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I find his thoughts about the potential limits of humanity provocative and really clever. These three parts made great impression on me:

> And in fact, you could argue that the reason why we’ve generated computational devices is consciously or unconsciously, we’ve come to recognize that our endogenous, organic computing power is not up to the task and we have to recruit machines to represent culture, because we cannot. I think there’s good evidence for that.

> The atom bomb, for example, forced a crisis. We had an extraordinary power and we didn’t really have the moral probity or sophistication to deal with it. We still do not. And that’s not making a judgment about whether our actions were right or wrong; it’s just that I think thinking reasonably about how to deploy power on that scale is beyond us.

> Human beings are hardware that’s about 100,000 years old, but we run string theory, Lie algebra. We’re running 21st-century software! How is it possible that old, antiquated hardware can continue to run ever newer and more complex cultural software?

I think the point is that when the AI takes over the control of the world it does not have to be through a technological singularity, with Roko's Basilisk and all the drama. It could as well be through generations of people progressively yielding their free will to what he calls "apps". In this scenario, our choices, over the course of a century or so, become ultimately non-existent.

Yes, you are right, it is much simpler when you have just a single number to "optimize" across population. And the correlations are strong indeed. But if you want to explain more variance, you need to reach for better tools.

We are all well familiar with people's various simplified models of the world. They tend to itch hackers, because they work well enough to not be automatically rejected by their users, yet hackers know, and sometimes even have proofs, that the models are ultimately wrong. The same thing happens with IQ. We all know it is mostly bullshit, but the truth is that it does work as a rough predictor of performance. It does explain some of the variance, not all of it.

I do not want one-pixel gifs, because the only use of such techniques is exploiting the HTTP "referer" field.

Not likely, given that you are allowed to edit comments.

I'm from east Europe, so the problem could not concern me as it has been written, as nobody here really flashes their money around like a clown. But I remember the feeling of being excluded as a student not coming from a top notch high school. The majority of the other people had nice groups of friends from day zero. But guess what - I graduated with a really good diploma, easily landed a job at a major tech company, and most of these people are now my friends or colleagues.

What matters in the end is your results, and your results only.

Well, seems that you are right. I stand corrected.

To be precise, Alice quits programming because modern languages lack proper concurrency specification, and thus lack actual "Math" in this area. I can sympathize with that.

I started some basic calculations in Google to find out what do you mean. So I converted 6.5 TeV to about 1 microjoule, then typed '1.21 GW / 1 uJ' to find out the beam intensity in particles/second, and realized that the first link is the Wikipedia entry for 'DeLorean time machine'.

Exactly. You do not need to understand what does NP-hardness mean to be an excellent developer.

Understanding complexity, computability and modern logics is pretty satisfying, I'm personally in love the Godel's incompleteness theorem. But it is just one of many variables. There's plenty of things to improve on.