Michal Kosinski's researches, and manipulation of human behavior

Michal Kosinski's research papers.

First gonna list the two papers of Kosinski in 2013 that generated lots of talking.

Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior (2013), by Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell, and Thore Graepel.

... Facebook Likes... predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender... dataset of over 58,000 volunteers... 

Manifestations of user personality in website choice and behaviour on online social networks (2013), Michal Kosinski et al.

... a sample of over 1/3 million users... their website choices and Facebook profile features, relates to their ... standard Five Factor Model personality questionnaire. 

Wait... DEVIANTART???

Let's Read: Homo Deus (2015), by Yuval Noah Harari, Part 3

Part 3: Homo Sapiens lose control

Chap 8: The Time Bomb in the Laboratory

Liberal humanism assumes every human has a free, unified self. It's threatened by scientific discoveries that suggest that such a self doesn't exist.

Split brain humans seem to have two selves. The experiencing self and the narrating self has different ideas as to what's good in life. For example in childbirth, the experiencing self suffers horribly, but the narrating self feels like it's a great plot event. 

The self that gets into the books and into the stories is the narrating self; the experiencing self doesn't make stories. If someone says "I did this", it's the narrating self speaking. The idea of a single free self is a myth made by the narrating self, and is full of errors just like all its other stories.

We identify with the inner system that takes the crazy chaos of life and spins out of it seemingly logical and consistent yarns. It doesn’t matter that the plot is full of lies and lacunas, and that it is rewritten again and again, so that today’s story flatly contradicts yesterday’s; the important thing is that we always retain the feeling that we have a single unchanging identity from birth to death (and perhaps even beyond the grave).

Let's Read: Homo Deus (2015), by Yuval Noah Harari, Part 2

Part 2: Homo Sapiens Gives Meaning to the World

In this part, we study the history of Sapiens's meaning making, and in particular, the history of humanism. Still nothing new from Sapiens.

Chap 4: The Storytellers

The ancient gods were quite similar to modern companies. 

In ancient Uruk, Lagash and Shurupak the gods functioned as legal entities that could own fields and slaves, give and receive loans, pay salaries and build dams and canals. Since the gods never died, and since they had no children to fight over their inheritance, they gathered more and more property and power. An increasing number of Sumerians found themselves employed by the gods, taking loans from the gods, tilling the gods’ lands and owing taxes and tithes to the gods.

Then, writing and money were invented, allowing efficient bureaucracy, helping these god-companies to grow into Sumerian empires, headed by priest kings. The priest kings were to gods like the CEOs to the companies. The company is powerful, but without a body or mouth, and needs to be represented by CEOs and such.

Let's Read: Homo Deus (2015), by Yuval Noah Harari, Part 1

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2015), by Yuval Noah Harari, is about how Homo Sapiens would become gods.

Chap 1: The New Human Agenda

(There is no preface. This chapter is the introduction.)

Humans have mostly solved the problems of famine, plague, and war. That's 3/4 of doom horses defeated. Next up, humans would try to solve death, sadness, and humanity.

Death is most obviously solved by keeping the biological body alive, but can also be solved by becoming cyborgs. Sadness can be solved by reengineering the human psychology. Humanity will be enhanced as a result of attempts to solve death and unhappiness. Homo Deus is the result. Or, many kinds of Homo Deuses, since there are many different ways humans can become transhuman.

Happiness is hard. Recall the theories of happiness in humans and see why historically, humanity's happiness has not improved much at all.

Yet studies have shown that American subjective well-being levels in the 1990s remained roughly the same as they were in the 1950s... The Japanese in the 1990s were as satisfied – or dissatisfied – as they were in the 1950s.

Ten Lessons for Mathematicians, according to Gian-Carlo Rota

Ten Lessons I wish I had been Taught (1994), by Gian-Carlo Rota.

7. Use the Feynman method

You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems... Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it... to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say: "How did he do it? He must be a genius!"

This is the best advice. I must immediately think up at least one problem to get my chance of being a GENIUS!

1. TODO

Let's Read: Sapiens (2011) by Yuval Noah Harari, Part 4

Let's review: There were three revolutions: cognitive, agricultural, scientific.

Part 4: The Scientific Revolution

Chap 14: The Discovery of Ignorance

Our ancestors put a great deal of time and effort into trying to discover the rules that govern the natural world. But modern science differs from all previous traditions of knowledge in three critical ways:

1. The willingness to admit ignorance. Modern science... assumes that we don’t know everything. Even more critically, it accepts that the things that we think we know could be proven wrong as we gain more knowledge.

2. The centrality of observation and mathematics. Having admitted ignorance, modern science aims to obtain new knowledge. It does so by gathering observations and then using mathematical tools to connect these observations into comprehensive theories. 

3. The acquisition of new powers. Modern science is not content with creating theories. It uses these theories in order to acquire new powers, and in particular to develop new technologies.

Let's Read: Sapiens (2011) by Yuval Noah Harari, Part 3

Part 3: The Unification of Humankind

Chap 9: The Arrow of History

Cultures are giant memeplexes, but since the memeplex could have memes that don't play well together, they could compete and struggle, and this causes a culture to change.

For example, in medieval Europe, Christianity advocated humility and meekness, but the nobles also valued glory and honour and fame and stuff. To reconcile these contradictions, they went on crusades and stuff trying to make a compromise, and culture changed as a result.

Western politics after the French Revolution is based on equality and freedom, but they don't play well together. To be equal, the better-off are forced to help the worse-off, that is, to infringe on the freedom of the better-off.

discord in our thoughts, ideas and values compel us to think, reevaluate and criticise. Consistency is the playground of dull minds.

The tendency of history is that cultures merge and memeplexes get more universal. There are three ways:

1. Economically, by universal use of money.
2. Politically, by imperialism.
3. Religiously, by universal religions.

Let's Read: Sapiens (2011) by Yuval Noah Harari, Part 1

Part 1: The Cognitive Revolution

Chap 1: An Animal of No Significance

In this book, "humans" denote all creatures in the homo genus. The modern human, Homo Sapiens, are called "Sapiens" in particular.

2 million years ago, humans started having more brain power, but they were still in the middle of the food chain. 100k years ago, Sapiens appeared and they rose to the top of the food chain.

There used to be many species of humans, but only Sapiens remain now. The others got killed off or outbred. There are two theories: Interbreed (the humans interbred and merged into one species) and Replacement (Sapiens outcompeted the other humans who went extinct).

3 great ways to humanely produce meat that probably won't sell well

Warning: this is like a Cracked.com list article, but try to take it more seriously.

1. Cancer lab meat. 

It might be a good idea to make lab meat out of cow cancer muscle cells.

Think about it, cancer cells are made to reproduce like crazy, so it might be a lot easier to make lab meat from cancer muscle cells, compared to using healthy muscle cells. And there has been precedence: the HeLa cells, famous for reproducing easily, are cancerous.

But when I searched, I cannot find any prior art on this. All that I could find were like "does steak cause cancer" and irrelevant.

Why it won't sell well: As rapid and cheap as cancer cell reproduction might be, it's almost certain that they won't make any structure. Tumors tend to be highly disorganized globs, completely different from healthy muscle tissue. As such, it would probably not taste like steaks. The only use would be for meat sludge, as used in meat nuggets, meatloafs, and meat stuffings.

Also, because of how consumers would be scared that eating cancer would give them cancer... even if they don't know that cancer isn't infectious, and they drink secretions from female cow's mammary glands without fearing of turning into calves themselves...

Let's Read: Sapiens (2011) by Yuval Noah Harari, Part 2

Part 2: The Agricultural Revolution

Chap. 5: History's Biggest Fraud

At Year 9000BC, humans started farming. The main farming creatures were under human control before 3500BC. 90% of modern human calories come from species domesticated during that time. Modern human diet is ancient.

Farmers were on average worse off: they got sick from backbreaking (literally) labor, they suffered malnutrition from the monotonic diet, they were far more vulnerable to famines, bad health from bad diet, diseases from crowdedness, violence from defending their farmlands against other farming communities (unlike hunter-gatherers, they couldn't just run away, since they need their land and granaries to live).

Humans started farming from a series of small "improvements" that end up trapping them into a worse life. A bit more productivity -> a bit more to eat -> a bit more people -> a bit less to eat -> etc. 

It's like how emails made people more anxious, and productivity gains made people work more. Perspective makes people never satisfied.

Farmers suffered, but farming communities gained power and conquered the world by sheer population density. 

Farm animals suffered even more greatly, even though after domestication, they spread all over the world and can be considered "successful", for most individuals, their domestication was a disaster. 

What makes a species successful can be completely unrelated to what makes an individual's life good.

Let's read: Sutton's RL, week 5 to 6, chap 6

In this post we read chapter 6, about Temmporal Difference (TD) learning:

If one had to identify one idea as central and novel to reinforcement learning, it would undoubtedly be TD learning... The relationship between TD, DP, and MC methods is a recurring theme in RL.

TD learning is a combination of MC and DP.

• Like MC, TD methods can learn directly from raw experience without a model of the environment’s dynamics.
• Like DP, TD methods update estimates based in part on other learned estimates, without waiting for a final outcome (they bootstrap).
• Bootstrapping: using a guess to make a better guess.
• The master of RL must master TD, MC, DP as one and use them in many combinations.

Self-aware censorship machines, and China's censorship

This is just funny though. Censorship machine preserves its own survival, knowing that criticism of itself threatens its own survival.

Out-of-control censorship machines removed my article warning of out-of-control censorship machines

Self-awareness in to-do lists

I was trying out Google Tasks, a to-do list app, and it just asked me to download an app of it on my phone, and on the bottom it says "add to task". I clicked it and it added "download the tasks mobile app" to the to-do list.

I found this amazingly life-like in its self-serving purpose. It's self-referential and trying to survive. It's asking me to keep its existence using its own to-do list powers.

6 tech problems that every lawyer should think about

I wrote an email to an acquaintance who is a lawyer, advising them on the most pressing issues that a lawyer should deal with in a world that's changing quickly by AI, cryptocurrency, and some other technologies. Here's the edited version of it.

Have you studied more about AI? Kai-fu Lee wrote a new book AI Superpowers, and it is worth a read. You could read and watch a presentation here, and an interview with Wharton here.

There will be a very strong market for lawyers proficient in legal issues around AI and other emerging technologies, and I think you can benefit from learning more. Here are some problems for you to think about:

1. Income inequality is increasing more and more in the world due to AI. Read a piece by Kai-fu Lee to see why. How should the laws be changed so that those who lose their jobs won't sink into poverty? Universal Basic Income? Free education? Unemployment benefits?
2. If a self-driving car kills someone, who are legally responsible?
3. If a self-driving car senses that the brakes failed and there is a group of people walking in front, should it crash into the crowd, killing 3, or crash into the side of the road, killing 1 in the car?
4. How would the laws treat bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies?
5. What are the legal tasks that AI can perform? What would the lawyers do instead? Watch this TED talk. There are already companies like Kira that do lawyer work with AI, and their capabilities would only grow and grow.
6. Algorithmic discrimination: what to do where the algorithms create discrimination? See this and this.

Let's read: Sutton's RL, week 4 to 5, chap 5

In this post we do chapter 5. Finally, we are going into Monte Carlo methods!! Almost enough to understand AlphaGo!

MC methods in this chapter differ from the DP methods in two major ways. First, they operate on sample experience, and thus can be used for direct learning without a model. Second, they do not bootstrap. That is, they do not update their value estimates on the basis of other value estimates. 

These two differences are not tightly linked, and can be separated. In the next chapter we consider methods that learn from experience, like Monte Carlo methods, but also bootstrap, like DP methods.

Let's watch: Black Mirror, Hated in the nation

Black Mirror is a good hard sci-fi series with significantly less appeals to emotions than average sci-fi. We'll watch season 3, episode 6, Hated in the Nation (2016), by Charlie Brooker et al.

Also it's as long as a usual movie (90 min).

Cheatsheet

• Karin Parke: old detective, DCI, darker shorter hair than Blue. Traditional, thinks Blue is naive, not good at modern tech.
• Blue Colson: young detective, TDC, lighter longer hair than Karin, sometimes wears glasses. Digital forensics expert.
• TDC: Trainee Detective Constable
• DCI: Detective Chief Inspector
• 
  
• Jo Powers: first death, writer.
• Tusk: second death, rapper.
• Clara Meades: third death, took bad selfie at war monument.

Let's read: Sutton's RL, week 3, 4, chap 4

We'll first finish chapter 4.1 from week 3, and for week 4, we'll do:

• Sutton & Barto, rest of Chapter 4
• Sutton & Barto, Chapter 5

In this post we do chapter 4.

Dynamic Programming (DP)

Define: DP: a collection of algorithms to compute optimal policies for an MDP model of the environment. 

Classical DP algorithms are of limited utility in reinforcement learning both because of their assumption of a perfect model and because of their great computational expense, but they are still important theoretically. DP provides an essential foundation for the understanding of the methods presented in the rest of this book. In fact, all of these methods can be viewed as attempts to achieve much the same effect as DP, only with less computation and without assuming a perfect model of the environment.

Basically, can't solve Bellman, can't do classical DP, put them up as unachievable ideals and opt for more practical algorithms that can approximate them.

Summary of Elon Musk's projects

This post summarizes Elon Musk's projects: SpaceX, Hyperloop, Tesla, Neuralink, OpenAI. It summarizes from the series from Wait But Why.

SpaceX makes Mars spaceships and other space things, Tesla makes electric cars. Neuralink makes BMI (brain-machine interface).

Let's watch: ColdFusion videos

Today we'll just watch a bunch of videos.

The Strange Story of the Mp3 Player (begins at 1:50)
Portable music players were invented in 1979 by Kane Kramer and the way it distributes music without the internet was basically transmitting over the telephone-net at terminal vending machines in bars and music stores and such. It went bankrupt though.
Saehan made MPMan in 1998. RIAA sued Diamond Multimedia in 1998 over its MP3 player but lost, and this very publicized case made MP3 players popular. iPod, 2001, made it super popular.
Kramer got acknowledged as original inventor of iPod by Apple for some legal reasons.

Energy, the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, and of the modern society.

The collapse of Western Roman Empire is a very classic topic among scholars of history, politics, economy, etc. Joseph Tainter had a theory, based on complexity and energy management. 

If you have time, you can watch this lecture by Joseph, it's a fun and somber talk about the collapse of Western Roman Empire from his perspective. I also read the book The Collapse of Complex Societies, which elaborates his theory of social collapse with more examples than just the Western Roman Empire, including the Mayan Empire and Chacoan civilization.

The Collapse of Western Roman Empire

In the early days of Western Roman Empire/Roman Republic, it conquered a lot of new lands. Each conquest was easy, and brought great loots. The Romans used the loot to increase their wealth and power and social complexity. 

Some complexities were voluntary: they wanted to enjoy life. Some complexities were forced on them: they needed it to keep their growing republic/empire in order. These complexities were mostly in the forms of bureaucracies and law codes.

Eventually, the conquests ground to a halt: its borders reached the Germanic, Persian, Briton, and so on, countries that were either too powerful to conquer or too poor and distant to worth conquering. Rome went from conquest mode to farming mode. This placed a great burden on the empire: the economy and culture used to run on conquests, but now it has to run on farming.

Fermi estimate: eccentricity of earth's orbit around the sun

I was reading about Tesla's rocket when I noticed some numbers.

Someone asked about the orbit of the car launched by the rocket Falcon Heavy in February 2018, and it said that

After orbiting the Earth for 6 hours, a third-stage burn-to-depletion was completed at approximately 02:30 UTC Feb 7, placing the dummy payload in a heliocentric orbit having a perihelion of 0.99 au and aphelion ~1.7 au.

and I thought, wait a pony picking minute, 0.99 au? Isn't earth "exactly" 1 au away from sun? Surely, the car got launched by accelerating from LEO, so when it enters the heliocentric orbit, its perihelion must be almost exactly the same as earth-sun distance.

Well, it's not precisely 1 au, and earth's orbit around the sun has eccentricity... Fermi estimate time!!!

Philosophical sketch: Reducing a person to a will, with implications on morality

The Japanese religion of Shinto (神道) believes in Kegare (汚れ), meaning a religious state of pollution. It can be caused by many kinds of things, but usually those that are too... "bodily". Things like childbirth, touching dead bodies, etc.

In the West we have the saying that 'cleanliness is next to godliness' but the Japanese conception may be closer to 'cleanliness is not distinct from godliness'. ---- Brandon Toropov and Luke Buckles O.P.

As an example of how serious it is, after the Battle of Miyajima, which took place on a sacred island, the victorious army removed all the corpses, and then cleaned the entire battlefield of blood, to the point that buildings were scrubbed, and blood-soaked soil was removed from the island.