It wasn't just the media:

Take the response to the avian flu outbreak in 2005. Dr David Nabarro, the UN systems coordinator for human and avian influenza, declared: ‘I’m not, at the moment, at liberty to give you a prediction on [potential mortality] numbers.’ He then gave a prediction on potential mortality numbers: ‘Let’s say, the range of deaths could be anything from five million to 150million.’ Nabarro should have kept his estimating prowess enslaved: the number of cases of avian flu stands at a mere 498, of which just 294 have proved fatal.

...

On 11 June 2009, just over a month after the initial outbreak in Mexico, the World Health Organisation finally announced that swine flu was now worthy of its highest alert status of level six, a global pandemic. Despite claims that there was no need to panic, that’s exactly what national health authorities did. In the UK, while the Department of Health was closing schools, politicians were falling over themselves to imagine the worst possible outcomes: second more deadly waves of flu, virus mutation – nothing was too far-fetched for it not to become a public announcement. This was going to be like the great Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-20. But worse.

However, just as day follows nightmares, the dawning reality proved to be rather more mundane. By March 2010, nearly a full year after the H1N1 virus first began frightening the British government, the death toll stood not in the hundreds of thousands, but at 457. To put that into perspective, the average mortality rate for your common-or-garden flu is 600 deaths per year in a non-epidemic year and between 12,000 and 13,800 deaths per year in an epidemic year. In other words, far from heralding the imagined super virus, swine flu was more mild than the strains of flu we’ve lived with, and survived, for centuries. Reflecting on the hysteria which characterised the WHO’s response to Mexico, German politician Dr Wolfgang Wodarg told the WHO last week: ‘What we experienced in Mexico City was very mild flu which did not kill more than usual – which killed even less than usual.’

Idle observation:

Clippy gets consistently voted up on a lot of his comments because we find him amusing, and rarely gets downvoted because very few of his comments are substantive. We will end up looking extremely silly to new members if he gets enough karma to put him into the list of top contributors.

So... I guess it depends whether we pitch ourselves as shiny fun community or serious rationalist Singularitarians as to whether this is actually an issue.

This question arises when I consider the moral status of intelligent agents. If I encounter a morally-significant dormant Turing machine with no input devices, do I need to turn it on?

If yes, notice that state N of the machine can be encoded as the initial state of the machine plus the number N. Would it suffice to just start incrementing a counter and say that the machine is running?

If I do not need to turn anything on, I might as well destroy the machine, because the Turing machine will still exist in a Platonic sense, and the Platonic machine won't notice if I destroy a manifestation of it.

David Allen notes that consciousness ought to be defined relative to a context in which it can be interpreted; somewhat similarly, Jacob Cannell believes that consciousness needs some environment in order to be well-defined.

I think the answer to my moral question is that the rights of an intelligent agent can't be meaningfully decomposed into a right to exist and a right to interact with the world.

For me, Go helped to highlight certain temptations to behave irrationally, which I think can carry over to real life.

One was the temptation to avoid thinking about parts of the board where I'd recently made a mistake.

And if I played a poor move and my opponent immediately refuted it, there was a temptation to try to avoid seeming foolish by dreaming up some unlikely scheme I might have had which would have made the exchange part of the plan.

The first is certainly valid reasoning in Go, and I phrased it in a way that should make that obvious.

I agree.

But you can also phrase it as "I've spent so much effort trying to reach goal X that I'm committed now", which is almost never sound in real life.

I think that this phrasing significantly changes the meaning of what you said originally, which was:

if I don't achieve goal X I've lost the game anyway, so I might as well continue trying even though it's looking unlikely.

I interpret this as assigning +infinity utilons to winning the game, and asserting that goal X must be achieved to accomplish that. I think it's completely valid, but the goal structure in life is so much more complicated than it is in go that it doesn't really transfer.

Your rewording sounds more like the sunk costs fallacy to me, but I think that it's terrible reasoning in go as well as life.

And on point 2:

I think there's an implicit "and I surely haven't made a mistake as disastrous as a two point loss" in there.

Which would make it valid reasoning. It might not be useful reasoning for life in general (as it's much harder to tell if you made a mistake than it is in go) but I think it's still valid.

Go teaches: behave differently when you are winning - don't take risks, consolidate, play conservatively. Also, to figure out how you are doing - so you can adjust accordingly.

I find the concept of "aji" especially fascinating when it comes to Go. The word means roughly translated means something like "taste", and as a go concept it refers to set of possible moves and continuations that can dramatically alter the local situation. For example, if there is a weakness in the opponent formation somewhere on the board because of the mistake opponent just made, but the opponent is able to somehow defend it under direct attack, I would most likely play away from this weakness for now, and try to steer the game so that the aji surrounding that weakness could be used as much as possible.

If the weakness was a possibility of a cut, which would totally work if you could get move A, an influential move that looks at the center of the board and works fine for you, instead of reaping the benefits straight away(playing A so now you got a nice influential move while opponent has to protect), you'd most likely want to go and start a running fight elsewhere on the board, and try to steer the fight so that A becomes a crucial move in it, so then opponent would face a choice, protect the original weakness, the possibility of a cut, or protect this new running group.

Leaving aji open and trying to get as much out of it as possible is, for me, the core of the game, but unfortunately I can't see any equivalent in rationality directly. Anyone else, any ideas?

One form is "if I don't achieve goal X I've lost the game anyway, so I might as well continue trying even though it's looking unlikely".

Is that really the sunk costs fallacy? I think it's valid reasoning-- play the moves that give you the best chance of winning even if that chance is looking slimmer. I think the sunk costs fallacy is more like a failure to be flexible-- e.g., insisting on making some stones live when you could have a larger benefit elsewhere by sacrificing them. (And that thinking is punished quite harshly in go.)

Another form (for stronger players than me) is "if I play A, I will get a result that's two points worse than I could have had if I played B earlier, so I can rule A out."

I don't think that's sound reasoning; you could have made a mistake since having played B, and A might be the best current option. FWIW, I'm a reasonably strong go player - it's easy to lie with tewari analysis, which is what it sounds like you're talking about.

Interesting article!

I think you're overstating the difficulty of Go to computers. The latest wave of Monte Carlo programs -- when run on fast multicore machines -- are able to beat professionals with a modicum of handicap on 19x19, or at even games on 9x9; they're certainly now better than the average club player.

On the other hand, there are some ways of thinking which are useful for Go but not for real life. One example is that damaging my opponent is as good as working for myself.

Another example is that, between equal players, the sunk costs fallacy is sometimes sound reasoning in Go. One form is "if I don't achieve goal X I've lost the game anyway, so I might as well continue trying even though it's looking unlikely". Another form (for stronger players than me) is "if I play A, I will get a result that's two points worse than I could have had if I played B earlier, so I can rule A out."