Finally, someone with a clue about biology tells it like it is about brain uploading
http://mathbabe.org/2015/10/20/guest-post-dirty-rant-about-the-human-brain-project/
In reading this, suggest being on guard against own impulse to find excuses to dismiss the arguments presented because they call into question some beliefs that seem to be deeply held by many in this community.
It depends. Writing a paper is not a realtime activity. Answering a free-response question can be. Proving a complex theorem is not a realtime activity, solving a basic math problem can be. It's a matter of calibrating the question difficulty so that is can be answered within the (soft) time-limits of an interview. Part of that calibration is letting the applicant "choose their weapon". Another part of it is letting them use the internet to look up anything they need to.
Our lead dev has passed this test, as has my summer grad student. There are t...
it's not strictly an AI problem-- any sufficiently rapid optimization process bears the risk of irretrievably converging on an optimum nobody likes before anybody can intervene with an updated optimization target.
individual and property rights are not rigorously specified enough to be a sufficient safeguard against bad outcomes even in an economy moving at human speeds
in other words the science of getting what we ask for advances faster than the science of figuring out what to ask for
(Note that transforming a sufficiently well specified statistical model into a lossless data compressor is a solved problem, and the solution is called arithmetic encoding - I can give you my implementation, or you can find one on the web.
The unsolved problems are the ones hiding behind the token "sufficiently well specified statistical model".
That said, thanks for the pointer to arithmetic encoding, that may be useful in the future.
The point isn't understanding Bayes theorem. The point is methods that use Bayes theorem. My own statistics prof said that a lot of medical people don't use Bayes because it usually leads to more complicated math.
To me, the biggest problem with Bayes theorem or any other fundamental statistical concept, frequentist or not, is adapting it to specific, complex, real-life problems and finding ways to test its validity under real-world constraints. This tends to require a thorough understanding of both statistics and the problem domain.
...That's not the ski
Also, I'm not sure if this is your intention, but it seems to me that the goal of spending 20 years to slow or prevent aging is a recipe for wasting time. It's such an ambitious goal that so many people are already working on, any one researcher is unlikely to put a measurable dent in it.
In the last five years the NIH (National Institutes of Health) has never spent more than 2% of its budget on aging research. To a first approximation, the availability of grant support is proportional to the number of academic researchers, or at least to the amount of ...
Secondly, you probably shouldn't worry about pursuing a project in which your already-collected data is useless, especially if that data or similar is also available to most other researchers in your field (if not, it would be very useful for you to try to make that data available to others who could do something with it). You're probably more likely to make progress with interesting new data than interesting old data.
This is 'new' data in the sense that it is only now becoming available for research purposes, and if I have my way, it is going to be in ...
People gain skills by working on hard problems, so it doesn't seem necessary for you to take additional time to explicitly hone your skill set before starting on any project(s) that you want to work on.
The embarrassing truth is I spent so much time cramming stuff into my brain while trying to survive in academia that until now I haven't really had time to think about the big picture. I just vectored toward what at any given point seemed like the direction that would give me the most options for tackling the aging problem. Now I'm finally as close to an optimal starting point as I can reasonably expect and the time has come to confront the question: "now what"?
So, for a retrospective approach with existing data, I could try to find a constellation of proxy variables in the ICD9 V-codes and maybe some lab values suggestive of basically healthy patients who consume a lower-than-typical amount of calories. Not in a very health-conscious part of the country though, so unlikely that a large number of patients would do this on purpose, let alone one specific fasting strategy.
Now, something I could do is team up with a local dietician or endocrinologist and recruit patients to try calorie restriction.
I should clarify something: the types of problems I can most efficiently tackle are retrospective analysis of already-collected data.
Prospective clinical and animal studies are not out of the question, but given the investment in infrastructure and regulatory compliance they would need, these would have to be collaborations with researchers already pursuing such studies. This is on the table, but does not leverage the clinical data I already have (unless, in the case of clinical researchers, they are already at my institution or an affiliated one).
My id...
If we are in an environment of open conversation and I say something that brings up an emotional trauma in another person and that person doesn't have the self-awareness to know why he's feeling unwell, that's not a good time to leave him alone.
?! Depends. If you don't understand that person intimately or aren't experienced at helping less self-aware (aka neurotypical) people process emotional trauma, it's probably a very good time to leave him alone. Politely.
I was tempted to vote "makes no sense at all". I did not because I've had far too many experiences where I dismiss a colleague's idea as being the product of muddled thinking only to later realize that a) the idea makes sense, they just didn't know how to express it clearly or b) the idea makes practical sense but my profession chooses to sweep it under the rug because it's too inconvenient. On Stackoverflow and LW I see the same tendency to mistake hard/tedious problems for meaningless problems and "solve" the problem by prematurely cl...
Come to think of it, "Red/Blue makes no sense at all" is not even a valid answer to the question. The question did not ask whether it made sense.
There's such a thing as a question that rests on invalid assumptions — the classic example being "Have you stopped beating your wife?" when addressed to someone who never did (or never married a woman). As in that case, questions can be used to sneak in connotations — the classic example is asked by a politician to his rival in a public debate, for the purpose of planting suspicion. The sage...
The tough part will be guarding against Goodhart's Law. I suspect that the current system of publications and grant money as an indicator of ability started out as an attempt to improve the efficiency of scientific progress and has by now been thoroughly Goodharted.
As Lumifer points out, tenure was intended to give productive scientists some protected time so they could think. However, the amount of hoops you jump through on the way to getting there puts you through the opposite of protected time so by the time you get tenure you've gotten jaded, cynical, and acquired some habits useful for academic survival but harmful to academic excellence.
I can offer advice on statistical analysis of data (frequentist, alas, still learning Bayesian methods myself so not ready to advise on that). Unfortunately, right now I have too little spare time to actually analyze it for you, but I can explain to you how you can tackle it using open source tools and try to point you toward further reading focused on the specific problem you're trying to solve. In the medium-future I hope to have my online data analysis app stable enough to post here, but this is not looking like the month when it will happen.
I can proba...
The current 500-year window needs to be be VERY typical if it's the main evidence in support of the statement that "even with no singularity technological advance is a normal part of our society".
This is like someone in the 1990s saying that constantly increasing share price "is a normal part of Microsoft".
I think technological progress is desirable and hope that it will continue for a long time. All I'm saying is that being overconfident about future rates of technological progress is one of this community's most glaring weaknesses.
Somewhere between an extended family and a kindergarten; like a small private kindergarten where the parents are close friends with the caretakers.
That, right there, is one of my fondest dreams. To get my tiny scientists out of the conformity-factory and someplace where they can flourish (even more). Man, if this was happening in my town, in a heartbeat I'd rearrange my work schedule to spend part of the week being a homeschooler.
Here's what I expect someone who seriously believed that markets will handle it would sound like:
"Wow, overpopulation is a threat? Clearly there are inefficiencies the rest of the market is too stupid to exploit. Let's see if I can get rich by figuring out where these inefficiencies are and how to exploit them."
Whereas "the markets will handle it, period, full stop" is not a belief, it's an excuse.
The choke point in our Fritz Haber/Norman Borlaug/Edward Jenner pipeline is not the amount of science education out there. It's a combination of the low-hanging fruit being picked, insufficient investment in novel approaches and not enough geniuses.
Very true. Each year we produce thousands of new Ph.D.s and import thousands more, while slowly choking off funding for basic research, so they languish in a post-doc holding pattern until many of them give up and go do something less innovative but safer.
Alternatively tutoring is free and with a similar level of time costs to raising your own children you could tutor a lot of others.
Yes! The school system in my state spends far more on remedial education than on GT. Education is seen as a status symbol instead of a costly investment that should be allocated in a manner that gives the highest returns (in terms of innovation, prosperity, and sane policy decisions).
A witty quote from an great book by a brilliant author is awesome, but does not have the status of any sort of law.
What do we mean by "normality"? What you observe around you every day? If you are wrong about the unobserved causal mechanisms underlying your observations, you will make wrong decisions. If you walk on hot coals because you believe God will not let you burn, the normality that quantum mechanics adds up to diverges enough from your normality that there will be tangible consequences. Are goals part of normality? If not, they certainl...
So, looking at shminux' post above, you would suggest mandatory insemination of only some fertile females and reducing subsistence to slightly above the minimum acceptable caloric levels..?
I believe that deliberately increasing population growth is specifically the opposite direction of the one we should be aiming toward if we are to maximize any utility function that penalizes die-offs, at least as long as we are strictly confined to one planet. I was just more interested in the more general point shminux raised about repugnant conclusions and wanted t...
Once we've dealt with the mass starvation, vast numbers of deaths from malaria, horrendous poverty, etc., then we can start paying a lot more attention to awesomeness.
What if, for practical purposes, there is an inexhaustible supply of suck? What if we can't deal with it once and for all and then turn our attention to the fun stuff?
So, judging from the reception of my post about the Malthusian Crunch certain Wrongians sense this and have gone into denial (perhaps, if they're honest with themselves, privately admitting the hope that if they ignore the ...
What if the reason repugnant conclusions come up is that we only have estimates of our real utility functions which are an adequate fit over most of the parameter space but diverge from true utility under certain boundary conditions?
If so, either don't feel shame about having to patch your utility function with one that does fit better in that region of the parameter space... or aim for a non-maximal but closer to maximum utility that that is far enough from the boundary that it can be relied on.
So your issue is that a copy of you is not you? And you would treat star trek-like transporter beams as murder?
Nothing so melodramatic, but I wouldn't use them. UNLESS they were in fact manipulating my wave function directly somehow causing my amplitude to increase in one place and decrease in another. Probably not what the screenplay writers had in mind, though.
But you are OK with a gradual replacement of your brain, just not with a complete one?
Maybe even a complete one eventually. If the vast majority of my cognition has migrated to the synthet...
That should be a new discussion.
You claimed that people ignore or outright oppose trying to accelerate the rate of technological advancement. Could it be instead that nobody has any idea how to do it?
Very, very possible.
An independent settlement seems quite beyond the possibilities of present and foreseeable technology.
I'm not saying its easy. I guess I calibrate my concept of foreseeable technology as sleeker, faster mobile devices being trivially predictable, fusion as possible, and general-purpose nanofactories as speculative.
On that scale,...
Well, that for starters.
Then there is the drive to insure the survival and happiness of your children. I have found that this increases with age. If you don't have that drive yet, simply wait. There's a good chance you will be surprised to see that you will develop one, as I have. I imagine this drive undergoes another burst when one's children have children.
Then there is foreclosing on the possibility of the human race reaching the stars. If that doesn't excite you, what does? Sports? Video games? I'm sure those will also spread through the galaxy if we d...
For the most part, my emphasis is not on limiting population directly. I do believe that charitable efforts have the responsibility to mitigate the risk of a demographic trap in the areas they serve. But I think getting anybody who matters to listen is a lost cause.
My emphasis is on being conscious of the fact that the reason we're still alive and prospering is that we are continuously buying ourselves more time with technology and use this insight to motivate greater investment in research and development. This seems like an easier sell.
Here is a thought experiment that might not be a thought experiment in the foreseeable future:
Grow some neurons in vitro and implant them in a patient. Over time, will that patient's brain recruit those neurons?
If so, the more far-out experiment I earlier proposed becomes a matter of scaling up this experiment. I'd rather be on a more resilient substrate than neurons, but I'll take what I can get.
I'm betting that the answer to this will be "yes", following a similar line of reasoning that Drexler used to defend the plausibility of nanotech: the ...
I agree. My reason for posting the link here is as reality check-- LW seems to be full of people firmly convinced that brain-uploading is the only only viable path to preserving consciousness, as if the implementation "details" were an almost-solved problem.