Try to convert your non-rationalist friends.

Tipler paper

Wow, that's all kinds of crazy. I'm not sure how much as I'm not a mathematical physicist - MWI and quantum mechanics implied by Newton? Really? - but one big flag for me is pg187-188 where he doggedly insists that the universe is closed, although as far as I know the current cosmological consensus is the opposite, and I trust them a heck of a lot more than a fellow who tries to prove his Christianity with his physics.

(This is actually convenient for me: a few weeks ago I was wondering on IRC what the current status of Tipler's theories were, given that he had clearly stated they were valid only if the universe were closed and if the Higgs boson was within certain values, IIRC, but I was feeling too lazy to look it all up.)

And the extraction of a transcendent system of ethics from a Feynman quote...

A moment’s thought will convince the reader that Feynman has described not only the process of science, but the process of rationality itself. Notice that the bold-faced words are all moral imperatives. Science, in other words, is fundamentally based on ethics. More generally, rational thought itself is based on ethics. It is based on a particular ethical system. A true human level intelligence program will thus of necessity have to incorporate this particular ethical system. Our human brains do, whether we like to acknowledge it or not, and whether we want to make use of this ethical system in all circumstances. When we do not make use of this system of ethics, we generate cargo cult science rather than science.

This is just too wrong for words. This is like saying that looking both ways before crossing the street is obviously a part of rational street-crossing - a moment's thought will convince the reader (Dark Arts) - and so we can collapse Hume's fork and promote looking both ways to a universal meta-ethical principal that future AIs will obey!

An AI program must incorporate this morality, otherwise it would not be an AI at all.

Show me this morality in the AIXI equation or GTFO!

After all, what is a computer program but a series of imperative sentences?

A map from range to domain, a proof in propositional logic, or a series of lambda equations and reductions all come to mind...

In fact, I claim that an ethical system that encompasses all human actions, and more generally, all actions of any set of rational beings (in particular, artificial intelligences) can be deduced from the Feynman axioms. In particular, note that destroying other rational beings would make impossible the honestly Feynman requires.

One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens. That the 'honestly' requires other entities is proof that this cannot be an ethical system which encompasses all rational beings.

Hence, they will be part of the community of intelligent beings deciding whether to resurrect us or not. Do not children try to see to their parents’ health and well-being? Do they not try and see their parent survive (if it doesn’t cost too much, and it the far future, it won’t)? They do, and they will, both in the future, and in the far future.

Any argument that rests on a series of rhetorical questions is untrustworthy. Specifically, sure, I can in 5 seconds come up with a reason they would not preserve us: there are X mind-states we can be in while still maintaining identity or continuity; there are Y (Y < X) that we would like or would value; with infinite computing power, we will exhaust all Y. At that point, by definition, we could choose to not be preserved. Hence, I have proven we will inevitably choose to die even if uploaded to Tipler's Singularity.

(Correct and true? Dunno. But let's say this shows Tipler is massively overreaching...)

What a terrible paper altogether. This was a peer-reviewed journal, right?

Our reason for placing the Singularity within the lifetimes of practi- cally everyone now living who is not already retired, is the fact that our supercomputers already have sufficient power to run a Singularity level program (Tipler, 2007). We lack not the hardware, but the soft- ware. Moore’s Law insures that today’s fastest supercomputer speed will be standard laptop computer speed in roughly twenty years (Tipler, 1994).

Really? I was unaware that Moore's law was an actual physical law. Our state of the art has already hit the absolute physical limit of transistor design - we have single atom transistors in the lab. So, if you'll forgive me, I'll be taking the claim of, "Moore's law ensures that today's fastest supercomputer speed will be the standard laptop computer speed in 20 years with a bit of salt."

Now, perhaps we'll have some other technology that allows laptops twenty years hence to be as powerful as supercomputers today. But to just handwave that enormous engineering problem away by saying, "Moore's law will take care of it," is fuzzy thinking of worst sort.

Hitler went to war with France and GB with no realistic prospect of winning. That's the major irrationality; close second was his cruelty to the subject nationalities in the USSR that turned them back to Stalin. Churchill did nothing on this scale (perhaps staying in the war alone was irrational; but he did have an empire to back him up, and plausible hope the USA would join in). Stalin... internally did a lot of stupid things, and trusted Hitler, but didn't commit massive external errors, and was often very prudent.

But Hitler just started war after war until one of them went badly for him.

Since most atheists, agnostics, etc, consider the First Amendment pretty important, we can assume they 'believe in religion'.

That's a pretty large logical leap. The First Amendment protects the right to speech and the right to petition government in addition to freedom of religion. Even if I accept Moldbug's assertion that religious ideology should be treated no different from other ideology, I can still think that the First Amendment is important.

It's hard to be the first to join a revolution, I agree. But should we really be making it easier for ourselves to be the lone dissenting voice in the woods? After all, most of those dissenting voices are just crazy; they don't have access to a greater truth, but they think they do. Maybe the difficulty of starting a revolution is a good thing -- it forces you to be really, really convinced in your idea.

In general the article was interesting. However the failures described seem to be related to lack of perspicacity more than to irrationality. If upper management are fooled by the middle managers’ signalling, they are not perspicacious enough and probably aren’t fit to be doing their jobs – training in rationality is unlikely to change that.

In the vast majority of failed projects I’ve been called to looked at, the managers have not read one book on software engineering. They haven’t taken one class, read one article, or been to one workshop. At best, they’ve managed other failing software projects.

This is not irrationality per se, but stupidity and incompetence.

Yes, businesses are under pressure to gravitate toward bad engineering practices, but shouldn’t they be under equal market pressure to compete against companies that are using actually good software engineering practices? Why sure, in the long run. But as Keynes succinctly put it, “In the long run, we’ll all be dead.” Eventually is a long time.

An alternative perspective is that extensive government intervention substantially reduces the market pressure that large companies experience. Here is Moldbug on the subject of Dilbertization (the government intervention he implies is its propping up of the maturity transforming banking system):

The late Communist world was a world in which it was often your job to do strange, useless things badly, all day, for no good reason at all.

There is another world in which it is often your job to do strange, useless things badly, all day, for no good reason at all. This is the world of Dilbert. Many of us have experienced it.

My theory is that Dilbert and Brezhnev are the same thing. I call it Dilbert-Brezhnev syndrome, or DBS. While we are certainly not the Soviet Union, my theory is that America has contracted a rather serious case of DBS.

The Soviet Union was a world in which business bore no relation to profit. People did strange, useless things badly because, lacking the discipline of profit that enforces efficiency, they succumbed to ulterior motives. Their unprofitable enterprises, purportedly businesses, were in fact patronage structures.

America is a much more interesting case, because (aside from its endlessly burgeoning political system, including its grant-funded "nongovernmental" periphery), the industries in which we see Dilbert syndrome are private, profitable. Nothing in America today is Brezhnev bad, but it is getting there. [...]

The answer, I think, is our friend zombie finance. We do not have Gosplan, but we have Wall Street. America is Dilbertized to the extent that Wall Street is zombified.

Let's take the loans that created the housing bubble. These were zombie loans to a T. So, for example, Steve Sailer asks: where was capitalism? Why wasn't anyone betting against these loans, and driving them down to their true value?

The answer is that the free market bears very little relationship to the process that distributed these loans. [...]

My feeling is that American zombie finance is largely responsible for the appearance of DBS in the New World. Why is the country covered with hideous developments, strip-malls and chain stores? Because it has, or had, a financial system designed to finance these things. Many of us would prefer a Ritual to a Starbucks and a Joe's Diner to a Burger King, but the chains have an unbeatable advantage: it is much easier for them to get a loan. [...]

Starbucks is subject to the discipline of profit - but it is not as subject as it should be, because its sheer size gives it access to zombie money. Thus the generic can defeat the specific, blandness outcompetes character, and we drink charred cat hair rather than coffee.

California will implement austerity measures similar to the ones currently being implemented by European countries: 80%.

The bubble underlying the current Chinese boom will collapse: 35%.

Some European country will abandon the Euro: 20%.