Nintil

Collection of papers and articles that I’ve spotted since my previous links post that seem interesting.

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I got some replies in my previous post about consciousness. Here I reply to those, and add a few more thoughts about consciousness. Comments from David Pearce are deliberately ignored, as I will devote a full post to his proposed solution to consciousness in a future post.

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I’ll be moving to London next May for a new job in Data Science. This means if you live there you may suddenly see me walking around absentmindedly thinking about my next blog post. Or something.

Next post will be a followup to my post on consciousness. After that one, no more philosophy for a while, and I’ll blog on something TBD, one strong candidate is the history of the railway system in Japan, the history of Embraer, or the fall of the Soviet Union. Or maybe about supersonic aircraft. There’s also a half-written post on the effects of inequality on growth that it’s written in Spanish and I will translate at some point. I also want to thank my patrons in Patreon for contributing monies to the blog, and I remind them -and you- that if they want me to write about something in particular, they can ask me to and I will consider it. There are lots of things to write about that I want to write about, and you can influence the order in which I do.

Collection of papers and articles that I’ve spotted the last two weeks that seem interesting.

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Here I present some thoughts about consciousness, especially arguing against the idea that consciousness is somehow not real, or an illusion.

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A reply to some comments and an article

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Collection of papers and articles that I’ve spotted this week that seem interesting. Comments on some of them. This week I’ve been busy, so not many comments…

Artificial Intelligence

• Evolution strategies as a scalable alternative to reinforcement learning
  • “ES is easy to implement and scale. Running on a computing cluster of 80 machines and 1,440 CPU cores, our implementation is able to train a 3D MuJoCo humanoid walker in only 10 minutes” …
  • Well, at least it’s technically not another case of ‘throw more GPUs at the problem’.
• Neural network architectures
• Deep photo style transfer
• Mask R-CNN
• Tutorial on adversarial autoencoders
• Distill: a journal for machine learning visualisations.
• Fantastic GANs and here to find them
• Intro to RNNs and other machines that learn algorithms
  • YOU AGAIN, Jürgen Schmidhuber

Economics

• Economic History Papers
  • Including the now world-famous Soviet Series which you all love and enjoy
  • Ok, maybe you aren’t that interested in Soviet fridges and wonky calculations of calories, but it is there indeed.
• Are larger banks valued more highly?
  • No evidence than US banks had an implicit too big to fail subsidy
  • Seems prima facie incredible to me.
• Comentarios finales sobre desigualdad, crecimiento y sectarismo económico
  • Worth a read if you can read spanish
  • Does inequality affect happiness, growth?

Psychology

• A perspective on the theoretical foundation of dual-process models

• Ideological asymmetries and the essence of political psychology
• Moralized rationality: relying on logic and evidence in the formation and evaluation of belief can be seen as a moral issue.
• Atheists and agnostics are more reflective than religious believers: four empirical studies and a meta-analysis.
• Research on intellectual humility
• The neuroscience of moral cognition: from dual processes to dynamic systems

Other

• New Zealand river granted same legal rights as human being
• Why complexity is different