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SingularityUtopia comments on AI Risk and Opportunity: A Strategic Analysis - Less Wrong
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Why do you state this? Is there any evidence or logic to suppose this?
My reply is to ask would a dog or cat live peacefully within a group of humans? Admittedly dogs sometimes bite humans but this aggression is due to a lack of intelligence. Dostoevsky reflects, via Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, upon how it is justifiable for a superior being to take the life of a lesser sentient being but in reality Dostoevsky was not violent. Einstein stated his pacifism is not an intellectual theory but it is safe to assert his pacifism is a product of his general intelligence: "My pacifism is an instinctive feeling, a feeling that possesses me because the murder of men is disgusting. My attitude is not derived from any intellectual theory but is based on my deepest antipathy to every kind of cruelty and hatred."
Many humans want to protect dolphins, but why is this? We are not dolphins, we cannot even communicate with them effectively. Perhaps a mindless thug would happily punch a dolphin in the face. Recently there was a news report about a soldier beating a sheep to death with a baseball bat and I remember an similar case of animal cruelty where solider threw a puppy off a cliff. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2089462/U-S-Army-probe-launched-sickening-video-soldiers-cheering-man-beats-sheep-death-baseball-bat.html
No, that's not at all obvious. Let me give you two alternatives:
It might be that pacifism is not highly correlated with either intelligence or scientific ability. For every Einstein, you can find some equally intelligent but bellicose scientist. Von Neumann, perhaps. Or Edward Teller.
It might also be that pacifism is correlated with the personality traits that push people into science, and that people of high intelligence but a more aggressive temperament choose alternate career paths. Perhaps finance, or politics, or military service.
One example of an intelligent pacifist isn't evidence of correlation, much less of causation.
So asr, would you say violence is generally stupid or intelligent?
People often equate mindlessness with violence thus the phrase mindless violence is reasonably common but I have never encountered the phrase intelligent violence, is intelligent violence an oxymoron? Surely intelligent people can resolve conflict via non-violent methods?
Here are a couple of news reports mentioning mindless violence:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-17062738
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/sport/4149765/Brainless-brawlers-cost-schools.html
It would be interested to know how many scientists or philosophers actually engage in violence.
A high level of intelligence can be a prohibiting factor for admission into the police force. There was a court case where police applicant was refused a job due to his high intelligence thus he sued on grounds of discrimination. I wonder how many scientists choose to fight in the army, are they eager to kill people in Iran, Iraq or Afghanistan? Does the army prohibit intelligent people from joining?
Perhaps a scientific study needs to be undertaken regarding a possible relationship between stupidity and violence, intelligence and pacifism?
Regarding the violence of Von Neumann there is no actual evidence of violence, as far as I am aware, it is merely hot air, violent rhetoric, but I would also question the "intelligence" of people who advocate violence. Perhaps their "intelligence" is a misnomer, thus what people are actually referring to is pseudo-intelligence or partial intelligence. Even stupid people can occasionally do clever things, and sometimes smart people do stupid things but generally I think it is safe to say intelligent people are not violent.
No; they prohibit stupid people from joining unless recruiting is in such dire straits that they will also be recruiting drug addicts, felons, etc. The US military has at times been one of the largest consumers of IQ tests and other psychometric services and sponsors of research into the topic, crediting them with saving hundreds of millions/billions of dollars in training costs, errors, friendly fire, etc.
If you're intelligent and you join, the situation is less they kick you out and more they eagerly snap you up and send you to officer school or a technical position (eg. I understand they never have enough programmers or sysadmins these days, which makes sense because they are underpaid compared to equivalent contractors by a factor or 3, I remember reading sysadmins in Iraq blog about).
We have gone to a great deal of trouble, in modern society, to make violence a bad option, so today in our society often violence is committed by the impulsive, mentally ill, or short-sighted. But that's not an inevitable property of violence and hasn't always been true. You would have gotten a different answer before the 20th century. I don't know what answer you'll get in the 22nd century.
The word we usually use for intelligent violence is "ruthless" or "cunning" -- and many people are described that way. Stalin, for instance, was apparently capable of long hours of hard work, had an excellent attention to detail, and otherwise appears to have been a smart guy. Just also willing to have millions of people murdered.
No. Many smart capable people go to West Point or Annapolis. A high fraction of successful American engineers in the 19th century were West Point alums.
You keep jumping from correlation to causation, in a domain when there are obvious alternate effects going on. I don't know if there is a correlation, but even if there were, it wouldn't be very strong evidence. Being a good scientist requires both intelligence and the right kind of personality. You are asserting that any correlation is solely due to the intelligence part of the equation. This strikes me as a very problematic assumption. Very few scientists are also successful lawyers. It does not follow that lawyers are stupid.
I am not presenting a scientific thesis. This is only a debate, and a reasonably informal one? I am thinking openly. I am asking specific questions likely to elicit specific responses. I am speculating.
asr, you wrote:
My point regarding mindless violence verses ruthlessness or cunning is that ruthlessness or cunning do not specifically define intelligence or violence in the blatant way which the phrase "mindless violence" does. Saddam and Gaddafi were cunning in a similar way to Stalin but the deaths of Saddam and Gaddafi indicate their cunning was not intelligent, in fact it is very stupid to die so close to Singularitarian immortality.
I am not asserting this proves all violence is mindless thus violence decreases with greater intelligence. I am simply offering food for thought. It is not a scientific thesis I am presenting. I am merely throwing some ideas out there to see how people respond.
If Stalin was truly intelligent then I assume he opted for Cryonic preservation?
"...Stalin was injected with poison by the guard Khrustalev, under the orders of his master, KGB chief Lavrenty Beria. And what was the reason Stalin was killed?"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2793501.stm
Regarding stupidity and the armed forces I have addressed this elsewhere: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ajm/ai_risk_and_opportunity_a_strategic_analysis/5zgl
Almost no one, regardless of intelligence opts for cryonics. Moreover, cryonics was first proposed in 1962 by Robert Ettinger, 9 years after Stalin was dead. It is a bit difficult to opt for cryonics when it doesn't exist yet.
It seems that you are using "intelligent" to mean something like "would make the same decisions SingularityUtopia would make in that context". This may explain why you are so convinced that "intelligent" individuals won't engage in violence. It may help to think carefully about what you mean by intelligent.
No, "intelligence" is an issue of survival, it is intelligent to survive. Survival is a key aspect of intelligence. I do want to survive but the intelligent course of action of not merely what I would do. The sensibleness, the intelligence of survival, is something beyond myself, it is applicable to other beings, but people do disagree regarding the definition of intelligence. Some people think it is intelligent to die.
And intelligent person would realise freezing a body could preserve life even if nobody had ever considered the possibility.
Quickly browsing the net I found this:
http://www.cryocare.org/index.cgi?subdir=&url=history.txt
1940 was before Stalin's death, but truly intelligent people would not need other thinkers to inspire their thinking. The decay limiting factor of freezing has long been known. Futhermore Amazon sems to state Luyet's work "Life and Death at Low Temperatures" was published pre-1923: http://www.amazon.com/Life-death-at-low-temperatures/dp/1178934128
According to Wikipedia many works of fiction dealt with the cryonics issue well before Stalin's death:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics#Cryonics_in_popular_culture
You need to be more precise about what you mean by "intelligent" then, since your usage is either confused or is being communicated very poorly. Possibly consider tabooing the term intelligent.
You seemed elsewhere in this thread to consider Einstein intelligent, but if self-preservation matters for intelligence, then this doesn't make much sense. Any argument of the form "Stalin wasn't intelligent since he didn't use cryonics" is just as much of a problem for Einstein, Bohr, Turing, Hilbert, etc.
Yeah, see this isn't how humans work. We get a lot of different ideas from other humans, we develop them, and we use them to improve our own ideas by combining them. This is precisely why the human discoveries that have the most impact on society are often those which are connected to the ability to record and transmit information.
It seems that what you are doing here is engaging in the illusion of transparency where because you know of an idea, you consider the idea to be obvious or easy.
Neither dogs nor cats are particularly intelligent as animals go. For example, both are not as good at puzzle solving compared to many ravens, crows and other corvids when it comes to puzzle solving). For example, New Caledonian crowscan engage in sequential tool use. Moreover, chimpanzees are extremely intelligent and also very violent.
The particular example you gave, of dogs and domestic cats, is particularly bad because these species have been domesticated by humans, and thus have been bred for docility.