Mike Linksvayer

Betterhumans cites a study that found curcumin (turmeric, the spice that makes curry yellow) inhibits the accumulation of destructive beta-amyloid plaques and breaks up existing plaques in genetically altered mice.

Perhaps this helps explain the possible very low incidence of alzheimer’s in India. Much more study needed.

For years I have eaten lots of turmeric, which may be added to just about any food. Yum. I doubt my father’s mother has eaten any apart from tiny amounts used in food coloring. Unfortunately she’s far past being helped by any crude dietary intervention. Happy holidays to the husk of Victoria Ulakey.

Over a month ago I attended Accelerating Change 2004. I agree with Peter McCluskey’s take: an unexpected but mostly well done and welcome focus on current developments and lots of excitement about virtual worlds, Second Life in particular. Virtual words offer a low cost platform for economic, social and even physical object experimentation, prototyping and more. Virtual worlds are the future! Pity I never was much of an enthusiast for MUDs or video games, so I have a couple decades’ worth of catching up to do.

Had it not been held across the continent (South Carolina) I would’ve preferred to attend the conflicting 3rd Annual Calorie Restriction Society Conference. The first two CR conferences were lots of fun, with a good mix of learning from CRONies (CRON is Calorie Restriction with Optimal Nutrition) far more serious than me and talks by academics studying CR and aging mechanisms.

Dean Pomerleau, whose site is well worth visiting, took notes on approximately every CR 2004 talk: day 1, day 2, and day 3.

This afternoon I attended a lecture in Berkeley by Nobel prize winning economist Robert Fogel titled “Changes in the Disparities in Chronic Diseases During the Course of the Twentieth Century.” After writing most of this post I discovered a paper (PDF) of the same name that contains all of the slides presented during the lecture. Some interesting points:

Male life expectancy at age 50 from ~1900 to ~1990 increased 6.6 years (life expectancy at birth increased by decades over the same time period), while onset of disabling conditions occur roughly 10 years later in life, meaning that we not only live longer, we spend less total time in a state of ill health. To put it another way, healthspan (not a word used by Fogel) is increasing faster than lifespan, contrary to the popular fear that longer life only means more time spent bedridden. I believe the way that Fogel did put it is that decline in morbidity has paralleled and actually exceeded decline in mortality. When questioned Fogel confirmed that this is the idea he intended to convey, and added somewhat jokingly that we should not dismiss the possibility that younger people today would be healthy until they finally all drop dead together.

Drawing on the Early Indicators Project and other data Fogel stated that chronic disease in mid and late life is heavily influenced by infection and other “insults” to health in early life. He indicated data from Dutch Famine survivors may indicate that the effect may be multi-generational — the children of mothers who were themselves fetuses during the famine may be less healthy than expected. This claim seemed tentative.

Before the twentieth century human lives really fit the description of nasty, brutish, and short. Fogel cited much data from Union army recruits and pensioners. One item: in 1861, one sixth of recruits aged 16-19 were rejected for a litany of medical conditions almost unknown to today’s youth. Over half of those aged 35-39 were rejected.

Concerning the lecture’s title, Fogel said that the health of the poorest has improved far more markedly than the health of the most wealthy.

Over a similar time period the gap in average height between British elites and the average Briton shrunk from four inches to less than one.

Perhaps the most stunning figure cited concerned homelessness. In the past (I’m not certain I heard the year correctly, perhaps circa 1750) 10-20% of Europe’s population was classified as vagrant or pauper. Now, less than 0.4% of the population in wealthy countries is homeless. The stunning bit however, is Fogel’s contention as to why vagrancy was so widespread in centuries past: severe malnutrition. Large segments of the population simply didn’t get enough calories to do useful work.

Regarding increasing healthcare expenditures, Fogel made several pithy comments:

Poor people live through pain, wealthy people go to the doctor.

In poorer times people spent most of their incomes on necessities. Now we spend an increasing amount on entertainment and healthcare. Why not spend our wealth on healthcare?

Somewhat jokingly: Going to the doctor and chatting in the waiting room is a favorite activity of many elderly. It’s difficult to factor out what is entertainment and what is healthcare.

A woman once told Fogel that she had a Mercedes in her mouth — that’s how much her dental work had cost. A young person may prefer a fancy car, and older person, if they must choose, may prefer teeth, or a knee.

Improvements in health outcomes from say 1970 to 2000 are not due only to improvements in medical technology during that time, but also due to improved “pysiological capital” built up over decades (recall that health in early life heavily impacts health in later life). Future cost estimates typically completely ignore this factor.

Unfortunately, the same factor may make the problem of an aging population worse than expected in countries like China, whose current middle aged population suffered “terrible insult” in early life.

Today’s lecture was the first of a two-part series titled “Changes in the Process of Aging During the Twethieth Century.” A paper ($5 — unless you’re a subscriber or in a poor country — much like what the Creative Commons developing nations license allows) of the same name is cited here with some data. Tomorrow’s lecture on “Common Analytical Errors in Explanations for Improvements in Health and Longevity.” Supposedly both will be available online at some point.

One of my favorite things about living in Silicon Valley is the availability of food from the Indian subcontinent, the southern portion in particular. Saravana Bhavan is my favorite restaurant. I jump at the opportunity to try something new in this vein, e.g., the short-lived Charulata (Bengali), the excellent Green Lettuce (Indian-style Chinese in Vancouver, BC — the local Passage to India has a Desi Chinese menu), and perhaps the best restaurant meal of my life at the departed Surat Sweets (Gujarati, also in Vancouver, BC).

Recently I saw Curry Leaf advertised as the only Sri Lankan restaurant in the San Francisco Bay Area and tried it out this afternoon. I vaguely expected something like South Indian cuisine plus fish. I was wrong. Sri Lankan cuisine heavily uses spices associated with India but is otherwise distinct. I don’t have vocabulary to describe it well, so see A Taste of Serendib. I had vegetarian Kottu Roti, with Jackfruit chunks standing in as meat. Pleasantly spicy. I recommend the place. It is of course in a low rent strip mall.

an organization for a good future

In 1998 I registered wifo.org (wayback June 2000 copy) with the intention of using the platform to mock the World Intellectual Property Organization and promote the study of production of nonrivalrous goods, with a decided bias against government-granted monopolies in such goods. My battle against life in the late 90s was mostly a losing one, so I never carried through.

Anyway, I now recommend you sign the Geneva Declaration on the Future of the World Intellectual Property Organization AKA “Proposal for the Establishment of a Development Agenda for WIPO” offered by Argentina and Brazil to the WIPO General Assembly last week. I’m not thrilled with all of the language, but upon first read it looks quite excellent given my low estimation of UN documents. Excerpt:

At the same time, there are astoundingly promising innovations in information, medical and other essential technologies, as well as in social movements and business models. We are witnessing highly successful campaigns for access to drugs for AIDS, scientific journals, genomic information and other databases, and hundreds of innovative collaborative efforts to create public goods, including the Internet, the World Wide Web, Wikipedia, the Creative Commons, GNU Linux and other free and open software projects, as well as distance education tools and medical research tools. Technologies such as Google now provide tens of millions with powerful tools to find information. Alternative compensation systems have been proposed to expand access and interest in cultural works, while providing both artists and consumers with efficient and fair systems for compensation. There is renewed interest in compensatory liability rules, innovation prizes, or competitive intermediators, as models for economic incentives for science and technology that can facilitate sequential follow-on innovation and avoid monopolist abuses. In 2001, the World Trade Organization (WTO) declared that member countries should “promote access to medicines for all.”

Humanity stands at a crossroads - a fork in our moral code and a test of our ability to adapt and grow. Will we evaluate, learn and profit from the best of these new ideas and opportunities, or will we respond to the most unimaginative pleas to suppress all of this in favor of intellectually weak, ideologically rigid, and sometimes brutally unfair and inefficient policies? Much will depend upon the future direction of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a global body setting standards that regulate the production, distribution and use of knowledge.

As you could guess from my description of a “World Intellectual Freedom Organization” I’m very interested in “models for economic incentives for science and technology that can facilitate sequential follow-on innovation and avoid monopolist abuses.” I admit that I’d never heard of compensatory liability rules or competitive intermediators. Google knows of only a few documents with the former term, excepting copies of the aforementioned declaration.

Using Liability Rules to Stimulate Local Innovation in Developing Countries: A Law and Economics Primer (PDF) appears to be the paper describing compensatory liability rules. At a glance it appears CLR is akin to a compulsory license for subpatentable innovations (which under the current regime are all too often patented). Sounds like a reasonable potential reform.

Google also knows next to nothing about competitive intermediators, which appear to be an invention of the authors of A New Trade Framework for Global Healthcare R&D. The proposal seems to amount to R&D funded by a payroll tax. Very boring.

The X-Prize has raised the profile of innovation prizes immensely, but they are an old idea that has deserved resurrection for a long time. I recommend starting with Robin Hanson’s Patterns of Patronage: Why Grants Won Over Prizes in Science (PDF). I’ve donated a small amount ($122.45 — can you guess why?) to the Methuselah Mouse Prize and will donate more to this and other science prizes in the future — I’m very keen on the concept.

Compensatory liability rules, innovation prizes, or competitive intermediators are only three of many interesting ideas in this vein. I’ll write about others in the fullness of time.

Perry Metzger recently started a blog with a misleading title. If the first few days are any indication, his blogging will be as prolific as his posting to Usenet and mailing lists in legedary times. I recommend every one of his posts, and wish I had that much capacity.

The San Francisco Chronicle writes about a Scientology-led course in made-up bullshit about drugs taught in public schools.

The article failed to include links to Stop Narconon, Narconon Clambake, or Narconon Exposed, among others.

I wonder why they didn’t call it Narcanon. Legal problems from twelve-step programs?

Narconon’s lies are unfortunately relatively harmless against the backdrop of drug war lies pushed by equally evil folk who get a pass from mainstream society.

I spent much of last week in Austin, attending SXSW Interactive with Creative Commons and hearing two nights of good music at SXSW music showcases.

I found time to do some of what I always do when I’m in a new place. First walk around as much as possible. Second, while I’m doing that eat at the local vegetarian restaurants. Third, visit the largest local library.

I think I crisscrossed most of the neighborhoods adjacent to or nearby downtown, about 30 miles total. I enjoyed Travis Heights the most, though admittedly many of my other walks were during the wee morning hours when I couldn’t take in as much visually. Mansions to the west. To the east the Tenth Ward, apparently a predominantly Mexican district, very different feel from San Franicsco’s Mission. Not at all urban. Are drug stores few in Austin, or is it odd to have them every other block, only a slight exaggeration for some areas of San Franicsco? Pleasant surprise: almost no barking dogs.

Mr. Natural (east) is all vegetarian with many vegan options and served some of the best Mexican food I’ve had (however, I’m not a huge fan). I had Tofu Pipian, “Tofu cooked with a rich sauce made of pumpkin and sesame seeds, peanuts, and peppers.” The tofu was very tasty.

Magnolia Caf� (south) does have many vegetarian options, but almost none vegan. I had Magnolia Stir Fry, “Ginger, garlic, carrots, broccoli, onion, mushroom, red bells and yellow squash sauteed in honey-lime teriyaki. Served over brown rice. With Tofu.” Surprisingly tasty (I’m really not a fan of American diner fare). The place was packed with a short wait for a seat at 3PM.

The Austin Central Library isn’t shiny, but it was quiet, aroma-free, and seemed to have a good collection. Too bad the San Francisco main library mostly has the opposite traits.

I look forward to visiting Austin again. The place started to grow on me.

Note: I posted this to the extropians mailing list April 2000, to this blog six years later. Recordings of the symposium are online at TechNetCast.
…

Ken Clements wrote:
> Hofstadter admitted that he had stacked the panel by not asking anyone
> from the anti-technology movement (Bill made up that whole side).

Hofstadter didn’t invite anyone who believes that intelligence requires a biological brain, which is quite different from believing that technology is bad. Joy seems to believe some technology is bad, but he doesn’t seem to fall into the “intelligence requires biology” camp. (Offtopic aside: Searle sounds like a very reasonable classical liberal in a recent interview with Reason magazine. Just more proof, not that any was needed, that even reasonable people often take dumb arguments seriously.)

There were really two debates going on (though the atmosphere wasn’t contentious at all): rapid vs. slow development/evolution of human-level or greater machine “intelligence” (in quotes because what this means is nebulous and wasn’t discussed) (primarily Kurzweil and Moravec vs. Holland and Koza respectively) and “we must relinquish dangerous technology now or face catastrophy” (Joy, with support from Koza, vs. Merkle and Moravec, with support from Kurzweil).

Kurzweil and Moravec’s initial talks were quite boring, though their contributions to the discussion and Q&A periods were the most insightful of the group. After droning about exponential and double exponential increases in computational speed, Kurzweil did sneak in one gem: he indicated that Moore’s law, or something like it, also applies to software, of course very much contrary to most people’s intuitions. I was very eager to hear a rationale for this claim. Unfortunately when Holland asked about it at one point, Kurzweil only mentioned better development tools.

Joy seemed quite proud (in a very serious way) that the media is paying attention to him and that he is well read (or at least can scour books for emotional quotes supporting his argument, or at least pay someone to do so). His argument basically boiled down to this: supervirulent pathogens will be easily engineered and/or produced in crazy and/or sick people’s basements, and if only a few of the millions of certifiably crazy, evil people in the world do this, we’re all doomed. We must not allow the democratization of KMDs (Knowledge of Mass Destruction?). Oh yeah, and remember how bad the plague was in Greek times or the middle ages? Why, they catapulted plague-infected bodies over city walls, and people died horrible deaths and doctors couldn’t help at all. Clearly we have not evolved to the point where people can be trusted with knowledge of biology sufficient to engineer pathogens. And oh yeah, there are a bunch of famous people and books that agree with Joy, and he can quote them all (I think Einstein was probably most quoted).

Joy’s solution is “relinquishment”, though he didn’t really give any details of what this would involve, though he seems to think that arms control treaties and subsequent verification protocols point in the right direction. He also mentioned, once, strict corporate liability as a deterrent to corporations developing dangerous technologies. I got a tiny chuckle out of that, as strict liability is one of those libertarian catchall answers.

I believe Joy said that he thinks there is a 30-50% chance of human extinction (presumably with no posthuman successor), not including all the other horrible outcomes that are likely. I didn’t get the impression from the other panelists (I should have asked that question), not to mention reading this mailing list, that human extinction isn’t a real possibility. I’d say that many of his concerns are valid, though his scaremonger/authoritarian approach seems contrived to create fame for himself.

If Joy was “wrong” and annoying, Merkle was “right” and extremely annoying. I felt that Merkle came across as a (highly intelligent) pompous ass with a really bad sense of humor. He didn’t even attempt to address Joy’s points, not counting wisecracks (”Would those nanomachines be using the broadcast architecture, or some other architecture?” Ok, you had to be there. I cringed.) I got the same impression of Merkle when I saw him on stage with Michio Kaku at a “Next 20 Years” event. My tentative evaluation: brilliant researcher, rotten public spokesperson.

I hadn’t heard of the broadcast architecture before (I don’t attempt to keep current with nanotech research, though hardly anyone in the audience raised their hands when Merkle asked if anyone had heard of it, and I suspect many of them were imaginging some networking or distributed computing architecture, as I was when I considered half-raising my hand). The idea seems to be that nanobots would somehow be broadcast instructions, eliminating the need for them to act completely independently (an analogy with DNA was made — these broadcast architecture nanobots wouldn’t carry around a full complement of DNA) and making them much cheaper and more controllable. The last point was held forth as a promising means of preventing a runaway self-replicator catastrophe.

My intuition (and that’s all I have on this point) doesn’t find this one-sentence version of the broadcast architecture very compelling in terms of cost or danger. Embedding instructions in a nanobot seems really cheap, considering the capacity of nanotech storage. Would an embedded communications device be cheaper? Well, it may be in one sense at least: it would be much easier to program nanobots to do some very limited function and await instructions than it would be to program nanobots to do generalized tasks and to handle general contingencies. But then it would be even simpler (not to mention safer) to program nanobots to do one task, then “die” after doing that task a desired number of times. On controllability, it seems that if nanobots can be broadcast instructions, then they, having security bugs, can be broadcast bad instructions.

John Holland’s comments were all very brief and generally well spoken. He was highly skeptical of Kurzweil and Moravec’s predictions. Holland said that we have a very slight understanding of intelligence, and without much better theory we won’t get very far. He drew an analogy between machine intelligence and fusion power — he believes that we haven’t gotten very far in five decades with the latter because we don’t have sufficiently good theory, despite spending billions trying to make it work, and despite fusion power potentially being a really good thing.

Throughout the afternoon there were several comments that alluded to the need for better theory, or at least different approaches, in order to make breakthroughs. Or, as Jeff Davis’ Ray Charles signature quote says “Everything’s hard till you know how to do it.” Kurzweil and Moravec were asked whether if 100 years in the future we knew how to create machine intelligence, we couldn’t run such an intelligence on today’s computers (this followed someone mentioning a tinkertoy computer (but it doesn’t run Linux!)). Both seemed to indicate that today’s computers simply don’t have the storage or horsepower needed. I can understand storage, but given an intelligent program and glacially slow hardware, why can’t it just be really slow?

Another comment in this vein from the audience mentioned that someone (at Sandia?) had created a robot that could walk with only twelve transistors, involving an analog feedback system, wheras it has been extremely hard to get many-MIPS digital-brained computers to walk. Moravec seemed to say that because analog requires some bulk technology, digital nanocomputers would probably be more cost effective even if they must be really complex. Well, yeah, but we don’t have nanocomputers yet. There’s lots of cool stuff remaining to be done with old technology, and I bet it will sometimes be much more cost effective from a development perspective.

Kevin Kelly’s answer to the symposium’s title “Will spiritual robots replace humanity by 2100″ was “NO WAY”. His argument, to the extent I caught it (I kind of zoned out for awhile do to extreme thirst) was that machine intelligence will fill lots of specialized niches, some of them niches previously filled by humans, but no machine will completely replace humans. He used as a calculator as a primitive example — it’s much better than any human at arithmatic, but not good for much else. I’m not making the point as eloquently as he did. Perhaps it was the graph with lots of little dots on it, all representing little niches for intelligent entities. At best, he seemed to say, intelligent machines will free humans from having to work.

I also remember Kelly being the first to mention that communicating with intelligent machines of our creation could be a very spiritual thing, much like communicating with “ET” would be. Kurzweil made a similar point several times.

Frank Drake came off as a mildly boring, mildly crackpot case. We’ll judge the aliens intelligence by the size of their radio telescopes, har, har, har.

John Koza said that in numerous attempts to have a genetic program learn to model some tiny aspect of human intelligence or perception, perhaps equivalent to one second of brain activity (I know this doesn’t really make sense, I’m fuzzy on the details and I don’t recall any of the specific cases) that he found he required 10^15 operations (requiring months on standard PCs). So, a “brain second” is 10^15 operations, and this huge number obviously poses a huge barrier to machine intelligence. Or something like that. I’ll have to watch the webcast when it is available, seemed like an interesting point.

Even while listening, I was confused concerning Koza’s argument vis-a-vis the hardness of machine intelligence. It seems (as Kurzweil later pointed out concerning his speech recognition software) that once a genetic program “learns” a desired behavior, it can be copied infinitely, so the operations required to get to a certain level of functioning are mostly irrelevant.

There was lots of good stuff in the discussion and Q&A sessions, but it’s mostly a blur to me. I’ll mention three things I remember:

Kurzweil said that he was using genetic programming to simulate stock traders (presumably using historical data?) Successful trader programs get to recombinate with other successful trader programs. He didn’t mention whether they were making real trades and if so, how successfully. I’m sure lots of people are doing similar research, given the potential payoffs.

A few people mentioned consciousness being a pattern that presumably could be mapped to any substrate. An example, given by either Kurzweil or Moravec, was that of a pattern in a river — the water molecules constantly change, but the pattern may remain for long periods of time. Moravec went even further, saying that perhaps conciousness is an interpretation of a pattern, so if you know what you’re looking for, you could perhaps find conscious patterns, say in rocks, to pick a cliche. Sure, this is run of the mill daydreaming for extropians, but somehow it’s pleasant to hear it in public.

In response to an audience question about spirituality, Joy said that he had read a book (of course!) by E.O. Wilson in which Wilson had hinted at explaining all beliefs, including spiritual beliefs, in physical terms. Joy said, roughly paraphrased, “the game’s changed, they [religious people] just haven’t been told yet.” See, he has some sense! Yeah, he wrote vi too.

After the event let out, I wondered around a bit and laid down under the pleasant sun in the deserted engineering quad. The cirrus clouds above were beautiful and the temperature perfect. The experience was giddy. I rededicated myself to experiencing the wonder of life, even as a mere human, and eagerly look forward to attaining ever giddier heights, perhaps with some technological assistance in the future.

Later I wondered around Palo Alto while waiting for the next Caltrain. I hadn’t been there in a few years. On a saturday night, it’s like fairyland. Healthy and obviously wealthy people literally spilling out of every immaculate restaurant. Someone went out of their way to pick up a pen I dropped in the bustle. Even the sole homeless man seemed to be doing pretty well. Reminded me of Santa Barbara, except that Stanford is where the ocean would be, and the workers aren’t mostly Mexican. Amazing what extraordinary wealth can do. Don’t imagine too many happy faces there today (NASDAQ selloff).