It's true that it's useful but its the same mathematical talent that was (ab|mis)used by Losada, according to the article. What was useful here was Brown's scepticism, borne by him being an amateur(having no bread to lose over it).
Both the Schrodinger equation and inflationary cosmology predict alternate worlds filled with alternate yous. MWI refers to the former. The author of this piece is talking about the later.
If anyone is looking for a simple introduction to the Everett interpretation I'll point you to this short lecture by James Ladyman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgXVEeL9tzM
My understanding was that some theories of inflation require multiverses to exist. I have never heard that the Schrodinger equation nor inflationary cosmology themselves predict alternate worlds. Some theories require them (to get the math to fit), but there are definitely alternatives.
>It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that a front line, if not the trench of the global gender war, is in Silicon Valley. In that sense, Silicon Valley culture echoes the Wolf of Wall Street culture in the ’80s and ’90s.
Signal the right politics and even this nonsense gets upvoted. Scott Alexander wrote about why differences in outcome in highly technical fields might not imply a vast economically-counterproductive misogynistic conspiracy here:http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/24/perceptions-of-required...
Reality is under no obligation to live up to our ideals.
I like that article a lot. GRE Quantitative and SAT Math skew heavily toward men. And the SAT covers very basic reasoning skills that would be related to programming aptitude. GRE Quantitative covers topics essential to surviving a CS major.
We should figure out where the educational system is failing women here. And we should also consider a new curriculum focused on programming, because traditional Computer Science isn't necessary for success as a tech worker. I've seen some colleges offer both a BA and a BS in Comp Sci which I think is smart, because in the BA they strip out physics, chemistry, calculus, etc which in my experience cause most CS majors to drop out.
>We should figure out where the educational system is failing women here.
How does "women do relatively poorly on quantitative tests" imply "the educational system is failing women"? This could be do to any number of factors, many of which having little/nothing to do with the education system.
And, of course, there are more female college students than male college students, so there are other areas where you could just as (in)accurately claim that the education system is failing men! In reality, it's probably (again) due to external factors.
> "women do relatively poorly on quantitative tests" imply "the educational system is failing women"
I said we should figure out where it's failing women. If we figure out it's not failing women, then the question is answered. And I didn't mean this to the exclusion of men either. Or children and adolescents.
Edit: I think it's a given anything can be improved, especially education. So in the constant discussions about fixing education, the article about math scores should certainly be on people's minds. And I'm also curious about verbal scores for men. And I agree there are a variety of factors at play, but that doesn't mean we can't investigate some of the factors in lieu of a comprehensive investigation/reform of everything in society, culture, and biology.
Also I don't think a degree without calculus can really be called CS. How are you going to understand analysis of algorithms without at least a basic grasp of the concepts of calculus. A person who failed out of calculus definitely wouldn't have survived the rest of my CS program.
I wouldn't advise anyone to do a CS degree with all the math stripped out. Sure you can build CRUD apps all day long without an understanding of math, but you don't need a degree to build CRUD apps.
I think people who are happy doing that kind of work should skip college all together (or get a degree in something other than CS) and learn on their own or maybe do some kind of bootcamp.
Personally I think you can understand algorithms knowing only algebra and finite math. However, I should clarify the BA programs I'm aware of still required a semester or so of calculus versus others which require a few semesters.
At my college, almost every CS major ended up being 1 credit short of a minor in Math. I don't think that much math is necessary.
Artifact of organization. My degree came through the college of engineering, which required physics and chemistry for all grads. And some technical breadth electives, too.
Michigan is a... unique beast. Anything worth doing is worth doing a minimum of twice, preferably with no knowledge of other attempts. This is why there are two entirely separate radio stations.
> differences in outcome in highly technical fields might not imply a vast economically-counterproductive misogynistic conspiracy
Even if there isn't a misogynistic conspiracy, there's still plenty of bog-standard human herd-behavior sexism telling girls they shouldn't even try to be good at computers because they can't be. It would be a shame if we ignored the latter just because we figured out the former doesn't exist.
OK everyone: At several people’s request, I’ve now taken a look at arXiv:1403.7686, and I can confirm that it’s complete garbage. The author is simply mistaken that solving the Schrödinger equation is “NP-complete” in any interesting sense: his argument for that seems to rely on a rediscovery of the adiabatic algorithm, but he doesn’t mention that the spectral gap could be exponentially small (and hence the annealing time could be exponentially large)—the central problem that’s been the bane of Farhi and his collaborators (and, of course, of D-Wave) for the past 15 years.
Also, even if you thought (for totally mistaken reasons) that quantum mechanics let you solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time, that might (or might not) suggest to you that quantum mechanics should be replaced by something else. But until you’d actually found a replacement, and given some sort of evidence for its truth, I don’t see how you could claim to have thereby “solved the measurement problem”!!
As additional problems, the author appears to conflate the P vs. NP problem with the question of whether NP-complete problems can be efficiently solved in the physical world, a common novice mistake. And also, he seems comically unaware of everything that’s been discovered in quantum computing theory over the past 20 years relevant to the issues he’s writing about—as if he just emerged from a cave.
While reading the summary and the paper abstract, I thought this was all way overstated and trivially so. Glad to see someone professionally working in quantum computing thinks so, too.
Except it doesn't. Decoherence is simply a complicated way of saying, "We are only aware of the existence of systems in multiple states via their interference with one another", which is true, but the interesting question, the central question, is: why is true?
Why aren't we simply and directly aware of quantum states the same way we are classical states? Why is consciousness purely classical, and the classical universe the only thing we are aware of? Why do we have to infer the existence of the quantum world rather than simply having the experience of being in a superposition ourselves?
> Why do we have to infer the existence of the quantum world rather than simply having the experience of being in a superposition ourselves?
Why would we? By the time our brain perceives something, haven't all the interacting parts of the brain undergone decoherence with respect to all other interacting parts?
No one has every believed in the basilisk, save for maybe Yud. Everyone on LessWrong thought it was dumb from day one. LessWrong, now mostly dead, was a fun community full of smart people. That article is trying to make the place out as a cult, but no one bought any of that stuff, not even Roko. He was just playing around with local memes. It's pretty gross how this whole basilisk thing has turned out.
No, in the comments on the original basilisk post, Roko said he was in fact going through with the quantum gambling scheme that the post outlines. http://basilisk.neocities.org/ ctrl-F to "23 July 2010 06:52:40PM"
It's assumed a rational agent judges its actions by how likely said action are to align the world with their fundamental values. For this reason, it is argued, a rational agent will not change its terminal goals. For example, suppose we build an agent that desires only to make shoes. That is, its ideal universe would consist of all available matter being converted into sneakers. Would it realize this is stupid? No. It judges it actions and thoughts only by how many shoes they are likely to bring into being. Any thought against this would be judged, correctly, as a negative contribution to shoe production and so wouldn’t be implemented, and likely would remain unthought.
The best paper on this by far it Basic AI Drives by Stephen M. OMOHUNDRO: http://selfawaresystems.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/ai_drive...
I urge you to read it. It really is a wonderful paper.
The real problem is that human values are incredibly complex and messy, and any deviation from them multiplied by the power of a superintelligence would most likely doom us forever.
Prison bars are dumber than a bacterium and they work just fine.
Still, the idea that AI is suddenly X smarter than people is ridiculously naive. Intelligence does not fit on a linear scale. And being smarter does not change the correct answer.
This is more like a 'reverse hacker', instead of a brilliant hacker trying to get into a system it is a brilliant hacker trying to get out of a system, and in this case the hacker is likely vastly more brilliant than the defenders. The same rules apply: the hacker has to succeed only once, the 'jailers' have to succeed all the times. Predicted long term outcome: escape.
Can I keep an intelegent AI in a box. Shure, unplug it.
Can I keep all AI's in a box well no.
PS: Lot's of dumb things are said about AI's. Sadly, people tend to think in terms of Science fiction as Magic but in The Future. And then picture AI's as the ultimate wizards able to reshape reality to their whim. Reolistically the first true AI may find programming boring and so much for the singularity. If AI smarter than you is a bad idea it's unlikely for a progression of AI to keep building ever more intelegent replacements.
Anyway, you're going to have to develop your AI somewhere, you're going to have to move it to the box somehow you're going to have to train it somehow and you're going to have to have it interact with the real world somehow. All of those are opportunities for escape, I think 'unplug it' sort of defeats the purpose of having an AI.
The problem isn't with AIs dumber than people - it's with what happens when someone finally builds a smarter one. It doesn't matter how good are prison bars if you're smart enough to social-engineer your way out of the cell. And human criminals do escape from prisons every now and then.
Most chefs are male - people don't care because its a low status job. Programming is now high status, so now this gender gap is an issue. As many feminists have "misogynistic conspiracy" as their default explanation for any differnces in outcome among genders, they're not in a very good epistemic position to judge these things. Unjust discrimination is economically counterproductive, I don't expect ruthless corporations to support such a conspiracy when defection is more profitable. Aside from blinded applications and maybe interviews, not much needs to be done. We are building businesses here, not collecting data for a census.
Being rich, being a VC, being Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs or Bill Gates is a lot of status, but despite popular assumptions, that doesn't really rub off on the programming equivalent of a line cook or plumber.
How about the intelligent management of the earth's resources?
For example, instead of humans wearing gold to impress each-other, we instead use gold for its properties.
It is the most efficient and effective use of resources with human concern that I am aware of... anyone with other ideas, I am open to listen and digest.
The developer "class" will be around to automate almost all job functionality as time continues. In this unique economic and functional opportunity that we have, what will we do with the time we have left? Will we create a world designed to support and nurture all human beings to grow their full potential, or will we be short-sighted and manipulative for momentary gain?
Either way, I have no expectations from this current culture.
Bingo. I believe you have nailed it. This is the eventual and (I believe) inevitable answer.
Open the code. Let anyone see how it functions if they care to take the time. Base it on real math. Real statistics. Remove the political sound bites from governance.
Factors the "market" doesn't take into account should be extrapolated and accounted for. What is the cost of a barrel of oil really? What about when it ruins a fishery or aquifer and heats up the planet? What about the fact it is a resource that is not renewable? So we are passing a burden to future generations in that they don't have the resource anymore. Not to mention a possibly ruined fishery. The market doesn't care about these things, and thus we get problem after problem (not to mention wars).
Governance of resources by nice hair and teeth and political soundbite and cronyism is ultimately a stupid way to do things and I can't imagine it will win the evolutionary battle of systems.
> we should experiment with newer forms of government...
This is so very true but almost certainly undoable without a some form of help from the rich and powerful.
For example, one positive (or negative depending on which side you're on) thing about depleting oil resources is that much of the Government financing relies on tax dollars collected from hydrocarbons. And thus little oil would effectively mean lower available budgets, lesser means/control etc. Especially for totalitarian Governments that are considerable more expensive to operate.
Unless of course entrepreneurs like Elon Musk solve the energy problem for them. :)
