LG

I'm guessing that merely having written similar material will not stop you from publishing, but it seems like a grey area and I am not an expert. I'd ask an agent or a publisher directly about the whole situation, and I'd do it sooner rather than later, because I'd hate to see any effort wasted.

My wife is an author with an MFA in Creative Writing, and advanced degrees in math, who has published both fiction and math textbooks, so I vicariously know a lot about publishing. The potential problem that exists with your otherwise reasonable plan is that many (all?) publishers will balk at pre published material. You're talking about material that's here, in ebooks, and on lulu, before it ever passes over the publisher's desk -- that could be a big problem, you need to look into it.

There's a common literary technique used in most storytelling in which the author writes alternating "up" and "down" scenes -- it provides pacing and context; it also allows us time to digest the "up" scenes.

It seems to me that the technique is appropriate here -- it might be worth making a goal for yourself to write a mathy post, then to follow up with a post on the same topic but without any math in it at all, except maybe references to the previous post. That would be an interesting exercise for you, I think. It's supposed ... (read more)

"You can't judge the usefulness of a definition without specifying what you want it to be useful for."

This was going to be my point:

"Once upon a time it was thought that the word "fish" included dolphins. Now you could play the oh-so-clever arguer, and say, "The list: {Salmon, guppies, sharks, dolphins, trout} is just a list - you can't say that a list is wrong. I can prove in set theory that this list exists. So my definition of fish, which is simply this extensional list, cannot possibly be 'wrong' as you claim."

Or ... (read more)

Cal, the whole point of the post is to introduce the idea of the prototype model versus Aristotelian model of cognition. The stated purpose of the blog is to be at least 50% accessible to the public, and the posts are headed toward amalgamation into a popular book, not a technical book. The point wasn't to rigorously support or defend the prototype model as such -- I would imagine that that has been done in many other places (maybe Eli could post some sources for your research). The point here was to expose it to a larger audience.

In the light of the large... (read more)

Lee, you're confusing the map with the territory, to borrow Eli's phrasing. Percentages are just a convenient way to label the ratio, or difference, between values, but they are not precisely the difference, just an arbitrary representation.

They can moderate comments, but Cal occasionally makes a (cantankerously phrased) good point, so I doubt that they will.

I wish, but I'm not in the Bay Area until the summer probably. Maybe next time!

This is interesting. When I read the first post in this series about Allais, I thought it was a bit dense compared to other writing on OB. It occurred to me that you had violated your own rule of aiming very, very low in explaining things.

As it turns out, that post has generated two more posts of re-explanation, and a fair bit of controversy.

When you write that book of yours, you might want to treat these posts as a first draft, and go back to your normal policy of simple explanations 8)

Ian, your God argument doesn't follow:

1) Objects behave in certain, predictable ways 2) God can make objects behave arbitrarily 4) No objects behave arbitrarily 5) There is no God

Hidden argumentation:

3) Therefore, God WILL make things behave arbitrarily

You can't assume that an omnipotent God will behave in any particular way.

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 evo... (read more)

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 fi... (read more)