NNs had lost favor in the AI community after 1969 (minsky's paper) and only have become popular again in the last decade

Yes, I'm familiar with the history. But how far would we be without the neural network work done since ~2001? The non-neural-network competitors on Imagenet like SVM are nowhere near human levels of performance, Watson required neural networks, Stanley won the DARPA Grand Challenge without neural networks because it had so many sensors but real self-driving cars will have to use neural networks, neural networks are why Google Translate has gone from roughly Babelfish levels (hysterically bad) to remarkably good, voice recognition has gone from mostly hypothetical to routine on smartphones...

What major AI achievements have SVMs or random forests racked up over the past decade comparable to any of that?

When I read these AI control problems I always think that an arbitrary human is being conflated with the AI's human owner. I could be mistaken that I should read these as if AIs own themselves - I don't see this case likely so I would probably stop here if we are to presuppose this.

Now if an AI is lying/deceiving its owner, this is a bug. In fact, when debugging I often feel I am being lied to. Normal code isn't a very sophisticated liar. I could see an AI owner wanting to train its AI about lying an deceiving and maybe actually perform them on other people (say a Wall Street AI). Now we have a sophisticated liar but we also have a bug. I find it likely that the owner would have encountered this bug many times while the AI is becoming more and more sophisticated. If he didn't encounter this bug then it would point to great improvements in software development.

In general:

Religiosity is correlated with fertility, the most extreme example being 'quiverfull' people having 8 kids each, with Mormons in a close second.

Religiosity is about 50% genetically heritable, and also mimetically heritable, the extent depending upon the situation.

The secularisation of Europe might have gone as far as it can go, while if anything the US seems to be getting more religious. In the long run, won't genes win out?

Therefore, it seems likely that the world is going to keep on getting more religious. And I'm sure we are all aware that exponential growth curves can cause very rapid changes. Trying to put an exact time-frame is difficult, because of immigration, questions of how long communities can remain isolated from the rest of the country, positive feedback where immigrants vote for more immigration, negated feedback from backlashes, birthrates decreasing in a demographic transition, and so forth.

I did a calculation and decided that within around 100 years many secular countries would be run by religious fanatics, and then I read that the quiverfull movement has around a 20% retention rate. Of course, given exponential growth that doesn't buy all that more time.

The problem isn't that ISIS take over. They don't have the weapons, they don't have the numbers, they don't control any tank factories. The worry is that in 2100 or 2200, if for some reason the singularity hasn't happened, fundamentalist Muslims are a democratic majority in France and evangelicals are a majority in the US, and now there is a far more serious threat than that of ISIS, and the question of whether, with the technology of 2200, the US can disable France's nuclear weapons in a first strike is raised.

Obviously that is just one hypothetical. But as the average religiosity rises, and when both Islam and Christianity have a serious history of violence, it seems likely to end in disaster, if baseline humans are still the dominant force at that point in time.

I wish I could pin it down. Some Big Think or similar forum talk. They discussed exactly the issue you bring up - the large differential birth rates between the very religious and the secular.

EDIT: Ha! Found it. "Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?", byt Eric Kaufman
See http://www.amazon.com/Shall-Religious-Inherit-Earth-Twenty-First/dp/1846681448
and youtube talk at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYEyv5a_3LM

The worry is that in 2100 or 2200, if for some reason the singularity hasn't happened, fundamentalist Muslims are a democratic majority in France and evangelicals are a majority in the US, and now there is a far more serious threat than that of ISIS, and the question of whether, with the technology of 2200, the US can disable France's nuclear weapons in a first strike is raised.

I think you're basically correct that in democracies, and even quasi democracies, it doesn't take long for differential birth rates to transform a society, but you are in fact underestimating the effect. The shit will hit the fan long before 2100.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/361804/russias-demographic-revolution-daniel-pipes

Russia is already approximately 15% muslim, with huge differential birth rates between christians and muslims. And that 15% understates the real issue for violence and control - who has the most young men. I've seen numbers that by 2020 (!) half the Russian army will be muslim, and that majority will only grow from there.

EDIT: Speaking of the shit hitting the fan, there's an article about the potential for Putin to lose power, and what could replace him.

http://www.vox.com/2015/1/5/7482441/how-putin-lose-power

But Navalny certainly seems to have demonstrated racist attitudes in the past. And he could play the "we Russians are being bled and exploited by the people from North Caucasus, by the people from Central Asia" card.
That plays to a depressingly powerful strand of common Russian public opinion, and it's something against which Putin has surprisingly little defense. That could conceivably build a wider public constituency quite quickly if Navalny is willing to play that card.

Putin has been stoking the fires of "the international world is holding us down" for a long time. We are Great and Imperial, but we have been Betrayed. Add the demographic threat to christian ethnic Russians, and they can really get that party started.

Being 100x more productive is about not solving hard problems you don't need to. Spending time thinking about ways to avoid the problem often pays off (feature definition, code reuse, slow implementations, ect). Much of the best practices that you read about are solving problems you wish you had - I wish my problem was poor documentation because that means someone actually cares to use it. I was always surprised by how bad the code was out in the wild until I realized it was survivor bias - the previous owner deferred solving some problem for a long time.

One thing I've been wondering about deep neural networks: to what extent are neural networks novel and non-obvious? To what extent has evolution invented and thus taught us something very important to know for AI? (I realize this counterfactual is hard to evaluate.)

That is, imagine a world like ours but in which for some reason, no one had ever been sufficiently interested in neurons & the brain as to make the basic findings about neural network architecture and its power like Pitts & McCulloch. Would anyone reinvent them or any isomorphic algorithm or discover superior statistical/machine-learning methods?

For example, Ilya comments elsewhere that he doesn't think much of neural networks inasmuch as they're relatively simple, 'just' a bunch of logistic regressions wired together in layers and adjusted to reduce error. True enough - for all the subleties, even a big ImageNet-winning neural network is not that complex to implement; you don't have to be a genius to create some neural nets.

Yet, offhand, I'm having a hard time thinking of any non-neural network algorithms which operate like a neural network in putting together a lot of little things in layers and achieving high performance. That's not like any of your usual regressions or tests, multi-level models aren't very close, random forests and bagging and factor analysis may be universal or consistent but are 'flat'...

Nor do I see many instances of people proposing new methods which turn out to just be a convolutional network with nodes and hidden layers renamed. (A contrast here would be Turing's halting theorem: it seems like you can't throw a stick among language or system papers without hitting a system complicated enough to be Turing-complete and hence indecidable, and like there were a small cottage industry post-Turing of showing that yet another system could be turned into a Turing machine or a result could be interpreted as proving something well-known about Turing machines.) There don't seem to be 'multiple inventions' here, as if the paradigm were non-obvious and, without the biological inspiration.

So if humanity had had no biological neural networks to steal the general idea and as proof of feasibility, would machine learning & AI be far behind where they are now?

Question on infinities

If the universe is finite then I am stuck with some arbitrary number of elementary particles. I don't like the arbitrariness of it. So I think - if the universe was infinite it doesn't have this problem. But then I remember there are countable and uncountable infinities. If I remember correctly you can take the power set of an infinite set and get a set with larger cardinality. So will I be stuck in some arbitrary cardinality? Are the number of cardinality countable? If so could an infinite universe of countably infinite cardinality solve my arbitrary problem?

edit: carnality -> cardinality (thanks g_peppers people searching for "infinite carnality" would be disappointed with this post)

What resources would you recommend for skilled, highly-specialized, employed EU citizens looking for employment in the US?

I don't understand why I do find certain kinds of goodness, kindness, compassion annoying. Of all the publications, The Guardians seems to rank highest in pissing me off with kindness. Consider this:

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/jun/12/anti-homeless-spikes-latest-defensive-urban-architecture

Ocean Howell, a former skateboarder and assistant professor of architectural history at the University of Oregon, who studies such anti-skating design, says it reveals wider processes of power. “Architectural deterrents to skateboarding and sleeping are interesting because – when noticed – they draw attention to the way that managers of spaces are always designing for specific subjects of the population, consciously or otherwise,” he says. “When we talk about the ‘public’, we’re never actually talking about ‘everyone’.”

Does anyone have any idea why may I find it annoying? Putting it differently, why do I experience something similar as Scott i.e. while I don't have many problems with most contemporary left-leaning ideas, I seem to have a problem with left-leaning people?

For example, I don't find anything inherently bad about starting a discussion about making design more skateboarder-friendly, or less directly skateboarder-hostile, I think skateboarders providing free entertainment to bystanders is kind of a win-win.

And I still feel like slapping Mr. Howell around with a large trout. But why?

Clearly it must be something about the style? Pretentious? Condescending?

Problem is, my emotions prevent me from analysing this clearly. But as far as I see it, the issue with the style is roughly this algorithm

1. assume very high level of compassion and altruism (public spaces are literally designed for everyone)
2. look sad or scandalized when you pretend to be surprised it is not so

Well, to use this example, we always knew it is not so. Clean, bourgeois middle-class folks never wanted e.g. homeless, amputee beggars, or other undesirables near where they live. I am not even ashamed about this, I don't find it incompatible to wish that they should get treated well, but somewhere I cannot see them much. It is not my eyesight is what they need most but more like professional care. I just wasn't aware skateboarders are also included in the category of undesirables. Anyway, the way I can best parse my emotions is that I find Mr. Howell condesdencing or pretentious because he is pretending to be surprised we are not saints. And this seems to be general tone of The Guardian, that may be why it annoys me.

Any better takers?

People of more or less explicit left-wing views: do you see your goals would better supported by, how to put, it less drama, or less pretense, or less antagonizing or trying to guilt-trip others, so I don't know, with a different tone than that of The Guardian or Salon.com? I cannot really express this better, but what I have in mind is more of a e.g. "please discuss why the homeless annoy you so much that you want to install spikes" tone, and less of a "fuck you for being a cruel monster who installs anti-homeless spikes" tone, do you find that counter-productive?

OTOH it is also possible that I find it annoying because it it actually pierces my conscience. But I actually don't think so. I never really considered perfect 200% compassion a super ace that trumps all other cards. It is one of the aces, sure, but there are other aces and also kings and whatnot in the stack. Maybe, it is annoying because it reminds me of a social expectation, certain social taboos, like, never feel grossed out by e.g. the homeless, because they suffer and the only proper reaction to suffering is compassion, those kinds of taboos.

Brokerage accounts (fidelity/etrade) are better then bank accounts in every way (in the US). Use them with a margin account to safely maximize your investments. The margin account will basically function as an overdraft / short term loan at very favorable rates. Reasons:

• direct deposit in to your brokerage account - all surplus money should be sweeped in to an index fund (SPY or global equiv)
• You can have a ATM card and do all your checks through them usually for free
• they all have bill pay service for free
• depositing checks - they can be mailed in
• Even if you don't invest the money it will automatically be in a money market account earning you interest
• investment interest payments (on the margin) can be tax advantaged unlike credit card payments

I didn't have a bank account for over a decade. There is no reason to think about checking and savings being separate things.

Concerns about margin account being scary are only that way when you margin a substantial fraction of your account. If you are under 10% and invest in stable index funds you won't have a worry.

instead of investing in SPY consider Berkshire Hathoway (brk) for the tax advantages - (Warren Buffet doesn't like to pay taxes). I'd look at costco's sharebuilder if you can't afford to buy 1 share.