I found an essay written by David Marr called Artificial Intelligence -- a personal view that I thought was fairly insightful. Marr first discusses how information processing problems are generally solved: > The solution to an information processing problem divides naturally into two parts. In the first, the underlying nature...
I originally titled this post "The Less Wrong wiki is wrong about group selection", because it seemed wildly overconfident about its assertion that group selection is nonsense. The wiki entry on "group selection" currently reads: > People who are unfamiliar with evolutionary theory sometimes propose that a feature of the...
This recent discussion post by SarahC got me thinking about how one can rationally manage research. It seems like software might be useful here, but I don't know how exactly the software should work. I'm intrigued by mind mapping software, but it's possible that all that structure is unnecessary and...
I agree on most of this, but would you mind explaining why you think neuroscience is "mostly useless?" My intuition is the opposite. Also agreed that pure mathematics seems useful.
Would you mind tabooing the word "preference" and re-writing this post? It's not clear to me that the research cited in your "crash course" post actually supports what you seem to be claiming here.
If you can come up with better images to represent Friendly AI, please let me know!
How about an image of a paper clip?
Apologies for the pedantry that follows.
Today, we know how Hebb's mechanism works at the molecular level.
This quote gives the impression that there is a unitary learning mechanism at work in the brain called "Hebbian learning," and that how it works is well understood. It is my understanding that this is not accurate.
For example, spike-timing-dependent plasticity is a Hebbian learning rule which has been postulated to underlie at least some forms of long-term potentiation and long-term depression. However, there is ongoing debate as to how accurate/useful this concept is, including one recent attempt at a re-formulation of classical STDP.
With regard to molecular mechanisms, it was my understanding that even fundamental issues like whether LTP/LTD primarily involve presynaptic or postsynaptic modifications (or both) have not yet been cleared up.
I think your statement should be changed to something like "Though there are likely a variety of Hebbian learning mechanisms at work in the brain, neuroscientists are beginning to understand the few of them that have been discovered so far."
That thread is way too long, so I'm not going to read it, but I did a quick search for and didn't see any discussion on what I consider the dealbreaker when considering the evidence for or against most religions (but especially any flavor of Christianity), which is the existence of "souls." Simply put, the "soul" hypothesis doesn't jive with current evidence from physics, and it doesn't pay rent with regard to observations from neuroscience (or any kind of observations, for that matter). I strongly suspect that the Book of Mormon doesn't deal with evidence from neuroscience, which means that, due to the "soul" hypothesis being fairly central to Christian belief (it is the postulated mechanism by which a person is judged for "sins" committed in their life), you don't have to read it.
As an aside, I consider this line of reasoning to be something like "atheism for dummies" since most religions that I've seen depend on humans having something like a soul.
Isn't 12.0 something like quadruple-beta of the "Stable" version of Chrome?
I'm not entirely sure what you mean here. It's the current stable release
OP: For the record, I'm on Chrome 13 and I haven't noticed anything like you mentioned here. The graphical glitches make me think something is up with your video card or the drivers for it, but if it's only happening for LW...I'm not sure what to tell you.
In the past year I've been involved in two major projects at SIAI. Steve Rayhawk and I were asked to review existing AGI literature and produce estimates of development timelines for AGI.
You seem to suggest that this work is incomplete, but I'm curious: is this available anywhere or is it still a work in-progress? I would be very interested in reading this, even if its incomplete. I would even be interested in just seeing a bibliography.
I'm interested in ... winning arguments ...
Ack, that won't do. It is generally detrimental to be overly concerned with winning arguments. Aside from that, though, welcome to LW!
I found an essay written by David Marr called Artificial Intelligence -- a personal view that I thought was fairly insightful. Marr first discusses how information processing problems are generally solved:
The solution to an information processing problem divides naturally into two parts. In the first, the underlying nature of a particular computation is characterized, and its basis in the physical world is understood. One can think of this part as an abstract formulation of what is being computed and why, and I shall refer to it as the "theory" of a computation. The second part consists of particular algorithms for implementing a computation, and so it specifies how.
This is reminiscent of Marr's three levels of analysis.
Next, Marr draws a distinction... (read 424 more words →)
I originally titled this post "The Less Wrong wiki is wrong about group selection", because it seemed wildly overconfident about its assertion that group selection is nonsense. The wiki entry on "group selection" currently reads:
People who are unfamiliar with evolutionary theory sometimes propose that a feature of the organism is there for the good of the group - for example, that human religion is an adaptation to make human groups more cohesive, since religious groups outfight nonreligious groups.
Postulating group selection is guaranteed to make professional evolutionary biologists roll up their eyes and sigh.
However, it appears that the real problem is not that the wiki is overconfident (that's a problem, but it's only... (read 722 more words →)
This recent discussion post by SarahC got me thinking about how one can rationally manage research. It seems like software might be useful here, but I don't know how exactly the software should work. I'm intrigued by mind mapping software, but it's possible that all that structure is unnecessary and you could do quite well with less. For instance, I'm considering trying a system of timestamped notes which are managed by a tagging system. If the tagging was done thoroughly enough, you could filter through all the posts sharing a cluster of tags and fairly easily get access to every idea you've recorded on a certain topic.
The only problem is, I think... (read more)
Your account of "proof" is not actually an alternative to the "proofs are social constructs" description, since these are addressing two different aspects of proof. You have focused on the standard mathematical model of proofs, but there is a separate sociological account of how professional mathematicians prove things.
Here is an example of the latter from Thurston's "On Proof and Progress in Mathematics."
... (read more)