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derekz comments on Intelligence enhancement as existential risk mitigation - Less Wrong
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I suppose the question is not whether it would be good, but rather how. Some quick brainstorming:
I think people are "smarter" now then they were, say, pre-scientific-method. So there may be more trainable ways-of-thinking that we can learn (for example, "best practices" for qualitative Bayesianism)
Software programs for individuals. Oh, maybe when you come across something you think is important while browsing the web you could highlight it and these things would be presented to you occasionally sort of like a "drill" to make sure you don't forget it, or prime association formation at a later time. Or some kind of software aid to "stack unwinding" so you don't go to sleep with 46 tabs open in your web browser. Or some short-term memory aid that works better than scratch paper. Or just biting the bullet and learning Mathematica to an expert level instead of complaining about its UI. Or taking a cutting-edge knowledge representation framework like Novamente's PLN and trying to enter stuff into it as an "active" note-taking system.
Collaboration tools -- shared versions of the above ideas, or n-way telephone conversations, or freeform "chatroom"-style whiteboards or iteratively-refined debate thesis statements, or lesswrong.com
Man-machine hybrids. Like having people act as the utility function or search-order-control of an automated search process.
Of course, neural prostheses may become possible at some point fairly soon. Specially-tailored virtual environments to aid in visualization (like of nanofactories), or other detailed and accurate scientific simulations allowing for quick exploration of ideas... "Do What I Mean" interfaces to CAD programs might be possible if we can get a handle on the functional properties of human cognitive machinery...
Congratulations, you've nearly reinvented spaced repetition! There is a great deal of writing on spaced repetition flashcard systems, so I won't inflict upon you my own writings; but the Wikipedia article will link you to the main programs (Anki, Mnemosyne, and SuperMemo) and some writeups of the topic. SR is a great technique; I love it dearly.
Well, you could just improve your working memory. Unusually, working memory is plastic enough to be trainable by WM tasks. The WM exercise I'm most familiar with is Dual n-back. I practice it, but while I have noticed improvements, I'm unsure whether they repay the time I've put into it; SR systems have proven themselves as far as I'm concerned, but the jury is still out on dual n-back.
Now that sounds interesting. But looking at this OpenCog link doesn't give me a good idea as to what PLN might do for note-taking (or really, in general); did you have any use-cases or examples?
No specific use cases or examples, just throwing out ideas. On the one hand it would be cool if the notes one jots down could self-organize somehow, even a little bit. Now OpenCog is supposed by its creators to be a fully general knowledge representation system so maybe it's possible to use it as a sort of notation (like a probabilistic-logic version of mathematica? or maybe with a natural language front end of some kind? i think Ben Goertzel likes lojban so maybe an intermediate language like that)
Anyway, it's not really a product spec just one possible sort of way someday to use machines to make people smarter.
(but that was before I realized we were talking about pills to make people stop liking their favorite tv shows, heh)
While I agree that it it would be cool, anything that doesn't keep your notes exactly like you left them is likely to be more annoying than productive unless it is very cleverly done. (Remember Microsoft Clippy?) You'd probably need to tag at least some things, like persons and places.
I have been obsessively researching this idea for several years. One of my conclusions is that an intelligence-amplification tool must be "incestuously" user-modifiable ("turtles all the way down", possessing what programming language designers call reflectivity) in order to be of any profound use, at least to me personally.
About six months ago, I resolved to do exactly that. While I would not yet claim "black belt" competence in it, Mathematica has already enabled me to perform feats which I would not have previously dared to contemplate, despite having worked in Common Lisp. Mathematica is famously proprietary and the runtime is bog-slow, but the language and development environment are currently are in a class of their own (at least from the standpoint of exploratory programming in search of solutions to ultra-hard problems.)
Could you give more examples about things you like about Mathematica? Years ago, I resolved to become an expert at it after reading A New Kind of Science (will you guys forgive me?) and like it for a while, but then noticed some things were needlessly complicated or refused to spit out the right results (long time ago so I can't give examples).
Btw, I learned about Lisp after Mathematica, and was like, "wow, that must have been where Wolfram got the idea."
1) Mathematica's programming language does not confine you to a particular style of thinking. If you are a Lisp fancier, you can write entirely Lispy code. Likewise Haskell. There is even a capability for relatively painless dataflow programming.
2) Wolfram Inc. took great pains to make interfacing with the outside world from within the app as seamless as possible. For example, you can suck in a spreadsheet file directly into a multidimensional array. There is import and export capability for hundreds of formats, including obscure scientific and engineering ones. In case the built-in formats do not suffice, defining custom ones is surprisingly easy.
3) A non-headache-inducing replacement for regular expressions. Enough said.
4) Graphical objects (likewise audio and other streams) are first-class data types. They are able to appear as both the inputs and outputs of functions.
5) Lastly, and most importantly: fully interactive program development. The rest of the programming universe lives a life of endlessly repeated "compile and pray" cycles. Mathematica permits you to meaningfully evaluate and edit in place every line of code you write. I am otherwise an Emacs junkie, yet I have never felt the slightest desire to touch Emacs when working on Mathematica code. The programmer's traditional need to wade through and shovel giant piles of text from one place to another while writing code is almost entirely absent when working in this language.
The downsides of Mathematica (slow, proprietary, expensive, etc.) are widely known. Thus far, the advantages have vastly outweighed the problems for my particular kind of work. However, I have found that I now feel extremely confined when forced to work in any other programming language. Perhaps this risk should be added to the list of disadvantages.
Wolfram had (at least in the early days of Mathematica) a very interesting relationship with Lisp. He seems to have initially rejected many of its ideas, but it is clear that they somehow crept back into his work as time went by.
Thanks for the motivation, by the way -- I have toyed with the idea of getting Mathematica many times in the past but the $2500 price tag dissuaded me. Now I see that they have a $295 "Home Edition", which is basically the full product for personal use. I bought it last night and started playing with it. Very nifty program.
I don't know wheter to applaud your ethical restraint, or pity your ignorance. I'll go with the first ;-)
If you're wondering whether I'm aware that I can figure out how to steal software licenses, I am.
ETA: I don't condemn those who believe that intellectual property rights are bad for society or immoral. I don't feel that way myself, though, so I act accordingly.
It's theoretically possible to believe in IP (on some level), but lack the will not to pluck the forbidden fruit.
Cool stuff. Good luck with your research; if you come up with anything that works I'll be in line to be a customer!
I am curious what you had in mind. Please elaborate.
Well if you are really only interested in raising the average person's "IQ" by 10 points, it's pretty hard to change human nature (so maybe Bostrom was on the right track).
Perhaps if somehow video games could embed some lesson about rationality in amongst the dumb slaughter, that could help a little -- but people would probably just buy the games without the boring stuff instead.
I cannot pin down this idea as rigorously as I would like, but there seems to exist such a trait as liking to think abstractly, and that this trait is mostly orthogonal to IQ as we understand it (although a "you must be this tall to ride" effect applies.) With that in mind, I do not think that any but the most outlandishly powerful and at the same time effortless intelligence amplifier will be of much interest to the bulk of the population.
I'm still baffled about what you are getting at here. Apparently training people to think better is too hard for you, so I guess you want a pill or something. But there is no evidence that any pill can raise the average person's IQ by 10 points (which kind of makes sense, if some simple chemical balance adjustment could have such a dramatic effect on fitness it would be quite surprising). Are you researching a sci fi novel or something? What good does wishing for magical pills do?
If the point of this essay was to advocate pharmaceutical research, it might have been more effective to say so, it would have made the process of digesting it smoother. Given the other responses I think I am not alone in failing to guess that this was pretty much your sole target.
I don't object to such research; a Bostrom article saying "it might not be impossible to have some effect" is weak support for a 10 IQ point avergage-gain pill, but that's not a reason to avoid looking for one. Never know what you'll find. I'm still not clear what the takeaway from this essay is for a lesswrong reader, though, unless it is to suggest that we should experiment ourselves with the available chemicals.
I've tried many of the ones that are obtainable. Despite its popularity, I found piracetam to have no noticeable effect even after taking it for extended periods of time. Modafinil is the most noticeable of all; it doesn't seem to do much for me while I'm well-rested but does remove some of the sluggishness that can come with fatigue, although I think the results on an IQ test would be unnoticeable (maybe a 6 hour test, something to highlight endurance, could show a measurable difference). Picamilone has a subtler effect that I'm not sure how to characterize. I'm thinking of trying Xanthinol NIcotinate, but have not yet done so. Because of the small effects I do not use these things as a component of my general lifestyle, both for money reasons and the general uncertainty of long-term effects (also mild but sometimes unpleasant side effects). The effects of other more common drugs like caffeine and other stimulants are probably stronger than any of the "weird" stuff, and are widely known. Thinking beyond IQ, there are of course many drugs with cognitive effects that could be useful on an occasional-use basis, but that's beyond the scope of this discussion.
Please read this short review of the state of the art of chemical intelligence enhancement.
We probably cannot reliably guarantee 10 added points for every subject yet. Quite far from it, in fact. But there are some promising leads.
Others have made these points before, but I will summarize: fitness in a prehistoric environment is a very different thing from fitness in the world of today; prehistoric resource constraints (let's pick, for instance, the scarcity of refined sugars) bear no resemblance to those of today; certain refinements may be trivial from the standpoint of modern engineering but inaccessible to biological evolution, or at the very least ended up unreachable from a particular local maximum. Consider, for example, the rarity of evolved wheels.
I think this is called need for cognition. (I first saw this phrase somewhere here on LW.)