Though I stand by my claim that he started it, unless you can point to someone else writing down a workable scientific method beforehand

Hakob Barseghyan teaches in his History and Philosophy of Science course that Descartes started it. The hypothetico-deductive method (what's commonly called the scientific method) is a result of the philosophic commitments of Descartes thought.

Gotcha. So, assuming that the actual Isaac Newton didn't rise to prominence*, are you thinking that human life would usually end before his equivalent came around and the ball got rolling? Most of our existential risks are manmade AFAICT. Or you think that we'd tend to die in between him and when someone in a position to build the LHC had the idea to build the LHC? Granted, him being "in a position to build the LHC" is conditional on things like a supportive surrounding population, an accepting government, etcetera; but these things are ephemeral on the scale of centuries.

To summarize, yes, some chance factor would def prevent us from building the LHC as the exact time we did, but with a lot of time to spare, some other chance factor would prime us to build it somewhen else. Building the LHC just seems to me like the kind of thing we do. (And if we die from some other existential risk before Hadron Colliding (Largely), that's outside the bounds of what I was originally responding to, because no one who died would find himself in a universe at all.)

*Not that I'm condoning this idea that Newton started science.

Like I just said, modern science started with an extreme outlier.

There's a lot of history of science and it generally doesn't find that it all hinges on one event like Newton.

It was poor wording on my part when I wrote "the contexts under which the adjustment was made". The spirit of my point is much better captured by the word "applied" (vs. made). That is, it looks like a balanced reading of stereotype literature shows that people are quite good in their judgments of when to apply a stereotype. My point is therefore a bit more extreme than it might have appeared.

I would think that many sociologists would say that many people who are racist and look down on Blacks are racists because they don't interact much with Blacks.

I agree with this and would add that such perceptions of superiority could be amplified by other members of the community reinforcing those judgments.

If the adjustment was made during a time where the person was at an all-White school, the interesting question isn't whether the adjustment performs well within the context of the all-White school but whether it also performs well at decisions made later outside of that heterogeneous environment.

To get a little deeper into this topic, I should mention that our stereotypes are conditional and, therefore, much of the performance of a stereotype depends on applying it in the proper contexts. Of the studies looking at when people apply stereotypes, they tend to show that they are used as a last resort under conditions in which almost no other information about the target is available. We're surprisingly good at knowing when a stereotype is applicable and seem to have little trouble spontaneously eschewing them when other, more diagnostic information is available.

My off-the-cuff hypothesis about students from an all-white school would be that they would show racial preferences when, say, only shown a picture of a black person. However, ask these students to provide judgments after a 5-minute conversation with a black person or after reviewing a resume (i.e., after giving them loads and loads of information) and race effects will become nearly or entirely undetectable. I don't know of any studies looking at this exactly and urge you to take my hypothesis with a grain of salt, but my larger point is this: You might be surprised.

It just has no reason to obey "do what humans mean" unless we program it to do what humans mean.

I'm not disputing that this is also a problem, indeed perhaps a harder problem than figuring out what humans mean. In fact there are many failure modes, I was just wondering why people seem to focus in on specifically the fickle genie failure mode to the exclusion of others.

to take them literally is certainly absurd.

You have more certainty than I do.

It could have been meant literally at some point, and the claim "it is there only as a metaphor" could have been inserted afterwards. If it traces back to a pre-Christian creation myth that got to be part of the Bible as an accident of history, it probably was meant literally at some point, and not just in a "this weird sect takes it literally" way, but in how it was generally understood.

Furthermore, there are other passages in the Bible that are not taken literally now, but were taken literally recently enough for that to have happened within recorded history. People only began to say they shouldn't be taken literally when taking them literally became embarrassing.

Are you responding to "Unless human psychology is expected to be that different from world to world?"? Because that's not my position, I'd think that most things recognizable as human will be similar enough to us that they'd build an LHC eventually. I guess I'm not exactly sure what you're getting at.

That's a loan, not a bet.

How is it that Solomonoff Induction, and by extension Occam's Razor, is justified in the first place? Why is it that hypotheses with higher Kolmogorov complexity are less likely to be true than those with lower Kolmogorov complexity? If it is justified by that fact that it has "worked" in the past, does that not require Solomonoff induction to justify that has worked, in the sense that you need to verify that your memories are true, and thus requires circular reasoning?

I will offer you a bet at any odds you want that humanity will still be around in 10 years.

See http://lesswrong.com/lw/ie/the_apocalypse_bet/