Of course, it turns out I’ll be in London on that day...
j_andrew_rogers
There is a subtle point I think you are missing. The problem is not one of processing power or even bandwidth but one of topology. Increasing the link bandwidth does not solve any problems nor does increasing the operations retired per clock cycle.
In parallel algorithms research, the main bottleneck is that traditional computer science assumes that the communication topology is a directly connected network—like the brain—but all real silicon systems are based on switch fabrics. For many years computer science simplified the analysis by treating these as interchangeable when they are not and the differences from an algorithm design standpoint start to become very apparent when parallelism exceeds a certain relatively low threshold.
The real limitation is that humans currently have very limited ability to design parallel algorithms from the theoretical assumption of a switch fabric. There are two ways to work around this. The first involves inventing a scalable direct-connect computing architecture (not any time soon), and the second involves developing new body of computer science that scales on switch fabrics (currently a topic of research at a couple places).
You are missing the point. There are hyper-dimensional topological solutions that can be efficiently implement on vanilla silicon that obviate your argument. There is literature to support the conjecture even if there is not literature to support the implementation. Nonetheless, implementations are known to have recently been developed at places like IBM Research that have been publicly disclosed to exist (if not the design). (ObDisclosure: I developed much of the practical theory related to this domain—I’ve seen running code at scale). Just because the brain exists in three dimensions does not imply that it is a 3-dimensional data model any more than analogous things are implied on a computer.
It is not an abstraction, you can implement these directly on silicon. There are very old theorems that allow the implementation of hyper-dimensional topological constructs on vanilla silicon (since the 1960s), conjectured to support massive pervasive parallelism (since the 1940s), the reduction to practice just isn’t obvious and no one is taught these things. These models scale well on mediocre switch fabrics if competently designed.
Basically, you are extrapolating a “we can’t build algorithms on switch fabrics” bias improperly and without realizing you are doing it. State-of-the-art parallel computer science research is much more interesting than you are assuming. Ironically, the mathematics behind it is completely indifferent to dimensionality.
It is analogous to how you can implement a hyper-cube topology on a physical network in normal 3-space, which is trivial. Doing it virtually on a switch fabric is trickier.
Hyper-dimensionality is largely a human abstraction when talking about algorithms; a set of bits can be interpreted as being in however many dimensions is convenient for an algorithm at a particular point in time, which follows from fairly boring maths e.g. Morton’s theorems. The general concept of topological computation is not remarkable either, it has been around since Tarski, it just is not obvious how one reduces it to useful practice.
There is no literature on what a reduction to practice would even look like but it is a bit of an open secret in the world of large-scale graph analysis that the very recent ability of a couple companies to parallelize graph analysis are based on something like this. Graph analysis scalability is closely tied to join algorithm scalability—a well-known hard-to-parallelize operation.
A related empirical data point is that we already see strong light cone effects in electronic markets. The machine decision speeds are so fast that it is not possible to usefully communicate with similarly fast machines outside of a radius of some small number of kilometers because the state of reality at one machine changes faster than it can propagate that information to another due to speed of light limitations. The diminishing ability to influence decisions as a function of distance raises questions about the relevancy of most long haul communication between AGI-like systems.
This is also related to another computer phenomenon where it is becoming cheaper to duplicate computation than to transmit the result of one computation.
Tangentially, the fact that she is arguing with a person that believes in evolution could itself be a problem that changes the dynamic.
I’ve often observed that most people believe in evolution in essentially the same way a creationist believes in creationism. They did not reason themselves into that position nor do they really understand evolution in any significant way, it was a position they were told all right-thinking people should believe and so that is why they do so. The charge often forwarded by creationists that evolution is merely another quasi-religious belief comports with reality in many cases, unfortunately. Nominal evolutionists that are clueless about evolution and just parrot talking points can often destroy the credibility of scientific evolutionists that come later.
Understanding the qualifications of the person she is having a discussion with is helpful from a tactical standpoint—it determines the nature of the defense of creationist ideas.
Being a veteran of many creationist arguments, I would make the point that there is no need or reason to bring religion into it nor even to talk about “losing an argument”. You can ignore it entirely if you choose to and it usually keeps the defensiveness down. Also, stay away from any arguments that have well-known creationist defenses; it will force her to think about what you are saying rather than giving the opportunity to borrow what someone else has said. Keep the tone matter of fact so that it doesn’t sound like you have an emotional investment in it—very important. If you really want to play it clean, don’t even frame it in terms of what you think or believe; just discussing chains of reasonings over reasonable facts without inserting a value judgement helps make the other party think they are reasoning to the conclusion themselves rather than you imposing your beliefs.
Most of the work is framing. If you make it completely orthogonal to what anyone believes, religious or otherwise, and turn it into an emotionally-neutral logic puzzle, you can often bypass the memetic defenses long enough to make a difference. It does not matter what you believe if we have this interesting set of scientific facts...
There is another effective framing technique that I almost never see used that might be worth considering because I’ve seen it used well in the past.
Most people think evolution is a purely biological concept and it is virtually always framed in such ways. This runs headlong into the mystical beliefs many people attach to living organisms. Making evolution a property of an organism is no different than making a “soul” the property of an organism to them, and fits in the same cognitive pigeonhole. A lot of the jumbled chemistry and thermodynamic arguments follow from this as well; biology is special precisely because it can violate the laws of science.
Evolution is fundamentally a systems dynamic from mathematics. If you have a system—any system—with a certain set of abstract properties then there are certain required mathematical consequences. The result of 2+2 is always 4, no matter where in nature we find it. Biology is just one type of system to which this mathematics is applied; it has the prerequisite properties on the left hand side of the equation that require the system dynamic biologists call “evolution” on the right side of the equation. Mathematics asserts that evolution should exist in biology whether or not science has found evidence of it (fortunately, we have found much evidence). When evolution emerges from mathematics instead of biology, it has a sterilizing effect on the concept.
It turns out that very few creationists are willing to dismiss mathematics in the same way they dismiss science. Mathematics is neutral territory, it does not have a political or religious affiliation in the minds of most people, and almost everyone tacitly “believes” in it because they use it every day. The few times I have seen this strategy used—completely divorcing evolution from science—even the militant true believers found themselves at a loss for a counter-argument (not that it changed their minds).
On the other side of that argument, a fetus does not have the higher brain function or consciousness that would allow it to experience pain. When an adult is put under general anesthesia for surgery we do not generally consider them to be “experiencing pain” even though the body is still reacting the damage as though they were conscious. They still have brain function, they temporarily lack the higher brain function required for the meaningful experience of pain. A very similar argument could be applied to a fetus.
For #1, having to drive, work, go to another important function, or being required to drink more later at some other function seems to be an acceptable occasional excuse but not a permanent one.
On #3, many cultures have sayings and aphorisms that share the idea that people who do not drink are not as trustworthy in various contexts. Much of it seems to follow from the idea that people are more honest when they’ve had a drink or two, and therefore people who do not drink are hiding their true character. The display of honesty is considered a trust-building exercise. I recall a proverb (Persian?) to the effect that people should not agree to serious matters sober that they have not discussed drunk.
On #2, if you must drink socially then drink very slowly. This can be developed to a fine art such that you are participating but consuming very little alcohol in fact. Also, there are also drinks you can order at any bar that have low alcohol content and large volume e.g. a redeye (tomato juice and light beer).
At a very high level, the problem is almost intrinsic; it is very difficult to stop a determined attacker given the current balance between defensive and offensive capabilities. A strong focus on hardening only makes it expensive, not impossible.
That said, most security breaches like the above are the result of incompetence, negligence, ignorance, or misplaced trust. In other words, human factors. Humans will continue to be a weak link across all of the components involved in security. There comes a point where systems are sufficiently hardened at a technical level that it is almost always easiest to attack the people that have access to them rather than the systems themselves.
Some of these hobbies are not like the others. I would classify hobbies based on whether or not rationalism is an essential prerequisite for engaging in the hobby. Programming and poker make sense to me but the rationales for the rest seem to be thinner, ascribing lessons that could be ascribed to almost any activity.
The distinction, as I see it, is that both programming and poker require rationalist discipline in depth that must be internalized to be effective. I can play video games or read/watch science fiction and benefit from the entertainment value without any investment in rationalism. By contrast, the very act of programming requires a considerable amount of logic and careful reasoning to produce anything but the most trivial result. Without a significant investment in rationalist thinking, you can’t participate in a constructive way, which to my mind defines a “rationalist hobby”.
As a general comment based on my own experience, there is an enormous value in studying existing art to know precisely what science and study has actually been done—not what people state has been done. And at least as important, learning the set of assumptions that have driven the current body of evidence.
This provides an enormous amount of context as to where you can actually attack interesting problems and make a difference. Most of my personal work has been based on following chains of reasoning that invalidated an ancient assumption that no one had revisited in decades. I wasn’t clever, it was really a matter of no one asking “why?” in many years.
I have always had this problem in a bad way, but the above prescription strikes me as flimsy. What is to prevent me from disabling the technical device so that I can get my pellet of rat food? What if I need to dig through a bunch of links for whatever work it is I am supposed to be doing? It does not structurally modify incentives or behaviors.
To put it another way, if it is a huge waste of time when you are supposed to be working on something else, is it ever not a waste of time?
The best solution to the problem of wasting time for myself is something that I tripped across accidentally, leveraging social media. I found that by carefully curating the feeds of “interesting things” from various sources to maximize signal to noise ratio, which produces a surprisingly manageable stream, it made most of my usual haunts boring. Over time, I simply lost interesting in all of my usual time wasting sites because I was extracting most of the value in concentrated form by other means before I ever wandered over to those sites. Most of what I spent my time on was wading through amusing crap to find a few nuggets, but while wading through that crap it was easy to spend time on amusements. When the incentive to wade through that morass disappeared, so did my exposure to distractions.
Aggressive social curation of my news feeds, originally done because I did not have time for the raw feed, achieved a signal to noise ratio where I lost interest in most of the time wasters. All I really did was inadvertently extract in pure form most of the value that made me expose myself to time wasters in the first place. It has been the single biggest optimization in me not wasting time in ages and all it really required was aggressive culling and tailoring for quality and uniqueness of content.
That sounds an awful lot like confirmation bias. ;-)
This story is about rapid iteration rather than quantity. The “quantity” is the detritus of evolution created while learning to produce a perfect pot. If a machine was producing pots it would generate great quantity but the quality would not vary from one iteration to the next.
There are many stories and heuristics in engineering lore suggesting rapid iteration converges on quality faster than careful design. See also: OODA loops, the equivalent military heuristic.
It is more or less what khafra stated. I’m not saying it is true in your case (hint: winking smiley) but it is very common for people to evaluate their life choices as you did without regard for the evidence. To put it another way, your statement would only distinguishable from the ubiquitous life choice confirmation bias if you stated it had made your life much worse.
I can imagine several places worse than the Bay Area for many people (and several places better), so it is not as though your statement was not plausible on its face. :-)
Chomsky? He is something of a bellwether for specious reasoning, which is a contribution of sorts. The obviously inconsistent logic of the various beliefs he holds makes his philosophy, such as it is, seem disjointed and arbitrary.
As a philosopher, he plays a “crazy uncle” character.
Gamification is essentially the art of exploiting human cognitive biases so it is very meta to use gamification to teach rationality.
A problem is that karma attempts to capture orthogonal values in a single number. Even though you can reduce those values to a single number they still need to be captured as separate values e.g. slashdot karma system for a half-assed example.
Karma seems to roughly fall into one of three buckets. The first is entertainment value e.g. a particularly witty comment that nonetheless does not add material value to the discussion. The second is informational value e.g. posting a link to particularly relevant literature of which many people are unaware. The third is argumentative value e.g. a well-reasoned and interesting perspective. All of these are captured as “karma” to some extent or another.
Objections are that this makes it difficult to filter content based on karma, which raises questions about its value. If, for example, I am primarily interested in reading hilarious witticism and interesting layman opinions, there is no way to filter out comments that contain dry references to academic literature. Alternatively, if I lack an appropriate sense of humor I might find the karma attributed to immaterial witticism inexplicable.
Even if a clever system was devised and ease of use was ignored, there are still issues of gaming and perverse incentives (e.g. Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem et al). To misappropriate an old saying, “karma is a bitch”.
Elysian Pub is a good spot. Conveniently located too, as far as I am concerned.