Comment author: CellBioGuy 04 October 2016 10:00:49PM *  11 points [-]

Advice solicited. Topics of interest I have lined up for upcoming posts include:

  • The history of life on Earth and its important developments
  • The nature of the last universal common ancestor (REALLY good new research on this just came out)
  • The origin of life and the different schools of thought on it
  • Another exploration of time in which I go over a paper that came out this summer that basically did exactly what I did a few months earlier with my "Space and Time Part II" calculations of our point in star and planet order that showed we are not early and are right around when you would expect to find the average biosphere, but extended it to types of stars and their lifetimes in a way I think I can improve upon.
  • My thoughs on how and why SETI has been sidetracked away from activities that are more likely to be productive towards activities that are all but doomed to fail, with a few theoretical case studies
  • My thoughts on how the Fermi paradox / 'great filter' is an ill-posed concept
  • Interesting recent research on the apparent evolutionary prerequisites for primate intelligence

Any thoughts on which of these are of particular interest, or other ideas to delve into?

Comment author: DavidPlumpton 07 October 2016 06:33:06AM 1 point [-]

Have you ever seen this paper that claims a complexity analysis of the Viking lander experiment results can't be explained by chemistry alone? Interesting stuff...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257958533_Complexity_Analysis_of_the_Viking_Labeled_Release_Experiments

Comment author: DavidPlumpton 21 September 2016 07:35:36AM 1 point [-]

I found a trick somewhere on the net for clearing a blocked nose (even very blocked). Hold your nose, inhale deeply, then repeat tipping your head back for four seconds, and then forward for four seconds. Breath out slowly. Then hold your breath as long as you can, still tipping forward and back every four seconds and holding your nose. Eventually you inhale and all the gunk just sort of flows out of your nasal cavity. Warning... much gagging, spluttering and spitting at this point. But it's worth it.

Comment author: DavidPlumpton 06 October 2015 07:44:32PM 1 point [-]

Possibly asking something like "you're good at finding points that back up your beliefs, but you also need to spend time thinking about points that might contradict your beliefs. How many contradictory points can you think of over the next five minutes?"

Comment author: DavidPlumpton 18 September 2015 09:40:28PM 1 point [-]

Usually "Monty Hall"?

Comment author: Romashka 02 August 2015 03:13:31PM *  2 points [-]

Could someone point me towards good fictional stories set in Roman times, like those by Kipling in Puck...? Thank you. (Edit: spelling)

Comment author: DavidPlumpton 03 August 2015 06:18:31AM 1 point [-]

Well there is this little classic that is apparently being made into a movie https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/k067x/could_i_destroy_the_entire_roman_empire_during/c2giwm4

Comment author: DavidPlumpton 02 March 2015 08:51:13AM 1 point [-]

I think you are making an unjustified assumption, e.g. "... that I will pop into existence again...", that there is an "I". There is a pattern of information that feels that it experiences qualia, and then later possibly there is another pattern of information that feels that it experiences qualia, and possibly with additional information representing memories corresponding to the first set of information. Shifting to this viewpoint dissolves the question. If we accept that qualia is an illusion then we still have an interesting question about how the illusion occurs, but many other tricky issues go away.

Comment author: Baughn 09 February 2015 02:39:24AM *  2 points [-]

I think Go, the board game, will likely fall to the machines. The driving engine of advances will shift somewhat from academia to industry.

This is a sucker bet. I don't know if you've kept up to date, but AI techniques for Go-playing have advanced dramatically over the last couple of years, and they're rapidly catching up to the best human players. They've already passed the 1-dan mark.

Interestingly, from my reading this is by way of general techniques rather than writing programs that are terribly specialized to Go.

Comment author: DavidPlumpton 09 February 2015 07:07:11AM 1 point [-]

Advanced quickly for a while due to a complete change in algorithm, but then we seem to have hit a plateau again. It's still an enormous climb to world champion level. It's not obvious that this will be achieved.

Comment author: DavidPlumpton 08 April 2014 09:48:43AM 1 point [-]

Looking at SHRDLU output just trying to recreate that looks pretty challenging for the modern coder, let alone decades ago. A little Lisp goes a long way.

Comment author: shminux 20 March 2014 05:28:28PM 1 point [-]

Consciousness exists

If you are trying to be all formal about it, it's good to start by defining your terminology. What do you mean by Consciousness and what do you mean by existence? And one of the best ways to define what you mean by a commonly used term is to delineate its boundaries. For example, what is not-consciousness? Not-quite-consciousness? Give an example of ten. Same with existence. What does it mean for something to not exist? Can you list a dozen of non-existing things?

For example, do pink unicorns exist? If not, how come they affect reality (you see a sentence about them on your computer monitor)? How is consciousness different from pink unicorns? Please do not latch on this one particular example, make up your own.

I am pretty sure you have no firm understanding of what you are talking about, even though it feels like you do in your gut, "but is hard to explain". If you do not have a firm grasp of the basics, writing fancy lemmas and theorems may help you publish a philosophy paper but does not get your anywhere closer to understanding the issues.

Comment author: DavidPlumpton 20 March 2014 07:12:23PM 1 point [-]

If you are trying to be all formal about it, it's good to start by defining your terminology. What do you mean by Consciousness and what do you mean by existence?

I'm trying to be slightly formal, but without getting too bogged down. Instead I would prefer to take a few shortcuts to see if the road ahead looks promising at all. So far I feel that the best I've managed is to say "If a system seems to itself to experience consciousness in the same way that we seem to experience it, then we can call it conscious".

I am pretty sure you have no firm understanding of what you are talking about,

Not as sure as I am ;-) But I am trying to improve my understanding, and have no intention of writing philosophy papers.

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 24 October 2013 10:11:15PM 4 points [-]

Suppose you carry a timetable of your daily routine with you. Whenever you look at the whole timetable, it's the same; but if you just look at a random single line of the timetable, there's a "clock observable" (words saying what time it is) and a "state of the universe observable" (words saying what activity should be happening at that time).

This experiment is "evidence" for the emergence of time from entanglement, to exactly the same degree that the experiment I just described, of looking at your daily schedule, is evidence for time being relational. They have a global superposition which remains the same over time, but in which the observed state of one part is correlated with the observed state of the other part.

The "physics arxiv blog" (which has no official relation to arxiv, it's just someone describing random papers) is completely uncritical, and faithfully repeats whatever claims authors make about the meaning of their work.

Comment author: DavidPlumpton 25 October 2013 01:56:31AM 0 points [-]

So it sounds like you're saying the details may all be correct but the high level interpretation of the results is significantly overreaching. Not too unexpected, I guess.

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