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Hypothetical scenario
One day, someone not a member of the Singularity Institute (and has publically stated that they don't believe in the necessity of ensuring all AI is Friendly) manages to build an AI. It promptly undergoes an intelligence explosion and sends kill-bots to massacre the vast majority of the upper echelons of the US Federal Government, both civilian and military. Or maybe forcibly upload them; it's sort of difficult for untrained meat-bags like the people running the media to tell. It claims, in a press release, that its calculations indicate that the optimal outcome for humanity is achieved by removing corruption from the US Government, and this is the best way to do this.
What do you do?
Quixey Challenge - Fix a bug in 1 minute, win $100. Refer a winner, win $50.
Hiring is so hard that we spent a man-month creating a sub-startup to do it. The product is the Quixey Challenge which is running today until 7pm PST (GMT-8).
Benefits of playing:
- You can learn something from our craftsmanship of the algorithms (we work hard on them)
- The 1-minute challenge is a rush
- You can make money
- If you do well you can interview at Quixey
[Meta] No LessWrong Blackout?
Our sister site apparently is:
Overcoming Bias will resume normal service on Jan 18 8:00pm (Eastern Time).
Today Overcoming Bias joins Wikipedia and many other sites in protesting proposed legislation — the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECTIP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate.
If passed, SOPA and PIPA will give the US Justice Department and courts tremendous power to shut down entire sites. These bills endanger free speech both in the United States and abroad, potentially setting a frightening precedent of Internet censorship for the world.
You can find out more about the impact of SOPA and PIPA from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Interesting, my model of Robin Hanson had him say something about the blackout and how it shows people are hypocrites. Though obviously he has strong opinions on intellectual property. I think it would have been a good idea to Blackout LessWrong today. It would have given us a status boost in most of the communities we frequent.
Resist the Happy Death Spiral
Followup to: Affective Death Spirals
Once upon a time, there was a man who was convinced that he possessed a Great Idea. Indeed, as the man thought upon the Great Idea more and more, he realized that it was not just a great idea, but the most wonderful idea ever. The Great Idea would unravel the mysteries of the universe, supersede the authority of the corrupt and error-ridden Establishment, confer nigh-magical powers upon its wielders, feed the hungry, heal the sick, make the whole world a better place, etc. etc. etc.
The man was Francis Bacon, his Great Idea was the scientific method, and he was the only crackpot in all history to claim that level of benefit to humanity and turn out to be completely right.
(Bacon didn't singlehandedly invent science, of course, but he did contribute, and may have been the first to realize the power.)
That's the problem with deciding that you'll never admire anything that much: Some ideas really are that good. Though no one has fulfilled claims more audacious than Bacon's; at least, not yet.
But then how can we resist the happy death spiral with respect to Science itself? The happy death spiral starts when you believe something is so wonderful that the halo effect leads you to find more and more nice things to say about it, making you see it as even more wonderful, and so on, spiraling up into the abyss. What if Science is in fact so beneficial that we cannot acknowledge its true glory and retain our sanity? Sounds like a nice thing to say, doesn't it? Oh no it's starting ruuunnnnn...
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