Could we live forever? - hey guys. I made a film about transhumanism for BBC News. It features some people in this community and some respected figures. Let me know what you think and if i missed anything etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STsTUEOqP-g&feature=youtu.be
26 Things I Learned in the Deep Learning Summer School
In the beginning of August I got the chance to attend the Deep Learning Summer School in Montreal. It consisted of 10 days of talks from some of the most well-known neural network researchers. During this time I learned a lot, way more than I could ever fit into a blog post. Instead of trying to pass on 60 hours worth of neural network knowledge, I have made a list of small interesting nuggets of information that I was able to summarise in a paragraph.
At the moment of writing, the summer school website is still online, along with all the presentation slides. All of the information and most of the illustrations come from these slides and are the work of their original authors. The talks in the summer school were filmed as well, hopefully they will also find their way to the web.
Probably the biggest cryonics story of the year. In the print edition of The New York Times, it appeared on the front page, above the fold.
A Dying Young Woman's Hope in Cryonics and a Future, by Amy Harmon
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/us/cancer-immortality-cryogenics.html
You can also watch a short documentary about Miss Suozzi here:
http://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000003897597/kim-suozzis-last-wishes.html
But the intellectual quality of some of the people who have signed up for cryonics is exceptionally high (Hanson, Thiel, Kurzweil, Eliezer). Among the set of people who thought they were Napoleon (excluding the original), I doubt you would find many who had racked up impressive achievements.
if you are at the airport and you see two lines while you are checking in, a very long one and a very short one, and you say, "It's a big mystery to me why so many people are going in that long line instead of the short one," then you'd better get in that long line, because if you get in the short one, you are going to find yourself kicked out of it.
What if you see Hanson, Thiel, Kurzweil, and Eliezer in the short line, ask them if you should get in the short line, and they say yes?
How Grains Domesticated Us by James C. Scott. This may be of general interest as a history of how people took up farming (a more complex process than you might think), but the thing that I noticed was that there are only a handful (seven, I think) of grain species that people domesticated, and it all happened in the Neolithic Era. (I'm not sure about quinoa.) Civilized people either couldn't or wouldn't find another grain species to domesticate, and civilization presumably wouldn't have happened without the concentrated food and feasibility of social control that grain made possible.
Could domestcatable grain be a rather subtle filter for technological civilization? On the one hand, we do have seven species, not just one or two. On the other, I don't know how likely the biome which makes domesticable grain possible is.
I suspect that developing a highly nutritious crop that is easy to grow in large quantities is a prerequisite for technological civilization. However, I wonder if something other than grains might have sufficed (e.g. potatoes).
This week on the BBC you may get the impression that the robots have taken over. Every day, under the banner Intelligent Machines, we will bring you stories on online, TV, radio about advances in artificial intelligence and robotics and what they could mean for us all.
Why now? Well at the end of last year Prof Stephen Hawking told the BBC that full artificial intelligence could spell the end for mankind. [...] That gloomy view started a public debate. Roboticists and computer scientists who specialise in the AI field rushed to reassure us that the "singularity", the moment when machines surpass humans, is so far off that it is still the stuff of science fiction.
Looks like Stephen Hawking is finally someone high enough status that he can say this sort of think and people will take him seriously.
A while back, I was having a discussion with a friend (or maybe more of a friendly acquaintance) about linguistic profiling. It was totally civil, but we disagreed. Thinking about it over lunch, I noticed that my argument felt forced, while his argument seemed very reasonable, and I decided that he was right, or at least that his position seemed better than mine. So, I changed my mind. Later that day I told him I'd changed my mind and I thought he was right. He didn't seem to know how to respond to that. I'm not sure he even thought I was being serious at first.
Have other people had similar experiences with this? Is there a way to tell someone you've changed your mind that lessens this response of incredulity?
The Fallacy of Placing Confidence in Confidence Intervals
Welcome to the web site for the upcoming paper "The Fallacy of Placing Confidence in Confidence Intervals." Here you will find a number of resources connected to the paper, including the itself, the supplement, teaching resources and in the future, links to discussion of the content.
The paper is accepted for publication in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.
...Interval estimates – estimates of parameters that include an allowance for sampling uncertainty – have long been touted as a key component of statistical analyses. There are several kinds of interval estimates, but the most popular are confidence intervals (CIs): intervals that contain the true parameter value in some known proportion of repeated samples, on average. The width of confidence intervals is thought to index the precision of an estimate; CIs are thought to be a guide to which parameter values are plausible or reasonable; and the confidence coefficient of the interval (e.g., 95%) is thought to index the plausibility that the true parameter is included in the interval. We show in a number of examples that CIs do not necessarily have any of t
I see. Looking into this, it seems that the (mis)use of the phrase "confidence interval" to mean "credible interval" is endemic on LW. A Google search for "confidence interval" on LW yields more than 200 results, of which many—perhaps most—should say "credible interval" instead. The corresponding search for "credible interval" yields less than 20 results.
How many hours of legitimate work do you get done per day?
Legitimate = uninterrupted, focused work. Regarding the time you spend working but not fully focused, use your judgement in scaling it. Ie. maybe an hour of semi-productive work = .75 hours of legitimate work.
Edit: work doesn't only include work for your employer/school. It could be self-education, side projects etc. It doesn't include chores or things like casual pleasure reading though. Per day = per day that you intend to put in a full days work.
[pollid:1029]
Recent discussion topics on Omnilibrium:
Should we actually expect 'big world immortality' to be true? I know the standard LW response is that what we should care about is measure, but what I'm interested in is whether it should be true that from every situation in which we can find ourselves in, we should expect a never-ending continuity of consciousness?
Max Tegmark has put forth a couple of objections: the original one (apart from simple binary situations, a consciousness often undergoes diminishment before dying and there's no way to draw continuity from it to a world in which it survives) an...
I have a variant on linear regression. Can anyone tell me what it's called / point me to more info about it / tell me that it's (trivially reducible to / nothing like) standard linear regression?
Standard linear regression has a known matrix X = x(i,j) and a known target vector Y = y(j), and seeks to find weights W = w(i) to best approximate X * W = Y.
In my version, instead of knowing the values of the input variables (X), I know how much each contributes to the output. So I don't know x(i,j) but I kind of know x(i,j) * w(i), except that W isn't really a th...
Singer asks, if it’s obligatory to save the drowning child you happen to encounter at the expense of your shoes, why isn’t it obligatory not to buy the shoes in the first place, but instead to save a child in equally dire straits?
...As a profession, we are in an odd but unfortunate situation. Our best philosophers and theorists develop accounts of global justice that are disconnected from the best empirical insights about poverty and prosperity.
Reading these theories, one might think that our best prospects for alleviating poverty
I don't understand how the karma system here works. One my posts below, about the usefulness of prostitutes for learning how to get into sexual relationships through dating regular women, dropped off for awhile with a -4 karma. Then I just checked, and it has a +4 karma. Where did the 8 karma points come from?
This has happened to some of my posts before. Do I have some fans I don't know about who just happen to show up in a short interval to upvote my controversial posts?
Many LWers, myself particularly, write awkwardly. Did you know Word can check your writing style, not just your spelling with a simple option change. I'm learning how to write with better style already.
The Importance, tractability, and neglectedness approach is the go-to hereustic for EA's.
The open philanthropy project approaches it like this:
“What is the problem?” = importance
“What are possible interventions?” = tractability
“Who else is working on it?” = neglectedness
I reckon it's a simplification of the rational planning model:
...Intelligence gathering — A comprehensive organization of data, potential problems and opportunities are identified, collected and analyzed.
Identifying problems — Accounting relevant factors.
Assessing the conseque
If a graduate student approached you to do a section of the data analyses of your research in return for credit/authorship and to degree requirements, what would you give her? Not, she's specified just a ''section'' and is not interested in any data collection, research administration or the link, she just wants to fulfill her mini-research project requirements.
From the Foreword to Brave New World:
...Nor does the sexual promiscuity of Brave New World seem so very distant. There are already certain American cities in which the number of divorces is equal to the number of marriages. In a few years, no doubt, marriage licenses will be sold like dog licenses, good for a period of twelve months, with no law against changing dogs or keeping more than one animal at a time. As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. And the dictator (unless he needs cannon fodder and fam
We can remember things we don't believe and believe things we don't remember. Which source of knowledge if a better authority for our expectations and priors?
I'm trying to wrap my mind around Stuart Armstrong's post on Doomsday argument, and to do so I've undertook the task of tabooing 'randomness' in the definitions of SIA and SSA.
My first attempt clearly doesn't work: "observers should reason giving the exact same degree of belief to any proposition of the form: 'I'm the first observer', 'I'm the second observer', etc." As it has been noted before many times, by me and by others, anthropic information changes the probability distribution, and any observer has at least a modicum of that. I suspect th...
Singer asks, if it’s obligatory to save the drowning child you happen to encounter at the expense of your shoes, why isn’t it obligatory not to buy the shoes in the first place, but instead to save a child in equally dire straits?
As a profession, we are in an odd but unfortunate situation. Our best philosophers and theorists develop accounts of global justice that are disconnected from the best empirical insights about poverty and prosperity.
Reading these theories, one might think that our best prospects for alleviating poverty around the world lie in policies of redistribution, foreign aid, reforms to the international system, new global institutions, and so on. And one might think that markets, property rights, and economic freedom are at best incidental, and more likely inimical, to the eradication of global poverty.
Such ignorance, if not denial, of the empirical findings about development and growth is irresponsible.
The article he is quoted in goes on to explain:
Mainstream development economics, in a nutshell, holds that the poverty is an institutional problem. More precisely, poverty is human being’s natural state. Poverty is normal and does not need to be explained, but wealth does.
The main reason some nations are rich and others poor is not because some nations have better geography, better natural resources, or better genes. Rather, rich countries are rich because they have better institutions. Rich countries have institutions that incentivize growth and development.
These institutions include strong private property rights, inclusive and honest governments, stable political regimes, a dependable and inclusive legal system characterized by the rule of law, open and competitive markets, and free international trade.
Poor countries have institutions that fail to incentive growth and development, and often instead have institutions that encourage predation. These countries have weak recognition or active disregard of property rights, exclusive and dishonest governments, instable political regimes, undependable legal systems characterized by the capricious rule of men rather than the rule of law, and closed, rent seeking, crony capitalist markets, or few markets at all, and little international trade.
Overall, we are not against charity. We accept that charity is good on the margins. We both give money to various charities.
But to focus on charity as means of fighting poverty is misguided. Mainstream development economics holds that that international aid and charity tend to do little good overall, and tend to do as much harm as good.† ...
As a profession, we are in an odd but unfortunate situation. Our best philosophers and theorists develop accounts of global justice that are disconnected from the best empirical insights about poverty and prosperity.
Reading these theories, one might think that our best prospects for alleviating poverty around the world lie in policies of redistribution, foreign aid, reforms to the international system, new global institutions, and so on. And one might think that markets, property rights, and economic freedom are at best incidental, and more likely inimical, to the eradication of global poverty.
Such ignorance, if not denial, of the empirical findings about development and growth is irresponsible.†
We share van der Vossen’s concerns.
Mainstream development economics, in a nutshell, holds that the poverty is an institutional problem. More precisely, poverty is human being’s natural state. Poverty is normal and does not need to be explained, but wealth does.
The main reason some nations are rich and others poor is not because some nations have better geography, better natural resources, or better genes. Rather, rich countries are rich because they have better institutions. Rich countries have institutions that incentivize growth and development.
These institutions include strong private property rights, inclusive and honest governments, stable political regimes, a dependable and inclusive legal system characterized by the rule of law, open and competitive markets, and free international trade.
Poor countries have institutions that fail to incentive growth and development, and often instead have institutions that encourage predation. These countries have weak recognition or active disregard of property rights, exclusive and dishonest governments, instable political regimes, undependable legal systems characterized by the capricious rule of men rather than the rule of law, and closed, rent seeking, crony capitalist markets, or few markets at all, and little international trade.†
To be inclusive, economic institutions must feature secure private property, an unbiased system of law, and a provision of public services that provides a level playing field in which people can exchange and contract; it must also permit the entry of new businesses and allow people to choose their careers.†
Now, not every development economist shares Acemoglu and Robinson’s exact views. But their general position — that private property, markets, and economic freedom — are needed for sustained growth is the mainstream view.
To be clear, we are not saying that mainstream development economics calls for libertarian politics at a domestic level. Economists have varying positions about the degree to which governments can and should correct market failures. They also have varying positions about the extent to which countries should provide social insurance to their citizens.
,,,
Our view — consistent with development economics — is that first-worlders’ willingness to buy DVD players and iPhones, not their desire to donate their income, is that thing that actually makes the bigger difference in fighting poverty.
Taiwan and South Korea grew rich and became First World countries, not because of handouts, but because they produced and sold luxury goods (on the broad definition of “luxury good”) to the First World.
But, as far as we can tell, they talk this way because they are ignorant and/or misinformed about the relevant empirical work. Philosophers disagree with economists not because they have read and discovered serious flaws in the economists’ work, but because philosophers have for the most part just ignored development economics.
Philosophers are of course free to disagree with mainstream development economics, but they bear the burden of proof of refuting it. We do not bear the burden of defending it here
...
But in the long-term, we’ll shut down the very economic system that made the First World rich. The Third World doesn’t need to eat our success — they need to emulate
...
Second, the history of food donations is fraught with peril. Donating food to the Third World sometimes alleviates a famine — it is sometimes the thing to do in an emergency.
But, more frequently, first-world food donations just put Third World farmers out of business, and make them dependent on donations in the future.†
Again, the consensus in development economics is not that the Third World needs us to give them grain, but, on the contrary, that the Third World needs our governments to stop subsidizing grain production in the first world, so that we First Worlders instead buy our grain from the Third World.
South Korea and Taiwan had no problem with Malaria killing children in which the society invested resources.
I don't understand why Van der Vossen thinks that there is clear evidence that the difference between what happened in a country like South Korea and what happened in subsaharan Africa has nothing to do with genes. Of course that's the politically correct belief. But standing there and saying that development economics proved it beyond all odds seems strange to me.
The rule of law does happen to be an important ingridiant to producing wealth but I do...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)
3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.
4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.