It is true that people are very likely to judge a given policy based on a large extent whether it came from their own party or an opposing party. And this isn't just US specific or political party specific; it even happens in other disputes. See for example https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249728513_Reactive_Devaluation_of_an_Israeli_vs_Palestinian_Peace_Proposal where Israelis and Palestinians would react positively or negatively to the same peace proposal simply based on who they were told had made the proposal in question. However, even given that this is a widespread thing, Trump's behavior has been far more extreme than that. Obama and W. Bush for example did roll back rules, regulations, and policies each made by their predecessor from the other party, but not nearly as extensively as Trump is doing. There really is a massive difference in scope here. And that's occurred even as Trump has made very few novel legislative or regulatory moves (other than just massive attempts at deregulation).
I actually originally had written it with the Falcon 9 as the example but it seemed that sticking to non-reusable rockets would make the analogy more clear so I edited it to the Saturn V before submitting.
Yeah, I was careful to not say that. I said that the commentator liked certain STEM fields, not that they didn't like others, but I can see how one could have read it as you have. I suppose the snarky aspect didn't really add much to the conversation.
Um, did you read the post I was responding to? They said the other prizes "don't recognize much of anything"- if they had said just that the other prizes weren't for science, that would be trivially true.
All three of those prizes do recognize. You can maybe argue that literature has been overly focused on European literature and even more so on Swedish literature to the exclusion of others, and with a very specific idea of what counts as "literature" (See some discussion here http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2008/10/nobel_gas.html). But the works being recognized are still major literary achievements.
However, the Peace prize has for all its issues, recognized some real accomplishments. Last year, the prize went to Juan Manuel Santos for his work trying to end the ongoing violence in Columbia, and although the initial peace deal was rejected by the voters, the follow-up seems to be really holding and FARC seems to have been mostly disarmed. Real progress can occur.
The Economics prize has also gone for serious and substantial work. (Note that the Econ prize is actually from a separate grant and awarded by a separate body (hence being referred to at the Nobel Memorial Prize officially rather than the Nobel Prize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Economic_Sciences).) Examples of substantial work include the 2005 prize to Schelling and Aumann recognized major work that is relevant not just to understanding economics, but many related fields including general negotiation theory and some aspects of what is sometimes called political economy. For example, the idea of a Schelling point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory) has found its way into standard negotiating texts, and it is useful for simply making people more likely to come to agreements. Similarly, Aumann's agreement theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann's_agreement_theorem is important not just in economics (for understanding how markets behave) but has also become relevant in philosophy as well as AI research. This is not the only example in econ, just one of the more blatant.
That you personally really like certain specific STEM fields says more about you than it does about the prizes.
This is much more of a problem for physics than other fields. While there are physics papers with massive numbers of authors, even in biology one won't see more than about 30 authors. And in math it is rare for a paper to have more than 3 or 4 authors- so the equivalent award there, the Fields Medal, is completely reasonable. In some of the physical sciences such as physics one has these very large author lists, and it isn't always completely clear how much actual work was done by some of the people on the collaborations; astronomy seems to be in a similar situation (but since astronomy doesn't have its own famous award, it doesn't come up in this context).
Note also that Nobel's original will did not have the restriction to 3 people, although it actually had an intent of it going to a single person https://www.nobelprize.org/alfred_nobel/will/will-full.html, so if we're going to allow it to go to multiple, why stop at 3? On the other hand, it seems that people understand that when someone like the director of LIGO gets the prize that they are functionally getting it for the project as a whole.
I agree that the measurement itself is fundamentally the same, but to get to this level of sensitivity required massive innovations, many clever tricks, and extremely precise optics. It is obviously a continuation of the line of thinking of M&M, but that's in the same way say the Saturn V is a continuation of the line of thinking as the V-2 or the Redstone.
Yes, completely. If we had failed to detect gravitational waves it would be an incredibly big deal. Right now, we're trying to understand how to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity. If LIGO had not detected gravitational waves that would be a major sign of what to do, and would also help us see a large-scale area where GR breaks down (right now, QM works very well on a small scale and GR works very well on a large scale). Some people actively expressed disappointment that LIGO not only detected the waves but detected waves that matched the predictions of GR nearly perfectly.
It dates to the 1970s when they firmed up a lot of the rules (including that it could only go to at most three people). Prior to that, it had gone to someone who had very recently died. The thought process isn't completely clear. It appears that since the original bequest stated that the reward should go to work in the previous year (although it very often in practice does not), that if the person was dead, then they had obviously not done recent enough work. Another thought process seems to be that if it is in part to promote further work, then giving it to a dead person doesn't make sense.
While Morley and Michelson did make inteferometers, what they were using to measure was very different than gravitational waves, and relied on a degree of sensitivity many orders of magnitude lower (hence for example they didn't use lasers (which of course they couldn't because they weren't invented yet)). Many aspects of LIGO are so different than a classical inteferometer that it really should be regarded for most purposes as a different type of instrument completely.
In terms of Nobel prizes per a capita the US isn't even in the top 10 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/maps-and-graphics/countries-nobel-prize-winners-per-capita/. It is a combination of the high US population and a somewhat high per a capita that has this impact. Note by the way that this data does have a few which are a bit silly since a single Nobel for a very tiny country immediately pushes it to the top of the list, but Israel, Germany, the Netherlands, and others are all on the list without relying on really tiny populations. The situation is similar with the Fields Medal (which is roughly the equivalent of the Nobel for math) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Fields_Medallists where the US per a capita is well above average but not at all the highest, and it is the large US population which then puts it in the top. Note by the way, that this data is approximate: a lot of people (especially the US ones) are immigrants from other countries or have dual citizenship, so these sorts of numbers are necessarily approximations. The really striking thing though is that China and India have very large populations with surprisingly few such prizes; similarly, one way of seeing how much trouble Russia was having scientifically during the Cold War was how few per a capita Nobels and Fields Medals they had (although to some extent this may have also been connected to political issues).
Kip Thorne has done a lot of impressive work, not just on LIGO. In this context though, Thorne, Weiss, and Ronald Drever (who died last year and thus wasn't eligible for the Nobel), proposed a detector of this type in the 1980s. Barry Barish got the prize as the LIGO director.
Since the initial work with LIGO, similar apparatuses are also coming online, including Virgo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgo_interferometer . There's also a proposal to set up a similar system in India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Initiative_in_Gravitational-wave_Observations. Having multiple detectors will have a whole host of benefits: this type of system has trouble detecting waves that come from certain angles so having multiple separate detectors will help cover those angles. Also, since we can measure the exact time difference from when a given wave hits the detectors we can use that to pinpoint the location much more narrowly. Along with neutrino telescopes, this sort of system is pretty much one of only two ways we can get information about far away stellar objects that isn't simply from the electromagnetic spectrum.
This isn't a thought experiment though. We have actual split-brain patients and we can see how they react. I'm not sure why you think that this kills the patient either, since for most purposes, such patients act very similarly to how they did before the procedure.
No, this doesn't even do that; what it does suggest is that a purely classical simulation would take a large amount of resources. It doesn't even prove that.
What they do suggests (but does not prove) that a purely classical simulation would require exponential size. So, nothing here rules out using a quantum computer to efficiently simulate a quantum system. Moreover, they don't give any proof of the claim, just a strong plausibility argument with an identified potential obstruction; rigorously proving what they want would be a stronger claim than P != PSPACE. Here P is the set of problems which can be solved on a classical computer in time polynomial of the input, and PSPACE is the same thing but for space, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSPACE . This is about one step away from the very famous P ?= NP problem. In fact, their claim if they had a proof would be even stronger than P !=PSPACE because it essentially comes down to making what amounts to an argument that P != BQP (where BQP is what a quantum computer can do in polynomial time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BQP). We already have very good evidence that quantum systems cannot be easily classically simulated even without gravitational effects like they are talking about here; In particular, Aaronson and Arkhipov's work on Boson Samplying https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boson_sampling strongly suggests that even a system just trying to accurately simulate the behavior of photons cannot be simulated classically without superpolynomial sized resources. Frankly, I'm a bit surprised that they don't cite or mention boson sampling at all. It is possible that I'm misinterpreting this new result, but if I'm correct this really isn't a big deal at all.
Pence would be horrible in many respects, but he wouldn't be nearly as incompetent or blustering. The sheer risk of nuclear war by itself is so severe with Trump, that I'd be completely willing to put up with Pence's theocratic tendencies if it meant we wouldn't have that risk.
George W. Bush and Obama were people who at least cared a tiny, tiny amount about civil liberties even as they established precedents which were easily abused. And now, we're seeing what happens when one has people in charge (Trump and Sessions) who don't even bother pretending that they care about civil liberties.
Because it could happen and isn't at all unlikely. Yes, it is possible that clean power costs will go down enough so that the difference isn't that large, and given Musk's other projects (especially Solar City), that's certainly on his own agenda, but it has to go down a lot for this to work. As a rule of thumb, every time one converts a form of energy to another form, you lose some usable energy, so there's an inherent inefficiency in converting electricity to methane since one is converting electric energy to chemical potential energy. No, we're not "certain" about this, but this is one of the most obvious possible problems, and has been one under discussion since Musk first proposed the Raptor engine. If we were to only talk about things where we were certain there would be no ability to talk about pretty much anything; discussion of likely issues will by nature deal with likely scenarios not absolutely certain scenarios.
Airplanes have crashes on occasion and people still take them. If something is cheap enough and quick enough, people will do it once it becomes routine. Furthermore, like airplanes, one gets more safety as one runs it more since one has more data about what minor things have gone wrong or things have almost gone wrong, and since all the rockets are reusable one is getting much better data than one would for disposable rockets since one can inspect the craft after.
The real issue is going to be cost; in that regard, they will need around 900 tons of propellant (they don't need to fill up the rocket for a sub-orbital lob, so the necessarily velocity is a lot lower, around 4.5 km/s as opposed to around 9 km/s to get to low Earth orbit), so if they can (like an airplane) make fuel be the bulk of the cost for day-to-day operations, one is looking at a plausible price range. The only thing that seems to be potentially hurting them price wise is the desire to manufacture their own methane which makes sense if one wants a carbon neutral production (Musk cares a lot about global warming) and gives them practice with infrastructure they'll need on Mars, but that could massively increase the cost of fuel.
While I agree with some of your points, buying carbon offsets is not one of them. The key moral distinction is that there's nothing wrong intrinsically morally wrong with producing CO2, so as wrong as long as the total net CO2 is lower one is acting reasonably. This is distinct from say murdering a person and donating enough money to save two people from malaria; murder is bad at an absolute level. CO2 is only bad because of what high levels of it lead to.
The situation you are concerned with, while certainly a concern (and certainly a cause for worry) is not an existential risk to humanity as a whole. Musk, Bostrom and others are concerned in part because the stakes if an AI itself takes over are much much higher.
Fiction: I'm currently reading a set of short stories by Alex Shvartsman, titled "Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma and Other Stories." He's a fun writer. Some of the stories are ideas I've seen before but there's a broad breath of stories, including classic scifi, fantasy, and magical realism. I also am rereading the Alcatraz v. the Evil Librarians which is made for about 10 year olds but is absolutely hilarious and well done (which shouldn't be surprising since the author, Brandon Sanderson is in general an amazing writer).
Non-fiction: I'm reading "Seeing like a State" which is a fascinating read about the impact (often negative) of governments trying to order society around them, even when it is just doing so to try to gather better data. I'm also reading "An Illustrated Theory of Numbers" which is a highly accessible number theory book that just came out and appears to be very broadly accessible; I'm considering using it the next time I teach number theory.
Slashdot Mirror
It is true that people are very likely to judge a given policy based on a large extent whether it came from their own party or an opposing party. And this isn't just US specific or political party specific; it even happens in other disputes. See for example https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249728513_Reactive_Devaluation_of_an_Israeli_vs_Palestinian_Peace_Proposal where Israelis and Palestinians would react positively or negatively to the same peace proposal simply based on who they were told had made the proposal in question. However, even given that this is a widespread thing, Trump's behavior has been far more extreme than that. Obama and W. Bush for example did roll back rules, regulations, and policies each made by their predecessor from the other party, but not nearly as extensively as Trump is doing. There really is a massive difference in scope here. And that's occurred even as Trump has made very few novel legislative or regulatory moves (other than just massive attempts at deregulation).
How is the goal to inspire rather than reward at all relevant to anything I said?
I actually originally had written it with the Falcon 9 as the example but it seemed that sticking to non-reusable rockets would make the analogy more clear so I edited it to the Saturn V before submitting.
Can you explain how it being designed to inspire greatness is at all relevant to what I said? I'm not seeing it.
Yeah, I was careful to not say that. I said that the commentator liked certain STEM fields, not that they didn't like others, but I can see how one could have read it as you have. I suppose the snarky aspect didn't really add much to the conversation.
Um, did you read the post I was responding to? They said the other prizes "don't recognize much of anything"- if they had said just that the other prizes weren't for science, that would be trivially true.
All three of those prizes do recognize. You can maybe argue that literature has been overly focused on European literature and even more so on Swedish literature to the exclusion of others, and with a very specific idea of what counts as "literature" (See some discussion here http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2008/10/nobel_gas.html). But the works being recognized are still major literary achievements.
However, the Peace prize has for all its issues, recognized some real accomplishments. Last year, the prize went to Juan Manuel Santos for his work trying to end the ongoing violence in Columbia, and although the initial peace deal was rejected by the voters, the follow-up seems to be really holding and FARC seems to have been mostly disarmed. Real progress can occur.
The Economics prize has also gone for serious and substantial work. (Note that the Econ prize is actually from a separate grant and awarded by a separate body (hence being referred to at the Nobel Memorial Prize officially rather than the Nobel Prize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Economic_Sciences) .) Examples of substantial work include the 2005 prize to Schelling and Aumann recognized major work that is relevant not just to understanding economics, but many related fields including general negotiation theory and some aspects of what is sometimes called political economy. For example, the idea of a Schelling point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory) has found its way into standard negotiating texts, and it is useful for simply making people more likely to come to agreements. Similarly, Aumann's agreement theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann's_agreement_theorem is important not just in economics (for understanding how markets behave) but has also become relevant in philosophy as well as AI research. This is not the only example in econ, just one of the more blatant.
That you personally really like certain specific STEM fields says more about you than it does about the prizes.
This is much more of a problem for physics than other fields. While there are physics papers with massive numbers of authors, even in biology one won't see more than about 30 authors. And in math it is rare for a paper to have more than 3 or 4 authors- so the equivalent award there, the Fields Medal, is completely reasonable. In some of the physical sciences such as physics one has these very large author lists, and it isn't always completely clear how much actual work was done by some of the people on the collaborations; astronomy seems to be in a similar situation (but since astronomy doesn't have its own famous award, it doesn't come up in this context).
Note also that Nobel's original will did not have the restriction to 3 people, although it actually had an intent of it going to a single person https://www.nobelprize.org/alfred_nobel/will/will-full.html, so if we're going to allow it to go to multiple, why stop at 3? On the other hand, it seems that people understand that when someone like the director of LIGO gets the prize that they are functionally getting it for the project as a whole.
I agree that the measurement itself is fundamentally the same, but to get to this level of sensitivity required massive innovations, many clever tricks, and extremely precise optics. It is obviously a continuation of the line of thinking of M&M, but that's in the same way say the Saturn V is a continuation of the line of thinking as the V-2 or the Redstone.
Yes, completely. If we had failed to detect gravitational waves it would be an incredibly big deal. Right now, we're trying to understand how to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity. If LIGO had not detected gravitational waves that would be a major sign of what to do, and would also help us see a large-scale area where GR breaks down (right now, QM works very well on a small scale and GR works very well on a large scale). Some people actively expressed disappointment that LIGO not only detected the waves but detected waves that matched the predictions of GR nearly perfectly.
It dates to the 1970s when they firmed up a lot of the rules (including that it could only go to at most three people). Prior to that, it had gone to someone who had very recently died. The thought process isn't completely clear. It appears that since the original bequest stated that the reward should go to work in the previous year (although it very often in practice does not), that if the person was dead, then they had obviously not done recent enough work. Another thought process seems to be that if it is in part to promote further work, then giving it to a dead person doesn't make sense.
While Morley and Michelson did make inteferometers, what they were using to measure was very different than gravitational waves, and relied on a degree of sensitivity many orders of magnitude lower (hence for example they didn't use lasers (which of course they couldn't because they weren't invented yet)). Many aspects of LIGO are so different than a classical inteferometer that it really should be regarded for most purposes as a different type of instrument completely.
In terms of Nobel prizes per a capita the US isn't even in the top 10 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/maps-and-graphics/countries-nobel-prize-winners-per-capita/. It is a combination of the high US population and a somewhat high per a capita that has this impact. Note by the way that this data does have a few which are a bit silly since a single Nobel for a very tiny country immediately pushes it to the top of the list, but Israel, Germany, the Netherlands, and others are all on the list without relying on really tiny populations. The situation is similar with the Fields Medal (which is roughly the equivalent of the Nobel for math) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Fields_Medallists where the US per a capita is well above average but not at all the highest, and it is the large US population which then puts it in the top. Note by the way, that this data is approximate: a lot of people (especially the US ones) are immigrants from other countries or have dual citizenship, so these sorts of numbers are necessarily approximations. The really striking thing though is that China and India have very large populations with surprisingly few such prizes; similarly, one way of seeing how much trouble Russia was having scientifically during the Cold War was how few per a capita Nobels and Fields Medals they had (although to some extent this may have also been connected to political issues).
Kip Thorne has done a lot of impressive work, not just on LIGO. In this context though, Thorne, Weiss, and Ronald Drever (who died last year and thus wasn't eligible for the Nobel), proposed a detector of this type in the 1980s. Barry Barish got the prize as the LIGO director.
Since the initial work with LIGO, similar apparatuses are also coming online, including Virgo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgo_interferometer . There's also a proposal to set up a similar system in India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Initiative_in_Gravitational-wave_Observations. Having multiple detectors will have a whole host of benefits: this type of system has trouble detecting waves that come from certain angles so having multiple separate detectors will help cover those angles. Also, since we can measure the exact time difference from when a given wave hits the detectors we can use that to pinpoint the location much more narrowly. Along with neutrino telescopes, this sort of system is pretty much one of only two ways we can get information about far away stellar objects that isn't simply from the electromagnetic spectrum.
This isn't a thought experiment though. We have actual split-brain patients and we can see how they react. I'm not sure why you think that this kills the patient either, since for most purposes, such patients act very similarly to how they did before the procedure.
No, this doesn't even do that; what it does suggest is that a purely classical simulation would take a large amount of resources. It doesn't even prove that.
What they do suggests (but does not prove) that a purely classical simulation would require exponential size. So, nothing here rules out using a quantum computer to efficiently simulate a quantum system. Moreover, they don't give any proof of the claim, just a strong plausibility argument with an identified potential obstruction; rigorously proving what they want would be a stronger claim than P != PSPACE. Here P is the set of problems which can be solved on a classical computer in time polynomial of the input, and PSPACE is the same thing but for space, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSPACE . This is about one step away from the very famous P ?= NP problem. In fact, their claim if they had a proof would be even stronger than P !=PSPACE because it essentially comes down to making what amounts to an argument that P != BQP (where BQP is what a quantum computer can do in polynomial time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BQP). We already have very good evidence that quantum systems cannot be easily classically simulated even without gravitational effects like they are talking about here; In particular, Aaronson and Arkhipov's work on Boson Samplying https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boson_sampling strongly suggests that even a system just trying to accurately simulate the behavior of photons cannot be simulated classically without superpolynomial sized resources. Frankly, I'm a bit surprised that they don't cite or mention boson sampling at all. It is possible that I'm misinterpreting this new result, but if I'm correct this really isn't a big deal at all.
Pence would be horrible in many respects, but he wouldn't be nearly as incompetent or blustering. The sheer risk of nuclear war by itself is so severe with Trump, that I'd be completely willing to put up with Pence's theocratic tendencies if it meant we wouldn't have that risk.
George W. Bush and Obama were people who at least cared a tiny, tiny amount about civil liberties even as they established precedents which were easily abused. And now, we're seeing what happens when one has people in charge (Trump and Sessions) who don't even bother pretending that they care about civil liberties.
Because it could happen and isn't at all unlikely. Yes, it is possible that clean power costs will go down enough so that the difference isn't that large, and given Musk's other projects (especially Solar City), that's certainly on his own agenda, but it has to go down a lot for this to work. As a rule of thumb, every time one converts a form of energy to another form, you lose some usable energy, so there's an inherent inefficiency in converting electricity to methane since one is converting electric energy to chemical potential energy. No, we're not "certain" about this, but this is one of the most obvious possible problems, and has been one under discussion since Musk first proposed the Raptor engine. If we were to only talk about things where we were certain there would be no ability to talk about pretty much anything; discussion of likely issues will by nature deal with likely scenarios not absolutely certain scenarios.
Um, I'm not certain. Notice that I said "could massively increase the cost" not that it would do so.
Airplanes have crashes on occasion and people still take them. If something is cheap enough and quick enough, people will do it once it becomes routine. Furthermore, like airplanes, one gets more safety as one runs it more since one has more data about what minor things have gone wrong or things have almost gone wrong, and since all the rockets are reusable one is getting much better data than one would for disposable rockets since one can inspect the craft after.
The real issue is going to be cost; in that regard, they will need around 900 tons of propellant (they don't need to fill up the rocket for a sub-orbital lob, so the necessarily velocity is a lot lower, around 4.5 km/s as opposed to around 9 km/s to get to low Earth orbit), so if they can (like an airplane) make fuel be the bulk of the cost for day-to-day operations, one is looking at a plausible price range. The only thing that seems to be potentially hurting them price wise is the desire to manufacture their own methane which makes sense if one wants a carbon neutral production (Musk cares a lot about global warming) and gives them practice with infrastructure they'll need on Mars, but that could massively increase the cost of fuel.
While I agree with some of your points, buying carbon offsets is not one of them. The key moral distinction is that there's nothing wrong intrinsically morally wrong with producing CO2, so as wrong as long as the total net CO2 is lower one is acting reasonably. This is distinct from say murdering a person and donating enough money to save two people from malaria; murder is bad at an absolute level. CO2 is only bad because of what high levels of it lead to.
The situation you are concerned with, while certainly a concern (and certainly a cause for worry) is not an existential risk to humanity as a whole. Musk, Bostrom and others are concerned in part because the stakes if an AI itself takes over are much much higher.
Fiction: I'm currently reading a set of short stories by Alex Shvartsman, titled "Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma and Other Stories." He's a fun writer. Some of the stories are ideas I've seen before but there's a broad breath of stories, including classic scifi, fantasy, and magical realism. I also am rereading the Alcatraz v. the Evil Librarians which is made for about 10 year olds but is absolutely hilarious and well done (which shouldn't be surprising since the author, Brandon Sanderson is in general an amazing writer).
Non-fiction: I'm reading "Seeing like a State" which is a fascinating read about the impact (often negative) of governments trying to order society around them, even when it is just doing so to try to gather better data. I'm also reading "An Illustrated Theory of Numbers" which is a highly accessible number theory book that just came out and appears to be very broadly accessible; I'm considering using it the next time I teach number theory.