pjeby comments on Why I'm Staying On Bloggingheads.tv - Less Wrong

25 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 07 September 2009 08:15PM

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Comment author: pjeby 11 September 2009 02:47:54AM 0 points [-]

As a working biologic engineer, and even viewed through the 'rational thought' filter which I employ to assess ALL observable data, there had to be intelligent input, likely a form of genetic engineering, at strategic points in time.

Until I got to this part of your comment, I was about to vote it up. And then I read the above, and decided not to.

Then I read the next couple of sentences about cosmic spirit entities, and decided to vote it down instead, as you'd by that point undermined the one interesting/useful point you had: the idea that there might be a way for genes to increase variability or decrease error correction, without needing some sort of external randomness.

It would probably be a good idea for you to read some of the past OB/LW corpus, particularly the bits on reductionism, optimization processes, and the mind projection fallacy, as you are committing rather big errors on all three fronts. (Specifically, you are positing ontologically basic mental entities, anthropomorphizing "design", and conflating intelligence with agency.)