SamAdams

Karma: −160

SamAdams 10 Jul 2010 3:50 UTC
−7 points
on: Open Thread: July 2010
Karma Encourages Group Think:

LW Karma system allows people to vote up or vote posts down based on good or usless reasons. Without it you cannot make high-level posts or vote idiotic comments or posts down.

Essentially Karma is the currency of popularity of LW. This being said I would wager that this encourages a group think attitude; because people have a strong motivation to get karma and not such a strong incentive to think for themselves and to question the group.

I would also posit that this kind of system causes a stagnation in ideas and thinking within the group. This is evident on LW with how many posts just seem to rehash old news.

Pearls before swine.

SamAdams 6 Jul 2010 23:54 UTC
−12 points
in reply to: orthonormal’s comment on: Cryonics Wants To Be Big
That’s lovely and all. But how is it that my question got voted down and this nothing response got voted up?

Is it because I refer to people in cryostasis as corpse popsicles?

Let’s be frank here the arguments for cryonics are positively flaccid. If what you are banking on is based on some set of technologies not yet invented, many not even thought up yet, with no large scale tests behind your claims then this is a matter of faith not science. This is trying to make the myth of the after-life not a myth.

Cryonics to date, at least the evidence, that these popsicle people will be revived from popsicle land, which is the flip side of Mr Rogers neighborhood, is essentially 98% hand waving and 2% sketchy evidence.

The last link you posted was especially unhelpful since I am inclined to discredit the source for reasons that I have already commented on.
What links here?
- JoshuaZ's comment on Cryonics Wants To Be Big by lsparrish (8 Jul 2010 1:20 UTC; 8 points)

SamAdams 6 Jul 2010 5:07 UTC
−12 points
on: Cryonics Wants To Be Big
You guys are aware that the type of cryonics you are talking about doesn’t exist. So far nobody has been revived from a frozen state. Sure they may be able to freeze organs or small scale things but that is a long ways from resurrecting a dead frozen human.

You also do realize that cryonics may never work in which case you are turning yourself into a corpse popsicle and having to pay for the honor.

How in the world can you assign any value to that proposal? There is a total lack of evidence in support of resurrecting a frozen human because its never been done and as of now nobody knows if it is even possible. So essentially cryonics is a way to spend money on a one in a million chance you might be revived in the future. Why? I would much rather bet on life extension then cryonics.

What you hope is that in the future, if it happens, where this is possible that they won’t just ditch all these warehouses of corpse popsicles because it is deemed to be a waste of money or not cost effective to defrost millions of 1000 year old, way past their prime, corpse popsicles.

Food for thought my future corpse popsicles.

SamAdams 2 Jul 2010 3:36 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: nhamann’s comment on: Open Thread: July 2010
You have, as has been pointed out, failed to understand the purpose of my comment. You will notice I never stated anything about this paper merely some basic guidelines to follow for determining if the paper is worth the effort to read, if one doesn’t have significant knowledge of the field within which the paper was written.

I apologize if my purpose was not clear, but your comment is completely irrelevant and misguided.

SamAdams 2 Jul 2010 1:54 UTC
−3 points
in reply to: HughRistik’s comment on: Open Thread: July 2010
EDIT: This is not an evaluation of the particular paper in question merely some general evaluation guidelines which are useful.

Drop dead easy way to evaluate the paper without reading it: (Not a standard to live by but it works)

1.) look up the authors if they are professors or experts great if its a nobody or a student ignore and discard or take with a grain of salt

2.) was the paper published and where (if on arxiv BEWARE it takes really no skill to get your work posted there anyone can do it)

Criteria: If paper written by respectable authorities or ones who’s opinion can be trusted or where you have enough knowledge to filter for mistakes

If the paper was published in a quality journal or you have enough knowledge to filter

Then if both conditions are met, I find you can do a good job filtering the papers not worth reading.

SamAdams 26 Jun 2010 14:08 UTC
−12 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: How to always have interesting conversations
So where are these huge number of original ideas?

By original do you me that in your very limited scope of “knowledge” they are original or do you mean in the grand scope of all ideas?

I would love to see a list of some of these “original ideas” otherwise I feel I must say that I smell a strong aroma of bullshit.

Food for thought....

SamAdams 28 Jul 2009 2:13 UTC
0 points
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: The Level Above Mine
“On one hand, Eliezer writes extremely good explanations. I’m learning from his style a lot.”

Yeah, but they are rather verbose he tends to use 5 words when 2 would do.

“On the other hand, many people have pointed out that he doesn’t publish novel rigorous results, which kinda detracts from the aura.”

If you want to be in science this is a big issue unless your trying to pull a Wolfram and we all know how that turned out.

“On the third hand, he often finds and corrects non-obvious mathematical mistakes made by other people, including me, and he’s turned out right every time that I know of.”

But the math on this site what little there is tends to be toy problems and very simple. Let’s see him find and correct a mistake in some higher order fluid mechanics equations. I would personally like to see him solve a non-trivial second order non-linear partial differential equation.

“On the fourth hand, I’ve seen multiple cases where he made math mistakes of his own, and have discovered a couple of those myself. But that could be attributed to the fact that he publishes so much, and his error frequency is certainly many times lower than mine.”

That’s horrifying if you’re going to do science you have to control your error rate and that is where peer review comes in. (I recently submitted a paper where I was sloppy on some rounding of some of my results and I got slammed for it, science is all about precision and doing it right) If you don’t do the peer review then you may think your idea is good when if you actually had someone else look at it you’d see it was total trash.

“On the fifth hand, he has published novel non-rigorous arguments on real world topics that I don’t completely agree with but find pretty important. Biggest of them is the idea of Friendly AI.”

But for science and AI this is essentially meaningless since if your goal is to make an FAI then math and rigor is necessary. The ability to write non-technical papers arguing for some idea that is technical is trivial. The challange is getting the technical detail right. This is where I would like to see Eliezer submit some of his work on decision theory show that he is actually making a theory that is properly rigorous.

I think the worst thing would be if people here just wait for Eliezer and he shows up at the end of 10 years with an extremely long non-technical paper that gets us no closer to a real FAI.

But those are just my thoughts.

SamAdams 23 Jul 2009 15:36 UTC
−3 points
in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: Creating The Simple Math of Everything
Oh I get it. I would make the same point either way especially when the idea comes from a non math person. Whenever a non math person says this kind of thing it should make anyone who has done their due diligence cringe.

If you can’t do the math so for the physics if partial differential equations are beyond you then you shouldn’t be talking about physics. There are many fields where knowing the “drop-dead” math is not sufficient to qualify one to talk about it.

Now I know you will all vote me down, I am rocking the boat.

SamAdams 23 Jul 2009 6:48 UTC
−2 points
on: Creating The Simple Math of Everything
Ok, I have to be honest this entire idea makes me cringe, it seems a bit to much like a cheap get out of learning the math idea. Maybe I am biased because I actually am a mathematician but these kind of ideas I think are dangerous since you take away an important bar of admission to fields like physics. If you don’t understand why the math is an important bar of admission look at the google groups physics group.

To be honest I think someone would be better off spending their time learning calculus at minimum then trying to read this kind of general overview. I think what is likely to happen is that either the math will be to simple and muddles the field to the point of being useless or its so complex that nobody can follow it. A good case and point you can understand quantum physics if you understand algebra but your going to be hopeless in a discussion about it without understanding things like the differential equations. Of course there are other fields which you have to know the math, from some of my own experience, fluid mechanics.

For my own part I think required math should include at minimum: Advanced Calculus (not that “calculus class” you took in high school it doesn’t count) Differential Equations Linear Algebra Abstract Algebra Set Theory (basic at least) Number Theory

I think with these you probably can figure a lot of the more complex math out.

I am sure I am leaving a couple out but you get the idea.

SamAdams 21 Jul 2009 0:33 UTC
0 points
on: Creating The Simple Math of Everything
Why re-invent the wheel this has already been done if I understand correctly for example in a bit of a more specific case “Fundamental Formulas of Physics”.