This matches my experience. When I don’t want to engage in conversation and someone asks “How are you?”, I always politely counter with “Fine, thanks” and just carry on whatever I am doing. I assume the same applies for other people.
Calvin
Karma: 79
One possible explanation, why we as humans might be incapable of creating Strong AI without outside help:
Constructing Human Level AI requires sufficiently advanced tools.
Constructing sufficiently advanced tools requires sufficiently advanced understanding.
Human brain has “hardware limitations” that prevent it from achieving sufficiently advanced understanding.
Computers are free of such limitations, but if we want program them to be used as sufficiently advanced tools we still need the understanding in the first place.
I think that for many people, getting fit (even if they arrived at fitness with incorrect justification) is far more important than spending time analyzing the theoretical underpinnings of fitness. Same thing with going to haven, choosing right cryo-preservation technique, learning to cook or any realm of human activity where we don’t learn theory
FOR THE SAKE OF BEING RIGHT, but we learn itFOR THE SAKE OF ACHIEVING X GOALS.I mean, I concur that having vastly incorrect map can result in problems (injuries during workout, ineffecting training routine, ending up in hell) but after you update a map a bit you hit the point of dimnishing returns, and it is probably better to focus on practical part than to theorize (especially in the realm of physical pursuits).
Assuming your partner is not closely associated with LW or rationalist-transhumanist movement, you might be better of looking for advice elswhere. Just saying.
It can get even better, assuming you put your moral reasoning aside.
What you could do, is to deliberately defect and then publicly announce to everyone that it was a result of random chance.
If you are concerned about lying to others, then I concur, that accdientally choosing to defect is best of both worlds.
I also liked “Smarter Than Us”, it sounds a lot like an popular science book from airport store.
I don’t like other titles as they seem to rely on a fearmongering too much.
I am not sure I follow.
If you predict that majority of ‘rational’ people (say more than 50%) would pre-commit to cooperation, then you had a great opportunity to shaft them by defecting and running with their money.
Personally, I decided to defect as to ensure that other people who also defected won’t take advantage of me.
The problem I see with your reasoning lies in the term “potentially save”.
Personally I think it is better to focus our efforts on actions that bring >1% chance to increase the quality of life and average lifespans of a huge populations (say fighting diseases and famine) rather than on something that has a 0.0005% percent chance of possibly preserving your mind and body so that there is a 0.0005% chance that you achieve immortality or elongate your lifespan when future generations decide to “thaw” you (or even give you new awesome body if you are lucky enough).
As for judgements, I hope they wouldn’t really mind just like no one of our contemporaries condemns ancient egyptians for not balsaming more corpses or medieval philosophers for not seeking philosophers stone with enough effort.
I can’t really offer anything more than a personal anecdotes, but here is what I usually do for when I try to grab attention of a group of my peers:
If you are talking to several people gathered in circle, and it is my turn to say something important, I make a small step forward so that I physically place myself in the center of the group.
When I am speaking, I try to mantain eye contact with all people gathered around, If I focus too much only on the person I am speaking to, everyone else turns their attention towards them as well.
I rarely do it myself, as I suppose it is a technique more tailored for public speeches, but conservative use of hand gestures to signify what you are talking about, probably won’t hurt.
I probably sound like a self absorbed jerk writing this, but if I want the attention to focus on myself, and not my interlocutor I often use “me” language. Compare and contrast [“What you say about vegans is true, but you may conisder...”—now everybody looks at the person who said something about vegans] [“I think that I agree with what was said about vegans, but I also think...”—now everybody looks at me as I explain my position].
But those are all just little little tricks, when the surest way of attracting attention of the audience is simply to have something important and interesting to say.