As a cryonicist, I'm drafting out a text describing my revival preferences and requests, to be stored along with my other paperwork. (Oddly enough, this isn't a standard practice.) The current draft is here. I'm currently seeking suggestions for improvement, and a lot of the people around here seem to have good heads on their shoulders, so I thought I'd ask for comments here. Any thoughts?
Astrobiology bloggery got interrupted by a SEVERE bout of a sleep disorder, developing systems to measure metabolic states of single yeast cells in order to freaking graduate soonish, and having a bit of a life for a while.
Astrobiology bloggery resumes within 1 week, with my blog moved from thegreatatuin.blogspot.com to thegreatatuin.wordpress.com, blogger being completely unusable when it comes to inserting graphs and the like. Dear gods I'm excited, the last year has seen a massive explosion in origin of life research and study of certain outer solar system bodies. To the point that I'm pretty sure the metabolism of the last universal common ancestor has been figured out and the origin of the ribosome (and therefore protein-coding genetics) as well.
Advice on running personal wordpress account welcomed.
For a while now, I have been working on a potentially impactful project. The main limiting factor is my own personal productivity- a great deal of the risk is frontloaded in a lengthy development phase. Extrapolating the development duration based on progress so far does not yield wonderful results. It appears I should still be able to finish it in a not-absurd timespan, it will just be slower than ideal.
I've always tried to improve my productivity, and I've made great progress in that compared to ten or even five years ago, but at this point I've picked m...
Have you ever taken Adderall? I greatly suspect you have not.
People who fight chronic akrasia because of varoius degrees of ADHD and related mental disorders have a different response to stimulants than "normal" individuals. For me, Adderall puts me into cool, calm, clear focus. The kind of productive mode of being that most people get into by drinking a cup of coffee (except coffee makes me jittery and unfocused). Being on Adderall is just... "normal." Indeed the first time I tried it I thought the dose was too low because I didn't feel a thing.. until 8 hours later when I realized I was still cranking away good code and able to focus instead of my normal bouts of mid-day akrasia. I could probably count on my hands the number of times I had a full day of highly focused work without feeling stress or burn-out afterwards... now it's the new normal :)
For such people low-dose amphetamines don't provide any high, nor are they accompanied by some sort of berserker productivity binge like popular media displays. In the correct dosages they also don't seem to come with any addiction or withdraw -- I go off of it without any problems, other than reverting to the normal,...
have updated the list of common human goals.
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mnz/list_of_common_human_goals/
social looked like:
Social - are you spending time socially? No man is an island, do you have regular social opportunities, do you have exploratory social opportunities to meet new people. Do you have an established social network? Do you have intimacy?
and now looks like:
...Social - are you spending time socially? No man is an island, do you have regular social opportunities, do you have exploratory social opportunities to meet new people.
Let's say I have a set of students, and a set of learning materials for an upcoming test. My goal is to run an experiment to see which learning materials are correlated with better scores on the test via multiple linear regression. I'm also going to make the simplifying assumption that the effects of the learning materials are independent.
I'm looking for an experimental protocol with the following conditions:
I want to be able to give each student as many learning materials as possible. I don't want a simple RCT, but a factorial experiment where student
I have a question for LWers who are non-native English speakers.
I am working on a software system for linguistically sophisticated analysis of English text. At the core of the system is a sentence parser. Unlike most other research in NLP, a central goal of my work is to develop linguistic knowledge and then build that knowledge into the parser. For example, my system knows that the verb ask connects strongly to subjectized infinitive phrases ("I asked him to take out the trash"), unlike most other verbs.
The system also has a nice parse visualiz...
Did Zuckerberg make the right choice by a Berkeley, Stanford, and University of California collaboration decide how to spend their money? I guess BioHub will be similar than the NIH is how it allocates funding.
Zuckerberg could also have funded Aubrey de Grey. They could have funded research on how to make medical research better the way the Laura and John Arnold Foundation does.
TechCrunch:
...The technologies Zuckerberg listed were “AI software to help with imaging the brain…to make progress on neurological diseases, machine learning to analyze large databa
Six plant extracts delay yeast chronological aging through different signaling pathways
"Our recent study has revealed six plant extracts that slow yeast chronological aging more efficiently than any chemical compound yet described."
article http://www.kurzweilai.net/these-six-plant-extracts-could-delay-aging
Sleep Learning: Your Brain Continues to Process Simple Tasks, Classify Words Subconsciously
The experiment showed that when people were subjected to simple word classification tasks before sleeping, the brain continues to unconsciously make classifications even in sleep."
Source: Kouider, Andrillon T, Barbosa L, et al. Inducing task-relevant responses to speech in the sleeping brain, Current Biology. 2014.
UK posts their guidelines for robotic ethics, pay-walled at 200 bucks tho. Article follows
http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/bsi-robot-ethics-guidelines/
edit: and robot disarms entrenched shooter by stealing his rifle
Here is a real world control problem: Self driving cars. Companies are currently taking dash cam footage of people driving, and using it to train AIs to drive cars.
There is a serious problem with this. The AIs can learn to predict exactly what a human would do. But humans aren't actually optimal drivers. They make tons of mistakes. They have slow reaction times. They fail to notice things. They don't apply the optimal braking or acceleration, they speed, they don't make optimal turns, etc.
AIs trained on human data end up mimicking all of these imperfection...
I have a name that I want to give my new product. That name is already trademarked for an unrelated use. Is it a bad idea to go ahead and use that product name? Is a trademark comprehensive enough that I should just pick a different name?
UN declares antibiotic resistance largest global threat
“Antimicrobial resistance poses a fundamental threat to human health, development, and security,”
There seems to be a sizable amount of people in the census who consider that there's a decent probability that there's another intelligent civilisation in our universe.
When it comes to existential risk discussions, there often the argument that existential risk is important for the future of intelligent life. If there's other intelligent life out there, is existential risk still as important?
It would be interesting to make Null experiment, which will consist only of two control groups, so we will know what is the medium difference between two equal groups. It would also interesting to add two control groups in each experiment, as we will see how strong is the effect.
For example if we have difference between main and control in 10 per cent, it could looks like strong result. But if we have second control group, and it has 7 per cent difference from first control group, our result is not so strong after all.
I think that it is clear that can't do...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here.
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