I agree that something unusual is going on. Humans, unlike any other species I'm aware of, are voluntarily restricting our own population growth. But I don't know why you say that there's "no reason" to believe that this strange behavior might benefit us. Surely you can think of at least one reason? After all, all those other species that don't voluntarily limit their own reproduction eventually see their populations crash, or level off in the face of fierce competition over resources, when they meet or exceed their environment's carrying capacity. The laws of physics as we currently understand them dictate that exponential growth cannot continue forever.
I'm not... (read 480 more words →)
I downvoted common_law's post, because of some clear-cut math errors, which I pointed out. I'm downvoting your comment because it's not saying anything constructive.
There's nothing wrong with what common_law was trying to do here, which is to show that infinite sets shouldn't be part of our ontology. Experience can't be the sole arbiter of which model of reality is best; there is also parsimony. Whether infinite quantities are actually real, is no less worthy of discussion than whether MWI is actually real, or merely a computational convenience. I only agree with you that the math lacked rigor. This is discussion, so I don't see a problem with posting things that need to be corrected, but I had to downvote the post because it might have confused someone who didn't notice the errors.
I agree with premise (1), that there is no reason to think of infinitesimal quantities as actually part of the universe. I don't agree with premise (2), that actual infinities imply actual infinitesimals. If you could convince me of (2), I would probably reject (1) rather than accept (3). Since an argument for (2) would be a good argument against (1), given that our universe does seem to have actual infinities.
the points on a line are of infinitesimal dimension ... yet compose lines finite in extent.
No. Points have zero dimension. "Infinitesimal" is something else. There are no infinitesimal numbers on the real line (or in the... (read more)
Fascinating. But note that these are still very old people with declining cholesterol as they age. The study is more relevant to physicians deciding whether to prescribe statins to their elderly patients, and less relevant to young people deciding whether to keep cholesterol low throughout life with diet.
I'd need to read the whole study, but what I see so far doesn't even contradict the hypothesis I outlined. The abstract says that people who had low cholesterol at the last two examinations did worse than people who had low cholesterol at only the last examination. But most of these old people had declining cholesterol. So maybe this just... (read more)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiNvQ-g1XGs&list=PLDBBB98ACA18EF67C&index=19
This (admittedly biased) youtuber has a pretty thorough criticism of the study. The bottom line is that cholesterol tends to drop off before death (6:26 in the video), not just because cholesterol-lowering medications are administered to those at highest risk of heart attack (as Kawoomba points out), but also because of other diseases. When you correct for this, or follow people throughout their lives, this reverse causation effect disappears, and you find exactly the association you would expect: higher cholesterol associates with higher cardiovascular and total mortality (10:21).
I think that studies like this one are like studies showing that overweight is "protective" against mortality - when the obvious alternative explanation is that smoking, cancer, and other diseases can prevent weight gain, or cause weight loss, just before they kill you! Obviously, this would mask or even reverse the association between overweight (high cholesterol) and death, even if overweight (high cholesterol) causes death.
Agreed. The multiverse idea is older than, and independent of quantum theory. Actually, a single infinitely large classical universe will do, since statistically, every possibility should play out. Nietzsche even had a version of immortality based on an infinitely old universe. Though it's not clear whether he ever meant it literally, he very well could have, because it was consistent with the scientific understanding of the time.
That said, I like the idea of sminux's post. I try to steer clear of quantum language myself, and think others should too, if all they mean by "quantum" is "random".
All the possible reasons for the conflict you listed suggest that the solution is to help feminists understand evolutionary psychology better, so they won't have a knee-jerk defensive reaction against it. This could come off as a little condescending, but more importantly, it misses the other side of the issue. In order to leave itself less open to criticism, evolutionary psychology could be more rigorous, just as other "soft" sciences like medicine and nutrition could be more rigorous. This would make it harder for critics to find things to object to, increasing trust in the field over time, and would probably be a good thing in itself anyway.
So I would add to your list: 8) Concerns about lack of rigor in the field of evolutionary psychology.
Actually I'm not sure if any of that is a problem. Spaun is quite literally "anthropomorphic" - modeled after a human brain. So it's not much of a stretch to say that it learns and understands the way a human does. I was just pointing out that the more progress we make on human-like AIs, without progress on brain scanning, the less likely a Hansonian singularity (dominated by ems of former humans) becomes. If Spaun as it is now really does work "just like a human", then building a human-level AI is just a matter of speeding it up. So by the time we have computers capable of supporting a human mind upload, we'll already have computer programs at least as smart as humans, which learn their knowledge on their own, with no need for a knowledge transplant from a human.
I think we need to separate the concept of whole brain emulation, from that of biology-inspired human-like AI. This actually looks pretty bad for Robin Hanson's singularity hypothesis, where the first emulations to perfectly emulate existing humans suddenly make the cost of labor drop dramatically. If this research pans out, then we could have a "soft takeoff", where AI slowly catches up to us, and slowly overtakes us.
CNRG_UWaterloo, regarding mind uploads:
... (read more)Being able to simulate a particular person's brain is incredibly far away. There aren't any particularly good ideas as to how we might be able to reasonably read out that sort of information from a person's brain. That said,
With all the exotic decision theories floating around here, it doesn't seem like anyone has tried to defend boring old evidential decision theory since AlexMennen last year. So I thought I'd take a crack at it. I might come off a bit more confident than I am, since I'm defending a minority position (I'll leave it to others to bring up objections). But right now, I really do think that naive EDT, the simplest decision theory, is also the best decision theory.
Everyone agrees that Smoker's lesion is a bad counterexample to EDT, since it turns out that smoking actually does cause cancer. But people seem to think that this is just... (read 1343 more words →)
I would definitely make it every other week, if it's weekly.