That’s on my list of things I didn’t expect to see today.
Miller
Karma: 422
I am going to take the unflattering guess that your expectations for yourself are generally unrealistic, and that you are unwilling to face this fact. This is not a conscious thing but an emotional and subconscious expectation trained into you during childhood (possibly). Quite simply, hard work and small incremental gains are beneath you. Failures on inconsequential steps are unacceptable. If only a simple solution were found, the key would turn, and an uber-awesome-individual emerge.
Many of the subjects addressed on this very website are grandiose in nature. By involving yourself, the signal is that you can participate in them: research topics from the deepest corners of academia, immortality, fate of humanity, superior general problem solving on all subjects, etc. We flock to them because we recognize they are important, and we flatter ourselves to recognize they are important, and yet our contributions to them are negligible. Sure we can admit we are horrible at decision theory or quantum mechanics or any specific item, but there must be something that can be found that will demonstrate the grand plan that features us as the hero. Even failing at quantum mechanics is better than the guy that thinks it’s a magazine that sits next to Motor Trend in the garage lobby, right?
This is narcissism spectrum stuff and very ego syntotic. It’s my new hammer and everything looks like nails, so I can easily be wrong. The (unconscious) decision is ultimately between living in a false fantasy of grandeur or living in a real world where you are one of many: striving for marginal gains, and doomed to grow old and die.
The guy that wrote this is mostly describing himself, is controversial, and is substantially more screwed up than almost anyone, but tell me if it rings any bells. He goes on elsewhere to differentiate cerebral from physical varieties of narcissism. It’s a word that kind of needs tabooing, but the underlying symptom is vehement subconscious guarding of a false fantasy persona. We aren’t secretly Harry Potter.
I notice that you don’t mention other people in any of your solutions (except #9 where you are causing an attention fueling ruckus). Why not?
I think you mean consumerism not capitalism. Putting some distance on those two seems wise to me.
Conflating simulationism with theism is only liable to lead to confusion.
This observation dissolves your post. If you agree with it then repent properly, o’ sinner.
This is not a simple problem to tackle. The coding example is essentially a human-implemented type system. I don’t generally prefer Joel’s solution because if you have isolated this as a frequent problem you might as well elevate your solution to it into the type system and get compiler support. But as you see with programming languages, and with the math example provided, people swap rigour for simplicity and speed. I don’t think we can trade one off for the other in any generalized fashion. That is, we see an error and we feel we’ve opted too much for simplicity. We see few errors and a lot of structure and we feel like we’ve overburdened ourselves. We kind of train ourselves on recent memory.
Interestingly it’s our basic satisficing around our poor memories that defines where we set our tradeoff. A good argument for AGI beating us is that it painlessly chooses more rigour.
Unfortunately my memory of this has faded. I know I had broken the charade by 6 or 7, but I can’t recall my thoughts about it at the time. I recall playing along with it for rather Pascal’s wager type reasons (more downside to risking the presents).
I take my poor memory of it as implying that it seemed less of a big deal to me. Same goes with the tooth fairy and Easter bunny. In comparison, unraveling the God story had a much longer and more significant timeline. Although the seeds of that were planted about the time of Santa’s destruction I can’t recall how the two are intertwined.
I would be surprised if the consensus here was that the story of Santa is a good parenting practice. We have a status quo bias potential here, so turn it around. If there was no such thing as Santa currently, would it be a good idea to invent him?
Or to further abstract it from reality, make up a whole bunch of stories. Would a child be better off with a pantheon of artificial creatures that want us to behave in certain ways? How about magical elves that make sure your schoolbus doesn’t crash if you brush your teeth every night, or crows that poop in your milk carton if you tell a lie to a teacher. Seems all bad to me. There’s enough challenge dealing with reality and our psychological bugs (like thinking that it’s quite plausible that a crow pooped in your milk because you are an unlucky or bad person).
I’d wager most people wonder wtf .org is all about and why it’s not a .com like all the others. But then again those people are not the ones that are gonna wind up at the site. So I find it most likely you two are just imagining two different sets of ‘most people’.
Kobayashi Maru!
C is almost certainly the correct answer. This image has been photoshopped or the ‘correct answer A’ references the next question, or some other similar mishap.
sample questions all point to C being the straightforward choice.
Or Ben Franklin, contemplating his vegetarianism:
But I had formerly been a great Lover of Fish, & when this came hot out of the Frying Pan, it smelt admirably well. I balanc’d some time between Principle & inclination: till I recollected, that when the Fish were opened, I saw smaller Fish taken out of their Stomachs:--Then, thought I, if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you. So I din’d upon Cod very heartily and continu’d to eat with other People, returning only now & then occasionally to a vegetable Diet. So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for every thing one has a mind to do
If your goal is to lower your credibility, why do that in the context of talking about credibility?
This sounds to me like a word game. It depends on what the initial intention for ‘pleasure’ is. If you say the device gives ‘maximal pleasure’ meaning to point to a cloud of good-stuffs and then you later use a more precise meaning for pleasure that is an incomplete model of the good-stuffs, you are then talking of different things.
The meaningful thought experiment for me is whether I would use a box that maximized pleasure\wanting\desire\happiness\whatever-is-going-on-at-the-best-moments-of-life while completely separating me as an actor or participant from the rest of the universe as I currently know it. In that sense of the experiment, you aren’t allowed to say ‘no’ because of how you might feel after the machine is turned on, because then the machine is by definition failing. The argument has to be made that the current pre-machine-you does not want to become the post-machine-you, even while the post-machine-you thinks the choice was obvious.
provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control
I must have been sleeping through all the other quotations of this. It’s the first time I noticed this was a part of the original text.
It was left off: http://singinst.org/summit/overview/whatisthesingularity/
It’s left off the wikipedia entry that references it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
And this other random high Google hit: http://www.committedsardine.com/blogpost.cfm?blogID=1771
I guess one upshot is that I pulled up the original article to verify (and no the comment about Vernor Vinge was not in the original). Scholarship!
Because the category titles are usually fairly complex puns, Watson is built to infer the theme of a category from the questions as it goes along. The humans would benefit from starting at the highest dollar and working towards the lowest dollar, so as to maximize their superior pun skills. I wonder if they’ll do that.
IBM also sets a threshold on certainty for Watson answering a question. The machine is perfectly capable of ‘howlers’, answers that are completely unrelated to the question. These would embarass it if that threshold is too low, and possibly frighten clients of the technology this evolves into. Put the threshold too high, and it might be too cautious to win. I’m sure the tech geeks are mostly interested in winning, but the PR department might be interested in playing with style.
you periodically take neuroimaging scans of your brain and save them to multiple backup locations (1010 bits is only about 1 gigabyte)
I think I understand but I’m lost as to why that 10^10 is showing up here. Wouldn’t it be whatever the scan happens to be rather than a reference to the compressed size of a human’s unique experiences? We might plausibly have a 10^18 scan that is detailed in the wrong ways (like it carries 1024 bits per voxel of color channel info :p).
eta: In case it’s not clear, I can’t actually help you answer the question of just how useful a scan is.
Because “signing” comments is not customary here, doing so signals a certain aloofness or distance from the community
No. I am very confident the intention was to signal that Luke was not being emotionally affected by the intense criticism for the purpose of appearing to be leader type material, which is substantially not aloofness from the community.
It’s not a convincing signal primarily because it’s idiosyncracy highlights it for analysis, but I still think the above holds.
I think driverless cars should be one of the most fantastic changes in the next 20 years. The benefits are just too many. My crazy prediction is that Zipcar will end up being a leader in deployment, making a transition akin to Netflix’s DVD to online one, the principle advantage being the possession of the right kind of customer relationship.
Nothing worse than a scratching you can’t make itch.
Imagine trying to trace the largest circle possible with the top of your head. I think.
Such a thing would disrupt your inner ear balance, and since your body knows it has to maintain the dextrous feat of not falling off the treadmill, this sends a variety of ‘falling off a cliff’ or ‘tripping on a stairwell’ surge of attention.
Pinker, The Blank Slate