586 karma · joined May 17, 2016
I believe Washington and the Valley are inextricably oppositional. I don't mean because of a Trump presidency. I mean I think in a foundational way Washington is in a zero sum game with the Valley and most of us are loathe to admit it. In 100 years, one has to subsume the other.
That book changed my thinking in ways I find difficult to describe. It was as if the world suddenly developed richer textures. I don't know if he would agree, but I felt it was a very 'Thielian' book. A lot of his ideas and statements came into focus for me when I read it. Together with the recordings I mention it became quite an experience.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12884413
FWIW I predicted Brexit and Trump. I made 4 predictions this year.
1. Irish same sex marriage would succeed. 2. Brexit would win (with possibility of sabotage). 3. Trump would win the presidency (with a high chance of being assassinated). 4. Civil conflict would break out in Europe (2016-2017).
I'd like to be wrong about the 4th, but that's the one I'm most sure of.
Am now wizard.
It's 04:13 here but this is too funny not to stay up for.
Favorite Reddit comments so far.
"There is still California, there's always money in the banana stand."
"CNN, now is not the time to be playing an advert for The Man In The High Castle".
My little Toshiba has been very reliable, runs Linux perfectly.
I would never buy anything else so I hope they manage to restructure so their talent survives. It is increasingly difficult to get quality products these days. More and more it is a choice between constantly breaking crap and unaffordable. It's in cars, houses, everything.
Some goods are better and cheaper such as electric hand tools. With white goods it is hard to get something that will last > 15 years. I'd be willing to pay twice or thrice the average price, but I don't see anything available^. I'm just hoping those new fridge linear compressors are going to do the job.
^ If wrong, do tell!
I would prefer instead of a wage, the distribution of shares that produced a dividend.
If AI and robotics really will produce all this new wealth, then that capital can be symbolized (Urbit could create such a system https://www.urbit.org/#learn) & represent this.
The basis for my reasoning is as follows.
We have already had a system that had the same effects as a 'UBI' system. We used to call people in that system aristocrats.
Suppose we enabled all or most people in our society to become aristocrats?
When we look at aristocrats of the past, we see two things.
A bunch of people who don't think mostly in terms of work/money for survival. This appears to produce two distinct genres of behavior.
Much of their time is spent partying and socializing.
Some of them greatly further the political, the artistic and scientific. Others gamble away their fortunes.
Obviously it is more complicated than this but that is the impression I'm left with when I visit the great houses. Aristocrats were continually throwing themselves into various projects. Sometimes virtuous, sometimes not.
So I was thinking about what creates an aristocracy in history, and of course the answer is mostly indentured labour or slaves.
The word robot originally comes from a slavic word for slave. Presumably a more humane aristocracy could be cultivated on the back of AI and robotics. This is what the Elon Musks and Sam Altmans point to, although they don't call it an aristocracy, what UBI advocates promote as their values (individual self empowerment, holding society to higher standards) does smack of the original meaning of the word aristocrat.
An aristocracy could never have existed were they reliant on a supply of money from the King. The popular culture idea 'the king controls all' is naive. It were never so except in certain extreme local cases. Without independent wealth (from being Landlords), the political economy would be one giant monopoly. The State would have total power in the same way the Soviet Union did over the lives of its citizens. Its too much power in one place.
This is the trouble I have with UBI. I can see scenarios for which it could work. I cannot see any of them working in which there isn't distribution of the wealth producing assets. The AI and the robots. Jaron Lanier has been saying similar things for a while now.
The left and the right, Nicolas_Colin correctly noted (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12473112), will tear a government funded UBI apart in trying to use it as a political weapon against each other. That problem can be ameliorated with property ownership.
Gawker loathed libertarians. Infamously so.
> The enemy is stagnation, and the vested interests that ensure stagnation
That is an interesting thing for Denton to say, but does he believe it or was he just trying to press Thiel's buttons?
I find Denton hard to understand. If he was really interested in the Technological Stagnation Hypothesis then why the sabotage? Does not compute. I saw a constant stream of attacks, personal and professional directed at anybody doing anything useful and I suspect he was Washington's Judas goat.
Should Trump win by a significant margin e.g. > 4%, that should cause you to ask whether systemic bias exists in polling. I think most of us in Europe concluded something like this when Brexit occurred. Some people were claiming the polling was accurate but the reporting was inaccurate, however when I doubled checked the polling I could see no discrepancy. Most of that weeks polls were very wrong and so were the bookmakers, the people with strong incentives to discern truth from bullshit.
Take a look:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_United...
It is really remarkable. Internet polls are accurate?!! Who knew! Depending on your reasons for believing in a significant prejudice in polling, that could indeed change the narrative.
If you read the literature you can see why I was phrasing it like that so perhaps I too was misled.
http://www1.agric.gov.ab.ca/$department/deptdocs.nsf/all/eng...
The potential energy harvest from a hydro setup must be 90% of available energy.
In practice half is lost due to the reasons outlined in the low tech magazine article I linked to. So the electricity production is lower than if we had the turbine hooked up to a motor. The other possibility is that small scale hydro is of a lower efficiency and that this explains the paradox. That is: the literature is talking of a large scale operation that can achieve 90% efficiency but smaller schemes incur losses that explain why converting a small hydro setup back to providing mechanical energy can double the output.
With a hydroelectric turbine you can produce electrical power (by black magic as far as I'm concerned) or mechanical power.
There is a terrific documentary called Ben's Mill on such a mechanical application here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2KJbRHO76s
That will explain visually how mechanical power can be coached into performing useful work. It's also worth watching just to see the cows reaction to their new water vessel at the end, they are like animals out of Disneyland.
Mechanical power when converted to electrical power undergoes a drop in performance (similar to other power conversions, something is lost).
There is a fascinating article here on the subject, I quote:
"The hydro power installations in use today are actually less efficient than those of earlier centuries"
"Direct hydropower is at least twice as economically viable as a hydroelectric operation with the same rate of energy production."
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2013/08/direct-hydropower.htm...
Also take a look at this:
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2013/09/power-from-the-tap-wa...
That is hacking if I ever saw it! I intend to construct a micro hydroelectric plant myself, so ask away if you've any questions. I love the idea of marrying up old school technology with modern technology. I also have a terrific idea for lighting using heliostats, which combines tech literally thousands of years old with the latest in machine learning.
You can get efficiencies of above 80%. In larger installations 90% or more. It's expensive but beats the shite out of solar and wind over time. You can also, if you have an application for physical energy, roughly double the output.
In addition almost all energy storage capacity for the grid is pumped storage from hydroelectric stations. I think it is massively overlooked merely because most people are interesting in scaling and these people overlook the fact that A: most things do not scale and B: long term maintenance matters. You can run a hydro plant with next to no maintenance for 100 years. I can't think of anything close to it and they can easily be fixed or repaired.
It annoys me that micro and small hydro aren't talked about more.
If you watch Thiel's presentations going back over a decade, you'll see something different. These are all public but it takes about a hundred hours or more so most people have jumped around, looking for the gist of what is going on, such as all these journalists attempting to psychoanalyze Thiel, with the obvious motives that first: something weird needs to be explained (100 journalists at the recent press conference!) and less honorably second: he has to be vilified as a prominent opposing political entity external to their tribe.
This is unfortunate because the truth is far more interesting albeit very difficult to explain in a way that would impart an understanding. It does not get picked up on because I believe it takes slow-thinking, it takes some reflection to absorb what is being suggested. Reading old books helps. I think somebody said once "the past is a foreign land, they do things differently there", and that intuition is of use here. Darwin, Gibbons, Girard, Spengler and many others, the basic theme is 'this basic reality you think you have? Well, it ain't so. Here is a deeper level'. In present day parlance this is called 'redpilling' by reactionaries but that should not put you off this, this is an old way to give knowledge by undermining former assumptions (the Christians call this 'revelation' I believe) and not the sole providence of a single political sect.
I see a disturbing picture emerging I call the Wolfian World after Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun. If there is a shortcut to understanding, then that book is it. Ancient institutions are crumbling due to age and corruption. The frame of reference the narrator has is bizarrely warped as things familiar are perceived with alien eyes. The past is without context. The accretion of crud is literally geological. The spirit of renewal, has evaporated. The keyholders are creatures of mimicry going through the motions. Many parts are vestigial limbs and do not know it. The peripheral shrinks literally and spiritually as the World turns inward, navel gazing instead of looking to new frontiers. Enemies, ancient and modern, are at the gates. What is more, the gates are abandoned, forgotten because the peoples who manned them no longer understood their purpose and left their posts generations ago. It is unclear who is controlled and who are the controllers. In Christopher Nolan's Interstellar humanity experiences not just empty future prospects but also a diminished expectation of the past. We did not really go to the moon in that future, that is very telling of human nature's chronocentricism - They cannot even imagine their past, let alone their future.
In short; our World is becoming like the Wolfian World. It is likely that we are on the threshold of sliding into a new Dark Age. In order to fight back one would need to utterly readjust his thinking and expectations of the future. The people who prepare (e.g. sama) for a systems collapse, are appreciating the possibility but those kind of actions are mostly in microcosm, a self preservation instinct. A sudden shock is more immediate and so more energizing for an individual to take action, but the more likely option is actually a long steady stagnation punctuated with the occasional shock.
tldr; Thiel believes our civilization has Alzheimers.
I repeat; if you want a shortcut to Thiel's worldview in my personal opinion the best way to see that is to read The Book of the New Sun. The suggestion you might find weird, but go with me on this, is to listen to the Voyager Recordings - Symphonies of the Planets while you're reading it. It is hard to escape our inherent chronocentricism. When demands are made of our presence from moment to moment, it becomes much harder to appreciate anything outside of that. If it feels 'weird' then good, it is supposed to, you have to get out of your comfort zone. If you wanted the material specifics of the Stagnation Thiel believes is going on, then I've written about it at length in my history on HN dozens of times, some samples are included below. There is a list of statistics, attributes and artifacts a mile long that cannot be explained in any other way than we have been plateauing. We ought to anticipate that the future will be much stranger than the present, and not in a good way.
[12] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12197054
[11] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12242497
[10] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12420696
[9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12413729
[8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12527867
[7] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12572091
[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12608052
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12626864
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12627138
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12757955
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5mYK2Ht-b0
There's also something about his presentation that is like some version of the uncanny valley with intellectual ideas. TED talks have this quality sometimes.
I don't have this with Sagan or Dawkins even though they will often use poetic turns of phrase.
I tried explaining this to my cousin who is infatuated with Cox, but I came across as somebody with highly specific form of racism directed at just Brian Cox.
Kenneth Clarke's Civilization. James Burke's Connections. Carl Sagan's Cosmos.
Show and tell.
That kind of television isn't made anymore. I say that as a millennial. If you have a niche interest in architecture or wildlife you can still find it today but not in popular television series. When I watch modern popular productions I find I can retain almost no information about them. I don't think it is me, I think it is them.
You can get Net access via sat link. Download is fine, upload is terrible. Expensive but that's what I'd do if money was no objection. If there is a service that gave you 'minutes' when down-time happened, that would be perfect for me. If you were 'serious', I'd investigate cubesats.
As Paul suggested a ham radio set is a good way to independently receive and send news from abroad. I think you can do TCP/IP over ham radio. http://www.ampr.org/
Depending on circumstance, a system of sneakernet with helpers can be effective. I used to 'browse' the web this way in the beginning when I didn't have a Net connection to the house.
If all of these proposals fail then you would have to setup your own internet infrastructure, make a meshnet. A local meshnet is easy. The trouble is at some point you have to connect to some backbone where Net access is available.
I was just thinking about microwave relays and lo', this appeared in my feed:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/privat...
I am convinced that we are surrounded by two kinds of autistic behavior but are conditioned to mostly notice one of them.
Social autism (the normal kind we're familiar with) is usually evident in person. It's a spectrum from debilitating to barely evident. Some people I've talked to online have been autistic and I'd never know it just by conversing. I generally prefer it this way because it removes any prejudgements. I liked the Net better before social networks made people's photos, names and assorted history available, I feel like you got to know people more intimately.
The kind of autism we mostly don't notice is physical. There are people who are experts at social interaction, but who genuinely cannot understand the physical world, they never think about it. Their world is filled with people and nothing but people. These are the people who are blinded by the sun.
All of the world's accumulated knowledge is utterly lost on them and they have no sense of an objective reality outside of the realm of relationships. In its own way, this is a disability because they can never be more than their network of connections.
Most people know people like this but think that those people choose not to be interested in X,Y,Z. I suggest that maybe they literally cannot fathom those things, or at least have a severe hindrance in their path to doing so, similar to the social autism spectrum.
Either that or he's got a secret supply of NZT.
It does speak to several things I've read about the brain though. The higher brain functions are 'new' and rudimentary. It fits in with Moravec's Thesis about AI. I don't see many animals procrastinating or stressing out unless there is an obvious physical stimulus that explains why they're behaving like that. Many of the psychological phenomena humans experience must be related to higher brain function and it being evolutionarily unrefined. In the human species itself there is a wide spread of behavior, where a lot of intellectual people are neurotic as hell (kvetching being quite noticeable) but the obviously less intellectual apparently don't suffer quite as much. It cannot be a coincidence that meditation has the goal for absence of thoughts and so many geeks practice it.
I think you meant 'computer'.
My grandmother was a computer. That is what they used to call the women who performed calculations in the old days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer
It's interesting history but this could not honestly be described as computer programming. Looking around online it appears there are a lot of articles that have conflated the jobs. There certainly were women in computer science back in the early days, Lovelace, Hopper come to mind.
At that rate cures for diseases would have to be complete panaceas in order to have a measurable effect on lifespan or healthspan.
The hypothetical promise of biotech is terrific.
The actual expectations we have are sadly diminished.
I only realized this myself when I was talking to my G.P, who is well known as one of the best doctors in the country, I asked him whether he wanted my DNA profile, or whether collecting some genetic information would be helpful.
He said no. He said that (apart from special cases) that in comparison to having medical records on my parents/grandparents plus a full medical history on myself, the genetic profiles are worthless. The hospitals already have a torrent of information they're struggling to organize.
At first I was taken aback at what he said. The more I thought about it the more sense it made to me because obviously your parents and grandparents are likely to inhabit a similar environment to yourself. That must constrain the range of gene expression. We need to know what actually effects us, not a suggestion box, that might hinder more than help!
I still hold out hope for a more scientific way forward but Freeman Dyson's future seems very distant. Honestly the Japanese intelligent toilets with stool/urine analysis might have a bigger impact on preventive medicine than the Human Genome Project.
To put it another way, we had serious medical breakthroughs before cheap genetic examination and alteration was possible. Our benchmark should not be nothing, it should be the past periods of change in the field surely.
How does the 'modern' genetic engineering stack up against antibiotics, peptide synthesis? How many lives saved, how much higher a quality of life do we have as a result?
Eroom's Law is still in force despite xray crystallography and dna sequencing being orders of magnitudes cheaper. Suppose drug discovery isn't the the bottleneck and we blame the FDA, then where are the breakthroughs in Russia and China?
> We wouldn't have recombinant insulin without genetic engineering, so there's a pretty good high footprint drug for you, the modern combination insulin products that are fast acting and sustaining.
That is notable, yes. Partly because it is a good high footprint drug as you say, but also because of the reason for its demand... It is interesting because if you watch the Ford Foundation video from the 1960s I linked to, there is a household personalized preventative healthcare system. I believe we could build such a device in theory, but I don't see that we're breaking much ground. The last thing I saw that impressed me was the Toto intelligence II toilet but it didn't take off. I'd like to buy one, esp. if it was linked to my fridge and food cupboard to perform input/output analysis. I don't think there's a company even pretending to offer such a system today but it was readily imagined half a century ago.
> It's also the case that breeders are using identical methods to their ancestors, except for the part where they do things like clone champion bulls to use for breeding.
Breeders were doing pretty okay before artificial cloning.
I have some relatives in farming, I think they send off sperm cells to be hazed by freezing or some other hazing process that eliminates the weaker candidates.
I also know some old school breeders from a cattle mart who are basically wizards. They carefully examine their subjects to determine characteristics, like Darwin's pigeon fanciers in Origin. They are extremely gifted at selecting, like the Met's super recognizers.
"He said that of the millions of cows produced every year, the number that are cloned is “overall pretty insignificant.”
“But the bottom line is you do not want large numbers of these animals for a number of reasons, number one being that cloned animals are generally unhealthy.”"
That in a nutshell is my general outsider know-nothing view of biotech. It has no serious visible impact and I begin to suspect we don't actually know what we're doing. DNA is less the library of Alexandria and more like Borge's Library of Babel. Where are the cows with adverts emblazoned on their fur for passing cars to see? Weird exotic GM pets? We should see stupid things like that if we had any power. Freeman Dyson's vision of GM, laudable though it is, seems very far away.
I was looking for bioluminescent outdoor lighting/cool science project a while back. Found nothing useful. That's a low bar! That kind of thing should be standard by now and I believe we should all in shock that it isn't cheap and readily available.
Do you believe that in ten years, or twenty, that such things will be available to the public?
I don't want to be cynical but innovative practices have come and gone without sticking before now. There was even head transplants with dogs or monkeys a few decades ago but nothing came of it.
There is little point in educating and refining individuals (although they may benefit) unless the whole network of society can be improved net.
P.J O'Rourke points out that a great many ignorant people exist in America, especially in certain zip codes.
He says the average Russian is far more well read and educated, not just in theory but in spirit too, and a great many of them have superior intelligence that makes their population natural adepts in science and literature.
Despite all of this; Russia is poorer and considerably worse off than the USA today.
It is good that you ask the question in the context of individuals and groups. There is something of a microeconomics/macroeconomics divide here! The aid of one does not help the other. It is a most strange and counter intuitive paradox.
I say a good heuristic for our 'algorithm' for improving society and individuals is a diversity of options. Then we allow society and individuals to make the value judgments of what to choose independently. That is the classic position of a Westerner such as myself.
The caveat then is to what extent does informing a judgment control that outcome. That is a wicked problem. As computer scientists say, Garbage in, Garbage out. I suspect if you solve for that then you have your answer.
Most of the time I believe we act instinctively. This implies there is also a cost to rationality. I also believe rationality is a distant cousin to education and raw intelligence. There are too many examples of educated quick witted people who believe things that cannot be true.
To make a stab at a practical endeavour which would answer your question, I would guess that directing attention productively could increase rationality. I think in some way having a pencil and a piece of paper increases your powers of reason, or at least the possible scope. Putting somebody into a room with a cool temperature, good lighting, some paper and writing materials, no distractions and perhaps preliminary meditation is very likely to increase your powers of reason.