Am I from Illinois? No, actually - Maryland. Checking the data, it seems I'm in a very strange statistical anomaly: 82% in 6 years. At a state university.

No wonder my impressions were skewed.

Re: "Already we have computer programs which can re-write existing to programs to run faster. These programs can also re-write themselves to run faster. However, they cannot rewrite themselves to become better at re-writing themselves faster."

You mean that they can't do that alone? Refactoring programs help speed up their own development, and make it easier and faster to make improvements in a set of programs that often includes their own source code.

It's not total automation - but partial automation is still very significant progress.

I'd appreciate some feedback on a brain dump I did on economics and technology. Nothing revolutionary here. Just want people with more experience on the tech side to check my thinking.

Thanks in advance

http://modeledbehavior.com/2010/03/11/the-economics-of-really-big-ideas/

I have a 2000+ word brain dump on economics and technology that I'd appreciate feedback on. What would be the protocol. Should I link to it? Copy it into a comment? Start a top level article about it?

I am not promising any deep insights here, just my own synthesis of some big ideas that are out there.

Perhaps I am missing something but it seems to me that a world in which Godzilla was common knowledge would have a completely different history of biology. For one thing it's hard to imagine that explaing Godzillia would not be a major goal of philosophers and scientists since the earliest days.

I imagine one of the basic questions would be whether Godzillia was a beast or a god and answering this would be a high priority. What does Godzillia want? Where did he come from? Has he always existed? Are there more? Do they mate?

These seem like really big deal questions when confronted by a sea monster which occasionally destroys towns.

I'm sure some people understand more than Keynes, both today and in his time, but can you name them? The understanding of the best unrecognized synthesizing geniuses of both today and Keynes' day aren't available. If you think that the most famous contemporary macro people know more than Keynes I won't laugh, just observe that they are probably using that knowledge to make hedge fund managers rich, not sharing it with you.

Macro-economists are rightly subject to the criticism "if your so smart, why aren't you rich".

Rediscovering is not as prestigious as discovering, because it is not as difficult and does not signal intellectual greatness.

There is a difference between rediscovering and old idea, and adapting an old idea to a new situation. Simply rediscovering an old idea does not grant much prestige. Austrians are constantly coming across Hayek quotes and parading them around as definitive solutions to current problems. The problem is that these ideas are every bit as untestable as they were on the day Hayek wrote them. A confirmation bias leads Austrians to see them as Truth, while Keysians remain skeptical.

When old ideas are adapted into a testable form they endow a great deal of prestige. There are all sorts of anecdotes about this happening, such as Henry Ford taking the idea of an assembly line from Oldsmobile and mixing it with his observations from a meat factory, to create the moving assembly line. The difference is that this is a testable idea that creates immediate results.

I think this post overstates the case a bit. My general impression is that the scientific method "wins" even in economics and that later works are better than earlier works.

Now it might be true that the average macro-economist of today understands less than Keynes did but I'd be hard pressed to say that the best don't understand more. Moreover, there are really great distillers. In macro for example, Hicks distilled Keynes into something that I would consider more useful that the original.

Nonetheless, I think it is correct that someone should be reading the originals. If not there is the propensity for a particular distiller to miss an important insight and then for everyone else to go one missing it.

What this says to me is that there should be rewards to re-discovery. Suppose that I read Adam Smith and rediscover something great. I should be rewarded for that just as much as if I had come up with the idea myself. Afterall, it has the same effect on the current state of knowledge. However, that will not happen.

Rediscovering is not as prestigious as discovering, because it is not as difficult and does not signal intellectual greatness.

One might argue that Newton didn't use any technique to invent calculus, just a very high IQ or some other unusual set of biological traits.

That would be a non-explanation in any case. However high Newton's IQ may have been, his brain was still operating by lawful processes within the physical universe. By the sheer improbability of inventing calculus by chance, there is bound to exist some general technique used by Newton for doing things like inventing calculus, for all that that technique may have been opaque to Newton's own conscious introspection. Perhaps someone else may be able to formulate this technique in explicit generality (in the same way that Newton himself formulated the methods of calculus, already known in special cases, in explicit generality).

"High IQ" probably doesn't mean more than something like high processing speed and copious amounts of RAM. The algorithms (at least in their essence) can still be run, less efficiently, on inferior hardware.

The neurology of human brains and the architecture of modern control systems are remarkably similar, with layers of feedback, and adaptive modelling of the problem space, in addition to the usual dogged iron filing approach to goal seeking. I have worked on a control systems which, as they add (even minor) complexity at higher layers of abstraction, take on eerie behaviors that seem intelligent, within their own small fields of expertise. I don't personally think we'll find anything different or ineffable or more, when we finally understand intelligence, than just layers of control systems.

Consciousness, I hope, is something more and different in kind, and maybe that's what you were really after in the original post, but it's a subjective beast. OTOH, if it is "mere" complex behavior we're after, something measurable and Turing-testable, then intelligence is about to be within our programming grasp any time now.

I LOVE the Romeo reference but a modern piece of software would find its way around the obstacle so quickly as to make my dog look dumb, and maybe Romeo, too.