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Wild Ideas

hanson.gmu.edu

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Re: Wild Ideas

#81

Post by derleth »

ckuehne wrote: post #64
aasarava wrote: post #13

#2, about health insurance, overlooks a big part of the RAND HIE's findings: people who were sick and poor in the study did have worse health outcomes.

The overall result, namely, that at the margin medicine has net-negative effects (i.e., after a certain point more medicine equals worse health) has been replicated many times. See for example this meta-study from 2008 about what happens when health workers go on strike [1]: "[..] mortality either stayed the same or decreased during, and in some cases, after the strike. [No study] found that mortality increased durin…

> emergency care was available during all of the strikes.

Interesting. Have there been strikes which made emergency care unavailable?

Re: Wild Ideas

#82

Post by derleth »

Houshalter wrote: post #66
unimpressive wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since we're now on the subject. I notice that there seems to be a very high turnover of young people from the various forms of anarchism as they get older. Would anybody who fits this description like to elaborate on why that happened? Found a convincing argument? General disillusionment with humanity?

I was an anarcho-capitalist for awhile. I thought it was the perfect system. There would be absolutely no incentives to do bad things. Anything a government could do, could in theory be done by a voluntary system if enough people agreed it was a good idea or it was a benefit to them to do so. But I no longer think it's a perfect system. People don't behave like perfect rational market actors, there are edge cases lik…

> Anything a government could do, could in theory be done by a voluntary system if enough people agreed it was a good idea or it was a benefit to them to do so.

And we call that system a government.

Seriously. Every time an anarchist seriously gets down to brass tacks about how their world would work, there's some agency by 'the people' which does things which have to be done, and it's indistinguishable from a government. It's just a Good Government, a Responsible Government, and, really, an Ideal Government.

Either anarchy has never happened or it's the only thing that happens. I don't know which is more damaging to the case of doctrinaire capital-A Anarchists.

> a semi-private legal system for some things might work

This is called contract law.

Re: Wild Ideas

#83

Post by arethuza »

bumbledraven wrote: post #19

1. Many times each day, your mind permanently splits into different versions that live in different worlds. True. 2. If medicine were taxed so much that people only bought half as much, they would be just as healthy. False. The "extra" spending in medicine drives innovations so we have better drugs & procedures etc. than we would otherwise. 3. If we keep writing down common sense datums until 2100, we can make comput…

"If we keep writing down common sense datums until 2100, we can make computers as smart as people."

Worth noting that this approach has already been tried:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc

"Commonsense reasoning" has been around for a long time as an AI topic - like many AI topics it appears straightforward but is actually full of complexity.

Re: Wild Ideas

#84

Post by derleth »

wikiburner wrote: post #43
snowwrestler wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your analogy is backward; early civilizations were far more dominated by religious beliefs than we are today.

Religion didn't always exist. In fact, I would guess that it didn't for the majority of human history, although it's ultimately speculation on both of our parts.

Religion (by way of magical thinking) is one of the things that defines humanity. We have evidence of it even in Neanderthal sites, given that we find them in caves, with their feet pointed east more often than not, with flower pollen on them in places in caves where we don't otherwise find flower pollen.

Only recently have we been able to overcome it.

Re: Wild Ideas

#85

Post by Symmetry »

Xcelerate wrote: post #61
bumbledraven wrote: post #19

1. Many times each day, your mind permanently splits into different versions that live in different worlds. True. 2. If medicine were taxed so much that people only bought half as much, they would be just as healthy. False. The "extra" spending in medicine drives innovations so we have better drugs & procedures etc. than we would otherwise. 3. If we keep writing down common sense datums until 2100, we can make comput…

> 1. Many times each day, your mind permanently splits into different versions that live in different worlds. True. The many-worlds interpretation is nonsense. It's not even science. It makes no testable predictions that differ from any of the other interpretations. I've never understood the weird fascination with "many-worlds". Quantum mechanics provides a very clear set of postulates that allow the prediction of va…

QM provides a clear set of equations that govern how wavefunctions evolve, but some versions also include the notion that wavefunctions collapse when an observation is made, but there are no equations or even firm rules for when this collapse is supposed to happen. Many-worlds is founded on the observation that the equations governing wavefunctions are sufficient in and of themselves to explain the observations that originally led people to believe that waveforms collapse, and that therefore the collapse postulate ought to be discarded as redundant. And because it's spooky action at a distance.

Re: Wild Ideas

#86

Post by mjn »

arethuza wrote: post #83
bumbledraven wrote: post #19

1. Many times each day, your mind permanently splits into different versions that live in different worlds. True. 2. If medicine were taxed so much that people only bought half as much, they would be just as healthy. False. The "extra" spending in medicine drives innovations so we have better drugs & procedures etc. than we would otherwise. 3. If we keep writing down common sense datums until 2100, we can make comput…

"If we keep writing down common sense datums until 2100, we can make computers as smart as people." Worth noting that this approach has already been tried: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc "Commonsense reasoning" has been around for a long time as an AI topic - like many AI topics it appears straightforward but is actually full of complexity.

Two other approaches, a bit messier but with bigger coverage:

* ConceptNet (http://conceptnet5.media.mit.edu/), I think the first major attempt at a "messier" crowdsourced commonsense-facts database. Not a carefully designed hierarchical ontology like Cyc, but rather a large set of lightly curated statements about natural-language nouns and verbs. Has the pros and cons you might expect: better coverage, and easier to use, but less precision and a lot of ambiguity due to polysemy.

* CMU's "Read the Web" (http://rtw.ml.cmu.edu/rtw/) and U. Washington's "Open IE" (http://openie.cs.washington.edu/), both projects that combine a shallow-parsing fact-extractor with web-scale crawling. They are truly gigantic, but the accuracy is not very high.

Re: Wild Ideas

#87

Post by sergiosgc »

sytelus wrote: post #15

Yes, wild ideas except for the "2100" part. The scientific and engineering breakthroughs have been slowing down dramatically in past 50 years or so. Science fiction from 60s and 70s is embarrassingly filled with predictions such as we would have colonies in space, computers indistinguishable from humans, flying cars on street, humankind without poverty and end of cancer by 2020. How close are we? If we go back in tim…

Please go read Kurzweil. Scientific advancement is dead on track on an exponential curve. Moore's law is still accurate.

Will it keep this rate as Kurzweil postulates? I have no idea. Until now, though, he's correct.

Comparing tech today with sci-fi of the past is wrong. Predictions fail both ways: there's lots of tech we do have that is missing in sci-fi.

Re: Wild Ideas

#88

Post by apl »

Xcelerate wrote: post #61
bumbledraven wrote: post #19

1. Many times each day, your mind permanently splits into different versions that live in different worlds. True. 2. If medicine were taxed so much that people only bought half as much, they would be just as healthy. False. The "extra" spending in medicine drives innovations so we have better drugs & procedures etc. than we would otherwise. 3. If we keep writing down common sense datums until 2100, we can make comput…

> 1. Many times each day, your mind permanently splits into different versions that live in different worlds. True. The many-worlds interpretation is nonsense. It's not even science. It makes no testable predictions that differ from any of the other interpretations. I've never understood the weird fascination with "many-worlds". Quantum mechanics provides a very clear set of postulates that allow the prediction of va…

  >  I've never understood the weird fascination with "many-worlds".
In addition to the parsimony/redundancy argument already brought up, our weird fascination with "many worlds" should be utterly obvious from a psychological perspective. It's a powerful, potentially soothing thought: anything that could have been has been, in some strange way.

Thinking about the "what if" constitutes a deeply human tendency (or weakness, if you will). The notion that all our missed chances, fantasies, dreams, ideas, etc. may be actual as opposed to potential -- that's way too attractive a thought to ignore.

Re: Wild Ideas

#89

Post by asgard1024 »

samweinberg wrote: post #76
GuiA wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe whoever is running the simulation isn't aware you are, either.

That's interesting to ponder on and all, but we know the Sims characters are not aware.

Are you sure? Since version 1, they can recognize themselves in a mirror.

Re: Wild Ideas

#90

Post by chetan51 »

If we keep writing down common sense datums until 2100, we can make computers as smart as people.

We learn more about brains and making smart computers, but we seem to have run out of major architectural innovations -- better ones won't make a huge difference. The big stumbling block seems to be how much "common sense" a system knows, like that things tend to fall down when you bump them. One group has been writing these down for fifteen years with moderate success; a century more effort may be plenty.

This seems like a really inefficient way to go about it.

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