brilee

Karma: 574

brilee Aug 28, 2012, 5:16 AM
0 points
on: What is the evidence in favor of paleo?
Modern highly processed food is optimized to our sense of taste, to the extent that they can be called superstimuli. They are also correspondingly unhealthier, on many metrics. (I suppose this is the part in contention… I don’t have any sources for this claim, sorry.)

The paleo diet, as well as the Atkins diet and other diets, inadvertently ‘works’ because highly processed foods tend to be carb-based (crackers, cookies, chips, sugary cereals, sugary yogurts, sugary soft drinks, sugary baked goods), and are thus excluded.

brilee Aug 21, 2012, 11:54 PM
9 points
on: [LINK] Strong AI Startup Raises $15M
Would be nice to have details of their algorithmic approach, instead of some nebulous buzzword like ‘Recursive Cortical Network’. I suppose it does hint somewhat at neural networks...

Their website also seems to emphasize the wrong thing—emphasizing the potential of visual processing algorithms and such. I would be more worried about whether their team is smart/visionary/revolutionary enough to make significant headway on such a difficult problem. Because they’re emphasizing the ‘wrong’ things, it sets off my ‘Solyndra’ alarms.

brilee Aug 18, 2012, 4:55 AM
1 point
on: Enjoy solving “impossible” problems? Group project!
Idea: Understand the human psychology that leads to the stability of the concept of currency/money.

http://www.economist.com/node/21560554
What links here?
- Enjoy solving “impossible” problems? Group project! by Epiphany (Aug 18, 2012, 12:20 AM; -2 points)

brilee Aug 15, 2012, 2:18 AM
6 points
in reply to: Jayson_Virissimo’s comment on: Idle speculation about anchoring and the Facebook IPO
While I agree with your sentiment, I think this is just begging the question—you are rejecting this speculation by assuming homo economicus.

brilee Aug 9, 2012, 10:59 PM
1 point
in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: Mentioning cryonics to a dying person
I imagine the author has written this with a healthy dose of self-irony. I applaud him for being so forthright about what we should all do as advocates of cryonics.

brilee Aug 9, 2012, 12:52 PM
−6 points
on: Mentioning cryonics to a dying person
Am I the only one who finds this about as distasteful as the rabbi who goes around a hospital ward trying to solicit deathbed conversions?

If a cryonics decision is to be made, it should be made when the person is not under duress.

brilee Aug 7, 2012, 10:13 AM
29 points
on: Natural Laws Are Descriptions, not Rules
This seems to be taking down a straw man, and far from “challenging a central tenet of LW: reductionism”, you perfectly describe it and expound on it, if a bit wordily. At least in my mind, it’s very obvious that physical ‘law’ is a map-level concept. Physicists themselves have noticed that for a map-level concept, physical ‘law’ fits the territory so amazingly well, that they have written articles such as “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html

brilee Aug 1, 2012, 3:43 PM
0 points
in reply to: juliawise’s comment on: Advice please: Cognitive distortion preventing me from accomplishing anything
Ah. Thanks for the link. Why is that post not front-paged, or indexed somewhere in the wiki?

I was trying to make use of known research that people who believe themselves to be hard workers will work harder, while people who believe themselves to be smart workers will work less. Of course, explaining that would have destroyed the effect, which is why I instead opted to start my post with something intentionally harsh-sounding.

brilee Aug 1, 2012, 8:32 AM
−5 points
on: Advice please: Cognitive distortion preventing me from accomplishing anything
No, it isn’t. You’re preventing yourself from accomplishing anything.

Start small—accomplish progressively larger tasks, starting with something as simple as taking out the trash. Every time you successfully complete a task, say, “See look—my ‘cognitive distortion’ is just an illusion.”

brilee Jul 27, 2012, 12:19 PM
4 points
on: The Criminal Stupidity of Intelligent People
There seems to be some content here, but it requires massive editing to be of any use. First thing I’d recommend is to cut the first three paragraphs entirely.

brilee Jul 25, 2012, 5:24 PM
0 points
on: A Description of Entropy
In other words, a universe where the arrow of time runs backwards?

brilee Jul 20, 2012, 6:19 AM
2 points
in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: What Longevity Research Most Excites You?
This is an interesting line of reasoning, which is not easily refuted. It seems quite plausible biochemically, and my strongest attack on it would probably be through the conjunction fallacy—while each of these steps seems reasonable, perhaps the entire chain is faulty.

However, there is one thing that seems blatantly out of place—and that’s the scale of the process. The citric acid cycle as a whole operates at a catalytic concentration of 1-5 millimolar, in just about every cell of the body. Multiplied by 70 kg of weight per person, that would equal 70-350 millimoles, or roughly 10-50g of CAC intermediates in the body. If this pill is really hoping to dump enough oxaloacetate into the system in order to temporarily force the cycle to run backwards, a 100mg daily dose seems small. I would think you’d need at least 1g daily before it actually affects the citric acid cycle.

Do they teach science in school nowadays? I feel like the analysis that I’m doing should be doable by most scientifically literate people.

brilee Jul 17, 2012, 3:02 PM
1 point
on: Exploiting the Typical Mind Fallacy for more accurate questioning?
I would suggest that an answer to “what do you think the percentage of employees who have stolen..” is a proxy question for, “just exactly how socially unacceptable to you is stealing from your employer”? It relates to, basically, your own levels of altruism, and what you perceive the local altruism levels to be. If you see that everyone around you is being altruistic, you feel a basic urge to keep the clean environment up, while if everyone around you is cheating, then you are less likely to keep up your own altruism.

I’ve had my bike stolen a few times. After getting a particularly nice bike stolen, I now am always on the lookout for unlocked bikes, and when I see one, the urge is most definitely there to grab it - ‘retribution’, if you will, for my own stolen bike. I don’t go through with it, but the possibility is a lot more present in my mind than if I had never had a bike stolen from me.

brilee Jul 15, 2012, 9:54 PM
3 points
in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: What Longevity Research Most Excites You?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citric_acid#Occurrence

47 grams per liter of lemon/lime juice. That converts to ~25 g oxaloacetate per liter. Oranges apparently have less citric acid, to the tune of perhaps 500mg oxaloacetate equivalent per liter of juice.

brilee Jul 15, 2012, 8:25 PM
8 points
in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: What Longevity Research Most Excites You?
Citric acid directly metabolizes to oxaloacetate in the body. This guy is selling you fruit juice at $50 bucks an orange.

brilee Jul 14, 2012, 9:28 PM
7 points
in reply to: David_Gerard’s comment on: PZ Myers on the Infeasibility of Whole Brain Emulation
In the first quote, he sets up the straw man as gwern describes it. In the second quote, he defends his first straw man by saying “but that’s what singularitarians believe”, essentially putting up a second straw man to defend the first.

brilee Jul 14, 2012, 6:54 PM
4 points
in reply to: brilee’s comment on: PZ Myers on the Infeasibility of Whole Brain Emulation
Oops, didn’t see a further comment below: In response to a comment, ” I still don’t understand why biologists insist that you have to do a perfect simulation, down to the smallest molecule, and then state the obvious fact that it’s not going to happen.”, PZ says this:

“Errm, because that’s what the singularitarians we’re critiquing are proposing? This whole slice-and-scan proposal is all about recreating the physical components of the brain in a virtual space, without bothering to understand how those components work. We’re telling you that approach requires an awfully fine-grained simulation.

An alternative would be to, for instance, break down the brain into components, figure out what the inputs and outputs to, say, the nucleus accumbens are, and then model how that tissue processes it all (that approach is being taken with models of portions of the hippocampus). That approach doesn’t require a detailed knowledge of what every molecule in the tissue is doing.

But the method described here is a brute force dismantling and reconstruction of every cell in the brain. That requires details of every molecule.”

Still seems like a straw man.

brilee Jul 14, 2012, 6:48 PM
4 points
on: PZ Myers on the Infeasibility of Whole Brain Emulation
From the comments, PZ elaborates: “Andrew G: No, you don’t understand. Part of this magical “scan” has to include vast amounts of data on the physics of the entity…pieces which will interact in complex ways with each other and the environment. Unless you’re also planning to build a vastly sped up model of the whole universe, you’re going to have a simulation of brain running very fast in a sensory deprivation tank.

Or do you really think you can understand how the brain works in complete isolation from physiology, endocrinology, and sensation?”

Seems like PZ is dismissing the feasibility of computation by assuming that computation has to be perfectly literal. To make a chemistry analogy here, one does not have to model the quantum mechanics and the dynamics of every single molecule in a beaker of water in order to simulate the kinetics of a reaction in water. One does not need to replicate the chemical entirety of the neuron in silico; one merely needs to replicate the neuron’s stimulus-response patterns.

brilee Jul 12, 2012, 6:42 PM
11 points
in reply to: A1987dM’s comment on: What Is Signaling, Really?
I am also a really fast speed-reader, and my mind tends to ignore these sorts of words.

I remember one time I opened a fortune cookie, glanced at the slip, laughed, and repeated it to my friend, with perfect grammar. He grabbed the slip, actually read the slip (which apparently had had horrible grammar mistakes), and demanded to know how I had managed to read the slip while unintentionally correcting all the grammar mistakes in it.

brilee Jul 6, 2012, 4:23 AM
11 points
on: Negative and Positive Selection
The concepts of positive and negative selection are not quite well defined in your essay, I think.

Imagine that you have one test, with a gaussian distribution of outcomes. Let’s arbitrarily set a threshold, and if people are above this threshold, they have passed this test. Call the sets of passing A and not passing ~A

Would you call this a positive or negative selection? It is neither, in my opinion.

Now, imagine you have two tests, A and B.

A positive test is one where A U B are selected. A negative test is one where ~(~A ^ ~B) are selected.

In other words—the operative difference between positive and negative selection is OR vs. AND.