= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
V_V comments on Steelmanning MIRI critics - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (67)
What would a citation for it look like?
I don't know, maybe because they were raised in highly religious families (Hanson and Muehlhauser in particular, Yudkowsky mentions an Ortodox Jewish upbringing but I don't know how much religious his parents were, I don't know about the other folks) and they are scared that they realized they live in a world "Beyond the Reach of God"?
Anyway, we don't have to psychoanalyze them. Similarity of beliefs and familiarity with the hypothetical source is evidence of relatedness.
You could compare different Christian denominations and find different "philosophical effect of the belief" (e.g. the five "Solae" of early Protestantism vs Catholic theology), but this doesn't mean that they are unrelated.
I don't know if this is a relevant data point, but I was raised in an atheist communist family, and I still like the idea that people could live forever (or at least much longer than today) and I think the world could be significantly improved.
It seems to me one doesn't need a religious background for this, only to overcome some learned helplessness and status-quo fatalism. Okay, the religion (and also communism) already provide you a story of a radical change in the future, so they kinda open the door... but I think that living in the 20th/21st century and watching the world around you change dramatically should allow one to extrapolate even if they wouldn't hear such ideas before.
Anything they wrote or said that might lead you to believe that there is actually this connection, beyond pure supposition?
'Beyond the Reach of God' is at least in the right vein, though there are two teensy weensy difficulties (i.e. it's completely useless to your argument). First, the fellow who wrote it was never Christian, so Christian Millenarianism wouldn't be ingrained into him. Second, 'Beyond the Reach of God' doesn't aim itself back into religion and less still Revelations-style religion. 'Let's build a tool that makes life fair' is completely crosswise to any religious teaching.
Yes, and they are obviously related due to all being substantially the same thing - heck, they share their NAME. Having opposite philosophical conclusions is a good reason to cut off a particular line of reasoning that someone generated an idea by pattern-matching to an existing narrative, in the absence of any other evidence that they did so besides a mediocre pattern-match. I didn't claim it was a general disproof.
When you have two ideas that are: called differently, they claim no common origin, one came from revelation while the other from reasoning presented publicly, one claims certainty while the other claims uncertainty, one is a moral claim while the other is a factual claim, one is supernatural and the other is materialistic...
and,
the connections between them are that they both claim to accomplish several highly desirable things like: raising the dead and keeping people alive forever, and doing so for all the world...
the high desirability of these things mean that multiple people would aim to accomplish them, so aiming to accomplish them does not indicate shared origin!
He was born and raised in a predominantly Protestant Christian society, where these beliefs are widespread. And, by the way, apocalyptic beliefs existed in all religions and cultures, including Judaism (Christianity was originally a messianic and arguably apocalyptic Jewish cult).
'Salvation through good works' comes to mind.
More generally, various doomsday cults have beliefs involving the cult members having to perform specific actions in order to trigger the Apocalypse or make sure that it unfolds in the intended way.
I don't want to push the pattern-matching too far. 'Singularity is a cult' has been already debated at nausem here, and is probably and exagerated position.
It sufficies to say that singularitarian and religious ideas are probably salient to the same kind of psychological mechanisms and heuristics, some innate and some acquired or reinforced by culture.
As I said in the my original comment, this doesn't necessarily imply that singularitarian beliefs are wrong, but it strongly suggests that we should be wary for availability heuristic/priviledging the hypothesis biases when we evaluate them.
'Beryon the reach of God' seems evidence to the contrary.
Fair enough.
Does it? I'm under the impression that singularitarians believe that, barring some major catastrophe, the Singularity is pretty much inevitable.
No. Both are factual claims about events that are expected to happen in the future. They may be more or less falsifiable, depending on how much the authors commit to specific deadlines.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.