The Bayesian Conspiracy

You can’t control (well) what you can’t count Samzdat’s posts that served as the basis of much of this episode: Man as a Rationalist Animal, and The Meridian of Her Greatness. Also: The Use and Abuse of Witchdoctors for Life (not Witchdoctors Without Borders, as Eneasz misremembered) Matt Freeman’s podcast – We’ve Got Worm Also from Matt – The Daly Planet Scott Alexander’s review of “Seeing Like A State” And the original source material, for the purists. Norman Borlaug’s dwarf wheat saved 1 billion people GreenPeace blocks golden rice for no good reason ChemTrails Turned My Frogs Gay Cats are Murder Machines Our Robin Hanson interview on Age of Em Kim Jong Il made a quilt of sparrow’s neck feathers A photon teleported from Earth to Space – or was it? Northpaw Anklet Friendship is Optimal & Caelum Est Conterrens (different authors) Red Legacy & Other Stories

Under the Aegis of Transhuman Spiderman + Other Considerations (and Listener Feedback Catch-up) Fiction The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, by Roger Williams The Golden Age, by John C Wright Utopia, LOL?, by Jamie Wahls (+audio version) Red Legacy and Other Stories, by Eneasz Brodski Non-Fiction Making Beliefs Pay Rent The Psychological Unity of Humankind, by Eliezer Yudkowsky  – counterpoint: The Psychological Diversity of Mankind, by Kaj Sotala Dunbar’s Number/Monkey Sphere CEV IQ actually doesn’t correlate with unhappiness. It’s either uncorrelated or weakly correlated with happiness! /surprised

Going beyond our meat-suits Transhumanism as Simplified Humanism text. Also available in audio here, starting at 6:52 Eneasz with PZ Meyers, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and David Brin: The Immortality Debate The Fun Theory Sequence (also – here’s a quick summary, but the summaries really never do the sequences full justice) Chinese scientists genetically modify human embryos China accused of engineering its most famous sporting export (Yao Ming) The Singleton Louis C.K.’s Incurable Shitty Ankle Fiction Mentioned: Eneasz’s short story “Host” (plus others) is now available in a collection, both print and ebook! The Quantum Thief, by Hannu Rajaniemi The Golden Age, by John C. Wright Friendship Is Optimal, by Iceman

AlphaGo is back. Patrick talks about its latest accomplishments, its future, and other topics in game advances. Our first AlphaGo episode (a very early one, sorry about the audio quality) News of the most recent AlphaGo adventures Steph Curry’s training is on a new level Eneasz’s favorite type of tool-assist challenges – Item Abuse. DOTA Sam Harris speaks with Tristan Harris about the arms race for human attention, the ethics of persuasion, and more  

All the cool kids are doing podcasts about drugs, so… The DARE program’s lack of efficacy (see also: Wikipedia page on DARE studies) How to get addicted to heroin without really trying. Eneasz thought he read this in The New Yorker, but it was actually Cracked, which is like the New Yorker except more prestigious. Sam Harris’s podcast episode “Drugs And The Meaning of Life” Slate Star Codex – Why Were Early Psychedelicists So Weird? American culture’s treatment of alcohol makes abuse worse – Short BBC article, Super Long Website, Huge PDF (Shelly points us to p156 & p386). The “wet house” Portugal decriminalized all drugs in 2001 and is doing pretty well Some areas of northern Mexico are basically cartel-states now Eneasz couldn’t find any back-up for his claim that all cultures experience a 100-year pause in development after the discovery of alcohol, and since alcohol has been around since basically the start of civilization, he’s beginning to suspect that anecdote was meant as a joke. Fake alcohol can still get people drunk (within limits) The experience of a woman did acid weekly for almost a year and nearly died (not daily, as we’d mentioned in the episode). Fascinating post. A presidential aide to Nixon reports that the Drug War was specifically about targeting the groups Nixon felt were his enemies. Do children see the sky as blue, or even see “it” at all, before we tell them it’s there? Maybe Not

** Fixed the audio. Please re-download for the correct episode. ** Drugs that boost mental performance for dummies. Did caffiene help kickstart the Enlightenment era? FOR SCIENCE! /r/nootropics for your nootropic discussion needs Other places to discuss include Nootropics Depot and Longecity Gwern’s posts on nootropics in general, and in-depth on Modafinil in particular The Flynn Effect The Last Psychiatrist’s Ritalin/Adderall post You Pass Butter The survey project where they’re gathering data on what humans would want self-driving cars to do in trolley-problem-like situations. Pretty fun! Blindsight by Peter Watts on Amazon. Also available free from the author! What Is It Like To Be A Bat? (note: PDF)

Slate Star Codex article – You Kant Dismiss Universalizability Wikipedia page on the Revelation Principle Eliezer’s post on LessWrong – Ends Don’t Justify Means (Among Humans) Another LessWrong post – Protected From Myself Louis CK bit on Lying (1:46 seconds long) Short book by Sam Harris on Lying (six minute preview of audiobook) Scott Alexander post on LessWrong – The Worst Argument in the World The Prevalence of Lying in America: Three Studies of Self-Reported Lies Kim B. Serota, Timothy R. Levine, & Franklin J. Boster https://msu.edu/~levinet/Serota_etal2010.pdf?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss * Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 July 2009 comment on Not Technically Lying by Psychohistorian http://lesswrong.com/lw/11y/not_technically_lying/wew?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss * Are animals capable of deception or empathy? Implications for animal consciousness and animal welfare S Kuczaj, K Tranel, M Trone, H Hill Animal Welfare. Special Issue 10:161- 173 (2001) * Comadena, Mark E. “Accuracy in detecting deception: Intimate and friendship relationships.” Annals of the International Communication Association 6.1 (1982): 446-472. Comadena’s study finds that friends & spouses have better deception rates than acquaintances, but friends have better deception rates than spouses. So, it’s more like closeness helps your lie-detection ability up to a point, but past that point of closeness, it starts to hurt instead of help. Some other studies show no significant difference between detection rates of strangers vs people in close relationships  

We talk with Tsvi from MIRI Game-playing algorithm that pauses Tetris “On The Origin of Circuits“, discussing a chip hardware evolution experiment MIRI’s technical research agenda overview Alignment for advanced machine learning systems paper from MIRI Musk’s OpenAI Paul Christiano’s about page, which links to his paper Tsvi mentioned Logical induction paper from MIRI Reason as Memetic Immune Disorder, by Phil Goetz (not Scott Alexander (yet)) The original “EA Has a Lying Problem” post. Lost of discussion in the comments, and also over at E-A.com  

The Logical Fallacy of Generalizing from fictional evidence Genie Button Though Experiment Wait but Why on AI Part 1 and Part 2 The Downfall meme we mentioned. This is Steven’s favorite version. Yudkowsky vs Hanson – Great AI FOOM debate  and the Video Sam Harris AI TED talk Albion’s Seed – SSC Redditor provides an incredible explanation of how being poor can make you bad with money

Who can access the external part of your brain that you carry around in your pocket? What rights do you have to it? With Chase. Police demand audio records from the Echo of a murder victim, Amazon displeased (more details) EFF defends podcasting (as a whole) from a patent troll Speaking of which – The EFF is the best. Seriously. The pacemaker that thwarted a fire insurance fraud The pacemaker that lives inside you is not legally yours and you can’t tamper with it NewEgg defends online shopping carts from a patent troll XKCD’s brilliant single-panel comic on DRM and piracy iTunes deleted music off their user’s hard drive A woman had her Kindle wiped by Amazon for using it in the wrong country Published after we recorded – Why You Should Care About The Supreme Court Case On Toner Cartridges (From article – “you don’t “own” things like movies, music, or even the software on your phone; rather, it’s being licensed, which means companies can go to all kinds of lengths to keep controlling how, when, and where you use the things you’ve bought long after you’ve bought them.”)