I was there last year. Indeed it was pretty much a repeat, but the event apparently really grew in attendance, there were many new people. So you can safely go without being scared of not meeting anyone new :)
Also, last time the event was right before the Suspended Animation conference, which was very interesting by itself. This time though there won’t be one.
Heh, it feels like I’m always on Mt Stupid on one topic or several, and the actual topics just come and go, only to be replaced with something new. Constantly on the summit of a mountain that moves around,
There’s a full description with all the details on the website. Quoting (highlighting is mine):
Situations where someone is dependent on someone else to help manage everyday life are very common. We can see these situations in bringing up a child, in the support of individuals with functional disorders, support of family members with special care needs, and in the care of elderly relatives. The care demand varies case by case, but when the dependency increases the burden of the carer increases as well. It is a situation where you cannot choose, you have to handle the consequences of the development. For the carer it is often time consuming, expensive, and stressful and affects the quality of life for everyone involved. Family members are not always able to support each other as much as is needed. We are interested in looking at novel concepts from nature, business, or other areas that may elucidate the dynamics that help promote and maintain altruistic behaviors.
Due to the burdens of being a caregiver, it requires an act of selflessness to move someone to become one, and to achieve the desired outcome, different kinds of resources must be activated. We believe there are existing systems in nature, business, and other areas that may elucidate the dynamics that help promote and maintain altruistic behaviors and that also utilize resources in an efficient way. The goal is to design scenarios for potential systems where care giving is encouraged and underutilized resources are mustered.
Eliezer, this is a wonderful post, but I’d just like to correct a couple of things:
My soul as a computer programmer cries out against the idea of representing N particles with N^2 distances between them; it seems wasteful. … Also, any position basis invokes an arbitrary space of simultaneity, and a relative position basis does so as well.
You most certainly don’t need N^2. For example, in quantum chemistry it’s common to use Z-matrices) which have precisely (3N-6) components in 3D space.
As for relativism, why not use relativistic intervals instead of distances? This way you would probably need 8N minus something (probably something=10) coordinates, and you don’t even need to arbitrarily choose axes labeled “x,y,z,t”.
In the Z-matrix, not all atoms are equivalent, but since it’s not unique, it should be possible to find a way to symmetrize it. However, for quantum physics, you probably don’t even need to care, because particles are already identical, just make sure your wavefunction has appropriate symmetry.
Finally, your cloud of complex amplitude still has an epiphenomenal factor: the absolute phase. I’m curious to see what would our usual quantum mechanics look like in a representation that would replace absolute phase with some relative coordinate :)
Excellent illustration of the Exploration vs Exploitation tradeoff, and I absolutely love how Second Chance got piggybacked by strategy I in the longer selection run!
Also, it would be curious to see what would happen if one allowed strategies to actually evolve.
I think you’re interpreting the quote too literally, it’s not a statement about some alien intelligences but an allegory to communicate just how important the science of evolution is.
Any useful idea about the future should appear to be ridiculous.
-- Jim Dator (“Dator’s Law”)
If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilization, is ‘Have they discovered evolution yet?’
-- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
(I know it’s old and famous and classic, but this doesn’t make it any less precious, does it?)
Yup… “less than wrong”, absolutely.
just under 1/X.
That’s a beautiful result, and it certainly feels like the calculation passes the “adds to normality” test. Thanks for the great post!
...the discovery of computers and the thinking about computers has turned out to be extremely useful in many branches of human reasoning. For instance, we never really understood how lousy our understanding of languages was, the theory of grammar and all that stuff, until we tried to make a computer which would be able to understand language. We tried to learn a great deal about psychology by trying to understand how computers work. There are interesting philosophical questions about reasoning, and relationship, observation, and measurement and so on, which computers have stimulated us to think about anew, with new types of thinking. And all I was doing was hoping that the computer-type of thinking would give us some new ideas, if any are really needed.
-- Richard P. Feynman, Simulating Physics with Computers, International Journal of Theoretical Physics, Vol 21, Nos. 6⁄7, 1982
We can have preferences about the passengers in a rocket that will have flown outside our future light cone
Can we? I mean, are you sure that whatever you verbally mean by “preferences” here can actually be mathematically formulated as a preference? How do you compute anything based on these “preferences”?
The economy is damaged
Ironically, there’s this proposal to use Quantum Suicide to improve the ecomomy: http://www.higgo.com/quantum/modest.htm
You aren’t that good at building stuff.
This is a nice point.
hmm… I can see new posts in the source XML, but Google Reader fails to show them :(
Is something wrong with the RSS feed? The last posts I can see there are dated early June.
In your example, given this utility function, risk aversion would correspond to consistently preferring guaranteed 16 paperclips to the bet you describe. In this case, by Savage’s theorem (see postulate #4) there must exist a finite number δ > 0 such that you would also prefer a guaranteed payoff of 16 to the bet defined by {P(25) = 0.5 + δ, P(9) = 0.5 - δ}, costing you an expected utility of 2δ > 0.