chickens flourish
Not many vegetarians would agree. Is farm chicken life is worth living? Does the large number of farm chickens really have net positive effect on animal wellbeing?
Animals that aren’t useful
What about the recreational value of wild animals?
Scott Aaronson has formulated it in a similar way (quoted from here):
whenever it’s been possible to make definite progress on ancient philosophical problems, such progress has almost always involved a [kind of] “bait-and-switch.” In other words: one replaces an unanswerable philosophical riddle Q by a “merely” scientific or mathematical question Q′, which captures part of what people have wanted to know when they’ve asked Q. Then, with luck, one solves Q′.
Of course, even if Q′ is solved, centuries later philosophers might still be debating the exact relation between Q and Q′! And further exploration might lead to other scientific or mathematical questions — Q′′, Q′′′, and so on — which capture aspects of Q that Q′ left untouched. But from my perspective, this process of “breaking off” answerable parts of unanswerable riddles, then trying to answer those parts, is the closest thing to philosophical progress that there is.
…A good replacement question Q′ should satisfy two properties: (a) Q′ should capture some aspect of the original question Q — so that an answer to Q′ would be hard to ignore in any subsequent discussion of Q, [and] (b) Q′ should be precise enough that one can see what it would mean to make progress on Q′: what experiments one would need to do, what theorems one would need to prove, etc.
As for your options, have you considered the possibility that 99% of people have never formulated a coherent philosophical view on the theory of truth?
Is there some reason to think that physiognomy really works? Reverse causation is probably the main reason, e.g. tall people are more likely to be seen as leaders by others, so they are more likely to become leaders. Nevertheless, is there something beyond that?
The answer to the specific question about technetium is “it’s complicated, and we may not know yet”, according to physics Stack Exchange.
For the general question “why are some elements/isotopes less or more stable”—generally an isotope is more stable if it has a balanced number of protons and neutrons .
Your article feels too abstract to really engage the reader. I would start with a surprise element (ok, you do this to some extent); have at least one practical anecdote; include concrete and practical conclusions (what life lessons follow from what the reader has learned?).
Worse, I feel that your article might in fact lead to several misconceptions about dual process theory. (At least some of the stuff does not match with my own beliefs. Should I update?)
First, you make a link between System 1 and emotions. But System 1 is still a cognitive system. It’s heavily informed by emotions, but does not correspond to emotions. Also, there has never been doubt that human thinking tends to be seriously emotionally biased. The surprising contribution of Kahneman was exactly to show that many (most?) judgment errors come from cognitive biases.
Also, your article makes it sound that System 1 is the one responsible for producing bias (“the autopilot system is prone to make errors”), while in fact System 2 is equally susceptible to biased thinking. (Biases are just heuristics, after all—there is nothing inherently irrational about them.)
Second, Kahneman himself stresses that the dual system theory is merely a useful fiction. So I would be wary of including the neuroscientific stuff. These conclusions are order of magnitude less solid than the dual system theory itself. Anyway, why is the localization of the systems in the brain, or the evolutionary recentness of prefrontal cortex even relevant to this article? Don’t try to prop up the credibility of your account by including random scientific facts. You’ll lose in the long term.
(Caveat—I’m not a LW regular, so most of my knowledge about dual process theory comes directly from Kahneman’s book.)
I meant that as a comment to this:
the information less useful than what you’d get by just asking a few questions.
It’s easy to lie when answering to questions about your personality on e.g. a dating site. It’s harder, more expensive, and sometimes impossible to lie via signaling, such as via appearance. So, even though information obtained by asking questions is likely to be much richer than information obtained from appearances, it is also less likely to be truthful.
If UGC is true, then one should doubt recursive self-improvement will happen in general
This is interesting, can you expand on this? I feel there clearly are some arguments in complexity theory against AI as an existential risk, and that these arguments would deserve more attention.
To sidetrack a bit, as I’ve argued in a comment, if it turns out that many important problems are practically unsolvable in realistic timescales, any superintelligence would be unlikely to get strategic advantage. The support for this idea is much more concrete than the speculations in the OP of this thread; for example, there are many problems in economics that we don’t know how to solve efficiently despite investing a lot of effort.
What are some good examples of rationality as “systematized winning”? E.g. a personal example of someone who practices rationality systematically for a long time, and there are good reasons to think doing that has substantially improved their life.
It’s easy to name a lot of famous examples where irrationally has caused harm. I’m looking for the opposite. Ideally, some stories that could interest intelligent, but practically minded people who have no previous exposure to the LW memeplex.
Perhaps one could say that an agent in the sense that matters for this discussion is something with a personal identity, a notion of self (in a very loose sense).
Intuitively, it seems that tool AIs are safer because they are much more transparent. When I run a modern general purpose constraint-solver tool, I’m pretty sure that no AI agent will emerge during the search process. When I pause the tool somewhere in the middle of the search and examine its state, I can predict exactly what the next steps are going to be—even though I can hardly predict the ultimate result of the search!
In contrast, the actions of an agent are influenced by its long-term state (it’s “personality”), so its algorithm is not straightforward to predict.
I feel that the only search processes capable of internally generating agents (the thing Bostrom is worried about) are the ones insufficiently transparent (e.g. ones using neural nets).
It would be interesting to see more examples of modern-day non-superintelligent domain-specific analogues of genies, sovereigns and oracles, and to look at their risks and failure modes. Admittedly, this is only an inductive evidence that does not take into account the qualitative leap between them and superintelligence, but it may be better than nothing. Here are some quick ideas (do you agree with the classification?):
Oracles—pocket calculators (Bostrom’s example); Google search engine; decision support systems.
Genies—industrial robots; GPS driving assistants.
Sovereigns—automated trading systems; self-driving cars.
The failures of automated trading systems are well-known and have cost hundreds of millions of dollars. On the other hand, the failures of human bankers who used ill-suited mathematical models for financial risk estimation are also well-known (the recent global crisis), and may have host hundreds of billions of dollars.
You’re right that it probably doesn’t exist.
You’re wrong that no one cares about it. Humans have a long history of caring about things that do not exist. I’m afraid that hypercomputation is one of those concepts that open the floodgates to bad philosophy.
My primary point is the confusion about randomness, though. Randomness doesn’t seem to be magical, unlike other forms of uncomputability.
I think universalism is an obvious Schelling point. Not just moral philosophers find it appealing, ordinary people do it too (at least when thinking about it in an abstract sense). Consider Rawls’ “veil of ignorance”.
Are there any moral implications of accepting the Many Worlds interpretation, and if so what could they be?
For example, if the divergent copies of people (including myself) in other branches of Multiverse should be given non-insignificant moral status, then it’s one more argument against the Epicurean principle that “as long as we exist, death is not here”. My many-worlds self can die partially—that is, just in some of the worlds. So I should to reduce the number of worlds in which I’m dead. On the other hand, does it really change anything compared to “I should reduce the probability that I’m dead in this world”?
There is a semi-official EA position on immigration
Could you describe what this position is? (or give a link) Thanks!
Taxing the upper middle class is a generally good idea; they are the ones most capable and willing to pay taxes. Many European countries apply progressive tax rates. Calling it a millionanaire tax is a misnomer, or course, but otherwise I would support that (I’m from Latvia FYI)
Michael O. Church is certainly an interesting writer, but you should take into account that he basically is a programmer with no academic qualifications. Most of his posts appear to be wild generalizations of experiences personally familiar to him. (Not exclusively his own experiences, of course.) I suspect that he suffers heavily from the narrative fallacy.
Even humans are capable of producing content (e.g. program code) where the real meaning is obfuscated. For some entertainment, try to look at this Python script in Stack Exchange Programming puzzles, and try to guess what it really does. (The answer is here.)