Open thread, June. 19 - June. 25, 2017

Interesting, how do you motivate the kids to want to learn?

That's one of those questions like "how do you play the violin" :-) There's no trick, you do it the hard way. I give lots of tiny exercises that are solvable but mildly challenging (typing, arithmetic, 2D coordinates, loops, etc). I make some simple game that fits in a screen of code, make the kids type it in from paper, then they naturally come up with tweaks and new features and add them with my help, so everyone ends up with a personalized game to show off. And so on.

(Why typing code from paper? Because kids start out unable to type. They need to practice it each lesson.)

The hardest part is getting the difficulty right, otherwise the kids run out of focus in 15 minutes and the rest of the lesson is wasted, or they solve everything too fast and get bored as well. I still get it wrong more than half the time, but when it works it feels great.

ChristianKl's suggestion of drama lessons doesn't seem like it would increase verbal abilities more than say reading,

Reading, writing, speaking and listening are all somewhat distinct skills; my guess would be that if you wanted to optimize verbal abilities, you'd want to encourage all four. Drama lessons sound like they would help with the speaking and listening skills in a way that reading doesn't.

Also I'm under the impression that if you have four interrelated skills A-D, even if you were only interested in optimizing A, spending some time on each of B-D also lets you learn A better. I don't have a formal cite for that, but at least this article discusses it.

ChristianKl's suggestion of drama lessons doesn't seem like it would increase verbal abilities more than say reading, but I'd be interested if anyone has evidence to offer about that.

Drama lessons train the ability to act in a specific scripted way in a social situation.

If I go in a hackerspace I don't see performance that can be modeled as an ordered list but rather as a highly complex graph. A ballet competition, on the other hand, does produce an ordered list.

Maybe it would help if we taboo art. What do you mean with the term when ballet and playing the piano are art but the kind of hacking you find at a hackerspace isn't?

The idea is not to ignore "social games" completely, but rather that some people - specifically, upper-class people - are in a risk of going too far, and seeing the world consisting of "social games" only. Mostly because they are liberated from forces that make lower classes play the "games with nature", such as having to bake your bread or having to keep a job.

Yes, division of labor is a good thing. Problem is, with any division, you need some kind of coordination: whether a person, or an impersonal market. But when you successfully do the revolution, you may kill the competent people and make the market illegal. Then, there may be many people who know how to grow grain and bake bread, but some activities necessary for this process may be made illegal and punished by death. The result is shortage of bread.

The king does not have to know how to make bread, but should not be so insane that he prevents anyone in his kingdom from making bread. And believing e.g. that "objective reality does not exist and everything is socially constructed" seems like a royal road to insanity; but at the same time it is easy to imagine how a person who only ever plays "social games" might find that credible.

There you go again, compulsively trying to round concepts off to something else!

Creating a distinct new concept in one's mind is an expensive operation (with both short term and long term costs), so I think it's only to be expected that people will try to match a supposedly new concept to an existing one and see if they can get away with just reusing the existing concept. I suggest that if you don't want people to do that, you should define your new concept as clearly as possible, give lots of both positive and negative examples, explain how it differs from any nearby concepts that people might try to "round off" to, and why it makes sense to organize one's thinking in terms of the new concept. (It would also help to give it a googleable name so people can find all that information. Right now, Google defines physical cognition as "Physical cognition, or 'folk physics', is a common sense understanding of the physical world around us and how different objects interact with each other." which is obviously not what you're talking about.)

I think I've avoided rounding off your physical cognition to an existing concept, but I still don't understand how the concept is defined exactly or why it's a useful way of organizing one's thinking as it relates to the question of what kinds of children's activities are most valuable. Clearly there are distinct skills within what you call physical cognition, and all those skills are not equally valuable, nor does practicing one physical cognition skill improve all physical cognition skills equally (e.g., if you practice math skills you improve math skills more than piano skills, and vice versa). Given that, why does it make sense to group a bunch of different skills together into "physical cognition" and then say that practicing piano is valuable because it exercises physical cognition? Wouldn't it make more sense to talk about exactly what skills are improved by practicing piano, and how valuable the increase of those specific skills are?

"Real-world achievement" is considerably less clear as a way of pointing to what I am trying to point to than "physical cognition". It evokes all kinds of distracting side-issues about what constitutes the "real world". (Is pure mathematics "real-world achievement"? et cetera, et cetera).

For me, I don't see how "physical cognition" is better, because just what "physical" means here is as unclear to me as what "real-world" means in bogus's comment, and in rather similar ways. Is doing pure mathematics "physical cognition"? What about physics?

With no more context than your earlier comment where (so far as I know) you first used the term, I'd have taken "physical cognition" to mean something like "applying one's brain directly to the real world in ways involving planning and subtlety and the like", with playing a musical instrument being an example. But I now have the impression that you intend it more broadly than that, perhaps including e.g. musical composition (even if done in one's head). But exactly what you mean remains unclear to me, as does why (if I'm understanding you right) you consider "physical cognition" a more fruitful category of things to lump together than "real-world achievement".

(Note for the avoidance of doubt: I am not claiming that "physical cognition" is not a more fruitful category, nor that bogus's thinking in this area is better than yours, nor anything of that kind. I am just saying that it seems unreasonable to complain of someone "rounding off concepts" when you have made no apparent effort to clarify what you do mean, and that your specific objection to "real-world achievement" seems to apply equally to "physical cognition".)

There you go again, compulsively trying to round concepts off to something else!

"Real-world achievement" is considerably less clear as a way of pointing to what I am trying to point to than "physical cognition".

It would be helpful if you try to define what you mean with "art" or "physical cognition" if you see people thinking you mean something different than you do.

Or are you seeking to dispute my contention that physical cognition is underpracticed and undervalued there[]?

Nope. More formally, I'm saying that the relation between the "physical" nature of cognition and the social benefits you talk about is essentially screened off by the more immediate fact that such physical activities are far more likely to feature a widely-agreed standard of achievement. Thus, the fact that humanities scholarship is in some sense "non-physical" (which it obviously is, since it is properly about human cultures, as opposed to physical phenomena such as the mechanics of playing an instrument) is practically irrelevant to whether or not we should consider it to be "intellectually stimulating", at least inasmuch as the merit of such scholarship is sometimes widely agreed upon.

It evokes all kinds of distracting side-issues about what constitutes the "real world". (Is pure mathematics "real-world achievement"? et cetera, et cetera

To some extent, these issues seem to be unavoidable. One reason why pure math academia is in such a "bad" shape socially is that it is only directly valued by a tiny minority. Within the subculture that values it, though, achievement is reasonably clear and thus it can at least escape the negative connotations of "social cognition". A similar situation seems to apply in newly-composed "serious" music, even though the subculture that values that might be even smaller, and the standard of "what makes this new piece worthwhile enough that I should be paying attention to it" somewhat less than clear.

Basically, Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a myth, and everyone would be better off forgetting about it entirely.

Not necessarily; it depends on what one's default or alternative theory would be. Let's be Bayesian, after all.

As I interpret it, "Maslow's hierarchy of needs" is little more than the claim that people's goals depend on their internal sense of security and status (in addition to whatever else they might depend on).

When I speak about it, I'm usually talking about something like a spectrum of exogenous vs. endogenous motivation: at one end you have someone being chased by a wild animal (thus maximally influenced by the environment), and at the other, the Nietzschean "superhuman" who lives only according to their own values, rather than channeling or being a tool of anyone or anything else (thus minimally influenced by the environment in some sense, although obviously everything is ultimately a product of some external force).

Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a myth

It's certainly not a myth because it's a theory (or a hypothesis) which actually exists. Its weak forms are rather obvious, famished poets notwithstanding. Psychology is not physics and should not pretend to be physics, it deals in weak generalizations and fuzzy conclusions. Maslow's hierarchy should not be thought of as an iron law which applies everywhere to everyone -- it's merely a framework for thinking about needs.

Generally speaking, whenever we think of something as being "technical", we're talking about the involvement of physical cognition. Art is social, yes, but it is also highly technical.

For certain arts -- e.g. music -- this is true (in the sense in which I understand "physical cognition" -- the body is intimately involved). But a counter-example would be something like digital art where your tools are on Photoshop palettes. The physical skill involved is moving a mouse and I don't think this qualifies. And yet, digital art is highly "technical".

Superforcasting might be an area that will be very useful in the future.

what is the modern equivalent of learning to program as a kid in the 80s.

Cryptocurrency investment. Imagine how your kid's peers will be impressed to hear "when I was at elementary school, I put my pocket money in various altcoins, and... long story short, I am a billionaire now". :D

But maybe learning to program is the modern equivalent of learning to program. Just because there are many tablet games teaching kids how to build "a loop in a loop" programs from predefined blocks, doesn't mean that kids will bother to play the games, and will move to further stages of programming.

Exception: Goertzel and just about every founder of the AI field who work on AI mainly as a way of understanding thought and building things like us.

Almost every flying machine innovator was quite public about his goal. And there were a lot of them. Still, a dark horse won.

Here, the situation is quite similar, except that a dark horse victory is not very likely.

If Google is unable to improve its Deep/Alpha product line to an effective AGI machine in a less than 10 years, they are either utterly incompetent (which they aren't) or this NN paradigm isn't strong enough. Which sounds unlikely, too.

Others have less than 10 years wide opportunity window.

I am not too excited about the amount of CPU/RAM requirements for this NN/ML style of racing. But it might be just good enough.

Currently, there's competition about how has the best cloud between Google, IBM, Amazon, Oracle and Microsoft. It seems that those companies believe that a successful cloud platform is one that has API's that can easily used for a wide variety of use cases.

I think this kind of AI research is equivalent with AGI research.

Facebooks internal AI research is broad enough that they pursued Go as a toy problem similar to how Deep Mind did so. After DeepMind's success, Tencent Holding didn't take long to debut an engine that's on par with professional players even through it isn't yet on the AlphaGo level.

Apple has money lying around. It's knows that Siri underperforms at the moment, so it makes total sense to invest money into long-term AI/AGI research. Strategically Apple doesn't want to be in a situation where Google's DeepMind/Google Brain initiatives continue to put it's assistant well ahead of Apple's performance.

Samsung wants Bixby to be a success and not be outperformed by competing assistants. Samsung also needs AI in a variety of other fields for military tech to internet of things applications.

Bridgewater Associates is working on it's AI/human hybrid to replace Ray Dalio. Using humans as subroutines might mean that the result get's dangerous much faster.

Palantir wants the money of the US military for doing various analysis tasks. Given that it's a broad spectrum of tasks it pays to have quite AI general capabilities. The US military wants to buy AI. While the CIA is now in the Amazon cloud, Palantir wants to stay competitive and don't lose projects to Amazon and that requires it do to basic research.

Salesforce has the money and it will need to do a lot of AI to keep up with the times.

I think Baidu and Alibaba will face similar pressures as Google and Amazon. I think both need to invest into basic AI and the have the capability to do so.

Given the possible consequences of AGI for geopolitical power, I think it's very likely that the Chinese Government has an AGI project.

I thought you wanted a set of cubes whose volumes don't intersect with each other. (Then this set can't be uncountable because each volume contains a rational point.) I don't understand what you mean by replacing cubes... Can you explain the problem once again?

target = Occupied(enemy) | EnPassantTarget(ply);

targetc = Occupied(enemy) | EnPassantTarget(ply);
targetc = targetc & target;
if (Pawns(enemy) & target & ((side) ? EnPassantTarget(ply) >> 8 :
        EnPassantTarget(ply) << 8))
  targetc = targetc | EnPassantTarget(ply);

  if ((PcOnSq(To(move)) == 0)
      && (PcOnSq(To(move) + epdir[wtm]) == ((wtm) ? -pawn : pawn))
      && (EnPassantTarget(ply) & SetMask(To(move))))
    return 1;

#define EnPassantTarget(ply)   (EnPassant(ply) ? SetMask(EnPassant(ply)) : 0)

#define EnPassant(ply) (tree->status[play].enpassant_target)

Otherwise the distance is infinite.

A metric is supposed to be always finite. Note the round right bracket in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_(mathematics)#Definition.