Greg Linster on the beauty of death

6 Jonathan_Graehl 20 October 2011 04:47AM

Without death we cannot truly have life. As such, what a travesty of life it would be to achieve a machine-like immortality!

Gray writes the following chilling lines: “If you understand that in wanting to live for ever you are trying to preserve a lifeless image of yourself, you may not want to be resurrected or to survive in a post-mortem paradise. What could be more deadly than being unable to die?” (my emphasis)

via.

Sounds like sour grapes. I'd heard of people holding such sentiments; this is the first time I've actually seen them expressed myself.

Contrarians judged mad after being proven right (John Hempton)

5 Jonathan_Graehl 02 September 2011 06:41AM

I recommend John Hempton's blog post on how badly people judge seeming madmen in the case the conventional view has only conventional-wisdom support. I also like how he explains his research and conclusions in general.

the gist:

In early June Carson Block and his firm Muddy Waters research published a report which made outrageous sounding allegations against Sino Forest - then a highly respected Canadian listed Chinese forestry company that had borrowed well over $2 billion to develop and expand forestry operations in China.

The base allegation in the report was that most the forests did not exist and by implication the (more than) $2 billion borrowed was stolen. Presumably many more shares have been sold too taking the total theft well above $2 billion.

I am obsessed about discovering the ways my positions can be wrong.

Dundee Securities was the most prominent Sino-supporter labeling Muddy Water's research a "pile of crap". Somewhat more considered sounding (but also flat wrong just more reasonable sounding) was Metal Augmentor who found Carson "loose with the facts and somewhat breathless". On the naive-sounding side was Susan Mallin whose complaint was that she had "never seen a research report written in this manner". More prominent people were fooled too.

The analysis of these people was staggeringly weak and self-referential. They judged Sino Forest against data provided by Sino Forest or people associated with Sino Forest. This is an elementary mistake in assessing fraud. To find fraud you need to be able to judge against things you are fairly sure are not fraudulent.

Everything the Carson Block doubters said sounded reasonable. Certainly more reasonable than Carson Block sounded because Carson Block held the radical position. Sounding reasonable however was wrong.

I think what is going on here is a general problem. When someone says something - anything - that is so far from the consensus as to sound outrageous then they will be considered mad, and sometimes they will be considered mad even after they are proven right.

synapse renormalization - another reason to sleep more than minimum-REM

6 Jonathan_Graehl 21 August 2011 07:44PM

(not yet studied in mammals)

The ratio of the strength of a synapse between neurons and the total potential (from all incoming synapses) needed to activate a neuron may be all that figures; the absolute values may not be important (this is the basis for computer neural networks, though temporal effects, firing rates, and who knows what else also matter in real brains).

So you can renormalize (multiply by some constant 1) and see almost no difference except for perhaps greater susceptibility to noise. But at least the amount of physical material needed is smaller, and the energy needed is smaller. It's more efficient.

In flies and other simple animals studied so far, this definitely happens during sleep. Maybe it happens in humans also. (remains to be studied).

In any case, be careful committing to some REM-sleep only 3hr/day-with-naps sleep schedule, just because you may feel fine at first, when the exact utility of non-REM sleep isn't completely known.

Via.

(US only) Donate $2 to charity (bing rewards)

-1 Jonathan_Graehl 18 August 2011 09:16PM

Probably not worth most of your time, but if you already have a Windows Live account, log in here and you earn enough Bing reward points (whatever those are) to donate $2 to charity - http://www.bing.com/rewards/signup/web

Unfortunately, the charity selection is limited to a couple of "better educate the poor" organizations.

SMBC: dystopian objective function

8 Jonathan_Graehl 24 June 2011 04:03AM

Cartoon: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2286 evokes the horror you should feel imagining your values being modified arbitrarily, although in the comic there's slippery-slope consent at each step.

This reminds me of a sci-fi novel where the participants are playing a game where points are awarded for "traditional" early 20th century behavior (the original records are lost, and some virus has infected the teleportation gates). Unfortunately I can't remember the author or name; it was pretty decent. Anyone recall it?

1-2pm is for ???

-5 Jonathan_Graehl 16 June 2011 05:01AM

I left myself a cryptic note for trying some lifestyle habit a few weeks ago, and can no longer recall its meaning. Here's the note in its entirety:

> 1-2pm

Any suggestions for what's best done at 1-2pm? I feel like (70%) it has something to do with diet or exercise (but not napping). I'm half hoping to hear a more useful idea than the one I forgot, which wasn't spectacular enough for me to remember. I already searched web, mail, and my RSS.

Friendlier AI through politics

1 Jonathan_Graehl 16 August 2009 09:29PM

David Brin suggests that some kind of political system populated with humans and diverse but imperfectly rational and friendly AIs would evolve in a satisfactory direction for humans.

I don't know whether creating an imperfectly rational general AI is any easier, except that limited perceptual and computational resources obviously imply less than optimal outcomes; still, why shouldn't we hope for optimal given those constraints?  I imagine the question will become more settled before anyone nears unleashing a self-improving superhuman AI.

An imperfectly friendly AI, perfectly rational or not, is a very likely scenario.  Is it sufficient to create diverse singleton value-systems (demographically representative of humans' values) rather than a consensus (over all humans' values) monolithic Friendly?  

What kind of competitive or political system would make fragmented squabbling AIs safer than an attempt to get the monolithic approach right?  Brin seems to have some hope of improving politics regardless of AI participation, but I'm not sure exactly what his dream is or how to get there - perhaps his "disputation arenas" would work if the participants were rational and altruistically honest).

She Blinded Me With Science

13 Jonathan_Graehl 04 August 2009 07:10PM

Scrutinize claims of scientific fact in support of opinion journalism.

Even with honest intent, it's difficult to apply science correctly, and it's rare that dishonest uses are punished. Citing a scientific result gives an easy patina of authority, which is rarely scratched by a casual reader. Without actually lying, the arguer may select from dozens of studies only the few with the strongest effect in their favor, when the overall body of evidence may point at no effect or even in the opposite direction. The reader only sees "statistically significant evidence for X". In some fields, the majority of published studies claim unjustified significance in order to gain publication, inciting these abuses.

Here are two recent examples:

Women are often better communicators because their brains are more networked for language. The majority of women are better at "mind-reading," than most men; they can read the emotions written on people's faces more quickly and easily, a talent jump-started by the vast swaths of neural real estate dedicated to processing emotions in the female brain.

- Susan Pinker, a psychologist, in NYT's "DO Women Make Better Bosses"

Twin studies and adoptive studies show that the overwhelming determinant of your weight is not your willpower; it's your genes. The heritability of weight is between .75 and .85. The heritability of height is between .9 and .95. And the older you are, the more heritable weight is.

- Megan McArdle, linked from the LW article The Obesity Myth

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