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JoshuaZ comments on AI Risk and Opportunity: A Strategic Analysis - Less Wrong Discussion

8 Post author: lukeprog 04 March 2012 06:06AM

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Comment author: JoshuaZ 10 March 2012 04:55:20PM 0 points [-]

If Stalin was truly intelligent then I assume he opted for Cryonic preservation?

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.

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.

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.

Comment author: SingularityUtopia 10 March 2012 06:36:25PM *  -2 points [-]

It seems that you are using "intelligent" to mean something like "would make the same decisions SingularityUtopia would make in that context".

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.

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.

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:

"In 1940, pioneer biologist Basil Luyet published a work titled "Life and Death at Low Temperatures""

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:

Lydia Maria Child's short story "Hilda Silfverling, A Fantasy" (1886),[81] Jack London's first published work "A Thousand Deaths" (1899), V. Mayakovsky's "Klop" (1928),[82] H.P. Lovecraft's "Cool Air" (1928), and Edgar Rice Burroughs' "The Resurrection of Jimber-Jaw" (1937). Many of the subjects in these stories are unwilling ones, although a 1931 short story by Neil R. Jones called "The Jameson Satellite",[83]........

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics#Cryonics_in_popular_culture

Comment author: JoshuaZ 10 March 2012 07:17:37PM 1 point [-]

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.

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.

truly intelligent people would not need other thinkers to inspire their thinking

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.

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