DTX

I just can't get over that it's Game Stop. I remember when Blockbuster finally crashed in January 2010, I was convinced Game Stop was next and I shorted them then. Their valuation did decline a tiny bit and I made a small amount of money. 11 years later, I can't believe this company still exists. 

Helping someone establish a dictatorship is still a high cost action that I think requires being more persuasive than convincing someone to do their job without decisively proving you're actually their boss. 

The distinction in this specific case here is between intelligence and persuasiveness. To the extent that some elements of persuasiveness are inherently embodied, as in people are more likely to trust you if you're also a person, that is at best orthogonal to intelligence.

More generally, "effectiveness" as some general purpose quality of agents that can do things is limited by the ability to acquire and process information, but also by the ability to act on it. You may know that being tall makes you more likely to be elected to office, but if you can't mak... (read more)

To expand, I actually think it applies much more to AI than to animals. Part of the advantage of being an animal is our interface to the rest of the world is extremely flexible regarding the kinds of inputs it can accept and outputs it can produce. Software systems often crash because xml doesn't specify whether you can include whitespace in a message or not. Part of why AlphaGo isn't really "intelligent" isn't anything about the intrinsic limitations of what types of functions its network architecture can potentially learn and represent. It isn't intellig... (read more)

Although this is probably true in general, it degrades when trying to get people to do something extremely high-cost like destroy all of humanity. You either need to be very persuasive or trick them about the cost. It's hard to get people to join ISIS knowing they're joining ISIS. It's a lot easier to get them to click on ransomware that can be used to fund ISIS.

In order to qualify as a non-profit, a foundation needs to have decisions made by a board, not a single individual. 

I'm not sure to what extent this also plays in to vaccine production specifically, but the requirement for being a foundation at all is you need to give 5% of your endowment annually to charitable causes. If vaccine production is not being carried out by qualifying 501(c)(3) non-profits, then any money you give them doesn't count toward that requirement. 

Someone who actually knows something about taxonomic phylogeny of neural traits would need to say for sure, but the fact that many species share neural traits doesn't necessarily mean those traits evolved many times independently as flight did. They could have inherited the traits from a common ancestor. I have no idea if anyone has any clue whether "data efficient learning" falls into the came from a single common ancestor or evolved independently in many disconnected trees categories. It is not a trait that leaves fossil evidence. 

It might be instructive to consider some specific examples. An internal combustion engine is particularly easy to analyze, for instance. The efficiency with which fuel is turned to kinetic energy is almost entirely determined by temperature gradient between the engine and its surroundings. This means that, apart from better cooling technologies, the only way to make an engine more efficient is to make it less powerful. In practice, we also make entire vehicles more fuel efficient by making them lighter and more aerodynamic. 

But the "goal" of an engine... (read more)

I'd expect a Pareto distribution for charitable donations, not log-normal, and that's exactly what the histogram looks like:

Looks like alpha >> 2, so the variance is infinite.

It's good to see Alan Sokal is still doing God's work.

Why these things? They largely involve plenty of "analytical engine" skill. I think I'm a pretty good singer, I was varsity basketball, had good enough balance and coordination to climb V6 before injuries, won the district-wide art show in high school three years in a row, fix all my own plumbing and fixed my lawn mower engine. My wife literally rebuilt her car's circuit board, which is maybe more up the typical geek alley, but if you can do that, or build a gaming platform from parts, you can rebuild a lawn mower engine. You got me on social ski... (read more)

And traditional behavior gives us an imperfect window into the economics of the past, which is what's under discussion when we talk about historical selective fitness.

I think we should keep in mind just how far back we're talking. I'm not saying we inherited homosexuality from our common ancestor with the modern fruit fly, but at least our common ancestor with other great apes. Framing the question as why would it be selected for in the context of human societies is probably wrong, when what we want to know is why it wasn't sufficiently selected against... (read more)

Did you know about this?

DARPA SUBNETS

The SUBNETS vision is distinct from current therapeutic approaches in that it seeks to create an implanted, closed-loop diagnostic and therapeutic system for treating, and possibly even curing, neuropsychological illness. That vision is premised on the understanding that brain function—and dysfunction, in the case of neuropsychological illness—plays out across distributed neural systems, as opposed to being strictly relegated to distinct anatomical regions of the brain. The program also aims to take advantage of neura

Just to pimp my school, Georgia Tech offers a free course through Udacity in Knowledge-Based AI that involves programming an agent to take the Raven's progressive matrices test. I never took the course, but I wanna say from hearing other students that somewhere around 80 is the current state of the art (that's not an IQ and I'm not sure how to translate a Raven's score to an IQ).

This seems like a decent explanation of why I change my own mind as frequently as I do. If you're just tracking my history of Internet comments, I probably sound all over the place, but it's really me going from 54% certain of position X to 52% certain of not X, and it's hard to properly express that in an environment prone to rhetorical flourish and a debate atmosphere where you feel like you really really can't back down or you'll look weak. Most of the interesting things out there are very hard to legitimately be certain of. Factor in availability bias ... (read more)