February 2017 Media Thread

Bruce Schneier's article on the IoT, and the danger it presents. Hits the highlights of security, crypto, and economic drive.

"The world-size robot is less designed than created. It's coming without any forethought or architecting or planning; most of us are completely unaware of what we're building. In fact, I am not convinced we can actually design any of this. When we try to design complex sociotechnical systems like this, we are regularly surprised by their emergent properties. The best we can do is observe and channel these properties as best we can."

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/02/security_and_th.html

Wallace's annotated copy of Darwin's Origin of Species

We hear about Wallace's courteousness in acknowledging Darwin's priority; this paper shows how Wallace kept reading the book, making valuable suggestions for future editions, and in general being the dream reviewer that so many people despair of ever finding. Even though there were matters on which Wallace and Darwin never agreed. They just rock!

Why’s Beijing So Worried About Western Values Infecting China’s Youth?

https://www.chinafile.com/features/whys-beijing-so-worried-about-western-values-infecting-chinas-youth

"For years, China’s leaders have feared that they’re losing their grip on the ideological loyalty of the country’s youth. According to official rhetoric, the forces wresting away young minds are cultural warfare waged through alluring foreign pop culture and the infiltration of “Western values.”

In late 2013, China established a national security committee to focus on “unconventional security threats,” including Western culture. A senior colonel working with the committee said that Hollywood movies were dangerously altering the thinking and values of China’s youth.

President Xi Jinping gave his first signal that higher education would be a key battleground in this struggle. “University Communist Party organs must adopt firmer and stronger measures to maintain harmony and stability in universities," he reportedly told a meeting of university Communist Party officials. “Young teachers have many interactions with students and cast significant [political and moral] influence on them. . . They also play a very important role in the spread of ideas.” “This is big and dark,” Minzner said. “This is several years in the making and it will likely roll out in colleges over the next several years. We don’t know how far it will go.”

and http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/13924/china-s-post-1980s-generation-between-the-nation-and-the-world

Why Do DMT Users See Insects From A Parallel Universe?

"This is an informal collection of tales regarding the strangest of possibilities -- encounters with praying-mantis like entities which occur after ingesting enteogenic compounds. Why is this so common? Nobody seems to mention spiders or grasshoppers, always mantids!"

http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/pc/dmtinsect.html

Robotic overlords beware, there is a preying mantis behind the curtain...

The 25th Amendment, explained: how a president can be declared unfit to serve"

"Yet that’s precisely why the 25th Amendment gives the power to the vice president and the Cabinet secretaries here. Their judgments won’t be skewed by political bias against the president’s party. They work with the president up close and see him in private. So if they see deeply troubling things, they are the ones who have the ability — and, arguably, the responsibility — to act."

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/2/9/14488980/25th-amendment-trump-pence

Elon Musk Is Wrong. We Aren't Living in a Simulation

"Once more, embracing an all-encompassing massive world simulation defeats its very nature. If the simulated apple replicates all properties of the apple, the simulated apple is the apple. " "And a simulated world is a myth too. The fact is that all minds we know of, human minds and possibly animal minds, are embodied and situated: they have a body and they partake of the physical world. We have never met a disembodied mind. We always meet bodies in the world."

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/we-dont-live-in-a-simulation

This paper by Kenneth Marcus describes a rhetorical technique called Accusation In A Mirror, which was used in Rwanda in the events leading up to genocide. Here's a quote which summarizes the technique.

"The basic idea of AiM is deceptively simple: propagandists must “impute to enemies exactly what they and their own party are planning to do.” In other words, AiM is a rhetorical practice in which one falsely accuses one’s enemies of conducting, plotting, or desiring to commit precisely the same transgressions that one plans to commit against them. For example, if one plans to kill one’s adversaries by drowning them in a particular river, then one should accuse one’s adversaries of plotting precisely the same crime. As a result, one will accuse one’s enemies of doing the same thing despite their plans. It is similar to a false anticipatory tu quoque: before one’s enemies accuse one truthfully, one accuses them falsely of the same misdeed.

"This may seem an unlikely means of inciting mass-murder, since it would intuitively seem likely not only to fail but also to backfire by publicly telegraphing its speakers’ malicious intentions at times when the speakers may lack the wherewithal to carry out their schemes. The counter-intuitiveness of this method is best appreciated when one grasps that its injunctions are to be taken literally."

From: Marcus, Kenneth L., Accusation in a Mirror (2012). Loyola University Chicago Law Journal, Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 357 - 393, 2012. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2020327

Leaked video shows new ‘nightmare-inducing’ wheeled robot from Boston Dynamics"

"experiment in combining wheels with legs, with a very dynamic system that is balancing itself all the time and has a lot of knowledge of how to throw its weight around.” He adds that using wheels is more efficient than legs, although there’s obviously a trade-off in terms of maneuvering over uneven ground.

http://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/2/1/14468126/boston-dynamics-new-wheeled-robot-handle?href=

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h5qpXO3isM&feature=youtu.be&t=3m45s

For new readers of LW, I have 29 part series of videos on game theory.

John Gustafson presents: Beyond Floating Point – Next Generation Computer Arithmetic

"“A new data type called a “posit” is designed for direct drop-in replacement for IEEE Standard 754 floats. Unlike unum arithmetic, posits do not require interval-type mathematics or variable size operands, and they round if an answer is inexact, much the way floats do. However, they provide compelling advantages over floats, including simpler hardware implementation that scales from as few as two-bit operands to thousands of bits. For any bit width, they have a larger dynamic range, higher accuracy, better closure under arithmetic operations, and simpler exception-handling. For example, posits never overflow to infinity or underflow to zero, and there is no “Not-a-Number” (NaN) value. Posits should take up less space to implement in silicon than an IEEE float of the same size. With fewer gate delays per operation as well as lower silicon footprint, the posit operations per second (POPS) supported by a chip can be significantly higher than the FLOPs using similar hardware resources. GPU accelerators, in particular, could do more arithmetic per watt and per dollar yet deliver superior answer quality.”

http://insidehpc.com/2017/02/john-gustafson-presents-beyond-floating-point-next-generation-computer-arithmetic/

https://youtu.be/aP0Y1uAA-2Y

And The Weak Suffer What They Must by Yanis Varoufakis https://yanisvaroufakis.eu/books/and-the-weak-suffer-what-they-must/nation-books-us-edition/

This is the book that Yanis Varoufakis wrote after resigning from being Greece's finance minister in 2015. It gives his perspective on the events he was part of, attempting to negotiate with the European Union and other creditors on behalf of Greec, and also on the history of the failed policies leading up to those events.

Women Who Love Psychopaths by Sandra L. Brown, Liane J. Leedom is a book that I wish I'd had years ago. It might have saved some of my friends from learning about what it's like to date a sociopath the hard way. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3234469-women-who-love-psychopaths

The dynamic described in the book also seems sadly relevant to what's going on in the political realm these days.

If after reading SlateStarCodex's post BOOK REVIEW: EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM you want to learn more about how other European nations "did or didn’t protect their Jews" I suggest reading Beyond Hitler's Grasp which discusses how Bulgaria saved many of its Jewish citizens.

Slow Catastrophes, Uncertain Revivals: Stories Inspired by Project Hieroglyph

Optimistic scifi stories with approaches to stabilizing or repairing the environment.

Project Hieroglyph is the brainstorm of Neal Stephenson, with a home at ASU in Az.

http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/2016/04/slow-catastrophes-uncertain-revivals-stories-inspired-by-project-hieroglyph/

There was a debate about Esperanto in an open thread about a month ago, so here are some songs in Esperanto.

• alia aventuro
• Chu vi pretas
• Dankon
• En Fabrikoj
• Estro
• Junaj idealistoj
• Kontra Krusadanto
• La Druido
• La grizeco
• La fina venk'
• Malbonulo
• Mi Staras
• Ni chiuj ni
• Pasio en Katen'
• Pli ol nenio
• Por La Rep'
• Samideano
• Superbazaro
• Tiel la Mondo Iras

I co-hosted a podcast discussing the three act story structure that I think was pretty good.

I did a podcast discussing my academic paper "The Fermi paradox and existential risk management."

Deep learning handbook from MIT, online html format only. Good maths overview.

http://www.deeplearningbook.org/

Google AI tool to combat trolling

https://phys.org/news/2017-02-google-ai-tool-combat-online.html

"Google said it will begin offering media groups an artificial intelligence tool designed to stamp out incendiary comments on their websites.

The programming tool, called Perspective, aims to assist editors trying to moderate discussions by filtering out abusive "troll" comments, which Google says can stymie smart online discussions.

https://www.gwern.net/newsletter/2017/01