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قبل 5 أشهرdiscuss

In the absence of other evidence, isn't it the case that any given trait is 50% heritable and 50% environmental?

السنة الماضيةdiscuss

Peter Godfrey-Smith discusses this topic at length in his recent-ish book Metazoa and uses observations of insects and other invertebrates to argue, compellingly in my opinion, that sentience and cognitive abilities are not intrinsically linked, but rather depend on the specific organism's evolutionary/reproductive strategies.

Most insects do not exhibit the classic signs of pain responses (the new findings discussed in this New Yorker article, notwithstanding). For example insects generally don't groom or guard an amputated limb. This puzzling (lack of) response can be explained as being aligned with their reproductive strategy: they reach breeding age quickly and die soon after. Thus, it's better not to waste energy avoiding limb loss for a future that won't happen.

Despite this lack of sentience, insects can be quite intelligent and learn complex cues and behaviors. Other invertebrates that look superficially like insects, prawns for example, have quite different life cycles and lifespans and often do exhibit signs of pain / sentience.

Basically pain/sentience emerge when there is a reason for the organism to protect the body from damage, and does not evolve (or is subsequently lost!) when there are more important short term goals. One wonders, for example, whether salmon experience pain when they fling their bodies up rivers, over and onto rocks, damaging them horribly in the process: all for purposes of spawning.

قبل سنتينdiscuss

See also: Marzullo, Rantze, and Gage. Stock Market Behavior Predicted by Rat Neurons. Annals of Improbable Research. Vol 12, No 4. July-August 2006. https://improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume12/v12i4/rat...

قبل سنتينdiscuss

The US put a fission reactor in space too. They did it first, in fact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNAP-10A

Edit: it’s apparently still there and will be for a long time (!) albeit non-functional:

  > Decay date: April 3, 5966 (planned)

قبل سنتينdiscuss

The other pro is cost: cameras are much, much cheaper than LiDAR. Tesla is making the bet that they can close the performance gap between cameras and LiDAR faster than the cost of LiDAR will come down.

قبل سنتينdiscuss

  > Iteration itself isn’t inherently bad. It’s just that the objective
  > function usually isn’t what we want from a scientific perspective.

I think this is exactly right and touches on a key difference between science and engineering.

Science: Is treatment A better than treatment B?

Engineering: I would like to make a better treatment B.

Iteration is harmful for the first goal yet essential for the second. I work in an applied science/engineering field where both perspectives exist. (and are necessary!) Which specific path is taken for any given experiment or analysis will depends on which goal one is trying to achieve. Conflict will sometimes arise when it's not clear which of these two objectives is the important one.

قبل سنتينdiscuss

Off-topic: in the photo lede at the top of the article, are the rescued merchant mariners wearing standard eye/ear protection or is something else going on? Based on how they are holding the shoulder of the person in front of them, it almost looks like they are blindfolded.

قبل سنتينdiscuss

I think language acquisition provides a pretty compelling example of learning affecting the experience of qualia. When someone is learning to speak a foreign language, there is often an period where certain sounds are difficult for the learner to produce, because those sounds are not present or are not distinguished in the learner's native tongue. For example, the R and L sounds of English are tricky for a native Japanese speaker.

A reason it's so hard to learn to produce these novel sounds, I would argue, is because the learner literally cannot hear the differences at first. It's only after learning (i.e. when the qualia starts to change) that production of the new sounds becomes possible.

One can think of other similar examples in the context of expert performance: a sonar operator can hear sounds in his headphones that most (at first) cannot; an artist can distinguish colors that the novice cannot, etc.

If you buy this argument, that learning can affect perception/qualia, then it's a fairly small leap to imagine how qualia itself might also be learned ex nihilo.

قبل سنتينdiscuss

See also: https://www.geisswerks.com/drempels/

قبل سنتينdiscuss

David MacKay discusses this in Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air. He concludes that, while it's on first glance appealing to want to use waste heat from power generation, heat pumps are strictly superior to combined heat and power except for in a few specialized circumstances (e.g. industrial uses that require high temperatures). The book is fifteen years old now, so I suspect the math even more strongly favors heat pumps than when it was published.

See the section, "Heat pumps, compared with combined heat and power": https://www.withouthotair.com/c21/page_147.shtml

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

Louis de Broglie's dissertation [1] is mindblowing and quite cogent (at least in the English translation, but presumably in French too ...)

1. https://fondationlouisdebroglie.org/LDB-oeuvres/De_Broglie_K...

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

Max Welling's Kalman Filter tutorial [1] derives the smoother equations using pretty clear and easy to follow notation (and is a great resource generally).

Briefly: you first run the filter equations "forwards", processing each datapoint sequentially from start to end. Then you run the smoother "backwards" in time on the same data going from end to start.

1. http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~liam/teaching/neurostat-spr12/...

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

The Ottomans were also not originally from Anatolia ...

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

That doesn't pose an issue: the "observation model" of a Kalman filer allows for affine transformations (e.g. scale, rotation, and offset) between the sensor data and the "true" latent state that you wish to estimate. Even better, it can appropriately handle correlational structure between your sensors.

What the Kalman filter equations don't tell you, is how to estimate the parameters of such an observation model. You either have to write it down from first principles, estimate it from "fully observed" data (if you have such a luxury), estimate it (up to a rotation) using expectation maximization (EM), or guess.

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

  By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; 
  Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the 
  bitterest.

قبل 10 سنواتdiscuss

You could absolutely borrow on margin to play the stock, although you would probably need to have more than the typical home mortgage 20% to get the loan.

قبل 17 سنةdiscuss

  * For better or worse, real customers will stick with the
  "original brand".
  * The fork won't get any of the community support the
  original did, and will always be out of sync.
  * Whatever community forms around the original project
  will angrily reject the fork.

I don't believe this is always true--usually the superior* fork wins out. Take Firefox or xorg. Both of them effectively replaced the projects from which they came.

* Where superior here means technically, or aesthetically or friendlier to contributers or whatever.