• AGI outcomes and civilizational competence.
• The Financial Times story on MIRI.

• The science behind Interstellar.
• Handy brief Ioannidis overview: “How to Make More Published Research True.”
• GiveWell chats nanotech with Drexler and Phoenix.
• Financial Times on AI optimists and pessimists, MIRI featured prominently.

• Google continues gobbling up AI talent.
• New-ish psychology study method: “preregistered adversarial collaboration.” From the abstract: “Prior to data collection, the [disagreeing researchers] reached consensus on an optimal research design, formulated their expectations, and agreed to submit the findings to an academic journal regardless of the outcome… [they also] set up a publicly available… agreement that detailed the proposed design and all forseeable aspects of the data analysis.”
• I just noticed the WTF, Evolution? book is out.

I like high-quality written debates for which (1) one ‘top thinker’ on the subject makes an argument, (2) four or more other top thinkers on the subject reply, and (3) then the first author writes a final reply to his or her critics. I think of these as “symposium-style debates,” as contrasted with e.g. the Oxford-style debates seen in Economist Debates and elsewhere. (Is there another name for them?)

Examples include:

• Boston Review‘s Forum
• Cato Unbound
• Brain and Behavioral Sciences
• Psychological Inquiry
• American Journal of Bioethics (almost: there’s no final reply in this case)
• Various journal special issues and academic edited volumes that serve as symposia for published books or invited papers/chapters

Know of other examples?

• Do superstitious traders lose money?
• Are women better decision makers?
• The White House has announced a temporary hold on government funding for some gain-of-function research while it reviews biosafety concerns.
• “When women stopped coding” (Planet Money)

• Hsu, “Super-intelligent humans are coming.”
• Winikoff, “Assurance of agent systems: what role should formal verification play?“
• New Friendly AI open problem description: “Corrigibility.”

• Yampolskiy, “The universe of minds.”
• Soares, “Newcomblike problems are the norm.”
• Tomasik, “Is there a hard problem of consciousness?” (summary of Type A vs. Type B physicalism)

• Interview with Daniel Roy on probabilistic programming and AI
• Interview with John Fox on AI safety
• Interview with Ken Hayworth on brain emulation prospects
• Interview with Kristinn Thórisson on constructivist AI

Decent books:

• Wrangham’s Catching Fire
• Brooks’ Business Adventures
• Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth
• Harris’ Waking Up
• Hvistendah, Unnatural Selection
• Ridley, Genome
• Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea of the World
• Morell, Animal Wise

Pinker’s The Blank Slate was excellent, and is now perhaps the #1 book I want someone to have read before I will debate social justice issues with them. (Note that as with most cognitive science books that cover this much detail, a few findings claimed herein are now out of date. E.g. at Blank Slate‘s time of release, it looked like IGF2R was a major gene for IQ, but this result failed to replicate.)

Murray’s Coming Apart was interesting as usual. His arguments for the increasing cultural split between classes in America were fairly persuasive. I ignored the parts about his policy recommendations. In the middle of the book there’s an amusing quiz you should take to learn whether you are a bubble-living elitist. Sample questions: “Who is Jimmie Johnson?” and “What is Branson?” If you’re a bubble-living elitist, you probably have no idea.

I scored 35, nearest to Murray’s “typical” score for “a first-generation upper-middle-class person with middle-class parents,” which does in fact describe me best of Murray’s available score interpretations. I scored 29 points on the first 7 questions about my early life in rural Minnesota, and only 6 points on all the remaining questions, 4 of which came from watching lots of movies (including popular ones).

I also finished (most of) Lobbying and Policy Change, which I summarized here.

The Sense of Style, which I downloaded from Audible at 12:30am on September 30th (its release date) and finished before the end of the day, is clearly the best style manual now available, though unfortunately it is not also a complete guide to How to Write as Well as Steven Pinker.

• How to give future citizens a vote.
• The top 50 science stars of Twitter.
• A demonstration of continued progress in chess AI algorithms.
• Pinker, “Why academic writing stinks.”

• Statistics prof Olle Häggström collects his blog posts about Superintelligence.
• “Governing cognitive biases: case studies of the use of… behaviorally informed policy tools.”
• Haidt & Tetlock & company, “Political diversity will improve social psychological science” (forthcoming in BBS).

• The Center for Effective Altruism reports on outcomes from their 10+ meetings with UK policymakers so far.
• Pinker on Ivy League education (very good).
• A profile of Martine Rothblatt: “Futurist, pharma tycoon, satellite entrepreneur, philosopher. Martine Rothblatt, the highest-paid female executive in America, was born male. But that is far from the thing that defines her. Just ask her wife. Then ask the robot version of her wife.”
• Okay, good, so I won’t read the new Fukuyama books.

• AI evaluation: past, present, and future.
• Google just got serious about building a quantum computer. (Martinis, not D-Wave.)
• Chalmers’ guidelines for constructive debate and discussion. I’ve been wanting to write a post about the epistemic virtue of kindness, but this will do for now.

• Max Tegmark and Eliezer Yudkowsky on AI goal retention / ontological crises.
• Superintelligence is out in the USA, and in audiobook and Kindle formats. MIRI is hosting an online reading group for the book.
• Nature on brilliant scientists who leave academia.
• FP provides an update on Honduras’ charter cities.

Some decent books:

• Greenwald, No Place to Hide
• Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
• Levinson, The Box
• Bloom, Just Babies

I also went through Gendlin’s Focusing and Cornell’s The Power of Focusing, which describe the latest unsupported “woo” technique for self-help that I’m experimenting with because Try Things. I don’t know yet how helpful this method is for me.

• “Exploratory engineering in artificial intelligence” for Communications of the ACM (w/ Bill Hibbard)
• Two talks for the 2014 Effective Altruism Summit: “MIRI Intro” and “Steering the Future of AI.”

• Aaronson, “Could a quantum computer have subjective experience?”
• Against Empathy, a debate between Paul Bloom, Peter Singer, Sam Harris, Jesse Prinz, and others.
• Obstacles to self-driving cars.

• GiveWell Labs has rebranded as the Open Philanthropy Project. Their finished analyses haven’t been moved there yet, though.
• Shulman, “Population ethics and inaccessible populations.”
• Christiano, “Three impacts of machine intelligence.”

• “Physical principles for scalable neural recording” maps the physical limits on brain activity mapping for several different methods. Potentially informative for whole brain emulation forecasting.
• Humor: Thanks, Textbooks is a Tumblr for amusing, weird textbook writing. For example, here’s one textbooks “colloquial” explanation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics: “You can’t shovel manure into the rear end of a horse and expect to get hay out its mouth.”
• Academic urban legends, a study.
• Markov, “Limits on fundamental limits to computation.”

• Funny: An honest political ad for Gil Fulbright.
• Well-produced explanatory video on automation and technological unemployment. Not enough caveats, but of course it’s more engaging that way.
• Molyneux, “How the (hard) problem of consciousness could emerge in robots.”
• And, an overview of reductionist approaches to consciousness, by James Reggia.