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Karma: 1,107

Toggle Jul 26, 2015, 7:01 PM
12 points
in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: Astronomy, Astrobiology, & The Fermi Paradox I: Introductions, and Space & Time
A primary candidate for free energy in icy moons is thermal venting at the bottom of the liquid oceans; they do have rocky cores, after all. If Jupiter’s tidal forces can cause the volcanism on Io, then it’s reasonable to assume that they can also cause the rocky interior of Europa to produce volcanoes that vent heat and interesting ions in to the liquid water.

There’s also a surprising amount of electrolysis going on in the ice of Europa, because Jupiter has such a terrifying electrical field. I doubt that’s enough to sustain an ecosystem, but it’s enough for me to fantasize about giant upside-down forests of filter-feeders digging their roots upwards to get at the free oxygen.

The preliminary results we’re seeing on Pluto should also adjust your expectations in favor of ice-moon habitability; there, we see active tectonics on a Kuiper Belt Object even without the tidal forcing of a nearby planet. It seems that a giant pile of silicates and water ice provide a great deal of dynamism all on their own.

Toggle Jul 26, 2015, 6:52 PM
9 points
on: Astronomy, Astrobiology, & The Fermi Paradox I: Introductions, and Space & Time
All the upvotes! I am something of an astrobiologist myself, although my emphasis is on geobiology and planetary geology. My current day job is to map out Martian sedimentary rocks with an eye towards liquid water distribution and ancient habitability. My graduate thesis was closer to home, a study of Paleoarchean microbialites.

If you think your posts would benefit from a bit of collaboration, don’t hesitate to ask. Otherwise, I’m eager to see what insights you have from a more astronomy-heavy and pure biology perspective.

Toggle Jul 25, 2015, 5:28 AM
1 point
on: Bayesian Reasoning—Explained Like You’re Five
Depending on how much ‘for five year olds’ is an actual goal rather than a rhetorical device, it may be worth looking over this and similar research. There are proto-Bayesian reasoning patterns in young children, and familiarizing yourself with those patterns may help you provide examples and better target your message, if you plan to iterate/improve this essay.

Toggle Jul 23, 2015, 10:22 PM
13 points
on: Open Thread, Jul. 20 - Jul. 26, 2015
Just an amusing anecdote:

I do work in exoplanet and solar system habitability (mostly Mars) at a university in a lab group with four other professional researchers and a bunch of students. The five of us met for lunch today, and it came out that three of the five had independently read HPMoR to its conclusion. After commenting that Ibyqrzbeg’f Iblntre cyndhr gevpx was a pretty good idea, our PI mentioned that some of the students at Cal Tech used a variant of this on the Curiosity rover- they etched graffiti in to hidden corners of the machine (‘under cover of calibrations’), so that now their names have an expected lifespan of at least a few million years against Martian erosion. It’s a funny story, and also pretty neat to see just how far Eleizer’s pernicious influence goes in some circles.

Toggle Jul 17, 2015, 4:59 PM
1 point
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Examples of AI’s behaving badly

You mean relative, not absolute.

Yes, yes I did. Thanks for the correction.

Toggle Jul 17, 2015, 2:12 PM
2 points
in reply to: Sable’s comment on: Recommended Reading for Evolution?

3) I am very interested in how evolution started—Dawkins references a soup of chemicals, and then the creation of the first replicator mainly by chance over a very long period of time. Is that accurate?

You are not the only one. :)

Most of the current thinking around abiogenesis involves the so-called ‘RNA world’, after observations of messenger RNA molecules (a single strand of ‘naked’ genetic polymer floating around the cell, rather than the double DNA helix). Because complementary nucleotides attract one another to varying degrees, a given nucleotide sequence in mRNA will clump the molecule up in a predictable way. Also, an ‘unraveled’ mRNA molecule would tend to attract complementary nucleotides from outside the molecule and align them in to a similar polymer. In a nucleotide-rich environment, mRNA might be capable of reproduction. Therefore, within the scope of a single molecule, you have a genotype that is directly expressed with a phenotype, and that phenotype would affect the lifespan of the molecule and therefore its chances of reproduction- a plausible origin for natural selection.

My favorite treatment of this scenario (and its problems) is found in Major Transitions in Evolution, also by John Maynard Smith. There’s also Origins of Order by Kauffman, although it’s a much more theoretical treatment, and I’m not sure the returns on investment are all that good.

Toggle Jul 17, 2015, 1:59 PM
1 point
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Examples of AI’s behaving badly
This is not correct, at least in common usage.

A Red Queen’s Race is an evolutionary competition in which absolute position does not change. The classic example is the arms race between foxes and rabbits that results in both becoming faster in absolute terms, but the rate of predation stays fixed. (The origin is Lewis Carrol: “It takes all the running you can do, just to stay in the same place.”)

Toggle Jul 10, 2015, 12:51 AM
0 points
on: Beware the Nihilistic Failure Mode
I’ve always been particularly frustrated with the dismissal of materialism as nihilism in the sense of ‘the philosophical theory that life has no intrinsic meaning or value.’

What it really means is that life has no extrinsic value; we designate no supranatural agent to grant meaning to life or the universe. Instead, we rely on agents within the universe to assign meaning to it according to their own state; a state that is, in turn, a natural phenomenon. If anything, we’re operating under the assumption that meaning in the universe is inherently intrinsic.

Toggle Jun 16, 2015, 1:32 PM
1 point
in reply to: D_Malik’s comment on: Open Thread, Jun. 15 - Jun. 21, 2015
I have two somewhat contradictory arguments.

First, this is probably a poor candidate for the great filter because it lacks the quality of comprehensiveness. Remember that a threat is not a candidate for a great filter if it merely exterminates 90%, or 99%, of all sentient species. Under those conditions, it’s still quite easy to populate the stars with great and powerful civilizations, and so such a threat fails to explain the silence. Humans seem to have ably evaded the malthusian threat so far, in such a way that is not immediately recognizable as a thermodynamic miracle, so it’s reasonable to expect that a nontrivial fraction of all civilizations would do so. At least up to our current stage of development.

Second, I’ll point out that bullets two and four are traits possessed by digital intelligences in competition with one another (possibly the first as well), and they supplement it with a bullet you should have included but didn’t- functional immortality. These conditions correspond to what Nick Bostrom calls a ‘multipolar scenario’, a situation in which there exist a number of different superintelligences with contradicting values. And indeed, there are many smart people who think about the dangers of these selection pressures to a sufficiently advancd civilization.

So, malthusian pressures on biological systems are unlikely to explain the apparent lack of spacefaring civilizations. On the other hand, malthusian pressures on technologically optimized digital entities (possibly an obligate stage of civilization) may be much more of a threat, perhaps even one deserving the name ‘Great Filter’.

Toggle May 30, 2015, 11:15 PM
0 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Request for Advice : A.I. - can I make myself useful?

Most of the fruits that you can gather with the current tools of molecular biology seem to be picked.

I am not quite sure what the scope of the statement is, but that’s strongly counter to the things I’m hearing from the molecular biologists that I know (two family members and a few close friends- I’m plugged in to the field, but not a member of it). Could you elaborate on your reasons for this belief?

My impression is that the discipline has spent the last couple decades amassing a huge (huge) database of observed genes and proteins and whatnot, and isn’t even close to slowing down. The problem is in navigating that wealth of observation and translating it in to actionable technologies. New methods will make discovery radically more efficient, but the technologically available space that these scientists have yet to explore is so large as to be intimidating. If anything, the molecular biologists I know are discouraged by the size of the problem being solved relative to the number of people working on it- they feel like their best efforts can only chip away at an incredibly large edifice.

Toggle May 30, 2015, 2:51 PM
9 points
on: Request for Advice : A.I. - can I make myself useful?
Norman Borlaug is the poster child of how to use genetic manipulation for large-scale impact as an individual, so I don’t think your degree is pointed in the wrong direction. But it is the nature of established institutions to fail at revolutionary thinking, so a survey of the ‘heavyweights’ in your field will tend to be disappointing.

I think a large part of my lack of enthusiasm comes from my belief that advances in artificial intelligence are going to make human-run biology irrelevant before long.

We have only crappy guesses about the completion date for the AGI project, and the success of FAI in particular is contingent on how well our civilization runs in the interim. For example, wartime research might involve risky choices in AGI development, because they have a more urgent need for rapid deployment- an arms race for the ‘first’ AGI would be terrible for our chances of FAI. Genomics won’t help us build a mind, but it can help foster an environment where that research is more likely to go well (see Borlaug again). You might, say, investigate the regulatory networks surrounding genes correlated with sociability or IQ.

I think the ultimate problems we’re tackling (predicting genotype from phenotype, reliable manipulation of biology, curing cancer/aging/death) are insoluble with our current methods—we need effective robots to do the experiments, and A.I. to interpret the results.

Do you believe that you can reliably distinguish ‘problems that cannot be solved by humans’ from ‘problems that humans could solve in principle but haven’t yet’? Personally, I’m very bad at this, especially when the solutions involve unexpected lateral thinking. While I do agree that AGI is more or less the last human invention, I doubt that it’s the next one- we haven’t run out of other things to invent, and I’d be surprised if that was the case in the narrower area of genomics.

It’s probably worth pointing out that you are at the exact stage in your PhD that is most known for general burnout. This looks suspiciously like such an event, with an atypical LW filter. So, this: “I think a large part of my lack of enthusiasm comes from my belief that advances in artificial intelligence...” is likely to be false, since many of your colleagues are experiencing similar feelings at a similar time.

Toggle May 11, 2015, 2:35 AM
15 points
on: Open Thread, May 11 - May 17, 2015
It looks like AI is overtaking Arimaa, which is notable because Arimaa was created specifically as a challenge to AI. Congratulations to the programmer, David Wu.

Toggle Apr 28, 2015, 1:33 PM
0 points
in reply to: TheAncientGeek’s comment on: Experience of typical mind fallacy.
And because the differences we notice and care about are the ones that provide satisfying explanations of prominent experiences, such as loneliness or frustration with others’ behavior. A quality of the self that works ‘behind the scenes’, the kind that only comes up when we talk about the theory of the mind on a fairly high level, will not usually seem like a candidate for such explanations. For example, I’ve known I was smarter than average since childhood, but it took me until college to notice that I was color blind. And color blindness is fairly concrete- like, the relationship between categories and central examples is almost certainly different in my head than in the average guy on the street, but there’s no real way of knowing.

(Or perhaps I’m falling prey to the typical mind fallacy, natch.)

Toggle Apr 27, 2015, 8:05 PM
2 points
in reply to: skeptical_lurker’s comment on: Open Thread, Apr. 27 - May 3, 2015

I wasn’t actually trying to imply that we shouldn’t tolerate homosexuality—I hope this was clear, otherwise I need to work on communicating unambiguously.

This was clear, yes. No worries!

I was trying to make the meta point that right-wing opinions don’t have to be powered by hate, but perhaps they often are because people can’t separate emotions and logic.

It is certainly possible that, in the territory, homosexuality is an existential threat. I believe the Westboro Baptists have a model that describes such a case, to name a famous example. A person who believes that the evidence favors such a territory is morally obliged to take anti-gay positions, assuming that they value human life at all. in other words, yes, there’s a utilitarian calculation that justifies homophobia in certain conditions.

But if I’m not mistaken, the intersection of ‘evidence-based skeptical belief system’ and ‘believes that homosexuality is an existential threat’ is quite small (partially because the former is a smallish group, partially because the latter is rare within that group, partially because most of the models in which homosexuality is an existential threat tend to invoke a wrathful God). But that’s an empirical claim, not a political stance.

Since we’re asking a political question, rather than exploring the theoretical limits of human belief systems, it’s fair to talk about coalitions and social forces. In that domain, to the extent that there are empirical claims being made at all, it’s clear that the political influence aligned with and opposed to the gay rights movement is almost entirely a matter of motivated cognition.

To generalize out from the homosexuality example, I think it’s trivially true that utilitarian calculations could put you in the position to support or oppose any number of things on the basis of existential threats. I mean, maybe it turns out that we’re all doomed unless we systematically exterminate all cephalopods or something. But even if that were true, then the political forces that motivated many people to unite behind the cause of squid-stomping would not resemble a convincing utilitarian argument. So, if you’re asking what causes anti-squid hysteria to be a politically relevant force, rather than a rare and somewhat surprising idea that you occasionally find on the fringes of the rationalosphere, then utilitarianism isn’t really an explanation.

If you’re looking for a reason to think that any given person with otherwise abhorrent politics might, actually, be a decent human- yes, you can get there. But if you’re looking for a reason why those politics exist, then this kind of calculation will fall short.

Toggle Apr 27, 2015, 7:24 PM
21 points
on: Experience of typical mind fallacy.
I wouldn’t be too surprised to learn that people are capable of independently thinking that they have highly atypical minds while simultaneously falling prey to the typical mind fallacy. In general, I expect myself to spend more time thinking about the overt things that make me feel unique, without necessarily being aware of the things that underlie those differences. With the TMF, it’s the unexamined assumptions that get you.

Toggle Apr 27, 2015, 7:15 PM
−1 points
in reply to: skeptical_lurker’s comment on: Open Thread, Apr. 27 - May 3, 2015

P(tolerance of homosexuality will destroy civiliseation)-P(tolerance of homosexuality will save civiliseation)>10^-30

Do you have a reason to consider this, and not the inverse [i.e. P(intolerance of homosexuality will destroy civilization)-P(intolerance of homosexuality will save civilization)>10^-30]?

I don’t think this is even a Pascal’s mugging as such, just a framing issue.

Toggle Apr 27, 2015, 4:26 PM
3 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open Thread, Apr. 27 - May 3, 2015
This is (I think) an extension of mindfulness practice. So the ultimate point of the exercise is to help you conscientiously notice and assign weight to a certain class of experience. Your feeling of entitlement is opposed to that in the sense that humans tend not to notice a well-functioning machine. So if we put a dollar in a vending machine and candy comes out, we might enjoy the candy, or be sad about not having a dollar any more, but we rarely take any time to be excited about how great it is to have a machine that performs the swap. Same with getting a paycheck.

Ideally, gratitude journaling expands the class of things you have to be happy about. It adds the vending machine as an object of joy, rather than an ‘inert’ object that catches our attention only when it fails.

Toggle Apr 22, 2015, 8:20 PM
5 points
in reply to: Mark_Friedenbach’s comment on: Open Thread, Apr. 20 - Apr. 26, 2015
In ancient Greece, it was common knowledge that the liver was the thinking organ. This is obvious, because it is purple (the color of royalty) and triangular (mathematically and philosophically significant).

Toggle Apr 11, 2015, 3:57 AM
1 point
on: On immortality
Hysteresis exists. Complex models are often time-dependent, and initial states may not always be retrievable under any circumstances.

In the immediate sense, the world we experience obviously has the quality of irreversible change. On a larger scale, our cosmos could easily be such a system- even without ChaosMote’s excellent statistical treatment, we can’t be sure that, just because things in general continue to happen, an event like the big bang could happen an infinite number of times. No matter how wide the scope of your analysis, it may be that the ‘final answer’ is that we are indeed working within a single time-dependent system.

I think that the most reasonable thing to assume is that every possible kind of reality exists. Why? Well, there seems to be no good reason for it not to. To assume that the universe is the sole reality is one assumption too many for me, and I say the fewer assumptions there are, the better.

If I’m not mistaken, this is the strong assumption underlying the whole post. And I would encourage you to consider this claim in probabilistic terms, rather than just working within a believe/disbelieve binary. What is your degree of confidence in this proposition, and why?

Toggle Apr 3, 2015, 4:25 PM
4 points
in reply to: Salemicus’s comment on: Stupid Questions April 2015
If nothing else, because it would be prohibitively expensive. Globally, something like 70 million barrels of oil are produced per day. The total value of all barrels produced in a year varies depending on the price of oil, but at a highish but realistic $100bbl, you’re talking about two and a half trillion US dollars per year. If you were to reduce the supply by introducing a ‘buyer’ (read: subsidy to defer production) for some large percentage of those barrels, then the price would go even higher; this project would probably cost more than the entire global military budget combined, with no immediate practical or economic benefits.