Just reading the title of this post, TVTropes came to mind, and there it was when I read it, which made me feel both good that I had made a successful prediction, and worried that it was probably me being biased by not remembering all the fleeting predictions that don’t come true.
Lapsed_Lurker
Karma: 329
I can’t help you there. Not enough detail has survived the years.
It has been more than a decade since then. All I have left are the less-reliable memories-of-memories of the dream. Having said that, I recall the dream being of text coloured like the MUD I was playing, but I am pretty sure that there was only the text. I don’t even recall anything that happened in the dream or if I previously did and have forgotten.
I very rarely recall any dreams, but I do remember one time, during a summer I spent playing a lot of MUD (Internet text-based game, primitive ancestor to World of Warcraft), that I had a dream in text.
Why would tools for which the failure-mode of the tool just wireheading itself was common be built?
Well, I realize that personal health is a personal choice in most cases.
You might want to rethink your wording on that one. Perhaps ‘personal health status is a consequence of previous choices in many cases’ or something. As written it sounds a bit overstated.
And yet, several high-status Less Wrongers continue to affirm utilitarianism with equal weight for each person in the social welfare function. I have criticized these beliefs in the past (as not, in any way, constraining experience), but have not received a satisfactory response.
I’m not sure how that answers my question, or follows from it. Can you clarify?
I am not sure what ‘accurate moral beliefs’ means. By analogy with ‘accurate scientific beliefs’, it seems as if Mr Danaher is saying there are true morals out there in reality, which I had not thought to be the case, so I am probably confused. Can anyone clarify my understanding with a brief explanation of what he means?
Not very sure. I’ve heard all sorts of assertions. I’m pretty sure that sugar and other carbs are a bad idea, since I’ve been diagnosed as diabetic. Also that too much animal fat and salt are bad—but thinking that things are bad doesn’t always stop me indulging :(
The UK government recommends five portions (handful-sized) of different fruit and vegetables per day, but I don’t even manage to do that, most days.
Sadly, the last time I got an appointment to talk about my diet, the nurse I had an appointment with turned out to be fatter than I am, and absolutely everything she said has slipped my memory, perhaps because I fail to believe the dieting advice of a fat nurse.
I think if I were given a few simple “doctor’s orders” about food, I might be able to follow them, but don’t think I can possibly hold dozens or hundreds of rules about food in my head—which is what all the stuff I recall reading consists of.
Not like that, at least not that I can generally detect—but I do agree that my communication skills could do with some improvement—which is odd, since I’ve had a ‘public-facing’ job for over 10 years and get a fair amount of practice talking to people and it seems that it hasn’t helped :(
The inability to adhere to a healthy diet in the face of food seems like the immediately worst one, since it seems liable to cause me to die early.
Presumably there are many others, but being blind spots, they’re hard to think of. No doubt I’ll go “Oh yes, that’s me too” to a lot of the other comments.
‘Overfitting’, yes? I think I may have learned about that from Nate Silver
Is the mean age for everyone who answered the age question similar to that of those who answered both the age and singularity questions?
I think I remember estimating a bit lower than that for the singularity—but I wouldn’t have estimated at all were it not for the question saying that not answering was going to be interpreted as believing it wouldn’t happen at all.
I declare your new species name is ‘Ugly Bags of Mostly-Water’. There you go, no more human deaths. I’m sure humanity would like that better than genocide, but the UBMW will then ask the equivalent question.
Fair enough, the AI could modify every human’s mind so none of them wish to replicate, but easier to terminate the lot of them and eliminate the risk entirely.
Any method that prevents any more children being created and quickly kills off all humans will satisfy that request.
The first-picked envelope is replaced, empty.
D’oh!. If I’d read the linked content first, I’d have understood the context that was being quoted there.
Why say “never fails to disappoint” if what you mean “is reliably excellent”?
You probably meant something more like ‘never fails to excite’ or some antonym of ‘disappoint’. Perhaps a good example of using too many layers of negation causing confusion.
If you mostly solve the ‘Ageing’ and ‘Unnecessary Unhappiness’ problems, the youthful, happy populous will probably give a lot more weight to ‘Things That Might Kill Everyone’
I don’t know about putting these things into proper categories, but I’m sure I’d be a lot more worried about the (more distant than a few decades) future if I had a stronger expectation of living to see it and I spent less time being depressed.