Robin, I think people tend to be enthusiastic when an idea they've known on a more or less intuitive level for a long time is laid out eloquently, and in a way they could see relaying to their particular audience. It's a form of relief, maybe.

So it's not so much "I like it because I agree with it," it's more "I like it because I knew it before but I could never explain it that well."

/unscientific guessing

You should ask those people what a cult is. They won't be able to answer, and they may just realize that their question was nonsense to begin with.

Maybe I'll take up the mantle of adversary, Eli, when the circumstances are right. You are far ahead, but I think I can catch up. Who else will do learn and over take, instead of idly chatting?

That bay area meetup sounds fun, but I'll only be in town from the 20th to the 26th. I'll look out if you decide to change the time!

I've thought that the single best thing that could happen our species is a hostile alien invasion (short of electronic transcendence, that is).

I don't feel this in/out group bias very strongly -- so I think it's possible to eliminate the mentality under certain circumstances. The question becomes, what are those circumstances, and how can they be reliably recreated?

Tibba, when you are in a bar, do you see an attractive person and say to yourself, "I think I'll initiate sexualized body language, so that I can mate with that person, thereby increasing the frequency of my genes in future generations"?

There is another post addressing your incorrect objection, but I can't remember what it's called, maybe someone else can dig it up.

Very good post -- I think it'd be helpful to have a series of examples of knowledge being regenerated. Then people could really get your idea and use it.

Unknown, you're making the assumption that the entity or entities in question will continue to replicate in a fundamentally similar manner to biological organisms, and I think that's a flawed assumption. My person bias is toward believing that an AI would not so much replicate, as envelope. Even if I am wrong, Eliezer's previous points about our concept of intelligence being a very small portion of the space of possible intelligences holds here.

Do you think your AI research has implications for this situation? It seems to me that going from our idiot god, toward self-engineering intelligence is a step up by an order of magnitude, so that such a "metaengineer" could, in fact, choose to optimize for species survival, or some other virtue that it chose.

I think the notion of "species" for a superintelligence doesn't really follow because I don't see the idea of "individual" surviving unambiguously in such a scenario, but I think my question still makes some sense: if evolution kills its creations by selecting for short term individual fitness at the expense of the species, do you think the next step of life, having been intelligently designed, will change the nature of that problem entirely?

I think I can shed some light on her behavior. In the view of religious people in the mystical traditions which paganism tries to emulate (with varying degrees of success, but that's beside the point), the world is vast and beckoning, yet our faculties are barely adequate to scratch the surface.

A mystic, or even a skeptic, sees our thoughts and perceptions of the world as metaphors in themselves, which become more and more deeply abstracted. Our vision and sense of space has a "metaphorical" relationship to the actual, physical reality that we find ourselves in. In the same sense, language and mathematics (math is a subset of language, but I thought it was worth singling out) have a metaphorical relationship to the raw universe.

The point of mysticism is to snap one's consciousness out of the notion that what you experience in day to day living can be trusted, and it calls for the mystic to look more closely at what experience really is: a useful metaphor for what is actually taking place in the universe around us.

So it seems that what this woman was trying to do was at least two "layers" deep. The first, most obvious layer, is that she was emphasizing the ridiculousness of taking the story literally, to force the audience to consider it as a useful metaphor. The deeper message she was conveying by making it clear that what she was saying was not to be taken literally, was a wake up call. It was a call for the audience to think in a fundamentally different way: not only is this creation myth a metaphor representing psychological and physical phenomena, but those phenomena themselves must be examined as metaphors.

She was trying to train the audience members' brains to think mystically. And appropriately enough she did it in an abstract, almost metaphorical sort of way, that the concrete thinkers here totally missed. Biases abound!