From reason at fightaging.org Wed Jun 1 00:34:15 2011
From: reason at fightaging.org (Reason)
Date: Tue, 31 May 2011 17:34:15 -0700
Subject: [ExI] Open Cures @ h+ Magazine
Message-ID: <009a01cc1ff3$a4367c90$eca375b0$@org>
An introductory overview:
http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/05/31/open-cures-an-initiative-to-speed-clinic
al-development-of-longevity-science/
You may recognize me as the author-slash-editor of
Fight Aging!, a long-running news and advocacy
site focused on progress towards reversal of aging and engineering longer
human lives. There is more to progress in the general sense than just the
underlying science, however, and with that in mind I recently announced the
launch of Open Cures, a volunteer initiative
with the aim of greatly speeding up the development of clinical applications
of longevity science. Participation is open to anyone who can help with the
goals listed in the Open Cures roadmap:
for example, we're presently looking for life science writers and people
familiar with the medical tourism industry, amongst others.
But why, in this age of biotechnology and accelerating progress, it is even
necessary to build an organization to help speed matters along? What is the
roadblock that stands in the way of the clinical development of
longevity-enhancing biotechnology?
The Biotechnologies of Longevity, Undeveloped
When we look at work on aging and longevity in the laboratory, we can see
that more than a dozen ways to use biotechnology to extend the lifespan of
mice have been demonstrated over the past decade. About half of those
methods appear to lack serious side-effects, delivering only longer lives,
lower cancer risk, improved health and vigor, and little else. Similarly, a
range of laboratory demonstrations conducted since the turn of the century
have reversed specific, measurable biological changes that occur with age in
mice: damaged mitochondrial DNA replaced throughout the body, the function
of cellular garbage collection mechanisms restored to youthful levels in
liver tissue, and so on. We live in an era of rapidly improving
biotechnology - and it is delivering the goods, in the laboratory at least.
But there is one common theme to all of these advances: none are undergoing
further development for clinical use in healthy humans for the purpose of
slowing or reversing degenerative aging, and thereby extending healthy life
span. Why is this? You would imagine, given the size of the market for
medicine, that a hundred start-up biotech companies would be leaping upon
these opportunities, giving rise to an era in which "anti-aging" fakes and
frauds finally start to fade away in favor of a market built upon true
rejuvenation science. This is not happening, however, as there is a
gargantuan roadblock that stands in the way.
The Nature of the Roadblock
In the US, where much of the research most directly relevant to engineered
longevity takes place, this roadblock is called the FDA: the Food and Drug
Administration. Appointed FDA bureaucrats have absolute control over the
commercial deployment of medical technology in the US: only those
technologies formally approved by the FDA can be sold for clinical use.
Further, the FDA only approves a new medical technology for narrow usage in
treating a specific, defined disease in a specific, defined way. Obtaining
even this narrow approval is a staggeringly expensive process. For one, that
list of diseases changes only very slowly, and an entire industry of
lobbyists exists solely to try to add new medical conditions to that list -
burning money that would better used for research and development.
Consider sarcopenia, for example, the characteristic age-related loss of
muscle mass and strength. Sarcopenia was first named as a distinct condition
a decade ago or so, and expensive efforts have been ongoing for some years
to convince the FDA to add it to the approved list of diseases. There seems
little prospect of this happening any time soon, however, and so the
lobbying efforts continue. There are potential therapies for sarcopenia, or
at the least the scientific basis for potential therapies that might prove
useful in humans, but little to no private funding to further develop these
leads - as there is no market on which to sell any resulting treatments.
Even if a storybook industrial philanthropist turned up tomorrow to devote
his entire net worth to pushing through development of a therapy for
sarcopenia, it would still be illegal to offer the resulting medical
technology for human use in the US.
Aging itself as a medical condition is in the same boat. Aging is not a
disease, per the FDA - and therefore, no one is legally permitted to treat
aging in humans with biotechnology in the US. The present state of the
lobbying game, as illustrated by the situation for sarcopenia, is that it
will take years and millions of dollars in to carve off one tiny component
of aging and have FDA bureaucrats grudgingly allow commercial development to
proceed. Thus what comparatively little development of longevity science
does take place - such as work on sirtuins and other possible calorie
restriction mimetics - sees applications of the underlying research
shoehorned into treatments for late-stage diseases of aging, whether it fits
or not. Even if successful, the resulting therapies will not be legally
available for use by healthy or younger people for the purposes of treating
aging itself.
The Mirage of Reform
Numerous organizations and advocates (such as
FasterCures, for example) have been trying for years to reform the FDA, or
at least make it less obstructionist - to try to make it possible for new
therapies to emerge without the stifling costs in years and hundreds of
millions of dollars, or to emerge at all where they are not recognized by
the FDA. These initiatives are all failing: over the course of time that
they have been active, and despite the funds and efforts poured into them,
the FDA has only become worse, approving fewer and fewer new technologies,
and continually raising the bar and the cost for approval. The fundamental
incentives that shape the actions of FDA political appointees are these:
they suffer very few problems due to medical technologies that are
suppressed or denied approval, but take a great risk to their career in
approving any new application of medicine or biotechnology. The rest of this
undesirable state of affairs unfolds from that basis - bureaucrats will
follow their incentives, regardless of the harm it causes.
Meanwhile, the years pass, funds are consumed by political processes rather
than being spent on actual research, and we're all getting older - our
bodies slowly sabotaged by the processes of aging.
All in all, working with the FDA is not a game that we win by playing. A
system so entrenched and badly broken cannot be reformed through existing
channels, and efforts to change it by playing within the rules do little but
provide the FDA with additional legitimacy. The only way to win here is to
refuse to play the game, and take an entirely different approach - which
brings us back to Open Cures, which is exactly that: an entirely different
approach to the roadblocks put in the path of development by the FDA and its
counterparts in other highly regulated countries.
The Rise of Medical Tourism
I'll restate the primary challenge: that it is illegal to commercially offer
medical treatments for aging in the US, and based on the lack of progress in
effecting change to date, this situation will persist for the foreseeable
future - regardless of how much money and effort is expended on lobbying
within the system. In turn, that the clinical application of longevity
science is forbidden means that there is little to no investment available
to develop laboratory demonstrations into therapies. Thus the most promising
and advanced biotechnologies shown to extend life or reverse specific
biochemical aspects of aging in mice languish unexplored and undeveloped.
Yet if we look beyond America and Europe, we see regions in which clinical
development of therapies based on cutting edge science is both possible and
less restricted. To pick one example, stem cell therapies that will not be
commercially available in the US for years yet have been offered for a
number of years by responsible, skilled groups in China, Vietnam, Thailand,
and other countries. You might look at Beike Biotech or Vescell, for
example. It should make American citizens of a certain age sad that China
has become an example of freedom outshining the US in any field of endeavor
- not sad for the Chinese, but sad for what has become of medical
development in America.
This is a shrinking world we live in. Air fares are cheap, tourism growing,
and the internet links together cultures, movements, and businesses ever
more efficiently with each passing year. When the cost of travel is low
compared to the cost of newly available medical technologies, we see the
growth of medical tourism. Clinical development will occur wherever capable
institutions exist and local law permits it, and patients will travel from
restricted regions like the US to receive treatments that are not available
at home.
Medical tourism is a growing business in the US precisely because forbidding
and regulating medical development is also a growth concern: medicine is
only expensive and unavailable because bureaucrats make it that way. Medical
tourism is still a comparatively young industry, however, feeling its way
and largely focused on a few major and well-known fields of medicine (such
as the early therapeutic uses of stem cell transplants). It is far from the
case that people are taking advantage of the full range of cost-savings and
possibilities, and this is due in part to all the standard challenges
inherent in establishing important business relationships across a great
distance.
When you stop to think about it, however, you'll notice that all of these
problems are well solved for traditional tourism - even where comparatively
large sums of money are involved, such as in the much maligned timeshare
business. People comfortably travel great distances and expect to rely on
critical services at their destination: this works because intricate,
long-standing industries of communication, organization, and education make
that possible. It will one day be the same when people routinely travel to
obtain medical services from far removed locations.
Now consider this: there is no technical barrier to, for example, clinical
development of a way to replace all damaged mitochondrial DNA in humans -
the basic technology has existed, demonstrated in mice, for six years. The
work is published, fairly well known in the small part of the field where it
matters, and were it made into a therapy there would be tens of thousands
lining up to pay for it. Yet in countries where it is both possible and
legal to move ahead with that commercial development, and where there is
already an established, albeit nascent, medical tourism industry, that
development has not yet happened. Why is this?
A Material Role for Open Biotechnology Movements
When it comes to the passage of information, we do not live in a
frictionless world. Scientists and medical development groups in widely
separated regions do not in fact necessarily have good insight into the work
of their far-removed peers, or even know that the work exists in the first
place. They are separated by distance, culture, and language - far less so
than in the past, thanks to the internet, but separated nonetheless.
The effects this has on a given field of research and development are a
matter of degree: smaller fields are more affected than the larger ones, as
more researchers, more funding, and more public interest means more
transmission of information. Aging research and longevity science is not a
very large field, as it happens, at least not in comparison to stem cell
medicine or cancer research - and you can see the difference that makes in
cooperation and organization across national boundaries in the resulting
levels of medical tourism. The relationships for development and
transmission of knowledge that exist for stem cell research, to pick one
example, dwarf those developed for longevity research. Thus you don't see
clinical projects outside the US and Europe that are analogous in scope and
ambition to those that presently take place in the field of stem cell
medicine.
But all is not doom and gloom: I do not expect the gaps in the transmission
of knowledge to last. Institutions and cultural forces will arise to close
these communication gaps, and they will arise from present-day open
biotechnology movements. These movements are still young and small, but very
similar in aims and ethos to the open software engineering cultures that
first formed in the 1970s in the US: information and designs are freely
shared, there is an emphasis on moving the ability to produce significant
products out of the ivory tower and large institutions, and the result is a
massive body of work that greatly lowers the barriers to entry for hobbyists
and professionals alike. Software development, once an arcane art practiced
only within large organizations and universities, became possible as a
garage industry, and then as a hobbyist activity - which in time gave rise
to a vast breadth of knowledge and practice, a staggering pace of
innovation, and a community of developers that has grown in size and
sophistication by leaps and bounds.
The last 40 years in the culture of developing software is a snapshot that
will be repeated for the next 40 years in the development of biotechnology.
Costs of equipment and processes will fall, garage developers and hobbyists
will come to greatly outnumber institutional professionals, and the pace of
innovation will accelerate dramatically. On the way to that end result, open
biotechnology movements (such as the DIYbio groups) will play an important
role in bridging the communication gaps that exist between life science
professionals and clinical developers in different parts of the world.
How will this happen? Consider that in software development today, there are
no secrets and no specialty so small that it doesn't have a hundred skilled
observers in the broader open community - watching, talking, and tinkering
on their own time. When an important new advance arrives, it will be echoed
around the world, dissected, analyzed, and evaluated. The best new
strategies rise to the top very rapidly indeed exactly because the community
is very large. Unfortunately, this state of affairs is not yet realized for
biotechnology and the life sciences, but that is only because the open
community of demi-professionals and hobbyists is still comparatively small.
It won't remain small for many more years, however, and as the community
grows, it will become increasingly unlikely that any promising
biotechnologies will remain buried in scientific papers, undeveloped.
So in short, it is my conjecture that the present scientific demonstrations
that might possibly be applied to extend life or reverse aspects of aging in
healthy humans go undeveloped because they haven't been brought out into the
open by a community of thousands: they haven't been discussed, picked over,
buffed up, and presented far and wide in overseas regions where provision of
clinical therapies for aging is not illegal. This process would happen as a
matter of course given a much larger open development community associated
with the biotechnology industry, but until that community arrives, a helping
hand is needed.
Information and Relationships: the Role of Open Cures
And here we come to the point of the exercise: the reason for Open Cures.
The high-level goal of the Open Cures initiative is to produce the
communication, examination of research, and relationship building in
longevity science that would naturally emerge from a larger open
biotechnology community - but which is nowhere in evidence today, and will
not arrive on its own for a long time yet.
The foundational items on the Open Cures to-do list are as follows:
. - Establish a repository of how-to documentation for
longevity-enhancing biotechnologies demonstrated on mice in the lab, with
sufficient detail and explanation to make it comprehensible and useful for
garage biotech groups, DIYbio practictioners, and overseas developers.
.
. - Establish a network of relationships with the open biotechnology
community, overseas developers, and the movers and shakers who are building
the medical tourism industry rooted in the US.
That might not seem like much, but we stand at a fulcrum point in the growth
of three large movements: regulation of medicine, medical tourism, and open
biotechnology, all driven in their changes by accelerating technological
progress in computing and biotechnology. The initial Open Cures projects are
a lever for that fulcrum, a foundation for the construction of lasting
bridges between researchers who discover and demonstrate the biotechnologies
of engineered longevity and overseas development groups who can translate
that science into new medicine for clinical use.
The bottom line is that the groundwork for a range of potentially
life-extending therapies exists already, and the development groups legally
able and capable of turning this science into therapies exist already:
something must be done to bring these two sides together, and ensure that
they build further ties for future development. If this were a better world,
therapies built upon replacement of mitochondrial DNA would already be
emerging, today, for example - there is no technical reason why that could
not have been the case. That this has not happened is a challenge of people
and organization: regulation, relationships, fundraising, the transmission
of knowledge and experience.
My vision for the future of Open Cures is a long-term process of growth in
establishing a self-sustaining community around the process of rescuing
longevity science from its current fate: discovered and published, yet
unheralded and undeveloped for use. This is analogous to the long-term
vision of the SENS Foundation, which is as much about the development of a
culture and community of longevity research as it is about the development
of true rejuvenation biotechnology capable of repairing the biochemical
damage of aging. When the scientific research of SENS is complete in its
first phase, perhaps twenty years from now, we want to be living in a world
in which potential biotechnologies of longevity are routinely and eagerly
developed into clinical applications, no matter where they were initially
researched, and no matter what destructive games the regulators and
bureaucrats have found to play.
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From mrjones2020 at gmail.com Wed Jun 1 01:13:55 2011
From: mrjones2020 at gmail.com (Mr Jones)
Date: Tue, 31 May 2011 21:13:55 -0400
Subject: [ExI] question for twitter hipsters
In-Reply-To: <003501cc1fd6$64d33f10$2e79bd30$@att.net>
References: <003501cc1fd6$64d33f10$2e79bd30$@att.net>
Message-ID:
2011/5/31 spike
> Question please, can a person go in and change his password if he suspects
> someone has hacked his account?
Yes, without difficulty.
> Is there any reason to not change the locks if one suspects a break-in?
One is interested in being broken into.?.?
> Could the politician have not known his account had been hacked?
Only if the person who hacked it didn't make any changes, or any posts under
the account; up until the pics.
> The story doesn?t make sense to me, but I don?t know how these devices
> work.
It's just an account that allows you to send up to 140 characters into the
interwebs instantly. You can also direct-message (private message). People
use it to update their status, link to blog articles, etc etc etc. It's a
site. The 'devices'...would be someone's phone/pc, which now
have multiple clients one can use to access their Twitter account, and send
'Tweets'.
> If one made this assertion to provide plausible deniability, does it make
> sense to be a follower of?
It's possible that someone else posted a pic, on this guy's account, and he
had no advance knowledge of any of this. BUT, if that's the case, then how
did the girl have advance knowledge, unless she's the hacker's accomplice.
If there were 'tweets' to his account, that he didn't personally make, then
it was OBVIOUS his account was hacked, and he should've changed his password
or taken appropriate action at that time.
He's a politician, so I'm inclined to believe he's a scumbag who's guilty of
putting a pic of his no-no spot or whatever the hell he did onto Twitter. I
haven't read the article, or seen anything about this...only know very few
details...so forgive me if I'm wrong about what pics got put where.
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From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Wed Jun 1 03:21:38 2011
From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki)
Date: Tue, 31 May 2011 23:21:38 -0400
Subject: [ExI] Usages of the term libertarianism
In-Reply-To:
References:
<4DC8EC5D.90300@moulton.com>
<527625.24883.qm@web30103.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Message-ID:
On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 1:38 AM, Kelly Anderson wrote:
> 2011/5/11 Mr Jones :
>>> I agree with this, except for the "as a whole" part. I think there are
>>> enough generous people, at least in a country like America, to care
>>> for the truly indigent.
>>
>> I would love to think that's true. ?And if I knew it to be true, I'd be all
>> for govt being shrunk beyond belief. ?But that'd require more than just
>> meals/shelter for the indigent. ?We'd still need roads, water, etc.
>
> Large terrestrial transportation construction projects have almost
> always been built primarily with public funds.
### Actually, there was a fair amount of privately built roads in 19th
century England but that ended because people felt entitled to use
them without paying the toll (much the same as the thieves who steal
music today) and this widespread theft eventually undermined the
project.
This is a general observation: Whenever property rights cannot be
enforced (because of technological limitations, or a widespread
propensity to steal), useful economic activity (building roads,
producing inventions, works of art) is stifled and has to rely on
either the advertising model (e.g. aristocratic patrons of the arts)
or on other sources of funding that are insensitive to economic losses
(e.g. the government), with all the attendant supply- and demand-side
inefficiencies (i.e. having either too much or too little supplied
expensively at the wrong time and place).
Rafal
From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Wed Jun 1 03:24:42 2011
From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki)
Date: Tue, 31 May 2011 23:24:42 -0400
Subject: [ExI] Usages of the term libertarianism
In-Reply-To:
References:
<4DC8EC5D.90300@moulton.com>
<527625.24883.qm@web30103.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
<011001cc149d$01227c40$036774c0$@att.net>
Message-ID:
On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 1:03 PM, BillK wrote:
>
> But I doubt that 44 million people are cheating the system. I think
> they are desperate for food to survive. Claiming and using food stamps
> is not a lifestyle that many families aspire to.
### You'd be surprised how many do, Bill. I see them all the time in my office.
(Of course, I think food stamps should be abolished)
Rafal
From spike66 at att.net Wed Jun 1 03:24:43 2011
From: spike66 at att.net (spike)
Date: Tue, 31 May 2011 20:24:43 -0700
Subject: [ExI] question for twitter hipsters
In-Reply-To:
References: <003501cc1fd6$64d33f10$2e79bd30$@att.net>
Message-ID: <00b401cc200b$73a6c4a0$5af44de0$@att.net>
From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
[mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Mr Jones
>.
If one made this assertion to provide plausible deniability, does it make
sense to be a follower of.
>It's possible that someone else posted a pic, on this guy's account, and he
had no advance knowledge of any of this. BUT, if that's the case, then how
did the girl have advance knowledge, unless she's the hacker's accomplice.
If there were 'tweets' to his account, that he didn't personally make, then
it was OBVIOUS his account was hacked, and he should've changed his password
or taken appropriate action at that time.
>He's a politician, so I'm inclined to believe he's a scumbag who's guilty
of putting a pic of his no-no spot or whatever the hell he did onto Twitter.
I haven't read the article, or seen anything about this...only know very few
details...so forgive me if I'm wrong about what pics got put where.
Excellent thanks Jonesey. So now, I understand enough to ask a more
intelligent question: is it possible to somehow trace the tweet in question
(some unidentified man's bulging undergarments) to the device or telephone
from which it was posted? If so, we can figure out if someone stole his
password, or if the politician (don't know yet if he is a scumbag) did it
himself and then lied to cover his tracks, claiming his account had been
hacked. This is kind of important not because of some anonymous politician
(I don't care about that), but rather because I want to know how much
anonymity one has on this "twitter" business. We know if we post under each
others' names here, then it is easy to tell, because of the headers. If we
invite friends to our house, and they post stuff from our computer, or if we
give out our password, then the password recipient can post under someone
else's name.
So now here is my question for hipsters: assuming someone guessed this
guy's twitter password, does twitter have some means of tracing the actual
phone number from which the tweet was tweeted?
spike
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From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Wed Jun 1 03:43:30 2011
From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki)
Date: Tue, 31 May 2011 23:43:30 -0400
Subject: [ExI] Usages of the term libertarianism
In-Reply-To: <4DD5C881.9080906@satx.rr.com>
References:
<4DC8EC5D.90300@moulton.com>
<527625.24883.qm@web30103.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
<4DD260C8.90307@lightlink.com>
<4DD5A224.9000806@satx.rr.com>
<4DD5C881.9080906@satx.rr.com>
Message-ID:
On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 9:48 PM, Damien Broderick wrote:
> On 5/19/2011 8:35 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote:
>
>> To respond to your point more directly, the easily-led will not be
>> quite so easily led when there is more intelligence in the world, I
>> hope. If everyone had an intelligent agent to look after their
>> political interests, that would be an interesting game changer.
>
> That would be Iain Banks's Culture, with a bit of luck. Post-scarcity
> anarcho-communism, with Minds to watch the wolves. Alternatively,
> post-Nineteen Eighty-Four hell.
### Banks is a weird screwball. He is smart enough to see the truth
but just can't lay off communism, so he came up with an utopia where
humans are more or less a pimple on the body politic, managed and
maintained by vastly superhuman creatures, and therefore able to have
their cake and eat it, too - to have peace and prosperity (i.e. "to
each according to his need") without the work ("from each according to
his ability") and without the Commissars screwing everybody over. And
he even thought about how to assure removal of old folks - somehow,
humans in the Culture become uniformly weary of life at around 400
years and choose to drop dead. Of course, this can't happen by
accident, implying that the Minds are behind it, designing humans to
remove themselves after their expiry date, for some inscrutable
Mind-derived purpose.
It's diagnostic of the imperfection of the communist vision that
thinkers smart enough to work their way through the details feel
forced on rely on divine (i.e. superhumanly smart and nearly
omnipotent Minds) force to keep their clock ticking.
Rafal
From giulio at gmail.com Wed Jun 1 04:42:10 2011
From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco)
Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2011 06:42:10 +0200
Subject: [ExI] Strong libertarianism, societal good,
& suffering (was: Cephalization, proles)
In-Reply-To:
References:
Message-ID:
Your position seems similar to mine.
There is certainly such a thing as fake libertarianism. In my book,
real libertarians wand freedom for everyone, while fake libertarians
want freedom for themselves and their group, and slavery for everyone
else. Real libertarians = good, fake libertarians = no good.
The freedom to do everything that does not cost money is not very
useful in today's world.
2011/5/16 Amon Zero :
> On 15 May 2011 19:04, Amon Zero wrote:
>>
>> Rafal -
>> Suffice to say, I disagree with your analysis on multiple levels. I have
>> never seen anything approaching conclusive evidence that full-blown
>> libertarianism would "produce good outcomes for the poor" (although of
>> course I've heard a *lot* of assertions), whereas I have seen plenty of
>> examples of unrestrained economic and political behaviour causing great
>> suffering to people unable to protect themselves from its effects.
>
> This conversation has been on my mind overnight, and I wasn't quite sure
> what it was about it that felt so irritating. I've just been added to a
> facebook group called "singulibertarians" by a friend, and as my wrote an
> introduction message it became clear what had been troubling me. In that
> message I asked a question and referred to the latest libertarianism thread
> in this list. I hope you don't mind if I simply re-post my message to that
> list:
> ******************************
> Hi All - Thanks for adding me to the group :-)
>
> Just a brief introduction: My name is?Amon Zero, I'm a transhumanist,
> singularitarian, artist/musician and cognitive scientist by day. I live in
> London with a young family who keep me busy ;-)
>
> So, to say hello properly, I have a question:
>
> There are aspects of my worldview which overlap with libertarianism. I
> strongly believe in personal and economic freedom, but I also believe that
> both have their limits. I mention this because I'm currently embroiled in a
> heated debate with an extreme libertarian on the ExI list, and that
> conversation is making me come across as anti-libertarian just because I
> think freedoms are only helpful insofar as they create net good, and don't
> cause suffering. I wouldn't scrap protections against child labour, for
> example.
>
> I wonder if anyone here has any thoughts on this... for you, is there such a
> thing as too extreme libertarianism? At what point does a supposedly
> libertarian point of view become so extreme, and engender such extreme
> outcomes, that you're not wholly comfortable endorsing it?
>
> (Or you might care to address the converse; at what point does government
> intervention become unacceptable? What level of governance would you be
> willing to accept?)
>
> Disclaimer: I am founder of a very new movement - the Zero State
> (http://zerostate.net/) - which addresses these matters in its founding
> principles. So I do have strong opinions on this. I'm just curious how
> people feel about such things in here...
>
> - Amon
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
>
From spike66 at att.net Wed Jun 1 06:08:41 2011
From: spike66 at att.net (spike)
Date: Tue, 31 May 2011 23:08:41 -0700
Subject: [ExI] a foaf is sick
Message-ID: <00ff01cc2022$5b9db1e0$12d915a0$@att.net>
If anyone is in the mood to do a good deed that doesn't cost anything, I
heard a friend of a friend is seriously ill, but his daughter is checking
his email, so if you want to send a foafoaf best wishes for a speedy
recovery, his name is Robert Watt, litebulb75 at hotmail.com thanks, but no
mention of cryonics please, I don't think he would know what that is (never
met the guy, didn't even exchange emails.)
I have pondered this question long and hard, never did figure out the
answer: is there a good way to introduce the notion of cryonics to an
already sick person? It seems like it should be equivalent to discussing
funeral arrangements, so all I can figure is if the patient decides to
initiate the topic of funerals, you can say: funeral schmuneral, you will
get better, and in any case, cryonics is the techno-hip thing to do, not
some weepy old-fashioned silliness like getting incinerated or being thrown
into a hole. Cryonics helps your own family cope, and furthermore, it's one
of those things where it doesn't matter whether you believe in it or not, it
either works or it doesn't either way.
Something along those lines.
spike
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From phoenix at ugcs.caltech.edu Wed Jun 1 06:40:11 2011
From: phoenix at ugcs.caltech.edu (Damien Sullivan)
Date: Tue, 31 May 2011 23:40:11 -0700
Subject: [ExI] Strong libertarianism, societal good,
& suffering (was: Cephalization, proles)
In-Reply-To:
Message-ID: <20110601064011.GA24630@ofb.net>
On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 12:58:02PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote:
> On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 4:43 PM, Damien Sullivan
> wrote:
> > On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 01:26:09PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote:
> >> Ok, except that only ~0.001%(a made up number) of their taxes go to
> >> basic research while ~55% (another made up number) go to social
> >
> > Why use made-up numbers? ?A quick look around shows abotu 2% of federal
> > spending going to research. ?Welfare's harder to tease apart, but maybe
> > 5% by one analysis, though that might have included state/local spending
> > too.
>
> I was including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security in my
> definition of what made up the 55%. It may be higher than that.
I don't think those -- maybe Medicaid -- fit the mooching you had after
the word 'social' up there. I don't have a copy of what you said,
though. Thus the distinction betwee welfare and the pension programs.
> If 2% of Federal spending is going to research, I would imagine that a
> LOT of that must be in the military budget.
IIRC much of it is NIH, actually. Natl Inst of Health. Lots more money
going there than to NSF. Don't know about defense, though how much of
that would be 'basic' research?
NSF budget is $7 billion, 0.002 of the budget, or 0.2%. NIH seems to
be $30 billion, or about 1%. I'd remembered something on the order of
$70-80 billion for all research.
Oh, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122957411475117509.html says $99
billion, so 3%. Don't know if all of that is basic research.
though how much of that would be 'basic' research?
NSF budget is $7 billion, 0.002 of the budget, or 0.2%. NIH seems to
be $30 billion, or about 1%. I'd remembered something on the order of
$70-80 billion for all research.
Oh, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122957411475117509.html says $99
billion, so 3%. Don't know if all of that is basic research.
On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 07:15:05PM +0200, Stefano Vaj wrote:
> On 31 May 2011 15:36, Damien Sullivan wrote:
> > Newly rich people being risk-propense does not mean that being
> > risk-propense is a good individual gamble for becoming risk.
> > Selection/survivor effects and all.
>
> As the concept goes, risk propensity means that I am ready willing to
> take a one in ten chances of getting 100 rather than a safe bet to get
> 10. Both may be reasonable economic and Darwinian and game theory
> strategies - otherwise risk-propensity would not exist in the first
> place - but of course it implies by definition that 9 out of 10 risk
> takers end up with nothing, and that no risk-averse player ends up
> with anything more than ten.
Right.
Unless the risk-averse can pool their bets, of course.
> Really? Any hard data to support that? BTW, small businesses are
> essentially the business of middle class, which establish them, well,
> to remain middle class.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/big-business-america/
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2009/08/actually-america-isnt-a-small-business-country-at-all/23219/
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2009/08/an-international-comparison-of-small-business-employment.html
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167629610001207
-xx- Damien X-)
From phoenix at ugcs.caltech.edu Wed Jun 1 06:49:46 2011
From: phoenix at ugcs.caltech.edu (Damien Sullivan)
Date: Tue, 31 May 2011 23:49:46 -0700
Subject: [ExI] Social right to have a living
In-Reply-To:
References: <20110523214131.GB27333@ofb.net>
<20110526223002.GA25323@ofb.net>
<20110530194428.GA28730@ofb.net>
<20110530223126.GA22109@ofb.net>
Message-ID: <20110601064946.GB24630@ofb.net>
On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 10:42:08AM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote:
> >> - Hiring huge amounts of labor at market prices (some call this
> >> exploiting the masses)
> >
> > Note "market price" depends on the alternative opportunities available
> > to the masses, which may in turn be constrained by previous unethical
> > behavior. ?Hiring landless workers at market prices, workers who are
> > landless because they were kicked off their land by others, seems like a
> > problematic grey area. ?You may not be doing anything directly wrong
> > yourself, but the whole system is messed-up and you're profiting from
> > injustices. ?Like, hrm, buying stolen goods. ?You didn't steal them,
> > but...
>
> I refuse to be responsible for the actions of others, including my
> ancestors. This is the slave reparations argument, and I don't buy
> that either. Life is not fair, get over it and move on! The only thing
A common argument from those who aren't being screwed over by the
unfairness...
> that CAN and SHOULD be made fair is that there should be liberty to
> live one's life according to your own choice. You can't pick the
> circumstances of your birth, but everything after that should be a
> choice. Being landless is a minor issue in today's economy in any
Being landless, yes. Being malnourished, uneducated, or otherwise
deprived in childhood, OTOH, are rather huge issues.
> case. Not having an education is a bigger problem, and I struggle with
> whether public education should be provided, only insofar as it is an
I'm glad for that much.
> > How about profiting from benefits and networking derived from racial
> > prejudice?
>
> You can't legislate your way out of that one. It has to be wrong
Well, we've legislatively banned hiring and firing based on race. We
could go further, e.g. by setting up resume bureaus that presented name
and gender scrubbed resumes to hiring companies, which would help people
at least get one step further in the process than "this name sound
black, let's not respond to them".
> > Networking can seem innocent on the surface, but the counterpart is the
> > reduced ability of those not in the old boys' (say) network to have the
> > same opportunities. ?"With hard work and your parents knowing the right
> > people anyone can get ahead!" ?The solutions aren't obvious to me but
> > dismissing the concern doesn't seem right either.
>
> Again, I don't like the old boy's network, but it can't be fixed by a
> political solution. It must be wrong according to the zeitgeist.
I'm not sure it can't be improved by political solutions. On the stick
side, requiring/encouraging more documentation and transparency in
various processes. On the carrot side, providing more opportunities.
Stuff like helping minorities into Ivy League schools is part of that.
And such legal changes can also change the zeitgeist. A lot of the
decline of racism in the US is probably from the federal government
cracking down and enforcing civil rights over "states' rights". Chicken
and egg: there had to be some core of interest in that, but having new
attitudes written into the law of the land probably helped extend it.
-xx- Damien X-)
From pharos at gmail.com Wed Jun 1 09:33:38 2011
From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK)
Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2011 10:33:38 +0100
Subject: [ExI] Usages of the term libertarianism
In-Reply-To:
References:
<4DC8EC5D.90300@moulton.com>
<527625.24883.qm@web30103.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
<011001cc149d$01227c40$036774c0$@att.net>
Message-ID:
On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 4:24 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
> On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 1:03 PM, BillK wrote:
>> But I doubt that 44 million people are cheating the system. I think
>> they are desperate for food to survive. Claiming and using food stamps
>> is not a lifestyle that many families aspire to.
>
> ### You'd be surprised how many do, Bill. I see them all the time in my office.
> (Of course, I think food stamps should be abolished)
>
>
You have to look at the evidence.
(Of course I agree that there are always some people who will take
whatever they can get for free. But that is a minimal overhead cost to
achieve the greater benefit).
About half the people who claim food stamps are 'working poor'. They
work crappy, part-time, low pay jobs, sometimes two or three jobs at
once, trying to survive. They are not idle wasters.
Walmart will tell you about the queues that form at midnight on the
last day of the month as people stock up on baby food and essentials
as soon as the food stamps credit takes effect. People don't choose to
shop at midnight unless they have to. These people are barely
surviving and probably haven't got any spare time to shop during
normal hours.
Your libertarian policy of letting 44 million people starve to force
them to get nice well paid jobs is obviously useless in the present
economic situation. Your policy would probably lead to civil unrest
and widespread looting. Do you think the government doesn't appreciate
this?
BillK
From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Wed Jun 1 10:57:20 2011
From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj)
Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2011 12:57:20 +0200
Subject: [ExI] Usages of the term libertarianism
In-Reply-To:
References:
<4DC8EC5D.90300@moulton.com>
<527625.24883.qm@web30103.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
<4DD260C8.90307@lightlink.com>
<4DD5A224.9000806@satx.rr.com>
<4DD5C881.9080906@satx.rr.com>
Message-ID:
On 1 June 2011 05:43, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
> It's diagnostic of the imperfection of the communist vision that
> thinkers smart enough to work their way through the details feel
> forced on rely on divine (i.e. superhumanly smart and nearly
> omnipotent Minds) force to keep their clock ticking.
As discussed in another thread, a planned, as opposed to a
market-based, economy might actually become competitive by relying on
a much lower threshold of computational resources.
While we have few examples of political experiments these days in this
somewhat unfashionable direction, the internal working of large
corporate conglomerates, where the allocation of resources is not
driven by market mechanisms but by centralised planning, may well
suggest something like that.
The working of living organisms, of animal societies, etc,. also
suggest that all that is basically a matter of information processing.
--
Stefano Vaj
From eugen at leitl.org Wed Jun 1 11:28:33 2011
From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)
Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2011 13:28:33 +0200
Subject: [ExI] Hydraulic Fracturing
In-Reply-To: <4DE54A80.1060100@satx.rr.com>
References: <4DE54A80.1060100@satx.rr.com>
Message-ID: <20110601112833.GN19622@leitl.org>
On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 03:07:28PM -0500, Damien Broderick wrote:
>
> Barbara Lamar commented to me:
>
> FWIW, ever since they fracked the well next to our land [an hour or so
> from Austin, TX], there have been small black particles in the well
Apropos Texas: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/7587055.html#ixzz1Nxf9dZT0
> water. These particles were never there before. Also, the water smells
> foul, not like simple H2S but something else, almost like a dead animal.
> I wouldn't even think of drinking it. I hesitate even to use it for
> irrigation. Also, contrary to what Rafal said, they often frack the
> wells more than once. I know this from personal observation on my own
> land and from working with clients in the oil business, not from
> something I've read.
>
> Oh, and although they were supposed to dispose of the portion of
> fracking fluid that came back up, and they did end up trucking some of
> it away (to contaminate other land somewhere else, no doubt), they
> stored much of it in open pits. The soil is sandy, so most of the fluid
> would have percolated down into the water table. Yeah, yeah, Rafal would
> say to sue them. What good is that when the courts are bound to consider
> the public good of having cheap oil, rather than individual rights of
> landowners?
--
Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
From mrjones2020 at gmail.com Wed Jun 1 13:52:26 2011
From: mrjones2020 at gmail.com (Mr Jones)
Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2011 09:52:26 -0400
Subject: [ExI] question for twitter hipsters
In-Reply-To: <00b401cc200b$73a6c4a0$5af44de0$@att.net>
References: <003501cc1fd6$64d33f10$2e79bd30$@att.net>
<00b401cc200b$73a6c4a0$5af44de0$@att.net>
Message-ID:
2011/5/31 spike
> So now here is my question for hipsters: assuming someone guessed this
> guy?s twitter password, does twitter have some means of tracing the actual
> phone number from which the tweet was tweeted?
I'm not sure if Twitter keeps track of IP's used to send a particular
'tweet' or not. Most likely they do. When you 'tweet', it will generally
tell you the means by which someone 'tweeted' as well; for instance whether
or not they used TweetDeck, Seesmic, an iPhone or some other program/plugin
etc. It wouldn't so much have to do with their phone number, as their IP
address/client used.
As for being anonymous on Twitter... You'd only ever be as Anonymous as the
account you're posting to. If you make a fake Twitter account, and always
make sure you use a proxy to connect, you could potentially keep your
identity a secret. Anonymously accessing a Twitter account, that typically
isn't accessed through an anonymous fashion, would in and of itself throw up
flags I'd guess; unless said person was in China or some firewalled location
where the proxy was necessary to get past barriers.
This is all pretty generic, shallow explanations...especially the anonymous
stuff. There's a lot that goes into that, so I apologize to any tech gurus
I've offended with my partial answers. I hope you find this somewhat
helpful though Spike.
Also, regarding this politician's account...rather than acquiring his
Twitter password, someone could have taken over his entire system. This
level of access would not only give the 'hackers' carte blanche to his
Twitter, but any other accounts he used on the system as well. Add to that
the ability to post to Twitter (or anything else for that matter), from the
politician's actual computer, thus making an IP trace moot.
So in the end...COULD someone go through all this to burn this guy. Yes.
Did they? No idea. Would it be very costly/difficult? Not really. My
intuition is the guy got busted with his pants down ;) and now he's trying
to cover his tracks.
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From mrjones2020 at gmail.com Wed Jun 1 13:56:01 2011
From: mrjones2020 at gmail.com (Mr Jones)
Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2011 09:56:01 -0400
Subject: [ExI] question for twitter hipsters
In-Reply-To:
References: <003501cc1fd6$64d33f10$2e79bd30$@att.net>
<00b401cc200b$73a6c4a0$5af44de0$@att.net>
Message-ID:
On a side-note...I hear the Pentagon is now (at least now 'officially')
considering 'cyber attacks' an act of war. Seeing as this guy is a
Politician, would the 'hacker' then be guilty of crimes against the USoA,
perhaps be labeled a 'terrorist' because of this, etc?
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From rpwl at lightlink.com Wed Jun 1 14:59:17 2011
From: rpwl at lightlink.com (Richard Loosemore)
Date: Wed, 01 Jun 2011 10:59:17 -0400
Subject: [ExI] Brain emulation, regions and AGI [WAS Re: Kelly's future]
In-Reply-To:
References: <20110523214717.GC27333@ofb.net> <4DDEC73E.3060307@mac.com> <20110526224959.GC25323@ofb.net> <4DDFA4A3.5010806@lightlink.com> <4DE3FF82.4060209@lightlink.com> <4DE50CF0.5070508@lightlink.com>
Message-ID: <4DE653C5.3070402@lightlink.com>
Kelly Anderson wrote:
> If I understand what you're saying, the cortex is structurally uniform
> (other than perhaps connection patterns in the dendrites, which is
> what I think you may be saying about within-column) but that different
> functions somehow manage to navigate themselves into similar areas
> across individuals. That's extremely interesting.
>
> The cortex is just one brain area. If you look at the brain,
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Human_brain_left_dissected_midsagittal_view_description_2.JPG
> it seems pretty clear that there are structures or regions that are
> quite distinct. One would have to be crazy to assume that they did not
> have distinct purposes.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainstem
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putamen
> etc.
>
> So, if I'm understanding right, what you are talking about is just in
> the cortex, right?
Yes. As far as I can see, the cortex is where most of the higher-level
action occurs, while the other stuff (admittedly, a lot of other stuff)
is either specialized support machinery (e.g. hippocampus) or more
primitive autonomic mechanisms.
> That's extremely interesting. I've heard that the brain has three
> overall structures, the reptile brain (roughly the brain stem), the
> mammalian brain (cortex), and the distinctly human part of the brain
> (neo cortex). Are you talking about the mammalian part, the human part
> or both?
I think the basic functionality is common to the mammals. Quite what it
is that we humans have that is extra, I am not sure: it looks to me
like a souped-up version of the same basic design. So when I talk about
the columns, I mean the cortex generally, rather than the neocortex in
particular.
It is worth me being balanced here and saying that not everyone accepts
this type of interpretation. Even the whole idea of columns is
sometimes controversial. For a perspective, see
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/34/12099.full
> And would it not make sense that part of our thought processes take
> place outside the cortex?
Yes, that is true. But it does depend on what you mean by thought
process. Example cases: when people are overtaken by anger (or other
overwhelming emotion) they are quite probably being driven by modules
below the cortex. Also, the state known to psychologists as "romantic
love" is pretty much a state of total insanity controlled by some
structures whose only purpose is to subvert the reasoning faculty and
make the person becoming obsessed with a single other individual. And
so on.
Motor control, also, can be disturbingly autonomous.
>>> Aren't there fully functional computational models of parts of the
>>> brain now? Aren't those models based on bottom up analysis, rather
>>> than top down?
>> There is a model of the cerebellum, but that really is a separate, fairly
>> simple function.
>
> Oh, I wish I understood more about all this.
For the cerebellar model, you should grab Marr and Nishihara or Marr and
Poggio (can't remember which it is). From the point of view of a
mathematician, it is very elegant.
>> If you are talking about the wiring diagrams that have recently been
>> announced, I believe you will find that all those announcements are kind of
>> sneaky: what they actually mean by building a computational model is that
>> they have *sampled* the neurons and patterns of wiring in a small area, and
>> then done a *statistically* accurate reconstruction of that area. I
>> consider that to be a cheat.
>
> Even if it is a cheat, it might be useful. Time will tell.
I don't know. Try to imagine that you were trying to understand how a
complex floating-point math engine worked (silicon-chip level), and
someone gave you a randomly wired network of transistors that had
similar statistical activation patterns to the real thing. To my mind,
I don't think I could learn anything at all from that. I think it might
just confuse me and distract me from trying to understand the true
functionality.
>> I am less sure whether anyone has done a real circuit diagram or model.
>> Because all these announcements and press releases tend to be fuzzy on the
>> details, it can be very frustrating to try to find out exactly what level of
>> detail they claim to have done. To the best of my knowledge, ALL of the
>> current claims about having bottom-up models of parts of the brain are
>> "cheats" in the above sense.
>
> I am less interested in cheating than in utility... :-)
>
> Kurzweil talks about areas of the auditory channel that have been
> fully emulated, among others. Do you have any comment along those
> lines?
I don't know about that work, but the general rule is that if it is
peripheral processing (input or ouput pathways) it is probably good
science. So I would not be surprised if they had good models of that
stuff. The availability of meaningful signals coming in (or going out)
means that it is easier to do a trace and understand the next few levels
of processing of those signals. The difficulty comes when you get
deeper in ..... which means that success in projects like deciphering
the auditory processing layers is not an immediate harbinger of success
for more abstract stuff.
What seems to happen is that the neuroscience folks get some success
with the periphery processing, then they try to understand deeper
structures and, lacking a fundamental grasp of the psychology, they seem
to revert to the only kind of psychological theory that they can get
their heads around in a hurry. Which, alas, is the stimulus-response
kind of theory .... aka behaviorism or conditioning. This is sad,
because there are good reasons why behaviorism was killed off as a
viable approach to psychology, some fifty years ago.
Pity you're not near upstate NY, because I am writing a brand new course
on Neural Nets and Cognitive Systems, to be given at Wells College in
the fall semester. I'm going to be hitting them with as much state of
the art as I can, so it should be fun.
Richard Loosemore
From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Wed Jun 1 14:59:39 2011
From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj)
Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2011 16:59:39 +0200
Subject: [ExI] Mars Tents
Message-ID:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/01/mars_tent/
All that sounds quite ingenuous, but flatly remains in the area of
simulacrum as opposed to real-world stepstones, IMHO.
--
Stefano Vaj
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From spike66 at att.net Wed Jun 1 15:30:33 2011
From: spike66 at att.net (spike)
Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2011 08:30:33 -0700
Subject: [ExI] question for twitter hipsters
In-Reply-To:
References: <003501cc1fd6$64d33f10$2e79bd30$@att.net> <00b401cc200b$73a6c4a0$5af44de0$@att.net>
Message-ID: <004b01cc2070$d9a69220$8cf3b660$@att.net>
From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
[mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Mr Jones
Sent: Wednesday, June 01, 2011 6:52 AM
To: ExI chat list
Subject: Re: [ExI] question for twitter hipsters
2011/5/31 spike
>>So now here is my question for hipsters: assuming someone guessed this
guy's twitter password, does twitter have some means of tracing the actual
phone number from which the tweet was tweeted?
>I'm not sure if Twitter keeps track of IP's used to send a particular
'tweet' or not. Most likely they do. .
So in the end...COULD someone go through all this to burn this guy. Yes.
Did they? No idea. Would it be very costly/difficult? Not really. My
intuition is the guy got busted with his pants down ;) and now he's trying
to cover his tracks.
Thanks again Jones, this has all been most educational. Here's where I was
going with all this. There was a book by Gleick called Faster, which was
about how everything is accelerating in the way society does everything,
information handling being a prime example. I am a fan of his, but I
consider this his weakest book. He missed so many important things, and one
of them is found in how quickly information soaks into public awareness.
For those of us who are old enough to remember Richard Nixon, there was the
Watergate break-in, the bad guys were caught on 17 June 1972, but it took
over two years for the press to tease out all the pertinent facts, publish
them on dead trees, resulting in Nixon's resignation in August 1974, and
even then, most of the public was mostly unaware until the summer of 74.
Contrast to 3 decades later, fall of 2004 when Dan Rather ran a 60 Minutes
spot on George Bush's service records with counterfeit documents. (The
story was true, but the actual evidence was counterfeit, ahem.) It took a
couple weeks for CBS to recant and Dan Rather to resign. Now this latest,
the photo of a man's bulging package was sent Friday, the buzz went around
the internet over the holiday weekend, and when the regular news staff
returned from the holiday, CNN grilled the congressman on Tuesday. The
betting is running high if he will resign before the end of the week. So in
our lifetimes, we see a process that took over two years, to one that took a
couple weeks, to one that may be complete in days.
Along with all this are other interesting questions of extrapolating these
trends. Consider the magnitude of the crime: Watergate break-in: enormous.
Reporting fake documents: big. Politician posting a photo of his penis:
tiny. (Ahem, pardon, but the jokes just write themselves in this case.)
Trend: smaller infractions by politicians and public figures cause more stir
faster.
Another interesting note: since we now have quick references to everything a
politician said, I noted that nowhere did the politician actually explicitly
claim the photo was not his junk. He implied it clearly, but if you look at
what he specifically said, it was "FB hacked" which is Facebook. When I
read that, I thought he meant his twitter, which made me immediately ask:
couldn't they trace that somehow and figure out the real killers? But he
never did explicitly say his twitters were hacked, only FB. So yesterday he
had a catastrophic interview with CNN in which he very skillfully and
lawyerly made no false statements, but didn't actually deny anything. He
repeatedly referred to his previous statements, which also don't
specifically deny that it is in fact his penis.
Stay tuned, this will be a short one. A short *time* I mean, to resolution.
spike
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From eugen at leitl.org Wed Jun 1 16:09:58 2011
From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)
Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2011 18:09:58 +0200
Subject: [ExI] question for twitter hipsters
In-Reply-To: <004b01cc2070$d9a69220$8cf3b660$@att.net>
References: <003501cc1fd6$64d33f10$2e79bd30$@att.net>
<00b401cc200b$73a6c4a0$5af44de0$@att.net>
<004b01cc2070$d9a69220$8cf3b660$@att.net>
Message-ID: <20110601160958.GT19622@leitl.org>
On Wed, Jun 01, 2011 at 08:30:33AM -0700, spike wrote:
> Stay tuned, this will be a short one. A short *time* I mean, to resolution.
Befitting today's attention spa... oooh, a bright and shiny object. Pretty.
From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Wed Jun 1 17:09:31 2011
From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson)
Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2011 11:09:31 -0600
Subject: [ExI] question for twitter hipsters
In-Reply-To: <20110601160958.GT19622@leitl.org>
References: <003501cc1fd6$64d33f10$2e79bd30$@att.net>
<00b401cc200b$73a6c4a0$5af44de0$@att.net>
<004b01cc2070$d9a69220$8cf3b660$@att.net>
<20110601160958.GT19622@leitl.org>
Message-ID:
On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 10:09 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 01, 2011 at 08:30:33AM -0700, spike wrote:
>
>> Stay tuned, this will be a short one. ?A short *time* I mean, to resolution.
>
> Befitting today's attention spa... oooh, a bright and shiny object. Pretty.
I now hear that there is a conservative Canadian politician who claims
that his blackberry "accidentally" took a picture inside his pocket
and tweeted/facebooked it all over creation. Will the insanity never
end? I don't know if you can set up a blackberry to auto post EVERY
picture you take to Facebook, but maybe.
Spike, I am not a facebook/tweeter expert either, but I do believe
that they can be linked such that anything you tweet shows up on your
facebook wall (and vice versa?) So someone hacking your FB account
might be able to arrange for a privates tweet (couldn't resist) to be
published more widely. This MIGHT imply that he did send a package of
his picture to the girl, and it inadvertently got more widely spread
(er, distributed). This kind of change might have been made by a
staffer as well, so it might have just been accidental rather than
malicious. So the staffer could be responsible for tweeting the staff.
(You are right, this is just too easy.)
Time will tell, and as you pointed out, not much time these days.
-Kelly
From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Wed Jun 1 19:52:27 2011
From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson)
Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2011 13:52:27 -0600
Subject: [ExI] Brain emulation, regions and AGI [WAS Re: Kelly's future]
In-Reply-To: <4DE653C5.3070402@lightlink.com>
References:
<20110523214717.GC27333@ofb.net>
<4DDEC73E.3060307@mac.com>
<20110526224959.GC25323@ofb.net>
<4DDFA4A3.5010806@lightlink.com>
<4DE3FF82.4060209@lightlink.com>
<4DE50CF0.5070508@lightlink.com>
<4DE653C5.3070402@lightlink.com>
Message-ID:
On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 8:59 AM, Richard Loosemore wrote:
> Kelly Anderson wrote:
>>
>> If I understand what you're saying, the cortex is structurally uniform
>> (other than perhaps connection patterns in the dendrites, which is
>> what I think you may be saying about within-column) but that different
>> functions somehow manage to navigate themselves into similar areas
>> across individuals. That's extremely interesting.
>>
>> The cortex is just one brain area. If you look at the brain,
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Human_brain_left_dissected_midsagittal_view_description_2.JPG
>> it seems pretty clear that there are structures or regions that are
>> quite distinct. One would have to be crazy to assume that they did not
>> have distinct purposes.
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainstem
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putamen
>> etc.
>>
>> So, if I'm understanding right, what you are talking about is just in
>> the cortex, right?
>
> Yes. ?As far as I can see, the cortex is where most of the higher-level
> action occurs, while the other stuff (admittedly, a lot of other stuff) is
> either specialized support machinery (e.g. hippocampus) or more primitive
> autonomic mechanisms.
I know the Limbic system (which is not in the cortex) is involved in
regulating emotion, but I'm not sure if it is the seat of emotion.
Given that, it seems probable that a purely cereberal cortex based AGI
would probably not be particularly human... at least from an emotional
standpoint.
>> That's extremely interesting. I've heard that the brain has three
>> overall structures, the reptile brain (roughly the brain stem), the
>> mammalian brain (cortex), and the distinctly human part of the brain
>> (neo cortex). Are you talking about the mammalian part, the human part
>> or both?
>
> I think the basic functionality is common to the mammals. ?Quite what it is
> that we humans have that is extra, I am not sure: ?it looks to me like a
> souped-up version of the same basic design. ?So when I talk about the
> columns, I mean the cortex generally, rather than the neocortex in
> particular.
Ok. Maybe ours is just bigger? I dunno.
> It is worth me being balanced here and saying that not everyone accepts this
> type of interpretation. ?Even the whole idea of columns is sometimes
> controversial. ?For a perspective, see
>
> http://www.pnas.org/content/105/34/12099.full
Interesting article. Just proves how little we know at this point...
>> And would it not make sense that part of our thought processes take
>> place outside the cortex?
>
> Yes, that is true. ?But it does depend on what you mean by thought process.
> ?Example cases: ?when people are overtaken by anger (or other overwhelming
> emotion) they are quite probably being driven by modules below the cortex.
Indeed.
> ?Also, the state known to psychologists as "romantic love" is pretty much a
> state of total insanity controlled by some structures whose only purpose is
> to subvert the reasoning faculty and make the person becoming obsessed with
> a single other individual. ?And so on.
But these processes ARE part of what make us human.
> Motor control, also, can be disturbingly autonomous.
Ah yes, I remember well that day in 5th grade when I peed my pants in class...
>>>> Aren't there fully functional computational models of parts of the
>>>> brain now? Aren't those models based on bottom up analysis, rather
>>>> than top down?
>>>
>>> There is a model of the cerebellum, but that really is a separate, fairly
>>> simple function.
>>
>> Oh, I wish I understood more about all this.
>
> For the cerebellar model, you should grab Marr and Nishihara or Marr and
> Poggio (can't remember which it is). ?From the point of view of a
> mathematician, it is very elegant.
I found some stuff on that, will read it.
>> Even if it is a cheat, it might be useful. Time will tell.
>
> I don't know. ?Try to imagine that you were trying to understand how a
> complex floating-point math engine worked (silicon-chip level), and someone
> gave you a randomly wired network of transistors that had similar
> statistical activation patterns to the real thing. ?To my mind, I don't
> think I could learn anything at all from that. ?I think it might just
> confuse me and distract me from trying to understand the true functionality.
That is certainly a potential outcome. As long as some people are
working at the problem from the top down, I don't see how it hurts.
>> Kurzweil talks about areas of the auditory channel that have been
>> fully emulated, among others. Do you have any comment along those
>> lines?
>
> I don't know about that work, but the general rule is that if it is
> peripheral processing (input or ouput pathways) it is probably good science.
Yes, I've seen some good work related to the visual input pathways in cats...
> ?So I would not be surprised if they had good models of that stuff. ?The
> availability of meaningful signals coming in (or going out) means that it is
> easier to do a trace and understand the next few levels of processing of
> those signals. ?The difficulty comes when you get deeper in ..... which
> means that success in projects like deciphering the auditory processing
> layers is not an immediate harbinger of success for more abstract stuff.
Absolutely. I hope we win though.
> What seems to happen is that the neuroscience folks get some success with
> the periphery processing, then they try to understand deeper structures and,
> lacking a fundamental grasp of the psychology, they seem to revert to the
> only kind of psychological theory that they can get their heads around in a
> hurry. ?Which, alas, is the stimulus-response kind of theory .... aka
> behaviorism or conditioning. ?This is sad, because there are good reasons
> why behaviorism was killed off as a viable approach to psychology, some
> fifty years ago.
>
> Pity you're not near upstate NY, because I am writing a brand new course on
> Neural Nets and Cognitive Systems, to be given at Wells College in the fall
> semester. ?I'm going to be hitting them with as much state of the art as I
> can, so it should be fun.
Sounds like a blast. Have fun with it.
-Kelly
From rpwl at lightlink.com Thu Jun 2 00:53:15 2011
From: rpwl at lightlink.com (Richard Loosemore)
Date: Wed, 01 Jun 2011 20:53:15 -0400
Subject: [ExI] Brain emulation, regions and AGI [WAS Re: Kelly's future]
In-Reply-To:
References: <20110523214717.GC27333@ofb.net> <4DDEC73E.3060307@mac.com> <20110526224959.GC25323@ofb.net> <4DDFA4A3.5010806@lightlink.com> <4DE3FF82.4060209@lightlink.com> <4DE50CF0.5070508@lightlink.com> <4DE653C5.3070402@lightlink.com>
Message-ID: <4DE6DEFB.7030908@lightlink.com>
Kelly Anderson wrote:
> I know the Limbic system (which is not in the cortex) is involved in
> regulating emotion, but I'm not sure if it is the seat of emotion.
> Given that, it seems probable that a purely cereberal cortex based AGI
> would probably not be particularly human... at least from an emotional
> standpoint.
Yes, exactly right.
So, when you hear me talking about the distinction between the
"thinking" component of the AGI and the motivational/emotional system,
that would be a simple way of saying that the AGI will have a cortex
equivalent (what I loosely describe as the "foreground" in the papers I
have written on this subject) and a bunch of lower brain components,
including the M/E system.
>> Also, the state known to psychologists as "romantic love" is pretty much a
>> state of total insanity controlled by some structures whose only purpose is
>> to subvert the reasoning faculty and make the person becoming obsessed with
>> a single other individual. And so on.
>
> But these processes ARE part of what make us human.
They are. But when it comes to building an AGI, I think I might ...
ahem ... go a little careful on the l-DLPFC equivalent. I don't think
we need to make them so much like us that they experience full blown
romantic love and go completely cuckoo.
Richard Loosemore
From thespike at satx.rr.com Thu Jun 2 01:18:41 2011
From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick)
Date: Wed, 01 Jun 2011 20:18:41 -0500
Subject: [ExI] more LENR
Message-ID: <4DE6E4F1.2070202@satx.rr.com>
[more total bullshit from NASA scientist?]
NASA Chief Scientist: Rossi eCatalyzer: "Could Change Geo-Politics /
Geo-Economics"
Thursday, June 2, 2011
"I think this will go forward fairly rapidly now."
"This is capable of, by itself, completely changing geo-economics,
geopolitics of solving quite a bit of [the] energy [problem.] - Dennis
Bushnell, Chief Scientist of NASA Langley.
Source: EV World
EV World Podcast
Interview of: Dennis Bushnell, Chief Scientist of NASA Langley
Host: J. William Moore
Transcribed by: Steven B. Krivit
[Partial Transcript of Podcast, Excerpts on Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions]
[This transcript is Copyleft 2011 New Energy Times. Permission is
granted to reproduce this text as long as the text, this notice and the
publication information are included in their entirety and no changes
are made to this text.]
J. William Moore: I?d like to [look at] some of the [energy
alternatives] that you think look most promising from your perspective.
Dennis Bushnell: The most interesting, and promising, at this point, in
the farther term, but maybe not so far, is low-energy nuclear reactions.
This has come out of [22] years of people producing energy but not
knowing what it is ? and we think we have a theory on it. It?s producing
beta decay and heat without radiation. The research on this is very
promising and it alone, if it comes to pass, would literally solve both
[the] climate and energy [problems.]
MOORE: I find it extremely exciting that there might be something here,
so what is it that you think is going on at the atomic level here?
BUSHNELL: Let me back up a little. [Stanley] Pons and [Martin]
Fleischmann came out with an experiment that they labeled ?cold fusion?
about 22 years ago which had replication issues at the time. Also, all
of the fusion theorists came out and said absolutely ?This is not
fusion.? And, of course, they were exactly correct, this is not fusion.
They?ve gone through 20 years of massive experimentation worldwide, in
almost every country, where they?ve been able to produce this effect.
But all of the energy produced by these ?cold fusion? experiments over
the last 22 years didn?t produce enough heat to boil water for tea. So
people didn?t get too interested in it and nobody knew what it was.
Back in 2005, 2006, [Allen] Widom [and Lewis] Larsen came out with a
theory that said, no it?s not ?cold fusion,? it?s weak interactions
using the Standard Model of quantum mechanics, only the weak interaction
part. It says that if you set up one of the cells, and you don?t have to
use deuterium, hydrogen works fine, nickel works fine and you don?t need
palladium.
If you set this up you produce an electron ? proton connection producing
ultra-weak neutrons and if you have the right targets out there you
produce beta-decay which produces heat.
At that point, in 2006, 2007 we became interested and started setting up
a set of experiments that we?re just about ready to start finally, where
we?re trying to experimentally validate this Widom-Larsen theory to find
out whether or not it explains what?s going on. And in the process, we
used quantum theory to optimize the particular surface morphologies to
do this.
Then, as you mentioned, in January of this year [Andrea] Rossi, backed
by [Sergio] Focardi, who had been working on this for many years, and in
fact doing some of the best work worldwide, came out and did a
demonstration first in January, they re-did it in February, re-did it in
March, where for days they had one of these cells, a small cell,
producing in the 10 to 15 kW range which is far more than enough to boil
water for tea. And they say this is weak interaction, it?s not fusion.
So I think were almost over the ?We don?t understanding it? problem. I
think we?re almost over the ?This doesn?t produce anything useful?
problem. And so I think this will go forward fairly rapidly now. And if
it does, this is capable of, by itself, completely changing
geo-economics, geopolitics of solving quite a bit of [the] energy [problem.]
MOORE: I think this was either last week or the week before last, I ran
a story on this. I went and took a look at it ? they were using hydrogen
and nickel, I believe, using hydrogen gas and putting that into this
device. In looking at the video and photographs, it looks to be about
the size of a fist and that thing was running from about 10:45 in the
morning till about 4:30 when they finally turned it off ? and
generating, I forget exactly what it was ? but it was a significant
amount of energy in the form of steam.
BUSHNELL: It produces heat and did so for days and was in the 12 or 14
kW range and they [will be] producing, with a large number of these
devices, a 1 MW power plant.
MOORE: That?s a pretty exciting thing. Do you think that this theory
that was developed ? are these NASA scientists that were working on that
theory?
BUSHNELL: No, the theory was developed by Widom and Larsen. Widom is a
faculty member and teacher at Northeastern and Larsen has a company in
Chicago.
MOORE: So that looks promising and so you can take and generate steam,
and of course, that?s what a nuclear reactor or coal-fired power plant
is all about. They?re just there to produce steam and turn a turbine and
produce power.
BUSHNELL: Once you?ve got heat, you can do everything. We looked at
using LENR to power a space-access rocket and it had better performance
conceptually than a conventional nuclear thermal rocket.
From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Thu Jun 2 02:08:50 2011
From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki)
Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2011 22:08:50 -0400
Subject: [ExI] Usages of the term libertarianism
In-Reply-To: <20110530181819.GA16591@ofb.net>
References: <4DD260C8.90307@lightlink.com>
<20110518065417.GB24232@leitl.org> <4DD97438.4080905@libero.it>
<4DDA339D.8090305@libero.it>
<20110524192812.GB18783@ofb.net>
<20110530181819.GA16591@ofb.net>
Message-ID:
On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 2:18 PM, Damien Sullivan
wrote:
> On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 07:11:37PM +0200, Stefano Vaj wrote:
>
>> ? ?"Barriers to entry" (typically, a given market or profession) would not
>> ? ?be, especially if they are of a legal nature, would they?
>> ? ?I am not sure of other, non-legal barriers, but then I am no expert of
>> ? ?libertarian doctrines about cartels.
>
> Not sure why you're jumping to barriers to entry but no, legal barriers
> like doctor licensing wouldn't be very libertarian. ?But that's
> irrelevant to land monopoly like I was talking about.
>
> Non-legal barriers would be high capital requirements, economies of
> scale, and the ability to use price dumping to drive new competitors out
> of business. ?Which last is perfectly libertarian.
### Read Sowell on common economic fallacies, including "price
dumping". There has never been a case where price dumping (i.e. using
unsustainably low prices of a good or service to permanently drive out
competitors) was actually proven to occur in a real free market.
Dumping is an invention of propagandists for incumbent industries,
used to rationalize laws restraining trade - in a way, a trick to make
voters shoot themselves in the foot, and pay for it.
I mean, you have to be an idiot to believe the guy who is selling
expensive cars when he tells you that you have to ban cheap cars, or
otherwise in the future car prices will be even higher, don't you
think?
The fact is, the "market" (random guys looking to make a buck) has a
much longer time horizon than even the richest "dumper" (a guy who
thinks he can make money by first losing money and then making it up
on the same product). Yes, in theory, you could make widgets for 10$,
and sell for 5$, stopping all >5$ manufacturers from making a sale.
But, these competitors wouldn't just curl up and die. They could look
at your prices, make a guess about your competitiveness, and decide to
lie low for a while, make other gizmos, have just enough widgets on
hand to keep you from being able to raise prices above their own cost,
while you are hemorrhaging money. Once you run out of cash for
dumping, they would be back, selling at 6$. Of course, they would't go
bankrupt, not all of them, only the weakest ones. The idea that you
can defeat *all* competitors but out-losing them is stupid. And it
takes only one competitor to prevent you from jacking up prices above
market level, which you would need to recoup your losses.
What boggles me is that about 20 years ago I uncritically accepted the
idea of dumping, until I read analyses similar to above. How could *I*
have been so stupid as to believe an inanity?
Which goes to show that one must always be on the lookout for glib
stories, especially the ones that appeal to tribal feelings ("our
manufacturers" being "attacked" by "unfair" aliens, i.e. brown or
yellow people). Even very smart people can trip themselves up on their
own prejudice.
Rafal
From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Thu Jun 2 02:38:24 2011
From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki)
Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2011 22:38:24 -0400
Subject: [ExI] Usages of the term libertarianism
In-Reply-To:
References: <4DD260C8.90307@lightlink.com>
<20110518065417.GB24232@leitl.org> <4DD97438.4080905@libero.it>
<4DDA339D.8090305@libero.it>
<20110524192812.GB18783@ofb.net>
<20110530181819.GA16591@ofb.net>
Message-ID:
On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 2:40 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote:
>
> Correct. Price dumping and monopolies are within the libertarian tent.
### Not monopolies. You can't maintain a monopoly (i.e. a single
provider capable of dictating above-market prices) without using state
or state-like violence. Really, it is not possible. You can have a
monopoly that charges a market price (e.g. Alcoa) but an above-market
monopoly without direct violence is a figment of progressive
imagination.
--------------
> Personally, I think there needs to be SOME law preventing people from
> unfair practices.
### Define "unfair".
-----------------
> For example, the insider trading
### Insider trading should be legal and encouraged. It is one of the
best ways of inducing leakage of information from companies to
investors, and true and timely information is the lifeblood of
efficiency. Yeah, some assholes would get rich on it, and I know it
irks a lot of people, but what matters is that underperforming
companies would not be able to hide information from investors as long
as they can now. Imagine that employees of AIG or Merrill Lynch would
be able to openly trade their own stock and keep the proceeds - would
hundreds of billions of dollars of trouble be allowed to accumulate
before the purulent boil was lancinated? I don't think so.
------------------
and market
> manipulation practices that were employed by Joe Kennedy in the 1920s
> should not be allowed. Bernie Madoff type cons as well as pyramid
> schemes should be illegal.
### Fraud is illegal under any libertarian regime. Stupid greed is
legal though, and carries its own punishment. I don't pity the rich
dumbfucks who piled cash on Bernie without doing some background
checks.
-----------------
> Other laws that are reasonable are some laws protecting the safety and
> health of workers. OSHA is a pain in the ass, but you need some level
> of protection for the physical safety of workers.
### Why do you think that bureaucrats are actually protecting anybody?
Are the workers themselves so stupid as not to care, not ask
questions, not make safer choices where they think they need them?
A combination of an unregulated personal insurance market with private
certification authorities and tort law would be much more likely to
protect workers where they want to be protected, rather than a
bureaucracy that morphed into a cancer that eats up our industry
without producing any tangible benefits.
------------
>
> I also support food safety laws. Someone needs to watch that sort of thing.
### Certification, personal injury liability, branding instead of the
bureaucrat. The bureaucrat is your enemy.
---------------
> I am not in favor of a society where corporations have absolute
> complete free reign.
### Just like having private individuals with absolute complete free
reign, that would not be libertarian.
---------------
That just moves tyranny from the public to the
> private sphere, and I am not in favor of tyranny in any form. That
> being said, there are too many laws and taxes holding companies back
> today.
### Amen to than, brother.
Rafal
From emlynoregan at gmail.com Thu Jun 2 05:53:57 2011
From: emlynoregan at gmail.com (Emlyn)
Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2011 15:23:57 +0930
Subject: [ExI] Why Cities Keep Growing, Corporations and People Always Die,
and Life Gets Faster
Message-ID:
---
Why Cities Keep Growing, Corporations and People Always Die, and Life
Gets Faster
http://edge.org/conversation/geoffrey-west
---
Apologies if this has been discussed recently.
Watch this talk by Geoffrey West. Very long, but well worth it.
He appears to have come up with a mathematical framework which
predicts and describes the singularity, but then disbelieves the
conclusion. Start somewhere around 25:00 if you're impatient, really
heats up around 32:00, gets to the point around 36:00.
He's found that, all things being equal, cities scale up in all kinds
of things with size, including crucially the amount (ie: speed) of
innovation, but can't go past a certain size without collapsing. Major
innovations let all things not be equal (ie: change the constants in
your equations), and allow us to have a new ceiling. Innovation gets
you out of the Malthusian trap. Ok.
But, the bigger cities get, the faster things go (including even, for
instance, walking speed!). You need major innovation on smaller time
scales to continue growing the way we do.
So right there, he's got the recipe for Singularity. But he baulks
well before the asymptote, saying for instance that major innovations
(say "invention of computing" sized innovation) couldn't happen, for
example, every 6 months.
Whereas I think what he's describing is that population cluster size
and density drives innovation faster and also requires faster
innovation, with no necessity for a ceiling.
Thoughts?
--
Emlyn
http://my.syyn.cc - Synchonise Facebook, WordPress and Google Buzz posts,
comments and all.
http://www.blahblahbleh.com - A simple youtube radio that I built
http://point7.wordpress.com - My blog
Find me on Facebook and Buzz
From eugen at leitl.org Thu Jun 2 09:25:08 2011
From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)
Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2011 11:25:08 +0200
Subject: [ExI] more LENR
In-Reply-To: <4DE6E4F1.2070202@satx.rr.com>
References: <4DE6E4F1.2070202@satx.rr.com>
Message-ID: <20110602092508.GD19622@leitl.org>
On Wed, Jun 01, 2011 at 08:18:41PM -0500, Damien Broderick wrote:
> [more total bullshit from NASA scientist?]
Absolutely finest bovine excrement.
> NASA Chief Scientist: Rossi eCatalyzer: "Could Change Geo-Politics /
> Geo-Economics"
--
Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Thu Jun 2 16:19:37 2011
From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj)
Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2011 18:19:37 +0200
Subject: [ExI] Usages of the term libertarianism
In-Reply-To:
References: <4DD260C8.90307@lightlink.com>
<20110518065417.GB24232@leitl.org> <4DD97438.4080905@libero.it>
<4DDA339D.8090305@libero.it>
<20110524192812.GB18783@ofb.net>
<20110530181819.GA16591@ofb.net>
Message-ID:
On 2 June 2011 04:08, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
> The fact is, the "market" (random guys looking to make a buck) has a
> much longer time horizon than even the richest "dumper" (a guy who
> thinks he can make money by first losing money and then making it up
> on the same product). Yes, in theory, you could make widgets for 10$,
> and sell for 5$, stopping all >5$ manufacturers from making a sale.
> But, these competitors wouldn't just curl up and die.
>
I am far from acritically supporting antitrust regulations, if anything
because my international client tend to have a dominant positions in their
markets ;-) and because cartels in the style of imperial Germany or
Meiji-era Japan would if anything make European industries more, not less
competitive nowadays, but the repertory of "unfair practices" is broader
than that.
Think of Microsof, giving browsers away, and delaying the control of the
operating systems becoming irrelevant for decades. Or of Coca-Cola. with
"free" dispensers allowing for just one brand of cola.
--
Stefano Vaj
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From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Thu Jun 2 16:26:31 2011
From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj)
Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2011 18:26:31 +0200
Subject: [ExI] Usages of the term libertarianism
In-Reply-To:
References: <4DD260C8.90307@lightlink.com>
<20110518065417.GB24232@leitl.org> <4DD97438.4080905@libero.it>
<4DDA339D.8090305@libero.it>
<20110524192812.GB18783@ofb.net>
<20110530181819.GA16591@ofb.net>
Message-ID:
On 2 June 2011 04:38, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
> On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 2:40 PM, Kelly Anderson
> wrote:
> >
> > Correct. Price dumping and monopolies are within the libertarian tent.
>
> ### Not monopolies. You can't maintain a monopoly (i.e. a single
> provider capable of dictating above-market prices) without using state
> or state-like violence. Really, it is not possible. You can have a
> monopoly that charges a market price (e.g. Alcoa) but an above-market
> monopoly without direct violence is a figment of progressive
> imagination.
>
I suspect on the contrary that "natural" monopolies do exist. Take for
instance the IT world, where a good-enough program can establish a
stronghold simply out of time-to-market, by becoming a de-facto standard
invulnerable to any technical prowess or lower price by competitors'
products.
It remains to be seen whether such monopolies should be fought, OTOH.
According to some theories, funds for private R&D, especially
breakthrough-oriented R&D, can exist in a market society only inasmuch as
the market is not perfectly efficient, and allows for some "parasitic" extra
margins that allow its financing.
--
Stefano Vaj
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From anders at aleph.se Thu Jun 2 16:58:33 2011
From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg)
Date: Thu, 02 Jun 2011 17:58:33 +0100
Subject: [ExI] homo sapiens as endangered species
In-Reply-To: <005f01cc1f55$04514d20$0cf3e760$@att.net>
References: <005f01cc1f55$04514d20$0cf3e760$@att.net>
Message-ID: <4DE7C139.40304@aleph.se>
spike wrote:
>
> In 1973 the US passed a law that protects endangered species, but in
> retrospect it may have been the biggest victory for the oil
> companies. Reasoning: every alternative energy source that I know of
> could be slowed to a stop by various camps of greens, some perhaps
> employed by oil companies.
>
Nah, this concern is more about the system being exploitable.
Counterparts exist in countries where corruption or bad governance could
cause governments to make decisions in favor of NIMBYs with deep
pockets, pull or the right relatives. The cure is of course to try to
make the legal system fair, transparent and nonarbitrary. Or place your
business in such places.
Recently I listened to a presentation by a biodiversity researcher who
had been developing a software tool for calculating the ecological
impact of building stuff in different locations. This was a GIS
tour-de-force, combining worldwide databases of geography, land cover,
the sightings of more or less endangered species, migration patterns
etc. This project was funded by StatOil, who wanted to figure out where
in a concession area to put their oil pumping stations to minimize
ecological impact. The great irony is that the authorities that gives
concessions to drill do not use any method like this: if they actually
used this kind of method they could place concessions so that impact
would be lower no matter where the oil company drills. This is not due
to any evil or corruption, just the lack of easily available smart tools.
When I saw the subject of this thread I thought it was more about
xrisks. I have been tinkering with some minimum viable population models
of H. sapiens. If we are ever near extinction, it is pretty tough to
maintain a population - big mammals are tricky.
--
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University
From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Thu Jun 2 17:57:58 2011
From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj)
Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2011 19:57:58 +0200
Subject: [ExI] homo sapiens as endangered species
In-Reply-To: <4DE7C139.40304@aleph.se>
References: <005f01cc1f55$04514d20$0cf3e760$@att.net> <4DE7C139.40304@aleph.se>
Message-ID:
On 2 June 2011 18:58, Anders Sandberg wrote:
> When I saw the subject of this thread I thought it was more about xrisks. I
> have been tinkering with some minimum viable population models of H.
> sapiens. If we are ever near extinction, it is pretty tough to maintain a
> population - big mammals are tricky.
>
I have some vague recollection of this notion, but do not remember the
reasoning behind it.
Why a few fertile individuals are actually not enough?
--
Stefano Vaj
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From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Jun 2 19:26:19 2011
From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson)
Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2011 13:26:19 -0600
Subject: [ExI] homo sapiens as endangered species
In-Reply-To:
References: <005f01cc1f55$04514d20$0cf3e760$@att.net> <4DE7C139.40304@aleph.se>
Message-ID:
2011/6/2 Stefano Vaj :
> On 2 June 2011 18:58, Anders Sandberg wrote:
>>
>> When I saw the subject of this thread I thought it was more about xrisks.
>> I have been tinkering with some minimum viable population models of H.
>> sapiens. If we are ever near extinction, it is pretty tough to maintain a
>> population - big mammals are tricky.
>
> I have some vague recollection of this notion, but do not remember the
> reasoning behind it.
>
> Why a few fertile individuals are actually not enough?
Stefano,
One reason a few fertile individuals are not enough has to do with
recessive gene borne diseases. For the same reason that you don't have
children with your sister or first cousin if you can help it. In a
large population, the chances of a child dying of a bad recessive gene
are generally small because both parents need to have the bad gene for
you to get it, otherwise you are just a carrier, but in smaller
populations, these genes can become quite common and subsequently
express themselves. Sometimes in horrible ways.
Also, if you go through a bottleneck (like the American Bison) then
you also have problems of all the individuals being susceptible to the
same disease vectors, and you risk extinction even with a larger
population due to a lack of genetic diversity.
You need a bit of gene diversity to maintain a healthy population for
these reasons. There may be more reasons, but these are what I know
of.
-Kelly
From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Jun 2 19:28:13 2011
From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson)
Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2011 13:28:13 -0600
Subject: [ExI] homo sapiens as endangered species
In-Reply-To: <005f01cc1f55$04514d20$0cf3e760$@att.net>
References: <005f01cc1f55$04514d20$0cf3e760$@att.net>
Message-ID:
2011/5/30 spike :
> In 1973 the US passed a law that protects endangered species, but in
> retrospect it may have been the biggest victory for the oil companies.
If this is so, then they may get some payback now. There is a lizard
about to go on the endangered species list in Texas that may shut down
a large number of the oil wells there. If the lizard doesn't do it,
there is a grouse that is up next...
-Kelly
From spike66 at att.net Thu Jun 2 19:18:47 2011
From: spike66 at att.net (spike)
Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2011 12:18:47 -0700
Subject: [ExI] chinese ghost towns
Message-ID: <007f01cc2159$e5e492f0$b1adb8d0$@att.net>
This is what happens when commies try to be capitalists:
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/26184891/vp/43214976#43214976
This blows my mind. If China and the US can work out some kind of deal
where we trade immigrants perhaps by the millions, and form little
capitalist empires with its own rules, we could turn that place into the new
Las Vegas.
spike
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From anders at aleph.se Thu Jun 2 19:33:53 2011
From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg)
Date: Thu, 02 Jun 2011 20:33:53 +0100
Subject: [ExI] homo sapiens as endangered species
In-Reply-To:
References: <005f01cc1f55$04514d20$0cf3e760$@att.net> <4DE7C139.40304@aleph.se>
Message-ID: <4DE7E5A1.7070100@aleph.se>
Stefano Vaj wrote:
> On 2 June 2011 18:58, Anders Sandberg > wrote:
>
> When I saw the subject of this thread I thought it was more about
> xrisks. I have been tinkering with some minimum viable population
> models of H. sapiens. If we are ever near extinction, it is pretty
> tough to maintain a population - big mammals are tricky.
>
>
> I have some vague recollection of this notion, but do not remember the
> reasoning behind it.
>
> Why a few fertile individuals are actually not enough?
Low genetic diversity is less of an issue than many think (but it
contributes a bit). The real threat is demographic noise: a small
population will have larger relative fluctuations, some of which can
drive it down to even smaller and even more vulnerable. A species
"circling the drain" can run into problems both with bad years, with few
children due to bad luck, bad luck with gender ratios, Allee effects and
a bunch of other things.
In my sims I need about 2000 people to get long term survival with more
than 90% probability. Smaller populations can survive, but they need to
be lucky.
--
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University
From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Jun 2 19:36:40 2011
From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson)
Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2011 13:36:40 -0600
Subject: [ExI] Usages of the term libertarianism
In-Reply-To:
References:
<4DC8EC5D.90300@moulton.com>
<527625.24883.qm@web30103.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
<4DD260C8.90307@lightlink.com>
<4DD5A224.9000806@satx.rr.com>
<4DD5C881.9080906@satx.rr.com>
Message-ID:
On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 9:43 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki
wrote:
> ###It's diagnostic of the imperfection of the communist vision that
> thinkers smart enough to work their way through the details feel
> forced on rely on divine (i.e. superhumanly smart and nearly
> omnipotent Minds) force to keep their clock ticking.
Rafal, It is clear to me that you and I have similar thinking about
some of these political issues, so I'm fishing for your views (and of
others) on what happens if and when going to work each day becomes
optional for most humans.
Our society is currently built off of the idea that the poor should be
supported by the rich. If in say 40 years, the richest among us are
all AGIs, and all humans are relatively impoverished (although
probably rich by today's standards) will the AGIs put up with
supporting us? I often reflect on the song lyric "We'll make great
pets" :-)
But what will being pets do to the human psyche? Do we need work to
feel fulfilled? Will we all just become artists? Or will we continue
to try and be economically viable, even though there is nothing we can
do vs. super intelligent beings?
Of course, this won't be a problem if we are enhanced to compete with
the super intelligent beings. I'm speaking more of the non-Ahmish and
non-enhanced (by choice) portion of humanity.
-Kelly
From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Jun 2 19:45:02 2011
From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson)
Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2011 13:45:02 -0600
Subject: [ExI] Usages of the term libertarianism
In-Reply-To:
References: <4DD260C8.90307@lightlink.com>
<20110518065417.GB24232@leitl.org> <4DD97438.4080905@libero.it>
<4DDA339D.8090305@libero.it>
<20110524192812.GB18783@ofb.net>
<20110530181819.GA16591@ofb.net>
Message-ID:
On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 8:08 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki
wrote:
> On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 2:18 PM, Damien Sullivan
> ###I mean, you have to be an idiot to believe the guy who is selling
> expensive cars when he tells you that you have to ban cheap cars, or
> otherwise in the future car prices will be even higher, don't you
> think?
Not if it is in preparation for setting up a monopoly where higher
prices can be sustained into the indefinite future. There are plenty
of examples from around 1880 to 1900 of Standard Oil and others
locally reducing their prices to drive local competitors out of
business, and once those local competitors are gone, the prices went
up higher than they were before. In a completely unfettered business
environment this can and does happen.
Unfortunately for us, this gave Teddy Roosevelt the ammunition he
needed to create the anti-monopoly legislation which was the beginning
of the progressive movement. And even Standard Oil is paying for that.
Evil acts by corporations lead to bigger badder government. That's why
it is so important to libertarianism that people have basic ethics
that most people stick to.
> The fact is, the "market" (random guys looking to make a buck) has a
> much longer time horizon than even the richest "dumper" (a guy who
> thinks he can make money by first losing money and then making it up
> on the same product). Yes, in theory, you could make widgets for 10$,
> and sell for 5$, stopping all >5$ manufacturers from making a sale.
> But, these competitors wouldn't just curl up and die. They could look
> at your prices, make a guess about your competitiveness, and decide to
> lie low for a while, make other gizmos, have just enough widgets on
> hand to keep you from being able to raise prices above their own cost,
> while you are hemorrhaging money. Once you run out of cash for
> dumping, they would be back, selling at 6$. Of course, they would't go
> bankrupt, not all of them, only the weakest ones. The idea that you
> can defeat *all* competitors but out-losing them is stupid. And it
> takes only one competitor to prevent you from jacking up prices above
> market level, which you would need to recoup your losses.
This is much more the case in a global economy. The example I give are
all local. So my counter argument is much weaker today than it was in
1900.
> Which goes to show that one must always be on the lookout for glib
> stories, especially the ones that appeal to tribal feelings ("our
> manufacturers" being "attacked" by "unfair" aliens, i.e. brown or
> yellow people). Even very smart people can trip themselves up on their
> own prejudice.
This is the feeling behind the anti-Walmart sentiment that is fairly
rampant here in America now. Yet Walmart saves the average consumer
around $2500 a year with lower prices in the entire market. This
applies even to people who don't shop at Walmart.... :-)
-Kelly
From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Jun 2 20:00:47 2011
From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson)
Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2011 14:00:47 -0600
Subject: [ExI] Usages of the term libertarianism
In-Reply-To:
References: <4DD260C8.90307@lightlink.com>
<20110518065417.GB24232@leitl.org> <4DD97438.4080905@libero.it>
<4DDA339D.8090305@libero.it>
<20110524192812.GB18783@ofb.net>
<20110530181819.GA16591@ofb.net>
Message-ID:
On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 8:38 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki