Overview for private_messaging - Less Wrong

private_messaging on Failed Utopia #4-2

2013-06-15T17:15:44.402631+10:00

I've been told by [insert language here] advocates that it does a good job of [insert anything]. The claims are inversely proportional to popularity. Basically, no programming language what so ever infers anything about any sort of high level intent (and no, type of expression is not a high level intent), so they're all pretty much equal except some are more unusable than others and subsequently less used. Programming currently works as following: human, using a mental model of the environment, makes a string that gets computer to do something. Most types of cleverness put into in "how compiler works" part thus can be expected to decrease, rather than increase productivity, and indeed that's precisely what happens with those failed attempts at a better language.

private_messaging on Failed Utopia #4-2

2013-06-15T14:09:40.713861+10:00

Exactly. There isn't a literal desire in an audio waveform, nor in words. And there's a literal genie: the compiler. You have to be very verbose with it, though - because it doesn't model what you want, it doesn't cull down the space of possible programs down to much smaller space of programs you may want, and you have to point into much larger space, for which you use much larger index, i.e. write long computer programs.

private_messaging on Earning to Give vs. Altruistic Career Choice Revisited

2013-05-31T00:37:20.121570+10:00

But as far as UFAI creation at all is concerned, there are any number of very smart idiots in the world who would love to be on the news as "the first person to program an artificial general intelligence".

Seems like a projection of the regular idiots.

private_messaging on Failed Utopia #4-2

2013-05-30T22:34:32.531157+10:00

Yes, that's the essence of it. People do it all the time. Generally, all sorts of pseudoscientific scammers try to maintain image of honest self deception; in the medical scams in particular, the crime is just so heinous and utterly amoral (killing people for cash) that pretty much everyone goes well out of their way to be able to pretend at ignorance, self deception, misinterpretation, carelessness and enthusiasm. But why would some superhuman AI need plausible deniability?

private_messaging on ...so did we now get cold fusion to work or what?

2013-05-28T17:46:10.288191+10:00

Well, the neutrons would get moderated by the water in the body rather well... i'm thinking the elements being essentially dissolved in moderator should make it worse overall.

I wonder how much activity would remain in the corpse after a week. To qualify as "short lived waste", the body would need to have less than 400 KBq/Kg of >30 years half life isotopes: http://www.iaea.org/ns/tutorials/regcontrol/intro/glossaryw_z.htm#W29 . I don't know what are the regulation for corpses though.

edit: speaking of which, other thing that's very fishy about "cold fusion", especially expanded to include transmutation of nickel, is that it never produces radioactive isotopes. On one hand you have those ridiculously high power outputs, on other hand not even a very small fraction of energy comes in form of gamma rays or high energy particles.

If I believed in cold fusion, I'd be experimenting in middle of nowhere, in a basement of a shed, remote viewing only, wearing a dosimeter, with a radiation alarm and so on edit: In fact one of my friends likes to mess with high voltage, and he got a dosimeter and everything for x-rays that are easy to inadvertently produce). It seems to me that one good way to identify pseudoscience is to ignore the talking beliefs, and look at walking beliefs (I mean, action inducing beliefs). The talking beliefs are, well, cold fusion works, but the walking beliefs are, no it does not, and therefore I don't need a dosimeter (unless it is part of the talk).

private_messaging on ...so did we now get cold fusion to work or what?

2013-05-27T15:57:00.494917+10:00

Finally, the largest part of life chemistry is also immune from neutron activation".)

But with low neutron capture cross sections, the neutrons are left available to activate elements that are present at low concentrations and have high capture cross sections. At 2 kW and 10 MeV per neutron you'd have ~ 10^15 neutrons per second...

(Interestingly, the Wikipedia entry does refer to neutron activation, but only of gold from a wristwatch buckle and copper from a cigarette lighter screw.)

Well, I'd think those were useful for measuring the doses...

Interesting study on sodium activation:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11791757

so, 0.05 Sv of neutrons, which I presume is on order of 0.05*80/10 = 0.4 joules (where 80kg is the weight of our unlucky cold fusion researcher and 10 is the dose equivalent factor for neutrons, albeit I am not entirely sure how dose equivalent works for low energy neutrons) , converts to 7KBq of Na-24 . Though, Na-24 has half life of 15 hours so this one is not a very big problem. But its clear that with a few watts absorbed for hours, the corpses, while perhaps not being a big health hazard, would be rather radioactive for some short while due to Na-24 alone...

edit: reading the pdf now, it says that 0.5..3 * 10^-6 Gy of gamma and neutrons from a criticality roughly corresponds to 1Bq of Na-24 in the whole body. With kilowatts of power, one could conceivably be getting 1Gy/s somewhere in the vicinity of such things, and running for tens hours at 1 Gy/s, one could conceivably end up with around 1 Ci of Na-24 in the corpse. edit: misread Gy as Sv at some point.

private_messaging on ...so did we now get cold fusion to work or what?

2013-05-27T06:59:27.537356+10:00

But those atoms, with the exception of nitrogen, also have low neutron capture cross sections... and the neutron doses you'd get from 2KW source running for many hours would be huge. It'd be much more like Tokaimura criticality accident than cold fusion. I know that the soldiers who died in SL-1 accident had to be buried specially, not entirely sure though if that was neutron activation.

private_messaging on ...so did we now get cold fusion to work or what?

2013-05-26T06:11:05.434150+10:00

Where would neutrons come from? If there was a neutron flux corresponding to the claimed power output, following things would have happened: all the people attending would have died of radiation poisoning (receiving fatal doses in the matter of seconds), the cameras would have gotten damaged possibly beyond any chance at recovering the data, there would have been massive and costly clean up on the site as neutron activation would have made everything around radioactive (including the corpses which would have to be disposed of in the sealed lead caskets if not as radioactive waste), and possibly, the radioactive gasses would have triggered alarms at nearby monitoring stations. We'd be watching this unfold like Fukushima. And there would have been no doubt what so ever that it works.

private_messaging on ...so did we now get cold fusion to work or what?

2013-05-26T02:29:56.623082+10:00

The verification was complete crap, as outlined in the review article. See the "power magic" image. Even that image over-thinks it. Rossi's marks used AC clamp meters that will incorrectly measure power consumption if you connect a diode in series with your load (and Rossi had a circuit generating "trade secret waveform" there).

edit: actually, the manufacturer's page for the meter they used is not very clear on how the clamps work, and I can't be bothered to look deeper for Rossi's sake. There's two types of clamps, DC or universal clamps use hall effect sensor, AC clamps use a pick up coil and measure only the AC component. The only thing that could not be fooled is high bandwidth oscilloscopes connected via shunts to every conductor going into this device, integrating the current*voltage.

Other issues: 2000W from <1 gram of loose powder is a little odd, to put it mildly (its not easy to conduct that much power away from something small). And of course, someone with a legitimate, working device that produces heat would invest into a variation that does not need external energy input to heat any resistors (and the concept is truly ridiculous).

On the other hand, the reviewers may well be honest, because if they weren't honest they'd have told us they did the whole thing with oscilloscopes and such.

private_messaging on Post ridiculous munchkin ideas!

2013-05-25T13:46:38.319223+10:00

Well, yeah. The primary worry among tulpa creators is that it might get pissed at you and follow you around the house making faces.

They ought to be at least somewhat concerned that they have less brain for their own walking around the house.

And what, pray tell, is the salient feature of mental illness that causes us to avoid it? Because I don't think it's the fact that we refer to them with the collection of syllables "men-tal-il-nes".

You don't know? It's loss in "utility". When you have an unknown item which, out of the items that you know of, most closely resembles a mushroom consumption of which had very huge negative utility, the expected utility of consuming the unknown toxic mushroom like item is also negative (unless totally starving and there's literally nothing else one could seek for nourishment). Of course, in today's environment, people rarely face the need to make such inferences themselves - society warns you of all the common dangers, uncommon dangers are by definition uncommon, and language hides the inferential nature of categorization from the view.

If you had looked into the topic, you would know the process is reversible.

The cases I've heard which do not look like people attention seeking online, are associated with severe mental illness. Of course the direction of the causation is somewhat murky in any such issue, but necessity to see a doctor doesn't depend on direction of the causation here.