You make a quick statement at the end about how Kurzweil does better than random chance. But I wonder how we'd assess that? I'd guess that, if he's getting 50% correct or weakly correct, he's doing better than random chance because many (most?) of his claims are far-fetched.

I've thought of a way to test this, although it will take another ten years:

Kurzweil makes a bunch of predictions about what will happen by 2023. Then you have a bunch of non-experts decide which of his predictions they agree with. After 10 years, we can measure how much better Kurzweil did than the non-experts.

Hello all -

My name is Colin, and I am a long time lurker / RSS reader. Thanks for posting this welcome message, as it gave me motivation to finally get registered.

I stumbled onto LW from Eliezer Yudkowsky's "An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem", which I found when trying to explain to my mother what I was up to in graduate school, and why I was so excited about it. I have been interested in science and epistemology for as long as I can remember, so finding that there are principled ways to reason about uncertainty was pretty amazing to me.

I most enjoy the LW articles about the application of careful reasoning to personal decision making, as that is something I constantly struggle with. I enjoy being a Bayesian at work (sonar signal processing), but have more trouble at home. For example, I have a constant internal debate about riding my motorcycle, as it is simultaneously the most fun and dangerous of my activities. It is much harder to do the math when there aren't numbers...

Thank you for all the interesting posts!