November 2012 Media Thread

In descending order of how much I liked them, I read in October nonfiction:

• When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God, Luhrmann
• Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus, Carrier
• Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together, Schneier
• Walden, Thoreau
• Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, Murray
• Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, Crawford
• When Prophecy Fails, Festinger
• Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche
• Psychiatry And The Human Condition, Charlton

The Personal MBA

Generally I hate business stuff but this book presents it really well, references modern cognitive science and avoids the bullshit management speak. Were I feeling cheesy I'd call it "a business book for rationalists" (they even quote Eleizer).

Disclaimer, since I've never read any other proper business books so I don't know how someone with more domain specific knowledge would find it.

Does anyone want to share Good Read accounts? Here's mine.

Church & Regis, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves.

Choice quote:

For all the benefits its promises, synthetic biology is potentially more dangerous than chemical or nuclear weaponry, since organisms can self-replicate, spread rapidly throughout the world, and mutate and evolve on their own...

So, how should we prioritize our research and life goals? ...We could join George Mallory, who justified a huge and risky effort with the phrase "Because it's there" — referring to Mount Everest where his body was lost, frozen in ice, for 75 years. But this is to blunder along blindly...

As a general goal I propose that, as a minimum, we ought to avoid the loss of all intelligent life in the universe.

The authors mention the singularity, and Singularity University, shortly after that, and they cite Good and Vinge and Kurzweil, but they ignore Yudkowsky and Singularity Institute.

I recommend Harry Potter and the Natural 20. I noticed a recommendation for it in a thread somewhere here, then there was another recommendation at HPMoR. It's quite good, even if it requires an understanding of D&D.

It's just occurred to me recently to recommend this, but one of my favorite all time works of literature is White Noise by Don DeLillo. It's a pretty decent satire of modern consumptionism, academia, media, and other aspects of society. But I read it a year and a half ago though, before I had really been exposed to anything from LessWrong - to my recollection, there is nothing in it that would bother me now, although I'm not entirely certain of that. If anyone else has read it, I would appreciate their comment on this.

As a trigger warning, it also explores violence as a theme and there are a couple of moderately graphic scenes, if I recall correctly.

I, Robot is a stupid movie, but I'll always remember what Will Smith says to one of the robots:

"You are a clever imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? … Can a robot take a blank canvas and turn it into a masterpiece?"

Not even a decade after the film's release and robots are already writing symponies and turning blank canvases into masterpieces.

I'm about 17 years late to the party here, but I've been really enjoying watching Neon Genesis Evangelion, a Japanese anime series about giant robots, Christian symbolism*, and teen angst. It's really atmospheric and intense a lot of the time, although given what I'd heard before the thing that's surprised me the most is how funny the more comedic scenes are.

Also, Does anyone have any recommendations for good anime series? Apparently I've been missing out.

*Or possibly Christian literalism depending on how the main plot arc works out - I'm only halfway through.

So, My Little Pony resumed today. For those who haven't tried it yet, I recommend it! It's cute and fun and happy.

Anyway, I had been both excited about new episodes and afraid for my (still under construction) fanfiction- sweeping changes to canon might require sweeping changes to the fanfiction. The episodes were just as much fun to watch as I expected, but better yet, everything new in this episode dovetailed neatly with what I'd written, with many of the changes making things even easier for me. (Instead of having to concoct a reason for Twilight to research rationality, now it's basically been handed to me, so long as I jump on the opportunity quickly enough.)

Re-watched Boogiepop Phantom. Had a hard time getting a watchable copy: the old fansub is quite old, and the filters and muddy image effects that BP was originally produced with do not come out well at all. Rewatching it was interesting since I first watched it a very long time ago, I think somewhere around 2003 or 2004. I found it incomprehensible back then, but watching it now, I understand better the overlapping storylines and flashbacks & forwards as they construct the overall story. Payoffs are spaced out curiously, and I find myself questioning the timing: wouldn't it have been much better to combine the really creepy red balloon plot with the Manticore plot, so as to not put too much spotlight on either and dilute the creepiness?

The British folk band "Show of hands" has some good songs that touch on rationalist/skeptic issues. E.g. Worried Well, IED:Science or Nature and (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvCHWT2Lxxo)[Evolution.] Their other contemporary stuff is also good, but I don't know how it would play out of a uk context.

Katzenjammer, a band from Norway. It's one of the rare occasions when I enjoy almost every piece of music by one band and not only one or two songs, as usually. Nice, melodic songs with interesting lyrics.

Examples: lSoviet Trumpeter Demon Kitty Rag Virginia Clemm

Someone arranged some Carl Sagan sayings for small choir and piano. Not being komponisto, I'll refrain from going in-depth, but it's fun, so you should give it a listen.

I was just going to post about liking Mumford and Sons new album, Babel, but while making sure I wasn't double-posting a recommendation, found that it doesn't seem like much modern folkish stuff has been posted at all, so:

Mumford and Sons- (example (from new album)- Hopeless Wanderer)- These guys are the most popular of the genre, and get a lot of radio play (but they're good). If you listen to the radio at all, you probably have heard their song "Little Lion Man".

The Unseen Guest- (example- Let Me In)- Unseen Guest is a mix of Western songs with Indian instruments. Not quite "folk", but I like them enough to put them in this list anyways. They are the least known group in this list. They don't even have a website, or wikipedia page, so you can be all hipster. But everyone who gives them a try, loves them.

Eddie Vedder- (example- Rise)- Although well-known as the front man for Pearl Jam, Vedder's solo work has a different very down-to-earth sound. His two solo albums include the soundtrack for Into the Wild, and a collection of ukulele songs, called Ukulele Songs.

Ray LaMontagne and the Prairie Dogs (example- Empty)- Generic folk singer, but I still love it, and a folk list wouldn't be complete without it.

...I'll stop now.

The Mountain Goats have some really great music. It's the kind of music the focus of which is the lyrics, which is something I look for. I'm not sure if these are my favorite songs by them, but they are among them: No Children, This Year (weird video), and The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton.

Based on army1987's recommendation, and the fact that I have previously liked music by Muse, I downloaded The Second Law. Most of it was pretty decent, although none of the songs lived up to some of their other music.

One of my favorite YouTube signers just covered "The Future Soon" by Jonathan Coulton. Sample lyric:

Il'l see her standing by the monorail
She'll look the same except for bionic eyes
She lost the real ones in the robot wars
I'll say I'm sorry, she'll say its not your fault
Or is it?
And she'll eye me suspiciously
Hearing the whir of the servos inside

I'm really enjoying Coheed and Cambria's new album (the second part is releasing in early February), though it may not be for everyone. Their music is an interesting mix of pop-oriented prog rock (with some emo and metal) and it comes with a sci-fi story along with each album. It might be better to listen to their albums chronologically, I rank the albums [1,2,4,3,6,5] in terms of how much I enjoy listening to them most to least.

The British folk band "Show of hands" has some good songs that touch on rationalist/skeptic issues. E.g. Worried Well, IED:Science or Nature and Evolution. Their other contemporary stuff is also good, but I don't know how it would play out of a uk context.

The new XCOM game is ridiculously addictive. I only managed to break my addiction by setting a sufficiently high difficulty that play became frustrating, and I'm still in danger of relapsing.

You may take this as a recommendation or a caution. :-)

Since we still don't have a lectures/talks thread I put it here:

http://fora.tv/conference/the_singularity_summit_2012/buy_programs

The Singularity Summit 2012

Content:

• Singularity Summit: Opening Remarks with Nathan Labenz
• Temple Grandin: How Different People Think Differently
• Singularity Summit: Olah, Deming & Other Thiel Fellows
• Julia Galef: Rationality and the Future
• Luke Muehlhauser: The Singularity, Promise and Peril
• Linda Avey: Personal Genomics
• Steven Pinker: A History of Vio
• Ray Kurzweil: How to Create a Mind
• Q&A: Economist Daniel Kahneman, the Pioneer of Heuristics
• Melanie Mitchell: AI and the Barrier of Meaning
• Author Carl Zimmer: Our Viral Future
• Robin Hanson: Extraordinary Society of Emulated Minds
• Jaan Tallinn: Why Now? A Quest in Metaphysics
• John Wilbanks: Your Health, Your Data, Your Choices
• Stuart Armstrong: How We're Predicting AI
• Vernor Vinge: Who's Afraid of First Movers?
• Peter Norvig: Channeling the Flood of Data

Funny strip about seeing yourself as an NPC.

A Slower Speed of Light is a first-person game prototype in which players navigate a 3D space while picking up orbs that reduce the speed of light in increments:

http://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/

If you want a free computer game that is highly delightful and not especially addictive, I recommend Cave Story. (Even in the worst case, if you feel overly compelled to play it, it's an RPG with a finite storyline so its opportunity for damage is pretty limited.)

There really is an art to finding break activities that have a high rejuvenation rate per minute but can also be put down easily...

I am terribly amused by the parody Nate Silver twitter feed:

A man boasts to me of Momentum, his greatest invention. "To victory," he cries, taking flight. I light a candle from the wax of his wings.

Go to the ocean. Cup your hands and drink its salty foam. This is your sample size. What lurks within its abyssal depths?

Lloyd, A Turing Test for Free Will:

Before Alan Turing made his crucial contributions to the theory of computation, he studied the question of whether quantum mechanics could throw light on the nature of free will. This paper investigates the roles of quantum mechanics and computation in free will. Although quantum mechanics implies that events are intrinsically unpredictable, the ‘pure stochasticity’ of quantum mechanics adds randomness only to decision-making processes, not freedom. By contrast, the theory of computation implies that, even when our decisions arise from a completely deterministic decision-making process, the outcomes of that process can be intrinsically unpredictable, even to—especially to—ourselves. I argue that this intrinsic computational unpredictability of the decision-making process is what gives rise to our impression that we possess free will. Finally, I propose a ‘Turing test’ for free will: a decision-maker who passes this test will tend to believe that he, she, or it possesses free will, whether the world is deterministic or not.

Glitch is an excellent infinite peaceful MMORPG that involves harvesting from egg plants and making cheese from butterfly butter. After two days I vowed never to play it again lest I become addicted and die.

Doom: Repercussions of Reaction

Multiheaded waited. The posts above him got downvoted and hidden from view. There were reactionaries on Less Wrong. He didn't see them, but had expected them now for years. His warnings to Konkvistador were not listenend to and now it was too late. Far too late for now, anyway. Multiheaded was a neurotic leftist for four years. When he was young he watched the internet debates and he said to dad "I want to be on the net daddy."

Dad said "No! You will BE TROLL BY REACTIONARIES!"

There was a time when he believed him. Then as he got oldered he stopped. But now in the Discussion section of LW he knew there were reactionaries.

"This is Konkvistador" the inbox crackered. "You must fight the reactionaries!"
So Multiheaded gotted his freudo-marxism and replied to comments.
"HE GOING TO KILL US" said the reactionaries
"I will troll at him" said the moldbugger and he fired the unqualified reservations. Multiheaded zizek'd at him and tried to blew him up. But then the server fell and they were trapped and not able to troll.

"No! I must kill the reactionaries" he typed.
The inbox said "No, Multiheaded. You are the reactionaries"
And then Multiheaded was a fascist.