Be a Visiting Fellow at the Singularity Institute
Now is the very last minute to apply for a Summer 2010 Visiting Fellowship. If you’ve been interested in SIAI for a while, but haven’t quite managed to make contact -- or if you’re just looking for a good way to spend a week or more of your summer -- drop us a line. See what an SIAI summer might do for you and the world.
(SIAI’s Visiting Fellow program brings volunteers to SIAI for anywhere from a week to three months, to learn, teach, and collaborate. Flights and room and board are covered. We’ve been rolling since June of 2009, with good success.)
Apply because:
- SIAI is tackling the world’s most important task -- the task of shaping the Singularity. The task of averting human extinction. We aren’t the only people tackling this, but the total set is frighteningly small.
- When numbers are this small, it’s actually plausible that you can tip the balance.
- SIAI has some amazing people to learn from -- many report learning and growing more here than in any other period of their lives.
- SIAI also has major gaps, and much that desperately needs doing but that we haven’t noticed yet, or have noticed but haven’t managed to fix -- gaps where your own skills, talents, and energy can come into play.
Your example of collie herding behavior is cool; I'm not sure what to make of that. Do wolves herd their pups? Or are there other plausible precedents? How complicated is collie "herding" behavior?
As to smell and tracking ability in blood hounds: given that these same abilities occur in wolves (though to a lesser extent?), my guess would be that these adaptations are relatively simple to acquire, if you have a wolf's genome as your starting point. Designing smell for the first time would be complicated, but designing a better sense of smell from a wolf's sense of smell might just require sending more brain cells to the "process smells" brain center, or building more of the kinds of olfactory receptors dogs already have, or some other simple shift. (OTOH, if blood hounds are sensitive to many compounds that wolves aren't sensitive to, or if they exhibit many strategies in tracking that wolves don't exhibit, I'd be wrong and surprised. Let me know if that's so.)
I haven't read your book yet, so forgive me if you discuss this there. But I’ve been wondering:
Simple traits (such as an organism's height) are probably relatively easy to alter via genetic mutations, without needing to combine many different genes chosen from huge populations. So, e.g., dog breeding altered dogs’ size relatively easily.
Complex adaptations aren’t nearly so easy to come by.
If intelligence is a conceptually simple thing, there might be simple mutations that create “more intelligence” -- it might be possible to make smarter people/mice/etc. by tuning a setting on an adaptation we already have. (E.g., “make more brain cells”).
If intelligence is instead something that requires many information-theoretic bits to specify, e.g. because “intelligence” is a matter of fit between an organism’s biases and the details of its environment, it shouldn’t be easy to create much more intelligence from a single mutation. (Just as if the target was a long arbitrary string in binary, and the genetic code specified that string digit by digit, simple mutations would increase fit by at most one digit.)
From the manner in which modern human intelligence evolved, what’s your guess at how simple human (or animal) intelligence is?
Re: Problem 4: Roughly speaking: yes.
Ordinary disagreements persist after hearing others' estimates. A and B may start out asserting "50" and "10", and then argue their way to "25" and "12", then "23" and "17". But if you want each estimate to be as accurate as possible, this is silly behavior; if A can predict that his estimate will go down over time (as he integrates more of B's evidence), he can also predict that his current estimate is too high -- and so he can improve his accuracy by lowering his estimate right now. The two parties should be as likely to overshoot as to undershoot in their disagreements, e.g.: A: 50; B: 10 A: 18; B: 22 A: 21; B: 21.
So next time you're in a dispute, try applying Principle 3: ask what an outside observer would say about the situation. If Alfred and Betty both apply this principle, they'll each ask: "What would an outside observer guess about Lake L, given that Betty has studied geography and said "10", while Alfred said "50"?" And, thus viewing the situation from the (same) outside, Betty and Alfred will both weigh Betty's evidence about equally. Alfred may underweight Betty's impression (e.g., because he doesn't realize she wrote her thesis on Lake L) -- but he may equally overweight Betty's opinion (e.g., because he doesn't realize that she's never heard of Lake L either). If he could predict that he was (over/under) weighting her opinion, he'd quit doing it.
More precisely: if you and your interlocutor can predict your direction of disagreement, at least one of you is forming needlessly inaccurate estimates.
View more: Next
We totally give rides from the Caltrain station. Will's the contact man on this: 520 305 0771.