I don’t believe that that quite applies to my situation. I’m not predicting whether I’ll choose right now to break up with my girlfriend (99.999% certainty I won’t); I’m predicting whether at some point in the next year one of the future Ozymandiases, subtly different from me, will find zirself in a state in which zie wants to break up with zir girlfriend. I have already made up my mind to not break up; I’m predicting how likely I am to change my mind.
_ozymandias
Karma: 172
I hope that the cynicism I reject in my own self-examination of my membership in my own church of rational physics engineering leads me to reject cynicism when trying to understand other people’s churches. There ARE reasons people believe things and they are by no means all stupid reasons.
We’re definitely in agreement there. And even the ones that are stupid may be psychologically reassuring or otherwise “make sense” even if they are completely irrational. While signalling arguments are important, I think it’s unrealistic to consider them to the exclusion of other arguments.
I was thinking roughly Matrix 2 level backlash: a significant group of “ruined FOREVER” fans, but the movie does not become a byword for terribleness now and forever like Episode 1. Possibly this could be measured by the number of negative YMMV tropes on its TVTropes page?
Fan backlash is remarkably difficult to operationalize.
Sorry. I apparently suck at the Internet. :)
No death or rape threats. I have yet to come up with a theory about why (beyond “crazy random happenstance” and “I’m so nice no one wants to rape and murder me”); suggestions appreciated.
Thanks! LW actually helped me crystallize that a lot of the stuff social-justice-types talk about is not some special case of human evil, but the natural consequence of various cognitive biases (that, in this case, serves to disadvantage certain types of people).
Dammit, could someone clean the fanboy off the ceiling? The goop is getting in my hair. :)
It is true, I forgot to account for the effects of a GOP presidency on OWS. However, I still think there’s a high chance of a OWS fadeaway for a few reasons. One, the liberal hippies (generally the backbone of social justice movements) have started to nitpick OWS in earnest: this could be a sign either that OWS is getting more successful (and the crab in a bucket mentality is taking over) or that it’s losing their support, but given that the mainstream media seems to have decided OWS is yesterday’s news, I think it might be the latter. Second, as the economy splutters into recovery, OWS will get less support. Third, if OWS continues to get more popular, the government will likely make some token effort to address their concerns that will take away some of the momentum of the movement.
Nevertheless, you did mention an important factor I overlooked, so I’ll downgrade it to a roughly 60% probability.
To a certain degree, different brands of feminism could function as different parties (certainly in academic feminism they do). A Christina-Hoff-Sommers-esque conservative feminist is unlikely to agree much with a Dworkinite radical feminist. For instance, “rape is a subset of violence with no particularly gendered component” and “rape is the natural outgrowth of a culture in which women’s subordination to men is eroticized” are two substantially different positions (both of which I disagree with).*
Admittedly, the average person is not particularly clear on the distinct branches of feminism; hell, there is still a widespread belief that radical feminist means “a feminist who’s really extreme” as opposed to a distinct framework of theories and political beliefs. And even among the different groups of feminists there are usually some common premises (gender being at least partially a social construct, men being privileged over women, etc.).
That said, I too would like more variation in the gender politics space; some groups (most notably, men) are distinctly underserved by the current gender discourse, and more competition in the marketplace of ideas can only be a good thing. :)
*I am somewhat cheating here by picking an issue on which there is a lot of disagreement among different branches of feminism, as opposed to (say) the gender gap, in which the primary disagreement is between feminists who do and do not suck at math.
The difference in my reaction when reading this post before and after I found my something to protect is rather remarkable. Before, it was well-written and interesting, but fundamentally distinct from my experience—rather like listening to people talk about theoretical physics. Now, when I read it, my feeling of determination is literally physical. It’s quite odd.
Has anyone else had a similar experience?
I’m already polyamorous, so there is in fact a certainty of a polyamorous relationship situation at some point in 2012. :)
My girlfriend knows and is highly amused at my pessimism.
My logic is that I have never actually had a relationship that went much beyond the six-month mark, and while there are all kinds of factors that mean that this one is different and will stand the test of time, all of my other relationships also had all kinds of factors that meant this one is different and will stand the test of time.
The prediction is only 60%, however, since I might have actually gotten better at relationships since the last go-round. And because my girlfriend is really fucking awesome. :)
Romney will be the Republican presidential nominee: 80%.
Obama will win reelection: 90%.with a non-Romney presidential nominee, 50% against Romney
The Occupy Wall Street protests will fade away over the next year so much that I no longer hear much about them, even in my little liberal hippie news bubble: 75%
There will be massive fanboy backlash against The Hobbit: 80%. Despite this, the Hobbit will be a pretty good movie (above 75% on Rotten Tomatoes): 70%
John Carter will be a pretty good movie (above 75% on Rotten Tomatoes). 85% Whether or not it is a good movie, I will love it. 95%
I will get my first death or rape threat this year: 80% My reaction to the death or rape threat will be elation that I’ve finally made it in feminist blogging: 95% Even if it isn’t I will totally say it is in order to seem cooler: 99%
My comod and I will complete the NSWATM spinoff book this year: 75% It will be published as an ebook: 80% It will not make the transition to dead-tree-book this year: 90% It will make the transition to dead-tree-book eventually: 60%
I will break up with my girlfriend at some point over the next year: 60%.
I will acquire a new partner at some point over the next year: 90%.
Thank you for the link to the Chalmers article: it was quite interesting and I think I now have a much firmer grasp on why exactly there would be an intelligence explosion.
The second is that consciousness is not necessarily even related to the issue of AGI, the AGI certainly doesn’t need any code that tries to mimick human thought. As far as I can tell, all it really needs (and really this might be putting more constraints than are necessary) is code that allows it to adapt to general environments (transferability) that have nice computable approximations it can build by using the data it gets through it’s sensory modalities (these can be anything from something familiar, like a pair of cameras, or something less so like a geiger counter or some kind of direct feed from thousands of sources at once).
Also, a utility function that encodes certain input patterns with certain utilities, some [black box] statistical hierarchical feature extraction [/black box] so it can sort out useful/important features in its environment that it can exploit. Researchers in the areas of machine learning and reinforcement learning are working on all of this sort of stuff, it’s fairly mainstream.
I am not entirely sure I understood what was meant by those two paragraphs. Is a rough approximation of what you’re saying “an AI doesn’t need to be conscious, an AI needs code that will allow it to adapt to new environments and understand data coming in from its sensory modules, along with a utility function that will tell it what to do”?
Before I ask these questions, I’d like to say that my computer knowledge is limited to “if it’s not working, turn it off and turn it on again” and the math I intuitively grasp is at roughly a middle-school level, except for statistics, which I’m pretty talented at. So, uh… don’t assume I know anything, okay? :)
How do we know that an artificial intelligence is even possible? I understand that, in theory, assuming that consciousness is completely naturalistic (which seems reasonable), it should be possible to make a computer do the things neurons do to be conscious and thus be conscious. But neurons work differently than computers do: how do we know that it won’t take an unfeasibly high amount of computer-form computing power to do what brain-form computing power does?
I’ve seen some mentions of an AI “bootstrapping” itself up to super-intelligence. What does that mean, exactly? Something about altering its own source code, right? How does it know what bits to change to make itself more intelligent? (I get the feeling this is a tremendously stupid question, along the lines of “if people evolved from apes then why are there still apes?”)
Finally, why is SIAI the best place for artificial intelligence? What exactly is it doing differently than other places trying to develop AI? Certainly the emphasis on Friendliness is important, but is that the only unique thing they’re doing?
Very few people know what career they want when they’re seventeen. Of those people, a significant proportion end up either doing a different job or displeased by their choice.
This is what I did; it may or may not work for you. Go to a college with a wide variety of class choices and highlight everything in the course book that looks interesting and that you have the prereqs for. Narrow it down to four or five classes by eliminating courses that occur in the same time block as another course you’re more interested in, courses with dull or unintelligent teachers, or courses that come from disciplines you’ve already taken a lot of classes in. (Note: if you have general course requirements, take those courses.) That should give you some data to eliminate majors you’re absolutely not interested in; for the rest, assuming you have not gotten an all-consuming obsession with one particular field, look at the BLS statistics to see which one has the best overall job outcomes (income, hours worked, unemployment risk, etc) and major in that one.
General warnings: unlike most people here, I am not a STEM major; my experience applies strictly to the social sciences and the humanities. I also have not attempted to get a job in this economy, so take my advice with a grain of salt.
I think many people will assume that “literature thread” also means “book thread,” since “literature” is often used to mean “book, with connotations of being worthwhile/classic/making you a better person/whatever.”
Perhaps “media” would work? Although that almost presents the opposite problem...
It’s Mary Daly, Catholic theologian and radical feminist: http://www.enlightennext.org/magazine/j16/daly.asp?pf=1