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Thanks! I must have got confused with the words. The link has a typo but I worked out my mistake.
Thanks for informing about the typo. LW doesn't understand brackets in links, had to put a backlash in the closing bracket and embed the link in the text to get a working link.
Words can be very tricky. If you want to learn a more general lesson of where that mistake might have come from, you might find this series of posts interesting.
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An overall schema for the friendly AI problems: self-referential convergence criteria
Evolution requires selection pressure. The failures have to die out. What will provide the selection pressure in the posthuman era?
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An overall schema for the friendly AI problems: self-referential convergence criteria
If there are mistakes made or the environment requires adaptation, a sufficiently flexible intelligence can mediate the selection pressure.
I'll try to summarize:
1) I want to know enough about the low-level mechanics of gene transfer to be able to model it accurately enough (not necessarily for a scientific paper) with mathematics. This has to have been done before - links to how would be appreciated, or I could start from scratch.
2) I want to know enough about how it works on the macro level to simulate that too, perhaps with the lower level mechanics working behind the scenes.
3) I am very interested in how evolution started - Dawkins references a soup of chemicals, and then the creation of the first replicator mainly by chance over a very long period of time. Is that accurate?
How did evolution work in the beginning? Dawkins mentioned that there were other explanations than the one he gave - what are they? How do I find them?
My training is in engineering/programming, and my genetics knowledge doesn't much exceed anything taught at the high school level. I am, however, prepared to read college-level textbooks on the subject.
Thanks.
My training is in engineering/programming, and my genetics knowledge doesn't much exceed anything taught at the high school level. I am, however, prepared to read college-level textbooks on the subject.
We read this in med school, a bit too wordy for my taste but easy to understand.
I am very interested in how evolution started [...] How did evolution work in the beginning?
Nobody knows for sure. The primordial soup is just an educated guess based on the fact that complex molecules had to arise from simpler ones. This paper focuses on the evolution of multicellularity and briefly references other necessary milestones in early evolution.
Socrates has some sound advice on making requests of powerful beings:
Our prayers should be for blessings in general, for God knows best what is good for us.
A god smart enough to know what's good for us is smart enough not to need a prayer to be summoned.
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Solving sleep: just a toe-dipping
Unless I'm misreading, I think the following two lines contradict each other. Does more adenosine correspond to higher or lower levels of sleep drive?
it seems the chemical correlate of sleep drive is the build-up of adenosine in the basal forebrain and this is used as the brain’s internal measure of how badly one needs sleep.
Adenosine levels are much higher (and sleep drive correspondingly lower) in the evening
It's a mistake, it should say higher.
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Recommended Reading for Evolution?
I assume that by evolution you mean biological evolution specifically, since the general mechanics of any evolution can be accurately described in a few sentences after reading The Selfish Gene. People here could probably write a program in a couple of lines of code that fits the bill.
If you want to simulate biological evolution, the simplest form of it would be in the realm of bacteria, and I'd search books about bacteriology and bacterial evolution. Any introductory text in cell biology will describe how genes are copied and expressed and how mutations work. I predict you'll be painfully surprised by the complexity of the specifics.
There are multiple ways you can solve the problem of who gets to go to the most desired school. You can do it via tuition fees and let money decide who goes to the best school. You can do tests to have the best students go to the best school. You can also do random assignments.
Neither of those are "better" from an ethical perspective.
If you let money decide or do tests you lose the statistical benefits of randomization. I don't understand how you see no ethical problem in ignoring preferences or not matching best students with best schools, perhaps I misunderstand you.
I think you'd need experimental research with randomization to several languages and this would be very costly and possibly inethical to set up.
You just need to have an area where different schools have different curriculums and there a lottery mechanism for deciding which student goes to which school.
That deals with the costs but I doubt consent would be easy to obtain unless the schools are very uniform in quality/status and people don't have preferences about which languages to learn, hence the possible problem with ethics. Schools have preferences too, quality schools want quality students.
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Open Thread, Jul. 13 - Jul. 19, 2015
Is it worth it to learn a second language for the cognitive benefits? I've seen a few puff pieces about how a second language can help your brain, but how solid is the research?
Quality observational research is probably very difficult to do since you can't properly control for indirect cognitive benefits you get from learning a second language and I'd take any results with a grain of salt. You also can't properly control for confounding factors e.g. reasons for learning a second language. I think you'd need experimental research with randomization to several languages and this would be very costly and possibly inethical to set up.
I have without a question gotten a huge boost from learning English since there aren't enough texts in my native language about psychology, cognitive science and medicine that happen to be my main interests. My native language also lacks the vocabulary to deal with those subjects efficiently. I have also learned several memory techniques and done cognitive tests and training solely because of being fluent in English.
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The god might give great weight to individual preferences. I have tried to convince lots of people to sign up for cryonics. When I say something like "if it were free and you knew it would work would you sign up?" some people have said "no", or even "of course not." Plus, the god might have resource constrains and at the margin it could be a close call whether to bring me back, and my stating a desire to be brought back could tip the god to do so with probability high enough to justify the time I spent making the original comment.
Our stated preferences are predictably limited and often untrue accounts what actually constitutes our well-being and our utility to those around us. I'm not sure I want to wake up to a god psychologically incompetent enough to revive people based on weighing wishes greatly. If there are resource constraints which I highly doubt it's especially important to make decisions based on reliable data.
I think this much more likely reflects the dynamics of the discussion, the perceived unlikelihood of the hypothetical and the badness of death than actual preferences. If the hypothetical is improbable enough, changing your mind only has the cost of losing social status and whatever comforting lies you have learned to keep death off your mind and not much upside to talk about.