Rape is rampant in India. WTF? It's possible that the media is distorting how prevalent it is due to a few of the high profile gang rape cases that have been reported, but still. You don't hear about gang rape of women here in the U.S.. Get your shit together, India.

Infrequently, but I did try to get out and walk 2-3 miles at least 3-4 times a week. I would go out at midnight and walk around if I needed to (no wonder the neighbors don't talk to me). There's a small park 2 miles from me, so walking to that and back was a nice break from reading, gave me time to stretch, and collect my thoughts. Depending on my workload, I sometimes made time for exercise, but other times I did not. So, I would call it irregular exercise.

We have a saying here, "grad school is 99% drudgery, 1% fun" and I think it's very true. This is an example of the drudgery

I will echo someone else's sentiment that reading on paper might actually help. I've now grown accustomed to reading everything in Mendeley, but for the first year and a half, I printed everything out (anyone want a 50lb box of Action and Perception readings?), and I think the physicality helped.

I am a PhD student, 4 years into a very difficult program (ecological/dynamical systems psychology... basically mathematical/physical psychology). My attention span has increased significantly from when I was an undergrad. Why? Discipline and hard work. I'm not implying you don't work hard. What I mean is that you need to re-train your brain, though. The first two years of my program involved courses where I has to read on average 500-800 pages per week (in addition to research and teaching obligations) in order to prepare for a weekly oral exam that was administered in front of my peers (it was very embarrassing to be unprepared for that!). This is what forced me to concentrate better. It wasn't fun, it sucked real bad, but I'm much. much better off for it.

Now, it does take me about an hour to get focused enough to do work, but once I get there, I'm good. So, my only suggestion is that you have to keep trying, keep reading, for many hours, even if you think you're not getting anything out of it, You are, it just takes time to see the results (kind of like working out). There might bet better way to go about this, this is just how it happened for me.

I get very anxious when I am presented with a bunch of menu items, and I feel social pressure to decide quickly because I am waiting in line. This causes me to stare blankly at menu items for many seconds at a time. I suspect that this would cause this thing to build the strangest pizzas for me, and probably not at all what I want. Good thing I don't eat at Pizza Hut anymore.

I probably won't but not for that reason... I am very suspicious of how most non-profits use their donations. It's well known, for instance, that the Red Cross is horribly mis-managed and probably wastes a shitton of the money that is donated to them. Many non-profits lack transparency, and so we have no way of knowing what happens to the money we donate to them. No thanks, there's better ways to spend my money.

Highjacker extension? I've not seen a single popup or bothersome thing from them about sharing it with others.... maybe they've changed that recently? It's one of the most unobstrusive extension I use.

Slow? Are you still using a modem, by chance?

I don't remember seeing any of that. Perhaps I did get that pop up the first time I used it, but apparently it didn't bother me as I don't even remember it. Wikiwand work great for me. When I switch back to the default Wikipedia interface, it makes me cringe. Apparently, they're still stuck in the 90s. I realize they are trying to keep the site accessible, even for people in 3rd-world countries with spotty internet connections, but still, the site is an eyesore... literally. Have they never heard of night view mode? I pretty much use Wikiwand for the night view mode, I'm not a fan of black text on white backgrounds,.

The British publication, The Economist is quite good, provided you agree with their generally liberal slant (liberal in the European sense). Of course, they're more focused on news of economic and political impact. They're certainly better than any U.S. news media I've ever read. I don't even read U.S. news anymore (tech news aside), it's a total waste of time.

What role did Slashdot play in building Wikipedia? Sounds like hyperbole, pretty typical for U.S. news media, I suppose.

Maybe Hawking's real concern is how strong AI will put scientists out of business, as in this wonderful short story from Nature Futures: http://www.nature.com/nphys/jo...

You're assuming that human actions are deterministic, though. At some scales, human behavior is more like a levy flight or random walk, though, both inherently unpredictable and indeterminstic. Yes, the AI could generate probability distributions indicating the most likely behaviors, but that is not nearly the same thing as understanding "you better than you understand yourself" (I do agree that humans tend to have poor personal insight).

I agree with your main point though, it's not the AI that is inherently dangerous, it's who uses it, and how, and why, that we need to be concerned about. I'm not sure how to get around that, many humans are inherently crummy people, or at least act like it, even more so those in positions of power and influence.

Why are people so attracted to doom scenarios involving technology? What if this supposed strong AI (I don't think we will ever develop that, but let's say we will for the sake of discussion) *gasp* HELPS HUMANITY? Why is that such an improbable scenario? Robert J. Sawyer explored this in his WWW trilogy (and I'm sure others before him have done so too), in which the WWW becomes sentient, but is taught to help humanity by a teenage girl (OK, that part is very improbable...a teenage girl who's thoughts don't revolve around her friends and relationships).

My point here is that, many people (except the transhumanists, I guess) are so quick to assume new technologies will be catastrophic, when most of the evidence on technological history suggests that, on the whole, new technologies will be massively helpful (the development of the computer and the internet, for instance).

I couldn't find anything about how non-coders can help out on OpenHatch. Am I missing something? It looks like they only want people who code: https://openhatch.org/search/

The OP implied that open source projects are looking for non-coders to do non-coding things, but I can't imagine what that would be, as 99% of OSS is the code, is it not? (Let's face it, Google searches of forums is a better way to find out how software works than documentation, which is often obtuse, patchy, or outdated). What use does OSS have for a psychology PhD student with skills in analytical thinking, statistics, and scientific computing (but no real coding experience)?

I'm with the other here who pointed out that, after spending 8-12 hours a day using a computer, I don't want to come home and sit down in front of a computer to work on a project for free, especially a project that might never make it. I want to chill out. Coding, for me, is the exact opposite of relaxing. I'd rather listen to music and close my eyes. That's relaxing.