I've been imagining a website lately that displays progress in a similar way for all kinds of things. Sort of like a global to-do list. Should be fun to build.
375 karma · joined October 19, 2015
I could also image that sequential information (i.e. videos) would help in the case of the liquid texture.
[1]: http://techtv.mit.edu/collections/bcs/videos/30698-what-s-wr...
Perhaps nudges are a viable alternative approach to this problem. Perhaps simple banners like "Procrastination can kill." on such websites are sufficient. There is a great book on this topic by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein.
I'm not seeing it.
On the other hand, we don't require absolute precision, it just needs to be plausible enough to fool our eyes. If a shadow just looks roughly like the object that it casts, that should be enough. It seems to me that this still would require at least a rudimentary geometrical understanding/abstraction which will possibly require in comparison to this technique extremely sophisticated neural networks that can perform things like mental rotation, path integration, object recognition and have an understanding of object permanence.
Would you argue that our system is much more based on taxation than on decentralization of decision making? Isn't taxation a form of decentralization of decision making as you move the means to make decisions to a central pool? Also, why do you have to let people vote to feel what? What is WotFC a proof of concept for? How will weapon technology and resentment against conscription shape, what are possible scenarios you have in mind?
Once individuals can synthesize viruses, armed drones, atomic bombs and AIs in their cellars, there will be a myriad ways of things going terribly wrong (in addition to the myriads of things that can already go wrong).
The reporting on MIT news is usually pretty vague and it lacks short overviews.
An architecture for encoding sentence meaning in left mid-superior temporal cortex
Human brains flexibly combine the meanings of words to compose
structured thoughts. For example, by combining the meanings of
“bite,” “dog,” and “man,” we can think about a dog biting a man,
or a man biting a dog. Here, in two functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI) experiments using multivoxel pattern
analysis (MVPA), we identify a region of left mid-superior
temporal cortex (lmSTC) that flexibly encodes “who did what to
whom” in visually presented sentences. We find that lmSTC
represents the current values of abstract semantic
variables (“Who did it?” and “To whom was it done?”) in distinct
subregions. Experiment 1 first identifies a broad region of lmSTC
whose activity patterns (i) facilitate decoding of
structure-dependent sentence meaning (“Who did what to whom?”)
and (ii) predict affect-related amygdala responses that depend on
this information (e.g., “the baby kicked the grandfather”
vs. “the grandfather kicked the baby”). Experiment 2 then
identifies distinct, but neighboring, subregions of lmSTC whose
activity patterns carry information about the identity of the
current “agent” (“Who did it?”) and the current “patient” (“To
whom was it done?”). These neighboring subregions lie along the
upper bank of the superior temporal sulcus and the lateral bank
of the superior temporal gyrus, respectively. At a high level,
these regions may function like topographically defined data
registers, encoding the fluctuating values of abstract semantic
variables. This functional architecture, which in key respects
resembles that of a classical computer, may play a critical role
in enabling humans to flexibly generate complex thoughts.I'm quite optimistic. There are already strong explicit indicators for the worth of a publication. If a paper comes from a university, for example, you can likely already be assured that it's worth reading. If it has a name with good reputation on it, that's an even better piece of evidence. If a paper has interesting content, it will be shared in the community. Also, Google isn't just ranking by a explicit measures, but mostly by PageRank, i.e. a measure how how well a certain item is woven into the network of links (plus possibly hundreds of heuristics). PageRank could likely be applied to a publication system as well. In that case the network links could be co-authorships, associations with accredited universities, and perhaps other things. And let us not forget that the vast majority of researchers are actually truth seeking and concerned about the impact they make on the world. Things might become a little bit noisier, but at the same time the feedback-loops become shorter, as we're seeing it in the machine learning field.