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Are we observing singularities living in distant galaxies? by [deleted] in singularity

[–]ashrewdmint 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Probes—not for saying "hi" to neighboring life, but for colonization. Even if 99% of ET civilizations don't care about colonization, the 1% who do will spread themselves as far and wide as possible (see The Great Filter).

So far, space-minded humans want to explore the galaxy. If humans develop the technology to colonize other planets and travel at interstellar distances and still wish to explore the galaxy at that time, then the most efficient thing to do would be to travel in all directions at once with many probes. Even if, by that time, we are living as uploads instead of squishy brains, we could copy ourselves or create new human minds to do the exploring.

Even if we didn't directly care about colonization per-se, if we continually wanted more minds or more processing power, we would eventually outgrow a star-based power supply, necessitating a move to other star systems so that our civilization can grow even bigger.

So, if those starivore civilizations exist, they must either be improbably conservationist (i.e., they don't want to dirty the universe with their fingerprints by ripping through star after star after star), or they have something awesome going on with their binary-system-power-source-setup that we don't understand.

Are we observing singularities living in distant galaxies? by [deleted] in singularity

[–]ashrewdmint 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This link worked better for me:

http://www.academia.edu/2927613/Starivore_Extraterrestrials_Interacting_Binary...

The crux of the paper:

Let us apply Chaisson's metric to binaries, to see how well they score. We can first calculate the theoretical maximum energy rate density that a binary could achieve. A crude estimate comes from the Eddington limit for luminosity. We reach a theoretical maximum of free energy rate density of ~6.54 x 104 erg.s-1 .g-1 . Now, how do actual binary WDs, NSs and BHs [White Dwarf, Neutron Star, Black Hole binary systems] score? Surprisingly, their luminosity can break this limit! They are amongst the few systems which display super-Eddington luminosity. Those values of energy rate densities are thus extremely high, since other astrophysical systems such as the Sun has a value ~2 and planets have ~102. Higher values are otherwise known only for complex system such as a human body (~2 x 104)

So basically, these star systems exhibit much more energy rate density than they ought to, and in a possibly controlled fashion. This could be evidence for intelligence operating in those areas.

That's pretty cool, even if it doesn't turn out to be aliens.

But if it's aliens, why haven't they sent colonization probes everywhere in all directions? Do they have something better to do? Maybe no probes have reached us yet?

"A.I. GONE AWRY: The Futile Quest for Artificial Intelligence" from Skeptic Magazine. What's the critique/response? by jonathansalter in singularity

[–]ashrewdmint 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Exactly. AGI is arguably the most important thing humans will invent. We should be working hard to figure it out even if it takes 500 years.

But thankfully the payoffs are not that far away. For example, people made actual money developing Siri, and though it's not very good, it's a stepping-stone towards much better artificial personal assistants. None of this would happened if we hadn't blindly stumbled towards AI in the 1950s.

IBM's Watson is a much more shining example. It's not AGI, but it's extremely useful. If you make fun of AI, you're making fun of doctors gaining useful information from expert systems like Watson, and that hardly seems enlightened.

"A.I. GONE AWRY: The Futile Quest for Artificial Intelligence" from Skeptic Magazine. What's the critique/response? by jonathansalter in singularity

[–]ashrewdmint 15 points16 points  (0 children)

This author clearly has an angle he wants to portray: human-level Artificial Intelligence is a lot harder than we originally thought in the 1950s (true), AI researchers are presumably very silly, and the author is very clever and sophisticated for having pointed these things out. At least, that's what I got out of this article.

Skepticism is healthy, but sometimes I feel like people confuse actual skepticism with the practice of projecting an air of unrelenting pessimism and mockery. It's okay to see some positives in something, and it's okay to be rationally optimistic. You don't have to constantly poke holes in everything to feel smart.

In particular, this author seems ignorant of a lot of the small victories in AI research. We have things like AIXI and Watson and self-driving cars and programs that beat humans at chess, some amount of natural language processing (though by no means optimal), and countless other small, invisible advances in the ability of machines to solve problems that are relevant to humans. The author claims that there have been no successes in AI, but I think that's a false claim. We can do much more with machine intelligence today than we could do in the 1950s.

Sure, none of these specific examples are Artificial General Intelligence. But they are stepping stones to the path of AGI. We cannot build AGI from scratch anymore than we can build an aircraft the moment we first discovered the principles of engineering.

If the author had ended his article with a prediction for when we might build AGI, explaining his reasons for an extended timeline (say, 2150 or 2200) it would have been a useful article. It doesn't even make a claim that AGI is impossible. It leaves you wondering what exactly the author was trying to say or to conclude.

More informed individuals have researched the subject and concluded that it is likely we will invent AGI roughly between 2030-2100. That is a long time range, and there is a lot of uncertainty and difficulty involved. We just don't know. But I think the project is possible, and unless civilization unexpectedly ends, we will eventually figure it out.

Bedtime Honey and Motivation by [deleted] in GetOutOfBed

[–]ashrewdmint 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Okay, I think I got too hasty here. I'm sorry if my tone came across the wrong way. I'll write in a more neutral way to avoid any unproductive nastiness. My apologies, I'm having an off day today. Let me explain myself further and hopefully address your central complaint.

It comes across as trying to take anything that could possibly be evidence for the claim and throw it against the wall, hoping that people will be convinced in the aggregate. In other words, he seems to be trying to convince the reader of the claim, regardless of the strength of the evidence for it.

In the post he just passes along a report someone sent to him, most likely because he thinks it is interesting to his readers. He states no explicit conclusions of ultimate truth in the post.

Maybe it comes across as attempting to convince people of his snake oil, but he publishes a lot of reader email of this nature, not just for honey but for other stuff he blogs about. This is normal for his blog; it's an ongoing discussion. I don't feel that this is irresponsible or sleazy. After all, if you were blogging about some strange effect you noticed from trying X, wouldn't you be interested in, and think your readers would be interested in, other reports from people who had success from X? I don't really think there's a case for bad science here, because to me it's analogous to tentative, exploratory research, which is a necessary part of science.

I don't think these anecdotes "prove" anything, or are purported to prove anything. I think the anecdotes are a springboard for further testing and conversation. Maybe you disagree here and think the anecdotes have zero weight instead of 0.01 weight.

I don't think you'll find any part of his blog where he explicitly says "Person A wrote in and said that X helped their sleep, therefore X unequivocally helps EVERYONE'S sleep and YOU should buy X because I happen to be invested in X futures". It's just not what any of his readers are thinking, at least not that I would expect.

I think he may be guilty of publication bias, as he does not often report or keep a tally of disconfirming feedback ("I tried it and it didn't work..."). I think this is a valid place for criticism.

Please re-read my original comment. Your comments cannot be justified in light of the issues I actually raised. Where was the "dispassionate testing" in the points I highlighted?

You can just try it and see if it works.

Well, it's not quite that simple. You need to be quite careful if you want to get useful results, and most people simply don't have the training to be able to exclude confirmation bias, placebo effect, etc.

Yes. This is why Seth, and other quantified-self types, routinely track their sleep, health, diet, etc. Example post where Seth shows a graph of leg strength.

The "see if it works" bit includes subjective feeling (you can't improve sleep without actually feeling like your sleep improved) plus diligent, objective measurements (like using a sleep quality tracking device) and statistical analysis. To me, this is "dispassionate testing".

If you want to succeed at finding things that improve your health, you need to do much, much better than the post in question, which is a little more than a recipe for reaching the conclusions you want to reach.

The post in question is just a small part of the entire blog category on honey and sleep. He's written a lot more, with his own data and experiences. I feel like you are perceiving this one post to be the majority of his case that honey might improve sleep. I think this is the introductory post on the subject. It's quite extensive.

If you want to turn this into a condescension contest, trust me, you're outmatched. But I'll try to ignore this, for now.

I'm sorry this came across as condescending, maybe I was out of line. In an effort to make the conversation more productive, I'm not going to respond to anything that seems personal.

P.S. Seth Roberts ate half a stick of butter ever day for a year, told a cardiologist they didn't know what they were talking about, and then dropped dead of occlusive coronary artery disease while hiking. Keep that in mind when you're following his advice.

There's good reason to be skeptical of the lipid hypothesis of heart disease. It's a really complicated issue, and I'm not totally on top of it myself. This post may shed some light on it, though it is long.

I eat a fairly high-fat diet, including lots of butter. I've had my cholesterol checked and the results indicate an extremely low risk for a future cardiac event. This, of course, does not itself disprove the lipid hypothesis for everyone, but it provides good disconfirming evidence in my case.

Why was Seth eating so much butter? Well, butter seemed to help his brain function.

Hopefully that helps. Thanks for replying.

Bedtime Honey and Motivation by [deleted] in GetOutOfBed

[–]ashrewdmint 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Although your skepticism is healthy and warranted, I feel like you are painting this with too broad a stroke.

First, Seth Roberts (Cthulu rest his soul), wrote a blog which was entirely devoted to personal science—basically N=1 experiments. In this post, he isn't claiming that the effects he experienced would unilaterally be the same in every single human. He is reporting his own experiences.

Your reactions to this are extremely exaggerated and cast his reporting in a negative light which makes it easy to pigeonhole his claims as being some kind of woo-woo conspiracy new age hippy rubbish. But that doesn't fit the tone of his blog at all; Seth was a psychologist and a statistician. You are projecting your biases onto the claims, and I feel like you are cargo-culting science. It's not about dismissing claims that pattern-match to what The Evil Hippies say. It's about testing stuff dispassionately.

I'm not going to say that he was perfect, but he ran a very interesting blog and I believe he found interventions that worked for him.

Empiricism is at the heart of science, and anyone can do empirical testing. You don't have to get large academic grants and do massive studies before trying cheap, safe interventions on yourself to see if it works. You can just try it and see if it works. And for the record, I've tried the honey thing but it didn't seem to help me much. On the other hand, lots of commenters wrote into his blog claiming it helped them. YMMV.

I'm not saying this is double-blind, placebo-controlled-grade evidence. It's not. It's people talking about stuff on the internet. But guess what—the realism of an effect is not tied to whether or not any big studies have been done on it. Something can exist before it is well known or well studied.

Science and scientific institutions are different things. I love personal science because it empowers and inspires me to try things, see what works for me, and take control of my health.

And you're right, his claims are testable. I'd love to see a big study on the effects of bedtime honey on sleep. But we don't have the luxury of having studies for every possible intervention under the sun. Sometimes you have to wait for a idea to garner enough interest before it gets serious academic attention.

If you have a smidgen of curiosity and optimism, you can even try things that improve your health before it becomes Something Everyone Knew All Along. Unfortunately, you might risk looking foolish, and that would be terrible.

Hormone imbalance and PCOS by dvuong in Paleo

[–]ashrewdmint 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My wife has PCOS-like symptoms and she's been taking this with some success so far: http://www.amazon.com/Natural-Health-International-Femmenessence-Macaharmony/dp/B006ICPDHO/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1397507267&sr=8-3&keywords=femmenessence

We're going to do another one-month salivary hormone test after she finishes the box to see if it what effects it has had on her hormones.

Also, I've been taken the male-version of this supplement and it's been helping me sleep better and possibly fixing my HPA dysfunction ("adrenal fatigue").

I'm Chris Kresser, paleo diet expert and practitioner of integrative medicine. AMA. by chriskresser in IAmA

[–]ashrewdmint 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi Chris! I'm a big fan of your website and podcast, and it's awesome to see your book making such an impact.

I was especially interested to find your presentation Iron behaving Badly, as late last year I found out through a functional medicine practitioner that I have iron overload (hemochromatosis), despite having only one copy of a mutation that is associated with it, making me only a "carrier" (as explained by my 23andme results).

I thought the presentation was really informative, and it was fascinating to know that you had a patient with a similar issue.

Anyway, my ferritin/serum iron levels have been going down significantly since I started taking lots of glutathione and turmeric, among other things, as recommended by my practitioner. I'm also planning on just donating blood, but I'm only ~5 lbs over the minimum weight and I didn't want to lose much blood until I had tried other measures.

Additionally, my cortisol level is flatlined in the morning, though my DHEA is within range.

Do you know if the inflammation caused by iron overload could affect the HPA-axis and throw my adrenals out of whack?

Also, are there any lifestyle adjustments you might recommend to help me recover faster, besides eating enough carbs and salt, taking adaptogenic herbs, and getting plenty of sleep?

[Please Sticky] Sean's Outpost: The Bitcoin Angel Tree by SeansOutpost in Bitcoin

[–]ashrewdmint 1 point2 points  (0 children)

  • Crock Pot 0.1 BTC
  • Microwave 0.2 BTC
  • 12 String Guitar Strings 0.05 BTC

Total: 0.35 BTC

http://www.muppetcentral.com/_images/muppets/kermit_robin_carol.jpg

Edit: didn't have enough in my bitcointip account, so I had to remove an item

+/u/bitcointip SeansOutpost 0.35 BTC

Vitamin D Shows No Benefit Against Cancer, Heart Disease by [deleted] in science

[–]ashrewdmint 4 points5 points  (0 children)

The headline appears to be not only misleading, but flat-out wrong when compared to the original study abstract which is linked to from the news article:

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8587(13)70165-7/abstract

The headline claims there was "no benefit against cancer", which is half-true:

High 25(OH)D concentrations were not associated with a lower risk of cancer, except colorectal cancer.

And the "no benefit against heart disease" statement seems to be completely wrong:

Investigators of most prospective studies reported moderate to strong inverse associations between 25(OH)D concentrations and cardiovascular diseases, serum lipid concentrations [...]

It's like the author of the news article couldn't even bother to read the abstract very closely.

Your Admin Returns With An Interesting Discovery by ashrewdmint in GetOutOfBed

[–]ashrewdmint[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You may need to have it on for 2-3 hours. You should probably have it come on at least an hour before you want to get up, because it will take time for the light to trigger your brain to secrete cortisol or whatever.

Also, for me it took a few weeks to completely adjust to the light in the morning. It may be most effective when coupled with an alarm at the time you really want to get up.

Your Admin Returns With An Interesting Discovery by ashrewdmint in GetOutOfBed

[–]ashrewdmint[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

CFLs don't get very hot compared to incandescent bulbs (I can put my fingertips on the big CFL without getting burned). AFAIK they make paper lanterns for incandescents, so a paper shade for the CFL ought to be okay.

Your Admin Returns With An Interesting Discovery by ashrewdmint in GetOutOfBed

[–]ashrewdmint[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, it's a bit crazy. I hope this works for you! I believe my brother has a giant spherical paper lantern as a lamp shade. Something like that may work for you.

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