Luke also has the advantage of that this is his job.

Though, this particular post was actually written before I was hired by SIAI at the beginning of September.

Summary:

"The human brain is really complicated, so I don't think we'll be able to do AI any time soon, because we need 'exponential' increases in software - also 'complexity brake'" (whatever those mean)

[edit] Changed TL:DR to Summary, which I should have used (or similar) in the first place.

I upvoted, but mostly because I too dislike our culture's promotion of owning other people's sexualities through monogamy, and am irritated that this is a cached thought that most rationalists either tacitly endorse or defend with crappy "evolutionary psychology".

My favorite large CGoL object is the MetaPixel. It is a life object implementing a life unit cell, which actually looks like a life unit cell when zoomed out. A copy of it and some meta-simulations come with Golly.

http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/OTCA_metapixel

I wish there was no illness, I don't care if an old doctor starves.

Loā Hô, a Taiwanese physician and poet.

You should probably have made that clear at the very beginning of the post; when I read it I first assumed you had simply neglected to tell us the instructions.

Gotcha. I'll edit.

In which case, A probably does make the most sense, since it seems to represent the most "equilibrium-like" situation, assuming what is being represented is a box with an object tied to it via a string, viewed from the side (not above or below).

Really? I don't see that at all. Surely B would be more reasonable, in that case? On A, it'd sort of be hanging off to the side.

I've been seeing this meme a lot lately, that the PRC leadership are engineers. It seems to be used in an implicit sense of 'they are practically scientists, and will be cool & rational & open to broader application of the scientific method (whatever their other failings), and we can generally expect rational actions of them'.

This bothers me.

1. There's the obvious point that even if they are rational actors, they may share few of our values and their rationality be a bad thing from our point of view; it's a common interpretation of the Party that it is ruthless, murderous, and determined to keep China intact and under its control (and there are racial undertones here of Han supremacy).
2. It's not clear at all that engineering is associated with the better parts of the scientific tradition and with rationality in general, given the connection between engineers and terrorism (and creationism is mentioned).

The red pill works by magic, and the yellow pill by science, but apart from that, they do similar things. Just pointing out a historical antecedent of the idea.

But the opposing sides of the argument aren't equal. The weight of bias isn't symmetrical. One side is much more wrong than the other. [...] The would-be theocrats have to distort more to make their case, because the truth isn't on their side.

Again, are you claiming this as an expert on the early U.S. history, or are you reasoning that since the "would-be theocrats" are further from the truth on contemporary issues, they must also be further from the truth about these historical controversies?

If the latter, it's a huge fallacy. I haven't studied this historical topic in-depth, but I have studied many others, some of which are commonly brought up in contemporary ideological controversies. In my experience, even in dispassionate topics it's hard to avoid oversimplifying and caricaturing history and retrojecting modern attitudes and conflicts onto it -- and when history is written for propaganda purposes, it's overwhelmingly likely to be distorted and biased to the point of worthlessness, no matter who does it and whose case it's supposed to advance. (This book might be an exception, for all I know, but what I object to is taking its value and accuracy for granted just based on ideological solidarity with the author.)

Not to mention that bringing up "theocrats" itself betrays a biased attitude. You may dislike the people in question and oppose their agenda, but "theocracy" is a reasonably well defined term in political theory, and what these people advocate doesn't satisfy this definition. Throwing derogatory labels at people may be an effective PR tactic in some circumstances, but there is no good reason to do it here.

I'm pretty sure I found Overcoming Bias through one of the links on the Bad Science blog. Either that or the Mind Hacks blog, which I...uh...found out about through Bad Science.

He's not been maintaining the miniblog links for the past month or so because he's been on tour with Uncaged Monkeys (a very awesome live show about science), but they're usually about the sorts of things I imagine most LW readers would appreciate.