Category Archives: Ideas

Withdrawing one's sanction really works.

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In Atlas Shrugged, withdrawing one’s sanction was removing one’s consent to servitude. It manifested in the story as the Strike that I think most outcast intellectuals have dreamed of on their own at one point or another, only on a grand enough scale to actually work.

I’ve been playing with the concept myself recently – becoming far more forceful than usual when finding myself in a situation where others rely on me but refuse to acknowledge me, up to threatening to end my service towards them.

And it has been working. I think that, deep down, many of those who wish to run my life realize that they need me more than I need them. I’ve planned so many contingencies throughout my life and have learned so many things that I have become irrepressible by this point. Close one door and I’ll charge full steam ahead through another.

They, on the other hand, have devoted all of their lives to a particular path, on which I am now a crucial node.

I don’t begrudge them this. But I will not bow down to their rule any more than I would ask them to bow to mine.

Isn't the first life being cellular a bit improbable?

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So we can go from inorganic molecules to organic molecules under primordial conditions. Let’s even say we can go from organic molecules to things like nucleic acids. The next step always gave me a sense of unease, however: a popular assumption is that cells somehow arose from this mixture – that after DNA formed, all of the cellular machinery that makes life’s (and DNA’s) self replication possible somehow sprung into existence, inconsequentially.

This doesn’t seem right to me. Cells are pretty complex. There are a lot of things that they do – that they have always been doing, as far as we know – that weren’t likely to spontaneously arise without some prior means of evolution (and thus something that reproduces).

I think something like a prion or a virus is a more probable step. Prions in particular, since modern viruses need to hijack cells in order to reproduce, while prions just need to come in contact with the right proteins. That means if viruses were the first “living” organisms, they would have required a capability that they somehow lost over the interceding time. Among viruses, I think something akin to retroviruses in particular would be good candidates, since direct RNA replication would cut out a great deal of complexity associated with DNA transcription and still result in a semi-viable means of genetic propagation. Of course, modern retroviruses reverse-transcribe their RNA into DNA prior to replication, but that’s because that’s what the cell uses.

Those are just some of my thoughts for today. The question of life’s origin fascinates me, and it irks me a bit that we have no way to simulate processes that took great spans of geological time to find some answers.

I often wonder whether it would be possible to simulate these sorts of things on a computer… but I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

So much for that.

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I think I’ve found a way to condense about twice the material normally presented into a CS class. Unfortunately, everyone just thinks I’m overestimating the students’ ability. Perhaps that’s true, perhaps not, but now there is no way to tell. Worse, there’s no way to pick out the students who would excel in such an environment.

How are new educational methods tested, if not in a classroom? How will the system ever improve?

Why am I the only one who cares?

*Shrug* No choice but to see how it works. Maybe the students really don’t have the potential I give them credit for. It is my first time teaching, after all.

Seeing possibilities is so incredibly frustrating. Anyone who thinks it’s a picnic doesn’t do it very often. My life isn’t easier for it. Quite the contrary: I’ve probably exhausted several typical lifetimes of mental anguish, and I haven’t even broken 25 yet.

Telomerase is a reverse transcriptase. It's an opportunity to cause a buffer overflow!

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Not being a biologist, I had assumed that telomerase was “hard-coded” with the telomere DNA sequence it writes at the end of a chromosome. This is actually not quite the case; the coding for a telomere is encoded in a sequence of RNA that the telomerase wraps around (making it a ribonucleoprotein) called TERC.

I, probably like many others, had once thought that inactivation of telomerase would result in a cure for many different cancers. However, for some reason, probably due to activation of other immortality pathways, this is not the case (although drugs that rely on this principle appear to be among the more successful treatment modalities in trials). This also appears to be one of those ideas that everyone is aware of but no one is acting on – I blame the way that science currently works for this (as I’ve mentioned before, how you express your values tangibly affects the impact you will have on reality; if you prefer to publish a lot and have a stable job, then you will not have the time to embark on the sorts of long-range high-risk research projects that actually make a difference).

Anyway, mere inactivation is unlikely to work. However, because TERC actually provides a template for what telomerase writes on the end of the cell’s chromosomes, inactivation is not necessary.

Here’s the fun part where I get to speculate wildly about the current state of the art because I can’t get the training that actually matters to actualize these sorts of ideas (you want your “committee of experts” and I’m the computer scientist. Fine, but the whole team suffers for the lack of synergy and vision):

Modification would do as well. If we could change what telomerase writes out to the end of the cell, we can write anything we want to it – and it would be specific to telomerase-immortalized cells (few normal cells carry this immortality, but it is very common in cancer cells), which means a treatment based on this idea would have few to no side effects.

What could we code for? I’m really not qualified to answer this, but some choices that seem obvious to me are the tumor suppressors that the cancers are inactivating in the first place, such as p53. Reactivate the suppressors, stop the tumors, and they won’t harm normal cells that produce telomerase but are making tumor-suppressors already. Again, minimal to no side effects.

And that’s the idea! It’s another interdisciplinary fusion:

This is what, in computer science, we would call a “buffer overflow with arbitrary code execution”. The code in this case is DNA. The “program counter” is the position of the ribosome. The end of the buffer is the telomere. Telomerase writes code out to the end of this buffer. You can take advantage of software this way by executing whatever code you want; you should be able to do the same to cells.

Algorithmic complexity curves can be shifted.

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It is theoretically possible to construct an algorithm with a complexity growth curve that is shifted on the x axis. In other words, you might get part of the left side of a parabola as well as the right for an O(n^2) algorithm if the algorithm happens to have a particular value of n that it performs best at were you to graph the algorithm’s runtime.

This is a fairly unimportant point, but it’s one that traditional algorithmic theory doesn’t really touch upon.

More artificial intuition ideas…

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A post I just made on Slashdot in the context of an article about improving computer “Go” opponents:

Intuition is something a successful AI (and a successful human Go player) will require, and while we can model it on a computer, most people haven’t thought of doing so. Most systems are either based on symbolic logic, statistics, or reinforcement learning, all of which rely on deductive A->B style rules. You can build an intelligent system on that sort of reasoning, but not ONLY on that sort of reasoning (besides, that’s not the way that humans normally think either).

I suspect that what we need is something more akin to “clustering” of concepts, in which retrieval of one concept invokes others that are nearby in “thought-space”. The system should then try to merge the clusters of different concepts it thinks of, resulting in the sort of fusion of ideas that characterizes intuition (in other words, the clusters are constantly growing). Since there is such a thing as statistical clustering, that may form a good foundation. Couple it with deductive logic and you should actually get a very powerful system.

I also suspect that some of the recent manifold learning techniques, particularly those involving kernel PCA, may play a part, as they replicate the concept of abstraction, another component of intuition, fairly well using statistics. Unfortunately, they tend to be computationally intense.

There are many steps that would need to be involved, none of them trivial, but no one said AI was easy:

1. Sense data.
2. Collect that data in a manageable form (categorize it using an ontology, maybe?)
3. Retrieve the x most recently accessed clusters pertaining to other properties of the concept you are reasoning about, as well as the cluster corresponding to the property being reasoned about itself (remembering everything is intractable, so the agent will primarily consider what it has been “mulling over” recently). For example, if we are trying to figure out whether a strawberry is a fruit, we would need to pull in clusters corresponding to “red things” and “seeded things” as well as the cluster corresponding to “fruits”.
4. Once a decision is made, grow the clusters. For example, if we decide that strawberries are fruits, we would look at other properties of strawberries and extend the “fruit” cluster to other things that have these properties. We might end up with the nonsymbolic equivalent of “all red objects with seeds are fruit” from doing that.

What I’ve described is an attempt to model what Jung calls “extroverted intuition” – intuition concerned with external concepts. Attempting to model introverted intuition – intuition concerned with internal models and ideas – is much harder, as it would require clustering the properties of the model itself, forming a “relation between relations” – a way that ideas are connected in the agent’s mental model.

But that’s for general AI, which I’m still not completely we’re ready for anyway. If you just want a stronger Go player, wait just a bit longer and it’ll be brute forced.

Bootstrapping a University.

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My funding plan for the Polymath Foundation has always relied upon a combination of donations and tuition for courses. Although my upcoming stint as an adjunct at Monmouth University has shown me that adjuncts in general are underpaid and lack job security, this is actually positive at the same time – even as I’m on the receiving end of the poor benefits, I also realized that it only takes two to four students’ tuition to pay the course instructor’s salary.

If we assume classes of 20-30 students, this suddenly seems like an excellent way to bootstrap the university.

A strike isn't even necessary

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An Atlas Shrugged-style strike isn’t even necessary to “stop the motor of the world”, as John Galt put it. The world will actually stop its own motor, merely by living under the outcome of its decisions. All the strikers needed to do was comply to the letter, not withdraw, if that was their only goal (however, withdrawal was still required to prevent them from becoming sacrifices to the looters’ moral code, and thus remains the course they’d take if acting in rational self-interest). They only upheld the social order because they were too moral; they refused to comply with unjust laws.

(Of course, any system that forces such a choice between morality and freedom is one best withdrawn from anyway).

Personal development – minimization of cognitive dissonance?

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I noted yesterday that a possible definition of personal development was the minimization of cognitive dissonance through elimination of contradictions between values. Both actualization-based and disintegration-based theories provide for this: actualization brings acceptance that held values need not be contradictory, while secondary integration results from a rigid evaluation and rejection of values that contradict the Ideal.