Wei_Dai comments on Shock Level 5: Big Worlds and Modal Realism - Less Wrong

15 [deleted] 25 May 2010 11:19PM

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Comment author: Wei_Dai 29 May 2010 05:56:22AM 1 point [-]

Modal realism by itself seems no more shocking than superintelligence and the Singularity (i.e., SL4):

  • Modal realism and the Singularity have followed comparable timelines of development. Modal realism was first proposed by David Lewis in 1968, the Singularity by Stanisław Ulam in 1958 and I. J. Good in 1965. The everything-list was created in 1998, SL4 in 1999 or 2000.
  • Jürgen Schmidhuber and Max Tegmark both supported versions of modal realism before (publicly) declaring themselves to be Singularitarians, so apparently the former is not more shocking to academia than the latter.

The two ideas put together might have consequences more shocking than either of them alone, but since those are still highly speculative it's probably too early to declare a shock level 5.

Comment author: ata 29 May 2010 06:08:26AM *  1 point [-]

Agreed. I didn't find modal realism terribly shocking, and I learned of it / semi-independently figured out my own version of it before I had heard of much >SL2 stuff.

Then again, I seem to have gone straight from SL1 to SL4, with no discomfort. Maybe I'm just hard to shock? Even so, putting myself in the shoes of someone who needs to gradually move up through the shock levels, I don't think modal realism would be higher than the Singularity; at most I'd put it alongside it at SL4.

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