hacker42

I like these channels:

Tom Scott

https://m.youtube.com/user/enyay

standupmaths

https://m.youtube.com/user/standupmaths

Cody's Lab

https://m.youtube.com/user/theCodyReeder

Matthias Wandel

https://m.youtube.com/user/Matthiaswandel

Primitive Technology

https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA

Applied Science

https://m.youtube.com/user/bkraz333

In a similar vein, and perhaps even more useful, here is a collection of probably 100+ useful concepts and thinking tools (make sure to read all comments and also the comments in the linked article at the top):

Concepts for Your Cognitive Toolkit

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10819355

> For new installations, wind and solar installations are cost competitive if not even cheaper, with little environmental or economic risks attached.

Citation needed.

There is a great answer on Quora which includes this aspect (but also many others): https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-evolutionary-reason-for-mi...

Pasted below.

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There are likely multiple evolutionary factors behind the tendency to create mischief.

Several concepts are interconnected with the idea of mischief:

- Playing fair vs. ignoring the rules (following/breaking social norms)

- Playing for fun vs. purposeful goal directed activity

- Pleasure derived from antisocial behaviors

- Pleasure derived from eliciting reactions in others

- Strategic reasons to create disruption

- The role of anonymity

Most of these have been studied separately, and not all of them may be required for an activity to be considered "mischief." Each one has its own set of evolutionary stories.

Breaking the rules: There are evolutionary advantages to the species as a whole (e.g. stable organized societies) for having everyone predisposed to following the social norms. Similarly, there are advantages to breaking the social norms: personal advantage in a world where others are unwilling to cheat, collective advantage to having a society that isn't 100% conformist (if the norms are bad, that will only be discovered if some people start breaking them and succeed).

Playing for fun (not goal-directed): Studies on play behavior in animals suggest that play during development serves several functions. It develops practice with give-and-take social interaction for more harmonious social order later, and physical play develops coordination that can help in adult behavior later (puppies playing and becoming better at fighting as dogs).

Pleasure derived from antisocial behaviors: This may fall a little bit outside of mischief, however the desire for revenge has been studied, as has duper's delight (pleasure from fooling others), or pleasure from cheating. In general, any behavior that could have an evolutionary advantage for some individuals is likely to have pleasure associated with it somehow, since that ensures that the behavior will be expressed. In any competition, using a strategy that would not occur to the opponent is to the individual's advantage because the opponent won't be planning to counter it. So whatever rules the opponent assumes you are playing by represent opportunities for advantage by ignoring them. There is the risk of winning the battle but losing the war (getting caught and punished), however this is a risk/reward trade-off.

Pleasure derived from eliciting reactions in others: There are rewards on multiple levels (neurological, social, existential) from getting others to respond:

- Neurological: Experiencing perceptual feedback to an action is inherently rewarding, which may relate to why kids enjoy hitting things and knocking things over. It is part of experimenting with and discovering the causal mechanisms of the environment.

- Social: A displaced or repurposed desire for social interaction, for example when preteens chase and hit girls or boys they are attracted to, or when adults "play the victim" to elicit sympathy.

- Existential: Feeling that one has an impact on the world, that one exists, that one matters. This might relate to enhancing the feeling of personal agency: the sense of power and causal control over the environment.

- Curiosity and personal amusement: Finding out what will happen, and watching the predictable reactions of others play out can be amusing (credit Naman Kumar).

There are also strategic reasons to create disruption in the specific social setting of a dialog (e.g. "trolling"):

- The disrupter wins social points for being dominant, tougher, funnier, and less naive than other participants.

- The bad boy (or b* girl) is admired by peers for being immune to the judgments and approval of others. From an evolutionary perspective, being revered by peers makes one attractive to potential mates in a social species (credit Ernie Bornheimer).

- Humor can be a way of moving the discussion away from an uncomfortable topic (credit Marcus Geduld).

- Sarcasm, ridicule, and shaming can be a strategy for shifting the power in a dialog, silencing opposing viewpoints, and changing the official view in the disruptor's favor (as with political debates).

Lastly, there is also the role of anonymity in mischief. Acting anonymously can be a way of playing out a fantasy without consequences to one's reputation in society. It certainly resolves one of the inner conflicts to antisocial behavior, the risk to one's reputation, by eliminating that risk altogether. Anonymity also facilitates pleasure derived from superiority, power, or knowledge. If you know something that no one else knows -- who is behind the mischief -- then you may be getting pleasure from what would normally be a positive evolutionary behavior: acquiring more knowledge than the next person, understanding causal mechanisms in the world, accumulating power.

Research on the neural basis of breaking the rules:

Moll J, et al (2005) The neural basis of moral cognition. Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

Spitzer M et al (2007). The Neural Signature of Social Norm Compliance. Neuron.

Sanfey AG et al (2003). The Neural Basis of Economic Decision-Making in the Ultimatum Game. Science.

de Quervain DJF et al (2004). The Neural Basis of Altruistic Punishment. Science.

I think this is basically the major and effective meme/emotion that Trump plays into: Nostalgia. Thiel also voiced concerns about the state of the infrastructure at a GOP Convention. Nostalgia is a strong emotion and it is often based on false memories or weak comparisons. Sure, large parts of our infrastructure are worse than they were 50 years ago, but on the other hand we had very different problems back then. We used to consume goods that turned out to be toxic. Today almost everyone has access to extremely fast transportation via air travel. Almost everyone has access to the world's knowledge at any time. Medicine has improved a lot. "Make it great again" is the central lie and people are dumb enough not to question it and to believe his financial independence would make him a superior leader, when in fact he only displays characteristics that are opposed to the ones we should expect from a good leader, for example decency and intelligence.

Here is an interesting take on this matter:

> Famously, the only reason he went to seek fortune in the Silicon Valley was because he was denied a highly prestigious clerk position for a Supreme Court justice.

> It seems to me that Thiel originally wished to become a politician, and only stopped pursuing that path to seek his fortune in the Silicon Valley when he hit his first setback when applying to clerk for the Supreme Court.

Source: https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Peter-Thiel-supporting-Donald-T...

But MCTS works in AlphaGo because the 'world' can be fully represented by a tiny state vector which fits a billion times into primary memory these days. The real difficultly of real world problems is the ill-defined, mutable, high-dimensional and partially observable state space.

Remember that arXiv is just pre-print and the last page if not the entire paper is probably nothing more than a lame/distasteful joke. Remember that any nutbag who knows a little English and LaTeX can publish on arXiv. It will likely not make it into a journal.

How much percent of the entire activity on GitHub is that?

> At least it's good for the plants.

There are plants (for example hop and wheat [1]) that cannot grow well at high CO2 concentrations.

[1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/328/5980/899.abstract

To substantiate this comment a bit, David MacKay wrote a good book on this matter: https://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_161.shtml

AFAIK it's not so bad at large scale and with brains only.

I am not seeing it. People are following the super stimuli of rockets, history etc. while further contributing to pollution and resource depletion. We need a culture that is satisfied with much less, one that overcomes the tragedy of the commons. Tesla might contribute a bit in that regard, but SpaceX is outright opposed to it. If you want to convince people of the future, there are more effective and reliable ways of doing that (for example science, cryonics, education etc.).

> failing to appreciate the subtleties in how progress is made

What are these subtleties? Why is it better to invest energy into space instead of sustainability? It's just heartbreaking that we can't remotely get as excited about sustainability as we can about romantic memes of curiosity and history books. Is the 'subtlety' that we just got to accept this as a fact about human nature and hope for sustainability as a byproduct?

It's almost certainly irrelevant for our survival, but it's also not expensive enough for me to care.

Yes, I think the same about deep sea exploration.

Perhaps I'm a bit cynical, but space exploration strikes me as a waste of money and energy. The universe is clearly no good for space travel, otherwise we would witness aliens visiting us. It's empty and hostile. This planet is the only realistic long-term home. Sure, space stuff gets kids into science, but I wonder how many more kids we would get into science by investing billions of dollars in education instead. We know enough about space for now. We've sent robots to Mars and the photos show it's just dust.

Right now we need to solve sustainability, global warming, super bugs, cancer, aging, friendly AI, pollution, global cooperation etc. Space can wait.

That's like saying people shouldn't read FAQs because they should rather read the documentation. These things aren't actually mutually exclusive.

> What exactly are western values, other than a not-so-subtle way of asserting hostility to Muslims?

For example that no death threats are spoken when a daughter defies her farther's will who she is supposed to spend time with. That caricaturists, satirists and atheists are safe. These are things that western cultures have established, and which could arguably be endangered by letting in refugees by the millions and by prohibiting cultural criticism at the same time. I am myself not convinced of the urgency of this threat, but I think these are some of the more convincing arguments against Merkel's refugee politics. Other arguments are for example second order effects or equilibrium effects, e.g. that conservatives, professionals and business folk amount to a counter-reaction that is worse than letting in refugees in a more controlled way (i.e. Brexit and brain drain).

> exactly the same people who hate gays and feminism in the first place.

I have no idea about the numbers, but I am pretty certain both groups exist. Those who use these arguments as pretense and those who are honestly concerned about the efficiency, safety and trust our culture has established (which e.g. allow us to focus on education, art and science).

Why? Leftist people would also get more diverse recommendations. They'd be exposed to arguments such as the importance of maintaining western values etc. I actually did an experiment of wading through videos recommended based on anti-Merkel stuff. There are very few reasonable discussions and mostly it's horribly populist and poorly researched stuff.

"Carbon Valley" probably.

I think personalized media might bring information bubbles to a whole new level because recommendation systems are more efficient and achieving millions of YouTube views has arguably fewer intellectual hurdles than achieving similar reading rates via print or TV. The information passes though fewer filters (none), e.g. proof readers, team discussions. If that causes an increase of misinformation, then it is on Google to fix it, i.e. to reduce the amount of misinformation at least to pre-YouTube levels.

Do you study the phenomenon of information bubbles at Google? Let's say, a German user just happens to watch some right-wing populist video claiming that we need to stop Merkel's refugee politics. The next day the user might receive plenty of recommendations in their feed that confirm the message in the first video. They happen to stumble upon a video of some party convention by an uprising German populist party, and everything makes sense now! Video by video the user gets dragged into a right-wing ideology.

That is an information bubble. The algorithm cannot detect low quality or populism, neither can it recommend opposite standpoints, and at the end of the day it has a real effect on a country's politics and the well-being of many people.

Do you have means of quantifying such effects? What are possible countermeasures?

If you cannot talk about that, then this would be my feedback: Perhaps you could train a language model to find opposing views in video titles and tags and then diversify the video recommendations based on that.

I also dimly remember that sparsity in the random fixed backward connections still works. There is actually a figure about that in the paper you've linked to.

Interestingly, feedback alignment is also patented, but it is unclear that is actually helpful, except for explaining neuroscience. To my knowledge there has been no application of it in two years.

It will be an approximation of the Jacobian because it is just backprop. It also seems they only use the linear model when they also condition on the correct class which makes things easier. It is also only MNIST (10 classes).

<spacemacs plug />

Interestingly for people with colds the sympathy is also commonly misplaced, at least mistimed, namely the outer symptoms often only show up after the worst parts (sore throat, dizziness, nausea, headaches) are already overcome.

It is obviously inaccurate to write "nobody" and I am sorry if I have hurt your feelings by this rhetorical device. I've merely pointed out a general tendency that Islam numbs social, economic and scientific progress, i.e. that the influence on the conflicts in the Arab World with regards to religion is not just a matter of differences in beliefs, but rather an underlying condition of a kind of belief which prevents progress. The niqab and burqa, the excessive structuring of day-to-day life, Islamic extremism, as well as oppression of women, gays and atheists are simply symptomatic examples for an overly binding religion. I've also only pointed out that it plays a significant role in the grievances in the Arab World, not that is the only cause.

The illusion is actually measurable. For example when you cause activity in cortical motor neurons by direct stimulation, then the subject will move e.g. their arm involuntarily, but they will later convincingly explain that they've moved their arm on purpose because of an itch or because they just felt like moving their arm.

Think about it. Isn't there something curious about this (probably innate) way of representing actions that were initiated inside our brains?

There are more examples like these, e.g. in split-brain patients where the speaking side simply rationalizes whatever the non-speaking side does. All of that points toward the same idea: Our feeling of being an entity that can choose in each moment what to do next misrepresents what actually happens inside our brains. Under the hood, every thought and every movement can be tracked back to either noise or to a recurrent control program that in turn was shaped by a reward maximizing mechanism and by learned statistics of real-world dynamics. On top of that there is an episodic self-representation which basically tells a story about itself and which has a bias to represent autonomously moving objects such as the structure it is part of, by a free, self-initiated intentionality. That story it tells itself about itself can of course affect future actions, but again the way it does is fully contingent on the laws of nature, on genetics, on the individual life experience etc.

If someone stopped caring about their life after reading this because they are not in control of their thoughts and movements anyway, then even that is fully contingent on the experience of reading whatever I am writing right now and society might decide to contain said subject for everyone's safety (i.e. to ensure their continued flow of reward signals). This exposes the role of this innate feeling of free agency as a mechanism of behavioral control. We need this representation to be efficient at attributing certain outcomes to certain individuals so that we can correct their behavior.

But we don't need to give up on anything knowing this. We still can do blame attribution. Actually we can probably gain something by improving the representation of ourselves and agents in general: Everybody is deeply shaped by their individual experiences and often it is actually quite insightful to go on 'auto-pilot' and ignore our representational urge to be our own initiator for a while and just see what the recurrent circuitry in ours brain can come up with.