Stupid Questions September 2015

Within four years, Google hopes to have the autonomous vehicles commercially available and citizens throughout the U.S. regularly riding in them, Urmson said.

Google Inc. threw the auto industry another curve ball Wednesday, saying its autonomous cars should be on public roads within five years without having to drive through a thicket of regulatory red tape.

Both sources are from 2015, the first one from january, second from last week. I think it unlikely (<10%) that they are going to overperfom by more than a single year, and very likely (70%) to take at least a year longer.

Remember, its not only a technological problem, but the inertia in a vast system. Insurance+lawmakers etc need to finish their side as well.

Elon Musk, someone who can reasonably called domain expert on innovative car systems, gives the same range:

The three-year estimate, Musk says, is when he thinks the technology will be ready. It could take longer for government regulations around the issue to go into effect. He acknowledged that it will take time for regulators to say "it's okay to go to sleep in the car" -- maybe another one to three years.

Note that I only looked up Musks opinion after I wrote the first part.

the possibility of getting a driverless car in a few years

Depends on how long is your "few", but note that you'll need for the driverless cars to not only become available to the public, but also stop being bleeding-edge expensive. Look at Teslas -- they are available to the public, but they are not cheap.

Why not buy a used car anyway? New cars often lose a lot of their value the moment you buy them.

Why would you want to deskill yourself like that?

Reminds me of your enthusiasm for sexbots. Apparently in your version of the future with self-driving cars and sexbots, you will turn a whole lot of adolescent boys into adult men who don't know how to drive and who have no clue how to get into organic sexual relationships with women.

At least I know how to drive.

I've never been in this situation, but one question I'm confused about is how both sides arrive at an appropriate-sized bribe. What's the stop them taking everything you have?

Yes, look at the ratio of a stock's price to it's current earnings to get a good prediction of how the company's earnings will change over the next decade.

Yes, of course, though it depends on what you consider "useful".

No, companies are too complicated. To address your particular example, Intel has three advantages over its competitors. One is that it pushes the boundary of Moore's law, the one point you are interested in. But the other two are that it is probably the best in the world at arranging transistors and that it has close to a monopoly on the 386 architecture, and thus inertia. Even if Moore's law did break down, it is not clear how long it would take for the competitors to catch up.

Yes; informal and crowdsourced ones where you can download and use without restriction include:

• https://my.pgp-hms.org
• https://opensnp.org
• http://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Genomes
• http://genomesunzipped.org/data
• you can probably also dig up some non-included ones using good old search engines and searching for phrases unique to a 23andMe or other genotyping data export file, eg https://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=%23%20This%20data%20file%20generated%20by%2023andMe%20

Probably a lot of overlap between them, though, so you would need to de-duplicate.

Various scientific/professional genome datasets are available; for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1000_Genomes_Project makes their 1k genomes available (but lacks any phenotype data). I don't have a complete list of those and probably a lot of them would put a lot of barriers in the way of access. You could look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Human_genome_projects but don't expect much: privacy and 'medical ethics' and 'publish or perish' are why we can't have nice things, and why there's only a few thousand public genotypes even though we must be well past the million mark by now, considering 23andMe has done 700k+.

(I compiled this list of open DNA sources because I was curious about the possibility of checking for dysgenic trends by downloading all of them and then correlating the Rietveld SNP hits with reported age; as they have some of the largest effects and there's 7+ of them now, I figure that if the postulated dysgenics effect of the better educated reproducing less was true, then it almost surely has been decreasing their frequency over the past few generations. 1000 Genomes is useless because they deliberately omit phenotype data like age, but I've already verified that there are a few hundred genomes in PGP with age/birthdate data, which may be enough. Still need to do a power analysis/simulation to see if it's worth bothering.)

Has anyone in the world published their 23andme data openly?

Here is mine.

Yes: http://manu.sporny.org/2011/public-domain-genome/

We know, and can formalize, what the upper limits of computing are. We have no idea what the upper limits of physics are. Even if we assume we know all the things there are to know about physics, that doesn't mean clever engineering can't come up with a way of doing it.

Even if you only move at a fraction of the speed of light, you could reach all the stars in a galaxy in a few million years. In the 1960s engineers came up with a way of travelling 1-10% of the speed of light using nuclear bombs. There was another proposal IIRC that used a giant collector in the front to grab hydrogen molecules, and could somehow reach 70% of the speed of light.

If you have nanotech, you can shoot millions of very tiny, pin sized or smaller, spacecraft at significant speeds. Even if only a tiny fraction reach their destination, the nanotech on board could self replicate, and create trillions more.

Colonizing the galaxy is a political problem, not a question of engineering possibility. A sufficiently zealous world government could jump-start asteroid mining with an Orion Heavy Lifter, construct mirror arrays near the sun, and start lobbing around interstellar VNMs, all with relatively simple refinement and application of existing technologies. Problem is, the best way of putting a complete industrial base into orbit runs afoul of certain atmospheric nuclear test ban treaties.

Without a reactionless drive there's no point sending a colony ship faster than about 60% of the speed of light. Gotta save some remass to decelerate.

Yes, buy index funds on U.S., EU, and Australian stocks. The ideal index fund would invest in every single asset class in the world in proportion to that asset's relative size in the world's economy.

I don't know for sure, but the answer is very probably yes. I recommend searching http://www.bogleheads.org/forum/ for Australia-specific info.

Is there some reason punching 'minimalist free personal finance software' into Google did not help you out?

http://www.ledger-cli.org/ is minimalist in some dimensions, I think less so in others.

Whatever Open/Libre Office calls their spreadsheet.

Not sure how minimalist you want to go, though. A shell and a filesystem are sufficient, if you want to be really minimalist :-/

I use Mint.com to great effect. It's free, it allows you to track all your bank accounts and investments and any property you care to keep track of. It also lets you set budgets.

It doesn't do anything for tracking time.

If you use it you will inevitably find shortfalls. For example, you will inevitably wish that you could apply this month's budget assumptions to previous months in order to test out the budget's performance, and you'll realize that you can't do that. But all software has limitations.

pocketbook; YNAB (you need a budget)

Notepad/TextEdit. If you want a few more features than that, MySQL. If you want a few more features than that, http://www.gnucash.org/

I consider it an actual phenomenon, but I'm not sure it's a phenomenon of somebody's eyes (facial expressions, technically speaking) or of my own perception.

Essentially, it's a snap judgement of whether a person is bright or dull and, in my experience, it works out quite well.

There's a good chance you'll have a second elephant failure while the first one is giving birth to a replacement, so at least use RAID6.

Or ZFS RAIDZ2. That's also great.

It will eventually become an elephant graveyard, anyway, so use zfs :-P

Sounds like epiphenomenalism.

Isn't that how it works right now? I mean, we actually "feel sad" and we actually "have thoughts".

In a sense, that's what ordinary materialists believe in: Oh look, here's this system which happens to be an instance of conscious thought! That's part of a soul!

It's just pattern-recognition, but that's all a read-only soul is.

When someone does something nice for you say "Thank You, that was very nice because...." and really mean it.

This feels to me like something that could be very different for different people.

Someone I know on Facebook just did a "say something nice about yourself" thread, and the result has been warm fuzzies all around.

Perhaps buying coffees for people in line around me?

That seems like a cheap experiment. Have you tried it? What else have you tried for purchasing warm fuzzies?

GiveWell for warm fuzzies

GiveNice ;-)

What are the 'best buys' in warm fuzzies?

Aka how to buy love cheap. Or is it self-love? X-)

Will you be paying in dollars?

Some people may make arguments for morality based on things similar to Coherent Extrapolated Volition. I don't find those arguments convincing. I help people I don't know because when I think about the alternatives, I prefer the world in which one fewer person is suffering to the one where I'm better off in whatever way (e.g., I have more money in my bank account) because I didn't help. That preference is based on empathy, which was evolved, but I don't particularly care where it came from. At some point that preference gets outweighed by selfish preferences, which is why I haven't given all of my money away.

I don't think maximally helping others is a particularly good way to maximize your own quality of life unless you already want to do that. Both (a) and (b) are true, but if your goal is maximizing your own quality of life you're almost certainly going to do better if you focus on that directly. At least, in my particular case, there's some amount of warm fuzzies I get from helping people and from identifying as someone who tries to effectively help people. So in that way my quality of life is improved. But I think that if I wanted to I could get that amount of fuzzies at a lower cost.

It's an investment.

When you have some asset that you don't immediately need, and somebody else would be able to make better use of it, renting it out or giving it away enriches the whole system. Then you get to live in that richer system and enjoy the benefits. Your quality of life is better when you live somewhere with reliable electricity, uncensored internet, and trivial access to potable water, right? A fancy car isn't much fun without fuel or decent roads.

Helping somebody on an altruistic basis is just another transfer of resources toward where they'll be used more efficiently. It's less directly profitable to the donor than sale or rent, but reduced transaction costs and targeting explicitly based on need means the net societal benefit can be greater.

Maximizing overall QALYs may be, in itself, a less efficient way to improve the society you live in than slanting toward helping your immediate social circle, municipality, or nation, but it's easier for everyone to agree on, and every dollar or man-hour spent on arguments is one less to spend on getting the actual work done. Besides, we live in a world where more of the mercury contaminating fish in Lake Michigan comes from industry in China than from local sources. You never know whose problems might land in your back yard, so just go ahead and solve all of them.

All that social stuff, instinctive empathy and cultural expectations alike, is secondary. It developed so people can do the right thing without needing to understand why it's the right thing.

Yes, it's Adam Smith's invisible hand at work creating incentives for highly self-interested people to take actions which better society.

Capitalism sets up rules based on practicality and repeated interactions between people, which means that they actually make sense to follow even if you are purely selfish. In a system where the rules are based on empathy or ideology, the psychopath will have ZERO desire to follow the rules if they won't get caught, but because interacting peacefully in trade with people actually pays off they get incentivized not to just do whatever they might impulsively want.

Another advantage of capitalism is that it limits some of the local power of sociopaths who are heads of families and landowners and such. Money is less entangled in systems of obligation than a more personal set-up.

I'd say it's not so much following rules as being productive. The value of capitalism is that embezzlement, bribery and the like are less often the most personally profitable course than they are under other systems.

Why would they feel bound by the rules of capitalism but not by rules of other types of societies?

Every game has rules and every rule can be gamed. What makes you think that sociopaths are rendered less threatening when living in a capitalist society? If anything, it seems like capitalism would be a highly advantageous environment for a sociopath compared to a society where all important economic entities are mired in government oversight.

What would you expect to get out of copy-pasting code to do a ML competition?

Literally every competition has people post code that gets ok results. Just search in the forum for "beat the benchmark". This is intended to help beginners get started.

A pulsing motion of what sort, and how tightly do you draw a line around 'big bang'? We can see by direct observation that things have been continually getting further apart for the past 13-odd billion years or so, and the earliest thing we can see is consistent with there not being a whole lot of structure before then.

Even if the behavior in the very beginning is different than we usually expect, that seems like a big bang to me.

It's better to think about the Big Bang as an admission of failure: using our best stitching of the two best theories that we have about the universe, and extrapolating back the data at hand as further as we can, we arrive to a point where our description breaks down (the singularity).
Will a better theory cast a brighter light on this point in space-time? I assign a 99.9% probability that it will.
I think that only the most zealot between relativists bite the bullet that inside a black hole there's actually a point where the gravitational field reaches an infinite value. And given that the more time passes the more paradoxes we discover about black holes, I'd say that quantum gravity will revolutionize our understanding of singularities. So my probability to Big Bang actually happening is 0.1%

That there was a finite time in the past in which all matter was squeezed tight and hot enough to undergo primordial nuclear reactions, and that the universe has expanded since, is pretty dang incontrovertible at this point. The nature of that event is still up for debate. Examining the fine details of light of different ages continues to reveal things, like the expansion appearing to initially slow followed by accelerating which is currently best explained by a dark energy model which is also favored for reasons relating to physical models of space I am unprepared to examine.

Most are elderly and are in nursing homes paid for by the federal government.

Some combination of Social Security Disability payments, caring friends and family, private-sector charities, and hospital emergency rooms that aren't allowed to check for ability to pay before providing treatment. It's a bad system with a lot of cracks to fall through, and a distressing number of poor people suffer miserable pointless deaths.

There's some sense of a social safety net that catches people. Sometimes it doesn't catch them and they die.

Flow. Love is pretty good too.

Infinite holodeck time.

Conan: Crush your enemies. See them driven before you. Hear the lamentations of their women.

Taboo "best". What are you trying to optimize for?

"The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters."

The man who said that is suspected of being an ancestor of about 8% of all living Asians so you probably should listen to him :-P

Something as close as possible to living in the wild with a small band of kin and allies.*

*Answer only valid if a posthuman overmind is ensuring the continuing safety and prosperity of the band, providing novel but conquerable challenges, and ensuring sufficient foraging materials such that the band has ample leisure time to engage in artistic and social recreation.

Wireheading seems like a perfectly reasonable answer to me.

Look at how people who are rich, attractive, healthy, and smart spend their free time.

That entirely depends on your utility function / preferences; one could make general statements based on certain preferences that the vast majority of humans share in common, but that's not specific to you, nor does it say anything about non-human preferences. I suppose one could find certain irresistible trends in agent preferences that are constrained by game theory, but those would be completely generic goals like "get more resources", and probably wouldn't satisfy the complex psychology of a human.

Well this certainly lives up to the discussion thread title. This is an ill posed question because it selectively carves out a very specific definition of human value for obviously ideological reasons. Why is capital the definitive measure of contributions to the human race? What about the wheel (Mesopotamians), what about fire (Africans - geographically, probably no one knows the taxonomy but certainly not northern Eurasians). What about geometry? Or perhaps something fairly important called numbers. Are those not knowledge?

It definitely gives some credence to either biological or cultural arguments for innovation.

The fallacy is in the use of the word "evolved."

If you take a random sampling of ten thousand modern humans and scatter them across an undeveloped planet, what will happen is basically:

• The ones who live in horrific environments will barely manage to survive and fail to develop technologically.

• The ones who live in environments with plentiful game and foraging availability but with minimal agricultural potential will not perceive any pressure to drive innovation.

• The ones who live in environments most conducive to agriculture, with a harsh enough climate that saving food for the winter is a good idea, will eventually develop agriculture.

The selection pressures on technological development work orders of magnitude faster than the selection pressures on intelligence.

That this is not a good measure of that?