Did the survey. Thanks, Yvain.
Steven_Bukal
“Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.”—Larry Niven
“Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science!”—Agatha Heterodyne / Cinderella (explaining what Niven meant), Girl Genius
There is a small genre of sci-fi short stories in which humans turn out to be the scariest species in the galaxy due to our possession of apparently mundane abilities. For example:
Human muscles have the terrifying ability to become increasingly more massive and powerful when placed under a routine of extreme stress. Many humans systematically overload their muscles in this way. For fun.
Humans breathe oxygen, a component of starship fuel!
The brain of a human is protected by an armored skull so powerful that a human fighter is impervious to any simple attack to the brain and can even use its braincase as a weapon to bludgeon enemies.
Humans naturally produce dangerous hormones and stimulants such as epinephrine. In desperate situations these boost a human’s abilities, allowing it to continue functioning even when severely wounded.
My point is that using violence to silence intellectual adversaries is very different from using violence against a perceived wartime enemy.
Took the whole survey. My preferred political label of (Radical) Centrist survived all explicit radio buttons.
As near as I can tell I’m -want/+like/-approve on both wireheading and emperor-like superiority.
Except that based on videos and letters left behind, the hijackers considered Americans to be not just intellectual adversaries, but wartime ones. I believe the majority of the hijackers cited American military presence in the Middle East and military and economic support of Israel to that effect.
The accuracy has been doubled!
The concept is popular on 4chan’s /tg/ board where they’re called “humanity” stories or “humanity, fuck yeah” stories. Here’s one archive of such threads:
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?tags=humanity
The flaw I’d point out is that Clippy’s utility function is utility = number of paperclips in the world not utility = number of paperclips Clippy thinks are in the world.
Learning about the creation or destruction of paperclips does not actually increase or decrease the number of paperclips in the world.
But also note that while the past may be fixed, your knowledge of the past is probabilistic. I assume there is evidence you could encounter that would convince you that Putin ordering airstrikes in Syria didn’t actually happen.
Wow, you guys did an awesome job. Very funny to read through and the music is hilarious.
snicker Vampire Thomas Nagel knows what it’s like to be a bat
I took the survey. Thanks for putting this together.
they have a lot of advantages over the rest of the software world. They have a single product: one program that flies one spaceship. They understand their software intimately, and they get more familiar with it all the time. The group has one customer, a smart one. And money is not the critical constraint
Not that the methods here don’t have their place, but it seems to me that this is a point by point list of exactly why the methodology used by this team is not used generally.
The average software project may involve many different products and many different programmers, making it difficult for anyone involved to become intimately knowledgeable with the work or for standardized programming practices to be enforced everywhere. There are usually very tight deadline and budget constraints, and the clients may or may not know exactly what they want so specifications are usually impossible to nail down and getting quick user feedback becomes very important.
The software design classes at my university teach Agile software development methods. The main idea is breaking a project down into small iterations, each one implementing a subset of the complete specification. After each iteration, the software can be handed off to testers and clients/users for evaluation, allowing for requirements to change dynamically during the development process. Agile seems to be the exact opposite of what is advocated in this article (invest money and resources at the beginning of the project and have a concrete specification before you write a single line of code).
I am a recent graduate of the University of Toronto, where we’ve seen that talks on campus that are viewed as opposing or questioning feminism will have their advertisements torn down and mobs organized by the student union will show up to harass and physically block attendees and take other disruptive actions like pulling fire alarms. I expect this would generalize to suppression of other forms of un-PC speech and thinking.
That said, the administration at UofT seems to respond to these incidents more reasonably than the UCLA administration in the article (i.e. they didn’t thoughtlessly capitulate), and my experience from taking courses across science, social science, and humanities faculties is that the atmosphere in general is definitely not extreme to the level of fire alarm pulling. I would guess that the extreme elements are mostly local to a small number of particular academic subject areas like women’s studies, but that this minority has significant power to influence what is acceptable speech and thought.
Arrives late to the party
Really great story, iceman. Some comments:
*Running the story through a beta group of non-LW bronies would definitely be a good idea to catch which ideas may need more explanation.
*I really like how it’s repeatedly show that when you interact with a super-intelligence, even if it’s just free conversation, the state of mind you leave in is probably going to be the state of mind it wants you to leave in. As others have said, this could be driven home even stronger by showing CelestAI strongly tailoring her interaction to different humans. Maybe even have her directly contradict herself in the information she uses to persuade people to upload.
*Related to the above, I can imagine a non-LW reader getting to chapter 5 and forever after wondering why Lars or anyone else never tries to shut Celestia down. I’m not sure how obvious an intuition it is that by the time you notice a super-intelligence doing things that make you want to stop it, it’s probably already far too late to stop it. In this case I assumed Celestia would have made sure that she is already invincible by the standards of human technology before launching any plan that’s going to antagonize people, but an unsophisticated reader might not get that.
This may just be me, but I’d prefer a bit more closure on the cosmic scale story. What *is Celestia’s plan against running out of matter? Slow the clock speed of her servers over time? Bust open the physics textbooks and hope for a useful paradigm shift?
Anyway, very good stuff.
Extensive use of abbreviations and acronyms was primarily a convenience for writers, when writing was done by hand and then by typewriter, there is less justification for it now when most writing is done by computer.
I don’t agree. My impression is that the popularity of abbreviations and acronyms is being driven by the rise in popularity of text messaging, which is usually done from phones with tiny, unusable keyboards; instant messaging, which is done in real time; and social networking site based communication, which often has hard limits on message length (e.g. Twitter).
The phrasing I used there is indefensible, but the general idea I’m trying to get at is that many people acquire tons of things which in theory increase their power but in practise don’t because they are never on hand when needed. Added to this are the tons of things many people acquire whose uselessness goes unnoticed because of a general failure to criticize potential acquisitions for power increasing ability at all.
Aren’t comics like that the source of the cached thought we’re trying to improve on here?
Did the survey. Thank you once again, Yvain.