yters

Aren't most discussions on HN an ideological debate of one form or another? I think my error is being on the wrong side of the popular view here. Oh well, you cannot please everyone all the time :). In parting I thank you for the great, and not appreciated enough, work you do as HN mod. My best to you, sir.

I would agree with that. There is often a practical question motivating comp sci and mathematical discoveries. The difference from Darwin's case is the mathematical conclusions are never wrong, regardless of the underlying motivation. That is what I mean by culture free. Change in culture cannot change the validity of mathematical deductions. On the other hand, Darwin's conclusions in Descent of Man are wrong, and he appears to have drawn these conclusions due to his cultural bias.

Yes of course there are cultural influences. But it seems some branches of STEM are fairly immune to the opinions of the surrounding culture. E.g. what can we say is victorian about any mathematical conclusion? Yet Darwin's supposedly scientific conclusions in this work appear to be very culture bound.

Well, for instance in computer science all the theorems are completely culture free, so it is not impossible. But it is indeed difficult, and to be expected for the most part.

Strange that Darwin's theory of human evolution was so culture bound. One would think looking to the science would transcend culture to a greater degree.

These really intense dreams, are you in control of the imagery, or is it something you are experiencing beyond your control? When I have intense dreams and try to control them the fidelity breaks down and I usually wake up.

When men exercise their reason coolly and freely on a variety of distinct questions, they inevitably fall into different opinions on some of them. When they are governed by a common passion, their opinions, if they are so to be called, will be the same.

- Madison, Federalist No. 50

One of the neatest aspects of git that I never see used is delta debugging, where git automatically finds the code that introduced a bug through binary searching the commit history. This requires many small commits, which is tedious.

I would like to see a good treatment of Lucas like arguments. Most take the form of humans having their own halting problem. But, that objection is completely irrelevant, and it concerns me that objectors do not realize this. Makes me think they are missing something.

There are no mathematical theories of runaway intelligence growth. On the other hand there are many theorems of fundamental limits to maechanical processes. E.g. NP completeness codiscoverer Leonid Levin also proved what he calls independence conservation that states no stochastic process is expected to increase net mutual information. Then there are the more well known theorems with similar implications: no free lunch theorems, halting problem, Kolmogorov complexity's uncomputability, data processing inequality, and so on. There is absolutely nothing that looks like runaway intelligence explosion in theoretical computer science. The closest attempt I have seen in Kauffman's analysis of NK problems, but there he finds similar limitations, except with low K terrains, but that analysis is a bit questionable in mind. To make arguments like gwern and Kurzweil they are essentially appealing to mysticism; assuming there is a yet to be discovered mathematical law utterly unlike anything we have ever discovered. They are engaging in promissory computer science, writing a whole bunch of theory checks they hope will be cashed in the future.

Good point. Pathos is not with the boring old tech approach :)

I read a similar article by Scott Alexander, about the fact some psi researchers could generate a reliable signal with their studies, but since he a priori ruled out the possibility of psi, he is convinced there is something wrong with the scientific process.

He is handling the integration. The maintenance of the products falls on the ops team. He is doing a great job. I just don't think he will stick around to maintain things once he is done, and we will have two stacks to migrate and maintain.

My internal devops group has this issue. We had a working system on teamcity and the hashicorp stack and linkerd. Now we are working on a brand new system using gitlab and openshift and istio. Highly redundant with, from my perspective, only incremental advantage. At the beginning I spoke out against this, but failed to convince anyone. Progress has been alright because of our new 10x hire who hated the old tech and loves the new stuff. But once he is out of the picture, we will be maintaining two highly redundant stacks both requiring deep technical knowledge to maintain effectively. I guess bailing is always an option, but I would prefer to be a force for good somehow. Any suggestions?

The SRI at Stanford claims psi is very prevalent in the human population, but operates at low levels that require a large number of sensitive experiments to detect. Not saying they are right, but that could explain why these people were persuaded of paranormal activity, but it never popped out at you as a really obvious capability.

What do you think about intelligent design sort arguments? It is hard to understand how random variation and natural selection can produce the equivalent of a biological operating system. I have also a fair amount of experience with evolutionary algorithms, and they add to my perplexity as to how random variation and natural selection are sufficient mechanisms to produce the genome, let alone how the whole system would get started in the first place. This does seem to be a pretty good piece of scientific evidence for the intrusion of something entirely unlike any physical process we know of, and capable of feats only analogous to what human intelligence can produce. This seems to me a quite persuasive scientific argument for something deity-ish.

Did you ever find some genuine inexplicable phenomena?

My main problem with dictatorships is mass concentration camps, mass executions, torture, human experimentation, etc.

Granted, democracies have done all the above, but diligent activists corrected the system, and the scale never reached that in dictatorships.

But yes, for your average citizen, dictatorship is probably not too bad.

What if psychedelics makes people more susceptible to demon possession?

I spend long periods of time without ingesting sources of information without getting bored and literally dying. Conversely, if I was constantly bombarded with useful information, I would still go crazy, and that could very well lead to literal death. I think staying alive is one piece of meaningful information out of a very large set of meaningful information, most of which has nothing to do with staying alive.

In other words, meaningfulness is orthogonal to staying alive.

Doesn't death allow the body to achieve maximal entropy?

Also, this conversation here has nothing to do with keeping me alive, yet I find it informative. Seems the concept of sematic information is missing something, or a lot.

It's a very important point the paper makes, which is the disconnect between what is commonly called Shannon information (he actually called it entropy) and what we call information in normal parlance. A channel may transmit a high amount of Shannon entropy, but contain zero information of the regular sort, since the transmission is just random noise. A concept that is closer to our intuition is mutual information, so named by Shannon's colleague precisely because Shannon entropy is not concerned with semantics.

What about webpages on suicide techniques? Do those count as information?

There is a possibility that drugs being illegal has resulted in many less addicted and dead drug users. Supposedly, prohibition back in the day was quite successful keeping people from becoming alcoholics.

Sometimes it is analogous, such as creating a new internal product and trying to get internal customers. The best part is if the effort fails I still keep my job and salary. On the other hand if it succeeds I can get a promotion and raise. Much less risk than real world startup, and better expected payoff.

On the other hand, if one is not of the viewpoint labeled as politically correct, then prepare to be ostracized in a very passive aggressive way. Not that I mind much, but passive aggressiveness is annoying. E.g. mentioning anything that smacks of religion, or discussing guns, or expressing skepticism that we modern people are the smartest thing since sliced bread.

Text is actually made of a bunch of little pictures. Pictures: check and mate!

I will follow up my negative take on pg with a positive. He already has a lot of flack for that essay online. I do agree with the general frustration. Philosophy taught in school seems to somehow miss the mark in our scientific discourse, and my exposure in school left me quite disatissfied. So, I do agree with PG's overall approach of starting with concrete useful things and generalizing from there.

After all, Plato and Aristotle had a very concrete purpose for their philosophizing, which was: how does one live a good life? That is why Socrates went around asking all the sophists how to become virtuous, since virtue for him is defined as being skilled at living the good life.

A fair amount of subsequent philosophers missed this original goal, and I suspect that is why a lot of philosophy seems pointless.

I agree on the procrustics. I would say the traditionalism is just an accident of the more fundamental problem which is sacrificing truth to the cause. Look at all the crazy things believed by both Nazi and communist regimes, and how maintaining the personality cult at expense of the truth was paramount, e.g. the Nazi belief in an orbiting ice planet that housed the true race, or the communist agriculture theory promoted because a son of peasants came up with the idea. I see this same thing happening in our culture on all sides.

This sort of thing struck me reading gulag archipelago. The courts used the class struggle dialectic to make any enemies of Lenin or Stalin criminals, regardless of what they'd actually done. I see this sort of thing all throughout our culture, not just Qanon.