“They stopped to piss off a bridge.”
That there is anthropomorphism. Bridges don’t get mad.
“They stopped to piss off a bridge.”
That there is anthropomorphism. Bridges don’t get mad.
Okay, so here’s a dryad. You cut her open, and see white stuff. You take a sample, put it under a microscope, and still see white stuff. You use a scanning tunneling microscope, and still see white stuff. You build an AI and tell it to analyze the sample. The AI converts galaxies into computronium and microscopium, conducts every experiment it can think of, and after a trillion years reports: “The dryad is made of white stuff, and that’s all I know. Screw this runaround, what’s for dinner?”
But using an outside view of sorts (observed behavior), you can still predict what the dryad will do next. Just like with quarks and with Occam’s razor and with prime numbers. And things you haven’t reduced yet, but think you can, like people or the LHC.
So, what would you call this dryad?
In one class in high school, we were supposed to make our classmates guess a word using hand gestures. I drew letters in the air.
“That’s not in the spirit of this blog. Status is the enemy, only facts are important.”
See? Another smart man agrees with Eliezer. That’s what I’m talking about.
“You have to use ex ante probabilities”
This reminded me of something. Why is the outcome of a crime used to sentence criminals, rather than the likeliest outcome? A cop died while driving to a robbery (IIRC), the robber was charged with murder. Does anyone else find that stupid?
In another instance, two kids had a fight, one fainted. The assailant would be chared with assault if the victim survived, or murder otherwise. So whether he committED murder depended on future events.
I bet this has a name. Doctrine of hindsightus perfectus or something. Anyone know?
I know it’s not entirely on topic, but biblical physics seems like a more important test of the Bible’s truth than God’s morality. If God does not follow the arbitrary laws of human society, what does that prove? Nor does the Bible wrongly saying that God is merciful mean much—what would you do if you were God and had to write a book? But if the Bible accurately states the age of the Universe, that’s something. In the end, the only important issue is whether you’re going to hell or heaven.
I actually think it’s rather irrational for someone to think that God’s cruelty is an argument against His existence, and this seems a common opinion among atheists. I mean, I believe in Stalin, who also claimed to be a milkmaid’s best friend while executing anyone who looked at him funny.
I think that people are born selfish. This is based on the fact that, if I grew up in an environment that didn’t compel me to be either selfish or selfless, I’d probably be selfish. Babies are selfish. I value those creatures that I was convinced to value. Slave owners taught their children that it’s okay to beat slaves, and the children were happy to comply. Now most people disregard the pain of food animals because they can get away with it.
Of course, some of my actions are genuinely altruistic. I chose to give up meat, although this brings me little tangible benefit. (It does get me out of some accusations of hypocricy.) One reason why I let myself become like this is that in human society, being nice is a habit that keeps my ass from getting kicked. And it needs to be a habit, because I’m not smart enough to delude everybody that I care, when I actually see them all as obstacles.
If I somehow become so powerful that I no longer depend on anyone, and noting they do can harm me, I will probably quickly become corrupted by my power.
But I agree that now, I can’t be considered purely selfish.
“So, it seems that Eliezer’s working definition of an intelligent person is “someone who agrees with me”.”
My definition of an intelligent person is slowly becoming “someone who agrees with Eliezer”, so that’s all right. Plus, the guy showed ability to revise a strongly held belief.
Well, the farmer’s wife seems to be one character who was thankful...
...and fared the worst.
But is this really cultural gloominess? Maybe this one is just reserved for when you’re in a really bad mood. What are the other stories in that book like?
“I’m especially surprised that anyone would suggest that the genocide was okay”
Okay, I’m afraid I have to accuse you of attacking a strawman. rukidding said that there was no genocide.
Oh please. Sure, diseases played a role. But they weren’t the only factor.
Anyway, National Turkey Genocide Day. That’s for sure.
1) Who the hell is Master of Fandom? A guy who maintains the climate control system, or the crew’s pet Gundam nerd?
2) Do you really think the aliens’ deal is so horrifying? Or are you just overdramatizing?
I think there is a real something for which free will seems like a good word. No, it’s not the one true free will, but it’s a useful concept. It carves reality at its joints.
Basically, I started thinking about a criminal, say, a thief. He’s on trial for stealing a dimond. The prosecutor thinks that he did it of his own free will, and thus should be punished. The defender thinks that he’s a pathological cleptomaniac and can’t help it. But as most know, people punish crimes mostly to keep them from happening again. So the real debate is whether imprisoning the thief will discourage him.
I realized that when people think of the free will of others, they don’t ask whether this person could act differently if he wanted. That’s a Wrong Question. The real question is, “Could he act differently if I wanted it? Can he be convinced to do something else, with reason, or threats, or incentives?”
From your own point of view that stands between you and being able to rationally respond to new knowledge makes you less free. This includes shackles, threats, bias, or stupidity. Wealth, health, knowledge make you more free. So for yourself, you can determine how much free will you have by looking at your will and seeing how free it is. Can you, as Eliezer put it, “win”?
I define free will by combining these two definitions. A cleptomaniac is a prisoner of his own body. A man who can be scared into not stealing is free to a degree. A man who can swiftly and perfetly adapt to any situation, whether it prohibits stealing, requires it, or allows it, is almost free. A man becomes truly free when he retains the former abilities, and is allowed to steal, AND has the power to change the situation any way he wants.
Quantum magic isn’t free will, it’s magic.
I guess I’ll use this thread to post a quote from “The tale of Hodja Nasreddin” by Leonid Solovyov, translated by me. I think it fits very well with the recent sequence on diligence.
“He knew well that fate and chance never come to the aid of those who replace action with pleas and laments. He who walks conquers the road. Let his legs grow tired and weak on the way—he must crawl on his hands and knees, and then surely, he will see in the night a distant light of hot campfires, and upon approaching, will see a merchants’ caravan; and this caravan will surely happen to be going the right way, and there will be a free camel, upon which the traveler will reach his destination. Meanwhile, he who sits on the road and wallows in despair—no matter how much he cries and complains—will evoke no compassion in the soulless rocks. He will die in the desert, his corpse will become meat for foul hyenas, his bones will be buried in hot sand. How many people died prematurely, and only because they didn’t love life strongly enough! Hodja Nasreddin considered such a death humiliating.
“No”—said he to himself and, gritting his teeth, repeated wrathfully: “No! I won’t die today! I don’t want to die!”″
About the book: it uses the name Hodja Nasreddin, but has little to do with him. The Nasreddin that Muslims know was a mullah. This one is a rabble-rousing vagabond who enters harems, makes life hard for corrupt officials, and has been successfully executed in every city in the Arabic world. I think that Solovjov took a Muslim hero and created a Communist hero. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that the book is a masterpiece.
Am I the first to laugh at Eliezer’s scenario?
It’s very simple: Mary was much more likely to be a liar than a virgin mother. This is true even if you assume that there are virgin mothers who are their own granny.
And the point is even simpler: don’t ignore the outlandishness of a claim just because everyone believes it.
(But I would also not advise you to judge a claim according to an unbeliever’s caricature. Make sure it’s not a strawman.)
“Tibba, when you are in a bar, do you see an attractive person and say to yourself, “I think I’ll initiate sexualized body language, so that I can mate with that person, thereby increasing the frequency of my genes in future generations”?”
Of course not. I want to get laid. That’s my explicit desire. Promoting my genes is just a side effect of this. And what is the explicit desire of a principal? Perhaps to teach children. Perhaps to go to work, get paid and ensure that nobody sues him. (He’d still like it if they all go to Harvard.) But “sorting students by abilities” is so off the wall, I don’t know how to iterpret it. Colleges and employers might see it that way, but is their opinion THAT important?
I’m getting the feeling that Eliezer is starting to get overly eager to attack semantic stopsigns. I recommend magic oil in the evening and emergent phenomena in the morning.
My impression of “emergence” was that it’s closely related to pattern recognition. You have atoms A, B..ZZZZZZZZZZ, and you recognize that these atoms form a certain pattern. So you say that a supercluster of galaxies/bar stool/intelligence “emerges” from a bunch of atoms.
I once had a prolonged debate with an anticognitivist. He, as usual, argued that no matter what kind of AI you build, if you take it apart, it’s just “switches flipping”. In that debate, I maintained that intelligence does not require anything else—it emerges from switches flipping the same way that Firefox emerges from switches flipping. Both are just human names for patterns that arise in a sea of subatomic particles.
[That was one frustrating debate… Both of us were equally bewildered that the other refuses to get it.]
Just great. I wrote four paragraphs about my wonderful safe AI. And then I saw Tim Tyler’s post, and realized that, in fact, a safe AI would be dangerous because it’s safe… If there is technology to build AI, the thing to do is to build one and hand the world to it, so somebody meaner or dumber than you can’t do it.
That’s actually a scary thought. It turns out you have to rush just when it’s more important than ever to think twice.
“everything that isn’t a duck”
Muggles?
“The accessory optic system: The AOS, extensively studied in the rabbit, arises from a special class of ganglion cells, the cells of Dogiel, that are directionally selective and respond best to slow rates of movement. They project to the terminal nuclei which in turn project to the dorsal cap of Kooy of the inferior olive. The climbing fibers from the olive project to the flocculo-nodular lobe of the cerebellum from where the brain stem occulomotor centers are reached through the vestibular nuclei.” —MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, “Visual Anatomy and Physiology”
Beautiful. I will use this on the prettiest girl I meet tomorrow, and if she doesn’t fall for me right away, she’s a deaf lesbian.
I suggest this post for the “start here” list. It’s unusually close to perfection.