Read and enjoyed “The Robot and the Baby”, a fictional short story by computer scientist John McCarthy), after being linked to his webpage from EY’s “Above-Average AI Scientists”. Some on the Less Wrong IRC seemed to like it as well, so I went ahead and posted it here.
The SCP Foundation is a wiki filled with short horror fiction (that has recently become more widely known because of several games produced based on its content). Most of the entries are written as fictional reports/MSDS data-sheet-like information handouts by a bureaucratic organization that is focused on, basically, shutting mind-blowing horrors away from the bulk of civilization for fear that people would implode if they realized the world did not run on math. The problem being that not everything they’re shutting away is a mind-blowing horror.
The articles are (or at least should be, in most circumstances) readable in any order or no order at all. The index is a passable place to start, and the wiki has decent quality control so nearly all of the articles are at least readable and grammatical, and a substantial fraction are downright bone-chilling. This is both a recommendation and an anti-recommendation. If you are easily emotionally affected by fiction, it is probably not for you.
[http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/seinfeld-scripts.html] has transcripts of all episodes of Seinfeld, and they are super funny. I tried watching some episodes as well, but at least for me I feel reading the scripts is more enjoyable (maybe because of faster pacing?).
JERRY: Shake is bad, but what if it’s the “two-hander”? The hand on the bottom, the hand on the top, the warm look in the eyes?
GEORGE: Hand-sandwich.
JERRY: Right.
GEORGE: I see, well, that’s open to interpretation. Because so much depends on the layering and the quality of the wetness in the eyes...[suddenly a woman approaches Jerry from behind and puts her hands over Jerry’s eyes]
LAURA: Guess who?
JERRY: Hey, hey.
LAURA and JERRY: Heeeey! [they take each others hands like they’re planning to do a folk dance; George is looking puzzled]
Short Online Texts Thread
Read and enjoyed “The Robot and the Baby”, a fictional short story by computer scientist John McCarthy), after being linked to his webpage from EY’s “Above-Average AI Scientists”. Some on the Less Wrong IRC seemed to like it as well, so I went ahead and posted it here.
A reasonably accurate history of how the Christian bible was actually compiled, by Jim Macdonald on Making Light. Easy, enjoyable, entertaining and educational.
The SCP Foundation is a wiki filled with short horror fiction (that has recently become more widely known because of several games produced based on its content). Most of the entries are written as fictional reports/MSDS data-sheet-like information handouts by a bureaucratic organization that is focused on, basically, shutting mind-blowing horrors away from the bulk of civilization for fear that people would implode if they realized the world did not run on math. The problem being that not everything they’re shutting away is a mind-blowing horror.
The articles are (or at least should be, in most circumstances) readable in any order or no order at all. The index is a passable place to start, and the wiki has decent quality control so nearly all of the articles are at least readable and grammatical, and a substantial fraction are downright bone-chilling. This is both a recommendation and an anti-recommendation. If you are easily emotionally affected by fiction, it is probably not for you.
Special mention, however, has to go to the recently created SCP-2333, which is an especially believable kind of horrifying when read through transhumanist eyes. (Jul vf vg gung rirelbar V qvfphff guvf negvpyr jvgu vf ubeevsvrq gung gur thl ng gur raq bs gur negvpyr unf gb yvir sberire, naq abar bs gurz ner ubeevsvrq jvgu gur snpg gung gur erfrnepuref nccneragyl pbqrq va gur bar-jrrx uneq yvzvg ba Fhcre Yvsrfcna ibyhagnevyl?)
Mm, I was more impressed by http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-988 than 2333.
[http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/seinfeld-scripts.html] has transcripts of all episodes of Seinfeld, and they are super funny. I tried watching some episodes as well, but at least for me I feel reading the scripts is more enjoyable (maybe because of faster pacing?).
Seinfeld is superb.
From the first episode:
Politics/religion:
“The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy”, Woodberry 2012 (excerpts; popular media coverage)
“An Economic Analysis of the Financial Records of al-Qa’ida in Iraq”, Bahney et al 2010; “$0.60 for cake: Al-Qaida [in Mali] records every expense”
“The lost history of Helmand” (failed nation-state building project in Afghanistan which exemplifies Scott’s Seeing Like A State)
“The Lost World of the London Coffeehouse”
“Secret without Reason and Costly without Accomplishment: Questioning the National Security Agency’s Metadata Program”, Mueller & Stewart 2014 (excerpts)
“Aztec Political Thought” (the king as Enemy and Mocker, leader of a theatre state)
“Hallucinated Gods” (on Julian Jaynes’s book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind)
“Thank God for Cancer”
Business:
“Hatred and Profits: Getting Under the Hood of the Ku Klux Klan”, Fryer & Levitt 2007 (discussion; excerpts)
“Inside the World of the Double-Crossing Fake Hitman”
“A Dolphin’s Tale: The Story of GameCube” (history)
“Death at the Summit” (Intrade)
Literature:
“Dwarf Fortress: A Marxist Analysis” (discussion)
“The Gooseberry Fallacy” (Russian literature & thoughts on the good life) ”...But for Me, It Was Tuesday” (TvTropes)
Medicine:
“Marijuana: Much More Than You Wanted To Know”
“Aretaeus On Bipolar Disorder” (ancient-Greek/psychiatry comparison)
“Beware Mass-Produced Medical Recommendations” (on vitamin D & niacin)
Statistics:
“Bayes’ Rule and the Paradox of Pre-Registration of RCTs”
“Josef Urban on Machine Learning and Automated Reasoning”
“Using deep learning to listen for whales”
“Adversarial Bandits and the Exp3 Algorithm”
“A Few Useful Things to Know about Machine Learning”, Domingos 2012 (nice guide to ‘common sense’ - data cleaning, modeling, overfitting, bias/variance, combining models, representation & learnability)
“The Median is Not the Message”, Gould (on cancer survival and interpreting statistics)
“Adventures in the Assessment of Animal Speed and Morality”
“Posterior-Hacking”
“Visualization Series: Using Scatterplots and Models to Understand the Diamond Market”
Technology:
“A Future Of Pipes” (the future of cities and computing power: cooling is a big deal but not a defeater)
“Auto Correct: Has the self-driving car at last arrived?”
“Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning”, Mnih et al 2013
Command-line folklore: the
sort --keytrick“Mobile Computing Research Is a Hornet’s Nest of Deception and Chicanery”, Mickens (excerpts)
“The Slow Winter”, Mickens (excerpts)
“The Night Watch”, Mickens (excerpts)
“The Graph of Math”
Rationality:
Best of Rationality Quotes 2013
“Lily Allen & decision theory” (Bitcoin)
“Lullaby Language”
Misc:
Subreddit: “Things Fitting Perfectly Into Other Things”
Ship’s cat
Israel-related animal conspiracy theories
By modern standards, it’s not the strongest story. But Robert Sheckley’s Watchbird is interesting as an early treatment of the problem of UFAI.