Computer Scientists

"I propose an idealist ontology that makes sense of reality in a more parsimonious and empirically rigorous manner than mainstream physicalism, bottom-up panpsychism, and cosmopsychism. The proposed ontology also offers more explanatory power than these three alternatives, in that it does not fall prey to the hard problem of consciousness, the combination problem, or the decombination problem, respectively. It can be summarized as follows: there is only cosmic consciousness. We, as well as all other living organisms, are but dissociated alters of cosmic consciousness, surrounded by its thoughts. The inanimate world we see around us is the extrinsic appearance of these thoughts. The living organisms we share the world with are the extrinsic appearances of other dissociated alters."

"[A]n order of magnitude quantitative change in technology can make a qualitative change in the lifestyle we enjoy."

"I dreamed of a friendly machine to which you could delegate all those manual tasks which are prone to errors. A machine that could quietly learn and perform tasks, that could store simple data and instructions, that could be used by anyone, that would be inexpensive and the size of other office products which people used. I had to create a new language which did not need interpreters in white coats."

"How does artificial intelligence refer to social relationships – for example, the functioning of one or another political system? Well, the evolution of the world is not a closed and completed process. For sure, we are awaiting a change in social relations due to moving of the labor market, especially as a result of transferring the burden of performing various activities on the devices. The invention of machines during the English Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries resulted in mass strikes and revolts, because many workers were afraid that they would be replaced by the machines. The societies has somehow coped with it. Will they defend themselves in the situation of the next step towards the automation of everything? It's an open matter."

"Various threats come along with the development of information technologies. Connecting people with machines, such a cyborgization of societies, creates a new type of threats – such threats that bring us back a little bit to the Orwellian universe of Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which someone gets very strong tools to control everything. If every human being will be appropriately chipped and our nervous systems, or even our minds, will be incorporated into a global network – one can imagine that sooner or later someone would like to take these technological possibilities in order to get some unprecedented concentration of power and domination. The possibilities of direct physical control may be created, especially if we are connected to a network in a way that interferes with the structure of our nervous system – then we can imagine different possibilities of exerting direct influence. For now, this is the field of speculation."

"In some individual actions a very high level of simulation was achieved, e.g. in chess or Go. However, we are still very far from being able to model all human behaviors, even very primitive ones. The number of decisions made every day turns out to be so huge that it will take a long time until a device capable of dealing with all the problems, a device of which actions would be indistinguishable from human ones, will be created. We cannot predict if and when this will happen, because from previous experience it appears that no forecast in this area managed to meet the reality."

"The fact that a computer player wins a game of chess or bridge with a human does not necessarily mean that the device is intelligent. The victory results from the fact that in the final analysis the device has been applied appropriate algorithms developed by man, e.g. using the properties of artificial neural networks. It is not the device that wins with a man, e.g. a chess player, but a man – the designer of the device. It is simply the rivalry of one intellect with another through the medium of computer science."

"A man who crosses the street must be careful not to be hit by a car, even if the car is an automatic vehicle without a driver, because the car is stronger than a man. We should be afraid of devices that function in a dangerous way for us. The robot will become such a device if we manage to equip it not so much in intelligence as in mechanisms imitating the effects of a certain human functionality. I mean equipping robots with mechanisms that function in a similar way to consciousness of existence and the instinct of self-preservation of a human being. I do not mean to say that the device will be conscious, but that its behavior will be similar to the behavior of a rational unit, such as a man aware of his existence. The machine will not receive consciousness, but it will behave as if it did."

"My cousin Zygmunt found a distant relative in Italy, Professor Vettolani, who works as an astrophysicist in Bologna. When we contacted him, it turned out that our family traditions are quite compatible. So I think we are really connected by Etruscan blood. Although Zygmunt, who is a tireless researcher of family history, has several other theories about our origins. It turns out that in Italy there were two, no longer existing, settlements called Vetulani: one in Lazio, and the other in Tuscany, near Pisa."

"I am so happy I want to be there. I know Saudi Arabia will never be the same again, women will have easy access to transportation and that means they will be more part of the workforce."

"Women driving is just the first step - we have a long way to go."

"The rain starts with a single drop."

"Imagine your son becomes your guardian, no matter my capabilities as a woman, I am still enslaved to somebody else. Freedom for me is to live with dignity, and if my dignity and freedom is controlled by a man, I will never be free."

"While people are celebrating on Sunday we shouldn't forget the people who fought for lifting this ban are in jail."

"Most people do not spontaneously try to solve the friendly artificial intelligence (FAI)] problem. If they're spontaneously doing something, they try to solve the AI problem. If we're talking about sort of 'who's made interesting progress on FAI problems without being a Singularity Institute Eliezer supervised person,' then I would have to say: Wei Dai."

"I think you're a much better writer & thinker than me"

"I had ambitious plans for a much longer post, but I don't feel like writing this one anymore, so I'm going to truncate it here and publish it. The main upshot was probably going to be something about how Wei Dai continues to be and have been the single best contemporary thinker."

"Yes, you're a freak and nobody but you and a few other freaks can ever get any useful thinking done and didn't we sort of cover this territory already?"

"Wei Dai made a coronavirus trade now up 700%, remarking "At least for me this puts a final nail in the coffin of EMH." Wei was already on my shortlist of EMH challengers. This genuinely isn't looking great for EMH."

"This [the feeling that writing reviews of posts is work] is partly why I haven't done any reviews, despite feeling a vague moral obligation to do so. Another reason is that I wasn't super engaged with [LessWrong] throughout most of 2018 and few of the nominated posts jumped out at me (as something that I have a strong opinion about) from a skim of the titles, and the ones that did jump out at me I think I already commented on back when they were first posted and don't feel motivated to review them now. Maybe that's because I don't like to pass judgment (I don't think I've written a review for anything before) and when I first commented it was in the spirit of "here are some tentative thoughts I'm bringing up for discussion"."

"I don't like playing politics, I don't like having bosses and being told what to do, I don't like competition, I have no desire to manage other people, so I've instinctively avoided or quickly left any places that were even remotely maze-like."

"One solution [to the problem that high status might cause stupidity] that might work (and I think has worked for me, although I didn't consciously choose it) is to periodically start over. Once you've achieved recognition in some area, and no longer have as much interest in it as you used to, go into a different community focused on a different topic, and start over from a low-status (or at least not very high status) position."

"Does anyone not have any problems with taking ideas seriously? I think I'm in this category because ideas like cryonics, the Singularity, unfriendly artificial intelligence], and Tegmark's mathematical universe were all immediately obvious to me as ideas to take seriously, and I did so without much conscious effort or deliberation."

"Part of it, which perhaps you and most other observers are not aware, is that I have enough passive income, and enough dispassion for conventional status signaling, that my marginal utility of money is pretty low compared to my disutility for doing busywork. To put it in perspective, I quit my last regular job in 2002, and stopped doing consulting for that company as well (at $100/hour) a year later when they merged with Microsoft and told me I had to do a bunch of paperwork and be hired by Microsoft's "independent consulting company" in order to continue."

"Here's my own horror story with academic publishing. I was an intern at an industry research lab, and came up with a relatively simple improvement to a widely used cryptographic primitive. I spent a month or two writing it up (along with relevant security arguments) as well as I could using academic language and conventions, etc., with the help of a mentor who worked there and who used to be a professor. Submitted to a top crypto conference and weeks later got back a rejection with comments indicating that all of the reviewers completely failed to understand the main idea. The comments were so short that I had no way to tell how to improve the paper and just got the impression that the reviewers weren't interested in the idea and made little effort to try to understand it. My mentor acted totally unsurprised and just said something like, "let's talk about where to submit it next." That's the end of the story because I decide if that's how academia works I wanted to have nothing to do with it when there's, from my perspective, an obviously better way to do things, i.e., writing up the idea informally, posting it to a mailing list and getting immediate useful feedback/discussions from people who actually understand and are interested in the idea."

"In other words, when I say "what's the evidence for that?", it's not that I don't trust your rationality (although of course I don't trust your rationality either), but I just can't deduce what evidence you must have observed from your probability declaration alone even if you were fully rational."

"I think status is in fact a significant motivation even for me, and even the more "pure" motivations like intellectual curiosity can in some sense be traced back to status. It seems unlikely that [updateless decision theory] would have been developed without the existence of forums like extropians, everything-list, and LW, for reasons of both motivation and feedback/collaboration."

"I think a highly rational person would have high moral uncertainty at this point and not necessarily be described as "altruistic"."

"[By the way], since you are advising high school students and undergrads, I suggest that you mention to them that they can start being independent researchers before they graduate from college. For example I came up with my b-money idea (a precursor to Bitcoin) as an undergrad, and was also already thinking about some of the questions that would eventually lead to [updateless decision theory]."

"I typically find myself wanting to verify every single fact or idea that I hadn't heard of before, and say either "hold on, I need to think about that for a few minutes" or "let me check that on Google/Wikipedia". In actual conversation I'd suppress this because I suspect the other person will quickly find it extremely annoying. I just think to myself "I'll try to remember what he's saying and check it out later", but of course I don't have such a good memory."

"Yes, but I tend not to advertise too much that people should be less certain about their altruism, since it's hard to see how that could be good for me regardless of what my values are or ought to be. I make an exception of this for people who might be in a position to build [a friendly artificial intelligence], since if they're too confident about altruism then they're likely to be too confident about many other philosophical problems, but even then I don't stress it too much."

"I do have some early role models. I recall wanting to be a real-life version of the fictional "Sandor Arbitration Intelligence at the Zoo" (from Vernor Vinge's novel A Fire Upon the Deep) who in the story is known for consistently writing the clearest and most insightful posts on the Net. And then there was Hal Finney who probably came closest to an actual real-life version of Sandor at the Zoo, and Tim May who besides inspiring me with his vision of cryptoanarchy was also a role model for doing early retirement from the tech industry and working on his own interests/causes."

"Here's my experience. I applied to just MIT and my state university (University of Washington). I got on MIT's waiting list but was ultimately not accepted, so went to UW. I would certainly have gone to MIT had I been accepted, but my thinking now is that if I did that, I would not have had enough free time in college to write Crypto++ and think about anonymous protocols, Tegmark's multiverse, anthropic reasoning, etc., and these spare-time efforts have probably done more for my "career" than the MIT name or what I might have learned there."

"As today’s form of capitalism is not compatible with our social and cultural value system, sooner or later it will be damaging to the foundations of societies and the values they are built on. Therefore, capitalism must be upgraded in a way that is compatible with societal and cultural values and with the fairness principle to provide equal opportunities."

"Science is a seamless web: each idea spins out to a new research task, and each research finding suggests a repair or an elaboration of the network of theory. Most of the links connecting the nodes are short, each attaching to its predecessors. Weaving our way through the web, we stop from time to time to rest and survey the view — and to write a paper or a book."

"In recent years, researchers have made considerable progress on the of inductive learning tasks, but for theoretical results to have impact on practice, they must deal with the average case. In this paper we present an average-case analysis of a simple algorithm that induces one-level decision trees for concepts defined by a single relevant attribute. Given knowledge about the number of training instances, the number of irrelevant attributes, the amount of class and attribute noise, and the class and attribute distributions, we derive the expected classification accuracy over the entire instance space. We then examine the predictions of this analysis for different settings of these domain parameters, comparing them to experimental results to check our reasoning."

"In the scientist’s house are many mansions... Outsiders often regard science as a sober enterprise, but we who are inside see it as the most romantic of all callings. Both views are right. The romance adheres to the processes of scientific discovery, the sobriety to the responsibility for verification..."

"BACON.4 does not have heuristics for considering trigonometric functions of variables directly . Thus, in the run described here we simply told the system to examine the sines. In the following chapter we will see how BACON can actually arrive at the sine term on its own in a rather subtle manner."

"New heuristic (1) is used to prefer revision to premises that support relatively weak generalized beliefs."

"In all of these cases, the error arose from accepting “loose” fits of a law to data, and the later, correct formulation provided a law that fit the data much more closely. If we wished to simulate this phenomenon with BACON, we would only have to set the error allowance generously at the outset, then set stricter limits after an initial law had been found."

"As aims to address larger, more complex tasks, the problem of focusing on the most relevant information in a potentially overwhelming quantity of data has become increasingly important."

"Given a sample of data S, a learning algorithm L, and a feature set A, feature xi , is incrementally useful to L with respect to A if the accuracy of the hypothesis that L produces using the feature set {xi} ∪ A is better than the accuracy achieved using just the feature set A."

"A cognitive architecture specifies aspects of an intelligent system that are stable over time, much as in a building’s architecture. These include the memories that store perceptions, beliefs, and knowledge, the representation of elements that are contained in these memories, the performance mechanisms that use them, and the learning processes that build on them. Such a framework typically comes with a programming language and software environment that supports the efficient construction of knowledge-based systems."

"Research on cognitive architectures varies widely in the degree to which it attempts to match psychological data. ACT-R (Anderson & Lebiere, 1998) and EPIC (Kieras & Meyer, 1997) aim for quantitative fits to reaction time and error data, whereas Prodigy (Minton et al., 1989) incorporates selected mechanisms like means-ends analysis but otherwise makes little contact with human behavior. Architectures like Soar (Laird, Newell, & Rosenbloom, 1987; Newell, 1990) and Icarus (Langley & Choi, in press; Langley & Rogers, 2005) take a middle position, drawing on many psychological ideas but also emphasizing their strength as flexible AI systems. What they hold in common is an acknowledgement of their debt to theoretical concepts from cognitive psychology and a concern with the same intellectual abilities as humans."

"Almost 2000 years ago, the Roman architect Vitruvius recorded what makes a design good: durability (firmitas), utility (utilitas), and charm (venustas). These quality requirements still hold, for buildings as well as software systems. A well-designed system is easy to implement, is understandable and reliable, and allows for smooth evolution. Badly-designed systems may work at first, but they are hard to maintain, difficult to test, and unreliable."

"Software engineering concerns methods and techniques to develop large software systems. The engineering metaphor is used to emphasize a systematic approach to develop systems that satisfy organizational requirements and constraints."

"Computer science is still a young field. The first computers were built in the mid 1940s, since when the field has developed tremendously. Applications from the early years of computerization can be characterized as follows: the programs were quite small, certainly when compared to those that are currently being constructed; they were written by one person; they were written and used by experts in the application area concerned. The problems to be solved were mostly of a technical nature, and the emphasis was on expressing known algorithms efficiently in some programming language. Input typically consisted of numerical data, read from such media as punched tape or punched cards. The output, also numeric, was printed on paper. Programs were run off-line. If the program contained errors, the programmer studied an octal or hexadecimal dump of memory. Sometimes, the execution of the program would be followed by binary reading machine registers at the console."

"Present-day applications are rather different in many respects. Present-day programs are often very large and are being developed by teams that collaborate over periods spanning several years. These teams may be scattered across the globe. The programmers are not the future users of the system they develop and they have no expert knowledge of the application area in question. The problems that are being tackled increasingly concern everyday life: automatic bank tellers, airline reservation, salary administration, electronic commerce, automotive systems, etc. Putting a man on the moon was not conceivable without computers."

"Innovative e-business projects start with a design of the e-business model. We often encounter the view, in research as well as industry practice, that an e-business model is similar to a business process model, and so can be specified using UML activity diagrams or Petri nets. In this paper, we explain why this is a misunderstanding. The root cause is that a business model is not about process but about value exchanged between actors. Failure to make this separation of concerns leads to poor business decision-making and inadequate business requirements."

"And programming computers was so fascinating. You create your own little universe, and then it does what you tell it to do."