Stupid Questions May 2015

Gondolinian

This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.

Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.

To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.

Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.

To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.

As I told someone else, this pdf has preliminary discussion about how to resolve differences that persist under extrapolation.

The specific example of religious disagreements seems like a trivial problem to anyone who gets far enough to consider the question. Since there aren't any gods, the AI can ask what religious people would want if they accepted this fact. (This is roughly why I would oppose extrapolating only LW-ers rather than humanity as a whole.) But hey, maybe the question is more difficult than I think - we wouldn't specifically tell the AI to be an atheist if general rules of thinking did not suffice - or maybe this focus on surface claims hides some deeper disagreement that can't be so easily settled by probability.