Some of my majoritarianism is in some sense a rationalization, or at least it's retrospective. I happened to reach various conclusions, some epistemic, some moral, and learned various things that happened to line up much better with Catholic dogma than with any other system of thought. Some of my majoritarianism stems from wondering how I could have reached those conclusions earlier or more reliably, without the benefit of epistemic luck, which I've had a lot of. I think the policy that pops out isn't actually majoritarianism so much as harboring a deep respect for highly evolved institutions, a la Nick Szabo. There's also Chesterton's idea of orthodoxy as democracy spread over time. On matters where there's little reason to expect great advancement of the moderns over older cultures, like in spirituality or morality, it would be foolish to adopt a modern-majoritarian position that ignored the opinions of those older cultures. I don't actually have all that much respect for the "average person", but I do have great respect for the pious and the intellectually humble. I honestly see more rationality in the humble creationist than in the protypical yay-science boo-religion liberal.
He's a prospective modal catholic--replace each instance of "amen" with "or so we are led to believe."
Though I think my actually converting is getting less likely the more I think about the issue and study recent Church history.
He suspects himself of prodromal schizophrenia, due to symptoms like continuing to post here.
More due to typical negative symptoms and auditory hallucinations and so on most prominent about six months ago, among a few other reasons. But perhaps it's more accurate to characterize myself as schizotypal.
Are there any essays anywhere that go in depth about scenarios where AIs become somewhat recursive/general in that they can write functioning code to solve diverse problems, but the AI reflection problem remains unsolved and thus limits the depth of recursion attainable by the AIs? Let's provisionally call such general but reflection-limited AIs semi-general AIs, or SGAIs. SGAIs might be of roughly smart-animal-level intelligence, e.g. have rudimentary communication/negotiation abilities and some level of ability to formulate narrowish plans of the sort that don't leave them susceptible to Pascalian self-destruction or wireheading or the like.
At first blush, this scenario strikes me as Bad; AIs could take over all computers connected to the internet, totally messing stuff up as their goals/subgoals mutate and adapt to circumvent wireheading selection pressures, without being able to reach general intelligence. AIs might or might not cooperate with humans in such a scenario. I imagine any detailed existing literature on this subject would focus on computer security and intelligent computer "viruses"; does such literature exist, anywhere?
I have various questions about this scenario, including: