Good someone pointed this out! I think this is correct and an important point. Voting is to a large extent about expressing loyalty to king and land (or system and government for those of you who do not live in constitutional monarchies). It is one of the processes that build trust in the society and thus in efficient coordination. Looking just at who will win the election is too a narrow perspective to properly understand the effect of voting.
Anyone who knows what these two pictures are and where they come from? Nemesis is doing some I think not very accurate critique of LessWrong on the Swedish Skeptics internet forum. It is in Swedish, and sorry, I have not time to translate into English. But though I do not know, I suspect that Nemesis have not the pictures them by himself but found them somewhere. If anyone knows I would be glad to know. (If someone should know already and recogises them, I do not ask anyone to spend significant time on it.)
Anyone who knows what these two picturse are and where they come from? Nemesis is doing some I think not very accurate critique of LessWrong on the Swedish Skeptics internet forum. It is in Swedish, and sorry, I have not time to translate into English. But though I do not know, I suspect that Nemesis have not produced them by himself but found them somewhere. If anyone knows I would be glad to know. (If someone should know already and recogises them, I do not ask anyone to spend significant time on it.)
"what can we do to prevent some small group of humans (the SIAI, a secret conspiracy of billionaires, a secret conspiracy of Google employees, whoever) from steering a first-mover scenario in a direction that's beneficial to themselves and perhaps their blood relatives, but harmful to the rest of humanity?"
Actually, if they managed to do that, then they have managed to build an FAI. The large(/largest ?) risk some (as SIAI I think, but I am not an expert) is that they think they are building an FAI (or perhaps a too weak AI to be really dangerous... (read more)
Yes. The orbital angular momenta spans the same space as the linear momenta, so it cannot add anything in principle to MIMO and similar. (Practical issues can of course in some cases make the one or the other basis more effective under various circumstances.)
The Landmark Education is probably yet another one of those non-serious self-improvement course providers. I do not know too much myself about them but e.g. the Swedish Skeptics who are often quite reliable are one of those who have accused Landmark Education of not serious methods. E.g., Landmark lämnar Sverige: Landmark Education, an American company that offers courses in personal development, to abandon services in Sweden, reported Dagens Nyheter 2004-06-08. The reason is a substantial reduction in interest rates. It should be related to several critic... (read more)
I will show up.
In what chapter is the outbreak of world-war 1 treated?
I read some time ago The Origins of Major War by D. C. Copeland. He argues that WW1 broke out because Germany feared that due to Russia's large size, and their at the time rapid industrialisation and economic growth, would become a strategic threat in the future. Therefore Germany better had to try a war to weaken them when Germany's relative military strength was at its peak, which the German gouvernment estimated was at 1914. So, according to Copeland, the German attack on France (which they hoped to... (read more)
I can recommend A Guide to Introductory Physics Teaching by Arnold B. Arons (or maybe Teaching Introductory Physics which seems to be in practice a second edition of the former although I have not read it). I read it more than ten years ago and don't remember much more than that I found it a good book. It is centred on high-school level physics but has some contents also to related subjects, e.g. on how to show the students how to think on why they/we believe what they/we believe we do understand.
That it should be possible to Algorithmize Science seems clear from that the human brain can do science and the human brain should be possible to describe algorthmically. If not at a higher level, so at least -- in principle -- by quantum electrodynamics which is the (known and computable in principle) dynamics of electrons and nuclei that are the building blocks of the brain.( If it should be possible to do in practice it would have to be done at a higher level but as a proof of principle that argument should be enough.)
I guess, however, that what is actu... (read more)
I wrote a backlink to here from OB. I am not yet expert enough to do an evaluation of this. I do think however that it is an important and interesting question that mjgeddes asks. As an active (although at a low level) rationalist I think it is important to try to at least to some extent follow what expert philosophers of science actually find out of how we can obtain reasonably reliable knowledge. The dominating theory of how science proceeds seems to be the hypothetico-deductive model, somewhat informally described. No formalised model for the scientific... (read more)
Very interesting. If you find time, could you elaborate on these. I am particularly interested in hearing more on the criticism of the skeptics movement.
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Massimo Pigliucci just recently had a dialogue on Bloggingheads.tv. The title is The Great Singularity Debate.
After Yudkowsky at the beginning gives three different definitions of "the singularity" they discuss strong artificial intelligence and consciousness. Pigliucci is the one who quite quickly takes the discussion from intelligence to consciousness. Just before that they discuss whether simulated intelligence is actually intelligence. Yudkowsky made an argument (something like) if the AI can solve problems over a suffic... (read more)
An interesting dialogue at BHTV abot transhumanism between cishumanist Massimo Pigliucci and transhumanist Mike Treder. Pigliucci is among other things blogging at Rationally Speaking. This BHTV dialogue is partly as a follow-up to Pigliucci's earlier blog-post the problems with transhumanism . As I (tonyf, July 16, 2009 8:29 PM) commented then, despite the title of his blog-post, it was more of a (I think) misleading generalisation from an article by some Munkittrick than by an actual study of the "transhumanist" community that was the basis fo... (read more)
This is a standard semiclassical motivation as to why gravitons most probably exist (I think from Steven Weinberg "gravitation and cosmology" but I have since long lost the book so I am not sure): In the limit of weak gravitation GR looks similar to the Maxwell equations. In particular there should exist gravitational waves.. (Have not yet been detected experimentally but if GR is (at least approximately) correct they should exist.) This means that you could in principle build a gravitational wave microscope. Say you want to measure the position ... (read more)
I guess that education systems differ quite a lot between different countries. So where you do your physics studies could make a significant difference. The OP is probably somewhat USA-centric. In Sweden there are two major undergraduate programs in physics. The general university physics program, and the engineering physics program. The latter is an engineering program and you are awarded an engineering degree. The contents, however, is mostly a physics program. For those going into an academic physics career it is as good a starting ground as the general... (read more)