Superintelligence and physical law
It's been a few years since I read http://lesswrong.com/lw/qj/einsteins_speed/ and the rest of the quantum physics sequence, but I recently learned about the company Nutonian, http://www.nutonian.com/. Basically it's a narrow AI system that looks at unstructured data and tries out billions of models to fit it, favoring those that use simpler math. They apply it to all sorts of fields, but that includes physics. It can't find Newton's laws from three frames of a falling apple, but it did find the Hamiltonian of a double pendulum given its motion data after a few hours of processing: http://phys.org/news/2009-12-eureqa-robot-scientist-video.html
Scope sensitivity?
Just wanted to share a NYT article on empathy and how different circumstances can reverse the usual bias to feel more empathy for 1 suffering child than 8, and a bunch of other interesting observations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/opinion/sunday/empathy-is-actually-a-choice.html?ref=international
Types of recursion
As a freshman in college I took an intro linguistics class where we spent a lot of time discussing universal grammar and recursive phrase structures. One of the examples we looked at I still don't fully understand - it illustrated two distinct forms of nested phrases that he mind handles very differently.
1. Nested prepositional phrases
The car in the driveway of the house on the street in NY...
I can make that sentence go on indefinitely, and while a reader (or listener) might get bored or forget parts, it will never feel confusing. It's just (The car (in the driveway (of the house (on the street (...))))).
2. Nested tense phrases
The mouse the cat the dog the man walked barked at chased ate the cheese.
Yes, it's grammatical. The mouse ate the cheese. (The mouse the cat chased) ate the cheese. The mouse (the cat the dog barked at) chased ate the cheese. The mouse the cat (the dog the man walked) barked at chased at the cheese.
Personally, I lose track with the introduction of the dog. At first I thought it was just a matter of working memory, but the information content is not that high. I can even turn it back into the first kind of recursion and then suddenly have no difficulty keeping it all in my head: The man walked the dog that barked at the cat that chased the mouse that ate the cheese. It seems to be more a bug in my natural language processing module.
Any suggestions on what might be going on here?
David Brooks from the NY Times writes on earning-to-give
Just wanted to highlight an article. David Brooks from the NY Times writes on earning-to-give by working at a hedge fund:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/04/opinion/brooks-the-way-to-produce-a-person.html?ref=opinion
Basically, he claims that working in an amoral environment will eventually turn you into a worse person than you would otherwise be, and weaken your resolve and desire to fulfill your original goal. Psychologically he may be right, and today's me may not like the me I would become after a decade on Wall Street, but at first glance it seems like even if I could only maintain my resolve for a few years, the payoff far outweighs my own well being. He is also opposed to valuing the far - life in general - over the near - people in your own home or community. Or even valuing them equally, AFAICT.
As a matter of history, though, I did not in fact choose such a career. Suboptimal or not, given what I did choose (consulting firm that helps companies invest and grow effectively in clean tech, nanotech, and biotech) I do not think I chose wrongly.
Cryonics priors
I am not currently signed up for cryonics. I am considering it, but have not yet decided whether it is the right choice. Here's my reasoning.
I am very sure of the following:
1. Life is better than death. For any given finite lifespan, I'd prefer a longer one, at least within the bounds of numbers I can reasonably contemplate.
2. Signing up for cyronics increases the expected value of my lifespan.
But then I also believe the following:
3. I am not particularly exceptional among the set of human beings, and so should not value my lifespan much more than that of other humans. I obviously fail at this in practice, but I think the world would be a much better place if I and others didn't fail so often.
4. The money it would take to sign up for cryonics, though not large, is enough to buy several centuries of healthy life each year if given to givewell's top malaria charities. Since on average I expect to live another 50-60 years without cryonics, the investment would need to increase the expected value of my lifespan by at least 5,000 years at minimum to be morally acceptable to me.
5. There is a chance we'll discover immortality in my lifetime. If so, then if I signed up for cryonics the payout is 0, and the people who died because I bought insurance instead of charity are people I could have saved for far longer.
So, what do you think is the probability that immortality will be discovered in my lifetime? What about the probability that, if signed up for cryonics, I will live into the far future? These priors would seem to be the key for me to decide whether signing up for cryonics is morally acceptable to me.
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