https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-happens-in-a-mind-that-cant-see-mental-images-20240801/
ChrisHibbert
Karma: 375
I think there’s a lot of research that shows we’re fairly bad at predicting how other people see the world, and how much detail there is in their heads. I’ve read quite a few books that talk about how some people presume that other people are speaking metaphorically when they talk about imagining scenes in color or in 3-d, or how they can “hear” a musical piece in their mind. Those who can assume that others just aren’t trying. Face-blindness wasn’t recognized for quite a while.
Some people are much better at doing mental rotations of 3-d objects than others. I can do a decent mental image of the inside of an orange, an apple, a persimmon, or a pear, but perhaps I’ve spent more time cutting up fruit than others. My mental image of the internal shape of the branches in our persimmon tree is pretty detailed, since I’ve been climbing inside to pick fruit and trim for 35 years.google.com/images?q=mental+rotation+three-dimensional+objects
There was a time when I was working on n-dimensional data structures that I could cleanly think in 4 or 5 dimensional “images”. They weren’t quite visual, since vision is so 2-d, but I could independently manipulate features of the various dimensions separately.
When looking at full-color stereograms, you have to have a mental model of the image depth to make sense of it, even if the rendering is all of surfaces.
The Iowa Election Markets were roughly contemporaneous with Hanson’s work. They are often co-credited.
Proofreading comment:
Please change “folks” to “focus”
I don’t see a place for listing book orders, so does this use an automated Market Maker? What’s the algorithm? (e.g. Hanson’s LMSR?) Where can we find the code?
Cooking tainted meat doesn’t denature prions. (They aren’t “alive”, so they can’t be “killed”.) Neither do most biological processes, as you might expect in the normal case of digestion. As the article above mentions, they can persist in the environment for years.
It can take temperatures of several hundred degrees to denature them.
Prion diseases are slow to develop (up to decades), incurable, and always fatal.
I think the “always fatal” part of this sentence is vacuous. Unless the meaning is something akin to “kills within X years of contracting the disease”, it can only mean “kills the victim if they don’t die of something else first.” (In fact, the article later says “Humans infected with BSE, meanwhile, can harbor it for up to decades post-exposure, and live an average of over a year after showing symptoms.”)
There are two known infectious prion diseases in people. … Kuru … vCJD
Wikipedia lists fatal familial insomnia, and two others.
But it doesn’t seem to infect people. Is it ever going to? If a newly-emerged virus were sweeping across the US and killing deer, which could be spread through consuming infected meat, I would think “oh NO.” I’d need to see very good evidence to stop sounding the alarm.
Scrapie, in sheep, has been known since at least 1732, and isn’t thought to spread to humans.
I think a thing that most people neglect is that dishwashers are designed for approximately a family of four preparing and eating two meals a day together, which leads to a certain accumulation of dishes, and the dishwasher needing to be run at least every other day. That means a certain amount of time for the detritus to dry on the dishes. If you have a smaller dishwasher, or more people eating, the dishwasher will be run more often, and it’ll be more effective at cleaning dirtier dishes. If you run the dishwasher daily, #4 or #5 might work well for you. If there are only two eating, or you’re eating more take-out (fewer pots and pans) and you only do a load every 4 or 5 days, then the dishes need to be cleaner going into the dishwasher.
Silly hats are commonly associated with some cults and secret societies, so that’s not particularly a mark in your favor. “not taking yourselves too seriously” is a plus, but neither dress code nor anti-dress code will get you there.
It’s helpful to the community to file a report with the BBB. And next time check the references there rather than trusting the super’s recommendations.
With only two questions about what people believe, I expected to see a matrix showing number of people in each 2-d category. The most interesting result is how do answers to the two questions correlate.
The laws in the US (generally local or state) are almost always written to criminalize transactions that involve “chance, consideration, and interest”.
“Chance” basically means that the outcome is outside the control of the participants. In Texas, poker is defined as a game of skill, so the outcome is, by definition, not a matter of chance. Most other places don’t take that stance.
“Consideration” means that the parties put up something of value. Another way around these laws is often taken by prediction markets (or casino nights) within a company. The participants might win something, but the initial stake is provided by the sponsor.
“Interest” means that the parties stand to gain something if the outcome is in their favor. If the winnings will go to charity, you aren’t breaking any laws. This is the work-around exploited by Long Bets.
It seems to me that one could make a solid case that prediction markets demonstrate skill, since there is consistency over time of who wins and who loses. A variety of PMs have demonstrated that there are super-predictors who have a consistent ability to do well. The issue is that the laws are written and enforced locally, so there’s no one to go to to get a blanket ruling that you won’t be prosecuted. If you offer PM services throughout the US, then every local prosecutor who thinks the publicity will help her in the next election can take you to court, and you have to win all the cases in order to not lose your shirt.
Please correct “her parents had took her to Third Hand Book Emporium” to “her parents had taken her to Third Hand Book Emporium”.
The focus on categorizing negative outcomes seems to obscure a lot of relevant detail. If you broaden the view to include things from non-takeover to peaceful cooperation, it would probably be evident that the boundaries are soft and scenarios near the edge aren’t as definitely bad as this makes them appear. I think we might learn more about possible coexistence and how thing might turn out well if we spend less time focused on imagined disasters.
First I’d point out that scenarios like Drexler’s “Reframing Superintelligence” aren’t that far from the *Flash Economy* scenario, and there’s probably a gradual blend across the boundary. My current thinking is similar to that, though I characterize it as AIs participating in an economy, which includes competition and cooperation. You get ahead in an economy by providing services that others are willing to pay for. If you do that for very long, you are incentivized to learn that cooperation (filling a need) is the way to garner resources that give you the ability to get more done.
Second I’d point out that there are many voices currently arguing that the largest companies of today (FANG, often) have too much power and are monopolizing societies’ resources. I’d just like to contrast that with the same arguments made in earlier eras about IBM, Microsoft, AT&T, Standard Oil, big Hollywood, the railroad trusts, the A&P stores, and many others. If you have the right viewpoint, you can look at an economy where someone is earning more money than you think is just, and believe that they’re going to own the world in another year if nothing is done to stop them. It’s usually competition and innovation that keeps this from happening and not government or other concerted action.
typo: serious ⇒ series in the second sentence
I think the crux is right-of-way. Boats and ships have elaborate rules that always establish a right-of-way that can be clearly established after the fact, so all pilots and captains adhere their behavior to their expectations about the rules. The other thing about navigation on water is that in a close encounter the boat with the right-of-way is required to follow through so the other parties can predict what they can do. This is also not true on the road, leading to the phenomenon of drivers “politely” waving you to go out of turn.
The rules of the road aren’t nearly as clear. (for instance, when they give the right of way to the car that arrived earlier at an intersection, that’s not decidable after the fact).
The role of traffic lights is ensconced in the law, so pressing the button causes the lights to change, and the lights impact who has the right of way. It doesn’t matter what the light thinks as long as the light changes.
Of course, I also remind myself at crosswalks that having the right-of-way is insufficient defense in an encounter between a pedestrian and a car.
This puts things in a substantially different light than popular explanations of bubbles caused by “greed” or popping from “fear”. There is something to those too: the subprime mortgages of ’08 were in fact greedy, bad decisions; the private wealth-hoarding after recessions can in fact delay recovery. But we can have the understanding that the economy will have some cyclical nature from these feedback loops no matter what, and ask the question: how stable could it be aside from this?
Treating greed as something that grows and shrinks over time and has a causative effect is a really bad model. It’s much more useful to think as greed as a renewable resource that takes advantage of opportunities when the incentives are strong and feedback loops are weak. The subprime mortgage crisis had examples of both. The CRA and congressional interference gave banks incentives to issue more loans with weaker underwriting standards. The “greedy” borrowers were taking advantage of a situation where they could more easily get a loan than at other times. Borrowers always have a higher estimate of their ability to repay than the banks do; it is the banks responsibility to draw a line somewhere.
This is orthogonal to your point, but you’re conflating two different descriptions of the mechanisms of aging when you attribute “7 hallmarks of aging” to Aubrey de Grey. Aubrey talks about seven distinct forms of damage that result from metabolic activity. There’s a separate discussion that addresses 9 hallmarks, though that is less attributable to any single researcher. The framework has been adopted by the NIH, AFAR, and extensively discussed in Sinclair’s book Lifespan.
There’s a fair amount of overlap between the two, but they’re distinct frameworks. de Grey’s theory talks about 7 distinct types of cellular damage that might be mitigated by separate interventions. (e.g. “mitochondrial mutations” by outsourcing the production of proteins, “extracellular linkages” by AGE breakers). The 9 Hallmarks approach identifies vaguer clouds of disfunction, only some of which are amenable to direct intervention. (e.g. “epigenetic alterations”, “loss of proteostasis”, “deregulated nutrient sensing”).
Typo watch:
Collectivization is so safe that days people with epilepsy often cure themselves by joining a collective.
should be
Collectivization is so safe that these days people with epilepsy often cure themselves by joining a collective.
“two” should be “to”.
Vader is clearly homicidal and irrational. Leia’s superior rationality won’t slow him down. Leia recognizes that immediately, but she should also have realized that revealing the base’s location wouldn’t prevent him from destroying the planet.