Jordan

Karma: 1,423

Jordan Oct 30, 2011, 6:54 PM
5 points
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on: Whole Brain Emulation: Looking At Progress On C. elgans
I was disappointed when I first looked into the C. elegans emulation progress. Now I’m not so sure it’s a bad sign. It seems to me that at only 302 neurons the nervous system is probably far from the dominant system of the organism. Even with a perfect emulation of the neurons, it’s not clear to me if the resulting model would be meaningful in any way. You would need to model the whole organism, and that seems very hard.

Contrast that with a mammal, where the brain is sophisticated enough to do things independently of feedback from the body, and where we can see these larges scale neural patterns with scanners. If we uploaded a mouse brain, presumably we could get a rough idea that the emulation was working without ever hooking it up to a virtual body.

Jordan Oct 1, 2011, 8:54 PM
9 points
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in reply to: Vladimir_M’s comment on: Rationality Drugs

(This is exacerbated by the fact that when I’m sleep-deprived, I tend to feel lousy and wanting to doze off through the day, but then in the evening I suddenly start feeling perfectly OK and not wanting to sleep at all.)

I suffer from this as well. It is my totally unsubstantiated theory that this is a stress response. Throughout the whole day your body is tired and telling you to go to sleep, but the Conscious High Command keeps pressing the KEEP-GOING-NO-MATTER-WHAT button until your body decides it must be in a war zone and kicks in with cortisol or adrenaline or whatever.

Jordan Sep 21, 2011, 7:18 PM
3 points
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in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: Knowledge is Worth Paying For
Hear, hear. I encourage everyone to buddy up with an academic and use that academic’s library’s access to journals.

Jordan Aug 21, 2011, 4:44 AM
2 points
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in reply to: Rain’s comment on: Why We Can’t Take Expected Value Estimates Literally (Even When They’re Unbiased)

I propose that the rational act is to investigate approaches to greater than human intelligence which would succeed.

This. I’m flabbergasted this isn’t pursued further.

Jordan Aug 5, 2011, 10:33 PM
1 point
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in reply to: MatthewBaker’s comment on: Rationality Quotes August 2011
Definitely works better than any supplement or herbal remedy I’ve tried, but I usually don’t feel rested the next day.

Jordan Aug 5, 2011, 8:51 PM
1 point
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in reply to: MatthewBaker’s comment on: Rationality Quotes August 2011
Fully agree, especially because I suffer from chronic insomnia =D

Jordan Aug 5, 2011, 8:05 PM
0 points
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in reply to: MatthewBaker’s comment on: Rationality Quotes August 2011

All i’m saying is that people attribute evolutionary reasons to things that have many separate causes and are unproven because they think they understand it.

I agree, however, reverse stupidity is not intelligence. You say

the behavioral pattern that polyphasic sleep requires isn’t evolved into our system its just a natural response to the natural light patterns of our world

but this seems like an unsubstantiated claim, just as much as people claiming sleep must be an evolved behavior. I agree that sleep is at least partially behavioral, but it’s unclear to me that there isn’t an evolved component. See this blurb from Wikipedia, which suggests that human sleep patterns are not completely dependent on external stimuli.

Jordan Aug 5, 2011, 1:01 AM
3 points
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in reply to: MatthewBaker’s comment on: Rationality Quotes August 2011
I would discount polyphasic sleep as being natural on grounds of my current knowledge of anthropology. As far as I know there are no known human cultures that engage in polyphasic sleep (not counting biphasic sleep). That seems like pretty strong evidence that it isn’t behavioral, it’s physiological, which in turn suggests (but doesn’t guarantee) an evolutionary basis for human sleep patterns. Of course, some amount of human sleep patterns is behavioral, e.g. the siesta.

Jordan Jul 16, 2011, 11:50 PM
5 points
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on: The limits of introspection
Great post, great review of the literature.

Where do you get most of your references? Do you wade through the literature, or do you use review papers? I’d love to see a book length compilation with the same density as this post.

Jordan Jul 16, 2011, 6:59 PM
−1 points
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in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Preference For (Many) Future Worlds

you had better start imagining pretty hard and consider every possible unexpected event of that order of improbability, including black swans

With QS you must guard yourself against all local Everett branches. Those branches could conceivably contain black swans, like a few electrons tunneling out of a circuit preventing a CPU from performing correctly. Even that is a 1:1,000,000,000 or more event. But they will not contain something macroscopic.

If I look around and notice no one nearby, I might say “I am only 99% confident that there isn’t anyone near.” If I then sample all local branches (with a device that has a 1:1,000,000 fail rate), killing myself in those branches that no one appears, what is the probability that I will find myself in a branch with another person nearby? I would say about 1%. The presence or absence of another person should behave classically for the small numbers we are talking about. Quantum probabilities are different than my own Bayesian probabilities.

In short, while some failure modes will become more common, others will not.

Jordan Jul 16, 2011, 2:35 AM
2 points
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on: Preference For (Many) Future Worlds
If I were to build a death machine it would be based on high explosives. I would encase my head in a mound of C4 clay (or perhaps a less stable material). The machine could fail, most likely at the detonator, but it’s difficult to imagine how it could maim me.

Jordan Jul 15, 2011, 5:29 PM
5 points
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in reply to: MixedNuts’s comment on: Rationalist Judo, or Using the Availability Heuristic to Win
It’s difficult for my brain to parse a sentence with ‘alieve’. I guess I’ve watched too many commercials, and my brain associates ‘Aleve’ with ‘relieve’, which has an approximately opposite meaning. I have to mentally substitute ‘alieve’ with something like ‘actually believe’ in order to comfortably read the sentence.
What links here?
- Vaniver's comment on Rationalist Judo, or Using the Availability Heuristic to Win by jschulter (Jul 16, 2011, 6:02 PM; 3 points)

Jordan Jun 22, 2011, 5:01 AM
11 points
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on: So, I guess the site redesign is live?
The borders on comments are fairly ugly, and far too thick. When I go to view all my comments, the way they are listed there is much more aesthetically pleasing.

I like the new header. The footer is a great improvement.

Mixed feelings about the thumbs up/down icons. I like icons, and they are smaller than the text “Vote up” and “Vote down”, but they actually end up taking more space than the text, because their vertical height is greater. Perhaps they can be shrunk a bit and placed in the title line of the comment, along with the permalink and reply icon? You could potentially hide all the icons unless you’re mousing over the comment, to avoid clutter.

Jordan May 27, 2011, 2:28 AM
3 points
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in reply to: SilasBarta’s comment on: Bias in capital project decision making
I think an unforeseeable edge case or bug that requires deep refactoring and severely cuts into allotted development time fits the bill for a black swan dead on.

Jordan May 16, 2011, 6:11 AM
0 points
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in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Beginning resources for CEV research
What if the subreddit was an actual reddit subreddit?

Jordan May 10, 2011, 6:48 AM
9 points
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in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Scholarship: How to Do It Efficiently
That is the heart of the social engineering problem at hand.

Programmers gain status by creating and contributing to open source projects, and by answering questions on StackOverflow, etc. I think that is a stable equilibrium, both for programmers and for academics. The question is how to get to that equilibrium in the first place.

First, I think it needs to become generally accepted that the current equilibrium is broken and that there are alternatives. To that end I encourage all academics to discuss it as openly as possible. Once that happens I think (hope) it will just be a matter of high status individuals throwing their weight around properly.

Jordan May 10, 2011, 5:47 AM
3 points
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in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: Scholarship: How to Do It Efficiently
Can you comment on what the end goal is for all your scholarship, aside from satisfaction?

Jordan May 10, 2011, 5:05 AM
22 points
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in reply to: fiddlemath’s comment on: Scholarship: How to Do It Efficiently
I lament this state of affairs with the subdued passion of a 1000 brown dwarf suns.

It’s ridiculous that wikipedia is more structured and useful that most of the academic literature. I would like to start some kind of academic movement, whereby we reject closed journals, embrace the open source mentality, and collaborate on up-to-date and awesome wikis on every modern research area.

Jordan 7 May 2011 21:26 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: SIAI—An Examination
You’re right, the guideline is not too well worded. You should probably replace “what you wouldn’t eat raw” with “what would be toxic to eat raw”.

Meat is edible raw. There’s nothing inherently toxic about uncooked meat. Many other foods require cooking to diminish their toxicity (potatoes, grains, legumes). There’s definitely concern about parasites in raw meat, but parasites are not an inherent quality of the meat itself.

There’s actually a whole raw paleo sub-subculture. I wouldn’t recommend it personally, and I’m not keen to try it myself, but it’s there.

Jordan 7 May 2011 19:31 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Peterdjones’s comment on: SIAI—An Examination
I think it’s likely humans are evolved to eat cooked food. The guideline don’t eat anything you wouldn’t eat raw isn’t intended to dissuade people to not eat cooked food, but rather to serve as a heuristic for foods that were probably less commonly eaten by our ancestors. It’s unclear to me how accurate the heuristic is. A big counterexample is tubers. Tubers are widely eaten by modern hunter-gatherers and are toxic when uncooked.