Anything by Neal Stephenson is good, especially Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. His work is characterized by very detailed, interesting settings.
For sheer scale and mind-bendingness, I haven't seen anything better than City at the End of Time, by Greg Bear. It's got a 100 trillion year old civilization with very alien culture, in a disturbingly weird universe.
Stephenson remains one of my favorites, even though I failed at several attempts to enjoy his Baroque Cycle series. Anathem is as good as his pre-Baroque-Cycle work.
Poor kid. He's a smart 12 year old who has some silly ideas, as smart 12 year olds often do, and now he'll never be able to live them down because some reporter wrote a fluff piece about him. Hopefully he'll grow up to be embarrassed by this, instead of turning into a crank.
His theories as quoted in the article don't seem to be very coherent -- I can't even tell if he's using the term "big bang" to mean the origin of the universe or a nova -- so I don't think there's much of a claim to be evaluated here.
Of course, it's very possible that the reporter butchered the quote. It's a human interest article and it's painfully obvious that the reporter parsed every word out of the kid's mouth as science-as-attire, with no attempt to understand the content.
"It doesn't feel planned."
This made me think of a noteworthy corollary: airport control towers.
In the United States air traffic control is heavily regulated, and as a consequence the technology used is straight out of the 1970s - moving about little scraps of paper. In Canada, on the other hand (apparently we're more economically free than the US? http://www.heritage.org/index/ ) there is less regulation, and the entire process is computerized.
For those of you who watch Breaking Bad, the disaster at the end of Season 3 probably wouldn't have happened if the US adopted a similar system.
I think that 'planned' is a fallacy; systems as complex as Hospitals and Airports resist central planning, allowing the troops with their feet on the ground to design their own solutions often leads to a better result. I'm reminded of the time I worked at Bell Mobility's Engineering dept - the only rule I had to follow, expenses wise, was "You cost the company twice what you're paid per hour - if hiring outside is more efficient, go ahead and do it." The entire office was loose and deregulated, and gosh darn, did we ever get things done!
Distributed decision making will occasionally result in 100 different researchers using $12.50/hour temps when pooling their resources would give them a computer programmer for less, but the hours spent in coordination would be expensive. On the other hand, the inefficient paper/electronic organization you bring up feels like the hallmark of over-regulation.
To quote Robbie Hanson, "Coordination is hard!"
For those of you who watch Breaking Bad, the disaster at the end of Season 3 probably wouldn't have happened if the US adopted a similar system.
When I saw that episode, my first thought was that it would be extraordinarily unlikely in the US, no matter how badly ATC messed up. TCAS has turned mid-air collisions between airliners into an almost nonexistent type of accident.
Suppose you have n shares of stock X, and you're trying to decide whether to sell or to hold onto it for a bit longer; and suppose that if you instead had the current cash value of those shares, you would easily decide not to buy those shares. So it would seem that this amount of money is currently worth more to you as available cash than as shares of this stock. Yet if you already have those shares, particularly if you bought them at a higher price, you may be reluctant to sell them immediately — you'd be inclined to hold onto it in hopes of recouping your loss, even if, given those shares' value in cash instead, you could think of a better use for it than investing it back in the same stock.
Questions:
This does happen a lot among retail investors, and people don't think about the reversal test nearly often enough.
There's a closely related bias which could be called the Sunk Gain Fallacy: I know people who believe that if you buy a stock and it doubles in value, you should immediately sell half of it (regardless of your estimate of its future prospects), because "that way you're gambling with someone else's money". These same people use mottos like "Nobody ever lost money taking a profit!" to justify grossly expected-value-destroying actions like early exercise of options.
However, a bias toward holding what you already own may be a useful form of hysteresis for a couple of reasons:
There are expenses, fees, and tax consequences associated with trading. Churning your investments is almost always a bad thing, especially since the market is mostly efficient and whatever you're holding will tend to have the same expected value as anything else you could buy.
Human decisionmaking is noisy. If you wake up every morning and remake your investment portfolio de novo, the noise will dominate. If you discount your first-order conclusions and only change your strategy at infrequent intervals, after repeated consideration, or only when you have an exceptionally good reason, your strategy will tend towards monotonic improvement.
This seems like a very unlikely sort of phenomena, reversed stupidity != intelligence etc. Why would you expect such people?
It's common in certain types of polemic. People hold (or claim to hold) beliefs to signal group affiliation, and the more outlandishly improbable the beliefs become, the more effective they are as a signal.
It becomes a competition: Whoever professes beliefs which most strain credibility is the most loyal.
I do not understand your point. Would you care to explain?
Sorry, I thought that post was a pretty good statement of the Friendliness problem, sans reference to the Singularity (or even any kind of self-optimization), but perhaps I misunderstood what you were looking for.
Potentially yes, but I think the problem can be profitably restated without any reference to the Singularity or FOOMing AI. (I've often wondered whether the Friendliness problem would be better recognized and accepted if it was presented without reference to the Singularity).
Edit: See also Vladimir Nesov's summary, which is quite good, but not quite as short as you're looking for here.
Argh. I'd actually been thinking about getting a 23andme test for the last week or so but was put off by the price. I saw this about 20 minutes too late (it apparently ended at midnight UTC).
You appear to be technically right, based on this. I remember reading the Cygwin license several years ago and concluding that I couldn't use it at work; now I can't remember if that was because of the GPL.
In practice, you can rarely use GPLed software libraries for development unless you work for a nonprofit. Cygwin is not a library, so you can use it as an operating system with no restrictions. I can't remember now why I was so worried about they licensing terms. Perhaps they were different then.
In practice, you can rarely use GPLed software libraries for development unless you work for a nonprofit.
That's a gross overgeneralization.
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I don't think Turing-completeness implies that.
Consider the similar statement: "If you loaded a Turing machine with a sufficiently long random tape, and let it run for enough clock ticks, an AI would be created." This is clearly false: Although it's possible to write an AI for such a machine, the right selection pressures don't exist to produce one this way; the machine is overwhelmingly likely to just end up in an uninteresting infinite loop.
Likewise, the physics of Life are most likely too impoverished to support the evolution of anything more than very simple self-replicating patterns.