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zoltzon Understanding the Danger from Strong AI

But the profit-aligned corporations are made of people, as you say, and once the leaders are personally affected by the „deterioration of the ecology necessary for human life to persist“, they will seriously try to stop it. That, I guess, is the difference to how AI would behave by default. (And in the thought experiment that you quote, unlimited capabilities are assumed, so the deterioration can be stopped.)

zoltzon A city-scale molecular profile of DNA collected from NYC's subway system [pdf]

Indeed, title needs to be changed to "Geospatial Resolution of Human and Bacterial Diversity with City-Scale Metagenomics".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8282204

zoltzon How a computer error helped Deep Blue beat humanity's best chess player

"After the loss Kasparov questioned whether Deep Blue's team had cheated in order to beat him, but in a fascinating new short documentary by FiveThirtyEight and ESPN, it's shown that the momentous victory — and the notorious 44th move that led to it — was actually the result of a computer error."

But the video actually says the error occurred in the first game, which Kasparov won, rather than in the second, which he lost and after which he suggested he had been cheated.

zoltzon Submission titles still subject to change by editors?

From the guidelines: "If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead". This would seem to explicitly allow telling others how to perceive a story, so I don't really see how the privilege thing can be the crucial point. But reading dang's comment I realised how an inferior title might damage the prospects of a story that would have been submitted under a better title by someone else.

zoltzon Submission titles still subject to change by editors?

Thank you for the explanation! In my 2nd paragraph I had older stories in mind where it's most likely a case of "either I submit it or nobody does". I can see now how my proposal is bad in the "normal" case of hot, new stories.

There should be enough interesting stories out there with good, informative, neutral original titles that it won't be another seven years.

zoltzon Submission titles still subject to change by editors?

Thanks! Just looked into this further. The guidelines say you should use the original title when submitting a story. But what if this title is uninformative and the subtitle is too long? Then you have to summarise. I don't think it's acceptable for a moderator to edit this summary, without giving any notice to readers (this was done several times to me). He should kill the whole submission instead if he doesn't like the title.

Apart from that, I guess it would be much better if submitters had a chance to indicate why they find their submission interesting. Just a thought.

zoltzon Ask YC: What methods do you use to manage your time?

Not sophisticated, and only a first step to get some kind of traction, but using it can make a real difference to me:

a) Define your main project

b) Choose an activity that you like and that comes naturally as procrastination

c) Choose a reasonable time ratio between them, and respect it

As an example, every hour of surfing the web has to be (sooner or later) compensated by three hours of work on the main project.

zoltzon Disagreeing with Paul Graham

Neither of these arguments even attempts to refute the central point of the essay. In case anyone wants to try it, the central point is that in an organization organized as a tree structure, structural forces tend to give each person freedom in inverse proportion to the size of the whole tree.

Already done: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=142597

If I hadn't already done it, I wouldn't bother with it now, though, because:

Even these dishonest DH5s are ...

Roth's contribution is CLEARLY NOT DISHONEST (couldn't resist the uppercase here). I get the impression that the chance you would ever take advantage of any refutations to plug holes and thus further improve the standard of your essay collection is precisely zero. It's all about "picking a winner" (this term actually appears in paulgraham.com/disagree.html) instead of advancing towards the truth. Readers of your essays will do best by just enjoying the incredible density of ideas, then deciding for themselves which ones to accept, rather than following the "comment" link at the bottom.

If anyone has a link to an instance where Paul Graham helps the search for the truth by conceding a nontrivial point in an argument, I would be grateful. That would help repair my impression, and probably some other people's as well.

zoltzon Disagreeing with Paul Graham

Refuting the proof of a central point rather than the central point itself must be considered DH6 in Paul Graham's hierarchy. Roth probably took that for granted. I certainly would. Otherwise I hereby claim P = NP and preemptively accuse anyone not accepting this of deliberate dishonesty and bad spirit and categorise their disagreement as "formally possibly up to DH5 but effectively DH1 at most".

zoltzon How to Disagree

"Even as high as DH5 we still sometimes see deliberate dishonesty, as when someone picks out minor points of an argument and refutes those. Sometimes the spirit in which this is done makes it more of a sophisticated form of ad hominem than actual refutation. For example, correcting someone's grammar, or harping on minor mistakes in names or numbers. Unless the opposing argument actually depends on such things, the only purpose of correcting them is to discredit ones's opponent."

How do you measure the spirit? An author may detect bad spirit everywhere and take all DH5-but-not-DH6 disagreements as effectively DH1.

Anyway, the quoted paragraph seems very harsh on many small-point DH5 disagreers. Some people just feel the "duty" (xkcd.com/386) to correct mistakes, without being deliberately dishonest. And there is a lot of uncharted importance space between grammar mistakes and the central point. As an example, what if the central point were correct and worthy but illustrated by two examples, one of them bad? The argument doesn't depend on it, but is it still clear that the only purpose of correcting the author is to discredit him?

Why not generalize DH6 from "stating the central point and refuting it" to "refuting a point and commenting on its importance"? Then you could even correct grammar mistakes, just add explicitly that you're aware that as a grammar mistake it's minor. DH6 would no longer imply power or effort, but, as pointed out in the essay, it already doesn't imply truth.

zoltzon How to Disagree

You seem to imply in the essay that disagreeing comments are more valuable than agreeing ones, though:

"And when you agree there's less to say. You could expand on something the author said, but he has probably already explored the most interesting implications. When you disagree you're entering territory he may not have explored"

zoltzon Coding Horror: Paul Graham's Participatory Narcissism

It was just that I recently had this thought that language could be divided into a "smalltalk" component, where the content is replaceable but not the conversation partner, and an "info" component, where the partner is replaceable but not the content. I have no clue about linguistics but I vaguely remember that this may correspond to competing theories how language evolved. "Phatic language is about maintaing the connection" seemed to fit perfectly.

But as there are four other components according to Jakobson, I should be careful. Added Jakobson to my reading list.

zoltzon Coding Horror: Paul Graham's Participatory Narcissism

Very interesting distinction between phatic and referential language. Thanks from me, too, for these terms.

You say phatic language is about maintaining the connection. If I understand this correctly then there's a role for it also with people one does know well. If you prefer referential conversation and meet someone who's completely restricted to that part of language, you may initially enjoy the conversations a lot. But, after some time (this could be months or years), despite their referential content they may appear increasingly "empty": you realise you're still completely replaceable as a conversation partner by a random new person.

zoltzon You weren't meant to have a boss

Let's assume humans are indeed "designed" to work in small groups of only 10 people, then at the bottom level of the company tree groups should only consist of 10 people each. So far so good.

But why has a company of 1000 a three-level tree structure with 10 groups of 10 groups of 10 each rather than a two-level structure with 100 groups of 10 each? You assert the reason is the 100 bosses couldn't work together as that group size would be too big. But the bosses don't form a "workgroup" in this sense anyway. They may meet occasionally but spend most of their time with their own groups. The reason for the additional tree level seems more that the supreme leader of the company wouldn't be able to oversee all 100 groups himself.

The distinction matters because for the purpose of being overseen, groups can be represented by their bosses without having to act as one person (as they might have to if their bosses formed a workgroup subject to size limitation due to humans' innate design), so the inverse relationship between freedom of the leaves and company size can't be deduced.

zoltzon We think with our bodies, not just our brains

"If we had wheels, or moved along the ground on our bellies like snakes," Lakoff argues, "math might be very different."

What a nonsense.

zoltzon How about this idea to save Hacker News from fluff?

To make the workings of Hacker News dependent on Reddit or any other site looks conceptually wrong --- can't it stand on its own?

The same holds for explicitly favouring topics like programming, math, science or whatever. From ycombinator.com/hackernews.html (emphasis is mine):

"If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

zoltzon Why a School Banned Legos

Interesting point, aside from capitalism/wealth/zero-sum etc:

The game created a classic case of cognitive disequilibrium: Either the system is skewed and unfair, or the winners played unfairly. To resolve this by deciding that the system is unfair would call everything into question; young children are committed to rules and rule-making as a way to organize a community, and it is wildly unsettling to acknowledge that rules can have built-in inequities. So most of the children resolved their disequilibrium by clinging to the belief that the winners were ruthless — despite clear evidence of Liam and Kyla's compassionate generosity.

The game was patently unfair, so why did the children blame the winners rather than the system? I suspect there is a general tendency among people (not only children) to blame other people, as opposed to abstract causes. That's more important here than any positive commitment to rules and rule-making.

zoltzon Inside the Bizarre World of Japanese Pickup Schools

"Since joining Mr. Fujita's school, I have had five successful relationships," says Hachioji Robocop, a 27-year-old civil servant who has been taking the course since 2004. "I lost my virginity six months into the course, and now I can now communicate with women. I'm very grateful."

Reminds me of The Onion.

zoltzon News.YC, could it be made clearer that submission titles have been subject to change by editors?

I don't think it's such a big deal, and maybe I'm the only one, but I don't like it if people have every reason to believe I wrote something that I didn't write. For example, the title of my most recent submission now contains the term "reproductive output", and I hate that term because it somehow seems to associate people with factories. (This is not to say the term is incorrect, and anyway it's taken from the story header.) But such things are very subjective.

zoltzon News.YC, could it be made clearer that submission titles have been subject to change by editors?

There is a thread for feature requests, see link at bottom of main page. (But I thought my suggestion here wouldn't really be a "feature".)

zoltzon PG on trolls

Arc

zoltzon Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things

I think the six-principles approach is great, and it really shows why the initial reaction will always be contemptuous and therefore doesn't mean anything.

Of course, not everyone can easily copy the approach, you need to be an original thinker in order to not overlook overlooked problems.

I don't understand the last part of the essay about reddit as a classic example. "Tell people what was new", was that an overlooked problem? News agencies have been around for a long time. "Stay out of the way" was only possible because of the user-submission-and-voting system, which seems to me a clever and non-obvious idea. What I like most about this idea is the voting part, it tells me what's interesting, I don't care about whether it's new.

zoltzon Terry Tao: The blue-eyed islanders puzzle

I messed this up, what I meant is "... from the viewpoint of each of them it would be also reasonable to assume that ..."

zoltzon Terry Tao: The blue-eyed islanders puzzle

I agree with you that the original wording should have rigorously ensured common knowledge among the islanders of their logicality and devoutness, since common knowledge (of a different fact) is what the puzzle is about. But that's a subtle point and not the source of the previous disagreements here.

zoltzon Terry Tao: The blue-eyed islanders puzzle

Day 2) Everyone's still here. If I were not blue eyed, these two guys would've noticed yesterday that they individually had blue eyes ... no they wouldn't have, because for each of them would be also reasonable to assume that there was only one person with blue eyes, who survived day 0 not knowing that there is anyone blue eyed at all.

zoltzon Terry Tao: The blue-eyed islanders puzzle

That's exactly the interesting point here: the foreigner states something self-evident (there is someone who has blue eyes), and yet it will kill all blue-eyed people, who would otherwise have been fine. Without the foreigner, the inductive chain cannot start at n=1.

zoltzon Linus Torvalds Interview, Part II

I found this very interesting, especially the beginning about software patents, where he compares the situation with cold war (big companies) and terrorists (patent trolls), and later what he concedes about innovation and open source.

zoltzon A proof that 12=13. Just look at the picture and count the people. (pic)

Not an optical illusion. Twelve guys really become thirteen. But they have to pay a price for that: they're somewhat shorter, their heads are slightly smashed in, etc. Basically the same as what happened when hunter-gatherers switched to agriculture: more people but less healthy.

zoltzon Ask YC: Why do people share on social websites (like Youtube, Digg, Reddit, YC)?

Difficult to say what exactly it is, easier to say what it is not:

"do these users (who submit and filter content) expect others to return the favor?"

That would be the classical economic explanation and it would be wrong (for the typical user).

zoltzon Who wants to be a cognitive neuroscientist millonaire?

I'm not sure he had to be a cognitive neuroscientist to employ these methods. But he did well.

Another trick, which you could use if for some reason you don't know the answer to one of the early, supposedly easy, questions: Guess an answer, but give it with full confidence. If you're wrong the shocked reaction of the presenter will tell you before the answer is final, and only in this case you will need a lifeline.