As a part of public relations, I think it's important to keep tabs on how the Singularity and related topics (GAI, FAI, life-extension, etc.) are presented in the culture at large. I've posted links to such things in the past, but I think there should be a central clearinghouse, and a discussion-level post seems like the right place.
So: in the comments, post examples of references to Singularity-related topics that you've found, ideally with a link and a few sentences' description of what the connection is and how it's presented (whether seriously or as an object of ridicule, for instance).
There should probably be a similar post for rationality references, but let's see how this one goes first.
a meta-analysis of 15 studies
As a statistical aside, I see no strong reason to believe a meta-analysis should be any more convincing than a single, large, well-designed study. In fact, by mixing the results of rigorous studies in with the unrigorous ones, you're probably just diluting the signal to noise ratio.
I see no strong reason to believe a meta-analysis should be any more convincing than a single, large, well-designed study.
Does anyone claim it is? I thought the advantage of a meta-analysis was the cost savings of not having to do a new, large study.
I would not be surprised if at least 20% of published studies include results that were affected by at least one coding error.
My intuition is that this underestimates the occurrence, depending on the field. Let us define:
Then I'd assign over 80% to P(CE|SP).
My mom is a semi-retired neuroscientist, she's been telling me recently how appalled she's been with how many researchers around her are abusing standard stats packages in egregious ways. The trouble is that scientists have access to powerful software packages for data analysis but they often lack understanding of the concepts deployed in the packages, and consequently make absurd mistakes.
"Shooting yourself in the foot" is the occupational disease of programmers, and this applies even to non-career programmers, people who program as a secondary requirement of their job and may not even have any awareness that what they're doing is programming.
I strongly agree that you're more likely to get wrong results out of someone else's code than your own, because you tend to assume that they did their own error checking, and you also tend to assume that the code works the way you think it should (i.e. the way you would write it yourself), either or both of which may be false.
This is what led to my discovering a fairly significant error in my dissertation the day before I had to turn it in :) (Admittedly, self-delusion also played a role.)
Good point. Wicked also is an imperfect example because it was written for adults, unlike the examples in the grandparent.
I wonder if there's something different about the way (most) authors write books for children and (some) authors write books for adults - HP, Narnia, Star Wars, and Oz all had young audiences in mind. Most of the more morally complex movies mentioned in the grandparent were for adults. Do any of Stephen King's bestsellers have moral complexity?
I also wonder if those writing and creating works for children (if they do gravitate towards moral simplicity) have the correct understanding of what their audience wants? Of course, HP and Star Wars certainly broke out well beyond children, so maybe a lot of adults want moral simplicity too.
Speaking of media for children, I once read that the MPAA will not certify a film as "G" if it contains if it contains morally ambiguous characters, regardless of the sex, violence, language or drugs. Unfortunately I cannot find an internet citation for this (beyond the talk of "mature themes").
Have I ever remarked on how completely ridiculous it is to ask high school students to decide what they want to do with the rest of their lives and give them nearly no support in doing so?
Support like, say, spending a day apiece watching twenty different jobs and then another week at their top three choices, with salary charts and projections and probabilities of graduating that subject given their test scores? The more so considering this is a central allocation question for the entire economy?
Indeed, some of us spend 9 more years in school to postpone this decision. (In case you were wondering, it doesn't help.)
Modern designers have finally started to take account of this. In Mass Effect 2, you do almost all of your side-questing while you wait for your employer to gather information about the main problem. Once the party does get started, the game makes it emphatically clear that waiting any more than absolutely necessary is going to severely compromise your primary mission.
But does it actually punish you for waiting, or just threaten to? (I haven't gotten around to playing Mass Effect 2 yet.)
Similarly, if you're on a quest to save the world, you do side-quests to put it off as long as possible
I've explicitly made note this fact, that one should do quests in exactly reverse order of importance, in every cRPG I've ever played. Because often making progress on major quests will change the game (lock you out of an area, say, or kill an NPC) such that you can no longer complete some minor quests if you haven't done them already .
[From Wikipedia:}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_%28Middle-earth%29)
In The Lord of the Rings Tolkien writes that they breed slowly, for no more than a third of them are female, and not all marry; also, female Dwarves look and sound (and dress, if journeying — which is rare) so alike to Dwarf-males that other folk cannot distinguish them, and thus others wrongly believe Dwarves grow out of stone. Tolkien names only one female, Dís. In The War of the Jewels Tolkien says both males and females have beards.[18]
On the other hand, I suppose it's possible that if humans find Elves that much more beautiful than humans, maybe Dwarves would be affected the same way, though it seems less likely for them.
Yeah, as JamesAndrix alludes to (warning: extreme geekery), the Dwarves were created by Aulë (one of the Valar (Gods)) because he was impatient for the Firstborn Children of Iluvatar (i.e., the Elves) to awaken. So you might call the Dwarves Aulë's attempt at creating the Elves; at least, he knew what the Elves would look like (from the Great Song), so it's pretty plausible that he impressed in the Dwarves an aesthetic sense which would rank Elves very highly.
Please don't use all-caps; it makes your comment harder to read and it's considered shouting.
Out of curiosity, how do you feel about everlasting paperclips? Do you feel that all paperclips must eventually be destroyed, or do you limit the scope of your deathism to living things?
I believe D. is imitating the style of Terry Pratchett, who uses small-caps for his "Death" character. The full-size caps are a bit annoying, I agree.
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The Big Bang Theory, Episode 402.
Sheldon (the most socially atypical character on a show full of them) plans a program of life-extension so that he will last until the Singularity, which he projects to occur around 2060 and chiefly involve the uploading of human consciousness into machines (his roommate Leonard describes the latter as become a "freakish self-aware robot". By the end of the episode Sheldon seems to have given up on the plan as too inconvenient/inadvertently dangerous.