HPMOR Wrap Parties: Resources, Information and Discussion [link to Main post]

2 TylerJay 05 March 2015 09:15PM

Posted to Main. X-posting for visibility

I know a lot of people don't check Main very often. Wanted to make sure everyone interested saw this. 

[Link] IBM to set Watson loose on cancer genome data

3 TylerJay 20 March 2014 04:48PM

http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/03/ibm-to-set-watson-loose-on-cancer-genome-data/

Can anyone more informed about Watson or Machine Learning in general comment on this application?  Specifically, I'm interested in an explanation of this part:

[...] the National Institutes of Health has compiled lists of biochemical pathways—signaling networks and protein interactions—and placed them in machine-readable formats. Once those were imported, Watson's text analysis abilities were set loose on the NIH's PubMed database, which contains abstracts of nearly every paper published in peer-reviewed biomedical journals.

Over time, Watson will develop its own sense of what sources it looks at are consistently reliable. Royyuru told Ars that, if the team decides to, it can start adding the full text of articles and branch out to other information sources. Between the known pathways and the scientific literature, however, IBM seems to think that Watson has a good grip on what typically goes on inside cells.

It sounds like Watson will be trained through some standard formatted input data and then it's going to read plaintext articles and draw conclusions about them?  It sounds like they're anticipating that Watson will be able to tell which studies are "good" studies as well, which sounds incredible (in both senses of the word).

Self-Study Questions Thread

12 TylerJay 29 January 2014 01:32AM
There are a lot of autodidacts on LessWrong and many of us hold scholarship to be a virtue.  Learning things on your own can be tricky for a number of reasons, but there is a lot of good material on LessWrong on how to do it efficiently.  We know that it's usually best to build small skills in the right order, but sometimes it's difficult to figure out just what that order is, especially across disciplines.  University programs have strict prerequisites that are supposed to ensure that you can handle a course before you take it, but taking a college course catalog's prerequisites to be absolute is an easy way to get demotivated before you learn anything you're actually interested in.

I've seen a lot of people run into trouble with self-study when they really want to study topic x, but know that they have to study topic y first as a prerequisite.  (For example, I once saw someone on LW who wanted to start learning programming, but thought he couldn't get started without learning a bunch of math first.)  For progress to be by accumulation and not by random walk, it is sometimes necessary to do this, but it can be hard to tell.

I wanted to create a thread where would-be autodidacts with limited knowledge of their target domain can ask these kinds of questions so that they can better plan their courses of study.  Whether it's questions about specific texts, recommended prerequisites, MOOCs, course overlap, whatever.  

Any general discussion about self-study is welcome too.

Gauging Interest: Santa Barbara, CA Meetup

1 TylerJay 24 January 2014 08:22PM

I live in Santa Barbara.  Los Angeles is a bit too far away for me to travel for LW meetups, so I wanted to see if anyone would be interested in a Santa Barbara meetup.  I would be happy to arrange it and plan content.

If anyone would be interested in attending *at least one* Santa Barbara meetup provided that it was on a day and time that worked for your schedule, please post a comment or send me a private message.

Thanks!

[Meta] Post-meetup reports and discussion

16 TylerJay 21 December 2013 04:11AM

Looking at the discussion section recently, it seems like over half of the posts are meetups.  I think it's really great that so many LessWrongers are able to get together and do interesting stuff.  Looking at a lot of the topics, I often find myself thinking "I wonder what they ended up talking about."  I looked at the meetups page and it looks like many give a description of the topic, but there is rarely any public followup.  I also did a search which turned up surprisingly few post-meetup posts.

For example, this Los Angeles meetup from a few days ago about resolutions looked really interesting to me and I'm curious to hear what kinds of strategies were proposed and if there were any insights or anecdotes that came up that would be useful to share with those of us that couldn't attend.

I remember reading a meetup report back in November that told the story of the exercises they went through and it seemed to spark some good discussion.  It even forced me to make a note to try some things on my own.  This one was atypical in that it was very detailed and was a crosspost from a personal blog, but I feel like even short reports would give a chance for the rest of the community to chime in and give praise, suggestions, and feedback.  

When I tried to think of reasons not to share what happened in meetups, I came up with a few potential factors:

  1. It's extra work
  2. Keeping it private increases the feeling of community within the group
  3. Meetups are supposed to be a safe place where your actions or comments won't be broadcast to the world
  4. Nothing really post-worthy happened
Some potential arguments in favor of having a post-meetup discussion post:
  1. It would allow LessWrongers who weren't in attendance to get involved in the discussion
  2. Insights would be shared with the whole community
  3. Meetup organizers and attendees could get suggestions for ways to improve future meetups
  4. Non-attendees could use these ideas to host their own meetups
  5. Summarizing key points of a discussion is helpful for those involved to retain the information they discussed
Does anyone else feel like this would be useful?  What is the real reason there are not very many reports?

In the spirit of putting my money where my mouth is, I pledge to attend a LessWrong meetup sometime in the next two months and do a post-meetup report to see if it is useful to anyone (provided the meetup group is okay with me sharing it.) 

 

Sal Khan publicly predicts the positive feedback loop associated with human intelligence augmentation. [Link]

4 TylerJay 21 August 2012 03:57PM

Ray Kurzweil is speaking at my university tonight. What questions should I ask him?

4 TylerJay 07 March 2012 01:17AM

I realize this is late notice, but I just found out.  He goes on at 8pm and will likely be answering questions by 9:30.  I would like to ask him some great questions and I will ask as many of the best that I see here as possible.  Any ideas?