If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)
3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.
4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
I asked Steve Hsu (an expert) "How long do you think it will probably take for someone to create babies who will grow up to be significantly smarter than any non-genetically engineered human has ever been? Is the answer closer to 10 or 30 years?"
He said it might be technologically possible in 10 years but " who will have the guts to try it? There could easily be a decade or two lag between when it first becomes possible and when it is actually attempted."
In, say, five years someone should start a transhumanist dating service that matches people who want to genetically enhance the intelligence of their future children. Although this is certainly risky, my view is that the Fermi paradox implies we are in great danger and so should take the chance to increase the odds that we figure out a way through the great filter.
In so far as the Fermi paradox implies we're in great danger, it also suggests that exciting newly-possible things we might try could be more dangerous than they look. Perhaps some strange feedback loop involving intelligence enhancement is part of the danger. (The usual intelligence-enhancement feedback loop people worry about around here involves AI, of course, but perhaps that's not the only one that's scary.)
How good do you think you'd be at raising a child who is a great deal smarter than any previous human?
Let's assume you're sane enough to not resent the child's superintelligence. Still, what does the child need?
Tentative suggestion: people who are interested in the project should aim for at least a dozen superintelligent children in the first generation so that at least they have some company.
He said it might be technologically possible in 10 years
He's talking about using CRISPR to edit DNA. I would ask what's the timeline for germline selection, but when he says:
then the main bottleneck will be the sample size of good (cognitive, genotype) data sets necessary to extract the genetic architecture. IF we can get to ~ millions (very plausible in 5-10 years), ...
And I assume that getting the datasets is also the bottleneck for germline selection.
Incidentally, is this the sort of problem which can be significantly speeded up by money/publicity? And how much money? Is this the sort of thing which would be a good target for philanthropy?
transhumanist dating service
Simpler idea: join okcupid, use #IWGEC (I want genetically enhanced children) as a hashtag to identify each other.
Of course, a dedicated niche dating site has advantages, in that the site can be tailored to the specific criteria, but its a lot harder to set up.
I don't think we are at the point where we can adequately assess the risks involved. It's known that higher IQ is correlated with major depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. What use is having a super-intelligent child if they have to spend most of their teenage and early adult years away from society, in a medicated stupor?
There may also be other genetic side effects to increased intelligence, such as increased risk of alcohol dependence and substance abuse.
I think I remember a study saying that over an IQ of 130, there is no correlation between increased intelligence and success/happiness.
It would probably be far more worthwhile to focus on having children of moderate-to-high IQ score (120-130 range), and put more emphasis on better upbringing, instilling values such as the importance of socializing and putting effort into one's goals. The focus that some transhumanists seem to have on raw intelligence seems a bit childish and naive.
Gwern has written an article for Wired, allegedly revealing the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto:
An anonymous source supplies Gwern with juicy facts about this man Wright, they see print after a few weeks, and then within hours his home is raided by Australian federal police. I am reminded that the source of the Watergate leaks was in fact the deputy director of the FBI...
From the linked Wired article:
The PGP key associated with Nakamoto’s email address and references to an upcoming “cryptocurrency paper” and “triple entry accounting” were added sometime after 2013.
Gwern's comment in the Reddit thread:
[...] this is why we put our effort into nailing down the creation and modification dates of the blog post in third-party archives like the IA and Google Reader.
These comments seem to partly refer to the 2013 mass archive of Google Reader just before it was discontinued. For others who want to examine the data: the relevant WARC records for gse-compliance.blogspot.com are in line 110789824 to line 110796183 of greader_20130604001315.megawarc.warc, which is about three-quarters of the way into the file. I haven't checked the directory and stats grabs and don't plan to, as I don't want to spend any more time on this.
NB: As for any other large compressed archives, if you plan on saving the data, then I suggest decompressing the stream as you download it and recompressing into a seekable structure. Btrfs with compression works well, but blocked compression implementations like bgzip should also work in a pinch. If you leave the archive as a single compressed stream, then you'll pull all your hair out when you try to look through the data.
Bug report: the antikibitzer's toggle button (which appears at the top right of the browser window's content area) doesn't work correctly for me (on recent Firefox on Windows) because the loop that attempts to identify the antikibitzer stylesheet fails. It fails because an earlier stylesheet in the list (actually, the very first) has a null href.
A simple fix is to change the obvious line in antikibitzer.js to this:
if (document.styleSheets[i].href && document.styleSheets[i].href.indexOf("antikibitzer") > 0)
but I make no guarantee that this is the fix the author of the code would prefer.
Some uncomfortable questions I've asked myself lately:
Could you without intentionally listening to music for 30 days?
I recall being taught to argue towards the predetermined point of view in schools and extra-curriculum activities like debating. Is that counterproductive or suboptimal?
Listening back to a recording I made of a therapy session when I was quite mentally ill, I feel amazed at just how much I have improved. I am appalled by the mode of thought of that young person. What impression do the people around me have that they won't discuss openly?
Aren't storm water drain explorer's potentially mapping out critical infrastructure which may be targetted more easily by terrorists? One way I see these things going is commercial drain tours. That way there would be a legitimised presence there and perhaps enhanced security.
something to be asked of academia
Imagine a person was abused for a large part of their childhood and is subsequently traumatised and mentally ill, then, upon regaining greater functioning as an adult decides to extort their abusive parents for money with the threat of exposing them while still counting on inheritence, instead of simply going to the authorities and approaching a legal settlement (expecting that will cut of any pleasant relations). Are there actions unconscionable? What would you do in their situation?
If I went straight to a family member without preparing them in advance would they consent to my cryonics application? to support a cryonics application?
Do most people really think like this?
The rate at which I come up with ideas that I feel are worthwhile business ventures is unmanageable. So, I’ll take a leaf out of the EA Ventures method webpage by asking: what are three existing organizations that are doing similar things and why aren’t you joining them?
Imagine a person was abused for a large part of their childhood and is subsequently traumatised and mentally ill, then, upon regaining greater functioning as an adult decides to extort their abusive parents for money with the threat of exposing them while still counting on inheritence, instead of simply going to the authorities and approaching a legal settlement (expecting that will cut of any pleasant relations). Are there actions unconscionable? What would you do in their situation?
Depends on what you mean by "abuse"? A lot of what's been called "child abuse", e.g., spanking, isn't. On the other hand, legitimate abuse happens as well.
Interesting article on vox (not a new one, but it's the first time I've seen it and I thought I'd share; apologies if it's been featured here before) on 'how politics makes us stupid': http://www.vox.com/2014/4/6/5556462/brain-dead-how-politics-makes-us-stupid
tl;dr: The smarter you are, the less likely you are to change your mind on certain issues when presented with new information, even when the new information is very clearly, simply, and unambiguously against your point of view.
The smarter you are, the less likely you are to change your mind on certain issues when presented with new information
In an adversarial setting -- e.g. in the middle of culture warfare -- this is an entirely valid response.
If you just blindly update on everything and I control what evidence you see, I can make you believe anything with arbitrarily high credence. Note that this does not necessarily involve any lying, just proper filtering.
The smarter you are, the less likely you are to change your mind on certain issues when presented with new information, even when the new information is very clearly, simply, and unambiguously against your point of view.
Also, as George Orwell said "There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them".
Paradox at the heart of mathematics makes physics problem unanswerable
Gödel’s incompleteness theorems are connected to unsolvable calculations in quantum physics.
Undecidability of the Spectral Gap (full version) by Toby Cubitt, David Perez-Garcia, Michael M. Wolf
We show that the spectral gap problem is undecidable. Specifically, we construct families of translationally-invariant, nearest-neighbour Hamiltonians on a 2D square lattice of d-level quantum systems (d constant), for which determining whether the system is gapped or gapless is an undecidable problem. This is true even with the promise that each Hamiltonian is either gapped or gapless in the strongest sense: it is promised to either have continuous spectrum above the ground state in the thermodynamic limit, or its spectral gap is lower-bounded by a constant in the thermodynamic limit. Moreover, this constant can be taken equal to the local interaction strength of the Hamiltonian. This implies that it is logically impossible to say in general whether a quantum many-body model is gapped or gapless. Our results imply that for any consistent, recursive axiomatisation of mathematics, there exist specific Hamiltonians for which the presence or absence of a spectral gap is independent of the axioms. These results have a number of important implications for condensed matter and many-body quantum theory.
Man has himself MRIed twice a week for a year and a half, plus tracking a lot about his life. The data mining is still going on, but at least it's been shown that (probably) people's connectomes change pretty rapidly.
I'm also posting this to the media thread because I'm not sure where it's more likely to be seen.
Calling what was mapped here a 'connectome' is REALLY stretching it. When they make those graphs of parcels connected to each other, what they're doing is just measuring the correlation between activity as revealed by an fMRI (which is itself removed from activity, measuring the short-term fluctuations in bloodflow as a result of energy requirements) in different parcels of brain and drawing a 'connection' when the coefficient is high enough. Correlation is not just connection.
I do note that there was diffusion tensor imaging (which shows you the average orientation of fibers in any given voxel [and showed an unusual crossing mixed fiber feature in a spot of his corpus callosum and will probably show similar oddities throughout the brain in any given human] ) and I will try to get at that information once I am past a paywall later on, but the repeated MRIs appear to be fMRIs.
World's first anti-ageing drug could see humans live to 120
Anyone know anything about this?
The drug is metformin, currently used for Type 2 diabetes.
It seems like the drug trial is funded by the The American Federation for Aging Research(nonprofit). Likelihood of success isn't high but one of the core reason for running the trial seems to be the first anti-aging drug trial and have the FDA develop a framework for that purpose.
3000 patients from who are between 70 to 80 years old at the start of the study. Metformin is cheap to produce, so the claim isn't too expensive for the nonprofit that funds it.
There is discussion on Hacker News. tl;dr: Don't hold your breath.