If that sounds good, please, it'd be great if you could do it. I don't have the status.

The link for the dwarf galaxy article use wrong, it should be:

http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/7528/20140611/galaxy-formation-theories-undermined-dwarf-galaxies.htm

Thanks.

I grew up thinking that the Big Bang was the beginning of it all. In 2013 and 2014 a good number of observations have thrown some of our basic assumptions about the theory into question. There were anomalies observed in the CMB, previously ignored, now confirmed by Planck:

Another is an asymmetry in the average temperatures on opposite hemispheres of the sky. This runs counter to the prediction made by the standard model that the Universe should be broadly similar in any direction we look.

Furthermore, a cold spot extends over a patch of sky that is much larger than expected.

The asymmetry and the cold spot had already been hinted at with Planck’s predecessor, NASA’s WMAP mission, but were largely ignored because of lingering doubts about their cosmic origin.

“The fact that Planck has made such a significant detection of these anomalies erases any doubts about their reality; it can no longer be said that they are artefacts of the measurements. They are real and we have to look for a credible explanation,” says Paolo Natoli of the University of Ferrara, Italy.

... One way to explain the anomalies is to propose that the Universe is in fact not the same in all directions on a larger scale than we can observe. ...

“Our ultimate goal would be to construct a new model that predicts the anomalies and links them together. But these are early days; so far, we don’t know whether this is possible and what type of new physics might be needed. And that’s exciting,” says Professor Efstathiou.

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Planck/Planck_reveals_an_almost_perfect_Universe

We are also getting a better look at galaxies at greater distances, thinking they would all be young galaxies, and finding they are not:

The finding raises new questions about how these galaxies formed so rapidly and why they stopped forming stars so early. It is an enigma that these galaxies seem to come out of nowhere.

http://carnegiescience.edu/news/some_galaxies_early_universe_grew_quickly

The newly classified galaxies are striking in that they look a lot like those in today's universe, with disks, bars and spiral arms. But theorists predict that these should have taken another 2 billion years to begin to form, so things seem to have been settling down a lot earlier than expected.

B. D. Simmons et al. Galaxy Zoo: CANDELS Barred Disks and Bar Fractions. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2014 DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stu1817

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141030101241.htm

The findings cast doubt on current models of galaxy formation, which struggle to explain how these remote and young galaxies grew so big so fast.

http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/spitzer/splash-project-dives-deep-for-galaxies/#.VBxS4o938jg

Although it seems we don't have to look so far away to find evidence that galaxy formation is inconsistent with the Big Bang timeline.

If the modern galaxy formation theory were right, these dwarf galaxies simply wouldn't exist.

Merrick and study lead Marcel Pawlowski consider themselves part of a small-but-growing group of experts questioning the wisdom of current astronomical models.

"When you have a clear contradiction like this, you ought to focus on it," Merritt said. "This is how progress in science is made."

http://mq.edu.au/newsroom/2014/03/11/granny-galaxies-discovered-in-the-early-universe/ http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.1799

Another observation is that lithium abundances are way too low for the theory in other places, not just here:

A star cluster some 80,000 light-years from Earth looks mysteriously deficient in the element lithium, just like nearby stars, astronomers reported on Wednesday.

That curious deficiency suggests that astrophysicists either don't fully understand the big bang, they suggest, or else don't fully understand the way that stars work.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/09/140910-space-lithium-m54-star-cluster-science/

It also seems there is larger scale structure continually being discovered larger than the Big Bang is thought to account for:

"The first odd thing we noticed was that some of the quasars' rotation axes were aligned with each other -- despite the fact that these quasars are separated by billions of light-years," said Hutsemékers. The team then went further and looked to see if the rotation axes were linked, not just to each other, but also to the structure of the Universe on large scales at that time.

"The alignments in the new data, on scales even bigger than current predictions from simulations, may be a hint that there is a missing ingredient in our current models of the cosmos," concludes Dominique Sluse.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141119084506.htm

D. Hutsemékers, L. Braibant, V. Pelgrims, D. Sluse. Alignment of quasar polarizations with large-scale structures. Astronomy & Astrophysics, 2014

Dr Clowes said: "While it is difficult to fathom the scale of this LQG, we can say quite definitely it is the largest structure ever seen in the entire universe. This is hugely exciting -- not least because it runs counter to our current understanding of the scale of the universe.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130111092539.htm

These observations have been made just recently. It seems that in the 1980's, when I was first introduced to the Big Bang as a child, the experts in the field knew then there were problems with it, and devised inflation as a solution. And today, the validity of that solution is being called into question by those same experts:

In light of these arguments, the oft-cited claim that cosmological data have verified the central predictions of inflationary theory is misleading, at best. What one can say is that data have confirmed predictions of the naive inflationary theory as we understood it before 1983, but this theory is not inflationary cosmology as understood today. The naive theory supposes that inflation leads to a predictable outcome governed by the laws of classical physics. The truth is that quantum physics rules inflation, and anything that can happen will happen. And if inflationary theory makes no firm predictions, what is its point?

http://www.physics.princeton.edu/~steinh/0411036.pdf

What are the odds 2015 will be more like 2014 where we (again) found larger and older galaxies at greater distances, or will it be more like 1983?

This may be a naive question, which has a simple answer, but I haven't seen it. Please enlighten me.

I'm not clear on why an AI should have a utility function at all.

The computer I'm typing this on doesn't. It simply has input-output behavior. When I hit certain keys it reacts in certain, very complex ways, but it doesn't decide. It optimizes, but only when I specifically tell it to do so, and only on the parameters that I give it.

We tend to think of world-shaping GAI as an agent with it's own goals, which it seeks to implement. Why can't it be more like a computing machine in a box. We could feed it questions, like "given this data, will it rain tomorrow?", or "solve this protein folding problem", or "which policy will best reduce gun-violence?", or even "given these specific parameters and definitions, how do we optimize for human happiness?" For the complex answers like the last of those, we could then ask the AI to model the state of the world that results from following this policy. If we see that it leads to tiling the universe with smiley faces, we know that we made a mistake somewhere (that wasn't what we were trying to optimize for), and adjust the parameters. We might even train the AI over time, so that it learns how to interpret what we mean from what we say. When the AI models a state of the world that actually reflects our desires, then we implement it's suggestions ourselves, or perhaps only then hit the implement button, by with the AI takes the steps to carry out it's plan. We might even use such a system to check the safety of future generations of the AI. This would slow recursive self improvement, but it seems it would be much safer.

Count me surveyed.

Unless challenged to think otherwise, people quickly move from "Phew! Dodged a bullet on that one!" to "I'm a great bullet-dodger."

Discussing the "Near-miss bias" which they define as a tendency to "take more risk after an event in which luck played a critical role in deciding the event's [favorable] outcome."

Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, page 150.

Having circular preferences is incoherent, and being vulnerable to a money pump is a consequence of that.

I knew that if I had 0.95Y I would trade it for (0.95^2)Z, which I would trade for (0.95^3)X, then actually I'd be trading 1X for (0.95^3)X, which I'm obviously not going to do.

This means that you won't, in fact, trade your X for .95Y. That in turn means that you do not actually value X at .9Y, and so the initially stated exchange rates are meaningless (or rather, they don't reflect your true preferences).

Your strategy requires you to refuse all trades at exchange rates below the money-pumpable threshold, and you'll end up only making trades at exchange rates that are non-circular.

Judging from the comments this is receiving on Hacker News, this post is a mindkiller. HN is an audience more friendly to LW ideas than most, so this is a bad sign. I liked it, but unfortunately it's probably unsuitable for general consumption.

I know we've debated the "no politics" norm on LW many times, but I think a distinction should be made when it comes to the target audience of a post. In posts aimed to make a contribution to "raising the sanity waterline", I think we're shooting ourselves in the foot by invoking politics.

I like the combination of conciseness and thoroughness you've achieved with this.

There are a couple of specific parts I'll quibble about:

Therefore the next logical step is to use science to figure out how to replace humans by a better version of themselves, artificial general intelligence.

"The Automation of Science" section seems weaker to me than the others, perhaps even superfluous. I think the line I've quoted is the crux of the problem; I highly doubt that the development of AGI will be driven by any such motivations.

Will we be able to build an artificial general intelligence? Yes, sooner or later.

I assign a high probability to the proposition that we will be able to build AGI, but I think a straight "yes" is too strong here.

Out of curiosity, what are your current thoughts on the arguments you've laid out here?