= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Roko comments on Intelligence enhancement as existential risk mitigation - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (198)
It could also disrupt them in the wrong direction; there's no particular reason to assume that becoming "smarter" won't just make us better self-deceivers.
As Michael Shermer writes, "Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons."
Cherished falsehoods are unlikely to be random. In groups that aren't artificially selected at random from the entirety of humanity, error will tend to be correlated with others'.
There are also deep flaws in humanity as a whole, most especially on some issues.
Should we decide to believe in ghosts because most human beings share that belief, or should we rely on rational analysis and the accumulation of evidence (data derived directly from the phenomena in question, not other people's opinions)?
Not if the original function of (verbal) "intelligence" was to improve our ability to deceive... and I strongly suspect this to be the case. After all, it doesn't take a ton of (verbal) intelligence to hunt and gather.
Good point. Of course, that mechanism is for detecting other people's lies, and there is some evidence that it's specific to ideas and/or people you already disagree with or are suspicious of... meaning that increased intelligence doesn't necessarily relate.
One of the central themes in the book I'm working on is that brains are much better at convincing themselves they've thought things through, when in actuality no real thinking has taken place at all.
Looking for problems with something you already believe is a good example of that: nobody does it until they have a good enough reason to actually think it through, as opposed to assuming they already did it, or not even noticing what it is they believe in the first place.
No. Your argument is specious. Evolution 'designed' us with all sorts of things 'in mind' that no longer apply. That doesn't mean that any arbitrary aspect of our lives will have an influence if it's changed on any other aspect. If the environmental factors / traits have no relationship with the trait we're interested in, we have no initial reason to think that changing the conditions will affect the trait.
Consider the absurdity of taking your argumentative structure seriously:
"Nature designed us to have full heads of hair. Nature also gave us a sense of sight, which it did not design to operate optimally in hairless conditions. It is therefore reasonable to expect that shaving the head will, to some extent, disrupt our visual acuity."
No, the criticism is valid if we have no reason to think that the traits will be causally linked. You're making another logical fallacy - confusing two statements whose logical structure renders them non-equivalent.
(thinking trait is ~relevant) != ~(thinking trait is relevant)