26 AUG 2024 by ideonexus
The Success of Spaceguard
For years, many scientists warned of the dangers that asteroids pose to life on Earth, but for many years they weren’t listened to. Even after it was first proposed, in 1980, that the dinosaurs were killed off by a huge asteroid striking the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico,1 there was, in the words of leading astronomer Clark R. Chapman, a “giggle factor” associated with the risk from asteroids.2 This all changed in 1994 when comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 thudded into the side of Jupiter with th...26 AUG 2024 by ideonexus
Plasticity and Lock-In/Entrenchment of Values
Entrenchment of values creates multiple equilibria because there is a significant element of chance in which value system becomes most powerful at a particular place and time, and because, once a value system has become sufficiently powerful, it can stay that way by suppressing the competition. Moreover, the theory of cultural evolution helps to explain why the predominant cultures in society tend to entrench themselves. Simply: those cultures that do not entrench themselves in this way are, ...Folksonomies: cultural change values
Folksonomies: cultural change values
06 JUL 2024 by ideonexus
Allegorithm is About the Relation of Sign to Number
Allegory is about the relation of sign to sign; allegorithm is about the relation of sign to number. Signs don’t open to reveal chains of other signs, pointing in all directions. Or rather, it is no longer of any importance what signs reveal. They billow and float, pool and gather, arbitrary and useless. There is no way to redeem them. But signs now point to something else. They point to number. And number in turn points to the algorithm, which transforms one number into another. Out of the...Folksonomies: gamespace
Folksonomies: gamespace
23 DEC 2023 by ideonexus
Anthropocene Traps
The concept of evolutionary traps has been used almost exclusively for studying how non-human species respond to cues in anthropogenic environments [24–34]. Key examples include artificial human lights attracting insects, island species responding naively to the presence of introduced predators, and seabirds not being able to discriminate between the cues of marine plankton and marine plastics [34–36] (figure 1a). In the context of humans, evolutionary mismatch is a much more fr...Folksonomies: evolution maladaptation
Folksonomies: evolution maladaptation
17 OCT 2021 by ideonexus
Understanding Cause and Effect is Based on Experience
Were a man, such as Adam, created in the full vigor of understanding, without experience, he would never be able to infer motion in the second ball from the motion and impulse of the first. It is not anything that reason sees in the cause, which make us infer the effect. Such an inference, were it possible, would amount to a demonstration, as being founded merely on the comparison of ideas. But no inference from cause to effect amounts to a demonstration, as being founded merely on the compar...Folksonomies: philosophy empiricism
Folksonomies: philosophy empiricism
Adam would not know that one billiard ball hitting another would cause a chain reaction.
07 NOV 2019 by ideonexus
Space Colonists as Selfish Fools
Human beings live in ideas. That they were condemning their descendants to death and extinction did not occur to them, or if it did they repressed the thought, ignored it, and forged on anyway. They did not care as much about their descendants as they did about their ideas, their enthusiasms. Is this narcissism? Solipsism? Idiocy (from the Greek word idios, for self)? Would Turing acknowledge it as proof of human behavior? Well, perhaps. They drove Turing to suicide too. No. No. It was not...Told from the perspective of the AI running the ship.
02 MAR 2019 by ideonexus
Scientific Laws Mean That God has No Freedom
he one remaining area that reHgion can now lay claim to is the origin of the universe, but even here science is making progress and should soon provide a definitive answer to how the universe began. I published a book that asked if God created the universe, and that caused something of a stir. People got upset that a scientist should have anything to say on the matter of religion. I have no desire to tell anyone what to believe, but for me asking if God exists is a valid question for science...02 MAR 2019 by ideonexus
New Kind of Memory for AI
AI researchers have typically tried to get around the issues posed by by Montezuma’s Revenge and Pitfall! by instructing reinforcement-learning algorithms to explore randomly at times, while adding rewards for exploration—what’s known as “intrinsic motivation.” But the Uber researchers believe this fails to capture an important aspect of human curiosity. “We hypothesize that a major weakness of current intrinsic motivation algorithms is detachment,” they write. “Wherein the a...31 OCT 2018 by ideonexus
Bumper Sticker Computer Science
A few of my favorites, not found in the linked article: "There are two ways of constructing software. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. The other is to make it so complex that there are no obvious deficiencies." C.A.R. Hoare "The purpose of software engineering is to control complexity, not to create it." Dr. Pamela Zave "The most important single aspect of software development is to be clear about what you are trying to build." Bjarne Stroustrup "T...27 JUL 2018 by ideonexus