betterthanwell

In June 2012, the Association for Computing Machinery—a professional society of computer scientists, best known for hosting the prestigious ACM Turing Award, commonly referred to as the "Nobel Prize of Computer Science"—celebrated the 100th birthday of Alan Turing.

The event was attended by luminaries like, oh, in no particular order: Donald Knuth, Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, Marvin Minsky, Judea Pearl, Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, Leonard Adleman, and of extra relevance here; Ken Thompson, inventor of the UNIX operating system, co-inventor of the C programming language, and computer chess pioneer.

In all, some 33 Turing Award winners were scheduled to be in attendance. There were no parallel tracks or simultaneous panels going on.

Image credit: Joshua Lock

So... (read 468 more words →)

Edit: Dangerously misleading on one crucial point.

This started out as a short reply to the Less Wrong post Minimum Viable Workout Routine. Unfortunately I was unable to summarise my points sufficiently, so this reply grew into a post of it's own. I realize that the following is a bit rude to the original poster, and I apologize. Minimum Viable Workout Routine seems to be backed solely by anecdotal personal experience. The majority of the post, which addresses strength training seems decent, and not obviously wrong. However, the following paragraph is dangerously wrong:

A note about cardio: Cardiovascular capacity (V02 max) has shown a high degree of correlation to all cause mortality. Why aren't I recommending cardio? Because the

... (read 1687 more words →)

Less Wrong used to like Bitcoin before it was cool. Monthly threads popped up around the same time a pricing bubble brought mainstream attention last year. When the bubble popped, and price continued to deflate, discussion on this site stopped entirely. Was there a change of sign in the social status of the topic, is the topic fully explored, or has there simply happened nothing of interest over the last year?

If you are not familiar with Bitcoin, here is one intro I happen to like.

Kaj Sotala lists a number of previous threads on the topic:

There seems to be quite a bit of a Bitcoin interest around here, with several articles about it already: [1 2 3 4 5 6 7]

Less Wrong seems like a good place to discuss recent developments, if one does not want to suffer the inanity of the officially unofficial forum. If you are not longer interested in Bitcoin, perhaps send your remaining balance to the Singularity Institute?

Transhumanist philosopher David Pearce co-founded Humanity+ with Nick Bostrom.

He is currently answering questions in an AMA on reddit/r/transhumanism.

A mundane cause for a surprising result. Consider this unconfirmed for now, however unsurprising it sounds.

According to sources familiar with the experiment, the 60 nanoseconds discrepancy appears to come from a bad connection between a fiber optic cable that connects to the GPS receiver used to correct the timing of the neutrinos' flight and an electronic card in a computer. After tightening the connection and then measuring the time it takes data to travel the length of the fiber, researchers found that the data arrive 60 nanoseconds earlier than assumed. Since this time is subtracted from the overall time of flight, it appears to explain the early arrival of the neutrinos.

New data, however, will be needed to confirm this hypothesis.

Source: Science/AAAS

Journalist David McRaney has very recently published a popular book on human rationality. The book, You Are Not So Smart, is currently the 3rd best selling book in Nonfiction/Philosophy on Amazon.com after less than a week on the market. (Eighth best selling book in Nonfiction/Education)

The tag-line of the project is: "A celebration of self-delusion." As such the book seems less an attempt at giving advice on how to act and decide, than an attempt to reveal, chapter by chapter, the folly of common sense.

Topics include: Hindsight Bias, Confirmation bias, The Sunk Cost Fallacy, Anchoring Effect, The Illusion of Transparency, The Just World Fallacy, Representativeness Heuristic, The Perils of Introspection, The Dunning-Kruger Effect,... (read 253 more words →)

Hopefully, AGI is at least "90 years" out.

I discovered the idea of Bitcoin early, made a life-changing amount of money.

AlphaGo's victory over World Champion Lee Sedol made a (seemingly) deep impression on me at the time.

I had just NOT expected that. I had expected the game to remain intractable for decades. But the initial excitement and mild sense of doom that followed soon faded. I'm not a computer scientist, just a civilian interested for philosophical reasons.

But many people in attendance at the Alan Turing centenary celebration were World Champions of computer science. And either none of them knew any better, or if any did, or even suspected. Then, it seems that any suspicion that humans would be, uh, defeated at go, in the next decade, was defeated by subtle snickering and mild peer pressure.

Gwern Branwen plays a notable part in this recent story about the demise of one ill-fated black market:

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/did-one-of-the-silk-roads-successors-just-commit-the-perfect-bitcoin-scam

Thus, I maintain the attacks were a huge failure at accomplishing the attackers' political agenda.

Osama Bin Laden (2004):

...All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two Mujahedin to the farthest point East to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qa'ida in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human economic and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits to their private companies. This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of

... (read more)

"I think there should be a law of Nature to prevent a star from behaving in this absurd way!" (Eddington, 1935)

Eddington erroneously dismissed M_(white dwarf) > M_limit ⇒ "a black hole" , but didn't he correctly anticipate new physics?
Do event horizons (Finkelstein, 1958) not prevent nature from behaving in "that absurd way", so far as we can ever observe?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_censorship_hypothesis

With some awe and much respect, I would say that you are an inspiration, but that has already been said. I'll upvote that and say something else instead. For whatever reason, some part of my brain tells me; "Yeah, this is pretty much what I would expect the research interests of of a "supervillain"-in-training to look like". I don't pretend to know exactly what awesomeness is, but you have grown a lot of it.

Aaron Winborn: Monday was my 46th birthday and likely my last. Anything awesome I should try after I die?

Just over two years ago, I was diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease. In short, that means that my mind will increasingly become trapped in my body as the motor neurons continue to die, and the muscles atrophy and waste away, until my diaphragm dies, bringing me with it.

...

But yes, there is a silver lining to this all, such as it is. Kim Suozzi made a similar plea to the Internet a year ago today, and came up with the brilliant idea of freezing her body in the hopes of a distant advanced technology being able to revive her someday. Her body now rests at liquid nitrogen temperatures.

...

EDIT: OTOH, there's this... What person makes a will at 26?

It seems he published "If i get hit by a truck" in 2002, at age 16. Sad. Also, perhaps, awe-inspiring. Eliminating the problem of one's bus-factor would ordinarily be admirable... if you do it for the contingency where you simply get hit by a bus. I want, but can't, quite make myself believe that he didn't write this, at that time, in anticipation of an end like this. In that case; not awe-inspiring, only sad.

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at Cambridge makes headlines.

Minimum Viable Workout Routine is Dangerously Misinformative

Less Wrong used to like Bitcoin before it was cool. Time for a revisit?

June 2012: 0/33 Turing Award winners predict computers beating humans at go within next 10 years.

betterthanwell

betterthanwell

June 2012: 0/33 Turing Award winners predict computers beating humans at go within next 10 years.

Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at Cambridge makes headlines.

Minimum Viable Workout Routine is Dangerously Misinformative

Less Wrong used to like Bitcoin before it was cool. Time for a revisit?

Transhumanist philosopher David Pearce AMA on Reddit

[link] Faster than light neutrinos due to loose fiber optic cable.

You Are Not So Smart (Pop-Rationality Book)

betterthanwell

Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at Cambridge makes headlines.

Minimum Viable Workout Routine is Dangerously Misinformative

Less Wrong used to like Bitcoin before it was cool. Time for a revisit?

June 2012: 0/33 Turing Award winners predict computers beating humans at go within next 10 years.

betterthanwell

betterthanwell

June 2012: 0/33 Turing Award winners predict computers beating humans at go within next 10 years.

Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at Cambridge makes headlines.

Minimum Viable Workout Routine is Dangerously Misinformative

Less Wrong used to like Bitcoin before it was cool. Time for a revisit?

Transhumanist philosopher David Pearce AMA on Reddit

[link] Faster than light neutrinos due to loose fiber optic cable.

You Are Not So Smart (Pop-Rationality Book)

Here is a small selection of CSER press coverage from the last two days:

Cambridge boffins fear 'Pandora's Unboxi