Interesting point…
it’s worth noting that he bought them for 2 pennies and the vendor is now gone, but yeah, sunk cost fallacy seems to be about right. For me, the visualization of the story is more real and powerful to me than remembering an abstract idea. There’s quite a lot of these stories and most of them are rather old, some more of them are here...
http://www.kdnuggets.com/ practical, well curated machine learning from jobs to datasets to articles
torrentz.eu—indexes various torrent sites
http://mvnrepository.com/ - search for includes on maven sites
http://www.crunchbase.com/ evaluating startups etc
slickdeals is dope, that is for sure.
I think high level generalizations are found in aphorisms and teaching stories from all around the world. They can sometimes be shorthand for a whole story, for example I often remind myself not to eat my money referencing this story:
Mulla Nasrudin, as everyone knows, comes from a country where fruit is fruit and meat is meat, and curry is never eaten. One week he was plodding along a dusty Indian road, having newly descended from the high mountains of Kafiristan, when a great thirst overtook him. “Soon,” he said to himself, “I must come across somewhere that good fruit is to be had.” No sooner were the words formed in his brain than he rounded a corner and saw sitting in the shade of a tree a benevolent-looking man with a basket of fruit in front of him. Piled high in the basket were huge, shiny red fruits. “This is what I need,” said Nasrudin. Taking two tiny coppers from the knot at the end of his turban, he handed them to the fruit-seller. Without a word, the man handed him the whole basket, for this kind of fruit is cheap in India, and people usually buy it in smaller amounts. Nasrudin sat down in the place vacated by the fruiterer and started to much the fruits. Within a few seconds, his mouth was burning. Tears streamed down his cheeks; fire was in his throat. The Mulla went on eating. An hour or two passed, and then an Afghan hillman came past. Nasrudin hailed him, “Brother, these infidel fruits must come from the very mouth of Sheitan!” “Fool!” said the hillman. “Hast thou never heard of the chillis of Hindustan? Stop eating them at once, or death will surely claim a victim before the sun is down.” “I cannot move from here,” gasped the Mulla, “until I have finished the whole basketful.” “Madman! those fruits belong in curry! Throw them away at once.” “I am not eating fruit any more,” croaked Nasrudin, “I am eating my money.”
--Idries Shah’s “The Pleasntries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin
“In this clip, from June 1995, Jobs says the difference between using good hardware can be a 2:1 difference for a company. But the difference between a company with superb programmers vs. average ones is 25:1, he says, adding, “That’s probably … certainly the secret to my success. It’s that we’ve gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people.”″
http://www.fastcompany.com/1836987/steve-jobs-the-payoff-of-a-great-employee
This productivity speedup is the key observation. Learn the basics from coursera or whatever and then really internalize the idea that your personal productivity varies in orders of magnitude and learn to arrange your environment to avoid diminishing returns. After you have the ability to do this and you can communicate to nontechnical people, finding work is no problem.
This is a nicely written proposal for a practical, actionable idea. If you’re not in tech, then you should consider doing this. It starts at a practical idea and has ways to branch out from the long term goal to other like including psychometrics and so forth.
I’m biased due to my open source project, but I think this is the kind of idea that fits well with cryptographically secure peer to peer systems that then aggregate into some groups, as the individual opinions are highly variable (correctly, as different brains need different training)
I think it’s appropriate to separate work ethic and akrasia mastery from rationality. Saying that work ethic is a choice is, imho, a relatively simplistic view. People often get fired for something trivial (smoking when a drug test is coming up, repeated absence, etc) that they know full well is a suboptimal decision and the short term benefits of getting high (or whatever) override their concern for the long term possible consequences. I think it makes sense to make some distinction that rationality is the ability to select the right path to walk and self discipline is the wherewithal to walk it.
I wonder how well defined “my goals” are here or how much to trust expectations. I think a rough approximation could involve these various systems generating some impulse map and then OPFC and some other structures get involved in selecting an action. I don’t think a closed form expression of a goal is required in order to say that the goal exists.
If yi would have to do more reading to understand the lattice stuff, it seems reasonable though.
As far as usefulness, the idea I had was you could layer a substrate to dissipate the heat really well. My limited understanding is 85% of the heat jumps the wires somehow and is absorbed by the substrate, which could be engineered arbitrarily. This is important because cnt are very good electrical conductors so you could pair them with a good head absorbing substance and achieve separation of heat and current in ways we have not seen before, which one could speculate as a way to restart moores law progression of speed.
Good Link. Wordnet is also the canonical language reference, but probably doesn’t serve OP’s purpose directly. If you start getting into these kind of graphs though, it’s quite useful to move around with.
USGS has good info.
http://www.usgs.gov/ http://cegis.usgs.gov/ontology.html
http://dbpedia.org/About Also there is no need to scrape wikipedia, work has been done for you. You can do sparql queries to get most of your statements and the CEGIS site supposedly has a working sparql endpoint but I haven’t used that in years.
statements that are ~50% true… this is actually pretty hard, mine some dataset for statistical info?
generally, I would look into RDF, (protege and topbraid composer free will let you poke around for free without knowing the data format)
Freebase has all manner of data in RDF
http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets/ public data sets, not all in RDF but “it’s more important that the data have structure” and all that
I think it tends to be most useful to do things that support multiple different plans, so I had a lot of motives for putting this up here. I don’t have a lot of time, so that’s how I try to roll anyway...
Here is what my motivations were :
In general play with the site—I did a little bit of work on it in the summer of 2010 and I was talking about making a contribution again, so I wanted to play with the interface and understand the code better.
I enjoyed my time at singinst, but was one of the rare people that had never read lesswrong when I arrived there (having found the post on hacker news) so it was an effort to reach out to the community
I deliberately didn’t write much about a topic that I have reason to believe should be interesting to this community, so it was a good level set for the community’s tech level, curiosity and so forth. Definitely more open to stuff than the average forum, but was surprised, would have thought people would be all over this as a weird idea.
definitely not just looking for expert opinions, I do think CNTs are very important and I want to encourage you and everyone else to let your imagination run wild a bit and say what you think, if it’s too dangerous to discuss fine, but I doubt most think that…
for experts that want to set me straight or point out some obvious reason these techs are not useful, let me know but since we are already using CNTs to replace thermal paste for heat sinks so can we do a full chip etc...
Thank you or the well considered response, actually helpful. You have my background about right, I published in a physicists in medicine conference and have the normal background in comparch and whatever classes I took for my math double. Definitely not a condensed matter physicist, will have to read more on phonons.
The idea that this is a hollow tube and so there is no interior region to be effected does seem intuitive. The thing that jumped out at me is that the tube itself remained cool.
I don’t have a good understanding of quantum electrodynamics or phonons and that is one reason I wanted to bring this up for discussion. Some types of scattering like bremsstrahlung seem like they play a role, but it doesn’t seem to explain it, from the lead scientist:
“”We believe that the nanotube’s electrons are creating electrical fields due to the current, and the substrate’s atoms are directly responding to those fields,” Cumings explains. “The transfer of energy is taking place through these intermediaries, and not because the nanotube’s electrons are bouncing off of the substrate’s atoms. While there is some analogy to a microwave oven, the physics behind the two phenomena is actually very different.”″ http://newsdesk.umd.edu/scitech/release.cfm?ArticleID=2657
The normal mechanism for heating in electric current transmission as I understand it, the electrons are bouncing off other atoms causing them to vibrate. So we make a transistor or a wire and we a pass a current through it, the atoms inside get hotter and we then dissipate that heat. They don’t appear to think this is what is going on here.
It seems like the electrons go through the nanotube wire and the energy kind of jumps from the current to the tube to the substrate it’s laying on without accumulating much inside the wire itself.
They claim this is a weird game changer which every scientist wants to find, so either that’s hype or it’s legit. It seems like you have a good understanding, this is in a discussion area, what’s your opinion, is this a big discovery that is going to lead to multilayer chips orders of magnitude faster or is it just a fluke thing?
For you, posting about the fact that you decided not to post it reinforces the idea that you are important enough to have an impact with a blog post, which is more likely to reinforce the most common bias of intelligent people.
I think more helpful people than unhelpful people come here. I remember a friend in grad school who had someone publish an algo he had discovered in the journal issue 1 before his publication, halfway across the world. I think it’s kind of like an avalanche, there is some sense to being quiet until you know enough to have a reasonable estimate of the impact of your action. As a rule though, I’d rather see ideas traded here than behind DARPA firewalls.
Or maybe you just use “how does X advance singularity timelines?”
Very much not this. I was a visiting fellow at singinst and discussed timelines with many people. I still feel some level of ethical obligation to provide a more complete analysis as I was actually converted to have some worry about this recursive self improvement, though I tend to worry more about IA than AI (even if just because of the IA-->AI path) I’m also poking a little bit at the LW codebase again and wanted to try to stimulate a discussion and explore the site. I was looking for actual discussion of the impact of this on people’s timelines, how they are updating on this kind of evidence.
Any you don’t have to put “Singularity” in the name of the article.
It’s interesting to note that I put singularity and timelines plural, implying this trajectory towards “methusalarity” or whatever you want to call it. I linked the other article to show there is some evidence that this particular advance might very well unlock a lot of tech along a lot of interesting, rapidly accelerating change technologies.
A short explanation of context
I posted the most relevant abstract. If they spent some fairly large time writing that, why should I assume I can do better? If you check out the link, this was published in nature nanotech, so that is pretty big news. I linked to papers on tissue engineering, nanotech used internally. That’s three pieces of a puzzle that we’re all trying to get a better handle on.
Something like this
I think that’s a good introductory description, but I thought people on this site already know all this. I think they know moore’s law has stalled and that we’re looking to increase it, that we’re right on the cusp of the computational power required to search solution spaces near the human scale (watson, go ais, deep blue, etc)
So, what techs will change that space… carbon nanotubes and graphene wires are taken pretty seriously. If our mutual goal is to get ahead of this problem, it seems we should all take the time to do the basic reading and you come to certain concepts—heat dissipation, scaling out rather than up, 3D chips, transistor sizes, nanotechnology, graphene and carbon nanotubes, cloud computing, bot nets, cortical columns, human computer interface, neuronal destruction due to wire thickness and so forth.
It is indeed kind of mean that I ask how this piece fits into everyone’s puzzle without disclosing my puzzle, but I do worry about security and that sort of thing and this was a good experiment on how people would respond, thank you for your insights, need to run back to code...
Curious if people would be willing to articulate negative sentiment on this piece?
It seems like we should all see advancements like this as a way of training our intuition about how the tech tree will go and also make efforts to do outreach into important communities as they are growing. If graphene transistor and remote cooling cpus eclipse efforts in parallelism or biological computing, then researchers in that field have a lot of influence to spread to users as well as developers.
Also, to most people this is a highly counterintuitive phenomenon and some people I hung out with for a while used to talk a lot about the utility of physics intuition.
Some hypotheses for negative affect are that the story is not relevant or interesting (strong evidence this is not the case), that those people who have the technical expertise to discuss it don’t want to discuss it off secure channels or…
I think people underestimate the intrinsic computational complexity in solving even relatively simple pattern recognition tasks. There are also all sorts of algorithms where you do a heuristic search through some big space and it’s particularly interesting to note that a lot of programs for finding proofs or optimizing code are in this class. Anybody who thinks computers today are fast doesn’t write enough code.
I have an intuition this particular tech(or related) is going to advance us to the next exponentiating phase of a stacked sigmoid advancement curve that eventually leads to ai.
Would you talk more about the coupling between substrate and carrier electrons, that is not clear to me.
I mean it makes sense that it went somewhere nearby, but why would it transfer at all, only with these particular materials?
Why isn’t it weird to you? If I got a lab report like that i’d be like ok, go ahead and rerun those experiments...
So if you have a background in nanotech and I have compsci, it seems like speculation could generate ideas.
I think that as a community interested in safety, it’s important we keep informed about the advancement trajectory. Understanding limitations and capabilities of fundamental science advancements also provides intelligence on companies to watch for, tech that is likely available soon and so forth.
so, why not speculate? It’s almost free to scan an idea for value.
I spent a fair amount of time in martial arts and have a similar attitude toward generalization of kata/form. This idea is standing behind my consistent emphasis on the benefits of coding (particularly TDD) for this community. It builds thought patterns that are useful for tasks that computers typically perform better.