Hacker News: Agebor

New comment by Agebor in "U.S. Suffers Sharpest Rise in Poverty Rate in More Than 50 Years"

Agebor — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 17:15:47 +0000

There are actually now some ideas in crypto spaces to use stablecoins bound to stock/coin indexes instead of fiat, so...

New comment by Agebor in "It's 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better (2016)"

Agebor — Thu, 12 Nov 2020 16:33:56 +0000

Why not corporations? They would be owned by the market and compete against each other to offer best quality machinery.

Of course you still have the leadership class of people that could be corrupt, but that can be solved e.g. by sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

+ you need anti-monopoly laws and some solutions preventing competition-to-the-bottom (e.g. if marginal cost of service becomes 0, it may no longer make sense to compete for it, so it needs to enter some sort of maintenance mode to keep quality in check)

New comment by Agebor in "AI pioneer Geoff Hinton: “Deep learning is going to be able to do everything”"

Agebor — Wed, 04 Nov 2020 17:10:28 +0000

That perhaps it was already done before...

New comment by Agebor in "AI for generative design: Plain text to 3D Designs"

Agebor — Fri, 20 Mar 2020 21:14:21 +0000

I've been thinking along similar lines on high level - this approach will likely be very general and can be used to create different kinds of media, as well as potentially behaviours in a later stage.

https://metapresent.org/creation-engine

Will be interesting to base it on a decentralised open platform that could be "built-in" in the Internet.

New comment by Agebor in "Not everyone has an internal monologue"

Agebor — Thu, 30 Jan 2020 19:41:06 +0000

Hmm actually now i'm not certain which one of these I have.

I'm a software developer and I have kind of like two different "address spaces".

There is the normal visual + auditory address space. And there is the "intuition space" which is similar to the first one (e.g. I can imagine a 3D object and rotate my viewpoint around it, simulate conversations, etc), but it's with limited detail, more like black and white unless I concentrate more. I can "hear" there but it's separate from normal hearing.

It's super-useful in programming, as i can imagine code in some kind of 3D space, where I can move in and out of different functions calling each other (I still imagine them mostly as text though), so I can remember them pretty well.

New comment by Agebor in "Things everyone in ML should know about belief formation in humans [video]"

Agebor — Tue, 24 Dec 2019 13:11:10 +0000

Great to see these views are becoming more mainstream. The talk does not mention it, but it's likely convergent with neuroscience ideas of:

- Bayesian Brain

- Theory of constructed emotions (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gks6ceq4eQ)

- Free energy principle and Active Inference (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1egnoCWgUg)

A good overview is also here: https://towardsdatascience.com/why-intelligence-might-be-sim...

The issue to be reconciled is though that some of those ideas are talking about "keeping uncertainty in the sweet spot, not too high or low" while others about "minimising uncertainty/prediction error". I think the difference will turn out to be only in relation to how far of a future/prediction we are talking about. So optimising for long-term vs the short-term.

Have Scientists Solved Consciousness? Introducing Projective Consciousness Model

Agebor — Wed, 11 Dec 2019 22:33:51 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLVZ7Lb1EfM

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21767513

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by Agebor in "Brain tunes itself to criticality, maximizing information processing"

Agebor — Sat, 07 Dec 2019 16:10:12 +0000

Oh interesting - thanks for the pointers.

New comment by Agebor in "Brain tunes itself to criticality, maximizing information processing"

Agebor — Sat, 07 Dec 2019 15:31:13 +0000

This is a similar view to the emerging theory of Bayesian Brain, which views the brain as a system that tries to minimise the prediction error (which might be the same thing as "free-energy" in some related publications) by comparing expectations with actual information coming from the senses.

https://towardsdatascience.com/the-bayesian-brain-hypothesis...

So far it seems that it explains quite a lot of data, and many mind illnesses (e.g. many diseases can be thought as the brain under-correcting or over-correcting for the prediction error).

By under-correcting, the brain is not learning enough on its mistakes, which may lead to delusions of superiority (e.g. being stuck in usual habits, or inability to change one's world-view based on new information). On the other hand, when over-correcting, the world may seem unpredictable, frightening - leading to self-doubt, anxiety and negative thoughts.

Being wrong around 15% of the time might actually be the optimal rate for learning... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/failing-study-suc...

New comment by Agebor in "What we get wrong about time"

Agebor — Sat, 07 Dec 2019 15:28:20 +0000

Science has been sticking to that view since around Newton. But it's actually beginning to slowly change now, as time-independent physics might be a reason why our theories work very well in specific areas, but tend to break down in a more holistic approach.

See the work of physicist Lee Smolin in Time Reborn (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Time-Reborn-Crisis-Physics-Universe...) on why time and information might be the most fundamental concepts.

This does not mean though that we experience time in the same way - far from it. Just that passage of time is fundamental to information processing.

New comment by Agebor in "Neural Annealing: Toward a Neural Theory of Everything"

Agebor — Sat, 30 Nov 2019 12:04:10 +0000

Yes. You might find interesting some very rated ideas as this article - Bayesian Brain. In this view, the brain is a complex system that learns to adapt to and predict its environment, similar to other complex systems like even companies.

New comment by Agebor in "Information Is Physics"

Agebor — Fri, 29 Nov 2019 19:42:36 +0000

Theories are now emerging that Universe is running one large bayesian learning algorithm (bayesian inference itself is proven to be an optimal knowledge creation method)

See e.g. Bayesian Brain and Universal Darwinism

Belief conversion – we can build a human value system converter and optimiser

Agebor — Wed, 27 Nov 2019 11:23:21 +0000

Article URL: https://metapresent.org/articles/belief-conversion

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21647003

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Hierarchy of Trust – Superintelligence as global reinforcement learning

Agebor — Sun, 24 Nov 2019 15:24:03 +0000

Article URL: https://metapresent.org/articles/hierarchy-of-trust

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21620908

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by Agebor in "Music is universal and used in strikingly similar ways across the globe: study"

Agebor — Sun, 24 Nov 2019 13:48:15 +0000

Indeed. This view is also compatible with the emerging Bayesian Brain theory

New comment by Agebor in "The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius"

Agebor — Sat, 23 Nov 2019 12:13:10 +0000

Yes, by visualisation of the future.

There are many ways to do this, like meditation, or some substances.

You basically imagine yourself in the future, having achieved some goal, or being in a situation that you like. This image has to be rich and invoke many emotions, so it becomes engraved in your neural paths.

You then work backwards from there, imagining different roads and specific steps on how to achieve that.

It literally and physically changes your brain over time, as you repeat it.

New comment by Agebor in "Hologram Within a Hologram Hints at Solution to Black Hole Information Paradox"

Agebor — Wed, 20 Nov 2019 13:16:05 +0000

I wonder how this relates to Cosmological Natural Selection theory - the idea is that the black hole 'bounces' into a child universe, which inherits some of the parent characteristics. Perhaps the information finds its way there.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-logic-an...

New comment by Agebor in "You can fool some of the people, all of the time"

Agebor — Thu, 07 Nov 2019 13:09:46 +0000

Resources? The real fight is now for people's minds.

We already have orders of magnitude more resources than 100 years ago and almost everyone can benefit from them.

New comment by Agebor in "Biology Is Eating the World"

Agebor — Wed, 30 Oct 2019 12:48:01 +0000

See Universal Darwinism for how it actually may have a goal.

New comment by Agebor in "Some people who take psychedelics continue hallucinating indefinitely"

Agebor — Thu, 24 Oct 2019 00:52:23 +0000

This sounds quite in tune with some of Daniel Dennett's ideas also, especially from 'Consciousness Explained'.

The gist is that our consciousness is only, and all, that we can say, or in any other way act on the world. So if people really believe in the things they say, those things must be quite real to them.

And perhaps visual hallucination come from some incomplete separation of the 'inner' visual loop - thoughts, memories - from the outside visual information.