Thinking Complete

Note: Alexey Guzey has identified a number of flaws in this book, casting doubt on its veracity. Pending further investigation, the information in this summary shouldn't be considered reliable. I read this book because I knew that it would tell me to sleep more, and I hoped it would cite enough scary statistics that I'd be likely to actually follow through. Well, it worked - I'm keeping a copy on my bedside table for the foreseeable future, just as a reminder. In addition to the exhortations to get more sleep, it contains a variety of other interesting and important facts about sleep. What is sleep? Human sleep consists of cycles lasting about 1.5 hours, each of which contains first a period of NREM (Non-Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, then a period of REM sleep. In brain scans, the former consists of slow, deep brain waves, while the latter shows the same frenetic activity as an awake brain. As the night goes on, cycles feature a higher proportion of REM sleep. This m

It was very striking to me to contrast the two recent successes of OpenAI: one, OpenAI Five , beating some of the best humans at a complex game in a sophisticated virtual environment; and the other, Dactyl , fumblingly manipulating blocks in ways that children master at young ages. This is not to diminish how much of an achievement Dactyl is - no other reinforcement learning system has come close to this sort of performance in a physical task. But it does show that the real world is very complicated , compared with even our most advanced virtual worlds. To be fair, the graphics and physics engines used to render videos are becoming very good (and as movies show, practically indistinguishable from real life when enough work is put in). Audio generation is worse, except on human voices, which are now very convincing - but background sounds aren't a crucial component of our environment anyway. The biggest experiential difference between current simulations and the real world seems to

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity."                                                    W. B. Yeats The idea that things aren't going great these days is pretty widespread; there's a glut of books pointing out various problems. Cowen's achievement in this one is in weaving together disparate strands of evidence to identify the zeitgeist which summarises the overall trend - in a word, complacency. There are at least two ways in which people can be complacent. Either they're living pretty good lives, and want to solidify their positions as much as possible. Or they're unsatisfied with their lives, but unwilling to mobilise or take the risks which could improve their situations. (People in the middle of the economic spectrum showcase aspects of both). What's the opposite of complacency? Dynamism and risk-taking - traits which have always been associated with immigrants, and with America, the land of immig

High-level analysis of reinforcement learning Building machines that learn and think like people . Lake et al. think that human learners are doing something fundamentally different from machine learners: we carry out tasks in the context of many years of related tasks, whereas ML systems cannot. So, they ask, "how do we bring to bear rich prior knowledge to learn new tasks and solve problems so quickly?" The core ingredients they identify are intuitive models of physics and psychology, which exist from infanthood, and the capacity for rapid building of mental models which can be used for classification, prediction, communication, explanation, and composition. The skill of model-building can be distinguished from pattern recognition, which the authors suggest makes up much of the recent progress in deep learning. In particular, notions of composition, causation and hierarchy which are central to models may be weak or non-existent in pattern recognition. Further, they note

Over the last decade and a half, I've spent a lot of time trying out different hobbies. I've gotten pretty good at many of them, but never excellent at any. Now that I've left university, I've decided that I should explore a bit less and focus a bit more, both because I'll have less free time while working, and because you get more out of things when you're very good at them and are very involved in a community around them. But how to choose the optimal combination of hobbies? This is something I think people don't plan well enough, especially for their children. So many girls end up spending a huge amount of time on ballet or gymnastics or figure skating - perhaps the three sports which it's most difficult to continue past childhood, since they're so hard on your body and so youth-focused. And the vast majority of kids who learn instruments - even those who really enjoy playing - end up dropping them a few years down the line. It's true that th

This blog often concerns itself with death, but not so much with that other unyielding constant of life, taxes. Inspired by a conversation with my friend Will, I’ve decided to rectify that imbalance. Apart from complaints, what is there to say about taxes? Economic theory says they should: Be very difficult to evade. Not disincentivise the production of things we actually want. Be progressive - ideally in percentage terms, but at least in absolute terms. A poll tax (a flat tax on all adults) meets criteria 1 and 2, since I doubt people will take it into account much when having children. But it fails dramatically on 3 - it's a fixed flat sum, which means it can't raise much money without badly hurting the poor. A consumption tax like VAT (value added tax) discourages consumer spending, which may well be good for people's happiness and the environment - but still hurts the poor if implemented badly (because it increases the cost of goods by a fixed percentage). A good

Notes from Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy , in particular the sections on ancient philosophy and theology. Western civilisation began in the city-states of Greece - and there wasn't any comparable intellectual and artistic flourishing until the city-states of Italy during the Renaissance. Russell argues that this isn't a coincidence: that the intellectual climate of a time is bound up in the political and historical circumstances. He also draws several dichotomies: between optimistic and pessimistic times; between individualistic and grouped times; also systematic and piecemeal; also subjective and objective. Some of these are useful perspectives, although they're the sort of categories we should be careful not to over-generalise. Russell holds that the first philosophers created scientific hypotheses which were, if not exactly testable, at least empirically meaningful. These included Thales (around 585 BC; he held that everything was made out of

Note: this is a slightly edited copy of a post I made on LessWrong a few months ago. I'm putting it here for completeness, and also because my next post will build on the ideas discussed below. tl;dr: “Utility” is often used to mean what people want, but that’s not what's morally relevant. Utilitarians shouldn't be trying to maximise this sort of utility, but rather "well-being". Use of the term “utility” as a thing we should maximise implicitly conflates two definitions. Consider person X. In the economic sense, X's utility is the function over possible worlds which X is trying to maximise. For practical purposes, we can often assume that utility functions are roughly linearly separable, and talk about the contribution of each term to the whole sum. For example, if X would save the lives of their family even at the cost of their own life, then we'd say that X assigns higher utility to their family's lives than to their own life. This is perfec