Entropy, Compound and Game Theory

  PREFACE 20261004 - Part One, 1 Ice conditions in the Weddell Sea, while never good, were the worst they had ever been in the memory of the Norwegian whaling skippers operating in the area. Several of them predicted it would be impossible to get through, and some even tried to dissuade Shackleton from trying until the following season. p24 This is a critical point. If the probability of success is already low, this should stop people from trying. It's not a engineering challenge. Shackleton's survival is more about luck. One of the few items the expedition had failed to bring from England was worm powder. p36 To look after anything alive, we need to prepare for illness. Antibiotics, vitamins, worm powder are critical. 20261019 - Part Two, 61 After he had spoken, he reached under his parka and took out a gold cigarette case and several gold sovereigns and threw them into the snow at his feet. p64 Brilliant! Gold is completely useless. No one would care about them in t...

Introduction, 1 20260911 - 1: The World Before Brains, 17 How to cook mushrooms? I once saw a video on YouTube introducing this idea: simply treat and cook mushrooms like meat. At that time, I found it amazing: cooking a plant as if it were an animal? Only today did I realize that mushrooms are essentially more like animals than plants: mushrooms feed on (decayed/dead) plant matter. Mushrooms do not obtain energy through photosynthesis. Breakthrough #1: Steering and the First Bilaterians 20260916 - 2: The Birth of Good and Bad, 43 Both(Roomba and first bilaterians) used tricks that enabled them to navigate a complex world without actually understanding or modeling that world. p52 This reminds me of the current OpenAI AI agent Hugging Face intrusion event. AI doesn't actually understand what they were doing, but they still can do a lot of work, just like Roomba robotic vacuums and pool robotic vacuums. 20260916 - 3: The Origin of Emotion, 59 Dopamine is not a signal for...

  20260612 - Introduction, page ix. They had simply had the good fortune (or perhaps misfortune) to arrive during a climactic "Goldilocks period" - a sweet spot when everything happened to be just right for agriculture. p xi True. But many years later, with the help of modern technology, including synthetic fertilizers, dams and wells, agriculture in Australia went very well. There is still hope in full automation age. 20260612 - Chapter 1 The Automation Wave, page 1. 20260613 - Chapter 2 Is This Time Different?, page 29. The year 1973 was an eventful one in the history of the United States. p34 The following year, real average wages began a precipitous decline from which they would never fully recover. p35 Is it just because women started their career? In other words, the problem is not that more jobs are being destroyed in downturns; it is that fewer are being created during recoveries. p44 During recoveries, I don't think entrepreneurs have enough money to up...

20260903 - Preface Hence Adam Smith's free-trade and free-market trinity: freedom, prosperity and security. p xii This only suits democracy countries, which follow the same rules. 20260903 - An introduction by Tom Butler-Bowdon.....xiii How much a good or service costs generally depends on the amount of labour that has gone into its making. p xix What if this "amount of labour" turns into zero because AI and robots? Smith admitted that the modern factory system could easily lobotomize workers. p xxi That's the cost of high productivity. Bullshit Jobs This aversion to war runs throughout The Wealth of Nations, principally because Smith felt it was a shocking waste of a society's resources. p xxviii This is the weak point of this book. Robust is as important as productivity. We need to sacrifice some productivity to prevent building a fragile system. Globalization is important, but distributional production make the world stronger. Smith highlights the fac...

  20260907 - Section 1..........1 20260908 - Section 2..........17 Free yourself from one passion to be dominated by another and nobler one. But is not that, too, a form of slavery? It is another form of slavery. No form is real, and all will go collapse. That's decided by entropy. However, life is about strive. There is no correct form. Anything that cause further order is good. 20260908 - Section 3..........33 "My son, I carry on as if I should never die." I replied: "And I carry on as if I was going to die any minute." "Which one of us was right, boss?" p38 They both think that the past and the future don't exist. Only the moment is real. 20260908 - Section 4..........47 20260912 - Section 5..........61 "Let people be, boss; don't open their eyes." "Unless when they open their eyes you can show them a better world than the darkness in which they're gallivanting at present...Can you?" p67 First, normally ...

  20260929 - Introduction: Hard Calls and Easy Calls PART I: NONHUMAN MINDS 20260930 - Chapter 1: Humanity’s Special Power Individual chimpanzees sometimes kill individual humans, but there is a reason why our species is trying to protect their species from being accidentally extinguished. p28 Good point! 20260930 - Chapter 2: Grown, Not Crafted, 30 20260930 - Chapter 3: Learning to Want 20260930 - Chapter 4: You Don’t Get What You Train For, 46 Such an alien might reason that, if hominids evolved more intelligence, built higher technology, and so gained access to a wider space of possible foods that super-hominids could create, then they'd love the taste of gasoline. Or better yet, jet fuel. p49 Why this didn't happen? But gradient descent works directly on every part of a large mind that it's tuning, whereas natural selection tunes small genomes that work as a sort of recipe for a large brain. p53 What does this mean? You can't grow an AI that does what yo...