dmvaldman

What I like about the effective altruist movement is the research they provide.

What I don't like is the cultish behavior, and inherent bias that what I think is good is "universally" good. Effective altruism is nothing more than a rebranding of utilitarianism, and suffers from the same moral quandaries.

Should I kill someone if it is the best way to decrease child mortality rates in Africa?

Should we all quit our jobs to solve friendly AI? Because if not there is a non-negligible probability of human extinction, and the math clearly says this should be our top priority.

I think it's healthy to be aware of the short comings of effective altruism as well as its benefits. Morality and duty are too nuanced for a single ideology to provide all the answers.

Edit: wording

[Shameless plug] For a philosophical interpretation on the differences between OOP and FP, you may enjoy my gist: Descartes, Berkeley and Functional Reactive Programming

https://gist.github.com/dmvaldman/f957dd9a8ed3f6edf35d

People without at least a masters in math are in no place to make commentary on math. 98% of the time it makes me cringe.

That being said, pure math is when you invest in the tool, applied math is when you invest in the problem. There is a very similar relationship in programming.

"When you say I don't care about the right to privacy because I have nothing to hide, that is no different than saying I don't care about freedom of speech because I have nothing to say or freedom of the press because I have nothing to write."

- Edward Snowden

a friend not worth having!

Do you have a source for this "information leaking" concept. I remember hearing about an experiment confirming such an idea, but I can't recall what it was.

Until Kepler, astronomers believed planets to move in circular paths, but this did not match up with experimental data. So it was postulated that they moved in epicycles (circles of circles of circles ..., as pictured in this codepen) of varying radii. This model was able to represent all the data astronomers collected, but did not explain why the radii were what they were.

When Fourier Analysis became a thing 300 years later, it was shown that indeed any periodic function can be modeled with epicycles of certain radii. That this epicycle "model" actually didn't simplify anything! It was an isomorphic way of phrasing the problem, not the solution.

Luckily by then, Kepler had already postulated planets move in ellipses, and Newton proved that even this was the consequence of the law of gravity.

Occam's Razor FTW.

Hmm.. could you be the overly confident person the OP is talking about? Nice to meet you.

This is a modern take on the Nuremberg defense.

You're right in a way. Values like these come from the top, in the project manager, the CEO etc. Morality is found in the company culture, and shouldn't be found exclusively in the worker bee software engineers.

But what else I see is that this can also come from the bottom up, in the way software engineers can "manage up". Software engineers are by definition more intimately aware of the details of a project, and they need to be listened to by management when they have a concern. Because frankly management can't be so aware of the details. It's our responsibility to be concerned about ethics, so that we can better manage up to spread that concern throughout an organization, so that it can filter down to someone else.

I think one red flag that people often miss, or make excuses for, is this: management not treating a coworker fairly.

When you're not treated fairly, that's clearly a red flag. But many people see coworkers treated poorly while they themselves aren't, grab a beer after work and talk about it, commiserate etc. but don't consider the possibility that maybe they themselves are next.

An interesting point to mention is that the traffic "jam" moves backwards. This is because at the front of the jam, cars are able to accelerate out of it, while at the back o the jam cars are piling up into it. Seen from above the jam is a shock wave moving backwards.

This often upsets people when they get out of a jam only to see there was nothing causing it! In reality what caused it may have been much further up the road.

Many cryptocurrencies have your last two points as part of their design.

For the first one, I see the value in going to a centralized place that has taken measures to make sure there is no coercing involved. Someone with a gun could indeed come to your home, and make you vote for a certain candidate. I don't have a good answer for this, but I do feel that it would be a difficult strategy to pull off, as citizens can vote at any time, from any place.

For your second point, this is indeed the hard part. It can be rephrased as: how can you be sure no one was given 2 coins? I also don't have an answer here that doesn't make you associate an SSN or another unique identifier with a wallet address, which would ruin the anonymity feature. Maybe someone else reading has some good ideas to add?

Seems like a great application for cryptocurrencies, though maybe better with those using proof of stake rather than proof of work.

Distribute one coin to every citizen (this is the hard part). Each citizen votes anonymously by giving the coin to the candidate of their choice. The network verifies that no coin (vote) is spent (cast) twice. Done.

Um no, these comments don't have hashes associated with them.

If you got rejected, mind sharing what you're working on? Reply below!

https://famo.us San Francisco, CA

nerd out on web apps. e-mail me if interested (in profile).

famo.us - SF - http://famo.us

Jobs page: https://jobs.lever.co/famo.us

We are reinventing web apps from first principles.

Front-end: if physics, UI, 3D modeling is your thing, give us a look.

Back-end: if tooling, performance testing, CI and code releasing, distribution is your thing, give us a look.

:-)

We'll be around for a while. Launches are hard, but well-crafted technology is a long play. I'm glad you've been experimenting and seeing past the good/bad hype.

We'll always be striving to make our platform better, I hope all of our users feel comfortable expressing their opinions and directly contributing to the project via GitHub. Famo.us is more yours than it is ours now.

what is the github link?

Entirely our fault. But if you still feel guilty, the best thing you can do is try recreating lineTime in famo.us. I think you'll find it a pleasure :-)

Hey there. Employee at Famo.us here. This URL wasn't meant for public distribution, but that's beside the point. We're officially launching on the 9th, and I can only hope we change your opinion of "Famo.us as vaporware" then and onwards.

Ultimately, the proof is in the product. I'm just excited to share with you what we think is some pretty sweet technology. If we convince (or don't convince) you, let me know. david@famo.us

That seems....excessive

what the author means to allude to, through some nonsensical rambling, are the incomputable numbers [1]

the cardinality of all real numbers that can be described by a terminating computer program to some accuracy is a countable set (since the number of such programs is countable) however, the cardinality of the reals is uncountable.

hence most real numbers cannot be computed beyond a certain accuracy.

Edit (additionally): the set of computable numbers forms a field (if a,b are computable, so is their sum, etc). and there are several movements in "constructive" mathematics, to work exclusively in this field, instead of the field of real numbers. however, many cornerstone theorems in analysis fail in this context, such as, the least upper bound of a bounded increasing computable sequence of computable numbers need not be a computable number [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_number

multiplying by two, and adding I presume. makes sense.

to give some related knowledge, all matrices can be decomposed into direct sums of shifts and scales. this is the base of the jordan normal form [1]. infinite matrices can certainly encapsulate chaos.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_normal_form

awesome :-)

Famo.us - SF Fulltime (http://www.famo.us)

We make 3D interfaces and cross-platform apps on top of WebKit browsers. We're a big javascript house, and don't use any 3rd party libraries for our main platform, though experience with MVC libraries, three.js, D3.js, Node are all pluses.

If you want to replace jQuery, send me an email: david@famo.us

It's not so surprising. This could also be summarized as "God created the integers."

But really the process is reversed: given arithmetic, what is the smallest axiom set to give us the power to prove our theorems.

It's like, given all code, what is the smallest language we can use to express it. Which is sequences of 0s and 1s.

Also, Golbach's conjecture has been verified up from 5 to 4000000000000000000 computationally.

But in general, it's common for mathematicians to assume a conjecture is true and go on from there, because if they arrive at a contradiction, then they can conclude the conjecture false (or that another interesting fact may be logically equivalent to the conjecture).

Pure mathematics consists entirely of such assertions as that, if such and such a proposition is true of anything, then such and such another proposition is true of that thing. It is essential not to discuss whether the first proposition is really true…. Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true. - Bertrand Russell

The reason why this problem is difficult is because primes have everything to do with multiplication (every number is the product of primes), and summing numbers have everything to do with...well, addition. To give additive properties of numbers in terms of primes is like putting a round peg in a square hole.

The reason why this problem is important, is that in the grand scheme of things, it'a more about the math and less about the applications. People have already assumed it to be true, and still not applied it to anything practical like cryptography, as far as I know. Please correct if not.