Overview for quanticle - Less Wrong

quanticle on September 2012 Media Thread

2012-09-05T12:30:28.607142+10:00

As gwern states in a sibling post, once Littlepip starts assembling her party, the story starts proceeding along nicely. If you've gotten past the introduction of the first two party members, and you still think it's slow, then I'd suggest skipping it.

Ruthless Extrapolation

Sat, 14 Jul 2012 06:51:23 +1000

Submitted by quanticle • 0 votes • 2 comments

Ruthless Extrapolation

Article Summary: One of the key adaptations of humanity is the ability to see trends, which allows us to anticipate and preemptively adapt to future conditions. However, this ability has its limits. We're very good at seeing first derivatives, but terrible at seeing higher level trends. This leaves us vulnerable to situations where those first derivative trends unexpectedly change. The example used is with energy resources, where our adaptation to continually increasing energy usage leaves us vulnerable to a situation where we no longer have access to ever increasing energy resources.

I have two questions regarding the linked article. First, is there a name for this cognitive bias? The author uses "Ruthless Extrapolation", which I find quite fetching, but I think this is well known enough to have a name already. Secondly, what assumptions do we make that could be described as ruthless extrapolation? It seems to me that many in the Singularity Studies community simply assume that CPU transistor densities will continue to increase indefinitely, which certainly seems to be a case of ruthless extrapolation. What would happen to whole-brain emulation if we woke up tomorrow and found out that the most powerful CPU possible would have a transistor density only two or four times higher than an Ivy Bridge Core i7?

2 comments

quanticle on Low hanging fruit: Websites that significantly improve your life?

2012-07-11T14:22:21.160507+10:00

One site that was recommended to me is Trello. It's a very flexible project management/to-do/brainstorming tool. It's organized as a number of boards, each of which has one or more lists or cards. You can move these cards between lists and between boards.

The general workflow I've established is to create a board for each project I'm working on, and have three lists: to-do, doing, and done. As you might suspect, cards start out in the "to-do" list, move to the "doing" list when I start on them and go to the "done" list when I finish. However, the tool, as such, does not force you into any particular workflow. That's an important consideration for me, because I've abandoned other task management software when its theoretical workflow model failed to match my real world needs. Trello is flexible enough to allow me to easily construct my own "pipeline" for tasks, with as many or as few steps as necessary, and have different pipelines for different projects.

Trello is a hosted application. However, they have a fairly easy-to-use export function that exports your boards and cards to a JSON document, so you're free to walk away with your data at any time. They also have an API, which you can use to further automate your task management.

Betrand Russell's Ten Commandments

Mon, 07 May 2012 05:52:22 +1000

Submitted by quanticle • 2 votes • 18 comments

Betrand Russell's Ten Commandments for teachers.

Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.

Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.

Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.

When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavour to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.

Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.

Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent that in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.

Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.

Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

I find this to be of use not just for teachers but for rationalists in general. #8, especially, is an especially eloquent formulation of Aumann's Agreement Theorem.

18 comments

quanticle on Advice for an isolated Rationalist?

2012-04-04T04:38:55.728963+10:00

I don't think that's a good idea, to be honest. Conversion of other individuals is one of the more difficult things you can do as an aspiring rationalist. Let's face it, a lot of irrational arguments have very very strong intuitive appeal. Unless you are very familiar with the standard arguments for rationalism, you're more likely to simply alienate those around you and further isolate yourself by attempting to convert your non-rationalist friends.

quanticle on Journal of Consciousness Studies issue on the Singularity

2012-03-03T09:41:23.599152+11:00

The quote that stood out for me was the following:

The nineteenth century physicists also believed in the aether, as did Newton. There were many aether theories available, but only one was consistent with observation: H.A. Lorentz's theory, which simply asserted that the Maxwell equations were the equations for the aether. In 1904, Lorentz showed (Einstein et al., 1923) that this theory of the aether - equivalently the Maxwell equations - implied that absolute time could not exist, and he deduced the transformations between space and time that now bear his name. [...] That is, general relativity is already there in 19th century classical mechanics.

Now, all that's well and good, except for one, tiny, teensy little flaw: there is no such thing as aether. Michelson and Morley proved that quite conclusively in 1887. Tipler, in this case, appears to be basing his argument on a theory that was discredited over a century ago. Yes, some of the conclusions of aetheric theory are superficially similar to the conclusions of relativity. That, however, doesn't make the aetheric theory any less wrong.

quanticle on Journal of Consciousness Studies issue on the Singularity

2012-03-03T09:07:34.207498+11:00

Our reason for placing the Singularity within the lifetimes of practi- cally everyone now living who is not already retired, is the fact that our supercomputers already have sufficient power to run a Singularity level program (Tipler, 2007). We lack not the hardware, but the soft- ware. Moore’s Law insures that today’s fastest supercomputer speed will be standard laptop computer speed in roughly twenty years (Tipler, 1994).

Really? I was unaware that Moore's law was an actual physical law. Our state of the art has already hit the absolute physical limit of transistor design - we have single atom transistors in the lab. So, if you'll forgive me, I'll be taking the claim of, "Moore's law ensures that today's fastest supercomputer speed will be the standard laptop computer speed in 20 years with a bit of salt."

Now, perhaps we'll have some other technology that allows laptops twenty years hence to be as powerful as supercomputers today. But to just handwave that enormous engineering problem away by saying, "Moore's law will take care of it," is fuzzy thinking of worst sort.

quanticle on The lessons of a world without Hitler

2012-01-17T08:15:15.191976+11:00

No realistic prospect? I disagree. When Hitler invaded France in 1941, the potency of blitzkrieg had been demonstrated. The Germans knew that they could pull off a Schlieffen Plan end-run much more quickly than they could in 1914.

Of course the French and British thought differently, but I don't think there's any evidence that the German general staff thought that a conflict with France was a sure loss as of 1941. If you'd been talking about the Remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936, I'd have agreed with you.

quanticle on [Link] Belief in religion considered harmful?

2011-12-20T04:41:10.864087+11:00

Since most atheists, agnostics, etc, consider the First Amendment pretty important, we can assume they 'believe in religion'.

That's a pretty large logical leap. The First Amendment protects the right to speech and the right to petition government in addition to freedom of religion. Even if I accept Moldbug's assertion that religious ideology should be treated no different from other ideology, I can still think that the First Amendment is important.

quanticle on [SEQ RERUN] Lonely Dissent

2011-12-08T04:29:52.565855+11:00

It's hard to be the first to join a revolution, I agree. But should we really be making it easier for ourselves to be the lone dissenting voice in the woods? After all, most of those dissenting voices are just crazy; they don't have access to a greater truth, but they think they do. Maybe the difficulty of starting a revolution is a good thing -- it forces you to be really, really convinced in your idea.