Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4

lukeprog

This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant.

Ask away!

Previously: round 1, round 2, round 3

From the original thread:

This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant.

Ask away!

Thank you for the links, they were exactly what I was looking for.

As for friendly upload FOOMs, I consider the chance of them happening at random about equivalent to FIA happening at random.

As for friendly upload FOOMs, I consider the chance of them happening at random about equivalent to FIA happening at random.

(I guess "FIA" is a typo for "FAI"?) Why talk about "at random" if we are considering which technology to pursue as the best way to achieve a positive Singularity? From what I can tell, the dangers involved in an upload-based FOOM are limited and foreseeable, and we at least have ideas to solve all of them:

unfriendly values in scanned subject (pick the subject carefully)
inaccurate scanning/modeling

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Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4

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Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4

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