31
The impossibility of intelligence explosion
In 1965, I. J. Good described for the first time the notion of “intelligence explosion”, as it relates to artificial intelligence (AI):
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 47 posts.
32
33
The Scientific Case for P≠NP
Out there in the wider world—OK, OK, among Luboš Motl, and a few others who comment on this blog—there appears to be a widespread opinion that P≠NP is just “a fashionable dogma of…
34
35
Oh My Gosh, It’s Covered in Rule 30s
New British train station design identified as cellular automata rule 30. Generating rule-based patterns. And a website that lets you try it yourself.
36
ESO Telescopes Observe First Light from Gravitational Wave Source
ESO’s fleet of telescopes in Chile have detected the first visible counterpart to a gravitational wave source. These historic observations suggest that this unique object is the result of the merger of two neutron stars. The cataclysmic aftermaths of this kind of merger — long-predicted events called kilonovae …
37
The Kolmogorov option
Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov was one of the giants of 20th-century mathematics. I’ve always found it amazing that the same man was responsible both for establishing the foundations of …
38
FDA grants Breakthrough Therapy designation to MDMA for treatment of PTSD
The non-profit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) today announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted Breakthrough Therapy Designation to MDMA for the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). MAPS and the FDA have also reached agreement under the Special…
39
P vs. NP
For those who just want the survey itself, not the backstory, it’s here. (Note: Partly because of the feedback I’ve gotten on this blog, it’s now expanded to 121 pages!) Upda…
40
41
42
An Interactive Introduction to Quantum Computing
This article was originally written in 2014, but has had some minor improvements in December 2017 and January 2018 when I received some useful feedback after the article had unexpectedly been posted on Hacker News in December 2017.
43
Toward a Predictive Theory of Depression
[Epistemic status: Total wild speculation] I. The predictive processing model offers compelling accounts of autism and schizophrenia. But Surfing Uncertainty and related sources I’ve read are…
44
45
The Dangerous Irrelevance of String Theory
Eva Silverstein has a new preprint out, entitled The Dangerous Irrelevance of String Theory. The title is I guess intended to be playful, not referring to its accurate description of the current st…
46
Influenza A (H1N1) – How many bits does it take to kill a human? (2009)
I read a fantastic article in Nature magazine (vol 459, pp931-939 (18 June 2009)) that summarizes not only the current state of novel H1N1 (aka Swine Flu) understanding, but also a compares H1N1 against other flu strains. In particular, it discusses in-depth how the pathogenic components — i.e., the stuff that kills…
47
Photovoltaic growth: reality versus projections of the IEA
This is a guest blog by Auke Hoekstra, senior adviser electric mobility at the Eindhoven University of Technology and developer of agent-based models for electric vehicles and renewable energy adop…