All of keefe's Comments + Replies

keefe10

I spent a fair amount of time in martial arts and have a similar attitude toward generalization of kata/form. This idea is standing behind my consistent emphasis on the benefits of coding (particularly TDD) for this community. It builds thought patterns that are useful for tasks that computers typically perform better.

keefe00

Interesting point...

it's worth noting that he bought them for 2 pennies and the vendor is now gone, but yeah, sunk cost fallacy seems to be about right. For me, the visualization of the story is more real and powerful to me than remembering an abstract idea. There's quite a lot of these stories and most of them are rather old, some more of them are here...

http://www.nasrudin-stories.com/

keefe10

http://www.kdnuggets.com/ practical, well curated machine learning from jobs to datasets to articles

torrentz.eu - indexes various torrent sites

http://mvnrepository.com/ - search for includes on maven sites

http://www.crunchbase.com/ evaluating startups etc

slickdeals is dope, that is for sure.

keefe10

I think high level generalizations are found in aphorisms and teaching stories from all around the world. They can sometimes be shorthand for a whole story, for example I often remind myself not to eat my money referencing this story:

Mulla Nasrudin, as everyone knows, comes from a country where fruit is fruit and meat is meat, and curry is never eaten. One week he was plodding along a dusty Indian road, having newly descended from the high mountains of Kafiristan, when a great thirst overtook him. "Soon," he said to himself, "I must come acr... (read more)

0tut
So "Don't eat your money" is a warning against the sunk cost fallacy. But wouldn't the rational response in the mullah's situation be to start selling the "fruits" for about the same price as the one you bought them from.
keefe00

"In this clip, from June 1995, Jobs says the difference between using good hardware can be a 2:1 difference for a company. But the difference between a company with superb programmers vs. average ones is 25:1, he says, adding, "That's probably … certainly the secret to my success. It's that we've gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people.""

http://www.fastcompany.com/1836987/steve-jobs-the-payoff-of-a-great-employee

This productivity speedup is the key observation. Learn the basics from coursera or whatever and then really inter... (read more)

keefe00

This is a nicely written proposal for a practical, actionable idea. If you're not in tech, then you should consider doing this. It starts at a practical idea and has ways to branch out from the long term goal to other like including psychometrics and so forth.

I'm biased due to my open source project, but I think this is the kind of idea that fits well with cryptographically secure peer to peer systems that then aggregate into some groups, as the individual opinions are highly variable (correctly, as different brains need different training)

keefe10

I think it's appropriate to separate work ethic and akrasia mastery from rationality. Saying that work ethic is a choice is, imho, a relatively simplistic view. People often get fired for something trivial (smoking when a drug test is coming up, repeated absence, etc) that they know full well is a suboptimal decision and the short term benefits of getting high (or whatever) override their concern for the long term possible consequences. I think it makes sense to make some distinction that rationality is the ability to select the right path to walk and self... (read more)

keefe00

If yi would have to do more reading to understand the lattice stuff, it seems reasonable though.

As far as usefulness, the idea I had was you could layer a substrate to dissipate the heat really well. My limited understanding is 85% of the heat jumps the wires somehow and is absorbed by the substrate, which could be engineered arbitrarily. This is important because cnt are very good electrical conductors so you could pair them with a good head absorbing substance and achieve separation of heat and current in ways we have not seen before, which one could speculate as a way to restart moores law progression of speed.

keefe00

Good Link. Wordnet is also the canonical language reference, but probably doesn't serve OP's purpose directly. If you start getting into these kind of graphs though, it's quite useful to move around with.

keefe10

USGS has good info.

http://www.usgs.gov/ http://cegis.usgs.gov/ontology.html

http://dbpedia.org/About Also there is no need to scrape wikipedia, work has been done for you. You can do sparql queries to get most of your statements and the CEGIS site supposedly has a working sparql endpoint but I haven't used that in years.

keefe40

statements that are ~50% true... this is actually pretty hard, mine some dataset for statistical info?

generally, I would look into RDF, (protege and topbraid composer free will let you poke around for free without knowing the data format)

US 2000 Census in RDF

Freebase has all manner of data in RDF

http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets/ public data sets, not all in RDF but "it's more important that the data have structure" and all that

cancer stats

keefe00

I think it tends to be most useful to do things that support multiple different plans, so I had a lot of motives for putting this up here. I don't have a lot of time, so that's how I try to roll anyway...

Here is what my motivations were :

  • In general play with the site - I did a little bit of work on it in the summer of 2010 and I was talking about making a contribution again, so I wanted to play with the interface and understand the code better.

  • I enjoyed my time at singinst, but was one of the rare people that had never read lesswrong when I arrived

... (read more)
keefe00

Thank you or the well considered response, actually helpful. You have my background about right, I published in a physicists in medicine conference and have the normal background in comparch and whatever classes I took for my math double. Definitely not a condensed matter physicist, will have to read more on phonons.

The idea that this is a hollow tube and so there is no interior region to be effected does seem intuitive. The thing that jumped out at me is that the tube itself remained cool.

I don't have a good understanding of quantum electrodynamics or... (read more)

1Luke_A_Somers
Phonons are the quanta of lattice vibration. Vibrations are one kind of imperfection in a lattice. Electrical carriers (electrons and holes) do not scatter off of individual lattice atoms; they scatter off of lattice imperfections. These imperfections can be defects, or phonons, or other carriers. On to the claims in the article... as before. Usefulness? I'm not really sure. If you're always using these nanotubes to carry currents, their entire environment will heat up (the heat will leak into them eventually), so it seems like it would only really help in cases where it needs to carry a current spike.
keefe20

For you, posting about the fact that you decided not to post it reinforces the idea that you are important enough to have an impact with a blog post, which is more likely to reinforce the most common bias of intelligent people.

keefe40

I think more helpful people than unhelpful people come here. I remember a friend in grad school who had someone publish an algo he had discovered in the journal issue 1 before his publication, halfway across the world. I think it's kind of like an avalanche, there is some sense to being quiet until you know enough to have a reasonable estimate of the impact of your action. As a rule though, I'd rather see ideas traded here than behind DARPA firewalls.

keefe00

Or maybe you just use "how does X advance singularity timelines?"

Very much not this. I was a visiting fellow at singinst and discussed timelines with many people. I still feel some level of ethical obligation to provide a more complete analysis as I was actually converted to have some worry about this recursive self improvement, though I tend to worry more about IA than AI (even if just because of the IA-->AI path) I'm also poking a little bit at the LW codebase again and wanted to try to stimulate a discussion and explore the site. I was ... (read more)

1Viliam_Bur
Thanks for explanation. Now my model is that you consider carbon nanotubes very important technology for increasing computational power (more than many other hardware-related technologies), so they are also a very important component in calculating Singularity timeline. Makes sense, though I lack the knowledge necessary to discuss it. Because they were writing for a different audience -- for people who already know a lot of context. Now it's your choice whether you want to discuss with an average LessWronger, in which case you should provide more content, or you want to discuss only with people who are experts in some area, which is completely legitimate, but perhaps you should state it more explicitly. That's good. I was hoping you will not get the impression that we are somehow biased against discussing singularity or carbon. :D
keefe00

Curious if people would be willing to articulate negative sentiment on this piece?

It seems like we should all see advancements like this as a way of training our intuition about how the tech tree will go and also make efforts to do outreach into important communities as they are growing. If graphene transistor and remote cooling cpus eclipse efforts in parallelism or biological computing, then researchers in that field have a lot of influence to spread to users as well as developers.

Also, to most people this is a highly counterintuitive phenomenon and some... (read more)

1Viliam_Bur
My reaction: You have posted a link to some invention, without explaining why it is related to singularity more than any other random technical invention. Sure, there are three hyperlinks where I can get more information, but I would like to get some explanation from the article itself. Or maybe you just use "how does X advance singularity timelines?" as a synonym for "X is cool"; I don't know, and you didn't help me avoid this suspicion. What would I like to find in articles like this? A short explanation of context (for people who know nothing about carbon nanotubes, which is not a typical LW topic), and explanation of why do you think this invention is exceptional (even when compared with hundred other inventions made and published in the same year). Something like this -- the following text is completely made up, just to better illustrate what I mean: Estimates of Singularity timeline are often based on the Moore's law. However, in recent years the progress in computer speeds has slowed down. Computers are not getting faster anymore. Their increased power is mostly gained by adding more processor cores, which is not the same as making faster cores. Also the electric power consumption increases linearly with the number of cores, so even if in 2050 we get a computer capable of simulating a human brain, it would require more power than is produced by Sun. One possible solution is to avoid an integrated-circuit approach and build the computer directly, atom by atom. (Just like we got a thousandfold increase in capacity and speed by replacing vacuum tubes by integrated circuits in 1960s.) To make it possible, we need a material that is able to do -- blah blah blah -- but material with such properties is not known yet. However, recent experiments with carbon nanotubes suggest that they are similar to what we need. More details about physical properties of carbon nanotubes are here: [1], [2], [3]. Any you don't have to put "Singularity" in the name of the article. "
keefe00

I think people underestimate the intrinsic computational complexity in solving even relatively simple pattern recognition tasks. There are also all sorts of algorithms where you do a heuristic search through some big space and it's particularly interesting to note that a lot of programs for finding proofs or optimizing code are in this class. Anybody who thinks computers today are fast doesn't write enough code.

I have an intuition this particular tech(or related) is going to advance us to the next exponentiating phase of a stacked sigmoid advancement curve that eventually leads to ai.

keefe00

Would you talk more about the coupling between substrate and carrier electrons, that is not clear to me.

I mean it makes sense that it went somewhere nearby, but why would it transfer at all, only with these particular materials?

Why isn't it weird to you? If I got a lab report like that i'd be like ok, go ahead and rerun those experiments...

2Luke_A_Somers
What kind of explanation are you looking for? Are you a physicist? Have you taken physics? Assuming you know some things but aren't a condensed-matter physicist: 1) single-layered graphene's intrinsic scattering rate is extremely low, so nearly anything else that causes scattering is going to dominate. 2) it is an exceptionally poor screener of electric fields, due to the low density of states. 3) it is entirely surface, so there is no interior region to be unaffected by boundary effects (though graphene is usually in poor mechanical contact with the substrate, this loose coupling is not weak enough to strongly suppress surface phonon scattering). Note that 'the top side, away from the substrate' is not distinct - the relevant carrier electron states straddle the center plane. So, what happens? You've got an electron in the electrical field, accelerating. It eventually scatters. What does it scatter off of? The substrate, mainly, by one mechanism or another. Whichever it is, some energy is dissipated directly into the substrate (that's what it bounced off of), and the electron bounces off in some other direction. This electron bounce is not heat - the electrical field just goes back to pushing it forward again, and it goes - very orderly except for the isolated scattering instances. The main ways the graphene itself gets warmer are by a) a carrier electron does manage to scatter off of a graphene lattice phonon (this is a really weak process, but it happens, and when you get rid of the substrate it dominates) ; and b) phonons from the substrate are transmitted into the graphene lattice (this is also weak because graphene binds poorly to the substrates mechanically speaking, but it's not extremely weak). That's the summary of what's going on. It applies equally to single-walled carbon nanotubes, and to a lesser extent, multi-layered graphene and multi-walled carbon nanotubes.
keefe-20

So if you have a background in nanotech and I have compsci, it seems like speculation could generate ideas.

I think that as a community interested in safety, it's important we keep informed about the advancement trajectory. Understanding limitations and capabilities of fundamental science advancements also provides intelligence on companies to watch for, tech that is likely available soon and so forth.

so, why not speculate? It's almost free to scan an idea for value.

keefe00

"Taking the outside view means using an estimate based on a class of roughly similar previous cases"

so the singularity by far is something after which we cannot predict how things are, but we're going to look at roughly similar cases for that?

I'm also an insider in this in the sense that I've been a professional software engineer for 16 years, dropped out of a phd program after passing qualification exam with a masters in compsci and eng, so yes, I am trying to imagine possible outcomes and look at trajectories and I hope other people with training on this board are doing the same.

1Vaniver
The comparisons people generally make are to agriculture and industrialization. Okay. Part of my academic background is physics, including nanoscale physics- but if anything, being half-educated about it makes me reluctant to speculate. For example, there's a technology under development which would use nanotubes and van der Waals forces (if I remember correctly) to do binary memory on a scale that's a massive jump from what we have now- I think the claim was they could store a petabyte in the volume of a dime. If that works, that'll be huge- you could significantly change computer architecture with the ability to store abundant memory on the same chip as the CPU, for example. But I'm reluctant to bet that it'll work until it works.
keefe-40

it seems much more important than tech 734/5000 necessary... carbon nanotubes are one of the core scientific discoveries of our generation and this shows a really interesting property of them directly related to electronics development. The heat dissapation bottleneck has been the most serious issue with nanotech and much, much faster and smaller processors. When we went from faster chips to multiple cores, things became really different - parallel algorithms are inherently more difficult and tech that could reinstate an exponentiation phase is extremely ... (read more)

1Luke_A_Somers
It's interesting and I hadn't thought of it, but it's not weird. The losses are from coupling between the substrate and the carrier electrons, so it makes sense that the energy will go there.
2Vaniver
There are two different things going on here; one of them is that nanotechnology has potential and is interesting, and the other is estimating if/when the next Singularity will occur. The second is done best by taking the outside view. An estimate that the Singularity will happen in 2100 assumes there will be many technological improvements between then and now- both big and small- and so doesn't depend on the details- that we fixed the heating problem now and the parallelism problem ten years from now, or did them in the reverse order. The first is interesting, but should be separated from the second.
keefe10

I was a civ junkie for a long time... one interesting thing is that the manual had structured data representations of everything in the game. It was also deadly exploitable, you would usually just not use certain strategies because they're boring.

keefe00

even the most extraordinary eat, shit, sleep, fuck, become addicted and I also feel that merging needs is the key to cooperation

keefe00

Understanding what some call the terror of the situation will change a lot. People should volunteer at shelters or prisons or with something like big brothers/big sisters and see the pain that stupidity, weakness, irrationality, love of ignorance and all the rest cause. The real terror of the traits commonly possessed by the people and economic entities that shape our society. Think hard about daily life in rural china, north korea, iran, the ghettos and the trailer parks and think about the evolutionary pressure that puts on the 150+ IQs that happen to be... (read more)

keefe20

I think that you are you are on a solid research path here. I think you have reached the bounds of business oriented software and it's time to look into something like apache mahout or RDF. Decision tree implementations are available all over, just find a data structure and share them and run inference engines like owlim or pellet and see what you can see.

RDF is a good interim solution because you can start encoding things as structured data. I have some JSON->RDF stuff for inference if you get to that point.

Here is one way to represent these graphs a... (read more)

keefe00

reductionism = (reduce until you have good reason not to);

I think this is a good construction for pragmatic reductionism. It feels like there is some connection to ockham's razor, using an excessively complex model ends up binding up computational resources that you are likely to need for some time sensitive problem. I think this is what is going on in your description of the thought chain you get bound up in. It's fine for fun to think about how relatively or quantum mechanics relate to some problem that is easily solved (or approximated quite accurately) with newtownian mechanics, but if you have some actual reason to solve that problem, it's best to take the easy answer and move on.

keefe00

It's going to happen over and over again throughout your life, particularly if you start doing things like training neural networks or svms or whatever you are playing with. If you set aside a weekend and visit your local linux users group, they will get you all sorted out for free. The additional advantage of this is that once you are in a known clean infrastructure, it's likely that you will feel more free to write and research.

keefe00

It's worth noting media is consumed in different modes. I am constantly watching BSG or buffy or stargate as I'm coding because there are these alternating phases of concentration and boring repetition so it's nice to have something I can glance at and appreciate something from. This is very different from watching for entertainment like game of thrones or justified.

keefe00

great show, having never read the books I think the storyline seems well thought out enough to learn from

keefe20

the bullet points...

  • neuroscience research, particularly related to neuroeconomics

  • rewriting codebase from 10 projects by breaking down into about 30 smaller more easily tested components

  • reviewing and automating infrastructure selections (java,eclipse,jquery,couchdb,postgres,bash,ubuntu lts, maven, git, custom code for lots of stuff, apache for various little things notably hadoop and mahout) deciding on feature subsets for internal use, trusted group use, and launch trajectory in 2012

  • some work on money and such annoying tasks

  • adjusting to being eng

... (read more)
keefe30

I would start with something like reuters API, http://wordnet.princeton.edu/ and some research on these guys http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ this is a fairly well studied problem by spammers, so I'd also work there

0imonroe
Thanks for the tips! I've been playing with the Alchemy API for NLP (http://www.alchemyapi.com/) and an API called DayLife (http://developer.daylife.com/) for news sources, etc. I'm trying to do my best to make it as un-spammy as possible, but how far I can get with that remains to be seen. I have a plan to take advantage of the inverted pyramid story structure so common in news reporting, along with entity extraction on the paragraph level, to get something out of it that's more or less readable. I'll post an example when my prototype works.
keefe20

what about your infrastructure required downtime due to laptop failure? a VPS or dropbox or gmail file system etc can meet security and uptime requirements one suggestion is that you could install ubuntu to boot off of a memory stick, store your files in a truecrypt volume and autobackup that encrypted file to various places

2gwern
I would have had to prepare all that in advance and they would have been less satisfactory.
keefe00

It seems like language and thinking are closely connected, particularly w.r.t. the categories we tend to reason with. http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lngbrain/main.htm is a good resource

keefe30

I'm pretty familiar with the codebase though I transitioned to ebay before getting too much done on it, send me an email if you want some feedback, I have more free time these days looking to contribute to open source for long term strategic reasons

keefe00

Directly answering the question, organ replacement including some brain augmentation that shifts into uploading eventually seems most likely. Cryonics isn't really a direct answer to the question, if you want to talk about trajectories to achieve immortality.... It's too hard to predict where a breakthrough will be made or a wall will be hit. I think the most feasible trajectory is focusing on money and power, then organ replacement and traditional life extension techniques, which include general existential risk reduction.

keefe10

Overall the concept of embodied cognition makes a lot of sense. Yoga and particularly martial arts give a lot of tools for embodied cognition. Particularly martial arts - these are all telegraphed gestures, in an adversarial mode it's not useful to advertise weaknesses. Changing weight balance and the subtle foot motions involved in shifting into a martial arts stance is less obvious and communicates strength to anyone able to notice.

keefe10

It's probably worthwhile asking people to put the logo with an alt text of sponsored by leading to lesswrong or siai. people that stumble onto such an article that don't know about lw or siai are likely to be interest, should also help pagerank.

keefe00

quick scan didn't see anything regarding accuracy of visual or kinesthetic imagination, probably one of the most important skills for solving problems and also related to # of possibility chains one can fit in the head at one time

keefe00

I spent more than I care to admit learning to tell myself to sleep for some window of hours, like no more than 2 or 4 or whatever

keefe00

Louie pushed the fix to production last night and it looks like the update script triggered sometime between these two posts

3Louie
Yes. Thank goodness I've fixed downvoting. It's my favorite part of this site.
keefe10

in one sentence... the vote processing mechanism required a reference to the global configuration for pylons and the pylons configuration import was missing.

not super interesting unfortunately :]

it was probably something like a munged automerge or something

keefe40

It was a simple bug, fix is committed and a pull request is in, I'll send an email out now to get this into production.

0DanielVarga
I would be very interested in a one-sentence description of the bug. Especially if it was not just a side-effect of some other change in the codebase.
0[anonymous]
I would be very interested in a one-sentence description of the bug. Especially if it was not just a side-effect of some other change in the codebase.
keefe20

hmmm I can confirm this both here and on a local copy of the codebase, I'll have a look and make sure Wes knows

4keefe
It was a simple bug, fix is committed and a pull request is in, I'll send an email out now to get this into production.