Non-cognitivism strictly speaking doesn’t imply the orthogonality thesis. For instance, one could consistently hold that increased intelligence leads to a convergence of the relevant non-cognitive attitudes. Admittedly, such a position appears implausible, which might explain the fact (if it is a fact) that non-cognitivists are more prone to accept the orthogonality thesis.
vallinder
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I don’t think Sweden is significantly more transhumanist than several other western European countries. The fact that two influential transhumanists (Bostrom and Sandberg) are Swedish could be due to chance. Once they became known, they may have attracted a disproportionate number of Swedes to adopt similar views, but that number is still trivial compared to the population as a whole. In fact, it could be that the general egalitarian sentiment makes Swedes less likely to accept certain transhumanist positions (even though that sentiment is arguably weaker today than it was a few decades ago).
You can prove everything from a contradiction, but you can’t prove everything from a false premise. I take it that you mean that we can derive a contradiction from the assumption of moral realism. That may be true (although I’d hesitate to call either moral realism or free will logically impossible), but I doubt many arguments from moral realism to other claims (e.g. the denial of the orthogonality thesis) rely on the derivation of a contradiction as an intermediate step.
If moral realism is simply the view that some positive moral claims are true, without further metaphysical or conceptual commitments, then I can’t see how it could be at odds with the orthogonality thesis. In itself, that view doesn’t entail anything about the relation between intelligence levels and goals.
On the other hand, the conjunction of moral realism, motivational judgment internalism (i.e. the view that moral judgments necessarily motivate), and the assumption that a sufficiently intelligent agent would grasp at least some moral truths is at odds with the orthogonality thesis. Other combinations of views may yield similar results.
I’m not familiar with his writings on the foundations of quantum mechanics, but in addition to his work on causality, the three volumes on measurement he co-authored have also been hugely influential. His intellectual autobiography (pdf) might be worth a look.
Well, I hope you’re in Oxford soon again, João! :)
Patrick Suppes to the left?
Some might find it more convenient to set this up as a Google Form.
Just came across the book Behavior Modification in Applied Settings, which I don’t think has been mentioned on Less Wrong previously. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but it looks like it could be useful for those of us interested in boosting productivity and personal effectiveness.
See my reply to diegocaleiro.
Not sure whether I do think otherwise. But if Luke had written “smarter-than-human machine intelligence” instead, I probably wouldn’t have reacted. In comparison, “machine superintelligence singleton” is much more specific, indicating both (i) that the machine intelligence will be vastly smarter than us, and (ii) that multipolar outcomes are very unlikely. Though perhaps there are very convincing arguments for both of these claims.
a machine superintelligence singleton is largely inevitable
So do you think that while we can’t be very confident about when AI will be created, we can still be quite confident that it will be created?
Here.
There’s a Swedish word for this, “problemformuleringsprivilegiet,” which roughly translates as “the privilege to formulate the problem.”
Indeed, my point was rather that if Scanian is included, so should ten or so other accents as well.
Being from southern Sweden myself, I was also quite amused to see that Scanian – which is really just an accent – is marked as a separate language.
Here.
A few points:
This year, spring has been much colder in most European countries than it typically is.
FHI folks are not very representative: the fact that many of them spend late nights and weekends at the office isn’t particularly strong evidence that other folks in the UK and in countries with a similar climate do the same.
Indeed, even this quote is way below 140 characters :-)
By the way, you’re off by a year: the February 2013 thread is here.
I don’t think it’s fair to say that “nobody understood induction in any kind of rigorous way until about 1968.” The linked paper argues that Solomonoff prediction does not justify Occam’s razor, but rather that it gives us a specific inductive assumption. And such inductive assumptions had previously been rigorously studied by Carnap among others.
But even if we grant that assumption, I don’t see why we should find it surprising that science made progress without having a rigorous understanding of induction. In general, successfully engaging in some activity doesn’t require having a rigorous understanding of that activity, and making inductive inferences is something that comes very natural to human beings.
Moreover, it seems that algorithmic information theory has (at best) had extremely limited impact on actual scientific practice in the decades since the field was born. So even if it does constitute the first rigorous understanding of induction, the lesson seems to be that scientific progress does not require such an understanding.