September 2016 Media Thread

Potential Risks from Advanced Artificial Intelligence: The Philanthropic Opportunity by Holden Karnofsky. Somehow missed this when it was posted in May.

Compare, for example, Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI) one of the most highly upvoted posts ever on LessWrong.

Edit: See also Some Key Ways in Which I've Changed My Mind Over the Last Several Years

Everything is heritable:

• Evolution:

  • "Divergent Ah receptor ligand selectivity during hominin evolution", Hubbard et al 2016 (Evolution to tolerate smoke poisoning, 350-45kya)
  • "Genetic Markers of Human Evolution Are Enriched in Schizophrenia", Srinivasan et al 2016 (Our evolution is not yet complete: evolution is still working out the kinks. Fortunately, we don't have to wait for it to finish the job.)
  • "Genetic Associations Between Personality Traits and Lifetime Reproductive Success in Humans", Berg et al 2016 (contemporary selection for personality traits)
  • "How cognitive genetic factors influence fertility outcomes: A mediational SEM analysis", Woodley et al 2016 (More on dysgenics in the USA: mostly mediated through education's effects on fertility.)
  • "Humans Never Stopped Evolving: The emergence of blood abnormalities, an adult ability to digest milk, and changes in our physical appearance point to the continued evolution of the human race"
  • "Rapid evolutionary response to a transmissible cancer in Tasmanian devils", Epstein et al 2016 (quick evolution through soft selection sweeps)
• "Phenome-wide Heritability Analysis of the UK Biobank", Ge et al 2016 (SNP heritability for 551 complex traits)
• "Identification of 15 genetic loci associated with risk of major depression in individuals of European descent", Hyde et al 2016
• "Associations between Polygenic Risk for Psychiatric Disorders and Substance Involvement", Carey et al 2016
• "Genetic Prediction of Male Pattern Baldness", Hagenaars et al 2016 (baldness GCTA of 52%, and GWAS with 250 new hits from the UK Biobank.)
• "Sweet Taste Perception is Associated with Body Mass Index at the Phenotypic and Genotypic Level", Hwang et al 2016
• "Analysis of Intellectual Disability Copy Number Variants for Association With Schizophrenia", Rees et al 2016 (more on the pervasive genetic overlap between mental illnesses/intellectual problems)
• "Heritability and causal reasoning", Lynch 2016
• "Genes, Evolution and Intelligence", Bouchard 2014
• "Prevalence of Congenital Amusia", Peretz & Vuvan 2016

Politics/religion:

• "Evolution is Not Relevant to Sex Differences in Humans Because I Want it That Way! Evidence for the Politicization of Human Evolutionary Psychology", Geher & Gambacorta 2016
• "Science Is Not Always "Self-Correcting": Fact-Value Conflation and the Study of Intelligence", Cofnas 2015 (scientific endorsement of the Noble Lie) Academia, liberalism, and propensity to blank slate beliefs like believing hens & roosters differ due to nurture:
• "Insane. Invisible. In danger. Florida cut \$100 million from its mental hospitals. Chaos quickly followed"
• "The Drugs Won: The Case for Ending the Sports War on Doping"
• "Incorruptibly Evil"
• "Is God an Accident?"
• "The Lie Factory: How politics became a business"
• "Intelligence challenged people and free speech"
• Stanislav Petrov

AI:

• "Decoupled Neural Interfaces using Synthetic Gradients", Jaderberg et al 2016 (DeepMind explainer; potentially allows for extreme parallelization of neural nets across GPUs)
• "Why does deep and cheap learning work so well?", Lin & Tegmark 2016 (Tegmark tries to explain from a physics perspective why deep learning works.)
• "Densely Connected Convolutional Networks", Huang et al 2016 (A new twist on highway/residual/fractal networks, with further records set on image tasks.)
• "How To Save Mankind From The New Breed of Killer Robots" (Tool AIs want to become agent AIs.)
• "Apprenticeship learning using Inverse Reinforcement Learning"

Statistics/meta-science:

• "How Multiple Imputation Makes a Difference", Lall 2016 (many political science results biased & driven by treatment of missing data)
• Fundamental theorem of poker
• "Dynamic Programming in Python: Bayesian Blocks"

Psychology/biology:

• "Long-Term Outcomes Associated with Traumatic Brain Injury in Childhood and Adolescence: A Nationwide Swedish Cohort Study of a Wide Range of Medical and Social Outcomes", Sariaslan et al 2016 (Terrifyingly large within-family estimates, and the risk increases with age in adolescence.)
• "Heads or tails: the impact of a coin toss on major life decisions and subsequent happiness", Levitt 2016 (You can randomize anything if you're sufficiently clever about it - even having babies, quitting jobs, moving, or starting a business. Arguably, like computer chess or 'comfort zone expansion', this suggests humans may be too risk-averse: the people on the margin, the 6% who apparently could be swayed by a coin flip, should be making these decisions more often, suggesting a bias towards the status quo.)
• "The Long-Term Impact of International Migration on Economic Decision-Making: Evidence from a Migration Lottery and Lab-in-the-Field Experiments", Gibson et al 2016 (Many traits are stable. Migrants aren't going to become more patient, intelligent, peaceful, pro-capitalism, or long-term oriented just because they've immigrated to your country.)
• "To Study or to Sleep? The Academic Costs of Extra Studying at the Expense of Sleep", Gillen-O'Neel et al 2013
• "We Add Near, Average Far"

A Quantum of Consciousness

Broadly speaking, suggestions about the mechanisms that might cause consciousness can be grouped into three: (i) the vital spark of life, (ii) an emergent property from basic control functions of the central nervous system and (iii) a special relationship between spooky quantum interactions and life.

But repeated experiments have shown that electron transfer in photosynthesis has an efficiency greater than ninety-nine percent, probably because of superposition and electron tunnelling.

And evidence is gathering that many enzymes may use spookiness for electron transfer. Enzymes are the classic controlling agents for the body’s biochemistry: the hierarchy is that DNA makes RNA makes enzymes, which then go on to regulate everything else. Many other biological systems are currently being investigated for quantum influences such as vision, olfaction, magnetoreception (detecting magnetic fields) and Brownian motors (typically nano-scale engines in a cell that convert chemical into mechanical energy)."

"Maybe, just maybe, consciousness is an emergent property of the positive and negative feedbacks between quantum mechanics effects at the level of single ions and an overarching electromagnetic field around the brain."

"To conclude we have no evidence that consciousness and self-awareness are caused by the number of links in a digital system."

http://www.baen.com/quantum_consciousness

Im reading "Collapse" by J. Diamond now, so this caught my eye..

Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0R09YzyuCI

EDIT: Perhaps I should say why this is relevant. Xrisk isn't just things which could destroy humanity outright, but also things from which we never recover. I'm also interested in building robust institutions which can survive unexpected circumstances, and have positive impact over centuries to influence the far future. (Nobel Prize Foundaton, DARPA's 100 year Starship, Long Now Foundation, etc.) Perhaps cryonicists will also find it interesting.

There was a recent TED talk on what makes systems robust in changing environments.

He starts with the example of the immune system, then mentions long-lived social systems (catholic church, roman empire), but goes on to focus mainly on applications to businesses that want to survive black swan events and industry disruption.

This flows somewhat counter to conventional wisdom, which says to optimize for growth by putting all your eggs into whichever basket has the largest growth rate or market.

He lists 6 characteristic that all these robust, long-lived systems have in common: Redundancy, Diversity, Modularity, Adaptation, Prudence, and Embeddedness.

• Fortune's Formula, Poundstone 2005 (review)
• The Future of Machine Intelligence: Perspectives from Leading Practitioners, ed Beyer 2016 (short 80pg ebook of interviews with ML experts; some are notable, like Ilya Sutskever, some much less so (an evolutionary computation guy? what has that field done in years?) but all interviews are so short, ~5 pages, that they hardly get into any depth, and it's a waste of time.)

Just adding this to my booklist, by Carlo Rovelli, the LQG guy.

The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy

https://www.amazon.com/Anaximander-Carlo-Rovelli/dp/159416262X/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

A history of philosophy and science.

"Most of the book is on the history and philosophy of science as well as the nature and evolution of religious thought. In fact, the book's main theme is how scientific thinking was liberated from mythic-religious thinking. This is centered on Anaximander since it is believed that he played a key role in this revolution, having lived in the appropriate period."

And an interview

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/the-philosophy-of-guessing-has-harmed-physics-expert-says/

One of his more amusing papers on Loop Quantum Gravity, is about building a framework of the universe without time.

"Following a line of research that I have developed for several years, I argue that the best strategy for understanding quantum gravity is to build a picture of the physical world where the notion of time plays no role. I summarize here this point of view, explaining why I think that in a fundamental description of nature we must "forget time", and how this can be done in the classical and in the quantum theory. The idea is to develop a formalism that treats dependent and independent variables on the same footing. In short, I propose to interpret mechanics as a theory of relations between variables, rather than the theory of the evolution of variables in time. "

http://arxiv.org/abs/0903.3832

Scott Bakker published the latest book in his 2nd Apocalypse series. The Great Ordeal. It's pretty awesome.

The series is 6 books in. The basic premise is that there is a secret monastery where people train to try and become fully aware of themselves, in the sense that they understand why/how they do everything. Mental martial artists, if that makes any sense, ultimate goal is to become "self moving souls", and escape the tyranny of cause and effect. Our protag has to leave the monastery and go out into the world, which is a typical fantasy bronze age hellhole.

I interviewed Zoltan Istvan (Transhumanist party Presidential candidate), Greg Cochran (expert on genetics and intelligence), and Phil Torres (founder of the XrisksInstitute) on my future strategist podcast. The Cochran interview has 4,266 listens. I had my best podcast moment when I observed my 11-year-old son texting his best friend saying that his dad interviewed a presidential candidate.

The growing problem of Internet “link rot” and best practices for media and online publishers"

http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/internet/website-linking-best-practices-media-online-publishers

and

http://www.seospike.com/broken-links-finder

might be relevant for folks with their own websites...

• The Wind Rises
• The Dog of Flanders (a classic anime children's movie; aside from the unusual Belgian setting, not too much to recommend it for adults - cardboard characters and almost excruciatingly slow, with a few missteps like failing to establish chronology so the main character's eviction 'by Christmas' comes as a total surprise because the viewer still thinks it's autumn)

Gangaji

• Marty (1955) (while extraordinarily lauded at the time, and one of the first American films to be officially shown in the USSR post-WWII, I had never heard of Marty. It is a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of an archetype which usually is excoriated and made the butt of all jokes in movies, the omega male - a socially awkward and unmarried loser. It also gives a strong sense of time, location, and community in making the main characters 1950s Italian-Americans in NYC's The Bronx. The plot is simplicity: the awkward Marty is repeatedly hectored into socializing until by chance he encounters a shy woman who he gets along with, only for his friends & family to reconsider how Marty's success would harm them, and Marty overcomes their opposition and his own fears to continue the relationship. The point is more to watch Ernest Borgnine and Betsy Blair act their way through it in an enjoyable fashion, although I think much of the humor is too dated to amuse now.)