Today is the thirty-fourth anniversary of the official certification that smallpox had been eradicated worldwide. From Wikipedia,
The global eradication of smallpox was certified, based on intense verification activities in countries, by a commission of eminent scientists on 9 December 1979 and subsequently endorsed by the World Health Assembly on 8 May 1980. The first two sentences of the resolution read:
Having considered the development and results of the global program on smallpox eradication initiated by WHO in 1958 and intensified since 1967 … Declares solemnly that the world and its peoples have won freedom from smallpox, which was a most devastating disease sweeping in epidemic form through many countries since earliest time, leaving death, blindness and disfigurement in its wake and which only a decade ago was rampant in Africa, Asia and South America.
Archaeological evidence shows evidence of smallpox infection in the mummies of Egyptian pharaohs. There was a Hindu goddess of smallpox in ancient India. By the 16th century it was a pandemic throughout the Old World, and epidemics with mortality rates of 30% were common. When smallpox arrived in the New World, there wer...
This deserves some music:
Old King Plague is dead,
the smallpox plague is dead,
no more children dying hard
no more cripples living scarred
with the marks of the devil's kiss,
we still may die of other things
but we will not die of this.Raise your glasses high
for all who will not die
to all the doctors, nurses too
to all the lab technician who
drove it into the ground
if the whole UN does nothing else
it cut this terror down.But scarce the headlines said,
the ancient plague was dead,
then they were filled with weapons new
toxic waste and herpes too,
and the AIDS scare coming on
ten new plagues will take its place
but at least this one is gone.Population soars,
checked with monstrous wars
preachers rant at birth control
"Screww the body, save the soul",
bring new deaths off the shelves,
and say to Nature, "Mother, please,
we'd rather do it ourselves".Old King Plague is dead,
the smallpox plague is dead,
no more children dying hard
no more cripples living scarred
with the marks of the devil's kiss,
we still may die of other things
but we will not die of this, oh no,
we will not die of this.
-- Leslie Fish, The Ballad of Smallpox Gone
The virus currently only still exists as samples in two freezers in two labs (known to the scientific community). These days I think that that is overkill even for research purposes for this pathogen, what with the genome sequenced and the ability to synthesize arbitrary sequences artificially. If you absolutely must have part of it for research make that piece again from scratch. Consign the rest of the whole infectious replication-competent particles to the furnace where they belong.
EDIT: I found a paper in which smallpox DNA was extracted and viruses observed via EM from a 50 year old fixed tissue sample from a pathology lab that was not from one of the aforementioned collections. No word in the paper on if it was potentially infectious or just detectable levels of nucleic acids and particles. These things could be more complicated to 100% securely destroy than we thought...
At risk of attracting the wrong kind of attention, I will publicly state that I have donated $5,000 for the MIRI 2013 Winter Fundraiser. Since I'm a "new large donor", this donation will be matched 3:1, netting a cool $20,000 for MIRI.
I have decided to post this because of "Why our Kind Cannot Cooperate". I have been convinced that people donating should publicly brag about it to attract other donors, instead of remaining silent about their donation which leads to a false impression of the amount of support MIRI has.
This post and reading "why our kind cannot cooperate" kicked me off my ass to donate. Thanks Tuxedage for posting.
PSA: If you want to get store-bought food (as opposed to eating out all the time or eating Soylent), but you don't want to have to go shopping all the time, check to see if there is a grocery delivery service in your area. At least where I live, the delivery fee is far outbalanced by the benefit of almost no shopping time, slightly cheaper food, and decreased cognitive load (I can just copy my previous order, and tweak it as desired).
This makes me wonder: What are some simple ways to save quite some time that the average person does not think of?
Another benefit for me is reduced mistakes in picking items from the list.
Some people don't use online shopping because they worry pickers may make errors. My experience is that they do, but at a much lower rate than I do when I go myself. I frequently miss minor items off my list on the first circuit through the shop, and don't go back for it because it'd take too long to find. I am also influenced by in-store advertising, product arrangements, "special" offers and tiredness in to purchasing items that I would rather not. It's much easier to whip out a calculator to work out whether an offer really is better when you're sat calmly at your laptop than when you're exhausted towards the end of a long shopping trip.
You'd expect paid pickers to be better at it - they do it all their working hours, I only do it once or twice a month. Also, all the services I've used (in the UK) allow you to reject any mistaken items at your door for a full refund - which you can't do for your own mistakes. The errors pickers make are different to the ones I would, which makes them more salient - but they are no more inconvenient in impact on average.
Ah, it's funny how easily I forget food isn't just about fueling your cells.
I was expecting some sort of a nutrition based argument.
I would point out that it's unwise to ignore one of the major sources of pleasure in this world :-)
New work suggests that life could have arisen and survived a mere 15 million years after the Big Bang, when the microwave background radiation levels would have provided sufficient energy to keep almost all planets warm. Summary here, and actual article here. This is still very preliminary, but the possibility at some level is extremely frightening. It adds billions of years of time for intelligent life to have arisen that we don't see, and if anything suggests that the Great Filter is even more extreme than we thought.
Now that is scary, although there are a few complications. Rocky bodies were probably extremely rare during that time since the metal enrichment of the Universe was extremely low. You can't build life out of just hydrogen and helium.
Is that a relevant number?
Doesn't the relevant number of opportunities for life to appear have units of mass-time?
Isn't the question not how early was some Goldilocks zone, but how much mass was in a Goldilocks zone for how long? This says that the whole universe was a Goldilocks zone for just a few million years. The whole universe is big, but a few million years is small. And how much of the universe was metallic? The paper emphasizes that some of it was, but isn't this a quantitative question?
I don't think this is frightening. If you thought life couldn't have arisen more than 3.6 billion years ago but then discover that it could have arisen 13.8 billion years ago, you should be at most 4 times as scared.
The number of habitable planets in the galaxy over the number of habituated planets is a scary number.
The time span of earth civilization over the time span of earth life is a scary number.
4 is not a scary number.
I decided I'd share the list of questions I try to ask myself every morning and evening. I usually spend about thirty seconds on each question, just thinking about them, though I sometimes write my answers down if I have a particularly good insight. I find they keep me pretty well-calibrated to my best self. Some are idiosyncratic, but hopefully these will be generally applicable.
A. Today, this week, this month:
B. Yesterday, last week, last month:
C. Generally: 9: If I'm not doing exactly what I want to be doing, why?
Are there any translation efforts in academia? It bothers me that there may be huge corpuses of knowledge that are inaccessible to most scientists or researchers simply because they don't speak, say, Spanish, Mandarin, or Hindi. The current solution to this problem seems to be 'everyone learn English', which seems to do ok in the hard sciences. But I fear there may be a huge missed opportunity in social sciences, especially because Americans are WEIRD and not necessarily psychologically or behaviorally respresentative of the world population. (Link is to an article, link to the cited paper here: pdf)
The plural of "corpus" is "corpora". I don't say this to be pedantic, but because the word is quite lovely, and deserves to be used more.
I'm expecting China to have an increasing role in global affairs over the next century. With that in mind, there are a couple of things I'm curious about:
Does anyone have an idea of how prevalent existential risk type ideas are in China?
Has anyone tried to spread LW memes there?
Are the LW meetups in Shanghai, etc. mostly ex-pats or also locals?
Thanks!
Gregory Cochran has written something on aging. I'll post some selected parts, but you should read the whole thing, which is pretty short.
Theoretical biology makes it quite clear that individuals ought to age. Every organism faces tradeoffs between reproduction and repair. In a world with hazards, such that every individual has a decreasing chance of survival over time, the force of natural selection decreases with increasing age. This means that perfect repair has a finite value, and organisms that skimp on repair and instead apply those resources to increased reproduction will have a greater reproductive rate – and so will win out. Creatures in which there is no distinction between soma and germ line, such as prokaryotes, cannot make such tradeoffs between repair and reproduction – and apparently do not age. Which should be a hint.
...
...In practice, this means that animals that face low exogenous hazards tend to age more slowly. Turtles live a long time. Porcupines live a good deal longer than other rodents. [...] Organisms whose reproductive output increases strongly with time, like sturgeons or trees, tend to live longer. The third way of looking at things is t
Discussion of why it plausibly does not make sense to look for a firm dividing line between life and non-life.
Don't traits have to be heritable for evolution to count? I'm not an expert or anything, but I thought I'd know if stars' descendants had similar properties to their parent stars.
Any good advice on how to become kinder? This can really be classified as two related goals, 1) How can I get more enjoyment out of alleviating others suffering and giving others happiness? 2) How can I reliably do 1 without negative emotions getting in my way (ex. staying calm and making small nudges to persuade people rather than getting angry and trying to change people's worldview rapidly)?
I'd recommend Nonviolent Communication for this. It contains specific techniques for how to frame interactions that I've found useful for creating mutual empathy. How To Win Friends And Influence People is also a good source, although IIRC it's more focused on what to do than on how to do it. (And of course, if you read the books, you have to actually practice to get good at the techniques.)
What are community norms here about sexism (and related passive aggressive "jokes" and comments about free speech) at the LW co-working chat? Is LW going for wheatons law or free speech and to what extent should I be attempting to make people who engage in such activities feel unwelcome or should I be at all?
I have hesitated to bring this up because I am aware its a mind-killer but I figured If facebook can contain a civil discussion about vaccines then LW should be able to talk about this?
There are no official community norms on the topic.
For my own part, I observe a small but significant number of people who seem to believe that LessWrong ought to be a community where it's acceptable to differentially characterize women negatively as long as we do so in the proper linguistic register (e.g, adopting an academic and objective-sounding tone, avoiding personal characterizations, staying cool and detached).
The people who believe this ought to be unacceptable are either less common or less visible about it. The majority is generally silent on such matter, though will generally join in condemning blatant register-violations.
The usual result is something closer to wheaton's law at the surface level, but closer to "say what you think is true" at the structural level. (Which is not quite free speech, but a close enough cousin in context.) That is, it's often considered OK to say things, as long as they are properly hedged and constructed, that if said more vulgarly or directly would be condemned for violating wheaton's law, and which in other communities would be condemned for a variety of reasons.
I think there's a general awareness that this pattern-matches ...
It does answer my question. Also thanks for suggestion to focus on the behaviour rather than the person. I didn't even realize I was thinking like that till you two pointed it out.
I agree that there are also other groups of people who are differentially negatively characterized; I restricted myself to discussions of women because the original question was about sexism.
I cautiously suggest you could say the whole premise of lw characterizes most people negatively,
I would cautiously agree. There's a reason I used the word "differentially."
Should negative characterizations of people be avoided in general, irrespective of how accurately we think they describe the average of the groups in question?
Personally, I'm very cautions about characterizing groups by their averages, as I find I'm not very good about avoiding the temptation to then characterize individuals in that group by the group's average, which is particularly problematic since I can assign each individual to a vast number of groups and then end up characterizing that individual differently based on the group I select, even though I haven't actually gathered any new evidence. I find it's a failure mode my mind is prone to, so I watch out for it.
If your mind isn't as prone to that failure mode as mine, your mileage will of course vary.
Ideally, I'd want the people to feel that the behavior is unwelcome rather than that they themselves are unwelcome, but people are apt to have their preferred behaviors entangled with their sense of self, so the ideal might not be feasible. Still, it's probably worth giving a little thought to discouraging behaviors rather than getting rid of people.
Since this comment is framed in part as endorsing mine, I should probably say explicitly that while I agree denotationally with every piece of this comment taken individually, I don't endorse the comment as a whole connotationally.
The quality of intelligence journalism
...I have been musing over the results of Rindermann, Coyle and Becker’s survey of intelligence experts presented at the ISIR conference. Since you may well be reading a newspaper this Sunday, I thought it might interest you to show what the experts think of the coverage of intelligence in the public media. By way of explanation, the authors cast their net widely, but did some extra sampling of the German media. Readers might like to suggest their own likes and dislikes in terms of the accuracy of coverage. I will be ad
What we actually know about mirror neurons.
Wow. I did not expect my background understanding of what is known about mirror neurons to have been so much hype-influenced.
Wirth's law is a computing adage made popular by Niklaus Wirth in 1995. It states that "software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
Is Wirth's Law still in effect? Most of the examples I've read about are several years old.
ETA: I find it interesting that Wirth's Law was apparently a thing for decades (known since the 1980s, supposedly) but seems to be over. I'm no expert though, I just wonder what changed.
It was my impression that Wirth's law was mostly intended to be tongue-in-cheek, and refer to how programs with user interfaces are getting bloated (which may be true depending on your point of view).
In terms of software that actually needs speed (numerical simulations, science and tech software, games, etc.) the reverse has always been true. New algorithms are usually faster than old ones. Case in point is the trusty old BLAS library which is the workhorse of scientific computing. Modern BLAS implementations are extremely super-optimized, far more optimized than older implementations (for current computing hardware, of course).
Finding food in foreign grocery stores, or finding out that reality has fewer joints than you might think.
From the comments:
Making sense of unfamiliar legal systems
...This insight also leads to a helpful lesson of just what "having an open mind to a different culture" really means. At bottom, it means having faith in the people who subscribe to the culture -- faith that these people are motivated by the same forces as we, that they are not stupid, irrational or innately predisposed to a certain temperament, that whatever they are doing will make s
I have a strong desire to practice speaking in Lojban, and I imagine that this is the second-best place to ask. Any takers?
There are a couple of commercially available home eeg sets available now, has anyone tried them? Are they useful tools for self monitoring mental states?
[Reposted from last thread because I think i was too late to be seen mch]
A monkey teaching a human how to crush leaves
Mirror neurons? Why does the monkey care about whether a human can crush leaves?
Many of the leaders in the field of AI are no longer writing programs themselves: They don't waste their time debugging miles of code; they just sit around thinking about this and that with the aid of the new [CS-specific] concepts. They've become... philosophers! The topics they work on are strangely familiar (to a philosopher) but recast in novel terms.
Red Queen hypothesis means that humans are probably the latest step in a long sequence of fast (on evolutionary time scale) value changes. So does Coherent Extrapolated Volition (CEV) intend to
1) extrapolate all the future co-evolutionary battles humans would have and predict the values of the terminal species as our CEV, or is it intended somehow to
2) freeze the values humans have at the point in time we develop FAI and build a cocoon around humanity which will let it keep this (nearly) arbitrarily picked point in its evolution forever?
If it is 1), ...
I've noticed something: the MIRI blog RSS feed doesn't update as a new article appears on the blog, but rather at certain times (two or three times a month?) it updates with the articles that have been published since the last update.
Does anyone know why this happens?
Because humans are imperfect actors, should the class of Basilisks include evidence in favor of hated beliefs?
Stuff that a rational person would be better off not knowing.
Interesting. So, living in Soviet Russia a rational person would treat knowledge about GULAG, etc. as a basilisk? Or a rational person in Nazi Germany would actively avoid information about the Holocaust?
I recently read a blog post claiming that alcohol consumption can increase testosterone levels up to 5 hours after intake:
...Scientists recently discovered, and I am not making this up, that consuming a drink containing grain alcohol (like Tucker Max’s “Tucker Death Mix”) raised both free and total testosterone for five hours post workout, whereas those who did not consume the frat boy rapist punch had their test levels fall below baseline. Happily, the alcohol had no effect on cortisol or estradiol levels, so the dudes in the study were just floating in
Object level response To the Stars. Meta level, check the monthly media thread archives and/or HPMOR's author notes. They have lots of good suggestions, and in depth reviews.
I think I want to buy a new laptop computer. Can anyone here provide advice, or suggestions on where to look?
The laptop I want to replace is a Dell Latitude D620. Its main issues are weight, heat production, slowness (though probably in part from software issues), inability to sleep or hibernate (buying and installing a new copy of XP might fix this), lack of an HDMI port, and deteriorated battery life. I briefly tried an Inspiron i14z-4000sLV, but it was still kind of slow, and trying to use Windows 8 without a touchscreen was annoying.
I remember reading ...
This story, where they treated and apparently cured someone's cancer, by taking some of his immune system cells, modifying them, and putting them back, looks pretty important.
Nicholas Agar has a new book. I read Humanity's End and may even read this...eventually.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0262026635/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?qid=1386699492&sr=8-3
Scientology uses semantic stopsigns:
http://www.garloff.de/kurt/sekten/mind1.html
...Loaded Language is a term coined by Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist who did extensive studies on the thought reform techniques used by the communists on Chinese prisoners. Of all the cults in existence today, Scientology has one of the most complex systems of loaded language. If an outsider were to hear two Scientologists conversing, they probably wouldn't be able to understand what was being said. Loaded language is words or catch phrases that short-circuits a person's
Motivated cognition is pretty much the only kind of cognition people do. It seems epistemically healthy to sample cognition stemming from diverse motivations.
Observation: game theory is not uniquely human, and does not inherently cater to important human values.
Immediate consequence: game theory, taken to extremes already found in human history, is inhuman.
Immediate consequence the second: Austrian school economics, in its reliance on allowing markets to come to equilibrium on their own, is inhuman.
Conjecture: if you attempt to optimize by taking your own use of game theory and similar arts to similar extremes, you will become a monster of a similar type.
Observation: a refusal to use game theory in consideratio...
Sorry, how did you go from "non human agents use X" (a statement about commonality) to "X is inhuman" (a value judgement) to "if you use X you become a monster" (an even stronger value judgement), to "being a jerk in the style of Cthulhu" (!!!???).
Does this then mean you think using eyesight is monstrous because cephalopodes also have eyes they independently evolved?
Or that maximizing functions is a bad idea because ants have a different function than humans?
Immediate consequence the second: Austrian school economics, in its reliance on allowing markets to come to equilibrium on their own, is inhuman.
I suspect all economics is inhuman. I suspect that any complex economy that connects millions or billions of people is going to be incomprehensible and inhuman. By far the best explanation I've heard of this thought is by Cosma Shalizi.
The key bit here is the conclusion:
...There is a fundamental level at which Marx's nightmare vision is right: capitalism, the market system, whatever you want to call it, is a product of humanity, but each and every one of us confronts it as an autonomous and deeply alien force. Its ends, to the limited and debatable extent that it can even be understood as having them, are simply inhuman. The ideology of the market tell us that we face not something inhuman but superhuman, tells us to embrace our inner zombie cyborg and lose ourselves in the dance. One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry or run screaming.
But, and this is I think something Marx did not sufficiently appreciate, human beings confront all the structures which emerge from our massed interactions in this way. A bureaucracy, or even a thoroughl
not uniquely human does not imply inhuman. Lungs are not uniquely human, hardly inhuman though.
Generally, using loaded, non-factual words like "inhuman" and "monster" and "cthulhu" and "horrifying" and "puny" in a pseudo-logical format is worthy of a preacher exhorting illiterates. But is it helpful here? I"d like to think it isn't, and yet I'd rather discuss game theory in a visible thread than downvote your post.
At risk of attracting the wrong kind of attention, I will publicly state that I have donated $5,000 for the MIRI 2013 Winter Fundraiser. Since I'm a "new large donor", this donation will be matched 3:1, netting a cool $20,000 for MIRI.
I have decided to post this because of "Why our Kind Cannot Cooperate". I have been convinced that people donating should publicly brag about it to attract other donors, instead of remaining silent about their donation which leads to a false impression of the amount of support MIRI has.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
