No, you downvoted me in retaliation. Your arguments are spurious and I have repeatedly identified them as this. I have repeatedly rejected your insistence that I'm "depending on secrecy". I have repeatedly attempted to explain to you the difference between 'secrecy' and conservation of technical competence. I have repeatedly explained how I would be able to both engage in trade/commerce and maintain relative geographic isolation relative to all other actors of the era. Case in point: your most recent reiterated objection:
I was under the impression that what you'd be doing is, training your smiths to crank out plow/rifle/air pump/aircraft parts to precise tolerances. This process would start by explaining to them the concept of "tolerances".
-- This is false. I have explained this to be false. No such concepts would be conveyed. Instead, the line workers would be trained to make parts in an exacting manner and be given tools necessary to that end. Notched gauges for example. No conceptual explanations would be needed -- only rote mechanical actions. I stated essentially exactly this, more than once. (Providing such conceptual frameworks rather than rote memorization of tasks would, furthermore, allow for the easier dissemination of technical competence outside of my control. A goal contradictory to my ends.)
Your response was to claim that I reacted by "merely making my claims bolder". The problem with this, of course, is that your objections were invalid from the outset -- they did NOT map to anything I was claiming. Take for further example on this very topic your usage of the general line assemblyman course as a 'citation' for your objection.
It was wholly and entirely inappropriate to the task of acting as a valid citation for an objection to what I was claiming for the simple reason that it did not address any claims of mine.
You continue to raise these objections despite their entirely spurious nature, and you continue to demand in this dialogue that I address these objections.
This is, as I said previously, contradictory of rational discourse and as such should be discouraged on LessWrong. I noted this and you in return downvoted me claiming the same of me as I have made clear of your positions.
This, too, is spurious and irrational behavior and as such should bee discouraged on LessWrong.
A recent discussion post has compared the difficulty of an AI destroying modern human civilization to that of a modern human taking over the Roman Empire, with the implication that it is impossible.
The analogy has a few problems: first, modern humans don't have much greater raw intelligence than the Romans, only a bit more knowledge and tools; an AI would have a genuine intelligence advantage. Second, a high-tech civilization like ours offers many more ways for a genius to cause chaos than existed in classical Rome: it's more plausible that you can throw a few existing technologies together to create a superweapon than that Ptolemy could have done likewise, and there's no ancient Roman equivalent to hacking a nuclear launch system.
But taking over ancient Rome might serve as an interesting upper bound on the difficulty of an AI taking over modern civilization. And it's a theme of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality that rationalists should be able to come up with creative solutions to seemingly hard problems. So if Professor Quirrell offered it as an extra credit assignment, how would you take over Rome?
Here are the rules:
- You are thrown back in time to the year 1 AD. You can choose to arrive anywhere in the world, but your method of arrival cannot itself give an advantage (you can't appear in a flash of light in the middle of a religious ritual or anything).
- You do not start with Roman citizenship or any other legal record of your existence.
- You keep your original physical characteristics, including sex, height, and fitness. You will appear in period-appropriate dress of your choosing, and can't carry any artifacts with you. You may start with enough money to live a patrician lifestyle for a year.
- You are intellectually near-perfect. You know all human knowledge as of 2012. You speak fluent Latin (and all other languages of the day) and can orate as eloquently as Cicero or Demosthenes. You are a tactical genius of the order of Caesar and Napoleon. And you have infinite willpower and goal-directedness: aside from human necessities like sleep or food, you need never rest.
- You win if you either become Roman Emperor (and are acknowledged as such by most Romans), or if a state you control conquers the city of Rome. You lose if you die, of old age or otherwise, before completing either goal.