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Heaven is being perfect.
(Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull)
In response to
High Challenge
Jonathan Livingston Seagull doggedly pursues his passion, improving continuously, and as he does so, the needs and limits of his body fall away. By flying, he no longer needs to eat. By flying, he no longer needs to age. By flying, he no longer needs to die. Richard Bach allows his character to surpass realistic diminishing returns, distractions, and danger.
That, uh... that sounds pretty good.
Now consider a similar-sounding stereotype: "Men are physically stronger than women". Think that's fixable by different expectations?
While some stereotypes reflect cultural expectations, some reflect biological reality.
Strength is determined by biology and behavior; the stereotype reflects both biological reality and cultural expectations. Note that boys are/were expected to be stronger than girls even before puberty actually creates a meaningful biological gap...
In response to
LW's take on nutrition?
Largest effects with the smallest error bars around them: Processed meats bad, fruits and vegetables good, fish and nuts good.
Everything else is significantly smaller effect size or large error bars AFAIK.
Can we safely tack "processed sugar bad" onto that list?
In response to
comment
by
on
How to Avoid the Conflict Between Feminism and Evolutionary Psychology?
Robin Hanson's argument for why cuckoldry is as bad as rape was based on a survey of men showing that most would rather be raped than cuckolded
And I guess most women would rather be cuckolded than be raped. So?
In response to
comment
by
[deleted]
on
How to Avoid the Conflict Between Feminism and Evolutionary Psychology?
Being cuckolded (in this context) means unknowingly raising not-your-genetic-offspring while believing it is your own. A male partner's infidelity can't cuckold a woman.
But I imagine most mothers would be horrified to discover, ten years after the fact, that their newborn was stolen and replaced with someone else's, and the child they've devoted so much to is not actually their genetic offspring. A brief bout of Google indicates that hospital baby swaps can spark multimillion dollar lawsuits, sometimes successful...
Me, 60%.
Well, yes, if you make the test non-adaptive, it's (exponentially) easier to pass. For example, if you limit the "conversation" to a game of chess, it's already possible. But those aren't the "full" Turing Test; they're domain-specific variants. Your criticism would only apply to the latter.
Are AI players actually indistinguishable from humans in Chess? Could an interrogator not pick out consistent stylistic differences between equally-ranked human and AI players?
...d-do I get the prize?
You have, in the local currency.
So, you are saying that free will is an illusion due to our limited predictive power?
...hmm.
If we perfectly understood the decision-making process and all its inputs, there'd be no black box left to label 'free will.' If instead we could perfectly predict the outcomes (but not the internals) of a person's cognitive algorithms... so we know, but don't know how we know... I'm not sure. That would seem to invite mysterious reasoning to explain how we know, for which 'free will' seems unfitting as a mysterious answer.
That scenario probably depends on how it feels to perform the inerrant prediction of cognitive outcomes, and especially how it feels to turn that inerrant predictor on the self.
In response to
comment
by
on
For progress to be by accumulation and not by random walk, read great books
So the easy answers might be:
Ben Bernanke
Mark Gertler
Micheal Wooford
Greg Mankiw
Its not clear to me why macro-economists are rightly subject to such criticism. To me its like asking a mathematician, "If you're so good at logical reasoning why didn't you create the next killer app"
Understanding how the economy works and applying that knowledge to a particular task are completely different.
In response to
comment
by
on
For progress to be by accumulation and not by random walk, read great books
"If you're so good at logical reasoning why didn't you create the next killer app"
'Designing the next killer app' seems to rely heavily on predicting what people will want, which is many steps and a lot of knowledge away from logical reasoning.
In response to
A Prodigy of Refutation
"And I wonder if that advice will turn out not to help most people, until they've personally blown off their own foot, saying to themselves all the while, correctly, "Clearly I'm winning this argument.""
I fell into this pattern for quite a while. My basic conception was that, if everyone presented their ideas and argued about them, the best ideas would win. Hence, arguing was beneficial for both me and the people on transhumanist forums- we both threw out mistaken ideas and accepted correct ones. Eliezer_2006 even seemed to support my position, with Virtue #5. It never really occurred to me that the best of everyone's ideas might not be good enough.
"It is Nature that I am facing off against, who does not match Her problems to your skill, who is not obliged to offer you a fair chance to win in return for a diligent effort, who does not care if you are the best who ever lived, if you are not good enough."
Perhaps we should create an online database of open problems, if one doesn't exist already. There are several precedents (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_problems). So far as I know, if one wishes to attack open problems in physics/chemistry/biology/comp. sci./FAI, the main courses of action are to attack famous problems (where you're expected to fail and don't feel bad if you do), or to read the educational literature (where the level of problems is pre-matched to the level of the material).
Seems like idea-fights between humans result in vastly more effort put into the fight than into the idea.
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"Local rationalist learns to beat akrasia using this one weird trick!"