So, several years ago I was moved by my primary dissatisfaction with HPMoR and my enjoyment of MLP to start a rationalist MLP fanfic. (There are at least two others, that occupied very different spheres, which I will get to in a bit.)

My main dissatisfaction with HPMoR was that Harry is almost always the teacher, not the student; relatedly, his cleverness far outstrips his wisdom. It is only at the very end, after he nearly loses everything, that he starts to realize how difficult it is to get things right, and even then he does not fully get it. Harry is the sort of character that the careful reader can learn from, but not the sort of character one should try to emulate.

MLP's protagonist, Twilight Sparkle, is in many ways the opposite character: instead of being overconfident and arrogant, she is anxious and (generally) humble. Where Harry has difficulty seeing others as equals or useful, Twilight genuinely relies on her friends. Most of Harry's positive characteristics, though, Twilight shares--or could plausibly share with little modification. (In HP terms, she's basically what would have happen if bookish Hermione had been the Girl-Who-Lived, with the accompanying leadership potential, and Harry Potter, the athletic Gryffindor seeker, was just one of her friends.)

So I had the clever idea to write a series of five scenes where Twilight learned a rationality lesson from each of the other five primary characters (yes, even Pinkie Pie, and that one actually wasn't hard to write). And then once I was thinking of a rationalist Twilight, an overall story formed around those scenes. I also wanted to write a story which had more of a Hansonian growth curve--yes, things are growing and a clever protagonist is constantly improving things around herself, but she's not the only PC in the world, and doesn't necessarily stand out as particularly effective. She might get a nice palace and lead a growing and exciting startup, but she's not going to become the Singleton, and she's more likely to have a bunch of exciting and energetic friends than be a lonely genius. (The primary two rationalist MLP fanfics that I'm aware of--not including any of PhilGoetz's stuff--are one in which a pony-flavored Singleton dominates the real world, and one in which a HPMoR-esque protagonist drops into the MLP world and does HPMoR-esque things.)

But, since I'm not celebrating finishing that story, obviously things went wrong. The primary ones:

1. My first project was not something temporary. This is the advice they give for any physical craft--don't make your first set of bookshelves for yourself, or your first scarf, or so on. You're going to muck something up, and to this day my primary scarf has a bit of a trapezoidal slant at the end of it because I didn't quite have the hang of how to crochet the end of a row. If I had made a dishrag to make my rookie mistakes on and then a scarf to wear, the scarf would have been fine. The application to fiction is obvious. Not only does it have deep problems, it isn't even done. (I do have a finished, joke story written in response to one of Eliezer's Facebook posts, which isn't any better but is at least a complete work.)
2. As the above suggests, I'm not very good at writing fiction. Like most people who DMed at some point, I did a fair bit of it when I was younger--but it never ascended to full hobby status. Arguing and forum-posting did, but that's a fairly different skill.
3. Continuing the trend, I don't find writing fiction all that rewarding. PhilGoetz, at some point, described himself as having to write. Perhaps the same is true of me, but I find that urge adequately satisfied by nonfiction, and I suspect the world is better off with another book review or an introductory causality lesson plan / textbook than it is with another piece of rationalist fiction (conditioned on me writing it, at least).

But with HPMoR finished, I feel the itch again. Especially in the light of the Final Exam and its resolution. (As Sun Tzu put it, "Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.") But just diving into it again because the itch has returned does not a plan for success make. Here are the things I'm thinking about (and please, feel free to suggest other things to think about):

1. Finish the original idea--the five chapters where Twilight learns a lesson from each of her friends--and publish it as its own work. (This is mostly done, and would just need some editing.) Gradually build out the full story as a separate thing when you have the time and interest.
2. Seek more serious help from other writers--not just editing, but possibly full coauthorship, or sliding further down the scale towards commissions. (I haven't fully sorted out my priorities here, but I think I care enough to use some units of caring on this.)
3. Drop this idea as less valuable than other projects. I don't have the introspection ability to be sure about energy/motivation, but I suspect this would draw from the same motivation budget as nonfiction writing projects, and it certainly would draw from the same time budget.

(By the way, here is the link to it; I last updated it about a year ago.)

I'm going to be doing a Rationality / Sequences reading group. Sorry I've been busy the last few days since the book came out, but I'll be making an introductory posting soon. The plan is to cover one sequence every two weeks covering the whole book over the course of a year.

I think I recall seeing somewhere that the open thread is a good place for potentially silly questions. So I've got one to ask.

As long as I can remember small things give me the willies. Objects around the size of a penny or smaller trigger a kind of revulsion response if I have to handle them. Things like small coins, those paper circles created when using a hole punch, those stickers that they stick on fruit. I'm not typically bothered by handling a lot of the objects at the same time, a handful of pennies wouldn't bother me.

One thing that's odd, well aside from everything else about it, is that it seems to be especially triggered by jewelry. Rings, basically any piercings, even smallish necklaces. I'm alright as long as they don't get too close to me, but I start feeling weird if I have to interact with them.

Anyway, I've always thought this was pretty strange and it recently occurred to me that someone here probably has some idea of what's going on. Thanks in advance for any thoughts.

What resources would you recommend for skilled, highly-specialized, employed EU citizens looking for employment in the US?

Gates goes into a little bit more detail on his views on AI.

Interviewer:

Yesterday there was a lot of talk here on machine intelligence and I know you had expressed some concerns about how machines are making leaps in processing ability. What do you think we should be doing?

Gates:

There are two different threat models for AI. One is simply the labor substitution problem. That, in a certain way, seems like it should be solvable because what you are really talking about is an embarrassment of riches. But it is happening so quickly. It does raise some very interesting questions given the speed with which it happens.

Then you have the issue of greater-than-human intelligence. That one, I’ll be very interested to spend time with people who think they know how we avoid that. I know Elon [Musk] just gave some money. A guy at Microsoft, Eric Horvitz, gave some money to Stanford. I think there are some serious efforts to look into could you avoid that problem.

Horvitz's thing.

Musk's thing.

If Gates were to really get on board, that would be huge, I think. Fingers crossed.

The World Weekly covers superintelligent AI.

It's one of the better media pieces I've read on the topic.

Bostrom, Yudkowsky, and Russell are quoted, among many others.

I just realized that some people object to hedonistic utilitarianism (which I've traditionally favored) on the grounds that "pleasure" and "suffering" are meaningless and ill-defined concepts, whereas I tend to find preference utilitarianism absurd on the grounds that "preference" is a meaningless and ill-defined concept.

This seems to point to a difference in how people's motivational systems appear from the inside: maybe for some, "pleasure" is an obvious, atomic concept which they can constantly observe as driving their behavior, whereas others perceive their own actions as being driven more by something like a "preference" that seems like a coherent and obvious concept to them, and others still don't feel that either of these concepts is particularly central, causing them to disregard utilitarianism. (Of course one may also reject utilitarianism for other reasons.)

I'll buy you sequences.

Sorry, I feel like a jerk repeating myself but this is the last time. I bought the three pack of the audio sequences on Kickstarter because there were multiple people who said they wanted it but for whom $50 was too dear. I just got the final "give us the names" email. Any takers?

What do you link someone to if you want to persuade them to start taking cryonics seriously instead of immediately dismissing it as ridiculous nonsense? There's no one single LW post that you can send someone to that I know of.

In the last few years I've been thinking about all the separate mental modules that influence productivity, procrastination, akrasia etc. in their own unique ways. (The one thing that's for sure is that the ability to get stuff done isn't monolithic.) This is how my breakdown of the psychology of productivity looks like, and I have a hunch that these are all separate and generate their own effects independently (more or less) of the others:

• a baseline level of energy or willingness to take control of your own life
• an affinity-based system that makes you autonomously pick some activities over others
• a willpower system that makes you keep going in spite of difficulties
• a "negative willpower" system that helps you abstain from temptations or impulses
• a response-to-incentives feature that regulates how extrinsic factors influence behavior
• a set of time-dependent responses that generate, among others: temporal discounting; putting off tasks; anxiety as deadline approaches; desperate last-minute efforts

Is this right? Discuss.

Animals getting smarter in cities, or at least better at living in cities.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/11/141121-coyotes-animals-science-chicago-cities-urban-nation/

http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2014/10/15/raccoons-animals-science-suburbs-evolution-intelligence/

Also, does a beagle moving a chair to get up on a counter count as having tool use?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Thum9-GU74M

On spaced repetition / Anki:

When I started to work after college I was surprised when people asked "How comes you don't know X? Haven't you read the manual?" I was surprised because in college it take more than one reading, a form of repetition, to learn, know and remember things. I would replay "I have read it, but have not yet memorized it."

Interestingly, later on, I managed to remember things after one reading, not details, but the general idea.

I wonder about the popularity of Anki and spaced repetition here. I am experimenting it for conditioning, but for learning, do you really need to remember things in more detail than a single reading allows, if you aren't preparing for college exams anymore?

Note: I think the remembering after one reading worked later on, because it was more of the which of the options to choose. Like where do you find the inventory cost report? Obvious candidates are warehouse menu and finance menu. I think in college I needed to memorize things when the answer was not choosing from known options but something I could not even imagine.

Are you using spaced repetition because you have more of the second type?

The good thing about becoming an expert in a narrow field is that sooner or later you know all the options, which means you are a lightning fast learner. You just look at something, take a not of which of the known options it has, and know all about it. Like a doctor making a diagnosis. Checkmark checkmark checkmark.

Could someone help me out with the LessWrong wiki? I made an account called Tryagainslowly on it; it wouldn't let me use my LessWrong account, instead making me register for the wiki independently. I wanted to post in the discussion for the wiki page entitled "Rationality". The discussion page didn't have anything posted in it. I wrote out my post, and attempted to post it, but it wouldn't let me, telling me new pages cannot be created by new editors. What do I need to do in order to submit my post? I'm happy to show what I was intending to post here if anyone wants me to.

In Our Own Image: Will artificial intelligence save or destroy us? by George Zarkadakis was published by Random House on 5 March. I haven't read it, but from a search on Google Books, there's no mention of "Yudkowsky" or "MIRI", while "Bostrom" only appears once, in a discussion of the Simulation Argument. I nearly gave up at that point, but then I thought to search for "Hawking", and indeed, there is a discussion of the Hawking/Tegmark/Russell/Wilczek letter; this seems to me to be evidence on how carefully the author looked into the issue before writing the paragraphs dismissing it. In summary: *sigh*.

Edit: The author was aware of MIRI in 2013.

To the old ask and guess thread: I grew up under the impression it is a gender thing.

My mother would be "guess", she would expect me to notice that the thrash needs taking out, I didn't because I was lazy, and then she did it and acted hurt and told me she is tired of always needing to tell me to do my share of housework, she rather does it herself but she was bitter and hurt.

In the occasional cases she was ill and my father had to give a damn about the housework (in his defense he tended to have 10-11 hour workdays, mother was at home, so it made sense not to), he would do it in the clearly "tell" style of military training sergeants, "get that effing thrash out but on the double you got five effing seconds to finish it", that kind of style, however he was NEVER angry or hurt about this, he actually looked amused and having fun during that verbal rudeness, I think he always thought if you order people do things and they do them on the bounce, then things are right even if you need to give that order every day: you just tell it ruder and ruder until they learn, easy enough.

While I know ask and guess cultures exist in general, for me it got really tied up with gender. I think as my father always had employees, often stupid ones, and had to play boss all the time, he simply did not mind being a boss even if it meant telling the same things all over. It is repetitive but maybe it always gives a bit of power trip feeling. And it matched nicely with the generally patriarchial social model. I think my mother felt she does not really have the power to enforce her wishes, and this is why she wanted us to take them to the heart and remember what she asked and not have to tell it over and over because really ignoring her wishes, to her, felt like a real possibility. I think she hated repeating them because she felt it could one day come to that that she tells it again and then my or dad refuse it outright and then she has no more recourses. She thought, and correctly, that if we really loved her we would remember what she asks. Having to guilt-tripped into pulling my share was probably a correctly identified lack of care on my side and maybe she was correct that I may not have been very far from outright refusal.

Wrist computer: To Buy or Not To Buy

I'm considering whether or not to buy an Android phone in a wristwatch form-factor, and am hesitating on whether it's the best use of my money. Would anyone here care to offer their opinion?

One of my goals: Go camping and enjoy it. One of my constraints: A limited budget. I suspect that taking a watch-phone, such as an Omate Truesmart or one of its clones ( eg, http://www.dx.com/p/imacwear-m7-waterproof-android-4-2-dual-core-3g-smart-watch-phone-w-1-54-5-0mp-black-373360 ), and filling a 32 gigabyte SD card with offline maps, Wikipedia, and related materials would improve my camping experience. However, I could also purchase an iPhone-like Android phone of comparable stats for half the price, allowing me to also purchase, say, a Kelly kettle, which would also improve my camping experience. (I already have various other digital devices, but none with enough room for the maps etc. I already have solar panels to hang from my backpack and external batteries, to keep any such devices charged while in the field.)

I have some leeway in timing, to get whatever items I decide on before camping season starts, and I find myself having spent several days being indecisive about what options, if any, to pick. My thoughts keep bouncing between something like "Wrist-computers are cool and I want one" and "I've made poor electronics purchasing decisions in the past and regretted them".

How do you think I should redirect my thought processes?

Suppose I wanted to predict the likelihood of and degree of delays and cost over-runs associated with a nuclear plant currently under construction. How would people recommend I do so?

I'm running an Ideological Turing Test about religion, and I need some people to try answering the questions. I've giving a talk at UPenn this week on how to have better fights about religion, and the audience is going to try to sort out honest/faked Christian and atheist answers and see where both sides have trouble understanding the other.

In April, I'll share all the entries on my blog, so you can play along at home and see whether you can distinguish the impostors from the true (non-)believers.

Is avoiding death possible is principle? In particular, is there a solution to the problem of the universe no longer being able to support life?

I labeled an exam question as "tricky" because if you applied the solution method we used in class to solve similar looking problems you would get the wrong answer. But it occurred to me that if the question had been identical to one given in class but I still labeled it as "tricky" the "tricky" label would have been accurate because the trick would have been students thinking that the obvious answer wasn't correct when indeed it was. So is it always accurate to label a question as "tricky"?

I don't understand why I do find certain kinds of goodness, kindness, compassion annoying. Of all the publications, The Guardians seems to rank highest in pissing me off with kindness. Consider this:

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/jun/12/anti-homeless-spikes-latest-defensive-urban-architecture

Ocean Howell, a former skateboarder and assistant professor of architectural history at the University of Oregon, who studies such anti-skating design, says it reveals wider processes of power. “Architectural deterrents to skateboarding and sleeping are interesting because – when noticed – they draw attention to the way that managers of spaces are always designing for specific subjects of the population, consciously or otherwise,” he says. “When we talk about the ‘public’, we’re never actually talking about ‘everyone’.”

Does anyone have any idea why may I find it annoying? Putting it differently, why do I experience something similar as Scott i.e. while I don't have many problems with most contemporary left-leaning ideas, I seem to have a problem with left-leaning people?

For example, I don't find anything inherently bad about starting a discussion about making design more skateboarder-friendly, or less directly skateboarder-hostile, I think skateboarders providing free entertainment to bystanders is kind of a win-win.

And I still feel like slapping Mr. Howell around with a large trout. But why?

Clearly it must be something about the style? Pretentious? Condescending?

Problem is, my emotions prevent me from analysing this clearly. But as far as I see it, the issue with the style is roughly this algorithm

1. assume very high level of compassion and altruism (public spaces are literally designed for everyone)
2. look sad or scandalized when you pretend to be surprised it is not so

Well, to use this example, we always knew it is not so. Clean, bourgeois middle-class folks never wanted e.g. homeless, amputee beggars, or other undesirables near where they live. I am not even ashamed about this, I don't find it incompatible to wish that they should get treated well, but somewhere I cannot see them much. It is not my eyesight is what they need most but more like professional care. I just wasn't aware skateboarders are also included in the category of undesirables. Anyway, the way I can best parse my emotions is that I find Mr. Howell condesdencing or pretentious because he is pretending to be surprised we are not saints. And this seems to be general tone of The Guardian, that may be why it annoys me.

Any better takers?

People of more or less explicit left-wing views: do you see your goals would better supported by, how to put, it less drama, or less pretense, or less antagonizing or trying to guilt-trip others, so I don't know, with a different tone than that of The Guardian or Salon.com? I cannot really express this better, but what I have in mind is more of a e.g. "please discuss why the homeless annoy you so much that you want to install spikes" tone, and less of a "fuck you for being a cruel monster who installs anti-homeless spikes" tone, do you find that counter-productive?

OTOH it is also possible that I find it annoying because it it actually pierces my conscience. But I actually don't think so. I never really considered perfect 200% compassion a super ace that trumps all other cards. It is one of the aces, sure, but there are other aces and also kings and whatnot in the stack. Maybe, it is annoying because it reminds me of a social expectation, certain social taboos, like, never feel grossed out by e.g. the homeless, because they suffer and the only proper reaction to suffering is compassion, those kinds of taboos.

Do dating conventions fall victim to Positive Bias?

It seems that people are always looking for positive evidence, and that looking for negative evidence (I suspect my vocabulary might be incorrect?) is socially unacceptable. Ie. "Let's see if we could find something in common." seems typical and acceptable, while "Let's see if each of us posses any characteristics that would make us incompatible" seems socially unacceptable.

Note: I have zero experience with dating and romance so these are just my impressions, although I suspect that they're true.

Perhaps beliefs are exaggerated partially due to the chance of those who disagree with the belief expressing their disagreement being less than the chance of those who agree with it expressing their agreement with it.

Justification: It seems the main incentive for expressing one’s agreement or disagreement (and the reasons for it) is to make the person more likely to hold your belief and thus more likely to hold a more accurate belief. If you agree with the person, expressing your agreement has little cost, as you probably won’t get into a lengthy argument, but it still has the benefit of reinforcing their belief. However, if you disagree, you are much more likely to get into a lengthy argument and may make them hostile to you, which can be much more costly.

Thus, I think it’s a good idea to account for this by actively seeking out arguments for opposing beliefs next time it seems the opposition has few good arguments. What do you all think?

It appears to me that the differences System 1 and System 2 reasoning be used as leverage to change one's mind.

For example, I am rather risk-averse and sometimes find myself unwilling to take a relatively minor risk (even if I think that doing that would be in line with my values). If that happens, I point out to myself that I already take comparable risks which my System 1 doesn't perceive as risks because I'm acclimated to these - such as navigating road traffic. That seems to confirm to System 1 the idea of "taking a minor risk for a good reason is no big deal".

I've written a post on my blog covering some aspects of AGI and FAI.

It probably has nothing new for most people here, but could still be interesting.

I'll be happy for feedback - in particular, I can't remember if my analogy with flight is something I came up with or heard here long ago. Will be happy to hear if it's novel, and if it's any good.

How many hardware engineers does it take to develop an artificial general intelligence?

I occasionally see people move their fingers on a flat surface while thinking, as if they were writing equations with their fingers. Does anyone do this, and can anyone explain why people do this? I asked one person who does it, and he said it helps him think about problems (presumably math problems) without actually writing anything down. Can this be learned? Is it a useful technique? Or is it just an innate idiosyncrasy?

From 2008: "Readers born to atheist parents have missed out on a fundamental life trial"

Not really, in my experience. First of all there are plenty of other silly things to believe in, such my parents tended to believe in feel-good liberal adages like "violence never solves anything".

But actually the experience made me learn from religious people quite a lot. For this reason: like for most modern secular liberal Europeans, for my parents the kind of history we live in began not so long ago. A few centuries ago. Or maybe 1945. Everything before is The Dark Ages. The Dark Ages are the period where people were both stupid and evil and we can learn nothing from them. Everybody before Galilei was an idiot. Modern ideas, from democracy to human rights are not simply right but obviously so.

Well, imagine my surprise when I made some Catholic friends with a slight conservative bent, who, through their religion, inherited quite older historical ideas, which came accross as new, interesting and thoughtful to me. Roughly the same kinds of ideas you can get from Chesterton. Or Tolkien.

Having said that, religion is not necessary for this, any atheist with a keen interest in history can have ideas like that. For example, my Catholic friends proposed it may not be entirely true that there cannot be anything wrong, ever, with gay people, it can actually be something like narcissism, as it is based on falling in love with people who are a reflection of the self. I still don't know if it is true but at least it explains a bit why some of the gay folks I knew from raves wanted all the attention all the time. Later on, I learned that this idea actually has nothing to do with Catholic tradition: it was invented by Freud. Who is generally not seen a particularly conservative fellow although this idea of his was clearly un-PC by now.

So, ultimately, it is not about religion then, it just seems my liberal-secular parents were too much in the narrow "canon" and my religious friends (who had some conservative bent) were simply aware of the existence of ideas outside it.

DAE know The Haze? The Haze is the brain fog whenever I have a subject I entertain comfortable lies about and the truth would be too painful. I.e. something negative about myself etc. whenever I approach the subject my brain decides to deal with the cognitive dissonance to avoid painful truth by reducing the IQ, but instead of becoming wooden and thick like normal stupidity, it becomes foggy. This fogginess is not actually felt or known at that time, but when I later on face the painful truth, it feels like a fog, a haze lifting. It feels a lot like as if formerly I was thinking about a subject in a drunken state, like when drunk people philosophize.

Since it does not feel like that at that moment, any method for discovering these?

What is the name of the logical fallacy where you rhetorically invalidate an argument by providing an unflattering explanation of why someone might holds that viewpoint, rather than addressing the claim itself? I seem to remember there being a word for that sort of thing.

On AI: are we sure we are not influenced by meta-religious ideas of sci-fi writers who write about sufficiently advanced computers just "waking up into consciousness" i.e. create a hard, almost soul-like, barrier between conscious and not conscious, which carries an assumption that consciousness is a typically human-like feature? It is meta-religious as it is based on the unique specialness of the human soul.

I mean I think the potential variation space of intelligent, conscious agents is very, very large and a randomly selected AI will not be human-like in way we would recognize it to. We will not recognize its consciousness, we will not recognize its intelligence, even its agency, all we would see it does mysterious complicated stuff we don't understand. It may almost look random. It does stuff, maybe it communicates with us although the human-language words it uses will not reflects its thought processes, but it will be profoundly alien.

Great. More ridiculous propaganda along the lines of "People revived from the dead are evil/damaged/soulless, etc."

The Returned on A&E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsXDcIDU_AY

My comment elsewhere got downvoted, but to me the Outlander franchise looks somewhat like a cryonics story, only it sends the protagonist 200 years into her past (from the 1940's to the 1740's), instead of 200 years or so into "the future." She winds up in a different time, she doesn't know anyone, and she has to figure out quickly how the society works so that she can connect with people willing to accept her, as a matter of literal survival. It shows in a fictional way that you can make the necessary adaptations in this kind of situation, so why wouldn't this work in the future-traveling version?

Generating artificial gravity on spaceships using centrifuges is a common idea in hard-sci-fi and in speculation about space travel, but no-one seems to consider them for low gravity on e.g. Mars. Am I mistaken in thinking that all you'd need to do is build the centrifuge with an angled floor, so the net force experienced from gravity and (illusory) centrifugal force is straight "down" into it?

I realise there'd be other practical problems with centrifuge-induced artificial gravity on Mars, since it's full of dust and not the best environment, but that doesn't seem to be the right kind of objection to explain it never being brought up where I've seen it.

I find it funny how the math-savvy community of Bayesians at LW -- those who want to fight existential risk and program AIs, no less -- are eager to demonstrate their complete helplessness in finance. "Oh, no, you can't possible believe anything different from the market!" "The historical S&P500 returns were X% so by golly that's what we should expect decades into the future!" /facepalm

If this post doesn't get answered, I'll repost in the next open thread. A test to see if more frequent threads are actually necessary.

I'm trying to make a prior probability mass distribution for the length of a binary string, and then generalize to strings of any quantity of symbols. I'm struggling to find one with the right properties under the log-odds transformation that still obeys the laws of probability. The one I like the most is P(len(x)) = 1/(x+2), as under log-odds it requires log(x)+1 bits of evidence for strings of len(x) to meet even odds. For a length of 15, it uses all 4 bits in 1111, so its cost is 4 bits.

The problem is that 1/(x+2) does not converge, making it an improper prior. Are there some restrictions by which I can use this improper prior, or to find a proper prior with similarly desirable qualities?

Are there any English words with the property that if you rot13 them, they flip backwards? For example, "ly" becomes "yl," but "ly" isn't a word.

I have a random physics question:

A solid sphere, in ordinary atmosphere, with a magical heating element at one pole and a magical refrigeration element at the other. If the sphere itself is stationary and at room temperature; one pole is super-cooled while the opposite pole is super-heated. (Edit: Assume the axis connecting the poles is horizontal.)

What effect does this have on air-flow around the sphere? Does it move? If so, in which direction?

Is everyone already aware of the existence of erotic fanfiction entitled Conquered by Clippy?

I've just read Initation Ceremony. Is this really where Bayesian probability begins? Because I don't claim to understand it, but I worked it out easy enough, just not mentally but with calc.exe, using my usual method of assuming a sample of 100. So there are 100 people, 75 W and 25 M, 75x0.75=56.26 VW and 25x0.5 = 12.5 VM so our ratio is 12.5 to 56.26 so a 22.2% chance (Because only the Sith deal in incomprehensible verbal-math like " two to nine, or a probability of two-elevenths". Percentages are IMHO way more intuitive. I use a sample size of 100 precisely because then I can say of 100 people 56.26 are VW and thus 56.26% of a sample of any size.)

At what point "okay, let's calculate on a sample of 100" breaks down and I really need to learn the Bayes Theorem and its applications? Note: the sample-100 method works well with the other example of diagnostic methods giving false positives for rare illnesses.

It is also possible percentages are not as intuitive to others as to me. To me 22% is visualized as drawing a 10 by 10 square on a grid paper and paint 22 of the constituent squares black, then throwing darts on the square. Assuming darts cannot land outside the cube.

Why can't we just make a CPU as large as a dump truck, that can store a thousand petabytes, then run an AI and try to evolve intelligence? I can't imagine that this is beyond the technology of 2015.

(Not that this would be a good idea, I'm just saying that it seems possible.)