I finally finished a computer program I'm writing for my Master's project. Granted, it's the bare minimum for what I'll call complete, but it's good enough for me to leave it until I finish the paperwork, and just finish if I have time left.

The program is designed to draw differential geometry from the inside. I modified it for raytracing, and produced these two videos:

The camera moves through a wormhole while spinning around

The camera moves in an infinite loop between two wormholes

Why? Most of human evolution happened when it was colder than today, whereas much of human agricultural civilization happened when it was warmer (1, 2).

Point 3, "properly motivated".

So long as the bots are easy to distinguish from humans, it'll be easy for competitions to produce false positives: all it takes is for the judges to want to see the bot win, at least kind of. If you want a real challenge, you'd better reward the judges significantly for correctly distinguishing human from AI.

This is the universe's occasional reminder to you that you should be keeping backups of your files: https://plus.google.com/103530621949492999968/posts/cpydtJGE5e6

I've read one transcript of a judge conversation. What I find striking is that the judge seems to be doing their best to be fooled! Of course, no one wants to get a 13 year old upset.

In a Turing Test situation I'd start by trying a bunch of Winograd Schemas.

A 2 minute youtube video

I'm not going to explain what it is because that would ruin the video.

Also since explaining the video ruins it, here is a link to rot13

Medicine:

• "Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy?" (Gary Taubes, 2007)
• "The End of Food: Has a tech entrepreneur come up with a product to replace our meals?" (Soylent)
• Low-dose aspirin for mortality reduction revisited
• Creatine self-experiment

Economics:

• "SSC Gives A Graduation Speech" (on the value of college and alternatives)
• "What You Should Know About Megaprojects and Why: An Overview", Flyvbjerg 2014 (excerpts)
• "Why Do Firms Buy Ads?" (advertising requires impossibly large sample sizes for meaningful results)
• "The Business Habits of Highly Effective Terrorists: Why Terror Masterminds Rely on Micro-Management"
• Inferring nuclear bomb components from stock market returns
• The Sewing Machine Patent Wars

Politics:

• "Hit or Miss? The Effect of Assassinations on Institutions and War", Jones & Olken 2007 (excerpts)
• "The Borgias vs Borgia: Faith and Fear (accuracy in historical fiction)"
• "800 Years Of Human Sacrifice In Kent"
• "King of Fearmongers: Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center, scaring donors since 1971"
• "BUGGER: maybe the real state secret is that spies aren't very good at their jobs"
• "Beyond the One Percent: Categorizing Extreme Elites"
• "free speech rights and ability"
• "Exploring Elitist Democracy: The Latest from Gilens and Page"

Psychology:

• "Common DNA Markers Can Account for More Than Half of the Genetic Influence on Cognitive Abilities"
• Many Labs project published
• "Slow Ideas: Some innovations spread fast. How do you speed the ones that don't?"
• "New meta-analysis checks the correlation between intelligence and faith: First systematic analysis of its kind even proposes reasons for the negative correlation"
• Biases in grocery shopping

Philosophy:

• "Don't Fear the (Great) Filter"
• "Humans are Utility Monsters"
• "Universal Library", by W.O. Quine

Literature:

• "Sand Kings", GRRM
• "The Island", Peter Watts
• "Calmly We Walk through This April's Day", Delmore Schwartz
• "Fermat's Last Stand: Soundtrack and Adventure Log"
• Parable of the Unjust Steward

As I am not a citizen of the US, I have no idea what the exact makeup is of the SAT, so I have to keep guessing. I take the contrary position for the sake of argument.

As far as the SAT measures knowledge it would be very surprising to see no effect of learning. What we are examining though is the effect of additional test preparation beyond the usual curriculum. So I would argue that the marginal benefit of additional preparation is extremely low as all the necessary knowledge is conferred by the usual curriculum - especially by the students considering taking the SAT and taking additional care to ace them.

I seem to recall that SAT and g are highly correlated. Insofar as the SAT is a g-heavy IQ test I am not at all surprised that additional preparation confers virtually no advantage, just as we know of no way to reliably increase g. Insofar the SAT measures ability like geometry it would be surprising if learning those subjects gives no benefit as long as the required knowledge goes beyond what is already taught in high school.

I am just throwing out a few thoughts here though this example can serve as an excellent case study.

The first is availability and selection bias. It is only the students that actually get an apparent benefit that come to your mind as examples and it is only the students that actually get a benefit from learning that will continue to do so. Why learn even more when through testing you see that there is virtually no benefit?

Another effect is that repeatedly testing on the SAT may be the only part of the intervention actually having an effect. This might be through gaining confidence in test taking and/or reducing test anxiety. Also there might be some weird psychological effect going on where people subconsciously do worse until they receive tutoring to justify the expense.

And a last thing is status quo bias. For any piece of evidence that says that conventional wisdom is wrong, people will tend to disregard the evidence and this shows as an apparent chasm. That is why I personally tend to dislike the sentence "The burden of proof is on you.".