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Messages - TLEILAXU

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1
Philosophy & Science / Re: Is the Cell Really a Machine?
« on: August 15, 2019, 02:00:51 pm »
Not sure I get the point. I mean, I'd say most biologists have at least some idea that stochastic and dynamic behavior is important and present at small scales. Like, it's not anything new that the cell is not a literal 'machine' like a microwave oven or something, it's just useful shorthand to say e.g. 'transcriptional machinery'.

2
Philosophy & Science / Re: The Universal Law That Aims Time’s Arrow
« on: August 15, 2019, 01:54:32 pm »
Yeah I liked this one too. I recommend the one that came after, the one with the bubbles, as well.

3
Philosophy & Science / Re: Would an uploaded mind have value?
« on: August 11, 2019, 01:59:34 am »
Of course. You could create a copy of say, a specialized engineer who's an expert in something, to a lot of different places that can then simultaneously make use of this engineer's knowledge.
Mind uploading is like FTL travel tho if you ask me, it's cool to think about but will never happen.

So each "genre" of upload faces a diminishing value right? Upload enough engineers and you can then write a good AI for novel circumstances?

Thinking about this perhaps it's like machine learning for facial recognition - we have the probability weights and locations on the face to compare, but as humans we don't (at least when I read about it) know why the program said those locations and those weights work so well.

So maybe uploaded structure allows you access to a particular human's memory and cognition but this doesn't given you actual understanding of what algorithms would be useful for writing an engineer AI from scratch?
I'm ill and it's late so I can't really parse this properly, but actually there are methods that try to infer which features are important in neural networks, but it's not trivial, see e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.02685 I didn't even understand this article myself.

4
Philosophy & Science / Re: Is Physical Law an Alien Intelligence?
« on: August 11, 2019, 01:18:25 am »
Quote
There are even possible motivations for that action. Life absorbs low-entropy energy (such as visible light from the sun), does useful work with that energy, and dumps higher-entropy energy back into the universe as waste heat. But if the surrounding universe ever got too warm—too filled with thermal refuse—things would stagnate. Luckily we live in an expanding and constantly cooling cosmos. What better long-term investment by some hypothetical life 5 billion years ago than to get the universe to cool even faster? To be sure, it may come to rue its decision: Hundreds of billions of years later the accelerating expansion would dilute matter so quickly that civilizations would run out of fresh sources of energy. Also, an accelerating universe does not cool forever, but eventually approaches a floor in temperature.
I don't think this is correct. Things stagnate when energy is used, the universe expanding shouldn't change this.
I like the main idea though (except for the parts where he goes too far down the rabbit-hole), i.e. that life could take on strange forms and that advanced lifeforms could be hard to spot because they're so unlike anything we'd imagine. Instead of focusing on e.g. finding water or whatever, people should pay more attention to finding anomalies.

5
Philosophy & Science / Re: Would an uploaded mind have value?
« on: August 11, 2019, 01:09:31 am »
While I don't think it's possible - a discussion for another thread - let's say you could upload a mind in the sense that the mind becomes software - is there a good reason for anyone besides the uploadee to think of such a mind as valuable?

Is it valuable because it's easier to replicate the physical structure of a brain in simulated space rather than trying to create a mind from scratch?

I suppose if it's the structural aspects that ensure successful uploads one might be able to upload minds but have no idea how to create true AI?
Of course. You could create a copy of say, a specialized engineer who's an expert in something, to a lot of different places that can then simultaneously make use of this engineer's knowledge.
Mind uploading is like FTL travel tho if you ask me, it's cool to think about but will never happen.

6
Philosophy & Science / Re: Do you know the mushroom man?
« on: August 09, 2019, 01:36:57 pm »
IIRC this guy claimed his mom's cancer was cured by mushrooms. I think he's a scammer.

Sauce?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXHDoROh2hA
Last 3-4 minutes.

7
Is holding a pen between your teeth while power posing something very popular on this forum?
Yeah, the guys at the top of the hierarchy here are big fans of self-help books, it's best not annoy them or you might get banned for a week (or more) like I did.

8
I think we all know there exists a replication 'crisis', and its almost equally apparent that when you misapply math you get out garbage.

The article suggests basically that we ought to verify our results rather than relying on statistics. Not exactly groundbreaking, as that is the basis of science to begin with.
How do you verify results without statistics? The point is that significance testing and p-values are so deeply ingrained into the scientific culture and misuse is so high that transparency and common sense suffer as a result.

9
General Earwa / Re: Thought about other supports?
« on: August 08, 2019, 01:29:20 pm »
I want like, at least three different kinds of TSA video game off the top of my head:

1. Basically an RTS that combines some of the lighter elements of nation-running akin to Age of Empires, but mostly just something like Starcraft in terms of controls, with Inchoroi = Zerg, Nonmen = Protoss, and obivously Humans = Terrans. The sheer size of the armies you control -- and fight -- should be one of key elements (need something for Sranc to swarm over, and sorcerors to destroy in epic magnitude). All of this spans the history of Earwa, from the Cuno-Inchoroi the Breaking of the Gates, to the First Apocalypse and then finally the Great Ordeal (and whatever comprises the 'final battles' of the Second Apocalypse) -- not necesarily in that order.

2. Action-focused RPG with precision melee combat a la Dark Souls/Sekiro, but with an actually nuanced/fun to play version of a Sorceror.

3. Elder Scrolls-like open world RPG that basically lets you travel across all of Earwa. Character creation, only with better and more realistic combat (things like weapon vs armor choices actually reflect reality, I.E. blade weapons can't cut through heavy plate armor, etc.).

Add Zeum for DLC expansion.



(Really, you could just combine the last two for my ideal TSA action-RPG)
I'm a huge RTS fan but a TSA sounds awful. An RPG like Sekiro could be cool though, like imagine playing as a skinspy and your mission is to infiltrate Zeum or something.

10
Good article from nautil.us highlighting flawed statistical thinking
http://nautil.us/issue/74/networks/the-flawed-reasoning-behind-the-replication-crisis

Quote
Here are three versions of the same story:

1. In the fall of 1996, Sally Clark, an English solicitor in Manchester, gave birth to an apparently healthy baby boy who died suddenly when he was 11 weeks old. She was still recovering from the traumatic incident when she had another baby boy the following year. Tragically, he also died, eight weeks after being born. The causes of the two children’s deaths were not readily apparent, but the police suspected they were no coincidence. Clark was arrested and charged with two counts of murder. The pediatrician Roy Meadow, inventor of the term “Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy,” testified at the trial that it was extremely unlikely that two children from an affluent family like the Clarks would die from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) or “cot death.” He estimated the odds were 1 in 73 million, which he colorfully compared to an 80:1 longshot winning the Grand National horse race four years in a row. Clark was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. The press reviled her as a child murderer.

...

Quote
The mathematical lens that allows us to see the flaw in these arguments is Bayes’ theorem. The theorem dictates that the probability we assign to a theory (Sally Clark is guilty, a patient has cancer, college students become less theistic when they stare at Rodin), in light of some observation, is proportional both to the conditional probability of the observation assuming the theory is true, and to the prior probability we gave the theory before making the observation. When two theories compete, one may make the observation much more probable, that is, produce a higher conditional probability. But according to Bayes’ rule, we might still consider that explanation unlikely if we gave it a low probability of being true from the start.

So, the missing ingredient in all three examples is the prior probability for the various hypotheses. In the case of Sally Clark, the prosecution’s theory was she had murdered her children, itself an extremely rare event. Suppose, for argument’s sake, by tallying up historical murder records, we arrived at prior odds of 100 million to 1 for any particular mother like her to commit double infanticide. That would have balanced the extreme unlikelihood of the observation (two infants dying) under the alternative hypothesis that they were well cared for. Numerically, Bayes’ theorem would tell us to compare:

(1/73,000,000) * (99,999,999/100,000,000)  vs. (1) * (1/100,000,000)

We’d conclude, based on these priors and no additional evidence aside from the children’s deaths, that it was actually about 58 percent likely Clark was innocent.

Quote
The problem, though, is the dominant mode of statistical analysis these days isn’t Bayesian. Since the 1920s, the standard approach to judging scientific theories has been significance testing, made popular by the statistician Ronald Fisher. Fisher’s methods and their latter-day spinoffs are now the lingua franca of scientific data analysis. In particular, Google Scholar currently returns 2.85 million citations including the phrase “statistically significant.” Fisher claimed signficance testing was a universal tool for scientific inference, “common to all experimentation,” a claim that seems borne out by its widespread use across all disciplines.

And this part in particular will likely make me even more unpopular on this forum
Quote
Just a few of the other casualties of replication include:

  • The study in 1988 by Strack, Martin, and Stepper on the “facial feedback hypothesis:” when people are forced to smile, say by holding a pen between their teeth, it raises their feeling of happiness.
  • The 1996 result of Bargh, Chen, and Burrows in “social priming,” claiming, for example, when people are exposed to words related to aging, they adopt stereotypically elderly behavior.
  • Harvard Business School professor Amy Cuddy’s 2010 study of “power posing:” the idea that adopting a powerful posture for a couple of minutes can change your life for the better by affecting your hormone levels and risk tolerances
.

11
Philosophy & Science / Re: Do you know the mushroom man?
« on: August 08, 2019, 08:24:20 am »
IIRC this guy claimed his mom's cancer was cured by mushrooms. I think he's a scammer.

12
Lagwagon - Twenty Seven
I love the part starting at 1:35, particularly when the lead kicks in
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apkk5y00Suc#t=1m35s

13
Link https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-peer-inside-a-fireball-of-quantum-matter-20190730/
I haven't even read the article yet, just wanted to share based on that picture of a machine that looks like something straight out of a hard sci-fi novel. And it's even called the HADES detector ffs.

14
Philosophy & Science / Re: Chaos Makes the Multiverse Unnecessary?
« on: July 21, 2019, 11:53:39 pm »
Quote
Rather, science studies predictable physical phenomena.
So this guy's argument is because people can't predict unpredictable/noisy/chaotic/computationally-untractable systems that means that somehow science is flawed? Is he familiar with the stockmarket, weather forecasting, biology etc.?
Sounds like a false dichotomy to me.

I don't think that was the argument? Rather he was appealing to hyper chaos as a means to explain reality without metaphysics...though that in itself is odd b/c he is paralleling the metaphysical argument of Mellissaoux...

In any case I don't think he is speaking of flaws in methodology of science at all?
Yeah that's kinda what I meant, that science is flawed in that there are some phenomena it deal with explain since they are this hyperchaos thing. But the argument is based on a dichotomy to which you can ask "what's the evidence of this dichotomy"? The octonion analogy doesn't account for the fact that clouds are made of the same type of atoms an ice crystal is made of, not some subset of it with the last 4 dimensions set to 0 or something.

I have to admit I think I am missing your point. What's the dichotomy? Aspects of reality amenable to scientific investigation vs those aspects that are not?
Yes, exactly, e.g. the shape of a cloud example.

15
Philosophy & Science / Re: Chaos Makes the Multiverse Unnecessary?
« on: July 21, 2019, 06:39:40 pm »
Quote
Rather, science studies predictable physical phenomena.
So this guy's argument is because people can't predict unpredictable/noisy/chaotic/computationally-untractable systems that means that somehow science is flawed? Is he familiar with the stockmarket, weather forecasting, biology etc.?
Sounds like a false dichotomy to me.

I don't think that was the argument? Rather he was appealing to hyper chaos as a means to explain reality without metaphysics...though that in itself is odd b/c he is paralleling the metaphysical argument of Mellissaoux...

In any case I don't think he is speaking of flaws in methodology of science at all?
Yeah that's kinda what I meant, that science is flawed in that there are some phenomena it can't deal with since they are this hyperchaos thing. But the argument is based on a dichotomy to which you can ask "what's the evidence of this dichotomy"? The octonion analogy doesn't account for the fact that clouds are made of the same type of atoms an ice crystal is made of, not some subset of it with the last 4 dimensions set to 0 or something.

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