brilee

Karma: 574

brilee Jul 14, 2012, 6:54 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: brilee’s comment on: PZ Myers on the Infeasibility of Whole Brain Emulation
Oops, didn’t see a further comment below: In response to a comment, ” I still don’t understand why biologists insist that you have to do a perfect simulation, down to the smallest molecule, and then state the obvious fact that it’s not going to happen.”, PZ says this:

“Errm, because that’s what the singularitarians we’re critiquing are proposing? This whole slice-and-scan proposal is all about recreating the physical components of the brain in a virtual space, without bothering to understand how those components work. We’re telling you that approach requires an awfully fine-grained simulation.

An alternative would be to, for instance, break down the brain into components, figure out what the inputs and outputs to, say, the nucleus accumbens are, and then model how that tissue processes it all (that approach is being taken with models of portions of the hippocampus). That approach doesn’t require a detailed knowledge of what every molecule in the tissue is doing.

But the method described here is a brute force dismantling and reconstruction of every cell in the brain. That requires details of every molecule.”

Still seems like a straw man.

brilee Jul 14, 2012, 6:48 PM
4 points
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on: PZ Myers on the Infeasibility of Whole Brain Emulation
From the comments, PZ elaborates: “Andrew G: No, you don’t understand. Part of this magical “scan” has to include vast amounts of data on the physics of the entity…pieces which will interact in complex ways with each other and the environment. Unless you’re also planning to build a vastly sped up model of the whole universe, you’re going to have a simulation of brain running very fast in a sensory deprivation tank.

Or do you really think you can understand how the brain works in complete isolation from physiology, endocrinology, and sensation?”

Seems like PZ is dismissing the feasibility of computation by assuming that computation has to be perfectly literal. To make a chemistry analogy here, one does not have to model the quantum mechanics and the dynamics of every single molecule in a beaker of water in order to simulate the kinetics of a reaction in water. One does not need to replicate the chemical entirety of the neuron in silico; one merely needs to replicate the neuron’s stimulus-response patterns.

brilee Jul 12, 2012, 6:42 PM
11 points
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in reply to: A1987dM’s comment on: What Is Signaling, Really?
I am also a really fast speed-reader, and my mind tends to ignore these sorts of words.

I remember one time I opened a fortune cookie, glanced at the slip, laughed, and repeated it to my friend, with perfect grammar. He grabbed the slip, actually read the slip (which apparently had had horrible grammar mistakes), and demanded to know how I had managed to read the slip while unintentionally correcting all the grammar mistakes in it.

brilee Jul 6, 2012, 4:23 AM
11 points
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on: Negative and Positive Selection
The concepts of positive and negative selection are not quite well defined in your essay, I think.

Imagine that you have one test, with a gaussian distribution of outcomes. Let’s arbitrarily set a threshold, and if people are above this threshold, they have passed this test. Call the sets of passing A and not passing ~A

Would you call this a positive or negative selection? It is neither, in my opinion.

Now, imagine you have two tests, A and B.

A positive test is one where A U B are selected. A negative test is one where ~(~A ^ ~B) are selected.

In other words—the operative difference between positive and negative selection is OR vs. AND.

brilee Jul 6, 2012, 3:23 AM
0 points
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on: Negative and Positive Selection
One word:

China.

One massive examination that determines your entire future? Isn’t that about as positive selection as you can get?

brilee Jul 5, 2012, 11:24 PM
10 points
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on: On the Care and Feeding of Young Rationalists—Revisited[Draft] [Request for Feedback]
It would seem to me that parenting is one of those fields of knowledge where you don’t know what you don’t know until you’ve actually had kids yourself. If you find this hard to believe, then imagine how seriously you’d take your younger self if ey were to talk about how to be in a good relationship, before having had a significant other.

So, while I generally dislike discouraging people who are enthusiastic about getting something done, I would like to suggest that perhaps you are not the right person to write this post (or not yet). This is based on my reading of the rubber-ducking sentence as meaning that you have not yet had kids.

brilee Jun 25, 2012, 11:05 PM
0 points
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in reply to: mwengler’s comment on: Four Short Stories on Error Checking
moderndescartes.com/blog

brilee Jun 25, 2012, 4:24 PM
0 points
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in reply to: Antisuji’s comment on: Four Short Stories on Error Checking
You’re very right about the moral of the story. I had intended it as a an allegory to publication bias in science, but I don’t think I wrote the stories quite right.

Four Short Stories on Error Checking

brileeJun 25, 2012, 4:58 AM

9 points

8 comments2 min readLW link

brilee Jun 24, 2012, 3:46 PM
14 points
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on: Minimum Viable Workout Routine is Dangerously Misinformative
Seems like a good post on its own; no need to bring down its apparent quality by making it appear to be an emotionally heated response to another post of lesser quality

brilee May 31, 2012, 10:30 PM
7 points
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in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Low Hanging Fruit- Basic bedroom decorating
Downvoted for being about as plausible as fan death http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death

brilee May 14, 2012, 8:46 PM
19 points
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in reply to: AlanCrowe’s comment on: Petition: Off topic area
To put it bluntly, HPMoR threads contribute a very non-trivial fraction of karma GDP. Shouldn’t you be worried about that?

brilee Apr 22, 2012, 1:26 AM
8 points
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on: Hofstadter’s Superrationality
Huh. I finally understand the “logic” that has been espoused in HPMoR, ch 33 “”Precisely,” said Harry Potter, his face now turning serious. “We are faced with a true Prisoner’s Dilemma...”

What this reminds me of is the logistic equation: dx/dt = x(1-x).

This simple system has two equilibrium points: x = 0, and x = 1. x=0 is unstable—that is, any perturbation will cause the system to veer away from that equilibrium point. x=1 is stable, and any perturbations return to that equilbrium.

Hofstadter says that superrationalists should decide to pick the x=0 (unstable) equilibrium—i.e., cooperate. But any deviation from superrationality, however slight, will cause the equilibrium to collapse into the all-defect equilibrium.

brilee Apr 15, 2012, 8:37 PM
−2 points
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in reply to: brilee’s comment on: Our Phyg Is Not Exclusive Enough
Could I get an explanation for the downvotes?

brilee Apr 15, 2012, 2:55 PM
13 points
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on: Our Phyg Is Not Exclusive Enough
From Shirky’s Essay on online groups: “The Wikipedia right now, the group collaborated online encyclopedia is the most interesting conversational artifact I know of, where product is a result of process. Rather than “We’re specifically going to get together and create this presentation” it’s just “What’s left is a record of what we said.”

When somebody goes to a wiki, they are not oging there to discuss elementary questions that have already been answered; they are going there to read the results of that discussion. Isn’t this basically what the OP wants?

Why aren’t we using the wiki more? We have two modes of discussion here: discussion board, and wiki. The wiki serves more as an archive of the posts that make it to main-page level, meaning that all the hard work of the commenters in the discussion boards is often lost to the winds of time. (Yes, some people have exceptionally good memory and link back to them. But this is obviously not sustainable.) If somebody has a visionary idea on how to lubricate the process of collating high-quality comments and incorporating them into a wiki-like entity, then I suspect our problem could be solved.

brilee Apr 15, 2012, 3:06 AM
−2 points
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in reply to: TimS’s comment on: Our Phyg Is Not Exclusive Enough
Don’t put up straw men; I never said that to be less wrong, you had to do all those things. “less wrong” represents a attitude towards the world, not an endpoint.

brilee Apr 15, 2012, 2:49 AM
25 points
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on: Our Phyg Is Not Exclusive Enough
[meta] A simple reminder: This discussion has a high potential to cause people to embrace and double down on an identity as part of the inner or outer circles. Let’s try to combat that.

In line with the above, please be liberal with explanations as to why you think an opinion should be downvoted. Going through the thread and mass-downvoting every post you disagree with is not helpful. [/meta]

brilee Apr 15, 2012, 2:35 AM
−2 points
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in reply to: TimS’s comment on: Our Phyg Is Not Exclusive Enough
I’m not the one who downvoted you, but if I were to hazard a guess, I’d say your were downvoted because when you start off by saying “people like me”, it immediately sets off a warning in my head. That warning says that you have not separated personal identity from your judgment process. At the very least, by establishing yourself as a member of “people like me”, you signify that you have already given up on trying to be less wrong, and resigned yourself to being more wrong. (I strongly dislike using the terms “less wrong” and “more wrong” to describe elites and peasants of LW, but I’m using them to point out to you the identity you’ve painted for yourself.)

Also, there is /always/ something you can do about a problem. The answer to this particular problem is not, “Noobs will be noobs, let’s give up”.

brilee Apr 14, 2012, 3:15 PM
9 points
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on: The So-Called Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
The Uncertainty Principle, is in fact, an uncertainty principle.

The uncertainty principle is not a fact about quantum mechanics. The uncertainty principle is a fact about waves in general, and it says that you cannot deliver both a precise-time and precise-frequency wavelet. This has implications in, for example, in radio signals, and electrical signals.

In QM, we assume matter behaves like waves. That means that matter now does all the same things waves do, including, as it turns out, an uncertainty principle. Uncertainty has simply been hyped up by philosophers who couldn’t add 2 and 2.

brilee Apr 11, 2012, 8:27 PM
1 point
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on: Help me teach Bayes’
I have a post here including a short primer on Bayes’ theorem.

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/8lr/logodds_or_logits/

brilee

Four Short Sto­ries on Er­ror Checking

Four Short Stories on Error Checking