Less Wrong link exchange

post by FiftyTwo · 2011-11-02T10:24:37.111Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 15 comments

Contents

15 comments

We've had similar threads before, but not for a while so I thought I'd make one. 

 

Basic rules, share links that are relevant to Less Wrong areas of interest, but aren't worthy of their own post. Please include a brief description with the link. (My own contributions are below.)

15 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.

comment by Alejandro1 · 2011-11-02T15:18:56.695Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Nate Silver on Herman Cain and the hubris of experts. Not really about politics in the mind-killing sense, but about uncertainty and overconfidence in political predictions. Both peter-hurford and me quoted from it on the monthly quotes thread.

Replies from: peter_hurford
comment by Peter Wildeford (peter_hurford) · 2011-11-03T03:24:33.862Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

It's a solid article just from its political science analysis; I obviously also recommend it.

comment by albert · 2011-11-05T03:29:37.692Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

So, first post in LW!

New TED Talks video about the role of Bayesian inference in controlling human movement: http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_wolpert_the_real_reason_for_brains.html

Replies from: KPier
comment by KPier · 2011-11-05T03:39:00.945Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Welcome! You should officially say hello; it's free karma.

Replies from: albert
comment by albert · 2011-11-05T05:31:37.489Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

thx, just said a nice hello!

comment by betterthanwell · 2011-11-03T11:54:46.850Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

BBC News: Signs of ageing halted in the lab

The onset of wrinkles, muscle wasting and cataracts has been delayed and even eliminated in mice, say researchers in the US. The study, published in Nature, focused on what are known as "senescent cells". They stop dividing into new cells and have an important role in preventing tumours from progressing.

comment by khafra · 2011-11-02T13:47:58.568Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

http://ai-class.syavash.com/naivebayes Someone in Norvig and Thrun's AI class made a bayesian classifier with laplacian smoothing. It shows you the complete equations generated and lets you set the text to classify, text in each training set, and smoothing parameter; so it's a great tool for direct instruction.

comment by FiftyTwo · 2011-11-02T10:27:34.812Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Cracked (humour website) on logical fallacies and cognitive biases.

Subheadings:

Most of which should be familiar but good example of presenting these ideas in a readable style. Might be a useful resource to point people to who would be put off by the style here.

Replies from: falenas108
comment by falenas108 · 2011-11-02T13:49:53.256Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

This actually got its own post a few days ago.

comment by FiftyTwo · 2011-11-02T10:26:28.669Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

The Guardian (prominent UK newspaper) on friendly (or otherwise) artificial general intelligence.

Interesting because its a 'popular culture' look at the basics of AI we might consider fairly basic. Might be a bit sensationalist, the tagline is "AI scientists want to make gods. Should that worry us? - Singularitarians believe artificial intelligence will be humanity's saviour. But they also assume AI entities will be benevolent"

Replies from: None, siodine
comment by [deleted] · 2011-11-02T11:05:17.627Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

What a disheartening article. The whole thing can be summed up with a quote from Three Major Singularity Schools:

Hey, man, have you heard? There’s this bunch of, like, crazy nerds out there, who think that some kind of unspecified huge nerd thing is going to happen. What a bunch of wackos! It’s geek religion, man.

Reading this article and the comments section really drove home how important rationality skills are when thinking about the future.

Replies from: FiftyTwo
comment by FiftyTwo · 2011-11-02T11:13:38.038Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Agreed. I hope you (and other LW people) contribute to the discussion to try and correct some of these misconceptions.

It is an important reminder of how strange and scary these ideas seem at first glance and the inferential distances involved.

comment by siodine · 2011-11-03T14:49:30.748Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

How would you estimate the percentage of LWers in the Singularitarian movement? Maybe most Singularitarians really are that clueless.

Replies from: jhuffman
comment by jhuffman · 2011-11-03T17:18:57.020Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

If you google Singularitarian, the obsolete singularitarian principles document on yudowsky.net is the second link. It would be good if the obsolete notice steered the reader to more current sources including LessWrong.

comment by albert · 2011-11-27T04:01:59.603Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

A nice A.I. themed movie for those who've never seen it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vn0cz7vYOcc all 10 parts on youtube