If you’d be so kind, could you clarify whether it is your (intellectual?) knowing or your emotional (feeling?) that is broader/more inclusive w.r.t. personhood? And am I correct to read this as saying you believe the former should trump the latter? Or is it just that the lack of agreement troubles you without your needing to “choose sides” between the two?
Roger Scott
Karma: 31
That’s not what I hear moridinamael saying. We all make mistakes constantly, and rarely are even aware of them, so focusing on the mistakes of others as a basis for assessing them as inferior is one more mistake to add to our personal collections.
“they just also sucked ass at reasoning”—did they claim to be trying to reason? There are plenty of forms of discussion other than reasoning, and it’s also possible you are a fan of only one of multiple flavors of reasoning and dismiss the practice of other forms.
Your recollections of spending time with your inlaws brings up an interesting asymmetry: you only talk about you adjusting to fit with their ways of being. If, apart from any intellectual disparity between you and them, you view them to be social or humanistic equals, should you expect them to have an equal obligation to fit with you as you have to fit with them? Put another way, what does it imply about your view of them socially or humanistically that you (apparently) do not have this symmetrical expectation?
“many people kind of construct a self-serving moral system that overweights the virtues they themselves possess”—or wish/believe themselves to possess.
“when i am around people i find intellectually unserious, i deny them personhood”—this seems like a great jumping off point for contemplating what “personhood” means, both in general and to you, specifically. In particular, if the partial derivative of someone’s personhood with respect their intellectual seriousness is so large does that mean you’re overweighting intellectual seriousness among all of the possible contributors to personhood? If so, is this because you genuinely value intellectual seriousness that much more than all those other factors, or is it just that you’re paying more attention to it and, perhaps, not making the effort to recognize and/or suitably value the other factors when (implicitly) evaluating their personhood?
How does one who, like all of us, has only lived in one narrow slice of time assess that the time they are living in is different, particularly “much more X” for any given X, than other times? My knee-jerk old person reaction to this is that everyone wants to think their time, their circumstance is special, significant, important, dire, whatever. As at least one other person has pointed out, those of us who lived through the 60s-80s lived with the every day fear of nuclear war—not something that might happen some day if a bunch of other uncertain things happened first, but something for which all necessary elements were already in place and a trial run had already been done in the form of the Cuban missile crisis.
Christians are an out group? Tell that to any non-Christian living in the American South.
Why would a rational person expend any effort to “defend” a belief? Shouldn’t all such effort be spent exposing one’s beliefs to potential refutation and weighing alternatives? Otoh, if we substitute the word “faith” for “belief” then we’ve got the answer to your question about rationality right there.
Would a Christian (or any other ) superintelligence also be able to remove heterosexual urges? If not, I don’t think there’s much hope for removing homosexual urges.
Why would the same sort of AIs that are doing all the bad things that people would be looking to shield themselves from be willing to genuinely help people shield themselves? In this doomsday scenario isn’t it more likely that these supposedly-shielding AIs would, in fact, be manipulating those expecting to be shielded for the AI’s own purposes? This seems very similar to fake apparent alignment.
Well, if you’re already ignoring history, science, and chronology why stop?
While you could give your internal AI wide indiscriminate access, it seems neither necessary nor wise to do so. It seems likely you could get at least 80% of the potential benefit via no more than 20% of the access breadth. I would want my AI to tell me when it thinks it could help me more with greater access so that I can decide whether the requested additional access is reasonable.
Could another factor impeding broad spectrum research be that the two big broad spectrum approaches in use today, chemotherapy and radiation, are both pretty brutal to the patient and many people believe they’ll be looked back on as barbaric in the future? That’s not to say that future broad spectrum treatments necessarily have to share these characteristics, but there’s sort of a “guilt by association” problem.
That still leaves the question of how the reader is to distinguish a sound (speech) from a description of sounds.
Run-on refers primarily to topic drift, not word count. You can have a fairly short run-on sentence where the end of the sentence is talking about something different than the beginning. Frequent use of “and” between clauses is a clue.
I don’t think children have any more difficulty learning to speak English than other languages. The difficulty comes in learning to spell in writing and, to a lesser extent, learning to pronounce written words when writing. Btw, there’s actually much more regularity in English spelling/pronunciation than may appear, and than is routinely taught. Much of the “weirdness” is the result of historical processes which are fairly regular in themselves, once you know the rules.
Given that the default, non-quotation text is not, in general, describing sounds in the environment, why do you think a reader would interpret unquoted text as environmental sounds rather than as simply more of the author’s description of goings on in the scene? I can see that presenting spoken words in some format that allows or encourages their interpretation as environmental might be artistically useful, I just don’t see that removing the quotation marks from otherwise-quoted dialog accomplishes that.
Does it seem likely that a trait that has survival significance (in a highly social animal such as a human) would be emergent? Even if it might have been initially, you’d think selective pressure would have brought forth a set of genes that have significant influence on it.
Yet, ironically(?), your emotions are telling you to rely more narrowly on your estimation of the person’s intellect? I think that’s what had me confused—I was assuming you were saying your intellect wanted you to focus on intellect while your emotions were urging you to include emotions, among possibly other factors. One would hope that the emotional drive to use narrower criteria would be short-lived in comparison to your more deeply rooted (?) intellectual position.