This is what's known as a "superstimulus" - something that pinpoints our brain's reward and pleasure centers orders of magnitude more than anything that existed in the evolutionary environment. Heroin and candy bars fall into the same category.
Of course, heroin and candy bars aren't exactly civilization-level risks - they're regulated to various degrees, and the people that overconsume simply self-select out of existence. I'm skeptical that an entire society would fall under the spell of a game (even a really good one) before society develops protections against it (through regulation and cultural norms).
Having tried to implement a certain form of this, I can say that forcing yourself into a certain mode of thinking, top down, is EXTREMELY mentally taxing. It's very difficult to keep up the mental focus necessary for an appreciable amount of time, and I would not be surprised if this actually impeded mental performance on an individual level because of the effort involved, though it's possible overall group performance could still increase.
A philosophical zombie is not a decision tree incapable of learning. A philosophical zombie is something that is exactly like a human in every way except that it lacks consciousness. The concept has more than a few problems - see http://lesswrong.com/lw/p7/zombies_zombies/
If a decision tree (or a clever algorithm or whatever) REALLY did perfectly mimic a thinking human (including our ability to learn), do you still think it wouldn't REALLY be intelligent? That there's some sort of important, qualitative difference between being shifted through a decision tree and sensory inputs and feedback loops building up neuron action potentials? That may be true, but the evidence is heavily stacked against such a worldview.
That said, I agree that this is a bad approach to AI. It's not like people haven't been trying to stitch together various subproblems of intelligence for the better part of 50 years.
>Complexity research doesn't need its own institute, because complexity research is a pseudoscience that means whatever you want it to mean
This. As far as I can tell, "complexity science" is really just a dumping ground for things we haven't figured out yet. Some pattern seemingly ‘emerges’ out of nowhere? Complexity! Feedback loops causing unpredictable behavior? Complexity! Non-linear or ‘chaotic’ behavior that's difficult to interpret? Complexity! Don’t know where something starts or stops? Complexity! Self-reference or deep, recursive hierarchies doing something weird? Complexity! You can’t talk about any of them without using the phrase “don’t know”. It’s a field defined by our ignorance.
Hrm, this submission is over 300 karma points as of this comment, which means that hacker monthly #2 will have to include an entire copy of hacker monthly #1...
Of course, at some point letting problems work themselves out just becomes laziness.
"Mr Coolidge's genius for inactivity is developed to a very high point. It is not an indolent inactivity. It is a grim, determined, alert inactivity, which keeps Mr Coolidge occupied constantly" - Columnist Walter Lippmann, 1926
When you're talking about a profession though, engineer means something very specific. It means that you're trained and licensed and can be held legally responsible if whatever you're building should malfunction. Referring to your profession as an engineer when you don't meet those criteria is a bit disingenuous. It's akin to the difference between calling yourself a doctor because you went to medical school, and calling yourself a doctor because you got a PhD in english lit.
You need a layout change - this looks more like a news aggregation site than a blog. News sites are designed to lure you in with a grabbing headline. With articles such as yours, you really need to put the text in front of me immediately - the title alone isn't going to get me interested. Unless you have a compelling reason to eschew the standard blog look, I'd stick with that.
I'd also suggest moving the google ads to the far right of the page. They were the first thing I saw and I was immediately annoyed by them.
As far as the content goes, you need a lot more explanation as to what sort of analysis you're actually doing, and what the graphs mean. Many of your graphs and charts are extremely cryptic, and they're frequently put at the end of the post with nothing following them.
Furthermore, you've got the unfortunate combination of writing in a stilted, scientific style (which really, you should never do) with posts that really don't have much scientific content to them.
Overall I'd say you need to focus more on your actual writing and less on everything else.
It's well known that Google collects massive amounts of data, and does massive amounts of UI testing (such as the infamous testing between 85 different shades of blue), so I'm somewhat skeptical that it's design is mediocre because this guy says it is and he's a web designer. Data trumps intuition every day of the week.
From his description, and from the bits and pieces I've picked up on other blogs, while the book is a popular science book, it's skewed much more to the science side than the popular side.
I seem to remember something (possibly posted here) about most company founders actually being in their 30's and 40's. There's something to be said for the value of years of knowledge and experience.
There's nothing wrong with trying to be smart. The problem is trying to show others how smart you are (as the guy so astutely wrote in your yearbook). It makes you look like a jerk. No one likes a jerk.
I have an extremely similar problem, where I feel like I always have to be right about...well, whatever I happen to be talking about. Because big personality changes are hard, instead I try to control some specific behaviors that get me into trouble, such as getting defensive and trying to sound like I know more than I do. That may be a better goal than a complete personality makeover.
I am not an expert on evolution, but much of this article strikes me as incorrect. The fact that genes are capable of modifying other genes (turning them off/on, splicing in new genes, etc.) doesn't refute the concept of natural selection of random mutations unless you're ALSO positing a new mechanism by which this modification ability can be acquired. I skimmed through and didn't see one, even though he strangely implies that the fact that genes behave in a complex fashion means that organisms aren't coded by them. His (apparent) creationist sympathies and tacit endorsement of the gaia concept leads me to believe he thinks there is some sort of magic at work, which is not a very useful explanation.
I'm equally perplexed by his overall point of "genetics is complicated, therefore genetic engineering and capitalism is immoral."
I don't know about Japanese, but in Chinese, all the numbers have words that can be said extremely quickly - si, qi, etc. Because our working memory is implemented as a 2 second loop of audio, this allows Chinese people to have a working memory that's closer to 10 items instead of the famous 'seven plus or minus two' that English speakers have. In 'Outliers' Malcolm Gladwell posits this as part of the reason why asians often seem to be better at math.