here

does the ability to pass for a human correlate with [qualities] which we vaguely describe as "intelligent" or "conscious"[?]

I always thought (and was very convinced in my belief, though I can't seem to think of a reason why now) that the Turing test was explicitly designed as a "sufficient" rather than a "necessary" kind of test. As in, you don't need to pass it to be "human-level", but if you do then you certainly are. (Or, more precisely, as long as we've established we can't tell, then who cares? With a similar sentiment for exactly what it was we're comparing for "human-level": it's something about how smarter we are than monkeys, we're not sure quite what it is, but we can't tell the difference, so you're in.) A brute-force, first-try, upper-bound sort of test.

But I get the feeling from some of the comments that it claims more than that (or maybe doesn't disclaim as much). Am I missing some literature or something?

you could ask it to make videos of itself skating or whatever

I don't think he meant it that way. I read it as "make a video montage of a meme" or the like. The point being that such a task exercises more elements of "human intelligence" than just chatting, like lexical and visual metaphors, perception of vision and movement, (at least a little bit of) imagination, planing and execution of a technical task, (presumably) using other software purposefully, etc. It is much harder to plan for and "fake" (whatever that means) all of that than to "fake" a text-only test with chat-bot techniques.

Of course, a blind (for instance) real man might not be able to do that particular task, but he will be able to justify that by being convincingly blind in the rest, and would be able to perform something analogous in other domains. (Music or even reciting something emphatically, or perhaps some tactile task that someone familiar with being blind might imagine.) The point I think is not to tie it to a particular sense or the body, but just to get a higher bandwidth channel for testing, one that would be so hard to fake in close to real time that you'd pretty much have to be smarter to do it.

Testing for consciousness seems to be so hard that text chat is not enough (or at least we're close to being better at faking it than testing for it), so I guess Stuart suggests we take advantage of the "in-built optimizations" that let us do stuff like fake and detect accents or infer distances from differences in apparent height (but is some contexts, status or other things). Things that we don't yet fake well, and even when we do, it's hard to mix and integrate them all.

I don't know about you, Romeo, as far as I can tell comparison to pornstars are also problematic for men, even discounting the roided to the gills gentlemen of the pornstar persuasion.

Which one is which, and how can you tell?

Context: I read Main much more than Discussion, due to time constraints and my perception that Discussion is less interesting in bulk. I tend to comment rarely, and thus I pay attention to those comments. Which means that something in Main is more likely to have comments from users like me than something in Discussion.

I’m not sure exactly what you meant, but I thought you meant Main gets more “casual” users and Discussion gets better, well, discussions because of the very active (non-casual) users are more predominant there.

My impression differs with regard to the latter, as I'd expect the very active posters to be mostly everywhere and the high-quality lurkers (which are "knowledgeable insiders" but comment rarely, and provide diversity to a discussion) are mostly in Main. It's probably true that we get more “newbies” in Main, but maybe the voting works better at hiding them for me.

For the record, before reading your comment I interpreted the two examples as "here are two extremes, please be more specific about where on this spectrum what you're describing falls", rather than "which of this two was it?"

(This is not to contradict your critique. On re-reading the original text I can see it's not explicitly saying either, I just interpreted differently. I only mean to make known to both the poster and you that (what I assume was) his intent was not opaque to all readers.)

On thinking of heels and lipstick, I think of ‘something people wear in places where they're looking for potential mates, such as nightclubs’,

OK, probably I've a skewed view because of my mom being dressier than average, and too little familiarity with white-collar workplaces and nightclubs.

Put differently (and, to my ear, more intuitively), time spent fixing bugs early has a high chance of being wasted because the part you fixed may not be needed after all.

Which is my experience, too, but then again I'm not writing software for space ships. I had the impression that space programs tend to be very well[1] planned in advance, and requirements change little once stuff actually starts to get built. (I'm saying this pretty much as an ignorant outsider, hoping to be corrected if I'm wrong.)

[1: Or at least meticulously, though looking at the apparent difficulty of the problems and the success rate I'd think "well" is deserved more often that in most endeavors.]

you'd have to replace the suit and tie with something like a muscle shirt and hair gel

In what way "muscle shirt and hair gel" are to men as "heels and lipstick" are to women?

(Not a rhetorical question. The first sounds like an exception and the second like a rule, and "suit and tie" also feels closer to a rule. I mean, mom usually wears heels and lipstick, and dad usually wears suits and ties. (For the record, I don't wear either.) I'm wondering where our intuitions diverge and why.)

Correct, as far as I know. Note that the "idea" did not mention that the dog was to be cryogenized using the poisonous stuff we have right now. (I.e., one "solution", or part of it, might be to invent a non-poisonous anti-crystal substance or procedure.)

Anyway, the point of my "suggestion" was not that this would be some kind of "least impossible" idea, nor necessarily the most useful one. I'm not sure if you noticed, but I entered several proposals, all of which are very unoriginal. Although they are serious suggestions in the spirit of the post, I picked those in particular as a kind of humorous comment to the five-step outline of the post: All three "ideas" have in fact been discussed... often... around here, and pretty popular in theory. The "comment" is that finding worthy impossible things to do is trivial, and putting that as the first two steps in a five-step list of "how to do the impossible" is somewhat silly, kind of an excuse not to reach the hard steps. (Humorously enough, one of the ideas is "Do everything on the final list that gets more than 10 upvotes"; as far as I can tell, nothing got 10 votes.)