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Annotate the Web: Phil Libin and Ezra Klein on Artificial Intelligence

Genius.it is one of the year’s better inventions.

Right now — right this moment — you can turn any web page into a cross between a Kindle book and a page of lyrics on Rap Genius. Other people can read your annotations alongside the article, and add their own comments.

I plan to use this invention often. It’s the best way to deal with the fact that someone is always wrong on the internet.

Below is the first article I’ve “annotated” in this way:

http://genius.it/8074392/www.vox.com/2015/8/12/9143071/evernote-artificial-intelligence?

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Ezra Klein and Phil Libin are both smart people. But I think that they make some mistakes in their depiction of how experts on artificial intelligence think about the risks of this powerful technology.

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The Good Judgment Project: My Experience

Are You Smarter Than a Coin-Flipping Monkey?

30 years ago, a man named Philip Tetlock decided to figure out whether the people we pay to make predictions about politics were actually good at predicting things.

He picked two hundred and eighty-four people who made their living “commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends,” and he started asking them to assess the probability that various things would or would not come to pass, both in the areas of the world in which they specialized and in areas about which they were not expert. Would there be a nonviolent end to apartheid in South Africa? Would Gorbachev be ousted in a coup? Would the United States go to war in the Persian Gulf?

–Louis Menand, Everybody’s An Expert

Tetlock’s discovery: On average, the commentators were slightly less accurate than a monkey flipping a coin with “yes” printed on one face and “no” on the other. They’d have been better off if they’d made completely random predictions!

What’s more, being an expert on a topic didn’t help much. At some point, more expertise even led to more faulty predictions.

 

Can We Do Any Better?

There are lots of reasons we make bad guesses about the future. But Philip Tetlock’s particular interest was in figuring out how to do better. 

Prediction, after all, is one of the most important things a person can ever do: Will I divorce this person if I marry them? Will I be happy in a year if I accept this job offer? It’s also an important skill for governments: How much will the Iraq War cost? Will this gun-control bill really lower the crime rate?

But if political experts aren’t good at prediction, who is?

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Dogs and Existentialism

I have a Tumblr now! I’m still experimenting with using the platform for short essays and thought nuggets. Here’s an essay cross-posted from that Tumblr:

 

The Melancholy of Retrievers

(Wandering philosophy. Not attached to most of these opinions.)

I’m staying for a few weeks in the home of relatives who own a Labrador Retriever. I’ve spent a lot of time around this dog in the last few weeks, after many years of not living with a pet. As a result, everything about the notion of “owning a dog” – or the very existence of domesticated dogs – has become strange to me.

The dog, Jasper, lives to play fetch. When he isn’t sleeping or eating or drinking, he picks up anything he can find and brings it to you so that you can throw it. If you don’t throw it, he’ll try another person. If no one else is around, he’ll pant and whine at you and shove his head between your legs to stare sadly into your eyes until you give up and play fetch.

I’m sure this is normal dog behavior, and it’s the sort of silly thing that people love about dogs. But it makes me wonder how it feels to be Jasper.

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Empathy and Heroic Responsibility

(Faithful readers: You can now subscribe to this blog!)

 

My last two posts for Applied Sentience are up:

http://appliedsentience.com/2015/05/29/moral-heroism-pt-1-empathys-faults-heroism-to-the-rescue/

http://appliedsentience.com/2015/07/06/moral-heroism-pt-ii-how-to-become-a-hero-or-at-least-get-started/

Within, I discuss some thoughts I’ve had recently on the problems with empathy, and how we need another layer of moral feeling on top of empathy — for which I borrow the term “heroic responsibility” from Eliezer Yudkowsky — if we want to do good in difficult situations.

The posts total about 2500 words, but this post provides a brief summary.

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Privileging the Story (Or: Do I Trust Journalism?)

My friend Jack Newsham, a reporter for The Boston Globe, asked a good question on Facebook the other day:

Question for my non-journalist friends: why don’t you trust us? (“Us” being journalists in general. Because poll after poll shows that the overwhelming majority of you don’t.)

My answer turned out long enough for a blog post.

I trust journalists. That is, I trust most people, and I don’t see journalists as being very different from most people on average. I would trust a journalist to watch my laptop in a cafe while I used the bathroom or water my plants when I went on vacation.

Journalism isn’t a person. It is a product, produced by journalists. And as it is practiced, I only half-trust journalism.

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My Senior Thesis: How Can Great Charities Raise More Money?

Update: Charity Science, an organization whose work I admire, has added my thesis to their page on charitable giving research. I highly recommend their site for more information on the topics discussed here.

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After months of work, I’ve finally finished my thesis:

Charitable Fundraising and Smart Giving: How can charities use behavioral science to drive donations?

It’s a very long paper, and you probably shouldn’t read the whole thing. I conducted my final round of editing over the course of 38 hours in late April, during which I did not sleep. It’s kind of a slog.

Here’s a PDF of the five pages where I summarize everything I learned and make recommendations to charities:

The Part of the Thesis You Should Actually Read

 

In the rest of this post, I’ve explained my motivation for actually writing this thing, and squeezed my key findings into a pair of summaries: One that’s a hundred words long, one that’s quite a bit longer.

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Twenty-Four Quotations About The Yale Book Of Quotations

The Yale Daily News Magazine just published my glowing review of The Yale Book of Quotations. I also profiled the book’s creator, Fred Shapiro. This is my last piece of original journalism for any Yale publication.

The article includes an interesting call to action. Fred needs help writing the next edition. If you’d like your favorite quote to end up in a book that sells tens of thousands of copies, read until the end, or just read the pitch right now.

 

Twenty-Four Quotations About the Yale Book of Quotations

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”

 –Francis Bacon, Of Studies

“Dictionary, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.”

–Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic’s Word Book

 

The Yale Book of Quotations (YBQ) is a magnificent beast of a tome, a rare creature found only in libraries and the homes of the most devoted litterateurs. Most books have one or two quotable lines. The YBQ has over twelve thousand. And though it is 1100 pages long, it remains, fundamentally, the project of a single man: Fred Shapiro, a librarian in the Yale Law School.

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Alpha Gamma Reviews: Edge 2015

Each year, Edge.org asks a few hundred very smart people how they’d answer a certain question. The results are always a mixed bag, but it’s one of the most exciting mixed bags in the intellectual world.

This year’s question dug into one of my own interests: “What do you think about machines that think?” 

In other words: What does the increasing power of artificial intelligence (AI) mean for humans, for the universe, and for the machines themselves? What will happen if and when AI becomes “general” or “superintelligent”, outperforming humans at almost every task?

The answers to this question would fill a book (and will, since Edge publishes one book each year). But even if you don’t have time to read a book, you should sample the content, because there’s always a ton of interesting material.

This post is my attempt to gather up some of the best answers and individual quotes, while responding to a few misconceptions about AI safety that popped up in the responses.

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17 Photos That Prove Barack Obama Had Polio This Whole Time

My first article for Buzzfeed. Also, Stage 1 in my campaign to turn Buzzfeed into Clickhole.

FDR stunned the world by hiding his lower-body paralysis from the people who elected him. After years of personal investigation, I now have ironclad proof that Barack Obama is pulling the same stunt. Don’t let him run for a third term!

http://www.buzzfeed.com/aarongertler/11-photos-proving-barack-obama-had-polio-this-whol-19deu

Obama/FDR mash-up, via time.com

This picture may be fake, but it gets the point across.

 

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Teach To The Future

I’ve started a new series of blog posts on Applied Sentience: “Teach To The Future”.

Through these posts, I cover subjects like teaching people (especially kids) to write for an online audience:

http://appliedsentience.com/2015/01/09/teach-to-the-future-part-1-how-to-write-for-the-internet

Or teaching people to see through the eyes of other people, in a rigorous and practical way:

http://appliedsentience.com/2015/03/09/school-of-the-future-pt-2-seeing-through-other-eyes/

I care a lot about education, especially since I’ve just received 17 straight years of the stuff. But I think we spend too much time on some subjects and not enough on… well, the subjects I cover in these posts. I don’t know much about pedagogy, but I try to stick to skills I do know. As always, let me know if you have thoughts on how to develop these ideas further.

Bonus: If you teach children and want help figuring out a curriculum based on any of the subjects or lesson plans I describe, I’m happy to help!