Open Thread, May 1-14, 2013

3 whpearson 01 May 2013 10:28PM

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Game for organizational structure testing

-2 whpearson 06 April 2013 10:16PM

Say we want to try out new organizational structures. Zaine suggests that a game might be a good method. However rather than a game to test a specific method of organizing people, I'm going to make a game where different organizational structures can be pitted against each other and statistics about their operation over time can be collected to inform new organisation designs. 

Some organizational structures that might be tested include Democracy, Futarchy, Control Markets, Histocracy, some form of Meritocracy and Direct Democracy.

The conditions under which organizations suffer from corruption of purpose more frequently are when the people inside the organization are generally selfish and only moderately interested in the goals of the organization. So it makes sense to concentrate on these sorts of conditions.

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Call for participation - Centre for Organisational Rationality

-3 whpearson 04 April 2013 06:59PM

Or something like that1. As per this article on Control Markets I am looking to experiment with them. This requires an organization of some sort. This post is my first step to the creation of the organization.

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An Introduction to Control Markets

10 whpearson 03 April 2013 11:33PM

Control markets are systems where the control of resources and the system is determined by a market, the currency of that market is given out dependent upon how well the system as a whole is doing.

They have been discussed and explored in computer systems for a while with Agorics, Learning Classifier systems and Eric Baum's work being two notable examples (ZCS being the closest LCS to it). These are limited and constrained markets, in that the communication and computational expressiveness of them are limited. However unlimited control markets may be of use in the real world to control an organization in a flexible fashion. For example it might be useful for shareholders  to control a board or possibly the whole company. Even if it isn't compatible with human motivational systems and real world conditions, discussing and thinking about these sorts of systems may enable us to find better organizational structures than our current ones.

Control market can be seen as trying to embed reinforcement learning into an organization.

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[Request] Software or Articles on financial life planning

2 whpearson 16 March 2012 07:06PM

Does anyone have recommendations for software or articles on how to plan your financial life?

Lets say I have a goal, retire at age 50 to X location with Y income in todays currency. Are there any tools that help me make decisions? E.g. to rent for a while, until a property dip (based on cyclical observations). Or how to spread investments over countries and investment types to mitigate black swan events like economic collapses.

I found reno when googling. But I don't know whether thats just because they are good at SEO or actually useful for what I am suggesting. Preferably it would have a wealth of data, such as property price increases by location etc.

Making computer systems with extended Identity

0 whpearson 08 March 2012 01:29AM

We often assume that an AI will have an identity and goals of its own. That it will be some separate entity from a human being or group of humans.

In physics there are no separate entities, merely a function evolving through time. So any identity needs to be constructed by systems within physics, and the boundaries are arbitrary. We have been built by evolution and all the cells in our body have the same programming so we have a handy rule of thumb that our body is "us" as it is created by a single replicating complex. So we assume that a computational entity, if it develops a theory of self, will only include its processing elements or code and nothing else in its notion of identity. But what an system identifies with can be controlled and specifed.

If a system identifies a human as an important part of itself it will strive to protect it and its normal functioning, as we instinctively protect important parts of ourselves such as the head and genitals.

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Possible Implications of the neural retrotransposons to the future

17 whpearson 16 February 2012 09:05PM

Retrotransposons are small bits of genetic code than can copy themselves into other bits of the dna strand

They have been found to be active in brains, with different amounts of activity in different brain sections. The highest being in the hippocampus (an important region for long-term memory). Also they were active in coding regions.

"Overall, L1, Alu, and, to a more limited extent, SVA mobilization produced a large number of insertions that affected protein-coding genes,"

This means that they are more likely to have some large effect, than if they were just in junk dna.

One form of autism is linked to a malfunctioning of retrotransposons. So it can have a drastic affect.

It makes a certain amount of sense. If there is information in the brain that needs to to be stored, but not directly in neural firing rates, why not store it in the DNA of neuron? There is lots of error correcting data storage there and the genome has lots of tools for manipulating itself. Time will tell if it is very important or not.

If it is important, what are the implications for the future?

Cryo is harder, scanning the genome is a lot harder than just doing some spectroscopy. but since we assume a certain amount of sufficiently advanced technology and don't have a timeline, our plans aren't impinged upon.

The em scenario seems like it will take longer to happen or may have some gotchas. Being able to scan the genetic code of each neuron would require some serious breakthroughs in scanning technolgies.

To naively emulate the genetic code changes would take immense amounts of bandwidth and to crack things like the protein folding problem (for how the changes in ). Just for storage I think we might need on the order of 500 exabits to store the dna sequence for each neuron. You'ld need to update them as well, which is going to take lots of memory bandwidth. This is not to mention chemical emulation.

I think naive emulation of the brain is off the table before AI. We may well be able to do better with shortcuts in terms of ability. But there might be questions of whether the copy is "you" if short cuts are taken. Also if we understand the brain, we don't need to make copies of people, we could just create AIs that do the same thing.

Some even more blue sky speculation. If the changes in the genetic code are to do with changing how we learn, then it still might be possible to scan a brain at low res and get something that seems to act the same as someone else, but cannot learn in the same way. An interesting twist to the Turing test, someone might be behaviourally human and fool you in the short-term, but may seem odd when tasked with learning problems.

So call centre staff would be out of work, but scientists would be still in demand.

It also has implication on cloning attempts at intelligence amplification.  I'm guessing this can be answered somewhat by looking at twins and the differential in mental ability between them. Anyone know of any books on this field.

Also anyone interested in discussion on this kind of topic (neurobiological implication on the future)?

[LINK] Brain region changes shape with learning the layout of London

1 whpearson 12 December 2011 05:01PM

General Intro:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-16086233

Older research:

http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/Maguire/Maguire2006.pdf

Abstract of latest research

Possible implications for WBE (Is it possible to get short term function correct without having the ability to do long term structural changes?)

Also possible implications for learning lots of information, cabbies with "the Knowledge" had worse visual information recall.

I haven't gone through it all myself yet.

Bayesian analysis under threat in British courts

10 whpearson 03 October 2011 04:06PM

This is an interesting article talking about the use of bayes in british courts and efforts to improve how statistics are used in court cases. Probably worth keeping an eye on. It might expose more people to bayes if it becomes common and thus portrayed in TV dramas.

Can we rely on business as usual to get us to the future?

2 whpearson 07 September 2011 05:32PM

We make decisions based upon our expectations of the future going 10 to 20 years out. However we don't have good systematic ways of making predictions. We rely on pundits and experts in their fields, which might ignore changes in other fields.

We are currently experiencing a period of low growth in the western world, so reliable economic growth is not an iron law throughout the world. So the projects and the organisations we start should depend upon what we expect of the future. If it unlikely to be a wealthy future for the sections of the world we are in or have influence over, we might do well to consider if we can do things to improve our prospects; our ability to shape the future depends upon our wealth.

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