We are talking about mind-matter dualism: substance dualism, where matter is one type of thing and mind is another type of thing, and also property dualism, where everything is made of matter, but mental states involve material objects with extra properties outside of those usually discussed in physics. You appear to be talking about some other kind of "dualism".

Maybe I'm misinterpreting this article (or maybe the NY Times isn't exactly presenting everything correctly), but doesn't Hugo Mercier seem to be coming pretty close to saying something like "this whole attempt at identifying and correcting biases is misguided -- flaws in reasoning are 'natural,' so we should be okay with them." I mean, consider the following excerpt:

Mr. Mercier, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, contends that attempts to rid people of biases have failed because reasoning does exactly what it is supposed to do: help win an argument.

“People have been trying to reform something that works perfectly well,” he said, “as if they had decided that hands were made for walking and that everybody should be taught that.”

Am I missing something, or is this one of the most absurd statements about human rationality ever made? We shouldn't try to get rid of biases, not because the effort is futile, but because flawed reasoning works? I guess that's why most people are so successful at handling personal finances, calculating risk, evaluating political proposals, and questioning ingrained religious beliefs.

An alternative to making things fun is to make things unconscious and/or automatic. No healthy individual complains about insulin production because their pancreas does it for them unconsciously, but diabetic patients must actively intervene with unpleasant, routine injections. One option would be to make the injections less unpleasant (make the process fun and/or less painful), but a better option would be to bring them in line with non-diabetic people and make the process unconscious and automatic again.

The meetup happened yesterday and we had a higher turnout that I was expecting (I made reservations for "6 to 12" and I think there were ~14 people) and I thought it was super fun, but I got the sense that better prediction/planning could have made it even better. I want to try a small experiment with this comment.

Please, anyone who attended, reply to this comment with an observation of something GOOD, BAD or INTERESTING. The idea is that we should try to repeat and retain the good stuff at future meetups, fix the bad stuff... and the interesting stuff doesn't have to be good or bad but it might grow into a practical intuition pump.

For comments responding to this, please do it like the monthly quotes thread, so if you noticed multiple things, make multiple comments so they can be voted up or down independently. I'll do three by way of example.

(If you were at the meetup but don't have an account you should all make an account and post something here, or at least vote on the other comments!)

I'll be attending.

In my experience, the inability to be satisfied with a materialistic world-view comes down to simple ego preservation, meaning, fear of death and the annihilation of our selves. The idea that everything we are and have ever known will be wiped out without a trace is literally inconceivable to many. The one common factor in all religions or spiritual ideologies is some sort of preservation of 'soul', whether it be a fully platonic heaven like the Christian belief, a more material resurrection like the Jewish idea, or more abstract ideas found in Eastern and New Age ideologies. The root of spiritual, 'spirit', is a non-corporeal substance/entity whose main purpose is to contrast itself with the material body. Spirit is that which is not material and so can survive the loss of material pattern decay.

In my opinion, THIS IS the hard pill to swallow.

I may be overlooking something, but I'd certainly consider Robin's estimate of 1-2 week doublings a FOOM. Is that really a big difference compared with Eliezer's estimates? Maybe the point in contention is not the time it takes for super-intelligence to surpass human ability, but the local vs. global nature of the singularity event; the local event taking place in some lab, and the global event taking place in a distributed fashion among different corporations, hobbyists, and/or governments through market mediated participation. Even this difference isn't that great, since there will be some participants in the global scenario with much greater contributions and may seem very similar to the local scenario, and vice versa where a lab may get help from a diffuse network of contributors over the internet. If the differences really are that marginal, then Robin's 'outside view' seems to approximately agree with Eliezer's 'inside view'.

There is a web-based tool being worked on at MIT's collective intelligence lab. Couldn't find the direct link to the project, but here's a video overview: Deliberatorium

Is your pursuit of a theory of FAI similar to, say, Hutter's AIXI, which is intractable in practice but offers an interesting intuition pump for the implementers of AGI systems? Or do you intend on arriving at the actual blueprints for constructing such systems? I'm still not 100% certain of your goals at SIAI.

"People are not base animals, but people, about 90% animal and 10% something new and different. Religion can be looked on as an act of rebellion by the 90% animal against the 10% new and different (most often within the same person)."

• Paul Lutus