Luke Muehlhauser

Assorted links

by

  • Aeon: Why has human progress slowed?
  • Gary Marcus on the future of AI (EconTalk). Kind of weird that Russ & Gary wonder why there’d be a risk from general AI, but then don’t mention the standard “risk via convergent instrumental goals” argument.
  • NYT reports on a Horvitz-funded 100-year Stanford program studying social impacts of AI. The white paper makes clear that the superintelligence control problem is among the intended focus areas!

Books, and stuff I wrote elsewhere, for November 2014

by

Decent books finished in November:

In case you hadn’t noticed, my choice of books is dominated by whether a book is available in audiobook, since the only time I have available to consume books these days is when my chronic insomnia is blocking me from sleeping anyway, so I put on my eye mask and open the Audible app on my phone. If I had more hours each month during which my eyeballs were still working, I’d be consuming a pretty different set of books, and I’d be reading them more carefully and critically rather than zooming through lots of easy material quickly.

Stuff I wrote elsewhere in November:

Brief notice

by

Earlier today I published a post called “Sometimes evil.” I’ve taken it down for editing, as the original draft was unclear and perhaps too tempting for trolls to misrepresent.

Books I finished reading in October 2014

by

Decent books:

The Goal is the worst novel I’ve ever read, and the first long piece of fiction I’ve finished in the past 6 years. How is that possible?

The novel is actually an introduction to Goldratt’s theory of constraints, from operations research. The writing isn’t supposed to be good, it’s just supposed to drive home the principles of Goldratt’s theory clearly and efficiently. I think I was able to finish this one because the book wasn’t trying to do all the normal literary things that good novels try to do, and instead was clearly trying to teach me things, like a nonfiction book would. And because it was explained with a story, I’ll probably remember the core principles of The Goal better than I remember the key points of most nonfiction books I read.

The audiobook is especially amusing. Every character is played by a different voice actor, there are ambient background noises that fit the scene, and the musical queues are often hilarious, such as the vaguely romantic hold music that plays while the main character and his wife make up after a fight and speak corny romance dialogue.

Dweck’s Mindset — see this summary — was alternately decent and annoying. I do suspect there’s something to the growth/fixed mindset distinction, but Dweck downplays individual differences too much, glosses over conflicting studies, and waves suggestively in the direction of debunked blank slate hypotheses.

Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma is well-written but the arguments aren’t consistently compelling.

Harris’ 10% Happier was moderately enjoyable but doesn’t have much content.

Assorted links

by

  • 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.

Symposium-style written debates

by

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:

Know of other examples?