= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
I think I have ADHD. What should I do now?
In response to
Open Thread, Apr. 20 - Apr. 26, 2015
What problems are your trying to solve? Knowing you have ADHD is useful because it offers insight into what solutions will work well. For example, it might offer suggestions as to what medications might produce useful results.
You see IR and all kinds of other emissions from all kinds of sources, what would distinguish artificial from natural?
IR from waste heat should cold to warm black bodies radiating a lot of heat over a large area. It should have relatively few spectral lines. It might look a bit like a brown dwarf, but the output from a normal star is huge compared to a brown dwarf, so it should look like a really huge brown dwarf, which our normal models don't offer a natural explanation for.
In response to
Astronomy, space exploration and the Great Filter
My guess is that the "filter" is at the point of life formation, but not in the way you describe. I am not sure we could detect an alien intelligence unless it left human-like artifacts. It would look largely "natural" to us. I've asked the question earlier on this forum, "how would we detect a generalized optimizer?" without relying on it leaving structures that look "artificial" to us. I have repeatedly pointed out that we don't have a good definition of "life", and that stars and galaxies tend to qualify under any definition that is not specifically tailored to carbon-based life forms.
So, my guess is, there is plenty of intelligent life everywhere, we just don't recognize it as such, because it is unimaginably different from our own, and we treat it as a natural process.
Why would you expect to not see infrared emissions from them?
Idea related to the clipboard, but combined with poker chips:
There is a stack of blank note cards on the table, and several pens/markers. If there's an existing discussion and you want to talk about an unrelated topic, you grab a notecard, write down the topic, and place it face up on the table. At any time, there may be several note cards on the table representing topics people want to talk about. Each person also has a poker chip (or a few) that they may place near a particular card, expressing their interest in talking about that topic. Poker chips are basically upvotes.
I like the index cards approach. I worry that the poker chips start making things distracting, which will discourage their use or reduce their effectiveness.
In response to
Cooperative conversational threading
One technique we've used with moderate success is to pass a clipboard around. People can jot down notes, or conversational ideas that are tangentially related or unrelated. Sometimes that provides a convenient way for someone else to say "hey, what's this thing you wrote down about?".
It also could let you list your three things to talk about in a breadth-first manner rather than talking about each one sequentially.
It probably sounds like a better idea than it is in practice; the clipboard gets stuck when holders get distracted, or people still refrain from bringing things up, or whatever. But you might try it out anyway!
In response to
Open Thread, Apr. 13 - Apr. 19, 2015
A new study suggests that experts may be less politically biased than non-experts at least in some limited circumstances. The study looked at lay people, law students, lawyers and judges, while giving them questions where their ideology might cause them to answer the questions differently even as a close reading would cause them to have the same answers. As one increased the expertise levels, there was less sign of ideological bias. There's a summary of the research here. The study itself can be found here. It should be interesting to see if this is replicated in similar ways either again in the legal context or with other professions.
This research suggests that for ideologically or politically involved topics, looking to expert opinion may be a good heuristic. On the other hand, it isn't always clear how to tell who should be an expert, and ideological gatekeepers could make it so that experts are already chosen from one set of ideologies.
Perhaps this offers a partial explanation for why judges do not always appear to follow the ideology of those who appointed them.
Do you have a precise definition of "ethical" in mind?
No. Don't need one either.
Where by "precise" I mean something roughly equivalent to a math paper.Without such a definition, how will you know the person in question is ethical?
By ordinary standards.. Eg, Einstein was more ethical than von Neuman.
With such a definition, how will you guarantee that the person in question meets it, will continue to meet it, etc.?
Since when did functional duplicates start diverging unaccountably?
How certain are you such a person exists?
I'm not talking about mathematically proveable ethics OR about superintelligence. I'm talking about entrusting (superior) human level ems less than absolute power....ie what we do already with real humans,
I'm fairly willing to believe that intuitive understandings of "more ethical" will do well for imprecise things like "we'll probably get better results by instantiating a more ethical person as an em than a less ethical one". I'm less convinced the results will be good compared to obvious alternatives like not instantiating anyone as an em.
We see value drift as a result of education, introspection, religious conversion or deconversion, rationality exposure, environment, and societal power. Why would you expect not to see value drift in the face of a radical change in environment, available power, and thinking speed? I'm not concerned about whether or not the value drift is "accountable", I'm concerned that it might be large and not precisely predicted in advance.
Once you entrust the em with large but less than absolute power, how do you plan to keep its power less than absolute? Why do you expect this to be an easier problem than it would be for a non-em AI?
Is it even possible in theory for nerves of two originally different organisms to join? And so many of them?
Re: ethics
If the procedure works, you can estimate that its future application can be used to save N lives. You can assign an X% probability to the procedure working. As long as N*X is > 8, it would be more unethical to carve up the body and parcel out the organs.
Assuming this procedure worked generally, is it more ethical to donate the whole body to one person, or to parcel it up and donate the organs individually? If the latter, is there an ethical application for this procedure?
If the successful procedure is ethical, I'm inclined to err on the side of assuming the research is ethical. If it's not, we get into the much more complicated problem of a shortage of donated organs, despite what appears to be an available effective and ethical solution (making organ donation opt-out instead of opt-in).
So, in a sane world, I'd be inclined to conclude it was ethical because there wouldn't be an organ shortage. In an insane world, I'm somewhat leery of ethical conclusions that assume no other ethically mandated changes are allowable.
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Stars are disassembling all over - mostly by exploding, but some are getting slowly sucked dry by a black hole or other compact object.
What kind of practical dissembly process do you expect future technology to use, such that it is more efficient than what we already see?
Dyson spheres suck:
Are you saying Dyson spheres are inefficient as computational substrate, as power collection, or both?
Because to me it looks like what you actually want is a Dyson sphere / swarm of solar collectors, powering a computer further out.