hegemonicon

According to google image search, it's Origin: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=On+the+Origin+of+Sp...

$1000 would barely cover 25% of the price of a current seat of AutoCAD.

This is what's known as a "superstimulus" - something that pinpoints our brain's reward and pleasure centers orders of magnitude more than anything that existed in the evolutionary environment. Heroin and candy bars fall into the same category.

Of course, heroin and candy bars aren't exactly civilization-level risks - they're regulated to various degrees, and the people that overconsume simply self-select out of existence. I'm skeptical that an entire society would fall under the spell of a game (even a really good one) before society develops protections against it (through regulation and cultural norms).

Excellent article about superstimuli here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/h3/superstimuli_and_the_collapse_of_...

Having tried to implement a certain form of this, I can say that forcing yourself into a certain mode of thinking, top down, is EXTREMELY mentally taxing. It's very difficult to keep up the mental focus necessary for an appreciable amount of time, and I would not be surprised if this actually impeded mental performance on an individual level because of the effort involved, though it's possible overall group performance could still increase.

What I find irritating is that a neuroscientist would be so easily drawn into mysterious, magical thinking about what was going on in her head.

Of course, I suppose I might see things differently if a blood clot turned half of my brain off for a while.

A philosophical zombie is not a decision tree incapable of learning. A philosophical zombie is something that is exactly like a human in every way except that it lacks consciousness. The concept has more than a few problems - see http://lesswrong.com/lw/p7/zombies_zombies/

If a decision tree (or a clever algorithm or whatever) REALLY did perfectly mimic a thinking human (including our ability to learn), do you still think it wouldn't REALLY be intelligent? That there's some sort of important, qualitative difference between being shifted through a decision tree and sensory inputs and feedback loops building up neuron action potentials? That may be true, but the evidence is heavily stacked against such a worldview.

That said, I agree that this is a bad approach to AI. It's not like people haven't been trying to stitch together various subproblems of intelligence for the better part of 50 years.

>Complexity research doesn't need its own institute, because complexity research is a pseudoscience that means whatever you want it to mean

This. As far as I can tell, "complexity science" is really just a dumping ground for things we haven't figured out yet. Some pattern seemingly ‘emerges’ out of nowhere? Complexity! Feedback loops causing unpredictable behavior? Complexity! Non-linear or ‘chaotic’ behavior that's difficult to interpret? Complexity! Don’t know where something starts or stops? Complexity! Self-reference or deep, recursive hierarchies doing something weird? Complexity! You can’t talk about any of them without using the phrase “don’t know”. It’s a field defined by our ignorance.

Careful. "The Black Swan" is a pop non-fiction book, and reading it won't give you an intimate understanding of markets. Taleb has taken his share of criticism (http://www.efalken.com/papers/Taleb2.html) and his ability to capitalize on the deep insights he'd like you to believe he has is somewhat questionable (http://www.businessinsider.com/did-nassim-talebs-universa-ge...)

Hrm, this submission is over 300 karma points as of this comment, which means that hacker monthly #2 will have to include an entire copy of hacker monthly #1...

Of course, at some point letting problems work themselves out just becomes laziness.

"Mr Coolidge's genius for inactivity is developed to a very high point. It is not an indolent inactivity. It is a grim, determined, alert inactivity, which keeps Mr Coolidge occupied constantly" - Columnist Walter Lippmann, 1926

When you're talking about a profession though, engineer means something very specific. It means that you're trained and licensed and can be held legally responsible if whatever you're building should malfunction. Referring to your profession as an engineer when you don't meet those criteria is a bit disingenuous. It's akin to the difference between calling yourself a doctor because you went to medical school, and calling yourself a doctor because you got a PhD in english lit.

You need a layout change - this looks more like a news aggregation site than a blog. News sites are designed to lure you in with a grabbing headline. With articles such as yours, you really need to put the text in front of me immediately - the title alone isn't going to get me interested. Unless you have a compelling reason to eschew the standard blog look, I'd stick with that.

I'd also suggest moving the google ads to the far right of the page. They were the first thing I saw and I was immediately annoyed by them.

As far as the content goes, you need a lot more explanation as to what sort of analysis you're actually doing, and what the graphs mean. Many of your graphs and charts are extremely cryptic, and they're frequently put at the end of the post with nothing following them.

Furthermore, you've got the unfortunate combination of writing in a stilted, scientific style (which really, you should never do) with posts that really don't have much scientific content to them.

Overall I'd say you need to focus more on your actual writing and less on everything else.

It's well known that Google collects massive amounts of data, and does massive amounts of UI testing (such as the infamous testing between 85 different shades of blue), so I'm somewhat skeptical that it's design is mediocre because this guy says it is and he's a web designer. Data trumps intuition every day of the week.

Disclaimer: I haven't read the book OR the article.

It's encouraging that Robin Hanson (who's a former physicist) has called the book excellent: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/01/from-eternity-to-here....

From his description, and from the bits and pieces I've picked up on other blogs, while the book is a popular science book, it's skewed much more to the science side than the popular side.

Unfortunately, there's the small matter of them requiring orders of magnitude more energy than exists in the universe.

Link to the Alcubierre Drive - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

I seem to remember something (possibly posted here) about most company founders actually being in their 30's and 40's. There's something to be said for the value of years of knowledge and experience.

There's nothing wrong with trying to be smart. The problem is trying to show others how smart you are (as the guy so astutely wrote in your yearbook). It makes you look like a jerk. No one likes a jerk.

I have an extremely similar problem, where I feel like I always have to be right about...well, whatever I happen to be talking about. Because big personality changes are hard, instead I try to control some specific behaviors that get me into trouble, such as getting defensive and trying to sound like I know more than I do. That may be a better goal than a complete personality makeover.

[If you're interested, I wrote about getting defensive here: http://www.hegemonicon.com/blog/?p=184 and sounding like I know more than I do here: http://www.hegemonicon.com/blog/?p=683]

I am not an expert on evolution, but much of this article strikes me as incorrect. The fact that genes are capable of modifying other genes (turning them off/on, splicing in new genes, etc.) doesn't refute the concept of natural selection of random mutations unless you're ALSO positing a new mechanism by which this modification ability can be acquired. I skimmed through and didn't see one, even though he strangely implies that the fact that genes behave in a complex fashion means that organisms aren't coded by them. His (apparent) creationist sympathies and tacit endorsement of the gaia concept leads me to believe he thinks there is some sort of magic at work, which is not a very useful explanation.

I'm equally perplexed by his overall point of "genetics is complicated, therefore genetic engineering and capitalism is immoral."

I don't know about Japanese, but in Chinese, all the numbers have words that can be said extremely quickly - si, qi, etc. Because our working memory is implemented as a 2 second loop of audio, this allows Chinese people to have a working memory that's closer to 10 items instead of the famous 'seven plus or minus two' that English speakers have. In 'Outliers' Malcolm Gladwell posits this as part of the reason why asians often seem to be better at math.

I guess 'five behaviors that people sometimes exhibit, some of the time' wasn't a punchy enough title.

This comparison doesn't seem particularly valid.

Insurgencies operate by leveraging small-scale, decentralized groups against a large, slow-moving beaurocracy. They succeed by operating faster than the beaurocracy (inside their OODA loops), leveraging the environment to their advantage and attacking critical points of failure. They're difficult to fight against because of their speed and the fact that they don't readily present targets to be attacked.

Granted, the Civil rights movement was largely grass-roots, but it's not clear to me why a comparison to an insurgency is apt.

"There is no such thing as information overload. There is only filter failure." - Clay Shirky

Always appropriate, Vannever Bush's prescient "As we may think"

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush

That's what I'd like to know - how LITTLE does an assistant professor make that 60,000 dollars of debt will take a lifetime to pay off, even in the absence of a mortgage (and presumably a car) payment?

Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Agreed, there's no need for designers to be treated as some sort of cadre of white knights. This is just basic business ethics - you could find similar situations in any job at any company.

My favorite definition of math, courtesty of http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2008/08/what-is-mathematics-r...

"Mathematics is the minimal environment to preserve ideas."

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth

Ah, the infamous Hollywood Accounting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

They apparently tried to pull something similar with Peter Jackson and the billions of dollars from LOTR, though Jackson did end up taking them to court.

For 1) That's going to be true of any resource that's used in spaceship construction. If you're building interstellar ships at such a scale that you might conceivably run out of stuff to build them out of, it's a fair assumption that you have the capability to go and mine the rest of the rocky planets in the solar system.

2) That 400 tons is not going to scale up with volume. Density of lead is around 650 lbs/ft3. Let's say you have a big ship, a mile in diameter. And let's be generous and put a 4 ft shell of lead around the whole thing. 4/3pi(5280^2-5286^2) * 650 * 1/2000 = 57000 tons of lead = 52000 metric tons. A drop in the bucket, tiny compared to the amount of steel and other material that would make up the rest of the structure. (Annual steel production is around 100 times more than of lead. We won't be running out of it either.)

The bottom line is that unless you're talking about transuranics or other extremely rare elements, or are building things at comically large scales (ie: thousands of ships) amount of construction material is not going to be a limiting factor in starship design.