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Right. So, if we are playing the game of giving counter-intuitive technical meanings to ordinary English words, humans have thrived for millions of years - with their "UnFriendly" peers and their "UnFriendly" institutions. Evidently, "Friendliness" is not necessary for human flourishing.
It's not necessary when the UnFriendly people are humans using muscle-power weaponry. A superhumanly intelligent self-modifying AGI is a rather different proposition, even with only today's resources available. Given that we have no reason to believe that molecular nanotech isn't possible, an AI that is even slightly UnFriendly might be a disaster.
Consider the situation where the world finds out that DARPA has finished an AI (for example). Would you expect America to release the source code? Given our track record on issues like evolution and whether American citizens need to arm themselves against the US government, how many people would consider it an abomination and/or a threat to their liberty? What would the self-interested response of every dictator (for example, Kim Jong Il's successor) with nuclear weapons be? Even a Friendly AI poses a danger until fighting against it is not only useless but obviously useless, and making an AI Friendly is, as has been explained, really freakin' hard.
I also take issue with the statement that humans have flourished. We spent most of those millions of years being hunter-gatherers. "Nasty, brutish and short" is the phrase that springs to mind.
In response to
Undiscriminating Skepticism
Proposed litmus test: infanticide.
General cultural norms label this practice as horrific, and most people's gut reactions concur. But a good chunk of rationality is separating emotions from logic. Once you've used atheism to eliminate a soul, and humans are "just" meat machines, and abortion is an ok if perhaps regrettable practice ... well, scientifically, there just isn't all that much difference between a fetus a couple months before birth, and an infant a couple of months after.
This doesn't argue that infants have zero value, but instead that they should be treated more like property or perhaps like pets (rather than like adult citizens). Don't unnecessarily cause them to suffer, but on the other hand you can choose to euthanize your own, if you wish, with no criminal consequences.
Get one of your friends who claims to be a rationalist. See if they can argue passionately in favor of infanticide.
This doesn't argue that infants have zero value, but instead that they should be treated more like property or perhaps like pets (rather than like adult citizens).
You haven't taken account of discounted future value. A child is worth more than a chimpanzee of equal intelligence because a child can become an adult human. I agree that a newborn baby is not substantially more valuable than a close-to-term one and that there is no strong reason for caring about a euthanised baby over one that is never born, but I'm not convinced that assigning much lower value to young children is a net benefit for a society not composed of rationalists (which is not to say that it is not an net benefit, merely that I don't properly understand where people's actions and professed beliefs come from in this area and don't feel confident in my guesses about what would happen if they wised up on this issue alone).
The proper question to ask is "If these resources are not spent on this child, what will they be spent on instead and what are the expected values deriving from each option?" Thus contraception has been a huge benefit to society: it costs lots and lots of lives that never happen, but it's hugely boosted the quality of the lives that do.
I do agree that willingness to consider infanticide and debate precisely how much babies and foetuses are worth is a strong indicator of rationality.
In response to
How the Grinch Ought to Have Stolen Christmas
Actually, causing poverty is a poor way to stop gift-giving. Even in subsistence economies, most farm households are net purchasers of the staple food; even very poor households support poorer ones in most years. (I have citations for this but one is my own working paper, which I don't currently have access to, and the other is cited in that, so you'll have to go without.) Moreover, needless gift-giving to the point of causing financial difficulties is fairly common in China (see http://www.economist.com/news/china/21590914-gift-giving-rural-areas-has-got-out-hand-further-impoverishing-chinas-poor-two-weddings-two).
The universe is always, eternally trying to freeze everyone to (heat) death, and will eventually win.
Wait, why would an athiest try to steal Christmas? It's become one of the most secular holidays of the year.
Wait, maybe we already stole it, and no one noticed?!
While walking through the town shopping centre shortly before Christmas, my mother overheard a conversation between two middle-aged women, in which one complained of the scandalous way in which the Church is taking over Christmas. She does not appear to have been joking.
This occured in Leatherhead, a largish town a little south of London in the UK. It is fairly wealthy, with no slummy areas and a homeless population of approximately zero. It is not a regional shopping hub; if they came specifically to shop, they almost certainly came from villages. Of the local schools, only the main high school is not officially Christian. We have at least three churches in town, one of which rings its bells every hour two streets from the shopping centre, but no mosque and no synagogue.
I think it is safe to say that someone has stolen Christmas, but I suspect they were intending to sell it, not destroy it.
In response to
Einstein's Superpowers
There is woolly thinking going on here, I feel. I recommend a game of Rationalist's Taboo. If we get rid of the word "Einstein", we can more clearly see what we are talking about. I do not assign a high value to my probabilty of making Einstein-sized contributions to human knowledge, given that I have not made any yet and that ripe, important problems are harder to find than they used to be. Einstein's intellectual accomplishments are formidable - according to my father's assessment (and he has read far more of Einstein's papers than I), Einstein deserved far more than one Nobel prize.
On the other hand, if we consider three strong claimants to the title of "highest-achieving thinker ever", namely Einstein, Newton and Archimedes, we can see that their knowledge was very much less formidable. If the test was outside his area of expertise, I would consider a competition between Einstein and myself a reasonably fair fight - I can imagine either of us winning by a wide margin, given an appropriate subject. Newton would not be a fair fight, and I could completely crush Archimedes at pretty much anything. There are millions of people who could claim the same, millions who could claim more. Remember that there are no mysterious answers, and that most of the work is done in finding useful hypotheses - finding a new good idea is hard, learning someone else's good idea is not. I do not need to claim to be cleverer than Newton to claim to understand pretty much everything better than he ever did, nor to consider it possible that I could make important contributions. If I had an important problem, useful ideas about it that had been simmering for years and was clearly well ahead of the field, I would consider it reasonably probable that I would make an important breakthrough - not highly probable, but not nearly as improbable as it might sound. It might clarify this point by saying that I would place high probability on an important breakthrough occuring - if there is anyone in such a position, I conclude that there are probably others (or there will be soon), and so the one will probably have at least met the people who end up making the breakthrough. It is useful to remember that for every hero who made a great scientific advance, there were probably several other people who were close to the same answer and who made significant contributions to finding it.
I'm not sure if this is the place for it, but I haven't found somewhere better and I don't see how it could be plot-critical. Nevertheless, warning for very minor spoilers about chapter 86.
I gave my mother a description of the vrooping device, and she had no idea. I said that it was one of a collection of odd devices with bizarre uses, and the conversation progressed as follows:
"Well in that case, it was an egg coddler." "An egg coddler?" "Coddling is like poaching but slower and gentler." "What about the pulsing light and the vrooping?" "The vrooping is to put you in mind of a hen and the light is for enterainment while you wait." "I'll suggest it." "Good egg!"
Given that we are meant to be able to recognise the vrooper, that it matches no known magical device and that Heads of Hogwarts tend to create strange devices to mystify their successors, it seems reasonable to me to presume that the vrooper is a really weird form of a muggle device. I further suggest that it's use is for cooking something or for keeping it warm (it might, for example, be a phoenix-egg incubator, given that Fawkes doesn't seem to build nests).
I'm not sure what kind of stance we need to take with regards to the characteristics of the device - if all of its properties are meaningful, then we should have identified it by now, and, moreover, we have no reason to believe that the designer would want all its properties to make sense. On the other hand, its real designer is EY, who expressed surprise that we haven't guessed by the time his last progress update came out.
In response to
The Parable of the Dagger
There are a lot of comments here that say that the jester is unjustified in assuming that there is a correlation between the inscriptions and the contents of the boxes. This is, in my opinion, complete and utter nonsense. Once we assign meanings to the words true and false (in this case, "is an accurate description of reality" and "is not an accurate description of reality"), all other statements are either false, true or meaningless. A statement can be meaningless because it describes something that is not real (for example, "This box contains the key" is meaningless if the world does not contain any boxes) or because it is inconsistent (it has at least one infinite loop, as with "This statement is false"). If a statement is meaningful it affects our observations of reality, and so we can use Bayesian reasoning to assign a probabilty for the statement being true. If the statement is meaningless, we cannot assign a probabilty for it being true without violating our assumption that there is a consistent underlying reality to observe, in which case we cannot trust our observations. Halt, Melt and Catch Fire.
The statement "This box contains the key" is a description of reality, and is either false or true. The statement "Both inscriptions are true" is meaningful if there exists another inscription, true if the second description is true and false if the second description is false or meaningless. The statement "Both inscriptions are false" is meaningless because it is inconsistent - we cannot assign a truth-value to it. The statement "Either both inscriptions are true, or both inscriptions are false" is therefore either true (both inscriptions are true, implying that the key is in box 2) or meaningless. In the latter case, we can gain no information from the statement - the jester might as well have been given only the second box and the second inscription. The jester's mistake lies in assuming that both inscriptions must be meaningful - "one is meaningless and the other is false" is as valid an answer as "both are true", in that both of those statements are meaningful - the latter is true if the second box contains the key, and the former is true if the second box does not contain the key. The jester should have evaluated the probabilty that the problem was meant to be solvable and the probability that the problem was not meant to be solvable, given that the problem is not solvable, which is an assessment of the king's ability at puzzle-devising and the king's desire to kill the jester.
It is also provable that we cannot assign a probabilty of 1 or 0 to any statement's truth (including tautologies), since we must have some function from which truth and falsity are defined, and specifying both an input and an output (a statement and its truth value) changes the function we use. If a statement is assigned a truth-value except by the rules of whatever logical system we pick, the logical system fails and we cannot draw any inferences at all. A system with a definition of truth, a set of thruth-preserving operations and at least one axiom must always be meaningless - the assumption of the axiom's truth is not a truth-preserving operation, and neither is the assumption that our truth-preserving operations are truth-preserving. Axiomatic logic works only if we accept the possibility that the axioms might be false and that our reasoning might be flawed - you can't argue based on the truth of A without either allowing arguments based on ~A or including "A" in your definition of truth. In other words, axiomatic logic can't be applied to reality with certainty - we would end up like the jester, asserting that reality must be wrong. As a consequence of the above, defining "true" as "reflecting an observable underlying reality" implies that all meaningful statements must have observable consequences.
The argument above applies to itself. The last sentence applies to itself and the paragraph before that. The last sentence... (If I acquire the karma to post articles, I'll probably write one explaining this in more detail, assuming anyone's interested.)
In response to
Applause Lights
Alas, for most audiences I think you would find no one laughing even after an entire applause light speech.
I tried this for my valedictoral speech and I gave up after about 15 seconds due to the laughter.
My preferred method is to use long sentences, to speak slowly and seriously, with great emphasis, and to wave my hands in small circles as I speak. If you don't speak to this audience regularly, it is also a good idea to emphasise how grateful you are to be asked to speak on such an important occasion (and it is a very important occasion...). You get bonus points for using the phrase "just so chuffed", especially if you use it repeatedly (a technique I learned from my old headmaster, who never expressed satisfaction in any other way while giving speeches).
I also recommend this technique, this way of speaking, to anyone who wishes to wind up, by which I mean annoy or irritate, a family member. It's quite effective when used consistently, even if you only do it for a minute or two. Don't you agree?
In response to
The Futility of Emergence
As Eliezer requested, I offer my view on what emergence isn't: emergence is not an explanation. When I say that a phenomenon is emergent, I am using a shorthand to say that I understand the basic rules, but I can't form even a simple model of how they result in the phenomenon.
Take, for example, Langton's Ant. The ant crawls around on an infinite grid of black and white squares, turning right at the centre of each white square and left ant the centre of each black square, and flipping the colour of the square it's in each time it turns.
The first few hundred steps create simple patterns that are often symmetric, but after that the patterns Langton's Ant produces become pseudorandom. If left to run for around 10000 steps, the Ant builds a highway - that is, it falls into a pattern of 104 of steps, and at the end of each cycle, it has moved diagonally and the cycle repeats. After millions of steps, the grid has a diagonal streak across it. As far as we know, the Ant always builds a highway.
Highways are emergent by the definition I use - that is, I know exactly how Langton's Ant works, and therefore, in theory, know why it builds a highway, but I can't form a model of its behaviour that I can actually use. I simply do not have a good enough brain to actually run Langton's Ant. By this definition, conciousness is an emergent phenomenon (I know it's caused by neurons, but I have no idea how) but the behaviour of gases is not (I know the ideal gas law and its predictions seem reasonable if I imagine a manageable number of molecules bumping about).
By my definition, emergent is much like blue. "It's emergent!" and "It's blue!" are both mysterious answers if I asked for an explanation, but useful answers if I asked for a description.
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Anyone else willing to share some specifics or can you expand some more on this? I'm still not past compulsory lectures, and I'd like to know how people keep their mind sharp secretly inside their skulls when everything moves so slowly you'd want to put time on fast forward. I usually review Anki cards, but that's not always possible.
What kinds of puzzles would be generally useful not just to programmers and other math oriented people? Mental arithmetic to a point is certainly useful for almost anyone.
Ask lots and lots of questions. Ask for more detail whenever you're told something interesting or confusing. The other advantages of this strategy are that the lecturers know who you are (good for references) and that all the extra explanations are of the bits you didn't understand.