So your ancestors were killed by stupid peasants, not the Church.
Peasants who were Catholics, taught by Catholic doctrine and engaged in a Crusade started by the Catholic Church. Yet you don't see such mobs systematically destroying entire Jewish villages in Protestant areas, and you don't see it in Russian Orthodox areas until the 1500s.
What? Everyone remembers the Albigensian Crusade. "Kill them all, God will know His own."
There may be an illusion of transparency here. Very few people remember where that phrase came from even if they've heard some version.
And if heretics won't repent you should expel them or kill them.
Somehow a lot of other religions have managed ok without doing that.
And if heretics won't repent you should expel them or kill them. I agree with the Church on that one. There are demons who would mislead the people, you can't just let them get away with it. You know what happens when you don't kill the heretics? Communism. And communism killed way more people than the Church ever did.
I'm wondering if I'm misreading what you are saying here.. Are you arguing that the Catholic Church should kill Catholic heretics and groups that disagree because otherwise other groups who will be more violent will arise?
Peasants who were Catholics, taught by Catholic doctrine and engaged in a Crusade started by the Catholic Church. Yet you don't see such mobs systematically destroying entire Jewish villages in Protestant areas, and you don't see it in Russian Orthodox areas until the 1500s.
Protestantism didn't even exist until the 1500s. I don't see why/how you're making the comparison.
A bunch of peasants got out of hand, directly went against the wishes of the Church, and killed some people. (Not very many, either, in the grand scheme of things.) When it comes to cri...
I'm skeptical about trying to build FAI, but not about trying to influence the Singularity in a positive direction. Some people may be skeptical even of the latter because they don't think the possibility of an intelligence explosion is a very likely one. I suggest that even if intelligence explosion turns out to be impossible, we can still reach a positive Singularity by building what I'll call "modest superintelligences", that is, superintelligent entities, capable of taking over the universe and preventing existential risks and Malthusian outcomes, whose construction does not require fast recursive self-improvement or other questionable assumptions about the nature of intelligence. This helps to establish a lower bound on the benefits of an organization that aims to strategically influence the outcome of the Singularity.
(To recall what the actual von Neumann, who we might call MSI-0, accomplished, open his Wikipedia page and scroll through the "known for" sidebar.)
Building a MSI-1 seems to require a total cost on the order of $100 billion (assuming $10 million for each clone), which is comparable to the Apollo project, and about 0.25% of the annual Gross World Product. (For further comparison, note that Apple has a market capitalization of $561 billion, and annual profit of $25 billion.) In exchange for that cost, any nation that undertakes the project has a reasonable chance of obtaining an insurmountable lead in whatever technologies end up driving the Singularity, and with that a large measure of control over its outcome. If no better strategic options come along, lobbying a government to build MSI-1 and/or influencing its design and aims seems to be the least that a Singularitarian organization could do.