summerdown2

> That's only true if AlphaGo never makes a mistake or if AlphaGo will 100% always make the better or equal decision than a human + computer at any given state of the board.

Even if AlphaGo makes mistakes, and somewhere on the board a better move can be found, you would also need the human to reliably spot it.

Eg: AlphaGo makes a move. Let's say that at least 20% of AlphaGo moves can be bettered. Is this one of them? How can you tell? Most of the time, you'll mistakenly think a move can be improved and end up playing a worse one.

But, let's make AlphaGo even more fallible. Let's say that at least 50% of AlphaGo moves can be bettered. Again, is this one of those? How can you tell? And more to the point, on the times you are wrong, are you more wrong than AlphaGo is with its mistakes? Because even if you imagine you can spot a better move than AlphaGo and pick the actual better move 50% of the time, you also need your mistaken moves to be better than AlphaGo's mistaken moves or you'll still lose.

Worst of all, you can rule out a really good ability to spot AlphaGo's mistakes already. Let's say 99% of AlphaGo's moves have a better option. If you could spot them all, you'd be beating AlphaGo regularly on your own. As no human can now beat AlphaGo, this plainly isn't true.

So it's likely that:

a) No human can reliably pick a better move than AlphaGo and/or b) No human can reliably spot a move from AlphaGo can be improved, and/or c) Human mistakes are worse than AlphaGo mistakes, so even if you could fight it up to parity you'd still lose.

If you assume society is democratic, however, then knowing the facts matters - even if you end up behaving the same way. It's never a good thing to have a whole set of pressure groups funded by an industry trying to sow doubts about the long-term effects of that industry in contradiction of the facts.

There's a whole lot of unaddressed middle between "give up all oil and make the world look like 1930" and "wilfully hide the truth in order to give us 2020 tech."

How about, "As a democracy, have a debate about long-term problems with a core part of society in reasonable time to address them?

To me, the two versions here don't seem like 'showing' vs 'telling,' but interior monologue vs exterior view.

I prefer the first example, and read it as a window into the character's thoughts. It's very much showing to me, but done through character voice and thought.

Brand names for household products came into their own not to differentiate identical products, but rather to differentiate identical-seeming products. I.e.. because of the scandals of adulteration in the Victorian age.

http://www.artisanfoodlaw.co.uk/history-of-food-law/19th-cen...

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=U29jOkKqI2kC&pg=PA96&lpg...

I think it's a complaint that has been resolved, and the solution is to work less hard at meditating. To me, it looks like you believe meditation is about achieving and then holding a particular mental state/feeling, and this is incorrect.

I suggest you reframe the act of "meditating" as being the moment when you become conscious of yourself being distracted, and bring your mind back to the object of meditation (the current moment/breath/mantra, etc). Think of it not like work, but more like a game you're playing. You can even tell yourself, "aha - noticed I'm thinking rather than following the breath," etc.

In other words, successful meditation is all about your mind wandering, you noticing it wandering, and you bringing it back. The more you notice the attention wandering and the faster you get at returning it to centre the more "meditating" you're doing.

Holding your mind rigid is just going to make you frustrated.

Incidentally, over time, learning to notice your attention wandering ever more quickly and bringing it back more reliably will produce new mental states. And over time your mind will wander much less often. But this is all something that's achieved indirectly. If you aim directly for the mental state you'll find it much harder if not impossible to achieve.

I'm not sure what you're implying. You seem to be missing out the bit describing which non-governmental actor can fix this.

The first issue is that everyone else thinks only government can solve this. If you say governments can't, but have no other solution, you're essentially saying "no-one can do this." Which, while depressing, isn't going to achieve much.

The second issue is that, clearly, governments could actually fix this. They most likely aren't going to. But the capital and human investments needed aren't impossible. It's not like a neolithic tribe building a computer for example. Resolving global warming is actually possible with our current resources and technology.

Am I the only one to think the article missed a trick here?

Yes, it may be that traditional books don't work as well as they might. I do know I frequently read articles and come away with very little to show for the time spent. I think partly that's a function of the setting - I seem to retain much more from paper or e-ink compared to something read on a VDU. It's probably also a function of my own state of mind. I know I retain much more when I'm rested and reading earlier in the day. I also retain much more the day after, when I've had time to sleep on something.

And yet, there is something about the art of learning. I did a really good Coursera course that went through this (How to learn), and it, too, explained the importance of working to engage with material. Even doing something like looking away every few paragraphs and giving yourself a quick test to see if you can summarise what you just read works wonders. Combine that with spaced repetition, exercise, sleep and memory tricks like a memory palace, and retention/understanding grows hugely. So I do think there's something to this article.

But I also think about some classic articles that are also models of what they are discussing, and I'm wondering why the author didn't attempt something similar. For example, here's a description of the importance of varying sentence length in writing that at the same time is an example of the very practice of what it's talking about:

"This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important." = Gary Provost.

Here's an article about suspense that's also a model of the very thing it's talking about:

https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/a-simple-wa...

Given this is possible, I'm disappointed. I tend to agree the article made sense and that there are better and worse models of how to engage with a text. It's even possible that a text can self-guide a novice reader through good techniques simply by good writing. So, my disappointment. I think the article definitely missed a trick here, which would have been to go one level deeper, and tried to not only discuss the importance of a new type of text, but to do so with a model of the very text the author was talking about. As a result, although I think it may be possible to do what the author is describing, I don't know how anyone might go about it. And I'm not sure I fancy reading an entire book on a subject that doesn't interest me all that much in order to find out, either.

Actually, the S&P has delivered 7% after inflation over its history, not 5%, so the returns are even larger than this.

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042415/what-average...

The real thing the article misses, though, is the mindset that giving up a latte is meant to symbolise. That's best expressed in this article:

https://jamesclear.com/marginal-gains

The point isn't to just drop the latte and see a massive gain. It's to understand that a set of marginal gains made across your life can, together, have a huge cumulative effect.

It's not that simple at all, otherwise no-one would be talking about it.

There are a number of competing effects, but at least one currently unanswered question about basic income is whether people are naturally lazy or naturally entrepreneurial. I.e. given an unshakeable safety net which means they are ok whatever they do, do people work harder to do better than ok, or sit on ok. There have only been unsatisfactory trials so far, but a number of results seem to favour the better result.

Here's another way of looking at it. Currently, people can get sucked into a benefit trap. They might have an income from benefits of £100 a week, which vanishes once they start work. So obviously they would lose out unless a job they can get provides at least £100 + travel and other costs. Basic income removes this trap by saying: "You get £100 always. But you also get to keep a large proportion of every pound you earn above £100. Go for it!

Under basic income, a person otherwise on benefits can walk round people's houses with a ladder and offer to clean windows - and gain from the process.

That's assuming the company explains in enough detail how it secures its product for consumers to tell the difference. More likely is that company A has a breach, and consumers who care about security move to company B, which is just as insecure but hasn't recently been hit by the risk realisation bat.

Much like Aleister Crowley's joke that explains how Magic works:

”Two strangers sat down opposite each other in a railway carriage. One of the men had on his lap a cardboard box with holes in the top. After some time wondering what might be inside it, the second man said, “Excuse me, but I couldn’t help noticing your box. Does it contain an animal?”

The first man smiled politely. “Yes, a mongoose.”

“A mongoose? Where are you going with that?"

“Ah,” the first man replied, “My sister has terrible dreams. She sees snakes everywhere. I'm taking her the mongoose so it can scare them off."

“But how can that work,” the second man said, “Those are imaginary snakes?”

“Indeed,” his fellow traveller replied. “Which is why this,” and here he lifted the top and tilted it to show an empty box, "is an imaginary mongoose.”

I wonder if it's a similar psychological effect to that seen in the smoke filled room experiments, where someone is sat in a room and smoke starts coming under the door. If they're on their own, they investigate. If the room is full of actors who treat it as nothing, the one subject of the experiment tends to do nothing also.

It turns out it's really hard for some people (maybe all people?) to go against the flow of a crowd. And if you combine that with the rise of clickbait, learning algorithms and social media, it suddenly becomes really easy to find yourself in a filter bubble surrounded by a very annoyed and consipiracy-believing crowd.

> It would be, by fair, the biggest failure in modern science. So there is reason that alternatives to dark matter are held to a higher standard than dark matter itself, beyond simplicity - which dark matter no longer really is.

I don't think this is anything to do with a higher standard. It's more like Occam's razor. If there's an alternative explanation that will upend our whole understanding of gravity and cosmology, have at it. But such an explanation must come with something testable that shows it's true.

Here's an example of an alternative explanation, "a wizard did it." But that's not science, because there's no way to prove it. As a result, in the absence of a testable hypothesis, you have to go along with the one that does the least violence to all currently existing knowledge, surely?

I.e. what I'm saying is that it isn't on the Dark matter theory to prove itself. We already have observable gravitational issues that need something weird to be true. Dark matter is just the simplest explanation anyone can come up with that fits the facts. It's on any other theory to either throw out less of already-established science by being an even simpler explanation, or to prove it's justified in throwing out more by showing experimental evidence.

Or, to put it another way. I agree that dark matter isn't a simple theory. But there isn't currently a simpler one on the market.

> You cannot falsify dark matter, and you cannot prove a negative. Imagine I say there is a 5 headed green deer that weighs 2000 pounds and can speak Gaelic, but it's really good at avoiding being spotted - so good in fact that you can even look at right at it and might not see it. And you can even touch it and not even know you're touching it! What would you could consider an exhaustive proof of its lack of existence?

Dark matter isn't like this, though. It's more like an invisible deer that's been eating your grass and shitting on your lawn. At some point you have to say "I might not be able to see it, but the only thing that eats grass and leaves deer shit is ... a deer."

We have the problem that the observable mass of a galaxy is not sufficient to explain the motion of its constituents. As gravity is a pretty well validated theory, it can all be solved if we postulate some matter that we can't see which is still gravitationally affecting those things we can see. Dark matter, in this respect, is no more than the simplest explanation of what's happening via a single item that, if it were true, would explain things.

If you think you have a deer you haven't seen so far eating your lawn, you can put out infrared cameras and all sorts of equipment - and just maybe you might find that someone down the road has been messing with you and is mowing it at midnight. But equally, you might see grass disappear and see shit appear from mid air, and come to the conclusion whatever's doing it is invisible.

Ultimately, it's very conceivable that someone might disprove dark matter. All they have to do is posit some other candidate (eg a modification to gravity), and then predict a result that would follow from that. So far, all the other candidates haven't resulted in a hit, but the field is open for the next great idea to come up with one.

There's also (4) - a discussion medium with an increasing number of partisan bad actors both at state and corporate level, whose interest is to gum up communication, switch the overton window or foster division by trolling.

In my opinion, an increasing problem with twitter and other discussion media is astroturfing and bot re-signalling, so I feel this needs an additional category different from (3), in that (3) is people who are incompetent. (4) would be people who are agenda-driven and/or malicious.

Or, to put it differently, (3) is about problems caused by people who can hide their incompetence. (4) would be about problems caused by people who can hide their identity.

I'm extremely pessimistic about this section of users, because in my opinion, an identity-based internet would just as radically screw up the internet in a different direction. I do feel, however, that that's the way governments are heading if things carry on the way they are.

> It would take 15 to 20 generations of human beings, living their entire lives confined to a prison, to complete this journey.

From a link given by a poster in another comment, earlier, you can do it at 1g acceleration for just 12 years subjective time:

http://convertalot.com/relativistic_star_ship_calculator.htm...

... so from the look of it, the difficulty isn't having a generation ship, it's having sufficient fuel to produce the acceleration.

You're not wrong about science, but I think you're selling Buddhist monks short if you think none of them generate awesome works of philosophy. For example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagarjuna

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogen

Also playwriting. There's a really good book explaining that if you read a play backwards you can work out the causality much better and get a far greater understanding of the play:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Backwards-Forwards-Technical-Manual...

I wonder how this will co-exist with

a) Tracking non-facebook users via Facebook icons on web pages, and

b) Storing the information of non-users such as photos other people take, phone books other people upload, etc?

> It's not clear to me why it's not troubling to European citizens for their government to be in charge of what information is and isn't relevant to the public. Whenever I ask people about this, I get the response "well, that's why we have courts." I dunno, Europeans must trust their courts a lot more than I trust mine.

I think we trust our governments much more than US citizens trust there government. There's a line from Ronald Reagan that goes something like:

"The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

The great preponderance of people in Europe simply do not think like this. For a huge range of issues that statement would actually sound reassuring in Europe. Essentially, if you believe in the rule of law and democracy, the government is simply ourselves, getting collectively together to fix something.

Note that this doesn't mean we like any particular politician. We despise many politicians. But the idea of government as a force for good still remains in Europe as far as I can see (UK). Sometimes I think the difference between Europe and the US is that we despise our politicians and quite like the non-political part of our government (civil service, NHS, etc). The US appears to hate the non-political part of it too.

People subject to identity theft due to poor control of their data do indeed suffer real world consequences. I wouldn't necessarily want to argue it's a case of life or death - but there's undoubtedly actual harm in some cases ranging from social issues if their data is sensitive, right down to financial loss.

And if you wanted to examine whether it could be a matter of life or death, it wouldn't be that big of a stretch. Consider what might be the result of someone trying to escape from an abusive relationship having their personal data exposed. Or a whistleblower / political dissident. For example, imagine a Chinese dissident with a free-Tibet facebook record whose data gets back to the Chinese government.

I'd focus on China particularly because they're developing a system for working out how much people align with the state and it appears it may be partly based on the information they can find out about people's internet postings:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System

> You can either decide that privacy is a basic right that everyone has and cannot be negotiated away, in which case this law makes sense.

> Or you can decide that it's a decision each person makes, and let the market take care of providing options that are more vs. less privacy-respecting.

Or, collectively, a group of people can agree on a government that supports privacy protection for goods sold under its remit. Which is what's happened here. I get that it's not popular in the US, but privacy controls are quite popular in Europe, and the EU is in this case following the mood of its people.

Brings to mind this cartoon:

https://www.shopontheborderlands.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/20...

And, of course, the ultimate spirit of a corporate-bureaucracy themed RPG would probably be Paranoia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_(role-playing_game)

Both the photographer and his subjects are the elite. No-one in a top hat would tip it to anyone of a lower status.

I have the same feeling when I hear politicians here in the UK say that they've had to make "tough decisions." Always the part being unsaid is "tough on who?"

Here's a moral question put the other way round. Do you think libraries are a good thing?

We now have the technology to make available the great majority of human knowledge and culture to a vast amount of humanity for free. I'd call that a very positive state both for the people receiving it and the benefits it would bring to the world.

And the only thing stopping us is that certain people would like to be paid. It's the same argument with cheap generic drugs for the third world. At some point you have to incentivise research. But also, at some point you have to consider the benefits to the rest of society too.

> > Freedom originally meant that you could deal with whoever you wanted on whatever terms both parties could agree on

Please could you provide a time and place in history where this has ever been the case?

An artificial womb is also one of the steps required to bring back the mammoth.

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170221-reviving-woolly-mamm...

Is there a short summary anywhere of recommendations for life style changes that do benefit the fight against dementia? I don't have it currently, but I must admit the older I get the more the prospect concerns me.

I agree with you a bit. But I also think there's a danger in assuming every anecdote is a data point, which is best expressed here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWr39Q9vBgo

(Short video with Richard Feynman)... tl;dv - it's very hard to know something and you have to be really careful that you've done the work and aren't just deluding yourself.

Or, to put it differently - every anecdote is really only a data point if you understand what exactly it's measuring and what has been excluded. If you haven't taken the care necessary, then it's very easy to draw false conclusions. People are really bad witnesses and really bad at seeing what is and isn't given in the information they think they have - particularly if the anecdote is time-shifted from the point it was taken.