My prior on cute little girls is that their parents put them in a dress, and that their work mostly consisted off putting up with it. ("Little girl" is ambiguous - as they grow up the prior on how much effort they're personally putting in obviously goes up).

I believe there are negative consequences to to overcomplimenting them on looks, same way there are negative consequences to being told you're smart. There may very well turn out to be consequences of being told too often that you're hard working.

There are also, I'm sure, negative consequences to not being told you're pretty often enough. A perfect agent probably spends some time figuring out how to tell when young girls looked good due to their own efforts, compares how often they instinctively compliment that over other ways they might begin the conversation (perhaps taking note of how often they begin conversations with young boys who look particularly well dressed with things like "Who's this handsome little man!") and then randomly decide whether to do so. Even without regarding how the rest of society also will impact the child, I doubt the ideal number comes out to more than 1 in 6 or so for the average person.

If you don't have time to do all that, I think beginning conversations with "how are you?" and going from there is a perfectly good heuristic. If the girl is particularly proud of her clothes, I suspect it'll come up, and you can compliment her then.

Children are input/output machines. What you put in, is what you get out. This is especially true of the younger ages. For example, an older child, say a 10 year old, already has 10 years of input going in, so it is much harder to work against all that previous input, than with a 3 year old.

Children's beliefs are being formed by their environment all the time. Every waking second, every personal interaction, is forming them into their future selves. You can either acknowledge this, and use it to your advantage to help them be the best future self they can be, OR you can say that it is "manipulative" and instead leave their formation up to chance.

For example, if I convince a child they like helping me cook, it certainly isn't for my benefit. Cooking takes three times as long, and causes more mess and trouble if you have a child "helping" you. You convince them they like cooking so that they grow up having a skill that is needed for coping in the world.

Also, in real life, the cartoon I convinced my charge that she like was "Higglytown Heroes", which I like because it shows that everyone in town is important in their own way. It was just less embarassing to admit that I like Kim Possible (which I like, but actually encourage kids away from) than that I like Higglytown Heroes. So yeah....not noticing my own signalling attempts, FTL.

Do you know if the liking is sincere?

IMO, telling them what they like/dislike does actually change their liking/disliking of an item/task, so long as that item was neutral to begin with. You can get them to LOVE something they used to LIKE, but not something they used to DISLIKE.

Have you read Kaczynski?

I've been in the collegiate environment for a while now and spent a lot of time around various people in academics, but I have consistently noticed a striking difference in people gifted in mathematics. I find that people with serious mathematical talent have an extremely propensity for thinking about mathematics. It's the most striking example of the sort of thing you're mentioning that I have ever come across. It's frequently given me the impression that mathematical talent is the academic talent that is most like athletics or sportsmanship in terms of just weird, unusually demonstrable performance characteristics.

It's difficult to be more specific than that, but when I started noticing this, it made me extremely interested in the sort of topic you're discussing. One of the ways this became apparent to me was when I realized that it wasn't just the difference between someone being stupid and smart, or something generic like that. I think at first I was disconcerted by this level of mathematical aptitude in some people, but then eventually after getting to know a lot of people like this I realized I could still hold my own with them, the aptitude wasn't some kind of signal for all around mental supremacy. I'm sure many people in my profession and people in various other areas of academia (biology, chemistry, all the engineering areas, philosophy, etc.) are just as "generically smart" as pure mathematicians, but when it comes to high level mathematics, it's astonishing what kind of massive gap you can observe between two people who are both "generically smart".

My personal intuition is that this really comes down to a brain wiring functionality that is peculiar to mathematical talent, since doing mathematics and doing proofs has such specific, strenuous requirements on serial logic processing, memory, symbolic representation, and so on. These constraints aren't that specific in nature, but they are much more about just doing ordinary things at a very high level of functionality. For example, mathematicians have to have a very high capability in learning new definitions and inserting them into their knowledge base, reminiscent of language, but it's essentially a task that all of us are able to do already, just not as well or as speedily. Hanging around mathematicians, you just start to get the feeling their minds are acting a lot more like computers than the rest of us, for example, just performing basic serial logic at an unusually high frequency.

are there any good arguments against the feasibility of WBE

Against the feasibility? Heck yes. It's a ridiculously hard technical problem. Building a mind from scratch sounds much easier. Airplanes were invented in 1903 and we still don't have a scanner that can copy birds.

Storage requirements for example. There are about 10^11 neurons and 10^14 synapses. If we don't model them all, there is absolutely no guarantee that you'll get a human, let alone a specific human. And there's some news that glial cells play an important role in cognition, too, so that's another couple hundred billion cells and more connections.

Even if saying everything important about a cell or synapse only takes 10 bytes, that still a few internetworths of data to keep running in parallel. In contrast, there are plenty of optimizing tricks that you can play with something made out of code rather than opaque physical data. Even if the first seed AI is as complicated as a human brain, it could be smushed down to smaller processing requirements because it's in an easily manipulable language. So if computing power requirements end up determining which comes first, it seems quite likely that seed AI comes first.

Personal Introductions

Feel like going ahead and giving a personal intro? Please put it as a thread to this comment!