I haven’t been to one of these meetups before, but I will be in London next month and am thinking of coming along. What actually goes on?
Maelin
Karma: 589
I’m coming along, I’ll stop by the pub afterward for a drink as well. I shall be the token Australian.
Back in the OB days, I lurked for several months, reading through the archives, and my first comment was quite brutally shot down in one dismissive sentence by Eliezer. I didn’t comment again for over a year.
Number of posts is, in my view, a far more reliable way to quantify a person’s dedication to the community than time-spent-reading. It’s far more likely for a long-time-reader commenting for their first time to be alienated or intimidated by downvotes and criticism than a short-time-reader who has been commenting prolifically.
Main area of expertise? I have completed a degree in Science with an extra Honours year, majoring in pure mathematics (especially abstract algebra) and with a hefty side serving of formal logic and computer programming as well. I arrived at mathematics after planning to study physics, leaving high school, finding physics to be terribly taught and full of things that I now realise at the time I lacked the mental sophistication for, and realising I found the maths more interesting.
Last year and this year have been dedicated first to earning money, now to travelling around Europe, and soon to earning money again. Next year I will begin studying teaching with the intent of becoming a high school maths teacher. I’ve spent a few years tutoring in mathematics and also worked part-time as a teacher’s aide for a semester last year.
What demands sharp thinking? Sharp thinking is pretty vital in pure mathematics but it’s probably not something that needs to be consciously practised so much, owing to the already rigid structure of mathematics. Whilst I’m confident that rationality is valuable in teaching, I’m not entirely sure I could verbalise exactly how. I have a talent for explaining things and I enjoy explaining mathematics, which is the main reason I’m going into teaching. I can’t think of any examples of ways that being a sharp rationalist will be -directly- helpful although some may exist.
A friend linked me to this rather ambitiously described paper: An Algorithm for Consciousness:
This document offers a complete explanation of the hard problems of consciousness and free will, in only 34 pages. The explanation is given as an algorithm, that can be implemented on a computer as a software program. (Open-)Source code will be released by Jan 2011. A solid background in psychology, computer science & artificial intelligence is useful, but if you’re prepared to follow the hyperlinks in the document, it should be possible for most people to enjoy.
The author wishes to remain anonymous, but is not a crank. He/she has 10 years professional experience building cutting-edge artificial intelligence, computer vision and machine learning systems that are used on 4 continents, and has degrees in computer science, artificial intelligence, and robotics.
I haven’t read past the first page yet (don’t have time right now) but I thought that it might be something people here would be interested in.
Sounds good. I will most probably be there.
Can somebody nonpartisan give us the Cliff’s Notes of the whole mess? I tried reading it. Then I tried skimming it. It seems to rely on some whole pre-existing unpleasant dynamic between several commenters of which I am currently blissfully unaware, and it also looks quite seriously dull.
It also looks pretty damn childish, despite having lots of fun mature-sounding rationalist words. A silly playground arguments is still a silly playground argument.
Are we really going to do this kind of thing on LessWrong now? Nothing is going to turn away non-committed members quite like a huge load of tedious, irrelevent drama on a front page post. I myself am, at this moment, feeling a moderate urge to say “welp, looks like LW has gone to shit now, oh well, thanks internet drama,” and I’ve been lurking here since the OB days.
It would take a lot of evidence to convince me that this shitstorm is going to end up being productive.
Sadly I will be back on the far side of the world by then. Would it be practicaly for the talk to be video recorded and uploaded to Youtube or some other suitable location? I would love to watch it.
Sure, but it may be a sharpie-on-napkin affair.
Remember, probabilities are not inherent facts of the universe, they are statements about how much you know. You don’t have perfect knowledge of the universe, so when I ask, “Is your mum on the phone?” you don’t have the guaranteed correct answer ready to go. You don’t know with complete certainty.
But you do have some knowledge of the universe, gained through your earlier observations of seeing your mother on the phone occasionally. So rather than just saying “I have absolutely no idea in the slightest”, you are able to say something more useful: “It’s possible, but unlikely.” Probabilities are simply a way to quantify and make precise our imperfect knowledge, so we can form more accurate expectations of the future, and they allow us to manage and update our beliefs in a more refined way through Bayes’ Law.
This sounds great, I’m definitely in. I feel like I have a moderately okay intuitive grasp on Bayescraft but a chance to work through it from the ground up would be great.
Still in. I’m in London until tomorrow and then back home to Melbourne, Australia.
Is there a PDF version that doesn’t have the text looking faded and hard-to-read? Even zoomed in to page width on a 22″ monitor it is not pleasant to look at. Or maybe there is some easy way to convert it (with all formatting intact) into a nicer looking font? I tried copy+pasting into Word but it appears to have not been properly OCRed and there are a lot of errors.
Ah, that’s great. Much nicer. Having the whole book in one PDF makes it easier for me too.
I find this to be an intriguing idea, especially having had a lot of difficulty maintaining any kind of exercise regime in the past. Can you explain in more detail the kind of bookkeeping required, and also the effects you personally feel as a result of having developed the habit of exercising?
I like this. Similar vein to the litany of Gendlin.
Cryonics in Australia: How do you actually do it?
Ack, just remembered this is on, I will be coming along too. I went to a couple of meetups while I was in the UK, which were both pretty interesting. Looking forward to it!
Yeah, wow. What the hell, guys. Stop undermining my naive belief that LW is a place free from shitty internet drama. There’s only so much evidence I can ignore.
I’m not so sure you can discount group selection amongst humans as easily as you can for other animals. Human groups are a lot more cohesive than those of other species. A human tribe can decide that another tribe, due to their different culture or whatever, must die—even when the expected cost of carrying out a war far outweighs the expected gain in resources. We have subverted the original evolutionary purpose of our adaptations with culture, and I’m unconvinced that the arguments against group selection still hold weight with humans.