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I spent a fair amount of time in martial arts and have a similar attitude toward generalization of kata/form. This idea is standing behind my consistent emphasis on the benefits of coding (particularly TDD) for this community. It builds thought patterns that are useful for tasks that computers typically perform better.
Interesting point...
it's worth noting that he bought them for 2 pennies and the vendor is now gone, but yeah, sunk cost fallacy seems to be about right. For me, the visualization of the story is more real and powerful to me than remembering an abstract idea. There's quite a lot of these stories and most of them are rather old, some more of them are here...
http://www.kdnuggets.com/ practical, well curated machine learning from jobs to datasets to articles
torrentz.eu - indexes various torrent sites
http://mvnrepository.com/ - search for includes on maven sites
http://www.crunchbase.com/ evaluating startups etc
slickdeals is dope, that is for sure.
I think high level generalizations are found in aphorisms and teaching stories from all around the world. They can sometimes be shorthand for a whole story, for example I often remind myself not to eat my money referencing this story:
Mulla Nasrudin, as everyone knows, comes from a country where fruit is fruit and meat is meat, and curry is never eaten. One week he was plodding along a dusty Indian road, having newly descended from the high mountains of Kafiristan, when a great thirst overtook him. "Soon," he said to himself, "I must come across somewhere that good fruit is to be had." No sooner were the words formed in his brain than he rounded a corner and saw sitting in the shade of a tree a benevolent-looking man with a basket of fruit in front of him. Piled high in the basket were huge, shiny red fruits. "This is what I need," said Nasrudin. Taking two tiny coppers from the knot at the end of his turban, he handed them to the fruit-seller. Without a word, the man handed him the whole basket, for this kind of fruit is cheap in India, and people usually buy it in smaller amounts. Nasrudin sat down in the place vacated by the fruiterer and started to much the fruits. Within a few seconds, his mouth was burning. Tears streamed down his cheeks; fire was in his throat. The Mulla went on eating. An hour or two passed, and then an Afghan hillman came past. Nasrudin hailed him, "Brother, these infidel fruits must come from the very mouth of Sheitan!" "Fool!" said the hillman. "Hast thou never heard of the chillis of Hindustan? Stop eating them at once, or death will surely claim a victim before the sun is down." "I cannot move from here," gasped the Mulla, "until I have finished the whole basketful." "Madman! those fruits belong in curry! Throw them away at once." "I am not eating fruit any more," croaked Nasrudin, "I am eating my money."
--Idries Shah's "The Pleasntries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin
"In this clip, from June 1995, Jobs says the difference between using good hardware can be a 2:1 difference for a company. But the difference between a company with superb programmers vs. average ones is 25:1, he says, adding, "That's probably … certainly the secret to my success. It's that we've gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people.""
http://www.fastcompany.com/1836987/steve-jobs-the-payoff-of-a-great-employee
This productivity speedup is the key observation. Learn the basics from coursera or whatever and then really internalize the idea that your personal productivity varies in orders of magnitude and learn to arrange your environment to avoid diminishing returns. After you have the ability to do this and you can communicate to nontechnical people, finding work is no problem.
This is a nicely written proposal for a practical, actionable idea. If you're not in tech, then you should consider doing this. It starts at a practical idea and has ways to branch out from the long term goal to other like including psychometrics and so forth.
I'm biased due to my open source project, but I think this is the kind of idea that fits well with cryptographically secure peer to peer systems that then aggregate into some groups, as the individual opinions are highly variable (correctly, as different brains need different training)
I think it's appropriate to separate work ethic and akrasia mastery from rationality. Saying that work ethic is a choice is, imho, a relatively simplistic view. People often get fired for something trivial (smoking when a drug test is coming up, repeated absence, etc) that they know full well is a suboptimal decision and the short term benefits of getting high (or whatever) override their concern for the long term possible consequences. I think it makes sense to make some distinction that rationality is the ability to select the right path to walk and self discipline is the wherewithal to walk it.
I wonder how well defined "my goals" are here or how much to trust expectations. I think a rough approximation could involve these various systems generating some impulse map and then OPFC and some other structures get involved in selecting an action. I don't think a closed form expression of a goal is required in order to say that the goal exists.
If yi would have to do more reading to understand the lattice stuff, it seems reasonable though.
As far as usefulness, the idea I had was you could layer a substrate to dissipate the heat really well. My limited understanding is 85% of the heat jumps the wires somehow and is absorbed by the substrate, which could be engineered arbitrarily. This is important because cnt are very good electrical conductors so you could pair them with a good head absorbing substance and achieve separation of heat and current in ways we have not seen before, which one could speculate as a way to restart moores law progression of speed.
Good Link. Wordnet is also the canonical language reference, but probably doesn't serve OP's purpose directly. If you start getting into these kind of graphs though, it's quite useful to move around with.
USGS has good info.
http://www.usgs.gov/ http://cegis.usgs.gov/ontology.html
http://dbpedia.org/About Also there is no need to scrape wikipedia, work has been done for you. You can do sparql queries to get most of your statements and the CEGIS site supposedly has a working sparql endpoint but I haven't used that in years.
statements that are ~50% true... this is actually pretty hard, mine some dataset for statistical info?
generally, I would look into RDF, (protege and topbraid composer free will let you poke around for free without knowing the data format)
Freebase has all manner of data in RDF
http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets/ public data sets, not all in RDF but "it's more important that the data have structure" and all that
I think it tends to be most useful to do things that support multiple different plans, so I had a lot of motives for putting this up here. I don't have a lot of time, so that's how I try to roll anyway...
Here is what my motivations were :
In general play with the site - I did a little bit of work on it in the summer of 2010 and I was talking about making a contribution again, so I wanted to play with the interface and understand the code better.
I enjoyed my time at singinst, but was one of the rare people that had never read lesswrong when I arrived there (having found the post on hacker news) so it was an effort to reach out to the community
I deliberately didn't write much about a topic that I have reason to believe should be interesting to this community, so it was a good level set for the community's tech level, curiosity and so forth. Definitely more open to stuff than the average forum, but was surprised, would have thought people would be all over this as a weird idea.
definitely not just looking for expert opinions, I do think CNTs are very important and I want to encourage you and everyone else to let your imagination run wild a bit and say what you think, if it's too dangerous to discuss fine, but I doubt most think that...
for experts that want to set me straight or point out some obvious reason these techs are not useful, let me know but since we are already using CNTs to replace thermal paste for heat sinks so can we do a full chip etc...
Thank you or the well considered response, actually helpful. You have my background about right, I published in a physicists in medicine conference and have the normal background in comparch and whatever classes I took for my math double. Definitely not a condensed matter physicist, will have to read more on phonons.
The idea that this is a hollow tube and so there is no interior region to be effected does seem intuitive. The thing that jumped out at me is that the tube itself remained cool.
I don't have a good understanding of quantum electrodynamics or phonons and that is one reason I wanted to bring this up for discussion. Some types of scattering like bremsstrahlung seem like they play a role, but it doesn't seem to explain it, from the lead scientist:
""We believe that the nanotube's electrons are creating electrical fields due to the current, and the substrate's atoms are directly responding to those fields," Cumings explains. "The transfer of energy is taking place through these intermediaries, and not because the nanotube's electrons are bouncing off of the substrate's atoms. While there is some analogy to a microwave oven, the physics behind the two phenomena is actually very different."" http://newsdesk.umd.edu/scitech/release.cfm?ArticleID=2657
The normal mechanism for heating in electric current transmission as I understand it, the electrons are bouncing off other atoms causing them to vibrate. So we make a transistor or a wire and we a pass a current through it, the atoms inside get hotter and we then dissipate that heat. They don't appear to think this is what is going on here.
It seems like the electrons go through the nanotube wire and the energy kind of jumps from the current to the tube to the substrate it's laying on without accumulating much inside the wire itself.
They claim this is a weird game changer which every scientist wants to find, so either that's hype or it's legit. It seems like you have a good understanding, this is in a discussion area, what's your opinion, is this a big discovery that is going to lead to multilayer chips orders of magnitude faster or is it just a fluke thing?
For you, posting about the fact that you decided not to post it reinforces the idea that you are important enough to have an impact with a blog post, which is more likely to reinforce the most common bias of intelligent people.
I think more helpful people than unhelpful people come here. I remember a friend in grad school who had someone publish an algo he had discovered in the journal issue 1 before his publication, halfway across the world. I think it's kind of like an avalanche, there is some sense to being quiet until you know enough to have a reasonable estimate of the impact of your action. As a rule though, I'd rather see ideas traded here than behind DARPA firewalls.
Or maybe you just use "how does X advance singularity timelines?"
Very much not this. I was a visiting fellow at singinst and discussed timelines with many people. I still feel some level of ethical obligation to provide a more complete analysis as I was actually converted to have some worry about this recursive self improvement, though I tend to worry more about IA than AI (even if just because of the IA-->AI path) I'm also poking a little bit at the LW codebase again and wanted to try to stimulate a discussion and explore the site. I was looking for actual discussion of the impact of this on people's timelines, how they are updating on this kind of evidence.
Any you don't have to put "Singularity" in the name of the article.
It's interesting to note that I put singularity and timelines plural, implying this trajectory towards "methusalarity" or whatever you want to call it. I linked the other article to show there is some evidence that this particular advance might very well unlock a lot of tech along a lot of interesting, rapidly accelerating change technologies.
A short explanation of context
I posted the most relevant abstract. If they spent some fairly large time writing that, why should I assume I can do better? If you check out the link, this was published in nature nanotech, so that is pretty big news. I linked to papers on tissue engineering, nanotech used internally. That's three pieces of a puzzle that we're all trying to get a better handle on.
Something like this
I think that's a good introductory description, but I thought people on this site already know all this. I think they know moore's law has stalled and that we're looking to increase it, that we're right on the cusp of the computational power required to search solution spaces near the human scale (watson, go ais, deep blue, etc)
So, what techs will change that space... carbon nanotubes and graphene wires are taken pretty seriously. If our mutual goal is to get ahead of this problem, it seems we should all take the time to do the basic reading and you come to certain concepts - heat dissipation, scaling out rather than up, 3D chips, transistor sizes, nanotechnology, graphene and carbon nanotubes, cloud computing, bot nets, cortical columns, human computer interface, neuronal destruction due to wire thickness and so forth.
It is indeed kind of mean that I ask how this piece fits into everyone's puzzle without disclosing my puzzle, but I do worry about security and that sort of thing and this was a good experiment on how people would respond, thank you for your insights, need to run back to code...
Curious if people would be willing to articulate negative sentiment on this piece?
It seems like we should all see advancements like this as a way of training our intuition about how the tech tree will go and also make efforts to do outreach into important communities as they are growing. If graphene transistor and remote cooling cpus eclipse efforts in parallelism or biological computing, then researchers in that field have a lot of influence to spread to users as well as developers.
Also, to most people this is a highly counterintuitive phenomenon and some people I hung out with for a while used to talk a lot about the utility of physics intuition.
Some hypotheses for negative affect are that the story is not relevant or interesting (strong evidence this is not the case), that those people who have the technical expertise to discuss it don't want to discuss it off secure channels or...
I think people underestimate the intrinsic computational complexity in solving even relatively simple pattern recognition tasks. There are also all sorts of algorithms where you do a heuristic search through some big space and it's particularly interesting to note that a lot of programs for finding proofs or optimizing code are in this class. Anybody who thinks computers today are fast doesn't write enough code.
I have an intuition this particular tech(or related) is going to advance us to the next exponentiating phase of a stacked sigmoid advancement curve that eventually leads to ai.
Would you talk more about the coupling between substrate and carrier electrons, that is not clear to me.
I mean it makes sense that it went somewhere nearby, but why would it transfer at all, only with these particular materials?
Why isn't it weird to you? If I got a lab report like that i'd be like ok, go ahead and rerun those experiments...
So if you have a background in nanotech and I have compsci, it seems like speculation could generate ideas.
I think that as a community interested in safety, it's important we keep informed about the advancement trajectory. Understanding limitations and capabilities of fundamental science advancements also provides intelligence on companies to watch for, tech that is likely available soon and so forth.
so, why not speculate? It's almost free to scan an idea for value.
"Taking the outside view means using an estimate based on a class of roughly similar previous cases"
so the singularity by far is something after which we cannot predict how things are, but we're going to look at roughly similar cases for that?
I'm also an insider in this in the sense that I've been a professional software engineer for 16 years, dropped out of a phd program after passing qualification exam with a masters in compsci and eng, so yes, I am trying to imagine possible outcomes and look at trajectories and I hope other people with training on this board are doing the same.
it seems much more important than tech 734/5000 necessary... carbon nanotubes are one of the core scientific discoveries of our generation and this shows a really interesting property of them directly related to electronics development. The heat dissapation bottleneck has been the most serious issue with nanotech and much, much faster and smaller processors. When we went from faster chips to multiple cores, things became really different - parallel algorithms are inherently more difficult and tech that could reinstate an exponentiation phase is extremely significant. This is more important than that though, if substantiated it is a truly weird physics advance and there's no telling what applications it will find. The first AI or human decision support system that will offer dangerous self improvement capabilties is most likely going to be on some $10M-$100M system and the question is how do you see that coming? I mentioned moore's law as the first of many obvious and important areas this advance will impact if there is not some serious engineering bottleneck in putting it into practice, be that in moving up orders of magnitude in clock speed or providing wiring for brain implants that is small enough not to damage neural tissue and so forth. I'm seriously surprised to see a response to this advance that is not at least curious interest at an obviously related physics advance.
I was a civ junkie for a long time... one interesting thing is that the manual had structured data representations of everything in the game. It was also deadly exploitable, you would usually just not use certain strategies because they're boring.
even the most extraordinary eat, shit, sleep, fuck, become addicted and I also feel that merging needs is the key to cooperation
Understanding what some call the terror of the situation will change a lot. People should volunteer at shelters or prisons or with something like big brothers/big sisters and see the pain that stupidity, weakness, irrationality, love of ignorance and all the rest cause. The real terror of the traits commonly possessed by the people and economic entities that shape our society. Think hard about daily life in rural china, north korea, iran, the ghettos and the trailer parks and think about the evolutionary pressure that puts on the 150+ IQs that happen to be born there and what the consequences of a little bit of love and reason can be. Thinking about this forces one to admit to selfishness and yield to temptation or intentional suffering to purify this, or admit that one is choosing love of misery over ripples of rationality that can add to a critical mass for breaking cycles of ignorance, corruption and abuse.
I think that you are you are on a solid research path here. I think you have reached the bounds of business oriented software and it's time to look into something like apache mahout or RDF. Decision tree implementations are available all over, just find a data structure and share them and run inference engines like owlim or pellet and see what you can see.
RDF is a good interim solution because you can start encoding things as structured data. I have some JSON->RDF stuff for inference if you get to that point.
Here is one way to represent these graphs as RDF.
Each edge becomes an edge to a blank node, that blank node has the label, arrival probability and could link to evidence supporting. Representing weighted graphs in RDF is fairly well studied.
The question is, what is your net goal of this from a computational artifact point of view?
reductionism = (reduce until you have good reason not to);
I think this is a good construction for pragmatic reductionism. It feels like there is some connection to ockham's razor, using an excessively complex model ends up binding up computational resources that you are likely to need for some time sensitive problem. I think this is what is going on in your description of the thought chain you get bound up in. It's fine for fun to think about how relatively or quantum mechanics relate to some problem that is easily solved (or approximated quite accurately) with newtownian mechanics, but if you have some actual reason to solve that problem, it's best to take the easy answer and move on.
It's going to happen over and over again throughout your life, particularly if you start doing things like training neural networks or svms or whatever you are playing with. If you set aside a weekend and visit your local linux users group, they will get you all sorted out for free. The additional advantage of this is that once you are in a known clean infrastructure, it's likely that you will feel more free to write and research.
It's worth noting media is consumed in different modes. I am constantly watching BSG or buffy or stargate as I'm coding because there are these alternating phases of concentration and boring repetition so it's nice to have something I can glance at and appreciate something from. This is very different from watching for entertainment like game of thrones or justified.
great show, having never read the books I think the storyline seems well thought out enough to learn from
the bullet points...
neuroscience research, particularly related to neuroeconomics
rewriting codebase from 10 projects by breaking down into about 30 smaller more easily tested components
reviewing and automating infrastructure selections (java,eclipse,jquery,couchdb,postgres,bash,ubuntu lts, maven, git, custom code for lots of stuff, apache for various little things notably hadoop and mahout) deciding on feature subsets for internal use, trusted group use, and launch trajectory in 2012
some work on money and such annoying tasks
adjusting to being engaged to my cofounder and out of cali permanently
increasing online presence
...this is all changes that benefit many different wordlines, need to select how to go public on various things
I would start with something like reuters API, http://wordnet.princeton.edu/ and some research on these guys http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ this is a fairly well studied problem by spammers, so I'd also work there
what about your infrastructure required downtime due to laptop failure? a VPS or dropbox or gmail file system etc can meet security and uptime requirements one suggestion is that you could install ubuntu to boot off of a memory stick, store your files in a truecrypt volume and autobackup that encrypted file to various places
It seems like language and thinking are closely connected, particularly w.r.t. the categories we tend to reason with. http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lngbrain/main.htm is a good resource
I'm pretty familiar with the codebase though I transitioned to ebay before getting too much done on it, send me an email if you want some feedback, I have more free time these days looking to contribute to open source for long term strategic reasons
Directly answering the question, organ replacement including some brain augmentation that shifts into uploading eventually seems most likely. Cryonics isn't really a direct answer to the question, if you want to talk about trajectories to achieve immortality.... It's too hard to predict where a breakthrough will be made or a wall will be hit. I think the most feasible trajectory is focusing on money and power, then organ replacement and traditional life extension techniques, which include general existential risk reduction.
Overall the concept of embodied cognition makes a lot of sense. Yoga and particularly martial arts give a lot of tools for embodied cognition. Particularly martial arts - these are all telegraphed gestures, in an adversarial mode it's not useful to advertise weaknesses. Changing weight balance and the subtle foot motions involved in shifting into a martial arts stance is less obvious and communicates strength to anyone able to notice.
It's probably worthwhile asking people to put the logo with an alt text of sponsored by leading to lesswrong or siai. people that stumble onto such an article that don't know about lw or siai are likely to be interest, should also help pagerank.
quick scan didn't see anything regarding accuracy of visual or kinesthetic imagination, probably one of the most important skills for solving problems and also related to # of possibility chains one can fit in the head at one time
I spent more than I care to admit learning to tell myself to sleep for some window of hours, like no more than 2 or 4 or whatever
Louie pushed the fix to production last night and it looks like the update script triggered sometime between these two posts
in one sentence... the vote processing mechanism required a reference to the global configuration for pylons and the pylons configuration import was missing.
not super interesting unfortunately :]
it was probably something like a munged automerge or something
It was a simple bug, fix is committed and a pull request is in, I'll send an email out now to get this into production.
hmmm I can confirm this both here and on a local copy of the codebase, I'll have a look and make sure Wes knows