Month: October 2010

Fermi Solutions

An enumeration of possible solutions to fermi’s paradox.

  • Aliens exist, but we see no evidence
    • Human limitations
      • Human beings have not been searching long enough (Freitas Jr 1983; Freitas Jr. 1985)
      • Human beings are not listening properly
    • Practical limitations
      • Communication is impossible due to problems of scale
      • Intelligent civilizations are too far apart in space or time (Wesson 1990)
      • Communication is impossible for technical reasons
      • They only recently emerged and have not yet had the time to become visible. This could for example be due to synchronization due to a declining rate of gamma ray bursts that sterilize much of the galaxy (Annis 1999; Cirkovic 2004).
      • Civilizations only broadcast detectable radio signals for a brief period of time before moving on to other media.
      • It is too expensive to spread physically throughout the galaxy (Landis 1998)
    • Alien nature
      • They are too alien to be recognized
      • They are non-technological and cannot be detected except by visiting them.
      • They tend to experience a technological singularity becoming unfathomable and invisible.
      • They develop into very fast, information-dense states that have no reason to interact with humans (Smart 2002; Cirkovic and Bradbury 2006)
      • They migrate away from the galactic disk for cooling reasons (Cirkovic and Bradbury 2006)
      • They tend to (d)evolve to a post-intelligent state (Schroeder 2002)
      • They choose not to interact with us
    • They are here unobserved
      • Earth is purposely isolated (The Zoo or “Interdict” hypothesis) (Ball 1973; Fogg 1987)
      • Earth (and nearby parts of space) are simulated (Baxter 2001; Bostrom 2003).
      • They secretly deal with the government or other groups.
  • No other civilizations currently exist
    • We are the lucky first civilization
    • Intelligent, technological life is exceedingly rare
      • Rare earth hypothesis
      • Life is very rare (Wesson 1990)
      • Intelligence is very rare
    • Intelligent, technological life is very short-lived
      • Intelligent life is wiped out by external disasters at a high rate
      • Technological intelligent life exhaust its resources and dies out or becomes nontechnological
      • It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself.
      • It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy others.

Arrow’s Theorem

What Arrow showed is that group choice (aggregation) is not like individual choice. Suppose that a person is rational and that we observe their choices. After some time we will come to understand their choices in terms of their underlying preferences (assume stability–this is a thought experiment). We will be able to say, “Ah, I see what this person wants. I understand now why they are choosing in the way that they do. If I were them, I would choose in the same way.”

this is why we can’t have nice things: even rational actors lead to absurd group choices.
2022-03-24:

When people make mistakes, they usually try to make better decisions subsequently. To do this, you have to acknowledge that you made a wrong choice. Next, you have to examine the process by which you made the choice, in order to theorize about what would have produced a better outcome. The next time you face a similar decision, you try to correct your decision-making process.

People can experience bad outcomes when they vote. Your preferred candidate or policy could lose. Or your side could win and produce bad results. But chances are, you will not go through an error-correction process. Very rarely will a voter say, “I made a mistake. What went wrong? I need to review how I made my choice, so that I do things differently the next time.”

There are 2 reasons that voters do not engage in error correction. One reason is that 1 person’s vote almost never affects the outcome of an election. It does not pay to invest effort in figuring out what went wrong and trying to correct it. Another reason is that political outcomes are more complex than personal outcomes.

Pink Noise

Leonid Korogodski’s publishing debut Pink Noise: A Posthuman Tale is a dense, hard-sf novella that takes a serious crack at imagining the priorities, miseries and joys of posthuman people. It’s a tall order: creating believably nonhuman post-people means that you necessarily give up on a certain amount of empathy and sympathy for your characters who are, by definition, doing things whose motivations we can’t purely understand.

Fingerprinting Phone Calls

yet another application for white noise analysis, this time to serve as a caller / route id for calls.

The tool is called PinDr0p, and works by analysing the various characteristic noise artifacts left in audio by the different types of voice network — cellular, VoIP etc. For instance, packet loss leaves tiny gaps in audio signals, too brief for the human ear to detect, but quite perceptible to the PinDr0p algorithms. Vishers and others wishing to avoid giving away the origin of a call will often route a call through multiple different network types. This system can be used to differentiate telephone calls from your bank from telephone calls from someone in Nigeria pretending to be from your bank.

Original Shakespeare

Quite a bit is known about how English was spoken back when Shakespeare wrote his plays but productions of his plays using the original pronunciation (OP) are quite rare. audiences will hear word play and rhymes that “haven’t worked for several 100 years (love/prove, eyes/qualities, etc.) magically restored, as Bottom, Puck and company wind the language clock back to 1595.”

Loebner 2010

When the scores are tallied, Suzette ties with Rollo Carpenter’s Cleverbot for 2nd-3rd. Yet, it turns out, the 3rd round judge got the human subject from hell. Poetic justice! The human was all over the place — confusing, vague. The judge voted irritated/angry/bored Suzette as human. Instant win since no other program swayed the judges.

heh, the first domino in the turing test falls.