Saturday links

Biography of the painter David Hockney (1937 - ). "Hockney’s life can be seen as one long quest for brighter sunshine, stronger colours, sharper light."Xi Jinping's war on spontaneous order, at Scholar's Stage. "That is the thread that ties all of these crackdowns together. Each targets an industry that seems to strip people of their …

Learn ALL the things?

In the history of artificial intelligence, you can see two trends.  The first is the growth of the amount of computation available to AI systems. If you consider just how little computation was available for AI for its first few decades, the field seems even younger than it is. Many of the advances of machine …

How to be a computer

[This post is part 2 of a summary of Gualtiero Piccinini's "Computational Modeling vs. Computational Explanation: Is Everything a Turing Machine, and Does It Matter to the Philosophy of Mind?" (2004)] In part 1, we saw that Gualtiero Piccinini wants to give a formulation of computation that does not entail pancomputationalism, the view that every …

Some things are computers

[This post is a summary of Gualtiero Piccinini's "Computational Modeling vs. Computational Explanation: Is Everything a Turing Machine, and Does It Matter to the Philosophy of Mind?" (2004)] Some things are pretty obviously computers. Calculators, for example. One of the landmark ideas of the last century was that in some important sense that is shared …

What do psychologists do?

[This post is a summary of ‘What is Psychological Explanation?’ by William Bechtel and Cory Wright]  Science is in the business of offering explanations. Why do certain things happen the way that they do? For example, Galileo showed that you can explain the period of a pendulum (T) in terms of the length of the …

Why current AIs are not conscious (according to some)

In their 2017 paper "What is consciousness, and could machines have it?", Dehaene, Lau, and Kouider argue that the computations performed by current AI systems are not conscious, and outline what sorts of computations would need to be performed for them to be so. They make a distinction between three kinds of computations: C0: unconscious …

How I use money penalties for accountability

Here are two common ways people use money penalties to get things done. One is unethical, the other self-defeating. If they fail to accomplish something by a certain time, they:  Pledge to donate money to an “anti-charity”, i.e. a charity or advocacy group that is making the world worse. For example, the Society for Shoving Grandmothers. …

Why it’s important to compete with yourself

If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. -Desiderata It’s important to compete with yourself and not with other people. Instead of constantly trying to be better than other people and taking them as your standard, you should instead strive …

The importance of mastering notation

This bit of advice has completely changed the way I approach learning math - from the excellent Michael Nielsen: "Over the years, I've often helped people learn technical subjects such as quantum mechanics. Over time you come to see patterns in how people get stuck. One common pattern is that people think they're getting stuck …

Friday links

-Superforecasting the end of of Covid, by Michael Story. "If there’s no reward for getting things right, then accuracy will drop down the list of incentives behind the forecasts. Instead pundits will say what they think will cheer people up, what will promote their career via wacky, attention-grabbing predictions, what shows loyalty to their friends …