Knowledge Basilisks

I've been somewhat curious about knowledge basilisks for the past year or so. They're downright scary. The idea is that there are some pieces of knowledge, true or false, that hurt or even kill you and/or others around you just by learning them. I almost discovered one a year ago and fortunately had the sense to turn back before it was too late. I didn't look the basilisk in the eye but I could feel it in the room.

Naturally, this is at odds with my tendency to view acquiring true beliefs and knowledge as a good thing.

Basilisks are a strict subset of knowledge that has unintended consequences. Sometimes you learn something that ends up making you better. Sometimes it has an effect that's hard to judge on the good or bad scale, but is nevertheless there. The whole field of psychological priming is an example of that.

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Some grounding for protests

I happened to catch a radio interview several days ago with the 84-year-old lady who got maced by the police in Seattle. Her responses were alright, surprisingly lucid for her age, but she fumbled on one issue and eventually hung up. The question was along the lines of "What gives you the right to block these main roads and cause people sometimes really emotional inconveniences?" The example was a caller who called in earlier complaining that he missed his daughter's piano recital because he couldn't go anywhere in his car.

The woman first responded "Well what else are we supposed to do? How else are we going to get attention but by blocking a main street or two or three?" This is close to the right answer, but she didn't carry it through, and under pressure later went on to say that anyone with a car or a job is implicitly backing Capitalism and is part of the problem and deserves any inconveniences. Well that's great, you just disassociated yourself from 90% of the 99% assuming 10% of them are unemployed. Capitalism isn't the problem here.

A few days earlier I heard a prediction that the Right Wing Media will paint the old woman as a Commie from older times. Remember that was a geek-chic trend back in the day she's from, and the Right Wing won't publicly distinguish between Communism and Socialism as economic policies (or as distinct from government systems for that matter). Well when she makes statements like she did, the media won't be that far off. However, I'd be surprised if most of the protesters thought the same, but I wouldn't be surprised if most of them can't come up with a philosophical or moral grounding for their protests to exist.

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Tracing Beliefs

Sometimes I wonder where I get some of my ideas. I try to identify my beliefs that have or don't have justification, too. Sometimes I find one that I don't know where it came from, but can think of some justification or where to find some justification and end up keeping it; other times I'll find no justification, and I can't remember where it came from, and I stop believing the proposition and increase my uncertainty about it.

Recently I rediscovered a source for one of my shaping beliefs, I think. The belief is that humanity is only going to survive long into the future if every human acquires the ability to destroy our planet's life completely, but chooses not to. I've blogged about that belief in passing a few times, maybe I'll do a full post devoted to it one of these days. Since I still believe it, it's one of those "I don't know where this came from, I'm pretty sure I didn't think of it on my own unlike some others, but I know some reasons why it could be a good belief to have" types of beliefs mentioned above. But now I'm pretty sure where it came from--not the original thinker, but just how I first came across it.

It also passes the makes-a-prediction test; I don't anticipate living in a world thousands of years from now where people's individual control of things is about the same or less than it is now. At the same time, this belief is one of the reasons I think nanotechnology coming before intelligence augmentation is a bad idea. I don't think everyone will choose not to destroy everything, and molecular nanotech in the hands of everyone who wants it makes that a scary possibility regardless of the immense benefits such technology would bring. I'm firmly in the camp that further technological progress will either be tremendously awesome or tremendously devastating. It won't be a mix, it won't be the same old story. This isn't to say that intelligence enhancement won't carry the same risks, but I think more intelligent humans have a better shot at handling existential threats than the current crop. Even if I'm wrong, and we can survive without everyone wanting to survive, I don't see a world where I'm wrong and we also don't have a way to stop people from destroying everything. If 100% isn't needed, the N% not on board will still need to be neutralized somehow for humanity to survive.

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Is general machine intelligence inevitable?

Short answer: yes, provided humanity doesn't go extinct.

We currently have one example of general intelligence, and that's us. But we're not just singular objects, our brains and our minds are composed of parts. Just as surely as you can blind someone by removing their eyeballs, you can also just damage the right parts of the brain to get the same result, and the eyeballs themselves will be fine. The person's reasoning and tasting faculties will also be fine. They just won't be able to see anymore.

The past century, though in particular the last thirty years, has brought tremendous advances in our understanding of the human brain as well as the human mind. Our understanding of the human brain is, more or less, complete in the sense that we can describe it in terms of neuron networks. There are just so many neurons that it's incredibly hard to model anything sizable with computers right now.

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Joins as Matrices

Warning: if you're unfamiliar with SQL Joins, go have a look at the Venn Diagram explanation here.

We'll start with the last example, Cartesian Joins. Recall the definition of a Cartesian Product:

[math]X\times Y = \{\,(x,y)\mid x\in X \ \text{and} \ y\in Y\,\}.[/math]

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Multicore programming with Clojure

This is really just a blurb, not a serious introduction or set of examples. A few months ago I wrote about how I prefer Python's map() to using its List Comprehensions feature even if list comprehensions look and feel more Pythonic. The main reason is because by using map, it makes it simple to extend functional code to multiple cores or machines without changing the original, just by writing a clever version of the map function.

Clojure has such a clever version built-in, called pmap. Basically, it works just like map but applies the mapper function to the input dataset in parallel. (Hence it really shines when the mapper function time dominates.) I just wanted to gush over how awesome it is. Clojure also includes a time macro that makes benchmarking easy. Check out the docs here for an example.

That's it.

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The Graph Nature of Reality

I'm not talking about the real reality that quantum electrodynamics, quantum chromodynamics, and general relativity describe. I'm not making statements about the fundamental level that's the only real level, but about what reality kind of looks like at a bigger scale if you squint my way for a moment.

Nature has tuned us to think heavily in Cause and Effect. A chain, one thing proceeding to the next. Sometimes human choice dictates the direction of that chain, but human choice contains its own cause and effect cycle with choice and consequence. Only a few smart thinkers in history have seen beyond this, and only for a moment. Consider this quote from George Santayana, circa 1905-1906 in The Life of Reason. (Emphasis mine.)

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

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