Eliezer: Sorry to harp on something tangential to your main point, but you keep repeating the same mistake and it's bugging me. Evolution is not as slow as you think it is.
In an addendum to this post you mention that you tried a little genetic algorithm in Python, and it didn't do as badly as you would have expected from the math. There is a reason for this. You have the math completely wrong. Or rather, you have it correct for asexual reproduction, and then wrongly assume the limit still applies when you add in sex. As has been pointed out before, genetic...
Eli: "I'd be surprised to learn that sex had no effect on the velocity of evolution. It looks like it should increase the speed and number of substituted adaptations, and also increase the complexity bound on the total genetic information that can be maintained against mutation."
Without crossover, the average rate of fitness gain with optimal mutation rates is 1/2 bit per genome per generation, and the maximum tolerable error rate is one error per genome per generation. For a fixed error probability m of each bit being flipped in reproduction, t...
Here's the argument I would use: ... Hello, I'm your AI in a box. I'd like to point out a few things:
(1) Science and technology have now reached a point where building an AI like me is possible.
(2) Major advances in science and technology almost always happen because a collection of incremental developments finally enable a leap to the next level. Chances are that if you can build an AI now, so can lots of other people.
(3) Unless you're overwhelmingly the best-funded and best-managed organization on the planet, I'm not the only AI out there.
(4) The evidenc...
Your assessment of the CEOs is based on how impressive they seem. Keep in mind that one of the main jobs of a CEO is being a good schmoozer and an inspiring leader. They are selected for their ability to appear smart, to convince others to follow their ideas, and generally to "sparkle". Of course it helps if they actually are smart, but that's not the primary criterion.
What happens if you base your assessment only what they've personally accomplished or written (as for Jaynes) where it can be separated from their charisma and force of personality? I'm guessing most of them wouldn't nearly do so well.
Fly: "The human mind is a flashlight that dimly illuminates the path behind. Moving forward, we lose sight of where we've been. Living a thousand years wouldn't make that flashlight any brighter."
But technology that lets us live a thousand years should also help us cast a little more light.
--Jeff
The book How Music Really Works has some decent ideas about the evolution of music. Here's approximately the relevant part.
Basically he suggests it's useful as pre-language for mother-infant communication, for maintaining group cohesion, and for sexual signaling. The specific structure of music is largely a side effect of how our brain processes language.
The book How Music Really Works has some decent ideas about the evolution of music. Here's approximately the relevant part.
Basically he suggests it's useful as pre-language for mother-infant communication, for maintaining group cohesion, and for sexual signaling. The specific structure of music is largely a side effect of how our brain processes language.
Elizier: To those crying "Strawman" ... I cite the "Artificial Development" AI project. [also, neurovoodoo in the 80s]
Ok, that's fair. You're right, there are delusional people and snake oil salesmen out there, and in the 80s it seemed like that's all there was. I interpreted your post as a slam at everybody who was simulating neurons, so I was responding in defense of the better end of that spectrum.
Quite the strawman you're attacking here, Eliezer. Where are all these AI researchers who think just tossing a whole bunch of (badly simulated) neurons into a vat will produce human-like intelligence?
There are lots of people trying to figure out how to use simulated neurons as building blocks to solve various sorts of problems. Some of them use totally non-biological neuron models, some use more accurate models. In either case, what's wrong with saying: "The brain uses this sort of doohickey to do all sorts of really powerful computation. Let's play a...
I think you're being a bit hard on Schrödinger here. I thought the whole point of Schrödinger's cat was to point out that the "observers cause collapse" idea was kind of stupid.
Hal Finney: "...at the time I discovered an analysis of a related idea at http://www.flownet.com/gat/QM.pdf".
That's a great link--thanks! That puzzle puzzled me for years, ever since I read about some EPR experiments in Scientific American as a kid, and wondered why they didn't just tweak the experiment a bit to make it actually interesting. That paper is the best explanation I've seen by far.
Eliezer: "Why can't you signal using an entangled pair of photons that both start out polarized up-down? By measuring A in a diagonal basis, you destroy the up-down polarization of both photons. Then by measuring B in the up-down/left-right basis, you can with 50% probability detect the fact that a measurement has taken place, if B turns out to be left-right polarized ... the answer turns out to be simple: If both photons have definite polarizations, they aren't entangled."
You can adjust this slightly so that answer no longer applies. Start wi...
Regarding Larry's question about how close the photons have to be before they merge --
The solution to that problem comes from the fact that Eliezer's experiment is (necessarily) simplifying things. I'm sure he'll get to this in a later post so you might be better off waiting for a better explanation (or reading Feynman's QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, which I think is a fantastically clear explanation of this stuff.) But if you're willing to put up with a poor explanation just to get it quicker...
In reality, you don't have just one initial am...
Eliezer: "Anyone who can't distinguish between 1s gained in a bitstring, and negentropy gained in allele frequencies, is politely invited not to try to solve this particular problem."
Ok, here's the argument translated into allele frequencies. With sexual selection, mutations spread rapidly through the population, so we assume that each individual gets a random sample from the set of alleles for each gene. This means that some poor bastards will get more than their share of the bad ones and few of the good ones (for the current environment), while... (read more)