I know someone who was on dialysis while waiting for a transplant. It was really hard on them, and for a while it looked like they might not pull through. I don’t know how common such an experience is.
darius
Karma: 271
A doctor faces a patient whose problem has resisted decision-tree diagnosis—decision trees augmented by intangibles of experience and judgement, sure. The patient wants some creative debugging, which might at least fail differently. Will they get their wish? Not likely: what’s in it for the doctor? The patient has some power of exit, not much help against a cartel. To this patient, to first order, Phil Goetz is right, and your points partly elaborate why he’s right and partly list higher-order corrections.
(I did my best to put it dispassionately, but I’m rather angry about this.)
I’ve wondered lately while reading The Laws of Thought if BDDs might help human reasoning too, the kind that gets formalized as boolean logic, of course.
This article reminded me of your post elsewhere about lazy partial evaluation / explanation-based learning and how both humans and machines use it.
The slowest phase in a nonoptimizing compiler is lexical scanning. (An optimizer can usefully absorb arbitrary amounts of effort, but most compiles don’t strictly need it.) For most languages, scanning can be done in a few cycles/byte. Scanning with finite automata can also be done in parallel in O(log(n)) time, though I don’t know of any compilers that do that. So, a system built for fast turnaround, using methods we know now (like good old Turbo Pascal), ought to be able to compile several lines/second given 1 kcycle/sec. Therefore you still want to recompile only small chunks and make linking cheap—in the limit there’s the old 8-bit Basics that essentially treated each line of the program as a compilation unit. See P. J. Brown’s old book, or Chuck Moore’s Color Forth.
I can’t make it. Anyone going through Burbank would be welcome to stop by my place for a chat, though—it’s quiet here. Email withal@gmail.com for the address.
A idealized free market is that of selfish rational agents competing (with a few extra condition I’m skipping). I’m moderately confident this could work pretty ok in the absence of “general” (if such a thing exists) or perhaps human “intelligence”, but I’m not familiar enough with simulations of markets to be certain.
Eric Baum’s papers, among others, show this kind of thing applied to AI. There doesn’t seem to have been much followup.
Comparative Ecology: A Computational Perspective compares this idea to the human economy and biological evolution and says the idealized computer version ought to be, well, more ideal as an optimization process.
Doug Orleans told me once of a version like this he made to be played with an IRC or MUD bot (I forget which). A rule was a regular expression. (This came up when I mentioned doing it with Lisp s-expressions for the koans instead.)
About this article’s tags: you want dark_arts, judging by the tags in the sidebar. The ‘arts’ tag links to posts about fiction, etc.
ObDarkArts101: Here’s a course that could actually have been titled that:
Writing Persuasion (Spring 2011) A course in persuasive techniques that do not rely on overt arguments. It would not be entirely inaccurate to call this a course in the theory, practice, and critique of sophistry. We will explore how putatively neutral narratives may be inflected to advance a (sometimes unstated) position; how writing can exploit readers’ cognitive biases; how a writer’s persona on the page—what Aristotle might call her ethos—may be constructed to influence her readers.
There might be more agreement here than meets the eye. Drexler often posts informatively and approvingly about progress in DNA nanotechnology and other bio-related tech at http://metamodern.com ; this is the less surprising when you remember his very first nanotech paper outlined protein engineering as the development path. Nanosystems is mainly about establishing the feasibility of a range of advanced capabilities which happen to not already be done by biology, and for which it’s not obvious how it could. Biology and its environment being complicated and all, as Jones says.
Freitas in Nanomedicine addresses applying a Nanosystems technology base to our bio problems, or at least purports to—I haven’t been able to get into it because it’s really long-winded and set in tiny type. Nanosystems was more inviting.
“Does this position win?” has a structure like “Is there a move such that, for each possible reply there is a move such that, for each possible reply… you win.”—where existential and universal quantifiers alternate in the nesting. In a SAT problem on the other hand you just have a nest of existentials. I don’t know about Go specifically, but that’s my understanding of the usual core difference between games and SAT.
Does anyone else remember a short article by Asimov presenting the idea of an intelligence explosion? I read it in the mid-80s in a collection of his essays I checked out from the library (so it wasn’t necessarily recently published); if I remember right and I’m not confabulating, the essay had been written years before for an airline in-flight magazine. If it mentioned I.J. Good’s paper, I don’t recall it.
This was the first I encountered the idea, as a teenager, and obviously it stuck with me.
BAD: limited and not-too-healthy choice of food and drink. (It feels presumptuous to post this, as I forgot to bring anything at all.)
GOOD: The venue was quiet and roomy, with comfortable chairs, whiteboards, and an overhead projector, and it was easy to find.
Anyone driving through the Burbank area? I’d like to hitch a ride; I’m just off the 134.
Stephan Guyenet’s blog is my favorite on diet from the kind of perspective presented in this post. It’s wide-ranging with regular critical discussion of research, with links to the sources. (My layman’s opinion.)
‘Something to protect’ always sounded to me like a term for a defensive attitude, a kind of bias; I have to remind myself it’s LW jargon for something quite different. ‘Definite major purpose’ avoids this problem.
Even with quiet I’m pretty marginal at interacting with a group, I’m afraid, but it’s a nice suggestion. (What can work for me as the person in question is one-on-one chat in a quiet environment. So why did I come? Just for the sake of maybe getting surprised—and I did have a nice chat with mindviews on the way.)
Thanks!
Would a detour through Burbank be any bother? I don’t have a car myself.
You bring up cryonics and AI. 25 years ago Engines of Creation had a chapter on each, plus another on… a global hypertext publishing network like the Web. The latter seemed less absurd back then than the first two, but it was still pretty far out there:
I believed Drexler’s prediction that this technology would be developed by the mid-90s but I didn’t expect it to be taking over the world by then. Probably to most people even in computers it was science fiction.
As far as computers in general, their hardware reliability’s the least intuitive aspect to me. Billions of operations per second, OK, but all in sequence, each depending on the last, without a single error? While I know how that’s possible, it’s still kind of shocking.