Prometheus

Don't know. You've read through their accompanying paper? Under their FAQs is a contact form - i'd ask them directly.

From their website: CDR and dementia diagnosis can be found with other demographic data in “ADRC Clinical Data”. Or you take the opportunity to try some unsupervised learning.

Isn't that more a definition of machine learning, which is itself a subset of AI?

Even if they prove correlated, with millions (billions?) of astronomical bodies now being tracked our sun is bound to be in sync with some of them for some of the time by some metric.

Does spatially-resolved have a specific technical meaning in this context? Spatial information is acquired by taking a spectrum from a defined location then shifting the stage slightly and taking a spectrum from an adjacent location and so on, then computationally stitching them all together.

Hyperspectral imaging using Raman microspectroscopy is a thing, the putative benefit being that images of various biochemicals can be acquired without the need for individual staining, as is currently done via immunohistochemistry. It's quite a specialised setup though. I gather the OP speculates such techniques can be modified to allow brain imaging? If only. I've seen some transcutaneous experiments, mostly for blood glucose monitoring which isn't concerned with spatial information. Going through skin is one thing, i've never come across any set-ups even trying to penetrate bone. I don't know physics, but one problem that straight away suggests itself is that if you are using longer wavelengths to achieve penetrance, then you are limiting the usefulness of any spatial information (as there is a dependence on wavelength and spatial resolution).

This collapses down to a value alignment problem. As a super-intelligence it should be able to predict people quitting their jobs etc. Whether it knows this is not what we really want depends on its goals. Is it simply maximising dopamine - then it could invent a way to directly stimulate dopamine receptors. Is it trying to cater to every physical whim - then we could end up with enforced hedonism. Is it trying to to optimise for some vague concept such as 'wellness' - this might sound ideal as wellness could include just enough resistance for us to overcome to make human life fulfilling, but can we define such vague goals? There are attempts to have AI agents that extract their goals from the environment instead of having them explicitly stated, which may provide one avenue to this end.

You mean SN8? I'm not an engineer but my understanding is that it hit the ground too hard as they couldn't get enough propellant to the engines. It crumpled where it was most structurally weak. I think they regarded it a resounding success. SN9 might give it another go this week or next.

Yes. Again, it depends on the culture. I can imagine something even as simple as ubiquitous automated driving would be well received and readily adopted in somewhere like Singapore, but rejected in many places in the US. Scale that up. I'm not sure that is true: most religions are predicated on the observation that on some level humans are not in control. Whether that manifests as a god/s being in control, or natural forces (to which humans are bound) is irrelevant - the idea exists in many systems of thought. Perhaps you mean human agency? I don't see that humans would necessarily give up this agency in light of a super-computer. Computers already play chess much better than all humans, but AFAIK that hasn't affected the numbers playing chess in the slightest. Nick Bostrom gives an account of this in his book Superintelligence in which he outlines several paths superintelligence could emerge and speculates that the most destabilising ones are one that emerges alone (i.e. the Chinese of Americans get the first, and so only superintelligence, as it can destroy all other attempts) and/or one that emerges so quickly that societies cannot react, either internally (emotional) or externally (putting in place laws) - we already see how slowly governments are responding to social media. The other scenario he warned of was an arms race to super intelligence in which AI safety (value uploading, goal misalignment, orthogonality thesis etc...) are ignored just to beat the competitors - which, i believe, is why open AI was founded.

I find anaconda useful for managing environments. I also had problems installing tensorflow, then a bunch of computer scientists said google didn't support it that much and that Pytorch was the way to go anyway.

I think that's an unfair representation of what MigL said, at least i didn't read it that way. Lack of motivation =/= laziness. You could be an extremely hardworking and unhappy warehouse worker, but never even think you could improve your lot through education. It's just not a thought for many socio-economically disadvantaged people. If your dreams provide the ceiling of what you can achieve in life, then poor people in rich countries are conditioned to dream no higher than the dog's bed. It's as much a barrier to education as is anything else, but perhaps the most important because it's the only one you can directly tear down with your own mind. That's not mutually exclusive with making changes to education system, but while we're waiting for that to happen, as Billy Bragg says: the system might fail you, but don't fail yourself.

I think this joke perfectly captures the essence of the topic. In this joke the monks were just following teachings blindly. Apparently they never questioned or explored their celebicacy. But i understand (some?) monks are encouraged to explore the experience of celibacy. It's not just an arbitrary rule, but a tool used to explore a headspace few humans choose to navigate. There's an inquisitiveness to it. In this case the transcription error wouldn't matter to their practice because they are focused on the experience. The mindset of the former monks might not be conducive to science, but the latter monks would have an easier time of it. Now it might be that certain religious institutions encourage one way of thinking over the other, but religions are not homogenous and each should be taken on their own merits.

Recently tried both these frameworks: Tensorflow is nothing like Python, it's like another language embedded in Python. Pytorch has much more 'Python-like' syntax, if you're familiar with numpy, Pytorch will be simple. However, the community support for Pytorch is currently paltry compared to Tensorflow. Either way, Python is a good start. I don't think the language matters as much as learning the fundamental concepts of ML though.

Genes also have their own evolutionary agenda - was that not Dawkin's great contribution to evolutionary theory, that the unit of replication is the gene not the organism?Wouldn't memes be the same? Therefore i don't think it's useful to think of some memes, like religious ones, as particularly self-serving - they all are. But we can think of memes that better serve the organism, in this case the cultures they exist in. Perhaps some religions are more suited to secular societies than others. But then evolution is a blind process and what constitutes better? By some metrics religious countries do very well. My guess is that the changes to the memetic landscape that social media brings, and the click-bait maximising algorithms that appeal to our reptilian instincts which drive it, will change the selective pressures towards favouring extremist religious interpretations. But then i favour the Greco-Roman tradition and they're known Cynics.

I've already given an account of the Genesis myth. The Jesus myth is from several centuries later. If you see how terrible and inconsistent the Star Wars prequels/sequels were compared to the original 50 years later then i can well understand why the Biblical mash-up so poor. A generous reading of the Jesus myth is that human sacrifice is no longer needed, because god has sacrificed himself/his only son for us. I'm not going to defend Christianity too much though, i think it was a regressive step even 2000 years ago when compared to the Greco-Roman traditions to the west and Vedic traditions to the east,. In the bible sacrifice comes up many times (Abel and Cain, Jacob and Jesus). Each instance demands that the best of humanity is demanded. But in the Greek myth Prometheus urges mankind to keep the best for themselves, tricking Zeus to take a lesser sacrifice. The Greek myths challenge mankind to aspire to godhood - which is the greatest sin, Lucifer's sin of Hubris, in the Christian tradition. My interpretation is that the blossoming of man is regarded as terrible in Christianity (although i don't think that's true of the Jewish myths), but as glorious in the Greco-Roman tradition. If we think in evolutionary terms, meme theory, then religion must have served quite a strong survival function. If it was so malignant, it developed so early in mankind it would have been like getting a childhood cancer - not something you survive in the natural world. I think a more accurate analogy would be to compare it to something like the appendix: something that helped us survive in the past, which became thought to be useless in modern times, but has been found to still serve a function for some people. Religion can can understood in terms of psychology and sociology too. The Greeks said that you can know a people by the idols they revere. Religions have their idols, as does the secular world.

The mistake, for the religious or non-religious alike, i think is to take the stories literally. Taken as frameworks they make more sense. The forbidden fruit ( Milton's Paradise Lost solidified it as the Apple) symbolises knowledge, particularly of good and evil. The first thing Adam and Eve notice after eating it is their nakedness - they can now discriminate between themselves and a potentially hostile world and so seek to place barriers between it and themselves. The most interesting aspect of this story is that this coming of knowledge is cast as a bad thing. (Also interesting to note is the role of the serpent - later interpreted as Satan - in bringing about insight in humans. There is a theory that snakes provided the selective pressure that developed the human visual system to such a high degree. Perhaps a hint of how ancient these myths reach back). Compare this to the Greek myth of how humans acquired divine knowledge. Prometheus, the bringer of light (incidentally the same meaning as the name Lucifer), gifts the divine fire it to mankind (again, that theme of light, fire is also probably one of mankinds oldest technologies, both bringer of life and death), so incurring Zeus's wrath and much liver pecking. However, the key difference is that this acquisition of divine knowledge is seen as a good thing, not something to be punished. Herakles, one of the greatest Greek heroes, repays Prometheus by rescuing him from Zeus's punishment. However, humans don't get off so lightly, with Zeus tricking Epimetheus and Pandora (the first woman, so equivalent to Eve in that respect) into opening her jar (or box), thus unleashing all the torments man experiences (hope being a silver lining or the final torment that makes you endure all others depending on your disposition). Both stories cast our acquisition of divine knowledge as the source of our suffering (indeed humans do seem able to suffer in a unique way compared to other animals). However, the Greco-Roman lineage sees that burden of knowledge as our bridge to divinity (through adversity to the stars), the Judeo-Christian lineage sees knowledge as what separates us from divinity - and our ignorance as a return to the divine (man is not justified by the works of the law but by faith).

Khan academy made a video giving a good explanation of how estimates are made:

This sounds like the poisoned drinks problem. Unfortunately it won't work here. In the idealised case where we there is say, exactly 1 in every 100 people infected then it could apply. But for every 100 hundred people we take there is no guarantee of the number of infected people. Sometimes there are none. Most times there will be one. Occasionally there will be 10. It is a random variable itself. Also, the tests themselves have a number of false positives and false negatives which will likely be significant.

Thought this was an excellent video introducing the maths of exponential growth and logistic growth and applying to the virus. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kas0tIxDvrg

The principles of good hygiene are well known: hand washing, particularly around food prep of touching your eyes, sneezing and coughing into tissues and disposing them properly, keeping clean surfaces. be careful when sharing drinks etc. The principles of a healthy immune system are also well known: diet, exercise, avoid excesses. What's the need for medicine? If you are immuno-compromised there are a number of options, but you're better off discussing those with a physician.

There are a number of misconceptions there, some of which have been addressed in this thread but let's visit them one more time. No one is disputing the average man is physically stronger than the average woman. How does this follow from men being physically stronger? Or is it a separate statement? Or it could be cultural conditioning with nothing to do with neurobiology. Why do you keep skipping over this possibility? Map reading isn't a defining characteristic of the sexes. But again, no one is disputing that there are biological differences between them. What we are asking of you is to try to disentangle those innate biological differences from cultural conditioning. That should be the starting point for any imagining of what a matriarchal society would look like. Do you acknowledge that there are some purely cultural differences between the sexes - it seems you just assume every difference can only be purely biological. We know this isn't true, and you've been given links throughout this thread if you want to follow this up. No one's asking you to do that (or imagine that). How do you know this? You've just assumed it's true. Provide some evidence to back it up. We don't have any societies that raise girls with boys toys so unfortunately it's not straight forward. I gave 3 types of evidence i would look for. There's probably more: for instance, there must be studies on child playing styles and toy preferences between the sexes. Have you tried to look for any of them? But we do have historical examples of some of the more matriarchal societies being famously warrior-like. Again, why do you keep ignoring this? I've only been talking in averages. There have been thousands of female rulers throughout human history across the globe, enough to give us the idea that they aren't so different to male rulers. There are also plenty of gay rulers, including Philip II, one of the greatest Greek (Macedonian) rulers and quite probably his son, one of the greatest rulers in recorded history: Alexander the Great. In the Greek and Roman golden ages, these weren't exceptions. Just to give an idea of the sort of things i was hoping you might submit as evidence i found this study. Turns out female rulers engaged in more wars than men. If you can't or don't want to answer these questions and points then i agree it's probably best to lock the thread.

Not really. I think you're trying to say that male hippocampi are innately larger than females', but that's yet to be proved. You're assuming way too much. What do animal studies suggest? Are there any studies on how sex hormones affect the growth of these regions? Any studies on neonate brains? These are the things i'd start off looking at. Even if we take something more obvious like the increased musculature of the average man and more aggressive impulses due to higher levels of testosterone, doesn't mean a matriarchal society would be less warlike (Sparta, perhaps the most famous warrior society in all of history, was also one of the most matriarchal). It might mean you'd still be sending men off to be cannon fodder, but the strategic decision to go to war could be made by a matriarchy. Decisions to go to war take months, balancing many factors, meaning impulses have less of an effect. I'm not convinced a matriarchy would be any less inclined to war than a patriarchy. There are historical precedents for this - female rulers have popped up quite often and didn't seem less inclined to war - but then they were still operating in a patriarchy. So that's another place to get clues: compare the number of wars engaged by kings vs queens.

Or men have larger hippocampi because they were encouraged to explore the world as boys, as girls were encouraged to domestic play (recently came across this with my niece who wanted a remote control car as a present but the mother over-ruled her to get a cooking toy). If we're imagining a society starting from scratch we'd need to know the direction of causality, at the moment we have only correlation (as far as i know - haven't delved into the literature). Again, how much of this is biological and how much cultural conditioning? My impression is that any biological differences are exaggerated by cultural norms. To imagine a truly matriarchal nascent society we need to strip away this cultural element, leaving us with a biological case from which to proceed (although it probably isn't as easy to separate culture and biology as i suggest given one emerges from the other). Maybe there are animal studies that could give us some clues?

While female and male brains have differences, it would be difficult to pick apart what is truly biological variance between populations and what is cultural conditioning. I vaguely recall a study that found female hippocampi were on average smaller than in males, which was said to explain why men were better navigators. But we also know parts of the brain less used will atrophy. So is it a case of their hippocampi being intrinsically smaller, or a result of gender roles directing its use (or lack of)? When women have risen to prominent historical roles they have pretty much done as men have done - Wu Zetian, Boudicca, Hypatia (but maybe that's because they emerged in patriarchies). There is also evidence of early societies that while not matriarchal, were more balanced. The Spartans are a probably the best documented example, and weren't significantly different from surrounding societies. I've also heard it said men more readily pursue risky pursuits, perhaps leading to voyages such as Colombus'. Assuming this is a neurobiological difference, it wouldn't necessarily preclude risky behaviour from men. Remember Colombus was sponsored by both Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, with the former willing to sell some jewels to fund it (thoough she didn't need to). War would still be conducted by men on the field; aside from differences in physiology making men on average more suited to those demands, sending women to fight would be a flawed strategy. The Romans lost ~300,000 men to Hannibal in the Punic wars from a total population of ~3.5 million - thats a huge proportion. If they had all been women of child-bearing potential Rome would almost certainly have fallen. Overall i don't think there'd be gross changes to the patterns of war, economic cycles, spiritual practices, technological development etc - just a lot of changed details which are impossible to guess at. They say men are from Mars and women from Venus, but we all know they're both from Earth.

Told you it was a musical thing...