I’ve actually thought of this before. I bet that some intelligent Christian non-physicalists would be a good way of externally testing the validity of arguments about an intelligence explosion. They can think about the problem while not considering that there’s any possibility of it being correct, which reduces the chance that their emotions would get in the way. I’ll ask some theology buffs to think about it.
Solvent
Why not practise mental arithmetic, like 45 times 23. It’s not really rationality, but can’t hurt. It’s probably good for your brain somehow.
Or you could try doing fun pointless economics or physics calculations. If you’re a cashier at a supermarket, you could calculate how far the chemical potential energy in a can of soup or whatever would propel it into the air, and do the calculation for as many products as you can find. Or figure out what proportion of the money that comes through you would have had to have stolen and invested twenty years ago on order to get your current salary. Or something like that. I dunno.
(Note: Here in Australia, cashier might have a different meaning. I hope I didn’t offend you by implying you were a check out guy in a supermarket.)
Oooh, pick me!
I do the IB, finishing this November. It’s true that ToK is a complete waste of time in general. I didn’t learn anything from it. I spent pretty much the whole course thinking “Less Wrong has already thought of this problem, and solved it.”
I gave my speech on the morality of abortion, using such concepts as the least convenient possible world, Shut Up and Multiply, playing rationalist taboo, and so on. I got perfect marks, which indicates that even though ToK teaches you nothing, it can grade you usefully.
I’m actually talking to the ToK teacher about giving a seminar to the year 11 students some time. I feel that in an hour or a bit more, you could really usefully go through the fundamentals of rationality.
If you were to go talk to the ToK class, it would be useful to know something of the curriculum. The two basic concepts are Ways of Knowing and Areas of Knowledge. The ways of knowing are intuition, sense perception, reason, and language. You could talk about each of those easily, just quoting from Less Wrong canon. (I quoted LukeProg on intuition in my essay, as it happens.) Areas of knowledge are like english, human sciences, natural sciences, and art. In the IB you have to do one subject from each of the six subject areas, so the students are likely to be well rounded. Also, they’re smart kids on average, so you could talk at a fairly high level.
The IB courses try to integrate ToK into all the various other subjects, in the form of short in class discussions. For example, in Economics it points out that a deterioration of Terms of Trade isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and then questions the use of language in restricting knowledge from passing outside the educated. Or in Physics, we talk about the various theories that attempted to explain things and failed. So we kinda do that.
However, it’s only really taken as seriously as the students want it to be. In Economics, we never really talk about it, but it’s in the textbook. In Physics, we mention it briefly, and then maybe argue about it because we’re argumentative.
There should be a link to Nick Bostrom’s taxonomy of information risks somewhere in your article. It’s here.
That was amusingly written, but probably too harsh. You want people to like you, even if it’s only so they say nice things about you.
That’s very useful. I’ll print out a copy and put it on my wall.
For fiction: How could alien minds differ from human minds?
To save some time and clarify, this was option 3: an analysis that purports to say whether or not Friendly AI is “feasible”.
What websites do you use that are .net?
That was nicely written and fun to read. I might pick up that book.
A question: I found the odds ratio version of Bayes’s theorem far more intuitive. Throughout history, has the equation ever been given as an odds ratio?
Fascinating, and well written. I can’t imagine ever being able to do this myself, but perhaps you might have convinced me it’s possible.
Of course, with the current complete lack of poly people I know, it may not be much of a problem.
I just read this article about a similar prisoner’s dilemma competition here. Tit for tat won.
It’s possible that this was assumed knowledge that everyone has but me, but perhaps someone didn’t know.
...I would never have thought of that in a million years. That’s fascinating.
I would strongly recommend against the God Delusion. It’s an extremely frustrating book to read as a theist: you start swearing at the book before you get out of the prologue.
Incidentally, I think that Mere Christianity is a bit outdated. Its whole argument from metaethics has kinda died with the advent of evolutionary psychology. The Screwtape Letters is far superior.
Without evo psych, they’re flawed. With evo psych, they’re entirely destroyed.
there are all kinds of studies around saying that most of the things we’d expect to have an impact on the long-term outcomes of the children actually don’t
Can you please give examples of this? It sounds fascinating.
although the move subverts this
typo
I’m reminded of the concept of information cascades: With every new level of witchness discovered, the probability of the next one increases.
(insert standard creepy late post disclaimer...)
I’m 17, but have been reading LW for more than a year (and telling all my friends to do the same, of course.) I think that at least for the smart, nerdy, sciency type teenagers I hang out with, LW isn’t too scary to get into. I could certainly manage it.
It was a bit hard to get into, though. If I didn’t love Three Worlds Collide and philosophy so much, I probably wouldn’t have bothered. All the “initial reading” that LW provided at the time felt to me like the worst of Eliezer’s output: the Simple Truth, and so on. The first truly awesome post I saw on here was the one which introduced “Shut Up and Multiply” to my vocabulary.
And I think I might PM you about that good education, hoping you extend that offer more generally.