Brief thoughts on maybe programmers are bad talk

I love the title, though the talk isn't quite a match. Whatever. The link is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqUgl6pFx8Q

Overall I thought it was a good discussion, but I'd have challenged Casey a bit more on the assembly stuff. And as usual he has some perspectives I really disagree with at the level he presents them at, but I think if we could talk and dig into it more we'd probably agree on a lot. He might even say my very poor understanding of certain things is sufficient for his goals, and that if everyone was at least as poor as me, things would be better. Perhaps. Anyway, remarks just on the assembly stuff for now.

Can you really learn to read assembly well without having to write a good amount of it? I'm skeptical. The reason I'm skeptical is because it doesn't actually help that much to know "xadd [r13+16], r14" means "exchange and add" etc. The reason assembly is so difficult to understand and to write in general, despite for each line it being trivial to know (in a platonic sense) the full before/after instruction state of the CPU, is that what we care about is almost always about the side effects at some other level of looking at things (I don't want to say abstraction). Those side effects can be very platform and hardware dependent, the mapping very custom, and I think it's hard to get a feel for how such mappings work just by reading, you need to write. There's a reason every computer engineer learns to write UART, SIP, and I2C protocol code, whether in C or assembly, and often has to inspect it with an oscilloscope: you can't learn well enough just looking at the block diagrams.

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Some brief thoughts on the Yudkowsky / Wolfram chat

Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjH2B_sE_RQ

I'm reminded when I started writing blog posts, thinking: "Ah, I'll write about this topic, and then I'll never have to make this argument about it again! I'll just have people read this." Naive youth, I soon discovered. And I see the same with almost everyone EY has ever had a discussion with: they haven't read the Sequences, and it's really painful to see EY forced to try to compress parts of them in the space of a few sentences. They really are needed as a ground-level common pool of information and arguments and counter-arguments that have been made, some with conclusions, decades ago.

(In an attempt to preserve my naive dream, I don't care if people don't read anything I've written, none of it's particular good or original, but I don't really want to have a serious discussion about AGI with people who haven't at least read some of the SL4 archives. (I myself was just a lurker.) They're invariably going to raise points that were brought up way back then and resolved one way or another. I see this again and again with people EY talks to. People say "what about..." and there's an answer, it was already thought of and addressed decades ago.)

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Bad science reporting

This article about a new gout study is really quite annoying.

The headline: "Huge Study Shows Where Gout Comes From, And It's Not What We Thought". Pure clickbait. Nothing has changed the basic fact that gout is caused by a buildup of uric acid leading to micro crystals. The only thing the study has found is more genetic markers to make gout susceptibility more or less likely. Genetics having influence on these things is not surprising to anyone except perhaps blank slatists.

Gout is often associated with drinking too much or not eating healthily enough, but new research suggests genetics play more of a factor in developing the arthritic condition than previously thought.

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