Clarification: Just yudkowsky after 2003 or yudkowsky and bostrom together, perhaps sharing the same mistake? It would be usefull to know so I don't make the same mistake, et al.

God could be the ultimate supervillian. Except it would make for a very small 'in' group.

So what is your response to someone like Hitler? Assuming the thug won't listen? Die? Run? I mean before the AGI goes "phoom".

The part about the ontological distinctiveness between cognitive and evolutionary causes reminds me of my old English professor who mixed the two. While I knew it was wrong, I didn't have a label. He believed that nature had a kind of memory through natural selection.

Hmm, well this is getting interesting from a layman's perspective. Time to crank up that expert detector with technical explanations...

Or perhaps it isn't worth your time? I won't understand it anyway. Sigh, back to my pre-cal homework.

In the meantime, there is some irony to be found in this link:

http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2005/10/on_the_beach_wi.html

Essentially Gould is misrepresented as a creationist by creationists! Or perhaps in the less extreme conclusion, he was agnostic about creationism.

I could agree Jim about the question begging part if you haven't opened a neurology/neuroscience textbook.

You might as well have said: "Using materialist assumptions to explain chemistry is question begging. Of course christianity is incompatible with the laws of chemistry when one does not come from a materialist perspective."

So when a christian presuppositionalist claims we can only know anything because God exists, your answer would be? I mean to say their is clearly no epistemology which explains clearly and technically intelligence itself. What is the your answer to the assertion: you have no epistemology but God is the basis of epistemology? I don't agree at all, my question is simply how to respond since they assume one needs to justify logic itself.

Eliezer Yudkowsky said: "Just because you do not know how the trick works, does not mean the trick is powered by magic pixie dust."

I agree yet this won't convinve a sophisticated right-wing Christian (or Jew, or Muslim, etc).

I knew you would come through Constant simply by reading your name.

Constant, the obviousness felt by both disagreeing parties almost never changes. How many formal debates actually end with the other person changing their mind? I would take it further and say formal debate is usually worthless too.

In the meantime where are your error bars? I bet somewhere there is a fundy who includes error bars.