“Rigor Mortis” is a book about the reproducibility crisis in science, and the various possible causes of the crisis. The book contains snippets of interviews with scientists in various fields that Harris has conducted. Many of the quotes from the interviews are illuminating.
The main focus in the book is on biomedicine. There is some reference to psychology. Biomedicine and psychology are the two areas of science where reproducibility studies have been conducted. In both biomedicine and psychology, high rates of non-reproducibility have been observed.
Harris documents many factors that contribute to the reproducibility crisis. …
The problem with superintelligence is that you can’t predict how it will behave. It might behave in a way that is detrimental to humanity. One approach to this problem is to try to code benevolence into the operating system of the AI. There is a project in Berkeley led by MIRI to try to create benevolent AI. There is some risk in relying on this strategy. When you picture AIs that are ultimately millions of times more intelligent than humans, there is risk in assuming that the simple ethical principles that we can come up with would work in a superintelligent being. …
Academia’s mission is to get every academic paper ever written on the internet, available for free, and to develop a more rigorous and efficient peer review system. Free access to academic research makes the world a more equitable place, and rigorous and efficient peer review accelerates the pace of scientific and scholarly research.
Academia launched in 2008, and now around 35 million people use the site a month. Around 19 million papers have been uploaded, and are freely available on the platform. Forty percent of Academia’s users are from developing countries and would otherwise have limited access to academic research.
In order to achieve Academia’s goals, Academia is working to become a sustainable operation. …
