I'm going to go out and state that the chosen example of "middle school students should wear uniforms" fails the prerequisite of "Confidence in the existence of objective truth", as do many (most?) "should" statements.
I strongly believe that there is no objectively true answer to the question "middle school students should wear uniforms", as the truth of that statement depends mostly not on the understanding of the world or the opinion about student uniforms, but on the interpretation of what the "should" means.
For example, "A policy requiring middle school students to wear uniforms is beneficial to the students" is a valid topic of discussion that can uncover some truth, and "A policy... (read more)
The most important decisions are before starting a war, and there the mistakes have very different costs. Overestimating your enemy results in peace (or cold war) which basically means that you just lose out on some opportunistic conquests but underestimating your enemy results in a bloody, unexpectedly long war that can disrupt you for a decade or more - there are many nice examples of that in 20th century history.
"Are we political allies, or enemies?" is rather orthogonal to that - your political allies are those whose actions support your goals and your political enemies are those whose actions hurt your goals.
For example, a powerful and popular extreme radical member of the "opposite" camp that has conclusions that you disagree with, uses methods you disagree with, and is generally toxic and spewing hate - that's often a prime example of your political ally whose actions incite the moderate members of society to start supporting you and focusing on your important issues instead of something else. The existance of such a pundit is important to you, you want them to keep... (read more)
The difference is that there are many actions that help other people but don't give an appropriate altruistic high (because your brain doesn't see or relate to those people much) and there are actions that produce a net zero or net negative effect but do produce an altruistic high.
The built-in care-o-meter of your body has known faults and biases, and it measures something often related (at least in classic hunter-gatherer society model) but generally different from actually caring about other people.
An interesting followup to your example of an oiled bird deserving 3 minutes of care that came to mind:
Let's assume that there are 150 million suffering people right now, which is a completely wrong random number but a somewhat reasonable order-of-magnitude assumption. A quick calculation estimates that if I dedicate every single waking moment of my remaining life to caring about them and fixing the situation, then I've got a total of about 15 million care-minutes.
According to even the best possible care-o-meter that I could have, all the problems in the world cannot be totally worth more than 15 million care-minutes - simply because there aren't any more of them to allocate. And in a fair allocation, the average suffering person 'deserves' 0.1 care-minutes of my time, assuming that I don't leave anything at all for the oiled birds. This is a very different meaning of 'deserve' than the one used in the post - but I'm afraid that this is the more meaningful one.
I'd read it as an acknowledgement that any intelligence has a cost, and if your food is passive instead of antagonistic, then it's inefficient (and thus very unlikely) to put such resources into outsmarting it.
If animal-complexity CNS is your criteria, then humans + octopuses would be a counterexample, as urbilaterals wouldn't be expected to have such a system, and the octopus intelligence has formed separately.
A gold-ingot-manufacturing-maximizer can easily manufacture more gold than exists in their star system by using arbitrary amounts of energy to create gold, starting with simple nuclear reactions to transmute bismuth or lead into gold and ending with direct energy to matter to gold ingots process.
Furthermore, if you plan to send copies-of-you to N other systems to manufacture gold ingots there, as long as there is free energy, you can send N+1 copies-of-you. A gold ingot manufacturing rate that grows proportionally to time^(n+1) is much faster than time^n, so sending N copies wouldn't be maximizing.
And a third point is that if it's possible that somewhere in the universe there are some ugly bags... (read more)
Dolphins are able to herd schools of fish, cooperating to keep a 'ball' of fish together for a long time while feeding from it.
However, taming and sustained breeding is a long way from herding behavior - it requires long term planning for multi-year time periods, and I'm not sure if that has been observed in dolphins.
I'm stuck wondering on a peculiar question lately - which are the useful areas of AI study? What got me thinking is the opinion occasionally stated (or implied) by Eliezer here that performing general AI research might likely have negative utility, due to indirectly facilitating a chance of unfriendly AI being developed. I've been chewing on the implications of this for quite a while, as acceptance of these arguments would require quite a change in my behavior.
Right now I'm about to start my CompSci PhD studies soon, and had initially planned to focus on unsupervised domain-specific knowledge extraction from the internet, as my current research background is mostly with narrow AI issues in... (read more)
A RSS feed for new posts is highly desirable - I don't generally go to websites "polling" for new information that may or may not be there unless e.g. I'm returning to a discussion that I had yesterday, so a "push mechanism" e.g. RSS is essential to me.