Jordan

• Jordan 11 Jul 2014 21:12 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: AshwinV’s comment on: Build Small Skills in the Right Order

  Ah, I should have guessed that ‘Immersion Learning’ had been co-opted a few times before. My above use is my own coinage. By it I just mean jumping in and being exposed to everything you can and letting your brain sort it out, rather than methodically building a cathedral of understanding, one block at a time.

• Jordan 11 Jul 2014 2:56 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Mark_Eichenlaub’s comment on: Build Small Skills in the Right Order

  This is how I prefer to learn as well. I call it “Immersion Learning”.

  For example, during my first year of Algebra, I carried a Calculus textbook with me to class, and read whenever I was bored. I read through the whole textbook that semester, and understood maybe 20%. I didn’t bother doing any problems, and when I tried I was totally incapable, but that was OK. The next semester I read through a Calc II and Calc III textbook. Afterward I decided I was going to take the AP Calculus exam. I bought a prep book and started doing calculus problems for the first time in my life, and found that mastering the techniques came naturally. A few weeks later I passed the AP exam.

  I think this works because knowledge (at least as it exists in brains) is not highly structured. It’s a giant associative mess. As with learning a language, the best way is to be immersed, and let the entire associative mess emerge simultaneously.

  Learn the shape of the forest before the lay of the trees. Afterward you can do targeted study to patch up your makeshift map.

• Jordan 10 Feb 2014 20:25 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: moridinamael’s comment on: White Lies

  I do this as well, but I don’t “lie” (from the perspective of my core values).

  I empathetically accept the other person’s ethics and decisions. I allow that common connection to genuinely color my tone and physical expressions, which seems to build rapport just as well as actually verbalizing agreement. When I find myself about to verbalize agreement of something I don’t actually believe, I consciously pull back. The trick is being able to pull back without losing your empathetic connection.

  Anecdotally, I find that I can verbalize disagreement, but as long as I maintain the tone and physical signals of agreement (or ‘acceptance’, perhaps, but I think ‘agreement’ is more true) that the other person remains open.

• Jordan 19 Nov 2013 16:31 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: CellBioGuy’s comment on: CRISPR opens up new ge­netic en­g­ineer­ing potential

  Awesome, thanks for the detailed response. After reading about CRISPR’s natural role in bacteria I was curious if it would have targeting limitations. It sounds like it does (needs GGG triplet), but that in practice this isn’t a big deal.

  You still need to get this system into a cell—that’s an issue as always, I agree—but the reduced chance of unwanted mutation seems like a big step forward over retroviruses.

  Thanks again for the great write up!

• Jordan 19 Nov 2013 8:24 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: CRISPR opens up new ge­netic en­g­ineer­ing potential

  I’m very curious how many genes can be targeted usefully. One paper succeeded in targeting 5 simultaneously in a mouse model. Given the purported accuracy that is already game changing, but if we can do 100 or 200 then maybe we can do more than merely eliminate some simple single gene disorders.

• Jordan 21 Jan 2013 20:27 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Peterdjones’s comment on: Non­per­son Predicates

  Scary enough for ya?

  Sufficiently scary, yes.

  That is equivalent to saying you can’t understand how mathematics could be a construct; or how mathematical anti-realism could possibly be true.

  I assign a respectable probability to anti-realism, and hold no disrespect for anyone who is an anti-realist, but I don’t understand how anti-realism can be true. I’ve never heard a plausible model for why one thing should exist but not another. Tegmarkism sweeps away that problem, leaving the new problem of how to measure probability (why do we have the subjective experience of probability that we do when there are so many versions of myself?). I don’t have a satisfactory answer for that question, but it feels like a real question, with meat to get at, whereas in an anti-realist universe the question of why some things exist and other don’t seems completely hopeless.

• Jordan 9 Oct 2012 15:55 UTC

  14 points

  in reply to: Kevin’s comment on: Fire­wal­ling the Op­ti­mal from the Rational

  I had a similar experience the first time I supplemented magnesium. Long lasting, non-jittery energy spike. I felt stronger (and empirically could in fact lift more weight), felt better, and was extremely happy. The effect decreased the next few times. After 4 doses (of 50% RDA, spread out over 2 weeks) I began to have adverse effects, including heart palpitation, weakness, and “sense of impending doom”.

  I wonder if there is a general physiological response to a sudden swing in electrolyte balance that causes the positive effect, rather than the removal of a deficiency.

• Jordan 23 Jun 2012 4:38 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: JenniferRM’s comment on: Plasti­na­tion is ma­tur­ing and needs fund­ing, says Hanson

  If you wipe out the chemical gradient information then how do you know what sorts of ways that the dendrites should regrow in the weeks and months post-resuscitation?

  If I wake up and I feel like myself on a second to second basis, I will not be upset if my path through mind space is drastically altered on a time scale of weeks and months, so long as it doesn’t lead me to insanity. Hell, I hope I’ll be able to drastically change my mind on that time scale anyway once I’m uploaded.

• Jordan 23 Jun 2012 4:30 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Plasti­na­tion is ma­tur­ing and needs fund­ing, says Hanson

  if a problem doesn’t appear quickly, then it probably isn’t that important...

  I agree completely, especially about how close we probably are to a successful Biosphere, but just to throw out an example where this is wrong: vitamin B-12 deficiency usually takes a decade to demonstrate symptoms, and is fatal.

• Jordan 19 Jan 2012 0:46 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: thomblake’s comment on: The prob­lem with too many ra­tio­nal memes

  It is dangerous in the same way as bringing John Q. Snodgrass to trial for murder. We might overweight evidence in favor of the hypothesis.

  Human intuition is a valuable heuristic. As a mathematician I constantly entertain hypotheses I don’t believe to be true, for the simple reason that my intuition presented them to be considered. I don’t believe I would be at all effective otherwise (although I did just now entertain the hypothesis, despite my lack of belief!)

• Jordan 18 Dec 2011 8:03 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Nymogenous’s comment on: Allen & Wal­lach on Friendly AI

  firstly, a lot of aspects would not necessarily scale up to a smarter system, and it’s sometimes hard to tell what generalizes and what doesn’t.

  I agree, but certainly trying to solve the problem without any hands on knowledge is more difficulty.

  Secondly, it’s very very hard to pinpoint the “intelligence” of a program without running it

  I agree, there is a risk that the first AGI we build will be intelligent enough to skillfully manipulate us. I think the chances are quite small. I find it difficult to image skipping dog level intelligence and human level intelligence and jumping straight to superhuman intelligence, but it is certainly possible.

• Jordan 16 Dec 2011 15:42 UTC

  6 points

  on: Allen & Wal­lach on Friendly AI

  I agree with Allen and Wallach here. We don’t know what an AGI is going to look like. Maybe the idea of a utility maximizer is unfeasible, and the AGIs we are capable of building end up operating in a fundamentally different way (more like a human brain, perhaps). Maybe morality compatible with our own desires can only exist in a fuzzy form at a very high level of abstraction, effectively precluding mathematically precise statements about its behavior (like in a human brain).

  These possibilities don’t seem trivial to me, and would undermine results from friendliness theory. Why not instead develop a sub-superintelligent AI first (perhaps an intelligence intentionally less than human), so that we can observe directly what the system looks like before we attempt to redesign it for greater safety.

• Jordan 13 Dec 2011 2:30 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Brain-Brain communication

  Very interesting. It appears my own model of the brain included a false dichotomy.

  If modules are not genetically hardwired, but rather develop as they adapt to specific stimuli, then we should expect infants to have more homogeneous brains. Is that the case?

• Jordan 3 Dec 2011 19:54 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: The Gift We Give To­mor­row, Spo­ken Word [Finished?]

  When I read it I was imagining something tongue in cheeky like Pirates of Penzance. Dr. Seuss would have the advantage of great illustrations though.

• Jordan 3 Dec 2011 5:25 UTC

  17 points

  in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: The Gift We Give To­mor­row, Spo­ken Word [Finished?]

  I request a full play, sir.

• Jordan 19 Nov 2011 19:29 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Manfred’s comment on: OPERA Con­firms: Neu­trinos Travel Faster Than Light

  Very good sir!

• Jordan 19 Nov 2011 0:03 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Manfred’s comment on: OPERA Con­firms: Neu­trinos Travel Faster Than Light

  I’m aware that we’ve caculated ‘c’ both by directly measuring the speed of light (to high precision), as well as indirectly via various formulas from relativity (we’ve directly measured time dilation, for instance, which lets you estimate c), but are the indirect measurements really accurate to parts per million?

• Jordan 18 Nov 2011 16:16 UTC

  8 points

  on: OPERA Con­firms: Neu­trinos Travel Faster Than Light

  If everywhere in physics where we say “the speed of light” we instead say “the cosmic speed limit”, and from this experiment we determine that the cosmic speed limit is slightly higher than the speed of light, does that really change physics all that much?

• Jordan 30 Oct 2011 18:54 UTC

  5 points

  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 1 Oct 2011 20:54 UTC

  9 points

  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.