you're not one of those you can sometimes be stunned by how much money you've left on the table. As an example, a guy at my office spoke to a business owner the other day with two teenage kids. Told him to bring the kids on as employees for $10k/year, to get money out of the corporation virtually tax-free instead of taking it as personal salary and paying taxes at his(very high) rate. Saved him $9k per year that he didn't even know could be on the table with a sentence. I may be biased here, but I think I'm worth what I get paid, and most of my clients agree.

Obviously, these rules are not absolutes. For example, both employer matching and tax shelters often come with restrictions that may make them undesirable. But if you follow those rules, you'll be doing personal finance better than 90% of people.

• More than 100% of my profit's are from market making. Overall, I lose money on my positions. For the firm as a whole, position trading might be slightly profitable.

• I have a basic strategy that works, and I run a couple variants on that strategy on a decent number of products. I am always trying to tweak the strategy to make it better, and add more products to trade. I also put some effort into developing new ideas. Most of the time, new ideas are a waste of time. There just aren't that many fundamentally different strategies that work, and that provide the kind of risk/return profile that works in my industry. I know it is a cliche that you learn more from failure than from success, but in developing trading strategies I think the opposite is true. You can spend forever trying things that don't work. Its much more valuable to understand and refine an idea that basically works.

Isn't everyone?

I decided against responding to such a silly trap, so because zero is even and the truth condition thus fulfilled, I decided to answer the question, so because I decided to respond to the question and zero is even, I decided against responding to such a silly trap, so -s--s-..... -...

[You'll be our first line of defense against uFAI, smithereening it with a simple question.]

I only implemented it to the specification; I suggest you take up that question with the designer. If I had to answer myself (it's been a few years since that project), I would say that it is like the "cardboard programmer" or "rubber duck": its value is in giving you something to address your one-sided conversation to. It does just a little bit more than the rubber duck.

I can say that unlike Eliza it doesn't use any of the content of incoming messages at all, except to distinguish when it is addressed from when it is not, and whether there is a question mark.

(Thanks for reminding me that I never published the (trivial) source code; I should fix that.)

Why are you pessimistic about the future?

I worry about a regression to the historical mean (Malthusian conditions, many people starving at the margins) and existential risk. I think extinction or return to Malthusian conditions (including Robin Hanson's hardscrabble emulation future) are the default result and I'm pessimistic about the potential of groups like MIRI.

What are your practical issues about the Seasteading Institute?

As I see it, the main problem with SI is their over-commitment to small-size seastead designs because of their commitment to the principle of "dynamic geography." The cost of small-seastead designs (in complexity, coordination problems, additional infrastructure) will be huge.

I don't think dynamic geography is what makes seasteading valuable as a concept. The ability to create new country projects by itself is the most important aspect. I think large seastead designs (or even land-building) would be more cost-effective and a better overall direction.

My major issue is that even if everything else works, governments are unlikely to tolerate real challenges to their authority.

I've always thought the risk from existing governments isn't that big. I don't think governments will consider seasteading to be a challenge until/unless governments are losing significant revenues from people defecting to seasteads. By default, governments don't seem to care very much about things that take place outside of their borders. Governments aren't very agent-y about considering things that are good for the long term interests of the government.

Seasteads would likely cost existing governments mainly by people attracting revenue-producing citizens away from them and into seasteads, and it will take a long time before that becomes a noticeable problem. Most people who move to seasteads will still retain the citizenship of their home country (at least in the beginning), and for the US that means you must keep paying some taxes. Other than the US, there aren't a lot of countries that have the ability to shut down a sea colony in blue water. By the time the loss of revenue becomes institutionally noticeable, the seasteads are likely to be too big to easily shut down (i.e. it would require a long term deployment and would involve a lot of news footage of crying families being forced onto transport ships).

What political theories, if any, do you find plausible?

I like the overall meta-political ethos of seasteading. I think any good political philosophy should start with accepting that there are different kinds of people and they prefer different types of governments/social arrangements.You could call this "meta-libertarianism" or "political pluralism."

Maybe you can give some common misconceptions about how people recover from / don't recover from their addictions? That's the sort of topic you tend to hear a lot of noise about which makes it tough to tell the good information from the bad.

I'm not sure if these are misconceptions, but here are some general thoughts on recovery:

1. Neural genetics probably matters a lot. I don't know what to do with this, but I think neuroscience and genetics will produce huge breakthroughs in treatment of addiction in the next 20 years. People like me will probably be on the sidelines for this big change.
2. People who feel coerced into entering counseling will almost certainly relapse, and they'll relapse faster and harder compared to people who enter willingly. However...
3. ...this doesn't make coercion totally pointless--counselors can plant the seeds of a sincere recovery attempt, and give clients the mental tools to recognize their patterns.
4. People who willingly enter counseling still usually relapse, multiple times. The people who keep coming back after a relapse stand a much better chance of getting to a high level of functioning. People who reenter therapy every time they relapse will usually succeed eventually. (I realize this is almost a tautology.)
5. Clients with other diagnosed disorders are much less likely to fully recover.)

Do you have any thoughts on wireheading?

Wireheading is somewhat fuzzy as a term.... The extreme form (being converted into "Orgasmium") seems like it would be unappealing to practically everyone who isn't suicidally depressed (and even for them it would presumably not be the best option in a transhuman utopia in which wireheading is possible.)

I think a modest version of wireheading (changing a person's brain to raise their happiness set point) will be necessary if we want to bring everyone up to an acceptable level happiness.

Have you tried any 19th/20th century reactionary authors?

I've read a lot of excerpts and quotes, but not many full books. I read a large part of one of Carlyle's books and one late 19th Century travelogue of the United States which Moldbug approvingly linked to. (I've read a fair amount of Nietzsche's work, but I think calling him a reactionary is a bit like calling the Marquis de Sade a "libertarian.")

The one concept from Nietzsche I see everywhere around me in the world is ressentiment. I think much of the master-slave morality stuff was too specific and now feels dated 130 years later, but ressentiment is the important core that's still true and going to stay with us for a while; it's like a powerful drug that won't let humanity go. Ideological convictions and interactions, myths and movements, all tied up with ressentiment or even entirely based on it. And you're right, I would have everyone read Nietzsche - not for practical advice or predictions, but to be able, hopefully, to understand and detect this illness in others and especially oneself.

I'm not sure I entirely understand the question. I'll try to give a history in three stages

1) Roughly, the earliest stages of philosophy were mathematics, and attempts at reductive, systematic accounts of the natural world. This was going on pretty broadly, and only by virtue of some surviving doxographers do we have the impression that Greece was at the forefront of this practice (I'm thinking of the pre-Socratic greek philosophers, like Thales and Anaxagoras and Pythagoras). It was everywhere, and the Greeks weren't particularly good at it. This got started with the Babylonians (very little survives), and when the Assyrian empire conquered Babylon (only to be culturally subjugated to it), they spread this practice throughout the Mediterranean and near-east. Genesis 1 is a good example of a text along these lines.

2) After the collapse of the Assyrians, locals on the frontiers of the former empire (like Greece and Israel) reasserted some intellectual control, often in the form of skeptical criticisms or radically new methodologies (like Parmenides very important arguments against the possibility of change, or the Pythagorean claim that everything is number). Socrates engaged in a version of this by eschewing questions of the cosmos and focusing on ethics and politics as independent topics. Then came Plato, and Aristotle, who between them got the western intellectual tradition going. I won't go into how, for brevity's sake.

3) After Plato and Aristotle, a flurry of philosophical activity overwhelmed the Mediterranean (including and especially in Alexandria), largely because of the conquests of Alexander and the active spread of Greek culture (a rehash of the thing with the Assyrians). This period is a lot like ours now: widespread interest in science, mathematics, ethics, political theory, etc. Many, many people were devoted to these things, and they produced more work in a given year during this period than every that had come before combined. But as a result of the sheer volume of this work, and as a result of the fact that it was built on the shoulders of Plato and Aristotle, very little of it really stands out. As a result, a lot was lost.

I feel overworked, desperate, and very happy.

The desperation: This is a very hard field to work in, psychologically, because there's no reliable process for producing valuable work (this might be true generally, but I get the sense that in the sciences it's easier to get moving in a worthwhile direction). It's not rare that I doubt that anything I'm writing is valuable work. Since I'm at the (early) dissertation stage, these kinds of big picture worries play an important daily role.

The overwork: This is exacerbated by the fact that I have a family. I have much more to do than I can do, and I often have to cut something important. I grade papers on a 3 min per page clock, and that almost feels unethical. I just recently got a new dissertation advisor who wants to see work every two weeks.

The happy: I have a family! It makes this whole thing much, much easier. Most of my problem with being a grad student in the before time was terrible loneliness. Some people do well under those conditions, but I didn't. Also, I do philosophy, which is like happiness distilled. When everyone is uploaded, and science is complete, and a billion years or so have gotten all the problems and needs and video games and recreational space travel out of our system, we'll all settle into that activity that makes life most worth living: talking about the most serious things in the most serious way with our friends. That's philosophy, and I'm very happy to be able to do it even if I don't get a job out of it.

I haven't published anything, but someone recently footnoted me in an important journal. Small victories. I have a paper I'd like to publish, but it's a back-burner project. As to my career, I will take literally anything they can give me, so long as I can be around my family (my wife is a philosopher too, so we need to both get jobs somewhere close). Odds are long on this, so my work has to be good.

Yes, in general we prefer conferences to journals. It's a little more complicated than "journals don't matter." In each subfield of CS (systems, AI, graphics, etc), there are several conferences and several journals. Generally, the best conferences and even the second-tier conferences, are more prestigious than even the top-tier journals. The best journals are better than low-tier conferences. And peer-reviewed glossy magazines, like Communications of the ACM or IEEE Computer, are high-visibility and well respected.

Bear in mind that the conference and journal models aren't so different in their final output. In each area of CS that I'm familiar with, the papers that appear in "Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Quintessence" or whatever the conference is called are written in the same style and have comparable length etc to the papers at the ACM Transactions on Quintessence [journal]. So the real difference is in the reviewing process, not in the writing style.

Neither the journal or conference model is great. The problem with journals is that they're incredibly slow -- for one of my articles, it took a year and a half from submission to publication. They're also annoyingly bureaucratic -- they have fussy typesetting and layout rules that generally don't improve the quality of the final work.

The impression people have is that it's rare for a paper to be rejected outright -- mostly even a relatively weak paper gets "here are the major flaws, fix and resubmit." And then it becomes siege warfare where the author fixes a few flaws and sends it back for re-review and at some point either the author gets fed up and quit, or the reviewers get fed up and say "okay fine, publish it."

The problem with conferences is that they have to make an up-or-down decision on each submitted paper. The timeline means there's no way for them to say "this paper has serious but correctable flaws and we will publish it if you fix it." You can always resubmit to a different conference, but it sometimes happens that conference A says "too much X", and and conference B says "not enough X" -- there's no continuity in reviewers. (In contrast, journal reviewers stay with the paper from submission through the "revise and resubmit" cycle.) The advantage of conferences is that the author gets an answer quickly and the paper, if published, gets attention quickly.

There's been some motion towards hybrid publication systems. There's a highly respected conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB). For the last few years, the model has been that you submit your paper to the VLDB Journal. The journal has a fixed reviewing cycle of a few months, fixing the "slow reviews" process. Authors of published papers get to give a talk at the VLDB conference, fixing the visibility problem. OOPSLA, a prominent programming language conference, has switched to two-round reviewing, which helps fix the "up or down and no continuity" problem.

As to how the problem got going -- Some part is that this is path dependent and the problem feeds on itself. Once journals become low status, people stop reading them. In science, visibility is the coin of the realm, and a conference talk at the leading venue is therefore much better than a journal article nobody reads. And once journals are low-status, the leading people don't want to review for them, and so you get lower-quality reviews. Conversely, once a conference becomes highly selective and prestigious, people send papers there because they want the stamp of approval of "the best people send their papers to ACM-Quintessence and only the top 20% get in."

I don't have a great sense of why CS has this model and no other field does. I have one guess: Most papers are rejected for being boring / incremental, not for being wrong or having weak evidence for an interesting claim. Mostly computers are easy to experiment on. The machines are pretty deterministic, it's easy to share code and data, and most things we care about aren't very expensive.

The conference model is pretty good for deciding if something is interesting. Whereas a journal has an editor and a couple reviewers, the conference model is to assemble a program committee of 15-30 people, and they discuss and vote on each paper. So that gets you a bigger sample of expert opinion on whether something is interesting and valuable.

My impression is that in physics, experiments are easier to get wrong and more important to replicate, and therefore the reviewers are there to check the details, not just give a high-level analysis of whether the paper solves an interesting and important problem with a solution with nontrivial elements that can be reused elsewhere.

I don't love the CS publication model, but my sense is that nobody likes the publication process. Pretty much all the jokes and complaints about peer review in physics or biology feel relevant to me. So I think it's just a sign of a healthy scientific field that having a highly-respected publication means having it scrutinized by skeptical experts who don't pull their punches.

Well, I've been on the same dose for the past 8 years (set by my original endocrinologist and carried forward by all doctors since, who've basically shrugged and said "ehh, worked so far"). Last time I had my testosterone levels checked they were on the high end of normal, which suits me fine. I have a fairly high sex drive, which you might expect, but very low aggression, which you might not - although I've always been a very passive and non-aggressive person. So I guess to answer your question, I haven't really explored different amounts. I don't particularly plan to in the future, if for no other reason than I've been on my current dose long enough to self-identify with the range of behaviours it produces.

First, I want people in computer vision and NLP to actually look at the data sets their algorithms apply to. Ask a physicist to tell you some facts about physical reality, and they will rattle off a lengthy list of concepts, like conservation of energy, isotropy of spacetime, Ohm's law, etc etc. As a vision scientist to tell you some things about visual reality, and my guess is they won't have much to say. Sure, a vision scientist can talk a lot about algorithms, machine learning techniques, feature sets, and other computational tools, but they can't tell you much about what's actually in the images. The same problem is true with NLP people to a lesser degree; they can talk about parsing algorithms and optimization procedures for finding MaxEnt parameters, but they can't tell you much about the actual structure of text.

So, yes, I expect the approach to produce new techniques, but not because it supplies some kind of new mathematical framework. It suggests a new set of questions.

What are you working on at google?

ngx_pagespeed and mod_pagespeed. They are open source modules for nginx and apache that rewrite web pages on the fly to make them load faster.

How much do you earn?

$195k/year, all things considered. (That's my total compensation over the last 19 months, annualized. Full details: http://www.jefftk.com/money)

How much do you give, and to where?

Last year Julia and I gave a total of $98,950 to GiveWell's top charities and the Centre for Effective Altruism. (Full details: http://www.jefftk.com/donations)

I've added an update to that post: http://www.jefftk.com/p/citric-acid

I ended up ordering malic and fumaric acids as well. I like the malic acid a lot, but the fumaric acid is really hard to taste. Not being soluble in water it just sits on the tongue being slightly sour. I probably just haven't found the right use for it yet.

Modern NLP (Natural Language Processing) uses statistical methods quite a bit - http://nlp.stanford.edu/fsnlp/

Hi Anatoly,

Initially it was a shock to my wife, but I took things very slowly as far as dropping practices. This helped a lot and basically I do whatever I want now (3.5 years later). Also transferred my kids to a good public school out of yeshiva. My wife remains nominally religious, it might take another 10 years :)

My kids don's speak Russian - my wife is American-born. I prefer English myself, so I'm not "unhappy" about them not speaking Russian in particular although I'd prefer them to be bilingual in general. They read a bit of Hebrew.

I'm happy to discuss my HFA kid via PM.

So why do you talk about it at all when it just makes you seem crazy to most of us?

When it comes to epistemic praxis I am not a friend of the mob. I want to minimize my credibility with most of LessWrong and semi-maximize my credibility with the people I consider elite. I'm very satisfied with how successful my strategy has been.

Or perhaps you suspect your kind of experiences are more common than openly expressed?

Indeed.

I assume I'd take seriously your crazy experiences if they were mine. Is there anything at all you can say that's of value to someone like me who just hears crazy?

I am somewhat proud of the care I've taken in interpreting my experiences. I think that even if people don't think there's anything substantial in my experiences, they might still appreciate and perhaps learn from my prudence. Interpreting the supernatural is extremely difficult and basically everyone quickly goes off the rails. Insofar as there is a rational way to really engage with the contents of the subject I think my approach is, if not rational, at least rational enough to avoid many of the failure modes. But perhaps I am overly proud.