I find that I can tolerate distractions like getting up to get a cup of coffee or stretch or do a few push-ups without much issue. I am able to maintain complex state and jump back into the flow. Maybe this is just a young brain thing and will go way, but in any case, this advice seems to be more tuned to those sorts of distractions. What happens in an office is entirely different. Your working memory is finite and social interactions are complex. Moreover, most people become personally offended (whether they will admit it or not) if you do not appear to be paying full attention. This was a particularly bad case but I once had a boss who would become visibly angry if you even stopped to write some notes when he showed up to interrupt you. Many of these interruptions are totally irrelevant too. Your boss does not need to stop by 4 times a day to get a detailed progress report. Your chatty coworker does not need to talk about his weekend at the lake. It's perfectly natural to feel some annoyance in a situation like this and it seems kind of absurd and subservient to me to ask devs to bend over backwards to accommodate the personality flaws of their bosses and coworkers. Sure, you shouldn't let this annoyance derail you, but that doesn't mean you also shouldn't tell your chatty coworker to shut up occasionally. Okay, maybe you shouldn't be so rude about it, but you need to set healthy boundaries and be allowed to block off time for the work you need to do. If you aren't, you are probably working for a shitty boss or organization. No amount of distraction management is going to help you there.
Beyond that, I think that there is a limit to the complexity of problems that can be tackled without periods of extreme focus. Some problem domains are full of deep and irreducible complexity. It's probably true that we often mistake accidental complexity for irreducible complexity or fail to break down problems, but, and this may come off as arrogant, I find that it is generally people that have never had to deal with a problem domain with such irreducible complexities who think that we can solve all of our problems by breaking up work into smaller chunks. Sometimes you also have to deal with business requirements that effectively turn accidental complexity into irreducible complexity. Like, yes, technically things like regulatory compliance are accidental complexity but we also can't just simplify them away without facing serious repercussions. It's also much much easier to maintain context and state in problem domains you have worked in extensively for years, and you tend to be able to write more concise yet still complete descriptions of things within that problem domain. I suspect that has something to do with why the author only adopted this working approach later in life, in addition to the health problems he mentions. For instance, I find that I can pick up physics and math problems with minimal friction because I spent the better part of a decade studying those subjects intensely, but ask me to debug a SQL script (an area where I have minimal domain knowledge) and I will need probably 30 minutes before I can even think a useful thought about it. Most devs do not have the luxury of only working on problems they are domain experts on. Business requirements and capacity are fluid things.
The war on drugs has been a resounding success at it's principle functions (none of which have anything to do with controlling drug use behavior). It helps maintain a permanent underclass which applies a downward pressure on wages via prison slave labor, allows the ruling class to more effectively criminalize dissent and propagandize against subversive groups, and provides an excuse to continue to militarize the police force.
It's interesting and rather revealing that your first reaction to a critique which draws an analogy to material wealth is to defensively frame it as nasty or distasteful.
Oh man, you are so close to realizing what's actually going on. Once you realize that creating a permanent underclass to apply a constant downward pressure on wages is a feature of market economies and not a bug you'll be all the way there.
This is the right way to look at it. In fact, your brain is plastic enough that if you wear glasses that flip your vision upside down for several days it will eventually relearn the mapping of retinal cells to neurons so that you see things normally while wearing them. This was studied in the 1890s by a guy called George Stratton.
While I am sympathetic to the idea of unionizing development and IT work, I have a hard time imagining a practical path. Vaguely libertarian ideologies seem to be the norm in these professions.
To me this kind of thinking from management is, frankly, negligent. If you're working on a simple e-commerce site I suppose it's excusable, because in the end, the customer is going to pay the cost of poor design in lost business and that is their decision. For safety critical systems it is absolutely inexcusable, and the manager responsible should face criminal liability. No one should die because some middle manager was cutting corners to hit his quarterly targets.
If you are interested at all in continental philosophy, I'd say Lyotard is a really good place to start for folks coming from an analytic philosophy or hard science background. He engages with some of the same ideas as the rest of the continental milieu but his writing style is not nearly as dense and allusive as the rest. For more contemporary stuff, Badiou is really interesting. He's, among other things, trying to bridge the gap between analytic and continental philosophy. If you want to dive deeper, I'd try to understand the historical development of contemporary continental philosophy from Kant through German idealism via Hegel. A lot of the stuff that is confusing in continental philosophy is confusing because we tend to teach it without regards to its historical development (I know my continental philosophy class was like this at least).
For most people, yes, I'd agree. For me personally, not really. I grasp abstractions and formal stuff almost instantly, but it takes a lot of grappling with the text for me to come to terms with continental philosophy. Like, I had zero trouble with Kant's Critique, but I had to read Discipline and Punish 3 times before I felt like I "got it".
NOTE: This doesn't mean I disparage continental philosophy, just noting that the discursive/narrative mode is not intuitive for everyone.
There's no financial incentive to fix things? It's almost like we need some kind of revolution to upend the existing system and replace it with one that addresses people's needs directly rather than blindly maximizing financial gains. I feel like I read something about this once...
I'm committing the cardinal sin of commenting before I'm done with the article, but whenever this discussion comes up, I feel like asking: why not both? Could it be that Bitcoin is currently overvalued and in a "bubble", but it or something like it still may have huge value and utility in the long run? The idea that the Bitcoin bubble is something more like the Dot Com bubble than Tulipomania seems plausible to me.
Oh, don't get me wrong, AGI is still terrifying, even if it is limited to a few (or a few hundred) multiples of human intelligence by algorithmic or physical constraints. The discovery of AGI will precipitate the biggest social upheaval we've ever seen. I'm just very skeptical of the quasi-religious side of the superintelligence community, who think that we'll create godminds that can bend reality to their will or something.
Also, it didn't seem to me like Chollet was claiming that better than human intelligence was impossible, honestly. This seems to be a motivated misreading of the original article on Yudkowksy's part, and most of his article is arguing with a straw man because of it. More charitably, Chollet seems to be saying that there may be limitations to intelligence that are "built in" due to the context in which intelligence operates. For instance, even if we create a "superintelligence" in the sense that it has much greater raw processing power than humans, we may not be able to create the sensory environment and training program that would allow it to learn how to recursively improve itself without limit.
The raw computing power of the human wetware has not increased appreciably over historical timescales, but the total intelligence of humanity, includes, for example, the increase in effective intelligence gained by storing knowledge in external devices like books. The gestalt organism that is "humanity" is much smarter than it was 500 or even 100 years ago, which correlates with our ability to extract resources. It's an extremely simplistic model, but since I was only after a very rough guess, I went with it.
A lot of folks who are critical of the AI safety movement also miss the potential for "side channel attacks" where the AI learns to manipulate human actors and trick them into "unbottling the genie". Honestly, this seems a lot more plausible to me than most AI disaster scenarios.
An analogous argument would hold in the case of "units of capability". Why do you think the problem of producing capable minds is any easier than the problem of producing intelligent minds? I'm not sure what the point of your chimp analogy is, unless you think I think that brain size is the unit of intelligence. Anyway, I'm also skeptical of the idea that there are such things as general "units of intelligence", but the entire notion of a superintelligence is predicated on the idea that intelligence is a general quality and can be meaningfully quantified. It's not clear to me how we'd even define superintelligence without reference to some quantitative measure of intelligence, although if you'd like to try, I'd be interested.
True, but I think that the results of such a "weak intelligence explosion" (where the linear/sublinear scaling case would be a "strong intelligence explosion"), while still remarkable, would fall far short of some of the expectations placed on general AI by the singularity / superintelligence crowd. For the sake of argument, extrapolating from our current energy consumption using a (simplistic) linear model and some rough back of the envelope calculations, the intelligence required to harness the total energy output of the sun would be 40 trillion times the aggregate intelligence of the entire human species today. Several hundred times just isn't going to cut it. Now, if our ability to harness energy increases exponentially with intelligence, then maybe it could work, but that's just an assumption, and, given that there are hard physical limits on the efficiency of energy generation due to thermodynamics, seems very unlikely.
I can't remember where, but I saw a fairly damning argument against the intelligence explosion hypothesis on the grounds that it only works if the algorithm used to design a mind with n units of intelligence (whatever these are) scales linearly with units of intelligence. If it scales faster than linear, then your recursive bootstrapping operation takes longer and longer each time, so that eventually your next bootstrapping step will take longer than the amount of time left in the universe, meaning there is some finite intelligence cap for any such bootstrapped mind. It seems quite implausible to me that the problem of designing a mind would scale linearly, given that ostensibly much simpler problems, like sorting a list of strings, require polynomial time or log-linear time algorithms.
First of all, I don't think the author claims to be a communist anywhere, just that his parents were, at one time, members of the communist party. Second of all, popular estimates of the death toll of communism are ludicrously exaggerated, sometimes outright fabricated, and often include a lot of questionable cases. The Black Book of Communism, where the infamous 100 million figure comes from, includes Soviet soldiers that died in WW2 and vastly inflates the number of people who died in gulags and famines, among many other inaccuracies. The gulag figure is orders of magnitude bigger than the number of people who were even sentenced to forced labor in first place. It is widely regarded as complete trash by serious historians. This is not to discount the very real human suffering under dictators like Stalin and Mao, but to compare famines resulting for incompetence to the deliberate industrialized slaughter of 11 million people is just stupid.
On the subject of fighting Nazis, I'll leave you with a quote from Hitler himself, perhaps the pre-eminent expert on Nazis: "Only one thing could have stopped our movement – if our adversaries had understood its principle and from the first day smashed with the utmost brutality the nucleus of our new movement."
It's interesting that you start off attempting to refute me but end up demonstrating my point. The cultural conditions in early agricultural societies, before the development of the city-state, were insufficient to support a strong rule of law, and hence, property as we now know it. Property and personal possession are not the same thing. Certainly, individuals claimed ownership of goods, and barter occurred, but these were far from the only or even the dominant modes of economic activity in early agricultural societies, which also incorporated gift economies and cooperative sharing of labor and goods. By interpreting past economic systems through the lens of capitalism, you are proving my point: that the defenders of the free market commit the fallacy of reifying markets and property, as we now define them, as some sort of inevitable emergent attribute of human society, when there have been many different economic systems throughout the history of human civilization, none of which fully correspond to the abstract conception of the free market as discussed by economists.
I sometimes feel like "free-market" types are actually incapable of understanding this point. The idea that markets and property exist as some sort of independent, empirical objects is baked so deeply into their ideology that it's almost as if they lack the symbolic vocabulary to even conceptualize the idea that property itself is created by regulations.
Same. 5 to 6 hours and I feel fine, unless I'm ill or already sleep deprived. I can function on 3-4 hours per night for extended periods of time before I start to notice serious deterioration in mental faculties. I believe it's genetic. Some studies have tentatively tied naturally short sleep cycles to a gene variant (http://www.sleepeducation.org/sleep-disorders-by-category/in...). Also, my father sleeps for about the same amount of time as well.
I sleep about 5-6 hours on average. Generally, I feel well rested with this amount, but I can function on 3-4 hours per night for a few weeks without serious ill effect. I just feel slightly groggy, although at the end, I will have a "hard crash" where I sleep more than 12 hours. If I'm ill, I will sleep 8-10 hours a night. I think this is mostly genetic, because my father has been going to bed at 9 or 10 PM and waking up at 3 AM for as long as I can remember. I usually stay up later, but sleep about the same amount.
Honestly, as far as that aspect goes, I found the comic helped me understand it better than the article did. While I think I understand the general concept of emotional labor, the example of the gift wrapping left out seemed kind of petty in that an item being out of place in a closet seems fairly easy for even an attentive person to miss and forget about. What I gatherer from the comic, is that it's more about situations in which one partner assumes that they don't need to do anything unless specifically asked.
From my perspective, as a leftist and not a liberal, I'd describe the BBC and NPR as having, largely, a liberal / centrist viewpoint. I don't think I've ever heard the BBC advocating seizing the means of production or NPR agitating for a general strike. If you are in the US, consider that our entire political compass is shifted very far to the right. In Europe, the Democrats would be considered a center-right party and the Republicans would be a far-right, borderline extremist party. Regardless of where you fall on this spectrum, it's important not to fool yourself into thinking you are in the "center" or have some "objective" viewpoint from which you can label things "left" and "right", when everything in politics is so contextual.