Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Many people think of themselves as rational and have mastered the basics (understand the scientific method, know how to systematically solve difficult problems, etc) but are still constantly fooled by their human, imperfect brains into irrational thoughts and actions - both in day-to-day life and when pondering larger questions (science, engineering, policy, philosophy). Many aren't aware (just as I wasn't) that there are many more levels of rational thinking to unlock, that mistakes and biases can be identified and reduced.
The book is adapted from a series of blog posts so lacks a bit in coherence (can be hard to get into), but stick with it for a bit, and I guarantee the ideas presented will be well-worth it.
You could still duplicate the verbal instruction in a (computer-readable) text, and then have an automated alert for any deviation from the texted instructions. Also, on big commercial flights with multiple pilots, could one of the pilots have more time to verify texted information? (I thought I heard something about a communicator/navigator role). And doesn't the ATC controller already have to type in the information into the ATC computer? I'm suggesting an automated message, not literally a human typing a text.
It is amazing that in this day and age, instructions from the ATC are still spoken, not texted. (Does anyone here know if the ATC computer keeps track of the target flight level, heading, etc? If so, these instructions could probably be texted at a push of a button in addition to the spoken words. The aircraft's avionics could then be smart and alert the pilots if they're doing something different.)
There's definitely 'mystic bullshit' in Vipassana, but it's not the 'vibrations' part (the Vipassana course emphasizes over and over again that the sensations you're supposed to watch for are real, physical sensations - pressure on the skin, temperature, sweat, itching - nothing mystical)
A while ago I wrote something very similar - https://fasterbadger.com - see discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9679464 - based on PhantomJS - didn't put nearly as much work into it though, it's still very much in prototype stage - the goal was different though, not so much for privacy but for browsing JS- and CSS-heavy sites (e.g. most news sites) on legacy devices/phones, especially where bandwidth is at a premium.
I've often seen the exact opposite of this: entry-level devs being all too happy to 'fill in the gaps' in a spec based on their own (very limited) understanding of the problem domain (not even being fully aware of where the spec ends and their interpretation begins), and more senior people recognizing when they don't actually know the answer and realizing that it's important enough to clarify with the domain expert. Basically Dunning-Kruger effect.
"3 numbers were inaccurate" (great job, that's way below average)
"3 numbers were inaccurate" (just an FYI for next time, no big deal)
"3 numbers were inaccurate" (and I am annoyed that I had to deal with the consequences, please ensure it doesn't happen again)
"3 numbers were inaccurate" (but I understand the pressure you were under and the volume of work you had, so I don't see it as an ongoing problem)
"3 numbers were inaccurate" (and I see it as part of an ongoing, worrisome pattern of sloppy work coming from you, and I expect you to correct it)
Sometimes the recipient of the message really does need the speaker's evaluation, not just the bare factual observations, to put the message in proper context. "My order took 4 days to arrive" is a lot less useful than "Thanks, my order only took 4 days to arrive" or "I had to wait a whole 4 days for my order to arrive".
The Zeo sleep monitoring headband. As far as I know, the only consumer device that accurately measured and reported sleep stages based on actual direct brainwave measurement, and not just secondary indicators like pulse and movement.
f_i was defined as the ith program in lexicographical order that is guaranteed to terminate and to only return 0 or 1 (from the article: "we can just throw out programs that loop infinitely or don’t return a 1 or a 0")
This means that to write your "gen_f(i)" function, you'd have to solve the halting problem, which is impossible. So there is no mechanical (and hence no Javascript-based) way to create the gen_f(i) function.
Note that f_i is still a well-defined mathematical object, and so table T is a well-defined mathematical object (and then so is fbar). But they are not computable objects.
From the research I did, limited liability is not at all to "protect liability between multiple participants", but indeed protects you from outside claims. It is indeed not bullet-proof (for example, if a one-person corporation owes taxes they can still go after your assets), but it is much better than nothing.
In my jurisdiction the actual incorporation is actually quite cheap (don't remember exact numbers unfortunately, but cost wasn't an issue at all). What's expensive is the services of a lawyer, but you really don't need it for a basic incorporation, the process is pretty self-explanatory. (Of course, if it's a startup with multiple co-founders, outside investment, etc, then a lawyer is definitely a must-have). The major cost, for me, is all of the ongoing tax accounting - you either need to pay for expensive bookkeping+accounting, or spend a lot of your time learning to do it yourself.
I have one corporate entity that I use for both my "side projects" and for consulting work. Mostly did it to ensure limited liability. Also, if one of the projects goes big, it will make things easier later on. Also, if we're talking about iPhone apps and such, a corporate name looks more professional in the app store.
Surely a future generation which has the means to resuscitate cryogenically-preserved individuals, has the capability to decide whether to do it or not? "Who decides" - surely the generation of would-be resuscitators decides, how can it be otherwise? As to whether "people living now are more worthy of living than future generations" - why does it have to be an either-or proposition? I think you may be assuming that overpopulation is a permanent problem, but I think that this is far from certain in the very-long-term...
> there is no need to imagine some hypothetical future of human suffering. We are already here
That's exactly the problem. The whole point of the SSC response was that the Boston Review is focused on current problems (societal, political, etc) instead of doing actual futurism, i.e. looking at how to solve these problems going forward, or at least prevent them from being worse. Futurists in all 4 quadrants are already aware of all these current problems, and as Scott says, they are "going to fight [their] hardest to end poverty, disease, death, and suffering"
Even if it's true that the natural tendency of technology is to "only amplify existing human systems and biases" (which I don't think is true, especially on the timescale of the graph in the SSC response) - but still, even if it's 100% true: Is it any reason to not think seriously about the future? To ignore the real possibility of the singularity? To judge ideas about the future based on superficial characteristics of the people proposing these ideas, rather than on their own merits? I feel like the Boston Review article is not actionable, it is not at all clear what it's actually proposing.
What the article doesn't mention is that Muscovites are right to be concerned about "replacement" apartments offered by the government. There have been plenty of cases across Russia where "replacement" apartments were sub-standard, unlivable, or in some extreme cases existed only on paper. (In a variety of circumstances, e.g. after homes were destroyed in the wildfires in Khakassia). This is of course the consequence of corruption (which unfortunately hits hardest on the poor, the elderly, the working class, etc).
Another interesting point that the article doesn't bring up is that "khruschevka" apartments are not just limited to ex-Soviet countries - you can find them in other ex-Soviet allies, most unexpectedly in Cuba!
I am not at all a linguist and not at all an expert on either writing system, but as a layman looking at both the Chinese and Ancient Egyptian writing systems, one similarity seemed really striking - the notion that a typical word is composed of a 2 parts - a semantic, pictographic "root", combined with another part that indicates pronunciation.
I've eaten apricot kernels as a kid, along with most of my family, certainly much more than 8 seeds a day, and we never had any issues. I've also seen them sold in stores in China, cheaply and in bulk. I am guessing that either (a) they're just trying to be over-cautious to protect themselves from potential liability, or (b) perhaps some people have a heightened sensitivity to this, or (c) perhaps it's some special, more poisonous type of apricot - which makes me question why they wouldn't just pick a less poisonous variety for the product. EDIT: Researching this more, I'm seeing that the danger is much more real than I thought. Not sure how to reconcile this with my very vivid childhood memories of consuming these things in pretty large quantities (though like the other poster in this thread, we've had to break apricot pits with a hammer to get at the seeds, we didn't have the seeds conveniently pre-packaged).
I don't know anything about Japanese, but if "aoi" is used to describe both the sky and unripe fruit, what makes linguists say that the correct translation for "aoi" is blue? Wouldn't it make more sense to say that "aoi" means "green/blue", i.e. a general term for both green and blue? Doesn't it make the relationship between the words "aoi" and "midori" the same as the relationship between the words "rectangle" and "square" - one is a superset of the other?
StackOverflow serves a dual purpose: (1) to answer the immediate question of the original poster, and (2) to serve as a reference for anyone encountering the same problem in the future. I'd say that (2) is more important - good question/answer pairs on SO have helped hundreds or even thousands of developers beyond the original poster. Answering "what have you tried" may help with purpose (1), but is often just distracting for (2). If I'm looking for a way to do X, reading through someone's failed attempts to do X is a waste of time. And this whole notion of making someone "struggle a bit" is entirely misplaced when you keep purpose (2) in mind. Let's say I'm not a CSS expert and I'm trying to find a way to make a sticky page footer. I can "struggle for a bit", spend maybe 30-60min researching the topic and come up with a solution myself, without ever involving StackOverflow. Multiply this by 1,000 developers facing the same problem, and you have 500-1000 hours of wasted developer effort. Compare this to spending 15min to write a precisely-worded question (but without "steps you've tried"), and an expert spending 15min to write up an answer. From that point on, the piece of knowledge is available to anyone, enormously amplifying the impact of this initial time investment. Of course I'm oversimplifying, but I see this amplification effect continuously ignored in discussions of StackOverflow posting guidelines. I think this attitude of "show your work" and "make the original poster struggle a bit" comes from the days of IRC/Usenet questions, where an answer to a question only helped one person, not thousands.
I did a Vipassana retreat a few years ago. Definitely an incredible experience, and I could see directly measurable positive effects on my thinking, on how I made decisions, etc. afterwards (although the effect does wear off after a while if you don't keep meditating regularly). However, I feel I must mention some negatives as well. First, the course emphasizes many times that it is purely secular, but towards the end it slides into the more religious aspects of Buddhism (reincarnation and even some explicitly anti-scientific ideas). I feel that this can turn off a lot of the more analytically-minded/secular/atheist people, which is a real shame because Vipassana still makes a lot of sense without these religious aspects. Secondly, towards the end of the course there's real pressure in the lectures to accept Vipassana as the "one true way" to meditate, and I got a little bit of a cult-ish vibe from some of the returning students and especially from the volunteers. Not to the degree that it's going to be a problem for most people, but I can see how a small minority of "brainwash-susceptible" individuals, especially in a vulnerable stage in life, may throw themselves 100% into Vipassana after a retreat, instead of critically thinking about this powerful experience afterwards. So my advice: definitely do it if you can, take it seriously and give it your 100%, but don't turn off your critical thinking skills during the lectures or after the retreat. If you can do it, there's lots to gain.
It actually starts rendering even before the entire page is ready (and fixes up the page later; well, in the current version it just re-renders the page later). For some sites (news sites tend to be particularly bad here), rendering on the client takes significant time, especially with older phones - because of complex scripts, styles, many re-layouts/reflows, ads/trackers (which bring their own scripts/styles), and so on. Additionally, there's the issue of the number and size of network requests, which can be a problem over slow 3G connections. Of course, I could be wrong in these assumptions, and it could be the case that with improved networks, improved hardware and better-optimized sites none of this will be an issue. So FasterBadger is an experiment - will server-side rendering be enough of an improvement for people to change browsing habits? What about people with slower phones and slower networks, e.g. in developing countries? We're definitely finding sites today that e.g. don't display any content for a whole 30-60sec on an iPhone4 and display in mere seconds via FasterBadger, but of course not every site will be sped up.
Thanks! WebKit.js could be interesting down the line, thanks for pointing it out, though I wonder about performance and standards compliance. There's also the stability issue - the page says it's "experimental/unstable/not yet alpha". FasterBadger is based on the much more stable PhantomJS, and still plenty of gnarly bugs are coming out.
Agree on the security aspect, and injecting ads would be horrible, I definitely think there are better monetization models here. Plugins are an interesting idea, will give it some thought. Though for now, I'm thinking in a different direction... I think FasterBadger is mainly applicable to mobile (since complex pages would be much more overwhelming to phones than desktop machines), and plugins are less of a thing there. However, a native app that speaks the FasterBadger protocol (essentially an alternative browser app) could be interesting.
Interesting idea. Unfortunately FasterBadger is far from being a universal browser now, there are still many sites that it won't support or won't support well (anything that relies on more than just basic click and keyboard input events), so the degree of integration you're talking about probably isn't appropriate yet... but perhaps will be in the future.