All of Saran's Comments + Replies

Answer by Saran42

Hi, according to this research, it might not be possible to increase working memory, since the memory limit seems to be the same for birds, monkeys and humans, and in extension in all animals:

https://phys.org/news/2021-12-brain-capacity-humans-birds.html

The scientists found that birds and monkeys—despite their different brain architecture—share the same central mechanisms and limits of working memory.

https://elifesciences.org/articles/72783

1Nicholas / Heather Kross
Certainly good to know, thanks for bringing this forward!
Saran10

Hi!

Your ML study guide seems nice, I'll probably need it in a year or two, waiting for improved versions :)

About diet, have you tried soylent or derivatives? I'm gonna try it, seems like a good way to save time.

1Borasko
I have not, but I'll look into it. I hope it goes well for you!
Saran*-10

it's not that people are innately evil, it's that they've learned a bad strategy to get what they want

what if sometimes it is not a bad strategy, but the only strategy?

For example nazi scientists did some cruel and evil experiments on humans, but in exchange they got what they wanted.

2Gordon Seidoh Worley
There's basically no time when you are actually faced with a single option you must take at this level of consideration, so this is a nonstarter. Instead, it's that an option has been screened off so that it looks this way, but in fact there were many available that were simply not considered.
Saran10

chimpanzees are cruel but have no concept of evil?

But... how do you know that chimpanzees have no concept of evil?

5ChristianKl
Evil is not a semantic primitive that all human languages have. It's a quite abstract concept. 
Saran30

Eh, I think this is no innate evil, but people optimizing their behavior around the incentive of getting dopamine jumps, when they show their superiority to people around them while acting as a bully, or self pleasure of knowing they managed to troll someone on the internet forums and thus are better than them.

You gave no examples of evilness but just things that some predisposed people do to get their rewards, because their prehistoric ancestors evolved that way over the course of millions of years. Real evilness would be to do things that give nothing in... (read more)

3ChristianKl
Innately evil would mean engaging in evil action for a innate reason. To the extend that a person engages in evil action because of how they are evolved they are innately evil. 
Saran50

Do you guys think it is worth to learn chinese if I'm planning a career in science?

China is becoming more and more influential in the world, plus in 2020 it's published more scientific papers than USA, most of which are not translated, thus being able to read them would be an advantage. (https://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank.php?year=2020)

I'm not sure how to find information about which country puts more money and is progressing faster in molecular biology/biophysics though.

I thought a bit more about it and at the rate that automatic translation gets better I would expect that it's no problem to read biology papers in 1-2 decades if they are written in Chinese and you don't know Chinese.

Yeah, I largely agree with lsusr. According to my mom (whose career has focused on second language acquisition and Chinese-American cultural exchange), basically no student gets past second year Chinese at a university level unless they're majoring it. Like, even business majors who plan to work in China. When I took university-level Chinese it really shocked me how much harder it was than other languages I'd learned – after nine months of five hours a week of quality university-level instruction, reading-wise I could barely understand books aimed at toddl... (read more)

lsusr*230

I have undergraduate degrees in physics and mathematics. I taught myself business, entrepreneurship, computer science, machine learning, web development and Chinese. I have run my own consumer hardware startup.

The Chinese word for kinetochore is 动粒. If you go to the English Wikipedia page on kinetochores it's all in English. If you go to the Chinese Baidupedia page on 动粒 the first sentence lists the English word "kinetochore". That's because English is the lingua franca of science.

Learning Chinese because you love China and Chinese culture is a stupendous ... (read more)

6matejsuchy
China's sciences are not very good, and relatedly most of those papers are likely of extremely low quality. I know Chinese, and it's a wonderful language, but I wouldn't recommend learning it for that purpose. My 2c
Answer by Saran00

Wouldn't AI rebuild itself from zero to prevent such trojans anyway? Then it is pointless.

I'm sure AI would be aware of such a threat, for example it could scan the internet and stumble upon posts such as this.

1[anonymous]
Why would it bother?  Every last bit of compute power has to be obsessed with [whatever task humans have assigned to it].  An AI that isn't using all it's compute towards it's assigned task is one that gets replaced with one that is.
Saran10

Isn't this another loop that you didn't mention? :P

His admirers

Who are his admirers? Just like who are his enemies.

2abramdemski
I'd add "what's the deal with being dragon spawned, is that really what it sounds like, and if so why would you hunt dragons?"
2Kaj_Sotala
Hmm, somehow "enemies" felt like it raised my curiosity more than "admirers", though I also didn't notice the "enemies" until someone else saw an earlier draft and pointed that out. I guess for these ones, it's a little subjective whether they count as open loops or not - whether you feel like the sentences are self-explanatory on their own or whether you feel like you want to know more.
Saran30

What about threads like "Open & Welcome Thread"? I had a bit trouble finding it today.

A way to make these would be to make a second version of the Personal Blog, which shows on the main page.

Or entirely different tag, "Community Post"? Available for trusted members. Though it would probably be the same as "Open Threads" tag.