gwern
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September links
Genomic Prediction is now offering embryo selection
You might look into the Lotka curve, the ‘o-ring model’, or Shockley’s analysis of productivity as a lognormal phenomenon: “On the Statistics of the Individual Variations of Productivity in a Research Laboratory”. The ‘adjacency’ of skills clearly must break down at some point, otherwise specialization & division-of-labor wouldn’t be so useful, and there are probably a lot of other things like hard thresholds for skills to be worthwhile, but probably many people aren’t at the optimal balances of skills/traits—I think yak shaving may be a particularly strong symptom of when certain skills or tools have been underinvested in.
I am a fan of Dune (I recently wrote a whole essay on the genetics in Dune), but I’ve never drawn on it much for LW topics.
The basic problem with Dune is that Herbert based a lot of his extrapolations and discussion on things which were pseudoscience or have turned out to be false. And to some extent, people don’t realize this because they read their own beliefs into the novels—for example, OP commits this error in describing the Butlerian Jihad, which was not a war against autonomous machines but against people who used machines (likewise, Leto II’s ‘Arafel’ involved prescient machines… made by the Ixians), and which was not named after Samuel Butler in the first place. If Herbert had been thinking of a classic autonomous AI threat, that would be more interesting, but he wasn’t. Similarly, ‘ancestral memories’: Herbert seriously thought there was some sort of hidden memory repository which explained various social phenomena, and the whole Leto II/Fish Speaker/war is apparently sourced from a highly speculative outsider, probably crank, book (which is so obscure I have been unable to get a copy to see how far the borrowings go). We know now normal humans can’t be trained into anything like Mentats, after centuries of failure of education dating at least back to Rousseau & Locke’s blankslatism, and especially all the many attempts at developing prodigies, and case-studies like dual n-back. His overall paradigm of genetics was reasonable but unfortunately, for the wrong species—apples rather than humans. Or the sociology in The Dosadi Experiment or how to design AI in Destination: Void or… the list goes on. Nice guy, nothing like L. Ron Hubbard (and a vastly better writer), and it makes for great novels, but like many SF authors or editors of the era* he often used his fiction as tracts/mouthpieces, and he was steeped in the witch’s brew that was California & the human potential movement and that made his extrapolations very poor if we want to use them for any serious non-fiction purpose.
So, it just doesn’t come up. The Butlerian Jihad isn’t that relevant because it’s hardly described at all in the books and what is described isn’t relevant as we’re concerned about entirely different scenarios; human prescience doesn’t exist, period, so it doesn’t matter that it probably wouldn’t follow the genetics he outlines so the whole paradigm of Bene Gesserit and Houses is irrelevant as is everything that follows; Mentats can’t exist, at least not without such massive eugenics to boost human intelligence that it’d spark a Singularity first, so there’s not much point in discussing nootropics with an eye towards becoming a Mentat because all things like stimulants or spaced repetition can do is give you relatively small benefits at the margin (or to put it another way, things Mentats do in fiction can be done in reality, but only using software on computers)
* eg Hubbard, Asimov, Cordwainer Smith even discounting the hallucination theory, especially John W. Campbell
I don’t think he was saying with his books that the multi-millennial ideologically motivated political stranglehold of the Bene Gesserit was a good thing. I don’t think that Herbert thinks that feudalism is a good thing just because it’s the system he presents.
I would say that he clearly presents the breeding program as a very good thing and vital for the long-term preservation & flourishing of humanity as the only way to create humans who are genuine ‘adults’ capable of long-term planning (in a rather gom gabbar sense).
As far as feudalism goes, there’s an amusing anecdote from Norman Spinrad I quote in my essay where he tweaks Herbert about all “this royalist stuff” and Herbert claims he was going to end it with democracy. (Given how little planning Herbert tended to do, I have to suspect that his response was rather embarrassed and he was thinking to himself, ‘I’ll do it later’...) He wouldn’t be the first author to find feudalism a lot more fun to write than their own liberal-democratic values. (George R. R. Martin is rather liberal, is a free speech advocate, was a conscientious objector, and describes Game of Thrones as anti-war, but you won’t find too much democracy in his books.)
August gwern.net links
After removing the individuals that I couldn’t find data for, we had a sample size of 86. A paired t-test, comparing the number of first-borns with the expected number of first-borns (one data point for each of the 86 mathematicians) was statistically significant, t(85)=2.86, p = 0.00529.
Wouldn’t this be a chi-squared/proportion test? Or a binomial regression? (What would you be comparing means of, taking birth category as an integer and averaging them?)
I actually think leaving comments online is a more scaleable strategy than people realize. I leave a lot of comments on LW, the EA Forum, etc. and I’m now no longer surprised when I meet someone IRL and they recognize my name. It took me a while to internalize how skewed reader/writer ratios are online and how many lurkers there really are.
My experience has been similar. I also believe this is true of Wikipedia articles, and that’s one reason I still engage. I’m less confident that I am making a difference by hosting fulltexts or scanning books, but I figure at some point I can do a time-series analysis of citations as a proxy.
As far as genetics goes, direct interactions haven’t gone too well, especially on Twitter; if you’re dealing with someone who flatly denies that GWAS hits replicate or that sibling comparisons prove causal effects or who claims that all hits are population stratification, at this point, there’s no reasoning with them. So I try to simply publicize a little all the research going on for the hidden masses, hoping that it’ll be Grothendieck’s ‘rising sea’.
July gwern.net newsletter
How would I distinguish between a human Go player executing an algorithm akin to MCMC, and one executing MCTS?
For any recent readers: I swear the formatting worked on the original LW.
June gwern.net newsletter
I’m embarrassed I didn’t finish them earlier. I’ve been procrastinating on them for years because they’re the most annoying kind of results—a lot of work to write up and then the results are just inconclusive (and predictably so due to sample size & measurement problems).
I had a similar problem with my catnip surveys: I saw even while running the first one that the results were heavily biased by an accidental demand effect*, which meant that the results would be not too solid regardless of how much I tried to salvage it in modeling, so I put it off for 3 years and it made me wince whenever I thought about how it wasn’t finished yet. (In contrast, delays in analyzing my ad A/B experiment showing apparent large harm to site traffic due to modest advertising, were for the opposite reason—I was so excited about what could be a very important, novel, interesting effect that I kept holding off to try different tweaks to analysis to make sure there wasn’t something I’d missed or an artifact of my initial model.) That sort of problem kills my motivation to finish, especially since, as the joke goes, running the experiment tales 90% of the work and then writing up the experiment takes the other 90% of the work… And I still have a bunch of half-finished experiments to write up (the CO2/sleep/Mnemosyne experiment; the second magnesium experiment; the Soylent daily variance experiment; the Long Bets experiment; the HN link submission experiment and analysis; the Mailchimp email send-time A/B tests), never mind all the usual projects.
* because I advertised it as about catnip, people selectively recalled only catnip-responding cats; you could see this bias easily because the second cat reported was much less likely to be reported as a catnip-responder even though there’s no reason to think that the first cat people reported would respond at 90%+ and second-fifth cats would be at 60-70%, and in the final analysis, if you add a covariate for ‘first cat reported’ vs second to estimate the bias and subtract it out, you get exactly the meta-analytic estimate for rate of catnip responding (2/3rds).
May gwern.net newsletter
/checks, sees 41k karma
Bwa ha ha! Power! INFINITE POWER!
Early example: “The Creative Personality and the Ideal Pupil”, Torrance 1969.
$5m cryptocurrency donation to Alcor by Brad Armstrong in memory of LWer Hal Finney
There are lots of specific examples. I see it as a generalization.
Speaking of Schmidhuber, he serves as a good example: he spends weirdness points like they’re Venezuelan bolivars. Despite him and his lab laying more of the groundwork for the deep learning revolution than perhaps anyone and being right about many things decades before everyone else, he is probably the single most disliked researcher in DL. Not only is he not unfathomably rich or in charge of a giant lab like DeepMind, he is the only DL/RL researcher I know of who regularly gets articles in major media outlets written in large part about how he has alienated people: eg https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/27/technology/artificial-intelligence-pioneer-jurgen-schmidhuber-overlooked.html or https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-15/google-amazon-and-facebook-owe-j-rgen-schmidhuber-a-fortune And this is solely because of his personal choices and conduct. It’s difficult to think of an example of a technologist inventing so much important stuff and then missing out on the gains because of being so entirely unnecessarily unpleasant and hard to bear (William Shockley and the Traitorous Eight come to mind as an example; maybe David Chaum & Digicash too).
/r/SSC discussion.