joggery

I think you're mistaken about this. Once the philosophical and technical breakthroughs are made that allow us to build an AGI then it will get all the data it needs from its environment. It would be 'unsupervised' in the sense that human children are i.e. no pre-processing of data required but it would still need parenting.

I like the way the narrator-hero is trapped in a sinister bell jar world and yet works optimistically to improve his knowledge of it. Regardless of outcome he sees no malevolence built into reality.

Consider that the machinery to make group decisions and allocate resources already exists (laws, institutions, government, etc). It is imperfect and can be improved. But what is relevant here is that groups of people wish to alter the machinery in certain fixed (uncreative) ways. The unconscious motive is that of preserving their own identities.

An extreme case would be a Dr Evil figure who will not examine his own heart and needs the world to burn just so he can pretend to himself that he's a good person. So he makes the world burn. At every stage convinced of his own righteousness.

This explains why 'war is the continuation of politics by other means'. What passes for peace is trench warfare where the only progress is sideways. Improving the machinery may be desirable but in practice politics is dominated by preventing inevitable perturbations from escalating into open hatred and violence.

(More parochially one can tell when politics is influencing the discussion because there is always blaming going on.)

Politics is about who to blame and hacking is about solving problems. (Blaming is the opposite of solving problems.)

I like because it gives due credit to Chiang. Painfully modest though he may be, this enterprise sprang out of his imagination.

Wai H. Tsang:

http://www.academia.edu/27961545/The_Fractal_Brain_Theory_-_...

With the advent of squeezable bottles the new problem is how to prevent the socially awkward squelching noise.

The criterion is not about assessing a particular individual's contributions, it's about choosing what and whom to investigate in the first place. Of course this is subjective, and rightly so.

Indeed. And just as most people can't see things accurately, not can they sense what's going on inside their mouths. AFAICT each accent has a signature pattern of muscle tension and positioning of jaw, pharynx, etc.

>I'm sure I'm even still missing aspects.

Perhaps this comes under 'defenders of the realm', but: dogs bark at strangers thereby acting as an alarm system.

I wonder if dogs domesticated themselves, at least to begin with. By following a human camp around they would be more likely to breed with other human-liking and human-tolerated dogs.

>hear of a name before you hear of a concrete achievement

That's an excellent criterion.

I often wonder if many famous past intellectuals were mere celebrities where I can't recall a single achievement. And if one can't name a famous true idea in an current academic field, perhaps the field itself is worthless.

Thank you! That's actually the one I meant.

(With apologies to Mr Dheere. I haven't heard his rendition.)

Ray Sizemore reads it in a detached manner (reminiscent of the Emergency Medical Hologram in Star Trek Voyager) which is highly suited to the material.

Consider: A monologue. No relationships. No sex. No strikingly new ideas. Mostly expositional. Yet so darned good.

Exhalation is one of the best SF stories ever written:

http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/

(Somewhere out there is an audio version crisply and cerebrally voiced by Tom Dheere.)

Why does it take so long for us to form our first memory? My guess is it's because human memories are ideas and like all our ideas they depend on other ideas for their meaning.

However when we were young our ideas about the world were very different from what they are now: much simpler and with many falsehoods. So our earliest memories don't make sense to us and can't be recalled.

What we call our 'first memory' may just be the earliest thing we can recall and make sense of now.

Isn't there a valid distinction between the joy of making genuine progress in life and mere pleasure such as that derived from drugs or alcohol?

I like to consider the difference between 'one','a couple','a few','several','many'. e.g 1,2,3-6,5-12,10+ respectively.

>Vagueness isn’t a problem about logic; it’s a problem about knowledge.

I think it's more to do with context. The transition from 'a grain' to 'a pile' to 'a heap' where those terms are actually useful is normally clear in the context of whatever problem we're trying to solve.

The confusion arises from the fact that 'a grain' is considered to be well-defined without context and that language refers to it directly. Thus we lament that we can't adequately define 'heap'. Whereas in fact all language is metaphorical and indirect, and definitions can't rescue us from this. So even the label 'a grain' is fuzzy if you look deeply and scientifically enough.

You need the math required to understand the language in which the current best physical theories are written. It's unknown as yet which mathematical objects will be required for their successors.

>terribly introverted adolescent, painfully aware of his own suffering

Self-awareness seems to be a key component of creativity.

>excessive screen time early in life can change the circuits in a growing brain

Any activity changes the brain. Also, as BurningFrog points out, "rewires" is a metaphorical term and therefore vague. Ditto "circuits".

>mice

...aren't human.

> But it also meant they acted like they had an attention deficit disorder

Such disorders are pretty loosely defined. Something "like" such a disorder is vaguer still. And, again, these are mice for goodness sake.

>In a video game, he said, you can meet the equivalent of a lion every few seconds.

No you can't. Lions are dangerous!

>our understanding of how sensory stimulation affects developing brains.

We're not passive. We decide what to pay attention to. Thus we can't be stimulated arbitrarily by the environment. Actually I think this is assumed by the contradictory concept of "attention deficit", elsewhere in the piece.

Isn't this sort of thing inevitable? I mean, the more technology advances the easier and cheaper it becomes to build terrorist devices or WMDs. Therefore society, in order to protect itself, has to be vigilant about how the relevant knowledge disseminates. An analogy might be an individual guarding against suicidal thoughts.

More interesting to me is how to create mechanisms to control who gets access to the data and under what circumstances. I think in the UK we have a pretty bad record of local councils and other busybodies using snooping powers not intended for them.

Indeed. Turn the spotlight of publicity onto what people, be they good or bad, have to say. Turn a platform into a "safe space" and pretty soon any kind of criticism will be interpreted as harassment. This will deny users a powerful means of making progress. So ultimately it becomes an unsafe space.

Wonder if drones could be shielded against this? Or, better yet, could the technology be adapted to transmit energy to drones or spacecraft?

Myself I prefer optimistic SF such as classic Asimov and Clarke. I don't mind things going wrong because mistakes are normal. But there ought to be resolution and problems solved by hard-won knowledge and the efforts of good people. If you think that is immoral or unrealistic consider whether you would read your children bedtime stories with no good guys and/or no happy endings. Consider how such children might grow up. Then consider the effect on society of unrelenting pessimism in SF.

>humans have an innate capacity for reason, which they fail to use

They use it as children; with adults explicit reason is mostly confined to their work.

The rest of the time adults use reason covertly: to rationalise doing what they think high status people expect of them.

Should thou not copiest this book most faithfully, taking care afterwards to dispatch it to three of thy brothers, thy brains shall be cudgelled forth and fed to the crows.

Prisons are dysfunctional and cost too much. Why isn't GPS-tagging, curfew and public record sufficient to protect society?

Reform could only be somewhere where >90% people are non-criminal e.g. army, monastery

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundredth_monkey_effect

Check out healthcare costs by age:

http://blogs-images.forbes.com/danmunro/files/2014/04/hccost...

Hence the importance of research into life extension technology combined with provision of assisted suicide for those who wish to die.

Here's one existing measure of temperature:

http://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/

Two decimal places looks pretty sharp to me!

Solar is expanding nicely on its own. Nuclear is expanding, but too slowly. The reason it takes so long to build is because of bureaucratic regulation due to historical opposition.

Now, if we're serious about ending climate change, why not agree to setting a global target temperature?

Changing curriculums is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, I'm afraid. Future generations will wonder how we could be so heartless as to coop children up in classrooms and require them to study random subjects.

The correct approach to maximising learning is as follows. Help children to do more of what they like and try to find things they'll like even better. This includes all video games, btw.