Would you be willing to show a reference or back-of-the-envelope calculation for this?
The last time I checked, the manufacture of large photovoltaic panels was energy-intensive and low-yield (their current price suggests that these problem persist.) They were also rated for a useful life of around two decades.
I do not believe that these problems have been corrected in any panel currently on the market. There is no shortage of vaporware.
solar panels take more energy to manufacture than they’ll produce in their lifetime
Do you mean to say that this is false?
Is there any other way to become literate?
What are your thoughts on the recent “Etsy considered harmful” article?
This comes to mind. The author claims that “the winner was accurate to six decimal places.”
Could you give more examples about things you like about Mathematica?
1) Mathematica’s programming language does not confine you to a particular style of thinking. If you are a Lisp fancier, you can write entirely Lispy code. Likewise Haskell. There is even a capability for relatively painless dataflow programming.
2) Wolfram Inc. took great pains to make interfacing with the outside world from within the app as seamless as possible. For example, you can suck in a spreadsheet file directly into a multidimensional array. There is import and export capability for hundreds of formats, including obscure scientific and engineering ones. In case the built-in formats do not suffice, defining custom ones is surprisingly easy.
3) A non-headache-inducing replacement for regular expressions. Enough said.
4) Graphical objects (likewise audio and other streams) are first-class data types. They are able to appear as both the inputs and outputs of functions.
5) Lastly, and most importantly: fully interactive program development. The rest of the programming universe lives a life of endlessly repeated “compile and pray” cycles. Mathematica permits you to meaningfully evaluate and edit in place every line of code you write. I am otherwise an Emacs junkie, yet I have never felt the slightest desire to touch Emacs when working on Mathematica code. The programmer’s traditional need to wade through and shovel giant piles of text from one place to another while writing code is almost entirely absent when working in this language.
The downsides of Mathematica (slow, proprietary, expensive, etc.) are widely known. Thus far, the advantages have vastly outweighed the problems for my particular kind of work. However, I have found that I now feel extremely confined when forced to work in any other programming language. Perhaps this risk should be added to the list of disadvantages.
I learned about Lisp after Mathematica, and was like, “wow, that must have been where Wolfram got the idea.”
Wolfram had (at least in the early days of Mathematica) a very interesting relationship with Lisp. He seems to have initially rejected many of its ideas, but it is clear that they somehow crept back into his work as time went by.
intelligence doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with our capacity to detect lies
Do you actually believe this?
Regardless of exactly what the new fact was?
I do not know of a working society-wide solution. Establishing research institutes in the tradition of Bell Labs would be a good start, though.
Do you mean that organizations aren’t very good at selecting the best person for each job.
Actually, no. What I mean is that human society isn’t very good at realizing that it would be in its best interest to assign as many high-IQ persons as possible the job of “being themselves” full-time and freely developing their ideas—without having to justify their short-term benefit.
Hell, forget “as many as possible”, we don’t even have a Bell Labs any more.
How does increasing “the marginal social status payoff from an increase in IQ” help?
The implication may be that persons with high IQ are often prevented from putting it to a meaningful use due to the way societies are structured: a statement I agree with.
But there is no evidence that any pill can raise the average person’s IQ by 10 points
Please read this short review of the state of the art of chemical intelligence enhancement.
We probably cannot reliably guarantee 10 added points for every subject yet. Quite far from it, in fact. But there are some promising leads.
if some simple chemical balance adjustment could have such a dramatic effect on fitness
Others have made these points before, but I will summarize: fitness in a prehistoric environment is a very different thing from fitness in the world of today; prehistoric resource constraints (let’s pick, for instance, the scarcity of refined sugars) bear no resemblance to those of today; certain refinements may be trivial from the standpoint of modern engineering but inaccessible to biological evolution, or at the very least ended up unreachable from a particular local maximum. Consider, for example, the rarity of evolved wheels.
I will accept that “AGI-now” proponents should carry the blame for a hypothetical Paperclip apocalypse when Friendliness proponents accept similar blame for an Earth-bound humanity flattened by a rogue asteroid (or leveled by any of the various threats a superintelligence—or, say, the output of a purely human AI research community unburdened by Friendliness worries—might be able to counter. I previously gave Orlov’s petrocollapse as yet another example.)
I cannot pin down this idea as rigorously as I would like, but there seems to exist such a trait as liking to think abstractly, and that this trait is mostly orthogonal to IQ as we understand it (although a “you must be this tall to ride” effect applies.) With that in mind, I do not think that any but the most outlandishly powerful and at the same time effortless intelligence amplifier will be of much interest to the bulk of the population.
ASCII—the onus is on you to give compelling arguments that the risks you are taking are worth it
Status quo bias, anyone?
I presently believe, not without justification, that we are headed for extinction-level disaster as things are; and that not populating the planet with the highest achievable intelligence is in itself an immediate existential risk. In fact, our current existence may well be looked back on as an unthinkably horrifying disaster by a superintelligent race (I’m thinking of Yudkowsky’s Super-Happies.)
It’s highly non-obvious that it would have significant effects
The effects may well be profound if sufficiently increased intelligence will produce changes in an individual’s values and goal system, as I suspect it might.
At the risk of “argument from fictional evidence”, I would like to bring up Poul Anderson’s Brain Wave, an exploration of this idea (among others.)
not quite what I was aiming at
I am curious what you had in mind. Please elaborate.
Software programs for individuals.… prime association formation at a later time.… some short-term memory aid that works better than scratch paper
I have been obsessively researching this idea for several years. One of my conclusions is that an intelligence-amplification tool must be “incestuously” user-modifiable (“turtles all the way down”, possessing what programming language designers call reflectivity) in order to be of any profound use, at least to me personally.
Or just biting the bullet and learning Mathematica to an expert level instead of complaining about its UI
About six months ago, I resolved to do exactly that. While I would not yet claim “black belt” competence in it, Mathematica has already enabled me to perform feats which I would not have previously dared to contemplate, despite having worked in Common Lisp. Mathematica is famously proprietary and the runtime is bog-slow, but the language and development environment are currently are in a class of their own (at least from the standpoint of exploratory programming in search of solutions to ultra-hard problems.)
I have located a paper describing Lenat’s “Representation Language Language”, in which he wrote Eurisko. Since no one has brought it up in this thread, I will assume that it is not well-known, and may be of interest to Eurisko-resurrection enthusiasts. It appears that a somewhat more detailed report on RLL is floating around public archives; I have not yet been able to track down a copy.
We can temporarily disrupt language processing through magnetically-induced electric currents in the brain. As far as anyone can tell, the study subjects suffer no permanent impairment of any kind. Would you be willing to try an anosognosia version of the experiment?