maxander

Check out the price tags on most infrastructure projects these days. As badly needed as they are, the US government currently doesn’t have re ability to execute them for less than the mid-horizon returns, if that.

I haven’t read Gould, but from what you describe- the people running the studies aren’t dumb, they’re aware of these difficulties! That’s why they use all sorts of means (statistical control, twin studies, etc etc) to get around them, in addition to using compilations of studies from different populations and methods to drive conclusions.

Generally “strong AI” means general intelligence, such as a human’s ability to figure out the solution to problems in general, as opposed to the single-purpose AI tools that we have today. So solving Linear A (by a method like this one) wouldn’t be “Strong AI”- merely profoundly powerful “weak AI.”

(“Strong AI” is also sometimes used to refer to conscious AI, but that’s a different issue again.)

Remember the square-cube law; for two things of different sizes, the difference in surface area is proportional to the square and the difference in volume is proportional to the cube of the difference in sizes.

So, compared to any Earth-bound compost heap, each bit of the sun's surface (wherever you draw the boundary) has more heat-generating interior backing it up.

It serves a purpose, though, since weather is more relevant to day-to-day experience than most news stories. E.g., Boston is going to hit just about 100F this Saturday; that’s enough to potentially hurt someone not expecting it, and there’s probably people who wouldn’t hear about a heatwave if it wasn’t in something like the NYT.

“Spending too much on medicine” isn’t like spending too much on clothes or nice houses. If the consumer goods you buy are crummy and don’t improve your life you can do without them, but we’re essentially unable to decide we can do without health. Demand for cures for our diseases is different than demand for other things, and that shows up both in the sorry economic structure of our (U.S.) health system, and here.

If we had more medical treatments that worked, and a lab-to-hospital pipeline with a better track record, I suspect better scientific standards would follow naturally. But for now, raising the standards of evidence would essentially block off the invention of new treatments altogether, which simply isn’t an option even on a psychological level.

With respect, your doctor’s response seems entirely reasonable. Spontaneous remissions, as this sort of thing are called, are known to happen, but the tools to understand why and how basically don’t exist, or at best are the purview of serious biomedical laboratories; certainly, your doctor couldn’t have mounted a serious investigation with the resources in his office. Meanwhile, the sick always outnumber medical practitioners, and there’s an essentially unlimited number of people in worse condition than yours who he could help; of course he would allocate his limited time to where it would do the most good.

Remember that Arxiv is not a scientific journal. Anyone* can post whatever they want there. It’s full of proofs of P=NP and zero-point energy designs and whatnot.

Looking at their argument itself, they seem to be saying that increased temperatures can be attributed to increased cloud cover rather than anthropogenic CO2. I don’t necessarily have the expertise to say whether that holds water, but even if so, it begs the question- what’s driving the increase in cloud cover? The correlation with anthropogenic CO2 remains unaccounted for.

(*Anyone associated with a college or university, or who has such a person vouch for them, or etc. It’s a bit like getting an invitation to gmail back when it was “in beta.”)

Location: Boston, MA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python, Haskell, R, C/C++/C#; machine learning and general statistics

Resume/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-max-alexander-8940469/

Email: w.max.alexander@gmail.com

Master's degree in computer science and 5 years of experience in bioinformatics. Particular experience in data processing and analysis workflows for proteomic mass spectrometry experiments, but interested in other "omic" technologies. Also interested in deep learning and other advanced machine learning applications in the biotech space.

Open to either full-time employment (starting late summer or fall '19) or consulting opportunities.

(Note, due to upcoming travel I may be slow/unable to respond to email until July 7th.)

If done only ~3 times, and only considering outcomes that manifest within a day or so. On possible harms beyond that the study is silent.

Well, yes, in that no one has lived forever yet. :) But that he has established a substantial research foundation and normalized a subject that was virtually fringe science a few decades ago is tremendous success in itself.

Sure it does, if a large chunk of the volunteers are in the US.

The division of the open source world into the “US part” and the “Chinese part” would be a roughly 50% cut in the efficiency of the FOSS ecosystem, and is on the table given the developments he describes.

You’ve got to admire Japan- they face a problem for the welfare of their citizens, but they’re grappling with it in an intelligent and informed manner. They’re not particularly close to solving the underlying issues but, from the sound of it at least, steps are in the consistently right direction.

In the U.S., in contrast, this kind of problem wouldn’t even come up- because everyone involved would be living on the street, and no one in a position of civic authority would consider it their responsibility.

A quirk of an old, badly implemented database... from before the days of databases.

Slightly smaller-scale than most suggestions here, but for the average nonscientific HNer, the best way to help scientists is to improve their programming tools. In the Python ecosystem, for instance; numpy/scipy, scikit-learn, and matplotlib are widely used across dozens of disciplines, and are open-source projects relatively welcoming of new contributors. Julia is a whole new language for scientific computing, where all the fundamental tools are still being built and refined. Raspberry pis, 3D printers and other “hobbyist maker” tools are appearing in research labs to help develop novel instrumentation, so hardware-oriented people can help by contributing to open-source efforts of that kind.

An old XKCD is, as usual, highly relevant: https://xkcd.com/1217/

Granted, this is actually a trial in humans, so that's good! But if you look at the study, the focus is on detecting circulating cancer cells; attempting to use the technology to destroy them is relegated to one paragraph near the end. There they note that this seemed to happen by accident, to a limited degree, in 6 out of the 18 patients; so they tried again in a single patient, whose melanoma cell melanin content was particularly favorable for this process, and it again seemed to work ("up to a 48-fold reduction" in circulating melanoma cells.)

They went on to do in vitro tests to try and show it would work in general, aiming the laser at a test tube full of blood; this worked, which is encouraging, but it shouldn't be taken as a strong indicator of anything practical. (And even there, they note that the melanin content of the tumor cells is important to the treatment's effectiveness.)

And yes, it's only targeting circulating melanoma cells. This tech can't just aim a laser at a tumor and kill it; it probably isn't useful for non-solid cancers like leukemia, either. So while this is cool and interesting, it's not a huge breakthrough in cancer treatment.

Several bars of CO2 are inhospitable to life evolved in an atmosphere of several hundred ppm of CO2, sure, but are there arguments that high levels of CO2 would be detrimental most possible lifeforms out there?

(CO is much more reactive, but it's harmful to us because it reacts to our hemoglobin in much the same way as oxygen. So since Earth life has managed to get on just fine with all this corrosive oxygen around, the same argument may still apply.)

I strongly second this- its a well-studied and well-resourced organization that has spent most of a decade investigating the precise kind of question you're asking (namely, how one can best position oneself in life to have a positive impact on the world.)

In particular, they're very clear that there are a large number of possible areas to aim at that all offer the chance to make a big difference, and that there are a wide range of skillsets that can be applied in various ways (you don't have to go back to school and become an engineer.)

I thought the "climate change is really produced by a dozen CEOs, all we need to do is eat them" idea was restricted to cheap memes. Now it's on HN?

Yes, corporate activities produce the bulk of human carbon emissions. But they're not doing it out on an island for their own amusement- they're doing it to produce things that individuals buy. (Or that other corporations buy to produce still other things, but it always grounds out in things-made-for-humans in the end.) Saying that oil companies are to blame for, e.g., automotive emissions, instead of motorists, is bizarre.

And yet, (almost) everyone has Facebook. There isn't one facebook for techie types and another for evangelicals and another for the elderly and so on, they're all on Facebook. It's a more comprehensive consolidation of it's particular niche than any previous mass media format could have hoped for.

It's not impossible that a "metaverse" would benefit from the same network effects. You would want to inhabit the same (virtual) reality as your friends, probably, and they would like to inhabit the same as their friends, and so on. (Which doesn't mean we would like this outcome!)

I didn't say it was a reflection; that was an analogy. Obviously I don't think a bunch of qualified military personnel would be fooled by something that trivial. I think you're reading opposing viewpoints with an agenda. :)

As for pilots' eyeballs- nothing I've read about this clearly states that anyone got close enough to get direct-eye-contact; most mentions of "visual" confirmation are talking about via cameras (and to me, the footage I've seen of it looks precisely like a camera artifact.) Also I wouldn't discount the possibility of a pilot, squinting to see a small distant object that his expensive flight equipment is insisting is there, simply hallucinating- humans are suggestible, and just as vulnerable to "sensor fusion" errors as prototype military hardware.

It makes perfect sense- in the same way that your reflection in a mirror "demonstrates awareness of your presence." An illusion generated by a sensor glitch or interference is entirely liable to move around when the sensors and interference moves around, and flight computers tracking the glitch would plausibly show it "performing maneuvers" that make no sense for physical objects, such as the ones you describe.

This is interesting in large part as a demonstration of how bizarre/indefinite the idea of being "from" a place is. For instance, Cambridge, MA isn't headlined by a famous MIT/Harvard academic, or local political figure, or even Neil Gaiman- but instead by Bhumibol Adulyadej, the previous king of Thailand, who was born there while his father was studying at Harvard, and left at the age of 2. Meanwhile, Boston gets John Cena, who was born in a far-out suburb.

From a minute of googling, there’s roughly 5k satellites in orbit right now. Most of those are in a slightly higher orbit than Starlink’s (LEO) so they’re incrementally farther away, but would be in a better position to catch sunlight in the night sky.

And yet I, probably like everyone else who isn’t an astronomy enthusiast, haven’t ever looked at a light in the sky and known it was a satellite. They’re subtle, not dominating the night sky by any means, at least insofar as an untrained modern human can tell. Starlink would up the number of satellites by ~2x, perhaps, but would that be enough to change the basic equation?

What does it even mean to “search directly for intelligence”? Intelligence isn’t visible stuff. You can see things that are done or made through intelligent action, and in this context that would constitute technology.

By Stross, yes. And it’s online: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...

As someone whose (bog-standard American-style) last name is also a common first name, this convention would save me a lot of trouble as well. It’s a consistent source of confusion for secretaries, receptionists, and so on.

10k you mean? Although it sometimes feels like people have smaller brains just lately, too...

It’s plausible that early humans broke into the “success through smarts” niche by a sudden expanded brain mutation that left them with a horrendous birth mortality rate, and that since then selection for mutations for smaller heads (and thus better birth safety) has been very strong (though hopefully not as strong as overall selection for intelligence- essentially evolution finding ways to pack more into a smaller space.)

Those huge Neanderthal brains were just the clunky and unstable Minimum Viable Product; ours are the more refined version.

I'm generally in favor of nuclear power, but I recognize that there's some reasonable ground for opposing its development on grounds of potential catastrophe or radiation leakage risk. What gets me, rather, is that while we as a society have rejected nuclear power plants as too dangerous, we're still sitting on thousands and thousands of nuclear weapons- and still building more in the present day! [0] The failure of anti-nuclear activists to address the kind of nuclear technologies which can actually be catastrophic, while instead focusing on those which are constructive and at least generally safe, is maddening.

[0] https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-nuclear-weapons-moderniz...

I’m glad you personally know all personnel involved in the US security apparatus so well that you can so happily vouch that none of them will use details of your private life in a way that you would disapprove of. Even that you can wholeheartedly vouch for the conscience of the US government as a whole is rather surprising, in light of past decades. I envy such a level of trust.