After reading David Burns's "Feeling Good" and receiving a score on the depression test corresponding to a severe depression I tried the exercises in the book. Though I still struggle with them, they have helped me temendously and lowered the score on the test after only a week. I can not attribute the change only to the exercises seeing as I have been more strict in my meditation regimen (15min at evening). The exercises are very interesting to this community I think and maybe I will write a dedicated discussion post.
With my new found optimism/hope/energy I am much more motivated to start exercising again in the next days, maybe a programming project and again taking up quantifying myself.
I'm thinking about a fantasy setting that I expect to set stories in in the future, and I have a cryptography problem.
Specifically, there are no computers in this setting (ruling out things like supercomplicated RSA). And all the adults share bodies (generally, one body has two people in it). One's asleep (insensate, not forming memories about what's going on, and not in any sort of control over the body) and one's awake (in control, forming memories, experiencing what's going on) at any given time. There is not necessarily any visible sign when one party falls asleep and the other wakes, although there are fakeable correlates (basically, acting like you just appeared wherever you are). It does not follow a rigid schedule, although there is an approximate maximum period of time someone can stay awake for, and there are (also fakeable) symptoms of tiredness. Persons who share bodies still have distinct legal and social existences, so if one commits a crime, the other is entitled to walk free while awake as long as they come back before sleeping - but how do they prove it?
There are likely to be three levels of security, with one being "asking", the second being a sort ...
All personalities are given a pair of esoteric stimuli. Through reinforcement/punishment, one personality is conditioned to have a positive physiological reaction to Stimulus A and a negative physiological reaction stimulus B. The other personality is given the converse.
The stimuli are all drawn from a common pool of images like "bear", "hat" or "bicycle", so one half of a stimuli pair may be "a bear in a hat on a bicycle". There's a canonical set of stimuli, like a huge deck of cards, with all possible combinations, all of which are numbered. The numbers for my stimuli pair are tattoed on my body in some obscure location, like the sole of my foot.
If I need to prove my identity, I show my tattoo to the authority figure. It will read something like "1184/0346". They pick out either image 1184 (bear in a hat on a bicycle) or image 0346 (a sword in a hill being struck by lightning), and show it to me. My immediate response will be either arousal or disgust, and they will know which personality I am.
I just ran across this in Wikipedia:
"Our "real will" (in Bosanquet's terms) or "rational will" (in Blanshard's) is simply that which we would want, all things considered, if our reflections upon what we presently desire were pursued to their ideal limit."
This is remarkably similar to the informal descriptions of CEV and moral "renormalization" that exist. Someone should look into the literature on Bosanquet and Blanshard's rational will, and see if there's anything else of use.
The waning of the nuclear family by Razib Khan
...But this is also a case where we can look to the past and other societies for lessons in terms of how it will impact our society. Though I have never personally lived in this sort of family, except to some extent between the ages of two and four (and so my memories are minimal), I know of the downsides from family lore and gossip. Just watch a Bollywood film as ethnography. From what I can gather a linear increase in the number of family members within a household does not entail a linear increase in the family drama. On the contrary, there is a very rapid increase, as inter-personal relationships become much more elaborated (this especially is true when you multiply grades of relatedness). A far greater proportion of one’s life is taken up by maintenance of household relationships. The American nuclear family is to some extent on the atomized side, but extended families tend toward hyper-sociality.
And I believe that this has consequences. The shift back toward extended families is due to the exigency of post-bubble America. But we may be on the way to a more thoroughgoing shift in the nature of American society, and how we relate to
I own a personal server running Debian Squeeze which has a 1Gb/s symmetric connection and 15TB per month bandwidth.
I am offering free shell accounts to lesswrongers, with one contingency:
1) You'll be placed in a usergroup, 'lw', as opposed to various other usergroups for various other communities I belong to, which will be in other usergroups. Anything that ends up in /var/log is fair game. I intend to make lots of graphs and post them on all the communities I belong to. There won't be any personally identifying data in anything that ends up publicly.
Your shell account will start out with a disk quota of 5g, and if you need more you can ask me. I'm totally cool with you seeding your torrents. I do not intend to terminate accounts at any point for inactivity or otherwise; you can reasonably expect to have access for at least a year, probably longer.
Query me on freenode's irc (JohnWittle), or send me an email. johnwittle@gmail.com.
Also, while the results of my analysis are likely to go in Discussion, I was wondering if this offering of free service itself might go in discussion. I asked in IRC and was told that advertisements are seriously frowned upon and that I would lose all my karma.
Related to: List of public drafts on LessWrong
An online course in rationality?
A month or two ago I made a case on the #lesswrong channel on IRC that a massive online class or several created in partnership with and organization like Khan Academy or Udacity, would be a worthy project for CFAR and LW. I specifically mention those two organizations because they are more open to non-academic instructors than say Coursera or EdX and seem more willing to innovate rather than just dump classical university style lectures online.
The reason I consider it a worthy project, is besides it exposing far more people to the material and ideas we want to spread, it would allow us to make progress on the difficult problems of teaching and testing "rationality" with the magic of Big Data and even something as basic as A/B testing to help us.
I considered making an article on it but several people advised me that this would prove a distraction for CFAR, more trouble than is worth at this early stage. I have set up a one year reminder to make such a proposal next summer and plan to do some research on the subject in the meanwhile to see if it really is as good an opportunity as I think it...
It has become increasingly clear over the last year or so that planets can in fact form around highly metal poor stars. Example planet. This both increases the total number of planets to expect and increase the chance that planets formed around the very oldest stars. (Younger stars have higher metal content). One argument against Great Filter concerns is that it might be that life cannot arise much younger than it did on Earth because stars much older than our sun would not have high metal content. This seems to seriously undermine this argument.
How much should this do to our estimates for whether to expect heavy Filtration in front of us? My immediate reaction is that it does make future filtration more likely but not by much since even if planets could form, a lack of carbon and other heavier elements would still make formation of life and its evolution into complicated creatures difficult. Is this analysis accurate?
I have a Great Filter related thought which doesn't address your question directly but, hey, it's the Open Thread.
My thesis here is that the presence of abundant fossil energy on earth is the primary thing that has enabled our technological civilization, and abundant fossil energy may be far less common than intelligent life.
On top of all the other qualities of Earth which allowed it to host its profusion of life, I'll point out a few more facts related specifically to fossil energy, which I haven't seen in any discussions of Fermi's Paradox or the Great Filter.
Life on Earth happens to be carbon-based, and carbon-based life, when heated in an anoxic environment, turns into oil, gas and coal.
Earth is roughly 2/3 covered in oceans (this figure has varied over geologic time), a fact with significant consequences to deposition of dead algae, erosion, and sedimentation.
Earth possesses a mass, size, and age such that the temperature a few kilometers below the surface may be hundreds of degrees C, while the surface temperature remains "Goldilocks."
Earth has a conveniently oxidizing atmosphere in which hydrocarbons burn easily, but not so oxidizing that it prevents stable
The oxidizing atmosphere is not due to chance. It was created by early life that exhaled oxygen, and killed off its neighbors that couldn't handle it. Hence, I don't think the goldilocks oxygen levels speak much to great filter questions.
Early in civilization, we used wood and charcoal as energy sources. Blacksmithing and cast iron were originally done with wood charcoal. Cast iron is a very important tool in our history of machine tools and hence the industrial revolution. It's possible that we could have carried on without coal, instead using large-scale forestry management or other biomass as our energy source. In the early 1700s there were already environmental concerns about deforestation. They were more related to continued supply of wood for charcoal and hunting grounds than "ecological" concerns, but there were still laws and regulations enacted to deal with the problem.
How many people do we need to support a high-tech civilization? I suspect fewer than we tried it with. It's quite possible that biofuel sources would have produced a high tech civilization, just slower and with fewer people.
Also, note that biofuels can produce all the lubricants and plastics you ne...
This discussion thread is insane.
Essentially, Eliezer gets negative karma for some of his comments (-13, -4, -12, -7) explaining why he thinks the new changes of karma rules are a good thing. To compare, even the obvious trolls usually don't get -13 comment karma.
What exactly is the problem? I don't think that for a regular commenter, having to pay 5 karma points for replying to a negatively voted comment is such a problem. Because you will do it only once in a while, right? Most of your comments will still be reactions to articles or to non-negatively voted comments, right? So what exactly is this problem, and why this overreaction? Certainly, there are situations where replying to a negatively voted comment is the right thing to do. But are they the exception, or the rule? Because the new algorithm does not prevent you from doing this; it only provides a trivial disincentive to do so.
What is happening here?
A few months ago LW needed an article to defend that some people here really have read the Sequences, and that recommending Sequences to someone is not an offense. What? How can this happen on a website which originally more or less was the Sequences? That seemed absurd to me, ...
I suggest everyone to think for a moment about the fact that Eliezer somehow created this site, wrote a lot of content people consider useful, and made some decisions about the voting system, which together resulted in a website we like. So perhaps this is some Bayesian evidence that he knows what he is doing.
There's also plenty of Bayesian evidence he's not that great at moderation. SL4 was enough of an eventual failure to prompt the creation of OB; OB prompted the creation of LW; he failed to predict that opening up posting would lead to floods of posts like it did for LW; he signally failed to understand that his reaction to Roko's basilisk was pretty much the worst possible reaction he could engage in, such that even now it's still coming up in print publications about LWers; and this recent karma stuff isn't looking much better.
I am reminded strongly of Jimbo Wales. He too helped create a successful community but seemed to do so accidentally as he later supported initiatives that directly undermined what made that community function.
My thoughts on the recent excitement about "trolls", and moderation, and the new karma penalty for engaging with significantly downvoted comments:
First, the words troll and trolling are being used very indiscriminately, to refer to a wide variety of behaviors and intentions. If LW really needed to have a long-term discussion, about how to deal with the "troll problem", it would be advisable to develop a much more precise vocabulary, and also a more objective, verifiable assessment of how much "trolling" and "troll-feeding" was happening, e.g. a list of examples.
However, it seems that people are already moving on. For future reference, here are all the articles in Discussion which arose directly from the appearance of the new penalty and the ensuing debate: "Karma for last 30 days?", "Dealing with trolling", "Dealing with meta-disussion", "Karma vote checklist?", "Preventing endless September", "Protection against cultural collapse", and hopefully that's the end of it.
So it seems we won't need some specialized troll-ologists to work out all the issues. Rather than a "war on tr...
Recently we had also a few articles about how to make LW more popular; how to attract more readers and participants. Well, if that happens, we will need more strict moderation than we have now; otherwise we will drown in the noise. For instance, within this week we have a full screen of "Discussion" articles, some of them containing 86, 103, 191 comments. How many of those comments contain really useful information? What is your estimate, how many of that information will you remember after one week? Do you think that visiting LW once in a week is enough to deal with that amount of information? Or do you just ignore most of that? How big part of a week can you spend online reading LW, and still pretending you are being rational instead of procrastinating?
Up voted for this. I can't believe how many people don't get it.
I am very confused right now.
A few years ago, I learned that multivitamins are ineffective, according to research. At that point, I have heard of the benefits of many of them, they were individually praised like some would praise anything that's good enough to take by itself, so I was thinking that multivitamins should be something ultra-effective that only irrational people won't take. When I learned they were ineffective, I hypothesized that vitamins in pills simply don't get processed well.
Recently, I was reading a few articles about Vitamin D - I thought I should definitely have it, because the sources were rather scientific and were praising it a lot. I got it in the form of softgels, because gwern suggested it. When they arrived, I saw it's very similar to pills, so I thought it might be ineffective and decided to take another look at Wikipedia/Multivitamins. Then I got very confused.
Apparently, the multivitamins DO get processed! And yes, they ARE found to have no significant effect (even in double-blind placebo trials), But at the same time, we have pages saying that 50-60% of the people are deprived from Vitamin D and that it seriously reduces the risk of cancer, among with other things (including a heart disease). Can anyone explain what's going on?
There was much skepticism about my lottery story in the last open thread. Readers should be aware, I sent photographic proof to Mitch Porter by e-mail.
As promised, I made substantial donations to the following two causes:
Brain Preservation Fund Kim Suozzi Fund
Please confirm my name on the list of donors Brain Preservation General Fund
I'm shortly going to be flying out to the EU to work on life extension causes, see my my blog for information: 27 European Union nations in 27 weeks
According to Wikipedia:
"Before Time Cube, Otis E. Ray advocated the sport of marbles. He authored a book titled Mr. Marbles – Marbles for Everyone,and got the city council of St. Petersburg, Florida to proclaim a "Marbles Week" in the 1970s. In 1987, this became a controversial attempt to establish a million dollar marble tournament inside a huge round structure and establish a philosophical "Order of the Sphere."
By rejecting many small spheres in favor of one large cube, Gene Ray has dedicated his life to demonstrating that reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
Precision First by L. Kimberly Epting on Inside Higher Ed was an interesting read for me.
...Indeed, many of my students have revealed this to me when complaining about points not earned on test questions; they have told me, in no uncertain terms, that they have learned to look at the topic of an essay question and then “just write pretty much everything [they] know about that topic.” This seems reasonable if the test prompt is “tell me everything you know about X,” but I can tell you the exact number of times I have written such an item: zero. Truthfully, I recognize I had a similar history, at least until advanced courses in college -- filling up the space on the page with at least related information generally produced favorable consequences.
Students also often ask if items on my tests are “trick questions.” My standard answer is that I never intend items to be “trick questions”; however, they are intended to be specific, precise questions. It occurs to me this might be an important revelation from them: focusing on specificity in reading and answering a short-answer/essay item is so unfamiliar to them, they find it suspect when required to do so. And they are genuinely confused
Stanislas Dehaene's and Laurent Cohen's (2007) Cultural Recycling of Cortical Maps has an interesting argument about how the ability to read might have developed by taking over visual circuits specialized for biologically more relevant tasks, and how this may constrain different writing systems:
...According to the neuronal recycling hypothesis, cortical biases constraint visual word recognition to a specific anatomical site, but they may even have exerted a powerful constraint, during the evolution of writing systems, on the very form that these systems take, thus reducing the span of cross-cultural variations. Consistent with this view, Changizi and collaborators have recently demonstrated two remarkable cross-cultural universals in the visual properties of writing systems (Changizi and Shimojo, 2005; Changizi et al., 2006). First, in all alphabets, letters are consistently composed of an average of about three strokes per character (Changizi and Shimojo, 2005). This number may be tentatively related to the visual system’s hierarchical organization, where increases in the complexity of the neurons’ preferred features are accompanied by a 2- to 3-fold increase in receptive field siz
List of public drafts on LessWrong
I've found the practice of providing open drafts of possible future articles in the open threads and relevant comment sections has proven quite useful and well received in the past. I've decided to now make and maintain a list of them. If anyone else has made similar posts, please share them with me, and I'll add them to the list.
Konkvistador
Related to: Old material
I've decided I should educate myself about LW-specific decision theories. I've downloaded Eliezer's paper on timeless decision theory and I'm reading through it. I'm wondering if there are similar consolidated presentations of updateless and ambient decision theory. Has anyone attempted to write these theories up for academic publication? Or is the best place to learn about them still the blog posts linked on the wiki?
Greater gender equality means that women are less apt to look for status in mates. Hey, it's just one study, but when does that stop anybody else?
I'm pretty sure greater gender equality in a society translates into women who are less likely to say they look for status in mates. To a certain extent it seems plausible that it influences behaviour, I'm very sceptical of the implied argument that "high status in men" ceases to be a key sexy trait if you just have the right culture though.
The participants were asked in their native language whether certain criteria (such as ‘financial prospect’ and ‘being a good cook’) were important in choosing a mate.
Did they put "is well liked by other women" or "someone who my friends consider cool" on that list?
People may be amused by this Bitcoin extortion attempt; needless to say, I declined. (This comment represents part of my public commitment to not pay.)
Short story about the Turing Test, entertaining read.
Consider two versions of that story, with one having the line "At that point, finally, he let me out of the tank." appended.
Ten minute video about human evolution and digestion which argues plausibly that we're very well-evolved to eat starch-- specifically tubers and seeds, though we also have remarkable flexibility in what we eat.
I thought coyotes have at least as wide a range of foods as we do, though.
Marginal Revolution University
Yet another Online University this one launched on Marginal Revolution. 2012 has been a remarkable ride for Online Education and in many respects is a start of a test to see which theory of what formal education is actually for is correct. Will software and the internet disrupt education like it did the record business?
Amusing commentary by gwern:
Hm, economists not outsourcing to any of the specialists in this very active growing marketplace, and doing an online education webservice in-house? The irony! It burns!
Is there anything solid known about eye position (front vs. side of skull) and other aspects of an organism's life? It seems to me that front of the skull correlates with being a hunter, but (as is usual with biology) there may well be exceptions.
For example, lemurs aren't especially hunters, but they have eyes in front.
I was thinking that cats are both hunters and prey, and they have eyes in front.
Also, what about the evolution of eye position? How much of a lag is there if living conditions change?
I've just started playing with Foldit, a game that lets science harness your brain for protein folding problems. It has already been used to decode an HIV protein and find a better enzyme for catalyzing industrial processes. Currently, work is under way to design treatments for Sepsis.
A 3 minute talk on the Financial Consequences of Too Many Men. It seems the perceived sex ratio strongly influences male behaviours.
The perception that women are scarce leads men to become impulsive, save less, and increase borrowing, according to new research from the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management.
Research on this in the context of online forums such as ours might be very interesting.
A related blog entry by Peter Frost title Our brideprice culture that deals with societal implications of gender imbalance. It begins with hig...
As [...] I wonder what it means that I don't [...].
Generally, when someone says that majority of A do X, but you are A and don't do X, here are some possible explanations:
Also from the outside, if someone else is saying this, don't forget:
Specifically for this topic, think also about the difference between maximizers and satisficers. If you read that "females value X", you may automatically translate it as "females are X-maximizers", and then observe that you are not. But even then you could still ...
I don't react to behaviors like competing for status, class signaling and spending beyond ones means
The demonstrations of power I do enjoy are when they're able to hold up their end of a debate with me (I keep wishing for someone to win against me), or when they're doing something really, really intellectually difficult. Those things, I do respond to.
That is class signalling (of a particular class) and winning debates is competing for status.
Fluff? No.
You have your own sexual preferences and the traits that you are not attracted to appear less intrinsically worthy. Another woman may say she isn't attracted to "Fluff" like intellectual displays and rhetorical flair and instead is only attracted to the 'things that really matter' like social alliances, security and physical health.
I have to wonder if other women like me are the same.
This seems tautologically likely.
The demonstrations of power I do enjoy are when they're able to hold up their end of a debate with me (I keep wishing for someone to win against me)
How do you define winning? From my observation of your comments here, you refuse to concede even when your arguments no longer make sense. Maybe they just get tired and pretend to yield, or look for a girl with less ego.
This approach to debating strikes me as exemplifying everything bad that I learned in high school policy debate. Specifically, it seems to me like debate distilled down to a status competition, with arguments as soldiers and the goal being for your side to win. For status competitions, signaling of intellectual ability, and demonstrating your blue or green allegiance, this works well. What it does not sound like, to me, is someone who is seeking the truth for herself. If you engaged in a debate with someone of lesser rhetorical skill, but who was also correct on an issue where you were incorrect (perhaps not even the main subject of the debate, but a small portion), would you notice? Would you give their argument proper attention, attempt to fix your opponent's arguments, and learn from the result? Or would you simply be happy that you had out-debated them, supported all your soldiers, killed the enemy soldiers, and "won" the debate? Beware the prodigy of refutation.
In the Transactional Interpretation, Cramer claims:
Further, the TI description does not need to invoke arbitrary collapse triggers such as consciousness, etc., because it is the absorber rather than the observer which precipitates the collapse of the SV, and this can occur atemporally and nonlocally across any sort of interval between elements of the measuring apparatus.
What is it about "absorbers" (which seems very much like a magical category, morally equivalent to "observers") which make them non-magical and therefore different f...
Nuke'm solution to the Newcomb problem: tell Omega that you pick what he'd have picked for himself, were he in your situation. That'll Godel him.
(semi-OT but strikes me of interest) "You know the science-fiction concept of having your brain uploaded to a computer and then you live in a simulation of the real world? Going to work for Google is a bit like this." Openness in the wider culture outside open source.
We are not the first to have meta discussions. Where are the best ideas on technical and social means to foster productive and reduce unproductive discussion? Are there bloggers that focus on getting the best out of "the bottom half of the Internet"?
Anybody know what happened to user RSS feeds? It used to be you could get them with "lesswrong.com/user/username.rss", but that now says no such page.
2 separate related comments:
1) I'm moving to Vienna on the 25th. If there exist lesswrongers there I'd be most happy to meet them.
2) Moving strikes me as a great opportunity to develop positive, life-enchancing habits. If anyone has any literature or tips on this i'd greatly appreciate it
Sorry for missing the stupid questions thread, but since the sequences didn't have something direct about WBE, I thought Open thread might be a better place to ask this question.
I want to know how is the fidelity of Whole Brain Emulation expected to be empirically tested, other than replication of taught behaviour ?
After uploading a rat, would someone look at the emulation of its lifetime and say," I really knew this rat. This is that rat alone and no one else".
Would only trained behaviour replication be the empirical standard? What would that ...
Was reading up on the Flynn effect, and saw the claim it's too fast to reflect evolution. Is that really true? Yes, it's too fast, given the pressures, for what Darwin called natural selection, given the lack of anything coming along and dramatically killing off the less intelligent before they can reproduce. But that's not the only force of evolution; there's also sexual selection.
If it's become easier in the last 150 years for women to have surviving children by high-desirability mates, then we should, in fact, see a proportionate increase in the high...
The Reproduction of Intelligence attempts to quanitfy this effect:
Although a negative relationship between fertility and education has been described consistently in most countries of the world, less is known about the relationship between intelligence and reproductive outcomes. Also the paths through which intelligence influences reproductive outcomes are uncertain. The present study uses the NLSY79 to analyze the relationship of intelligence measured in 1980 with the number of children reported in 2004, when the respondents were between 39 and 47 years old. Intelligence is negatively related to the number of children, with partial correlations (age controlled) of −.156, −.069, −.235 and −.028 for White females, White males, Black females and Black males, respectively. This effect is related mainly to the g-factor. It is mediated in part by education and income, and to a lesser extent by the more “liberal” gender attitudes of more intelligent people. In the absence of migration and with constant environment, genetic selection would reduce the average IQ of the US population by about .8 points per generation.
I'd assign a low probability to this hypothesis. Most of the Flynn effect seems to occur on the lower end of the IQ spectrum moving upwards. Source. This is highly consistent with education, nutrition and diseases hypotheses, but it is difficult to see how to reconcile this with a sexual selection hypothesis.
Also, I'm not sure that your hypothesis fits with expected forms of infidelity. One commonly expected form of common infidelity would be generally with strong males while trying to get a resource rich males to think the children are there's If such infidelity is a common pattern, then one shouldn't expect much selection pressure for intelligence, if anything the opposite.
The fraction of the population which engages in infidelity even in urban environments is not that high. Infidelity rates in both genders are around 5-15%, but only about 3% of offspring have parentage that reflects infidelity. Source, so the selection impact can't be that large.
One thing worth noting though is that one of the pieces of evidence for disease mattering is that there's a correlation between high parasite load and lower average IQ, but your hypothesis would also cause one to expect such a correlat...
Poll: What is the smallest portion than be considered a "vast majority" of the whole? What about a "vast, vast majority"?
Two great posts from Julian Sanchez: Intellectual Strategies: Precisification and Elimination, and its follow-up On Partly Verbal Disputes. Related to our conception of "Rationalist Taboo", and to Yvain's Worst Argument in the World post.
Sample quote:
...So, for instance, you may recall a little flurry of debate a while back over the Republican rhetorical trope of characterizing Social Security as a Ponzi scheme, and the ensuing boomlet of essays and blog posts vehemently insisting that obviously the program is or is not an instance of one. A more
Trying to measure the shadow economy
People thinking hard about measuring something they have no exact way of checking.
It is possible there simply isn't any such experimental material. If I had to bet on it I would say it is more likely there is some than not, though I would also bet that some things we wish where done haven't been so far. In the past I've wondered if we can in the future expect CFAR or LessWrong to do experimental work to test many of the hypotheses based on insight or long fragile chains of reasoning we've come up with. I don't think I've seen anyone talk about considering this.
While mention of say CFAR doing this, the mind jumps to them doing expensiv...
I need help in explaining this case to myself.
I just talked to someone and she praised her doctor, because she complained from chest (armpit) pain, and the doctor, untraditinally, cured her with accupuncture on the spot. I asked her and she said the pain was going on for a few weeks (and was quite intense), and it disappeared on the next day. Some bias IS expected of her (more so than from the average person).
Maybe it's just random chance plus unconscious exaggeration, but I doubt it could have been so strong. After I started writing this, I looked up on W...
Does profit maximizing software eat the world and go darwinian ?
I don't think that is a good description of what happened. Konkvistador But that is a rather huge topic... it seems to me Konkvistador that the arbitrary thing they optimize for may turn out to be something that makes them eat up a lot of reality Konkvistador also the humans present a sort of starting anchor, what do humans want? They want information processing, they want energy, they want food, they want metal, finished products Konkvistador What do companies try...
Could one train an animal* to operate a turing machine via reinforcement mechanisms? Would there be any use for such a thing? (Other than being able to say you have an organic computer...).
*Obviously you can train humans, and I guess likely great apes as well. But what would be the lower bound on intelligence? A rat? An insect?
Physicists cast doubt on renowned uncertainty principle.
This isn't from The Onion-- " 'real' or from The Onion" is macro uncertainty-- it seems that, by being clever, it's possible to do somewhat better measurement of subatomic particles than was expected. Does the article look sound? If so, what are some implications?
I have a Great Filter related thought which doesn't address your question directly but, hey, it's the Open Thread.
My thesis here is that the presence of abundant fossil energy on earth is the primary thing that has enabled our technological civilization, and abundant fossil energy may be far less common than intelligent life.
On top of all the other qualities of Earth which allowed it to host its profusion of life, I'll point out a few more facts related specifically to fossil energy, which I haven't seen in any discussions of Fermi's Paradox or the Great Filter.
Life on Earth happens to be carbon-based, and carbon-based life, when heated in an anoxic environment, turns into oil, gas and coal.
Earth is roughly 2/3 covered in oceans (this figure has varied over geologic time), a fact with significant consequences to deposition of dead algae, erosion, and sedimentation.
Earth possesses a mass, size, and age such that the temperature a few kilometers below the surface may be hundreds of degrees C, while the surface temperature remains "Goldilocks."
Earth has a conveniently oxidizing atmosphere in which hydrocarbons burn easily, but not so oxidizing that it prevents stable carbon-based life. Quite a narrow window, really.
Life has existed on Earth for billions of years, and thus algae and other life forms have been dying in oceans and swamps and accumulating subsurface hydrocarbon source material, for billions of years.
Put all this together and realize that the formation of oil, gas, and coal happens only in rare and specific circumstances even on Earth. We seem to have a lot of these resources today, but it took billions of years for them to accumulate in the quantities we now find.
If any one of the above facts were not true, we would not have fossil energy - coal, oil, gas, plastics, lubricants - we would not have an industrial revolution, and we would not have a technological civilization.
Many of the facts on the above list have to be true simply to enable fire, as in, wood fire, imagine what human history would look like if the oxygen content of Earth's atmosphere was too low to sustain wood fire?
Anyways, maybe people have discussed this before, but I wasn't able to Google anything up.
Frankly, I'm wondering if the whole idea of exponential growth is just short cultural time horizons applied to the implications of fossil fuels for energy production, which touched off the Industrial Revolution. The Hubbert Peak holds, although coming out the other side of it resembles a gradual stepping-downward with its own local spikes and valleys (much as there are spikes and valleys in growth and use now, despite a steady upward trend). Fossil fuels still supply over three quarters of the world's energy demand; there hasn't been a nuclear renaissance ...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.