tjradcliffe

"Maybe people intuitively figured out what was up (one of the parameters of the Drake Equation must be much lower than our estimate) but stopped there and didn’t bother explaining the formal probability argument."

There's no "intuitively" about it. We know from the data available that the probability of machine-building general intelligence of the kind that is unique to humans on Earth is fantastically unlikely to arise. It depends on a confluence of completely unrelated selective pressures: one on tool-making, one on social cooperation, and one on continuous mate competition/selection. There is good evidence that all of those forces are important to specifically human--not dolphin or bird or whatever--intelligence on Earth, and without any one of them we'd still be fairly handy monkey-creatures banging rocks around.

As well as a theoretical understanding, we have empirical data. We can ask, "If something is at all probable how many times will it have evolved on Earth?"

Eyes, for example, have evolved independently multiple times, based on differences in retinal biochemistry. Wings and fins and legs have also evolved many times across an incredible diversity of species. This tells us that things that are easy to evolve have evolved multiple times in Earth's history.

Specifically human, machine-building intelligence has evolved exactly once. This is strong evidence that it has an enormously low probability.

Once you've realized that one of the parameters in the Drake equation is incredibly small, the Silent Universe is no longer surprising. And both empirically and theoretically, the probability of evolving specifically human, machine-building intelligence is incredibly small.

However, I have never met anyone enamoured of Fermi's Paradox who gives any credence to this, which is why no attempt to resolve the paradox will ever have any effect on the discussion. This is in general the case with so-called paradoxes: no matter how many times they are clearly and simply resolved, people who want there to be paradoxes will pretend the resolution doesn't exist, or will deliberately misrepresent it as a non-solution. Or they will present some other non-solution as more compelling, even when the solution presented makes those non-solutions unnecessary.

This story is a textbook example of bad reporting.

The headline and opening paragraph combine two completely different categories of error--"wrong" and "late"--so that it is possible to say "most Americans".

The story then goes on to talk exclusively about "wrong" as if that was the dominant category. "Late" is never mentioned.

The abstract of the ($60) report talks about errors only, but reading between the lines "late" is subsumed under the author's notion of "error".

So this story tells us nothing about the actual rate of misdiagnosis, but it leaves unwary readers with the probably false impression that "most Americans will experience misdiagnosis".

This is not to say that misdiagnosis is not a serious problem. But then, so is really bad reporting.

I agree on the phrasing issue. Both there "types" seem to require Bohr's classical observer, but as soon as you assume that observers are classical you've swept the big question under the carpet, which is, "Why is there a classical world at all?" Decoherence and similar approaches at least try to address this question, and don't fit at all well with their two-Type scheme.

Or to put it another way: observers are intrinsic to reality as well as the systems under observation, and any attempt to treat them separately will fail. But this is uninteresting, because any interpretation is going to have to acknowledge this at some level (as Bohr correctly pointed out quite a long time ago.)

The creation of science depended on a large number of random factors, from Judeic monotheism (or something like it) to the disasters of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and even (plausibly) the English Civil War and its aftermath. Those random accidents--including the founding of universities in the late Middle Ages--created a set of conditions where people with the brains to create science were given access to institutions that let them think and investigate at the same time when they had both the social freedom and the technological capacity to publish their work, and the freedom to engage in institutional innovation to create things like the Royal Society, whose founding should be considered the final act in the birth of modern science: once it existed, it would be extremely hard not to get something like science going.

So on this view, the reason why science happened here and not there was the same reason why hominids with the capacity for general, tool-using, representational intelligence and language happened in Africa and not the Americas: such developments depend on a confluence of multiple unlikely factors and as such are very unlikely to happen at all, much less multiple times. If science hadn't been created in Western Europe in the 1600's it might never have happened. It only looks inevitable because it did.

Sure you can, unless you're shuffling a perfectly ordered deck. OP was deleted so there may be some context missing?

That's a very odd observation, because religious people as a population show very slight deviations from non-religious people. It is extremely difficult to tell by observation whether or not someone is religious, beyond church/temple/mosque attendance, which is equivalent to asking them.

Does he reference any data that would give his suggestion non-negligible plausibility?

It's a mediocre article. It glosses a bunch of history adequately and then points out a completely different anomaly. By "completely different" I mean "has all the signatures of an instrumental or analysis artefact." It's intermittent (huge red flag) and while the article doesn't say so (additional red flag) close to the threshold of observation.

There are completely mundane explanations (upper atmosphere models slightly wrong, unaccounted-for EM effects) so while there may be a fundamental cause (gravity is doing something exciting) the odds are that it's a boring effect, just like the superluminal neutrino observations.

Their results may be significant to VCs, but likely aren't to anyone else.

They get about a 4% increase in good outcomes, from 23% to 27%, for a 1 sigma increase in expert positive response. This is significant at the 5% level.

It's enough to say that "Experts do slightly better than chance in IP-heavy fields", but about 3/4 of those businesses will still fail, and that remains true regardless of expert evaluation.

If you're a big investor this could make a difference to your bottom line. If you're a small investor or entrepreneur, it is pretty much irrelevant.

We find it because that's what we're looking for, or inventing. Here's a comparable question: "How is it that we can find an unfathomably small sub-set of possible symbols--a mere 26!--that are capable of encoding any idea whatsoever?"

The answer is: we are humans, doing human things within the scope of human capabilities. If there are ideas that are inexpressible by us, we can't possibly know about them. If there is physics profoundly beyond our ken (what lies behind the quantum veil, for example) we simply don't know about it.

Mathematics is a natural language (as physicists use it) to describe nature to ourselves. The fact of the knowing subject, and the activity of the knowing subject, cannot be left out without leaving a central mystery, which always amounts to "Why does the knowing subject do what they do?" (like restrict math to Smolin's four key categories of number, geometry, algebra and logic). If you imbue some mystical subject-free "mathematics" with these properties, rather than the activity of the knowing subject with them, they will remain mysterious.

This also explains why mathematics is so very, very bad at describing reality: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=381

Reality is continuous. Human categories--like cancer--only have sharp edges because we draw them with an act of selective attention. The edge of our attention is discontinuous. Nothing else (that doesn't involved quantum mechanics or integer counting of attentionally-isolated objects) is.

"Cancer" is not a simple thing. Two people with "breast cancer" may have very similar or almost completely different diseases. As others here have pointed out, the magnitude and frequency of wins and losses matter even though trades are binary win/lose (which they can be because we've created an entire category of imaginary objects called dollars that can be counted).

Bayes rule is as applicable to any area of significant uncertainty, including win/loss magnitude. It is universal.

The meaning is not the same because it's very difficult for poor and less educated parents to give their children what rich and more educated parents give them. My kids went to a high school that had a considerable socio-economic range and I was fairly involved in some stuff there, and it was clear there were plenty of poorer, less educated parents who were working really hard to give their kids everything they needed, but it was almost impossibly difficult for them.

This is not an argument against treating your children well, but the reality is that having parents who are well-off and educated buffers you against all kinds of mistakes and issues that would sink other kids. Moderating (not eliminating, which is neither possible nor desirable) social inequality is important precisely because we can say with as much certainty as we can say anything that there are kids out there today as talented and driven as Bill Gates who don't have anything like the resilient support system that he had, and without it they are likely going to be a drag on society rather than contributors to it.

Oxygen is not flammable (neither is fluorine... every other element is, in the sense that it forms stable compounds in exothermic reactions with oxygen.)

Oxygen is, however, fairly toxic (2 atmospheres partial pressure starts to get pretty dangerous after relatively short times.)

For comparison, the Great Lakes are about 60 m above sea level (Kingston, at the junction of Lake Ontario and the St Lawrence, is at 200 ft). Salt water inundation has not been a problem. However, invasive species (zebra mussels, for example) have been. They are fresh water species that get sucked up into ballast water in other ports (many of which are on rivers or estuaries) and pumped out in other destinations. There are procedures to avoid this (exchanging fresh-water ballast for salt water while at sea, for example) but those procedures are inevitably implemented by humans, who are certain to eventually make a mistake sufficient to cause contamination.

These are lovely anecdotes and he's obviously an interesting and capable story-teller, but he worked very hard to make his nominal epiphany true. The trick of writing in a foreign language as a way of discovering his own voice is fascinating, but it also must have been very difficult.

So a better title might be: "How I was motivated to be dedicated enough to become a novelist." And this is actually a more interesting story, at least for other artists, because the thing everyone faces at the outset is failure and lack of belief in our own work. We have to have something to keep us going. He had that single moment at a baseball game. Others have other things, but having a weird little talisman like that can be very useful in solving the ongoing problem of motivation.

In my own life, at the age of 13 I ate at a Chinese restaurant for the first time (on a school trip to the 'big city' a couple of hours distant from the town I grew up in) and got a fortune cookie that read, in its entirety, "An ambition far beyond your reach".

I've achieved a good deal in the forty years since then, and at times when the going has been particularly tough I've thought back to that and told myself, "Yeah, well, you were told what to expect and went ahead anyway. So don't complain, just get back to work."

Would I have accomplished as much without being able to do that? Maybe, maybe not. But being able to do it made the journey easier at times. It's a silly thing--I don't believe in fate or fortunes--but sometimes silly things can be made to work for us.

So I could say that was "the moment I became X", where X is any major achievement since, but "One weird trick to stay motivated and focused on your goals" would be at least as accurate.

All knowledge is probability-based. The question is: are the probabilities in this case low (or high) enough to be very interesting?

My first thought on reading the headline was: hadn't they better get printing working first? I just assumed it still doesn't because after five years or so of not being able to print anything but postscript files to a postscript printer I completely gave up on printing on linux, because like you, no amount of messing with configuration stuff would make it work (I could on rare occasions get CUPS configured on a single machine with one printer, but it was always an incredibly fragile and delicate arrangement that fell to bits when anyone looked at it sideways.)

I have long suspected that the story of "The Aristocrats" is a hoax, although I've never bothered to pursue the question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aristocrats_%28film%29

My reasons for this are a) it is very difficult to find any pre-2005 citation for the joke, despite one supposed reference from 1975; b) the details of the story don't seem to me very plausible given what I know of comedians; and c) it's the kind of thing Penn Jillette would do.

So the story may have already played out in the modern era, if not in this case then perhaps in others: the 'Net is so full of nonsense and mis-information it would be very hard to tell. Social fragmentation of information sources likely makes it even easier today... you could argue that Birthers and the like are an example of this kind of hoax (or victims of it.)

We could call it cfront: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cfront

Yeah, and by the mid-1990's no one was using them, which is the adoption curve that's characteristic of a fad, not an effective method of doing anything useful. Now 20 years later the fad is back, right on schedule. Expect it to last five to ten years (closer to five) then drop off as people lose interest because once the novelty wears off there is nothing to go back for.

No worse than normal, at least for me. I found the experience dull. Always having some internal auditory stimulation may have been part of the cause of that.

Also, I meditate very easily and prefer a whitenoise environment for meditation. And I'm very happy in my own head and used to being alone. So the whole thing was not much a novelty in any respect, and the lack of whitenoise made it suboptimal for meditation.

I wonder how people's response to these things varies as they move along the extroverion-introversion scale. It seems plausible that extroverts would find them a much more novel and disturbing experience than introverts.

This is fairly boring because the "incompleteness" is built in to the Navier-Stokes equation from the off, and we (physicists) have been well-aware of it for over a century.

Solutions to the Navier-Stokes equation are turbulent on all scales, but reality is only turbulent down to the atomic scale. This matters practically in rarefied gas dynamics, but it matters formally--that is, to mathematicians--no matter what.

Also, the Navier-Stokes equation is typically solved with extremely simple boundary conditions, but reality has surface tension and whatnot.

Ergo: the Navier-Stokes equation is an incomplete description of reality. This is not news. There may be some news in the generalized understanding of how to turn the atomic-level Boltzmann equation into an appropriate macroscopic equation, but the incompleteness of the Navier-Stokes equation is just not all that interesting.

This is fairly usual in physics: the mathematical language we use to describe reality is in most cases approximate, and leaves out various (physically insignificant) terms, as well as including (physically impossible) solutions (waves that propagate backward in time, etc).

One might as well say we are hardwired to social stratification (which we almost certainly are) and our language reflects that.

Every human society has more-or-less arbitrary rules or fashions, and how closely our behaviour conforms to those rules reflects our social status. This is universal and almost certainly evolved over the course of our million-year-long dance of mate competition and selection.

Since social rules are fairly arbitrary (which we know because they vary so much) there are bound to be situations where it is useful to be able to signal we are moving outside them. Taboo words serve that function very efficiently.

This is a bit different from saying "We are hardwired to have taboo words", but it does show there are perfectly sensible ways to think about hardwiring in this regard, and it's a bit tricky to get away from.

One way of testing this hypothesis would be to look at the distribution of taboo words as a function of the strength and complexity of social hierarchies. I would predict that strongly hierarchical societies with more social restrictions would tend to have more taboo words and likely a finer grading of taboo words than more relaxed societies. On the other hand, if we are more directly hardwired to have taboo words, there would be no reason for the number or gradation to vary across different societies.

What is meant here is an ordinary empirical claim that is false, which is unsurprising because it is made independently of any empirical investigation into how we form our notion of space.

Observational studies in developmental psychology--which didn't exist in Poincare's day, much less Kant's--tell us that our notions of space are developed interactively, not observationally. We are not passive recipients of sensation trapped in Plato's cave, but active intervenors in the world who learn about the universe by being causes.

"According to Piaget, the origin of spatial representation coincides with the origin of drawing, language and representational thinking in general. In spite of their common development, drawing soon falls behind the mental conception of space (especially in the case of complex and three-dimensional constructions). Yet, in its simplest and earliest appearances, drawing should be conceived as the representation or even the motor of spatial conception, because—here Piaget quotes his teacher, the philosopher of mathematics Léon Brunschvicg—drawing is not founded on geometry, but on the contrary, geometry is founded on the practice of drawing. If one explains the origins of geometry as arising from drawing, the child’s drawing can indeed be operationalized as a reconstruction apparatus of the psychogenesis of space. If one understands drawing in this way, it does not record an independent process of development, rather it documents and reflects its own developmental conditions—and thereby furthers mental ontogeny. Children’s drawings are able to visualize geometric conceptions because they are one of its main motors. The drawing child constitutes a veritable machine that works on the production of a Euclidean future, because—as Piaget detected in his experiments—it helps to complete and partly to conceal the infant’s older tacit topological knowledge." (emphasis added) -- http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/en/news/features/feature11

I am not in any sense a strict Piagetian, and I realized there has been a lot of work done on this topic since, but I use this as an example simply because his empirical investigations were foundational and should have brought us to the point where everyone recognizes that philosophical imaginings are not a useful way to approach any question whatsoever regarding the development of ideas, even when they are the imaginings of someone as clever as Kant, whom as others here have pointed out, Poincare' was channeling.

The imagination is a terrible guide to what is real: we can imagine all kinds of things that can't exist (the god of the Bible, for example) and can't imagine all kinds of things that do exist (whatever lies behind quantum phenomena, say).

Philosophers (and at times mathematicians) like to sweep away the messy empirical realities that actually give rise to our ideas of geometry and everything else. It's a fun game to play. It just tells us far more about the human imagination than the rest of reality.

There is a certain type of mind that delights in paradoxes, to the extent that even after an explanation has been clearly produced, the person will continue to insist there is a paradox.

Naming things paradoxes attracts this sort of individual, so it's a kind of marketing ploy for an idea: it won't just get it talked about, it'll get it talked about forever, because each generation of paradox-mongers will take it up anew and discuss it and analyze it and do absolutely anything except acknowledge that the specific flaw in the reasoning that leads to the appearance of an impossible conclusion being true was exposed generations ago.

For example, consider the supposed paradox of the evening star and morning star, which I will first state in the a way that makes it clear there is no paradox, then restate in the traditional way.

"The Evening Star is Venus seen in the evening sky." "The Morning Star is Venus seen in the morning sky." "Transitivity implies therefore that the Evening Star is the Morning Star, since Venus seen in the evening sky is Venus seen in the morning sky."

This is obviously stupid: no one would make this claim. The traditional formulation actually depends on a falsehood, or at least on radically incomplete statements:

"The Evening Star is the planet Venus." "The Morning Star is the planet Venus." "Transitivity implies therefore that the Evening Star is the Morning Star, since the planet Venus is the planet Venus."

At this point, you can spend millions of words explaining why the statements identifying lights in the sky viewed at a particular time of day with a ball of rock orbiting the sun are problematic. It will be pointless: paradox-mongers will simply not let their nice toy be demolished.

Most traditional paradoxes have straightforward resolutions (frequently involving inserting a knowing subject into them, like the person who observes Venus) but none of them will ever be "solved" because of this purely psychological resistance to the possibility of their solution on the part of a very vocal sub-population.

One useful trick is to never let a paradox be stated in the traditional way. The first step in any discussion should be to restate the paradoxical situation as completely as possible, usually by introducing the perspective of particular individuals, as I've done above. Traditional paradoxes almost all depend on very specific ways of stating them for their psychological effect, and breaking out of that ritual pattern of restatement often makes them look simply stupid. One can then ask what is missing in the ritual statement of the paradox that makes it not seem stupid.

In the case of the Potato Paradox, the restatements we've seen here, which introduce the ratio 1:99 as the way to think about the problem, is a good example of this. Since the answer is not intuitive, the correct way to introduce the problem is to make it intuitive, not to blurt out a non-intuitive answer and expect the now-confused listener to catch up. That's just bad pedagogy.

It seems given the sheer amount of it, that the universe should be taking a radiation bath from the past history of insane amounts of dark matter anihilating.

The industry of dark matter modelling in cosmology involves attempting to find a set of characteristics of candidate particles that ensures we a) have enough dark matter on the right scales to account for the observed motions of distant galaxies (exotic dark matter is not required to explain the rotation curves of spiral galaxies, as there may be enough normal matter to do that particular job) and b) the dark matter has characteristics that don't contradict any current observations. Bonus points for a model if it makes some clear predictions of things that have not yet been observed.

All of this is intensely mathematical, because as it turns out the human intestine is a lousy judge of physical phenomena. Our guts believe in Aristotle's physics, and give us wildly wrong intuitions about the way the world is. They do a bad enough job with earthly phenomena, much less cosmological ones.

It turns out that the math tells us it is possible to have weakly interacting massive particles that simply don't decay into anything interesting on the timescale of the life of the universe, and don't interact with normal matter strongly enough to be much slowed down by the Earth. A WIMP in the halo of the galaxy, though, is going to pass through entire stars now and then, as well as large clouds of dust and gas that may not be very dense, but which have enormous thickness. As such these weakly interacting particles can be drawn in to ordinary matter on very large scales.

These mathematical constraints are vital to narrowing down what dark matter consists of (if it is a particle at all, and not a euphemism for some novel dynamical effect... there was a brief time a few years ago when someone claimed that we were solving the field equations of General Relativity in a subtly wrong way that explained the galactic observations, but they didn't turn out to have a compelling argument.)

You don't have to break 'em, just put them in casts.

I realize you're joking, but it reminded me of this story: one of my ex-girlfriends actually did something like this as part of her PhD: she signed up half a dozen volunteers--including herself--to wear casts on one arm for six weeks.

It was a total bust: she was the only subject who made it through more than half the investigation period. The rest mostly came in after a week or so and asked to have the casts removed. One didn't even want to wait for that once they had decided they couldn't stand to go on with it, and soaked it off at home.

Maybe with modern plastic immobilization it would be easier to do this kind of research, but it was pretty extreme at the time and getting ethics approval today would be almost impossible.

This is a really interesting comparison. I've done the startup thing (unsuccessfully) and know a fair number of other people who have as well (including one who came within one business decision of being a millionaire but who couldn't convince his partners to accept the buyout offer they were being given.)

When you consider reward/(risk*effort) rather than just risk/reward it wouldn't surprise me if lotteries came out on top.

But... the thing you don't get from a lottery is a statement like this: my life-partner and I met through PoF almost ten years ago, and I will be forever grateful to Marcus for building the site that made that possible.

We had both been on other sites previously, and we had actually seen each other's profiles on other sites in the year or two before we met while we were both in a post-divorce dating phase, but PoF had the right mix of features that it happened to be where we actually connected with each other.

As I recall, I saved her profile for later consideration at one point, and the site (unbeknownst to me) notified users when that happened, so she looked at my profile and contacted me with something along the lines of, "Don't hesitate, I won't be here long!" I didn't, and she wasn't.

Now, I agree that accolades from strangers doesn't necessarily balance off time not spent with your family, but it is another factor in the overall equation, knowing you've made the world a better place for a lot of people.

The problem is that it is politically impossible to implement the only solution that would take them to zero emissions. It is a solution that uses existing, proven, decades-old technology, but thanks to extremely powerful anti-science lobby groups we can't use it. Think about that for a minute: just how powerful does a lobby group have to be to prevent us implementing a solution to 1/3 of global air polution?

Everyone reading this, if they think for a few minutes, will be able to figure out what the technology is (because it's marine propulsion, and how do we make that zero-emission?) and who the political groups are who oppose it, so I'm not going to actually specify them because I think the point will have more impact if people work it out for themselves. The sad thing is that half of the people who do figure it out will have an immediate reaction of, "Well of course we can't do that!", thereby dismissing a practical, safe solution to 1/3 of global air pollution based on the nothing but politics, because what does the well-being of the planet matter when implementing a workable solution means changing your political stance on anything? That's something only those looney pro-science people do, right?

Why do I need a mortgage?

If you want to see what life is like without access to modern financial tools, got visit an Indian Reserve in Canada. Housing is cheap there.

Lack of access to modern financial instruments--municipal bonds in particular--is a major block in the way of First Nation's prosperity. Last year a new kind of "aboriginal bond" was floated for the first time to get around this, and hopefully more will come.

So you have an example of what life looks like in your dream world. It isn't pretty. And like everyone else who is pro-finance here, I'm not saying there aren't issues with what we've got. We can fix them. What we can't fix is the massive poverty that comes without access to financial tools, however morally repugnant those tools seem to naive outsiders.

Many years ago I did a comprehensive analysis of Canadian mutual fund returns over about 20 years, and found that the average return per year was dead on the market. The distribuiton of returns was Guassian and had a width of about 1%. I concluded from this that in fact fund managers can beat the market... by precisely amount they pay themselves.

This is evidence for the "second order version of market efficiency" your mention: it was uncanny, and put me into index funds for life (that, and the fact that there was no way of predicting from year-to-year which funds would beat the market the following year.)