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 ha…

Collection of papers and articles that I’ve spotted the last two weeks that seem interesting. Economics When economics failed Half of Americans are responsible for only 3 percent of health care costs US Healthcare: most people don't know what they're talking about Fifty years of growth in American consumption, income, and wages Economic mobility in America The end of the past Left wing governments are no more anti-immigration than right-wing governments Insurance may not save lives, but it saves money …

Here I present some thoughts about consciousness, especially arguing against the idea that consciousness is somehow not real, or an illusion. Descartes was the famous originator of cogito ergo sum. He argued that even if your senses were deceived, you could still be sure that you were conscious. And so consciousness would be the Tier 1 truth amongst the beliefs we hold. This is indeed the case for me, at least. Consider the following set of things: quantum field theory, the theory of relativity, neuroscienc…

A reply to some comments and an article I'd like to thank  SchopenHauer Pauer, [REDACTED], and Francois Tremblay for their comments in my previous post. Francois also wrote an article in response, which you can find here. I will address their comments in order. ANyone who thinks Benatar is the smug one, not the avowed pollyanna’s, needs a polemical spanking, and I’m just the guy. Why do I think Benatar is being a bit smug? Well, going to the book we find things like 'The cheery will say', optimists being …

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…

Collections of papers and articles that I’ve spotted the last two weeks this week that seem interesting. Comments on some of them. Economics Are the rich more selfish than the poor, or do they just have more money? A natural field experiment. Turns out that controlling for the marginal value of money, they behave equally That is, people respond similarly to similar incentives here after that control. Other papers about this: More likely to make a charitable donation and contribute a larger percentage of …