Daniel_Burfoot

Karma: 4,170

Daniel_Burfoot 1 Oct 2017 17:17 UTC
22 points
on: Feedback on LW 2.0
First, I appreciate the work people have done to make LW 2 happen. Here are my notes:
1. Strong feeling—the links and descriptions of the Sequences, the Codex, and HPMOR (while good) should not be at the top of the page. The top should be the newest material.
2. Please please please include a “hide subthread” option to collapse a comment and all its responses. That is a dealbreaker for me, if a site doesn’t have that feature, I won’t read the comments.
3. Current LW has a really nice alternating color scheme for comment/reply. One comment will have a grey background, the comment below it will have a beige background. That is a key feature for visually parsing a comment thread.
4. I liked the concept of having a main section and a discussion section, where the bar for posting in the latter is lower. For whatever reason, people seem to get angry if you post something that they feel is low quality or not relevant.
5. I can’t put my finger on it exactly, but somehow I don’t quite like the default font. It may be that I like a different font for reading on dead tree paper vs on a computer screen?
6. It may be slightly evil, but the karma display on the right side of the screen makes the site more addictive, because people love to see if they get upvotes or comment replies.
7. It seems weird to allow people to upvote/downvote an article right from the home page, do you really want people to vote for an article without reading it?

Daniel_Burfoot 12 Sep 2017 16:36 UTC
3 points
on: Open thread, September 11 - September 17, 2017
Why do people see Mars as a better target for human colonization than the Moon? Most comments on lunar colonization seem to refer to two facts:
1. the Moon has quite low gravity, so it cannot maintain an atmosphere for a long period of time.
2. the Moon has no magnetic field, so it will not protect us from solar radiation.
In my mind, both of these problems can be solved by a ceiling or dome structure. The ceiling both retains the atmosphere and also blocks harmful radiation. Note that a failure in the ceiling won’t be catastrophic: the atmosphere won’t drain rapidly, and the amount of radiation exposure per unit time isn’t disastrously high even without the ceiling.

Daniel_Burfoot 9 Sep 2017 4:13 UTC
0 points
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Open thread, September 4 - September 10, 2017
Very nice, thanks. Ahh… Haskell really is quite pretty.

Daniel_Burfoot 9 Sep 2017 4:11 UTC
0 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Open thread, September 4 - September 10, 2017
Good analysis, thanks. I buy the first two points. I’d be shocked to see an implementation that actually makes use of the lower metadata requirements. Are there languages that provide a boolean primitive that uses a single bit of memory instead of a full byte? Also I don’t understand what you mean by persistence.

Daniel_Burfoot 7 Sep 2017 4:57 UTC
16 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: New business opportunities due to self-driving cars
-1, this is pointlessly negative. There’s a disclaimer at the top (so it’s not like he’s claiming false authority), the title is appropriate (so it’s not like you were tricked into clicking on the article), and it’s reasonably on-topic because LW people are in the software/AI/entrepreneurship space. Sure, maybe most of the proposals are far-fetched, but if one of the ideas sparks an idea that sparks an idea, the net value could be very positive.

Daniel_Burfoot 4 Sep 2017 21:57 UTC
2 points
on: Open thread, September 4 - September 10, 2017
Has anyone studied the Red Black Tree algorithms recently? I’ve been trying to implement them using my Finite State technique that enables automatic generation of flow diagrams. This has been working well for several other algorithms.

But the Red Black tree rebalancing algorithms seem ridiculously complicated. Here is an image of the deletion process (extracted from this Java code) - it’s far more complicated than an algorithm like MergeSort or HeapSort, and that only shows the deletion procedure!

I’m weighing two hypotheses:
1. Keeping a binary tree balanced in N log N time is an intrinsically complex task.
2. There is some much simpler method to efficiently maintain balance in a binary tree, but nobody bothered looking for it after the RB tree algorithms and analysis were published.
I’m leaning toward the latter theory. It seems to me that most of the other “elementary” algorithms of computer science are comparatively simple, so the weird overcomplexity of the tool we use for binary tree balancing is some kind of oversight. Here is the Wiki page on RB trees—notice how the description of the algorithm is extremely hard to understand.

Daniel_Burfoot 15 Aug 2017 4:52 UTC
0 points
on: Open thread, August 14 - August 20, 2017
Can anyone offer a linguistic explanation for the following phenomenon related to pronoun case and partial determiners:
1. None of us want to go to school tomorrow.
2. None of we want to go to school tomorrow (**).
3. We want to go to school tomorrow.
4. Us want to go to school tomorrow (**).

Daniel_Burfoot 8 Aug 2017 23:24 UTC
5 points
on: Open thread, August 7 - August 13, 2017
Theory of programming style incompatibility: it is possible for two or more engineers, each of whom is individually highly skilled, to be utterly incapable of working together productively. In fact, the problem of style incompatibility might actually increase with the skill level of the programmers.

This shouldn’t be that surprising: Proust and Hemingway might both be gifted writers capable of producing beautiful novels, but a novel co-authored by the two of them would probably be terrible.

Daniel_Burfoot 6 Aug 2017 22:47 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: Open thread, July 31 - August 6, 2017
I haven’t written it up, though you can see my parser in action here.

One key concept in my system is the Theta Role and the associated rule. A phrase can only have one structure for each role (subject, object, determiner, etc).

I don’t have much to say about teaching methods, but I will say that if you’re going to teach English grammar, you should know the correct grammatical concepts that actually determine English grammar. My research is an attempt to find the correct concepts. There are some things that I’m confident about and some areas where the system needs work.

One very important aspect of English grammar is argument structure. Different verbs characteristically can and cannot take various types and combinations of arguments, such as direct objects, indirect objects, infinitive complements, and sentential complements. For example, the word “persuade” takes a sentential (that-) complement, but only when also combined with a direct object (“I will persuade [him] that the world is flat” is incorrect without the direct object). In contrast, the verb “know” can take either a direct object or a that-complement, but not both. To speak English fluently, you need to memorize all these combinations, but before you memorize them, you need to know that the concept exists.

Daniel_Burfoot 31 Jul 2017 23:04 UTC
3 points
on: Open thread, July 31 - August 6, 2017
Against Phrasal Taxonomy Grammar, an essay about how any approach to grammar theory based on categorizing every phrase in terms of a discrete set of categories is doomed to fail.

Daniel_Burfoot 25 Jul 2017 19:22 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Hafurelus’s comment on: Open thread, July 24 - July 30, 2017
In terms of strategy, I recommend you to think about going to work at the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms. They recently received a grant from OpenPhil to do AI Safety Research. I can personally recommend the two professors at McGill (Joelle Pineau and Doina Precup). Since you are Russian, you should be able to handle the cold :-)

Daniel_Burfoot 20 Jul 2017 16:06 UTC
21 points
on: Sam Harris and Scott Adams debate Trump: a model rationalist disagreement
Continuing with Adams’ theme of congratulating himself on making correct predictions, I’ll point out that I correctly predicted both that Adams did in fact want Trump to win a year ago, and also planned to capitalize on the prediction if it came true, by writing a book:

My guess is that Adams is hoping that Trump wins the election, because he will then write a book about persuasion and how Trump’s persuasion skills helped him win. He already has a lot of this material on his blog. In that scenario he can capitalize on his correct prediction, which seemed radical at the time, to generate a lot of publicity for the book.

Both of these claims seem to be confirmed by the podcast. Maybe I should write a book!

Daniel_Burfoot 18 Jul 2017 20:55 UTC
6 points
on: Open thread, Jul. 17 - Jul. 23, 2017
Does anyone have good or bad impressions of Calico Labs, Human Longevity, or other hi-tech anti-aging companies? Are they good places to work, are they making progress, etc?

Daniel_Burfoot 8 Jul 2017 22:19 UTC
0 points
in reply to: username2’s comment on: Against lone wolf self-improvement
I agree with you in the context of entrepreneurship, but the OP was talking about self improvement. The best strategy for learning or self-improving may be very different from the best strategy for building a company.

Daniel_Burfoot 7 Jul 2017 16:35 UTC
10 points
on: Against lone wolf self-improvement
This is a mean vs median or Mediocristan vs Extremistan issue. Most people cannot do lone wolf, but if you can do lone wolf, you will probably be much more successful than the average person.

Think of it like this. Say you wanted to become a great writer. You could go to university and plod through a major in English literature. That will reliably give you a middling good skill at writing. Or you could drop out and spend all your time reading sci-fi novels, watching anime, and writing fan fiction. Now most people who do that will end up terrible writers. But when someone like Eliezer does it, the results are spectacular.

Furthermore, because of the Power Law and the “Average is Over” idea, most of the impact will come from the standout successes.

Daniel_Burfoot 4 Jul 2017 3:05 UTC
4 points
on: Open thread, Jul. 03 - Jul. 09, 2017
I am working on a software tool that allows programmers to automatically extract FSM-like sequence diagrams from their programs (if they use the convention required by the tool).

Here is a diagram expressing the Merge Sort algorithm

Here is the underlying source code.

I believe this kind of tool could be very useful for code documentation purposes. Suggestions or improvements welcome.

Daniel_Burfoot 1 Jul 2017 17:58 UTC
2 points
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: What useless things did you understand recently?
There are lots of cacti that are mostly hairy/fuzzy instead of pointy.

In terms of air flow protection purchased vs biological effort expended, I’m not sure a leaf is better than a spike.

Daniel_Burfoot 29 Jun 2017 0:05 UTC
10 points
on: What useless things did you understand recently?
For a long time it was odd to me that cacti have lots of spikes and big thorns. I supposed that the goal was to ward off big ruminants like cows, but that doesn’t really make much sense, since the desert isn’t really overflowing with big animals that eat a lot of plants.

It turns out that protection from predators is only a secondary goal. The main goal is protection from the environment. The spikes capture and slow the air moving around the plant, to preserve moisture and protect against the heat.

Daniel_Burfoot 16 Jun 2017 23:25 UTC
0 points
on: Stupid Questions June 2017
Given that many of the most successful countries are small and self-contained (Singapore, Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, arguably the other Scandinavian countries), and also the disasters visited upon humanity by large unified nation-states, why are people so attached to the idea of large-scale national unity?

Daniel_Burfoot 15 Jun 2017 22:43 UTC
5 points
on: Announcing AASAA—Accelerating AI Safety Adoption in Academia (and elsewhere)
I really don’t think you should try to convince mid-career professionals to switch careers to AI safety risk research. Instead, you should focus on recruiting talented young people, ideally people who are still in university or at most a few years out.