j_andrew_rogers

Karma: 146

j_andrew_rogers Feb 13, 2011, 4:13 AM
14 points
in reply to: tenshiko’s comment on: An Abortion Dialogue
On the other side of that argument, a fetus does not have the higher brain function or consciousness that would allow it to experience pain. When an adult is put under general anesthesia for surgery we do not generally consider them to be “experiencing pain” even though the body is still reacting the damage as though they were conscious. They still have brain function, they temporarily lack the higher brain function required for the meaningful experience of pain. A very similar argument could be applied to a fetus.

j_andrew_rogers Feb 13, 2011, 4:00 AM
8 points
on: What’s the single best introduction to evolution to give to a creationist?
There is another effective framing technique that I almost never see used that might be worth considering because I’ve seen it used well in the past.

Most people think evolution is a purely biological concept and it is virtually always framed in such ways. This runs headlong into the mystical beliefs many people attach to living organisms. Making evolution a property of an organism is no different than making a “soul” the property of an organism to them, and fits in the same cognitive pigeonhole. A lot of the jumbled chemistry and thermodynamic arguments follow from this as well; biology is special precisely because it can violate the laws of science.

Evolution is fundamentally a systems dynamic from mathematics. If you have a system—any system—with a certain set of abstract properties then there are certain required mathematical consequences. The result of 2+2 is always 4, no matter where in nature we find it. Biology is just one type of system to which this mathematics is applied; it has the prerequisite properties on the left hand side of the equation that require the system dynamic biologists call “evolution” on the right side of the equation. Mathematics asserts that evolution should exist in biology whether or not science has found evidence of it (fortunately, we have found much evidence). When evolution emerges from mathematics instead of biology, it has a sterilizing effect on the concept.

It turns out that very few creationists are willing to dismiss mathematics in the same way they dismiss science. Mathematics is neutral territory, it does not have a political or religious affiliation in the minds of most people, and almost everyone tacitly “believes” in it because they use it every day. The few times I have seen this strategy used—completely divorcing evolution from science—even the militant true believers found themselves at a loss for a counter-argument (not that it changed their minds).

j_andrew_rogers Feb 13, 2011, 3:11 AM
7 points
on: What’s the single best introduction to evolution to give to a creationist?
Tangentially, the fact that she is arguing with a person that believes in evolution could itself be a problem that changes the dynamic.

I’ve often observed that most people believe in evolution in essentially the same way a creationist believes in creationism. They did not reason themselves into that position nor do they really understand evolution in any significant way, it was a position they were told all right-thinking people should believe and so that is why they do so. The charge often forwarded by creationists that evolution is merely another quasi-religious belief comports with reality in many cases, unfortunately. Nominal evolutionists that are clueless about evolution and just parrot talking points can often destroy the credibility of scientific evolutionists that come later.

Understanding the qualifications of the person she is having a discussion with is helpful from a tactical standpoint—it determines the nature of the defense of creationist ideas.

Being a veteran of many creationist arguments, I would make the point that there is no need or reason to bring religion into it nor even to talk about “losing an argument”. You can ignore it entirely if you choose to and it usually keeps the defensiveness down. Also, stay away from any arguments that have well-known creationist defenses; it will force her to think about what you are saying rather than giving the opportunity to borrow what someone else has said. Keep the tone matter of fact so that it doesn’t sound like you have an emotional investment in it—very important. If you really want to play it clean, don’t even frame it in terms of what you think or believe; just discussing chains of reasonings over reasonable facts without inserting a value judgement helps make the other party think they are reasoning to the conclusion themselves rather than you imposing your beliefs.

Most of the work is framing. If you make it completely orthogonal to what anyone believes, religious or otherwise, and turn it into an emotionally-neutral logic puzzle, you can often bypass the memetic defenses long enough to make a difference. It does not matter what you believe if we have this interesting set of scientific facts...

j_andrew_rogers Feb 11, 2011, 4:37 PM
8 points
on: Subjective Relativity, Time Dilation and Divergence
A related empirical data point is that we already see strong light cone effects in electronic markets. The machine decision speeds are so fast that it is not possible to usefully communicate with similarly fast machines outside of a radius of some small number of kilometers because the state of reality at one machine changes faster than it can propagate that information to another due to speed of light limitations. The diminishing ability to influence decisions as a function of distance raises questions about the relevancy of most long haul communication between AGI-like systems.

This is also related to another computer phenomenon where it is becoming cheaper to duplicate computation than to transmit the result of one computation.

j_andrew_rogers Feb 11, 2011, 4:10 PM
0 points
in reply to: jacob_cannell’s comment on: Fast Minds and Slow Computers
It is analogous to how you can implement a hyper-cube topology on a physical network in normal 3-space, which is trivial. Doing it virtually on a switch fabric is trickier.

Hyper-dimensionality is largely a human abstraction when talking about algorithms; a set of bits can be interpreted as being in however many dimensions is convenient for an algorithm at a particular point in time, which follows from fairly boring maths e.g. Morton’s theorems. The general concept of topological computation is not remarkable either, it has been around since Tarski, it just is not obvious how one reduces it to useful practice.

There is no literature on what a reduction to practice would even look like but it is a bit of an open secret in the world of large-scale graph analysis that the very recent ability of a couple companies to parallelize graph analysis are based on something like this. Graph analysis scalability is closely tied to join algorithm scalability—a well-known hard-to-parallelize operation.

j_andrew_rogers Feb 11, 2011, 6:56 AM
0 points
in reply to: jacob_cannell’s comment on: Fast Minds and Slow Computers
You are missing the point. There are hyper-dimensional topological solutions that can be efficiently implement on vanilla silicon that obviate your argument. There is literature to support the conjecture even if there is not literature to support the implementation. Nonetheless, implementations are known to have recently been developed at places like IBM Research that have been publicly disclosed to exist (if not the design). (ObDisclosure: I developed much of the practical theory related to this domain—I’ve seen running code at scale). Just because the brain exists in three dimensions does not imply that it is a 3-dimensional data model any more than analogous things are implied on a computer.

It is not an abstraction, you can implement these directly on silicon. There are very old theorems that allow the implementation of hyper-dimensional topological constructs on vanilla silicon (since the 1960s), conjectured to support massive pervasive parallelism (since the 1940s), the reduction to practice just isn’t obvious and no one is taught these things. These models scale well on mediocre switch fabrics if competently designed.

Basically, you are extrapolating a “we can’t build algorithms on switch fabrics” bias improperly and without realizing you are doing it. State-of-the-art parallel computer science research is much more interesting than you are assuming. Ironically, the mathematics behind it is completely indifferent to dimensionality.

j_andrew_rogers Feb 10, 2011, 9:35 PM
0 points
in reply to: jacob_cannell’s comment on: Fast Minds and Slow Computers
There is a subtle point I think you are missing. The problem is not one of processing power or even bandwidth but one of topology. Increasing the link bandwidth does not solve any problems nor does increasing the operations retired per clock cycle.

In parallel algorithms research, the main bottleneck is that traditional computer science assumes that the communication topology is a directly connected network—like the brain—but all real silicon systems are based on switch fabrics. For many years computer science simplified the analysis by treating these as interchangeable when they are not and the differences from an algorithm design standpoint start to become very apparent when parallelism exceeds a certain relatively low threshold.

The real limitation is that humans currently have very limited ability to design parallel algorithms from the theoretical assumption of a switch fabric. There are two ways to work around this. The first involves inventing a scalable direct-connect computing architecture (not any time soon), and the second involves developing new body of computer science that scales on switch fabrics (currently a topic of research at a couple places).

j_andrew_rogers Feb 10, 2011, 9:08 PM
0 points
in reply to: j_andrew_rogers’s comment on: Seattle, WA—Less Wrong Meetup—Sunday February 20th, 2:00 PM
Of course, it turns out I’ll be in London on that day...

j_andrew_rogers Feb 8, 2011, 1:22 AM
0 points
on: Seattle, WA—Less Wrong Meetup—Sunday February 20th, 2:00 PM
Elysian Pub is a good spot. Conveniently located too, as far as I am concerned.