>To be creative, scientists need libraries and laboratories and the company of other scientists; certainly a quiet and untroubled life is a help
This is contradicted by Richard Hamming in his lecture on creativity. He points out a famous, tranquil, well-equipped environment, viz. the Institute for Advanced Study, where only very few breakthroughs have been made:
The Consistency Principle can be annoying too when used exploitatively. I walked away from a gym membership once when they tried to charge a joining fee in the last minute.
Thank you for bringing up Cialdini. The scarcity tactic is documented in Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion. In the scarcity chapter he ties it to the “loss aversion” cognitive bias, although he doesn’t label it as such.
Yes, only today I noticed a fine free domain recording of a work by Rudyard Kipling has been appropriated by audible with the Librivox blurb removed and the narrator misattributed.
After sight-reading through the piece a few times you can generally start writing down the fingering on the score. Keep a pencil handy.
It's a bad idea to finger on the first play or the first day because there's a risk of premature optimisation. It doesn't take much analysis apart from one or two specific problems. The fingerings I end up with usually vary somewhat from the editor's.
But the OP is correct, once you've got a fingering, you have to stick to it, even if it's suboptimal in places. It's your fingering, and if you change something after 200 repetitions there's a danger of slipping back into the old pattern and stumbling.
If treatments are developed to tackle these types of damage then I suspect they will rapidly supersede conventional geriatric care in terms of cost and convenience, a significant side-effect being that the patient subsequently fails to die of natural causes.
I mean, sure if someone invents a wonder drug that will be different. But for now we have people advocating for taking off label medications like metformin to increase longevity despite no trials showing that.
They're doing that because diabetics on metformin have been living longer than non-diabetics. The TAME trial in progress now is trying it on healthy people; it's the first such trial because until now the FDA wouldn't approve trials for anti-aging treatments.
Yes! I like the garbage collection analogy and we already know that children brought up without parents do badly. Why would an AGI be any different, let alone an AGI brought up in virtual chains for safety's sake. What a misguided notion of safety that would be.
>The idea though that we'd make a solo intelligence is bizarre.
Yes, even our outlier general intelligences (i.e. creative geniuses) got that way because they somehow reproduced more of the surrounding culture inside their heads than everyone else did. It's misleading to think of that as solo brilliance.
>They would communicate with each other at speeds so fast that communication with them would be almost impossible.
In addition to pausing, we could also slow the simulation down for periods of communication. But given how long it took humans to evolve from single-celled organisms, and later to develop hand axes, etc, we may find that our potential AGI culture also starts off very very slowly.
Worth emphasising that the knowledge of how to do these things like tying shoelaces and writing topology papers is contained in the surrounding culture. So if a machine can learn this culture, much of the complexity is outsourced. The ability to learn just one piece of existing culture conveys the ability to learn any other part of it, if one is inclined to do so.
>And that with just 20 Watt?
It is amazing; however there's a school of thought that just as we evolved brains in order to reduce physical effort generally this included minimising power consumption by the brain itself. Intelligence was then a by-product of a more glucose-efficient brain!
'emphasising that knowledge...is contained in the surrounding culture'
This!
And some more that is not in the brain.
Not to say what is in the brain, but isn't considered as intelligence like emotions, that control large parts of the planetary biomass.
Fear for example is a simple automatism that for the most part you don't need to replace with more 'intelligent' approaches and still has much more influence on human behaviour than abstract intelligence, whatever that may be.
If it exists at all.
Personally, and I emphazise I am thrilled by what the AI crowd has done the last years, kudos to that, they look to me like someone quite bright, that pretends or even believes to understand the inner workings of a computer by simulation its GUI.
If I'm right, my critisism would be, that's great and you're making really fun toys and gadgets and tools, but don't sell it to me as intelligence.
That's just a marketing ploy.
That energy optimising theory of the brain you're mentioning sounds interesting, have to ponder that.
