Make Your Observations Pay Rent

第一

Elon Musk said during the panel at the Asilomar conference ("Beneficial AI 2017 Conference"):

[...] Everyone is already superhuman. And a cyborg. The limitation is one of bandwidth. We're bandwidth constrained, particularly on output. Our input is much better, but our output is extremely slow. If you want to be generous, you could say maybe it's a few hundred bits per second, or a kilobyte, something like that, output. The way we output is, we have our little meat-sticks, that we move very slowly and push buttons, or tap a little screen.

Effects of carbon dioxide on health and cognition

Summary

• Really high concentrations of CO₂ (30,000 - 40,000 ppm) produce obvious and terribly bad physiological effects.

• CO₂ levels even in poorly ventilated buildings rarely exceed 3,000 - 5,000 ppm.

• The evidence about those levels of CO₂ directly affecting cognition remains inconclusive.

• However, CO₂ levels are roughly indicative of overall air quality, which seems to affect both health and perceived comfort.

Prediction Calibration - Doing It Right

第一

To improve your skill at predicting the future, you work on two things - accuracy and calibration. There are well established and mathematically pretty ways to score accuracy. However, scoring calibration tends to be a mixture of eyeballing histograms and calculating fractions of failed predictions for arbitrary fixed ranges of confidence. This is not ideal.
First, let's talk about the current ("traditional") method, and what is wrong with it.

Applied Rationality Exercises

I was just about to run an introductory workshop around applied rationality, mindfulness, effective communication etc. in Warsaw, Poland when I got the flu, which forced me to stay in bed for a few days. A friend agreed to replace me at the event, and I wrote up the following notes for him.

The notes are not comprehensive, and do not include any background information or explanations. However, the availability of this kind of materials seems to be low, so there is a chance someone will at least take some inspiration from this.

On Risk of Viral Infections from Chlorella

第一

In November 2014, a certain study caused a great deal of panic. The study reported detecting traces of a Chlorella virus (ATCV-1) in samples from human throats, and finding a decrease of cognitive capacity in those infected with it. The authors of the study report that they had further verified their result by infecting mice with the same virus, and finding that they had lower performance on solving some puzzles versus mice in the control group.

Internal Race Conditions

第一

You might be familiar with the concept of a 'bug', as introduced by CFAR. By using the computer programming analogy, it frames any problem you might have in your life as something fixable... even more - as something to be fixed, something such that fixing it or thinking about how to fix it is the first thing that comes to mind when you see such a problem, or 'bug'.
Let's try another analogy in the same style, with something called 'race conditions' in programming. A race condition as a particular type of bug, that is typically very hard to find and fix ('debug'). It occurs when two or more parts of the same program 'race' to access some data, resource, decision point etc., in a way that is not controlled by any organised principle.

Against Amazement

第一

The feelings of wonder, awe, amazement. It's a very human experience, and it is processed in the brain as a type of pleasure. If fact, if we look at the number of "5 photos you wouldn't believe" and similar clickbait on the Internet, it functions as a mildly addictive drug.
If I proposed that there is something wrong with those feelings, I would soon be drowned in voices of critique, pointing out that I'm suggesting we all become straw Vulcans, and that there is nothing wrong with subjective pleasure obtained cheaply and at no harm to anyone else.
I do not disagree with that. However, caution is required here, if one cares about epistemic purity of belief. Let's look at why.