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I'm attempting to use it alongside Udacity to grasp Maths, Science, Statistics and Computer Science (well, programming). I've not got down to doing everything systematically yet, but it's all much more effective and efficient than school (I'm 15). Currently, I'm learning Calculus, and it's much better than the English education system, even though I have a one-to-one session for one hour per week with my teacher. On Khan, I have an Earth Badge, and 66,858 points.
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How many of you doing Khan Academy?
As a soon-to-be maths teacher, hearing about high school students going above and beyond the terribly-designed curricula that teachers are forced to inflict on their students warms my heart enormously. May your passion for learning continue to grow, and guide you to ever greater intellectual heights. Have an upvote. :)
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PROPOSAL: LessWrong for Teenagers
I think this is a good idea. I wish LW had existed when I was a teenager; maybe I could have got started on the path to enlightenment earlier, instead of spending more than half a decade as one of those smirking, sarcastic, self-congratulatory Atheists that now make me cringe. But it does seem likely that LW could be intimidating to teenagers, and this seems to me to be a demographic we should be trying to reach.
Perhaps we could make an effort to produce some more accessible, entry-level posts that provide a gentler introduction to the material of the sequences and LW community memes, without assumed prereading, as part of this...
Lots of amazing things happened. Imagine watching it all happen. Given the data you had at each moment, how many complete shocks awaited you?
Stephen Baxter does a very good job of evoking this in his SF anthology Vacuum Diagrams, I think, although of course we don't know there actually were such forms of life at each stage you mentioned. :)
Ooh, I read his novel Evolution and found it to be extremely enjoyable. It's the evolution of humans from a little ratlike mammal thing living through the KT-event, all the way through to modern humans and then speculative extension beyond - but each chapter is a narrative about some individual actual creature going through a significant event in its life, with realistic depiction of the increasing cognitive abilities (i.e. no sapient monkeys). I found it gave me an amazing subjective feeling of perspective on the evolution of primates and humans. Heartily recommended.
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2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey
Done. I did all of the extra credit except the Myers-Briggs. The IQ test was the most interesting but three or four questions towards the ends were frustratingly difficult and refused to yield their secrets to me; even now I can feel lingering annoyance at the fact that I eventually gave up on them instead of wrestling with them for longer. Oh well.
Trivialists are!
But they weren't. Trivialists certainly do assert that is true, and so is
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[LINK] Mastering Linear Algebra in 10 Days: Astounding Experiments in Ultra-Learning
Crunch time motivation is very high quality and not trivially replicated. So I'd be impressed if you managed to pull this off in practice.
(BTW, I recommend students plan to do things during crunch time by default, or at least experiment with this. You're going to have an extremely high-quality source of motivation if you just wait a while--why not take advantage of it? If you want to work, and you have no imminent deadlines, either work on whatever you feel like working on AutoFocus-style or, if your energy level is high enough, work on some independent project that has no deadline--your opportunity costs are lower this way.)
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[LINK] Mastering Linear Algebra in 10 Days: Astounding Experiments in Ultra-Learning
Oh no. Now I have a perfect, bulletproof excuse, that I actually buy, for my habit of procrastinating so badly with assignments that I typically end up doing them in a modafinil-powered all nighter on the night before they're due.
John_Maxwell_IV, what have you done?
Treating the boundary between Clippy and gravity as a quantitative one (optimization power over a wide range of targets, as above) rather than a qualitative one does violence to some of my intuitions as well, but on balance I don't endorse those intuitions. Gravity is, technically speaking, an optimization process... though, as you say, it's not worth the name in a colloquial sense.
I find this very unsatisfying, not least because the optimisation power over a wide range of targets is easily gamed just by dividing any given 'target' of a process into a whole lot of smaller targets and then saying "look at all these different targets that the process optimised for!"
Claiming that optimisation power is defined simply by a process's ability to hit some target from a wide range of starting states, and/or has a wide range of targets that it can hit, both seem to be easily gameable by clever sophistry with your choice of how you choose the targets by which you measure its optimisation power. There must be some part of it that separates processes we feel genuinely are good at optimising (like Clippy) from processes that only come out as good at optimising if we select clever targets to measure them by.
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[LINK] blog on cryonics by someone who freezes things in a cell bio lab
Per PZ Myers, the state of the art in neural preservation doesn't recoverably preserve usable amounts of state in zebrafish brains, which are a few hundred microns on a side. How thin slices were you thinking of? And how fast were you going to be slicing?
I’ve worked with tiny little zebrafish brains, things a few hundred microns long on one axis, and I’ve done lots of EM work on them. You can’t fix them into a state resembling life very accurately: even with chemical perfusion with strong aldehyedes of small tissue specimens that takes hundreds of milliseconds, you get degenerative changes. There’s a technique where you slam the specimen into a block cooled to liquid helium temperatures — even there you get variation in preservation, it still takes 0.1ms to cryofix the tissue, and what they’re interested in preserving is cell states in a single cell layer, not whole multi-layered tissues. With the most elaborate and careful procedures, they report excellent fixation within 5 microns of the surface, and disruption of the tissue by ice crystal formation within 20 microns. So even with the best techniques available now, we could possibly preserve the thinnest, outermost, single cell layer of your brain…but all the fine axons and dendrites that penetrate deeper? Forget those.
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[LINK] blog on cryonics by someone who freezes things in a cell bio lab
Clarification: the current state of the art in neural preservation doesn't preserve amounts of state in zebrafish brains that are recoverable in usable form by the current state of the art.
If we had the ability to recover the information in usable form today, there would be no need for cryonics to exist.
Yes, I agree that on this account every process is technically speaking an optimization process for some target, and I agree that optimization power can only be measured relative to particular target or class of targets.
That said, when we say that evolution, or a human-level intelligence, is an optimization process we mean something rather more than this: we mean something like that it's an optimization process with a lot of optimization power across a wide range of targets. (And, sure, I agree that if we hold the environment constant, including other evolved lifeforms, then evolution has a fixed target. If we lived in a universe where such constant environments were common, I suspect we would not be inclined to describe evolution as an optimization process.)
I don't see how that makes "optimization process" a useless notion. What do you want to use it for?
(apologies for delayed reply)
I really just want to know what Eliezer means by it. It seems to me like I have some notion of an optimisation process, that says "yep, that's definitely an optimisation process" when I think about evolution and human minds and Clippy, and says "nope, that's not really an optimisation process - at least, not one worth the name" about water rolling down a hill and thermodynamics. And I think this notion is sufficiently similar to the one that Eliezer is using. But my attempts to formalise this definition, to reduce it, have failed - I can't find any combination of words that seems to capture the boundary that my intuition is drawing between Clippy and gravity.
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I've got tasker, but haven't successfully set it up to do anything. I find all of the layers of menus and terminology confusing and wonder why there isn't a configuration file I can edit by hand.
Yeah, the interface is usually the biggest complaint and I agree it's quite suboptimal. I guess the good bit is once you get something working you don't have to interact with it again until you want to change it.
I haven't tried it myself, but I believe there is a way to write the contexts and tasks in XML files or something similar... you could look that up.