hairyfigment

What do people see as the plausible ways for AGI to come into existence, in the absence of smart people specifically working on AI safety? These are the ones that occur to me, in no precise order: 1. An improved version of Siri (itself an improved version of MS Clippy)....

This essay at Edge touches on a few possible meanings for the term "group selection." Pinker argues that as a form of memetic theory it has no explanatory power, and that group selection for genes does not fit the evidence. He focuses on humans with some mention of insects that...

This book from 1930 or so (PDF) seems chiefly concerned with describing ways thinking can go wrong. The author does not seem to know much of Bayes, but his book appears largely sound. It ends with practical suggestions for dealing with various "dishonest tricks" -- though the list assumes these...

By what looks like popular demand on the Society for Creative Anachronism thread, I'm linking a three-part account of three roles that supposedly exist within every lasting subculture or "volunteer-dominated" organization. The author has no proper authority at all but has personally observed many subcultures in the wild. These roles...

Kurt Gödel showed that we could write within a system of arithmetic the statement, "This statement has no proof within the system," in such a way that we couldn't dismiss it as meaningless. This proved that if the system (or part of it) could prove the logical consistency of the...

A Dr. Nigel Thomas has tried to show a logical self-contradiction in Chalmers' "Zombie World" or zombiphile argument, in a way that would convince Chalmers (given perfect rationality, of course). The argument concerns the claim that we can conceive of a near-duplicate of our world sharing all of its physical...