Zaphod: kind of funny, given the many foreign words in English - ennui, weltschmerz, melancholy etc.

> 1) Procrastinating until the last moment to actually do the work (you have never heard of students doing that, have you?) :-). This is a common reason that no matter how long people are given to complete a task, they do not complete it on time, or do so at the last minute.

David, I think you're kind of missing the point here. The question is whether students could predict their projects' actual completion time; they're not trying to predict project completion time given a hypothetical version of themselves which didn't procrastinate.

If they aren't self-aware enough to know they procrastinate and to take that into account - their predictions are still bad, no matter *why* they're bad. (And someone on the outside who is told that in the past the students had finished -1 days before the due date will just shrug and say: 'regardless of whether they took so long because of procrastination, or because of Parkinson's law, or because of some other 3rd reason, I have no reason to believe they'll finish early *this* time.' And they'd be absolutely correct.)

It's like a fellow who predicts he won't fall off a cliff, but falls off anyway. 'If only that cliff hadn't been there, I wouldn't've fallen!' Well, duh. But you still fell.

Tom: I agree. The last _Dungeons & Discourse_ comic merely had Kimiko as a logical positivist.

TGGP: why are you opposed to the idea that we may want to retain parts of pain?

If we could get rid of the 'painfulness' of pain, and keep the informative part of pain, that'd be ideal. With no pain at all, we're in the situation of someone with nerve damage who might lose a limb to gangrene when she accidentally damages something but doesn't notice it. (Anyone for _The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever_?)

Painless pain isn't all that strange an idea:

'The second pain pathway is a much more recent scientific discovery. It runs parallel to the sensory pathway, but isn't necessarily rooted in signals from the body. The breakthrough came when neurologists discovered a group of people who, after a brain injury, were no longer bothered by pain. They still felt the pain, and could accurately describe its location and intensity, but didn't seem to mind it at all. The agony wasn't agonizing.

This strange condition - it's known as pain asymbolia - results from damage to a specific subset of brain areas, like the amygdala, insula and anterior cingulate cortex, that are involved in the processing of emotions. As a result, these people are missing the negative feelings that normally accompany our painful sensations. Their muted response to bodily injury demonstrates that it is our feelings about pain - and not the pain sensation itself - that make the experience of pain so awful. Take away the emotion and a stubbed toe isn't so bad.' http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2009/01/back_pain.php

Shard: it's a theodicy; specifically, I think it's a divine plan theodicy ( https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Theodicy#God.27s_divine_plan_is_good_.E2.80.94_no_theodicy_is_needed ). (This isn't surprising, given Wolfe's intellectual interests.)

In this blog context, I suppose one could argue, it is a suggestion that it would not necessarily be a bad thing for a superintelligence to simulate humans/sentient-beings in unpleasant or unhappy situations if the dis-utilities of the simulated humans are not merely very much tinier than the utilities the superintelligence gets from the results of the simulation.

Doug S.: do you have any links to that? As described, it sounds like you're plagiarizing Borges...

Patri: Yes, I too thought of the Algernon principle when reading Bostrom's paper; I've never seen that exact phrase used in any formal work (although the Red Queen principle is similar), but I know I've seen people reference informally the 'Flowers for Algernon principle' or just 'the Algernon principle'.

'Buller is well known in the community he is attacking for misrepresenting the claims of the literature, ignoring evidence that contradicts his views, and generally engaging in academic malpractice. (He also doesn't understand the most basic principle in evolutionary biology, adaptationism.) Responses to these criticisms, which he has made before, are gathered here:

http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/buller08.htm'

Another good link from the SciAm comments is http://www.pitt.edu/~machery/papers/MAchery_Barrett_%202006_Buller.pdf

Hm, another Tsukihime quote. I wonder if perhaps Eliezer should one day do A Seed AI programmer's guide to Anime"? :)

For anyone wondering where the quote is from: Morisato-san is Keiichi Morisato of the anime/manga franchise _Oh My Goddess!_, and the speaker is Belldandy.