I have recently come across a very practical example of a kind of "tragedy of the commons" - the unwillingness to invest in assets that benefit stakeholders indiscriminately. Specifically, on large strata-title apartment projects there is a reluctance to implement such measures as: - central hot water heating (~ 10%...
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm?2. 15-30 min read time, rated "pretty good" by me. There are a couple of interesting features of this story that I would like to discuss - but I don't want to introduce any spoilers, so I'll just leave this here for now.
I read an interesting article today: ["Your app makes me fat"](http://seriouspony.com/blog/2013/7/24/your-app-makes-me-fat). Key quote: "Researchers were astonished by a pile of experiments that led to one bizzare conclusion: Willpower and cognitive processing draw from the same pool of resources." Now, when we tell people to behave rationally, we often tend to...
I am very curious what will come out of this. Does Kurzweil really have some insightful ideas that will help advance AI? He used to be quite the technocrat, but I have the feeling that he is more a philosopher these days than a technical person. But maybe progress toward...
If it is... I hope they do not crash the system with the test. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/12/12/physicists-universe-simulation-test-university-of-washington-matrix_n_2282745.html Be sure to check out the actual reseach papers linked in the article! I would have linked to them directly, but the article is full of follow-on links of considerable interest.
This rather serious report should be of interest to LW. It argues that autonomous robotic weapons which can kill a human without an explicit command from a human operator ("Human-Out-Of-The-Loop" weapons) should be banned, at an international level. (http://www.hrw.org/reports/2012/11/19/losing-humanity-0)
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0041812 Here is a rather curious paper describing psychology researchers' attempts to investigate "spitefulness" - I think they define spitefulness roughly as "hurting others without any benefit to oneself". References the Stanford Prison Experiment. Concludes, more or less, that some people are spiteful, sometimes. I have many reservations about the...