I hold the opinion that one should be curious about everything but some things only superficially. If you dig deep into something, it changes the experience of it. There's something to be said about being intimately familiar with a subject.

Forcing yourself to be curious about every single thing that crosses your path is a good way to make yourself uncomfortable. I consider discomfort of that kind to be good practice when it comes to confronting the possibility I may be wrong about something.

I guess I have trouble living up to that ideal, but at the same time I have learned to be uncomfortable with being too comfortable. I worry that too much anti-curiosity would lead to too much comfort.

but it seems that according to lesswrong doctrine, they are above the sanity waterline while my first friend group is below.

No. Having religous beliefs places an upper bound on how rational a person could be, past a certain level of rationality, a person will necessarily discard religion. But this does not mean that any particular atheist became an atheist by achieving that level of rationality. Most have not.

The article Raising the Sanity Waterline proposes not directly arguing against religion, but to instead teach the skills that would enable people to level up to the point where they systematically reject religion on their own, in part because just getting someone to reject religion does not actually make them more rational.

For the record, I heard that, outside of chess, Bobby Fisher was a grade-A nutcase.

My brother has used Dvorak for the past 10 years.

It's easy to learn. You can still retain qwerty proficiency. It does feel nicer for typing English. It doesn't help programming. It's annoying to use multiple/public computers.

There are quite a few layouts that may be better than Dvorak. But probably not by enough to justify the extra effort of choosing one.

Not without some changes; yes - and: not part of the human economy.

Various machines certainly behave in goal-directed ways - and so have what can usefully be described as "vested interests" - along the lines described here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vested_interest

Can you say what you mean by "interests"? Probably any difference of opinion here is a matter of differing definitions - and so is not terribly interesting.

Re: "The fact that machines are not exclusively on our side simply means that they do not perfectly fulfill our values."

That wasn't what I meant - what I meant is that they don't completely share human values - not that they don't fulfill them.

Retroviral genetic engineering once we know what genes control rationality.

It has the advantage that it would be in people's self-interest to do this. I suspect that some kind of individually beneficial modification is the solution.

Re: "before we were assuming that the Robots (ems) were consumers. Here we're assuming the opposite, that humans and only humans consume."

More accurately, Martin Ford was assuming that - and I was pointing out that trucks, fridges, washing machines, etc. are best modelled as consumers too - since they consume valuable low-entropy resources - and spit out useless waste products.

The idea that machines don't participate in the economy as consumers is not a particularly useful one. Machines - and companies - buy things, sell things, consume things - and generally do participate. Those machines that don't buy things have things bought for them on their behalf (by companies or humans) - and the overall effect on economic throughput is much the same as if the machines were buying things themselves.

If you really want to ignore direct consumption by machines - and pretend that the machines are all working exclusively for humans, doing our bidding precisely - then you have GOT to account for people and companies buying things for the machines that they manange - or your model badly loses touch with reality.

In practice, it is best to just drop the assumption. Computer viruses / chain letters are probably the most obvious illustration of the problem with the idea that machines are exclusively "on our side", labour on our behalf, and have no interests of their own.

The mis-handling of this whole issue is one of the problems with "The Lights in the Tunnel".

Re: "If the average consumer is unemployed and has no income, he is obviously not going to be purchasing stuff for his machines. In fact, ownership of the machines will concentrate into a shrinking elite as machines take the jobs of average people."

Sure - but that was not the point which you were making that I was criticising:

You argued that unemployment would mean that spending would decline - and the economy would plummet or crash.

Whereas a more accurate analysis suggests that those in charge of the machines will ramp up their spending to feed the demands of their machines - thereby contributing to expenditure in the economy. In other words, the machines will buy and sell things - if not directly, then via companies or humans. This is not really a "jump into the stuff of science fiction" - people regularly buy things to "feed" their machines today.

The machines act as consumers - in that they consume things - even if there is a human or corporation who is buying the things involved somewhere. So: the whole idea that the economy will collapse because nobody is earning money and buying things falls down. Machines will still be earning money and buying things - even if they will be doing it by proxy agents in the form of corporate or human masters.

This idea is a fairly central one in "The Lights in the Tunnel" - and it is based on unsound thinking and bad economics :-(

Re: "Everything produced by the human economy is ultimately consumed by individual human beings."

That seems like a rather muddled way of looking at the situation. Machines have needs too. They slurp up gas, oil, electricity, raw materials. They consume - and excrete - along with all other agents in the biosphere. Companies act as non-human consumers too. It could be argued that machines and companies are slaves to humanity (to some extent - though the inverse perspective - that they are using us to manipulate the machine world into existence - also has considerable validity) - but that doesn't mean that we consume their waste products.

Re: "If too few people have the ability to purchase END products, the mass market economy will collapse."

No: the issue is not the number of human consumers, but their total spending power. Rich minorites commanding huge squads of machine minions could generate a large demand for resources - and the also ability to produce those resources - thus lubricating the economy very effectively.

Of course in a human democracy, voters would try hard to ramp up corporation taxes - in order to resist such huge inequality - but that is another issue entirely.

To test this, you'd need to somehow identify a group of patients that were going to receive some kind of very specific brain surgery, and give them a pre- and post- rationality test.

Rationality seems more like a way of reasoning and a higher level trait than these 'specialized' forms of intelligence however.

Maybe. Actually, I think that the dominant theory around here is that rationality is actually the result of an atrophied motivated-cognition module, so perfect rationality is not a question of creating a new brain module, but subtracting off the distorting mechanisms that we are blighted with.