I read this book seven years ago, and I have vague memory that Adams was purposefully controversial rather than truth-seeking and, while maybe not out-and-out wrong, relies on misleading connotations to make his point. Based on my memory alone, I would downvote this. I'm curious well this memory holds up, so I'm holding off judgment for the moment while I skim it.

ETA: Wow, that was absolutely horrible. Meant as "serious philosophy" or not, that really failed. Perhaps for someone with no exposure to philosophy, it might useful to nudge them towards getting them to "think." Seems about as likely to be actively harmful, though. Adams is on the edge of clearing up some confusions, but then falls into worse ones himself.

Some gems:

The fact that we exist is proof that God is motivated to act in some way. And since only the challenge of self-destruction could interest an omnipotent God, it stands to reason that we [...]. We are God’s debris.

Probability forces the coin toss to be exactly fifty-fifty at some point, assuming you keep flipping forever. Likewise, probability forced us to exist exactly as we are. Only the timing was in question.

Rationality can’t explain our obsession with the Internet. The need to build the Internet comes from something inside us, something programmed, something we can’t resist.

God’s dust disappears on one beat and reappears on the next in a new position based on probability. If a bit of God-dust disappears near a large mass, say a planet, then probability will cause it to pop back into existence nearer to the planet on the next beat. Probability is highest when you are near massive objects. Or to put it another way, mass is the physical expression of probability.

The problem with skeptics is that they are right too often...

Light can be thought of as zones of probability that surround all things. A star, by virtue of its density, has high probability that two of its God-dust particles will pop into existence in the same location, forcing one of them to adjust, creating a new and frantic probability. That activity, the constant adjusting of location and probability, is what we perceive as energy.

“Probability is the expression of God’s will. It is in your best interest to obey probability.” “How do I obey probability?” “God’s reassembly requires people—living, healthy people,” he said. “When you buckle your seat belt, you increase your chances of living. That is obeying probability. If you get drunk and drive without a seat belt, you are fighting probability.”

Why would AI care about our wishes at all? Do we, humans, care about wishes of animals, who are our evolutionary predecessors? We use them for food (sad,sad :((( ). Hopefully, non-organic AI will not need us in such a frightening capacity. We also use animals for our amusement, as pets. Is that what we are going to be, pets? Well, in that case some our wishes will be cared for. Not all of them, of course, and not in a way one might want. Foolish or dangerous wishes will not be heeded, otherwise we simply destroy ourselves. Who knows, maybe saying "God have mercy on us" will get a new, more specific meaning.

There's lots of different libertarian theories of ethics. Can you be more specific?

Why is the discrimination problem "unfair"? It seems like in any situation where decision theories are actually put into practice, that type of reasoning is likely to be popular. In fact I thought the whole point of advanced decision theories was to deal with that sort of self-referencing reasoning. Am I misunderstanding something?

Maybe "progress" doesn't refer to equality, but autonomy. It does seem like the progression of social organization generally leads to individual autonomy and equality of opportunity. Egalitarianism is a nice talking point for politicians, but when we say "progress" we really mean individual autonomy.

The kinds of writing produced based on 'praxeology', by people like Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, I have changed my mind to think as being not very reliable. I don't think that the arguments put forth by these Austrian Economists trying to justify when they reject empiricism and make weird assumptions are very good. This actually hurts a sizable amount of writing by these people, most of which I haven't read but any that I did end up having believed I now place very little trust in. The wikipedia synopsis of one of Mises' works should give you a fairly good idea of the kinds of assumptions he makes..

The links are fairly broad because I was admittedly trying to get a better grip on this stuff after having accepted much of it for a while, having given the whole school much benefit of the doubt early because the kinds of ideas it concluded with (stuff like lassiez-faire econ, not to regulate) fitted in with my preconcieved, often political, beliefs. Politics is the mind-killer, don'tcha know. Sorry for the lack of specific propositions.

I've read some Hayek too, he seems better, but I don't really know.

edit: changed a word to make a sentence make sense

I've changed my mind on the persuasiveness of a specific argument. I used to hold a high degree of confidence in the line of reasoning that "since nobody can agree on just about anything about god, it is likely that god doesn't exist". But then, in an unrelated conversation, someone pointed out that it would be foolish to say that "since nobody can agree on the shape of the earth, earth has no shape." I must be question-begging!

You know, I've always thought that graph was pretty inaccurate. A village idiot is not overwhelmingly smarter than a chimp. There was a time when the term "idiot" designated people who suffered from profound mental retardation, and anyone that low on the scale is probably significantly dumber than the average chimp. It's not like humans are so much smarter than other animals that our intelligence curves are totally non-overlapping with any other species. Koko the gorilla would probably be somewhere from moderately to severely retarded by human standards, although some of her mental faculties might be significantly better than those of a mentally retarded human. Even highly mentally disabled humans might be graced with neurological anatomy that's only appeared in the last few million years of evolutionary history, but that doesn't mean it's all functioning properly.

A modern car might have tremendous technological advantages over old ones, but drain enough of its lubricant and it'll still run worse than a Model T.

I think the DRH quote is pretty out of context, and Eliezer's commentary on it is pretty unfair. DRH has a deeply personal respect for human intelligence. He doesn't look forward to the singularity because he (correctly) points out that it will be the end of humanity. Most SI/LessWrong people accept that and look forward to it, but for Hofstadter the current view of the singularity is an extremely pessimistic view of the future. Note that this is simply a result of his personal beliefs. He never claims that people are wrong to look forward to superintelligence, brain emulation and things like that, just that he doesn't. See this interview for his thoughts on the subject.

In general, how does one determine whether X in HPMOR is supposed to [represent / be commentary on] Y? I could make up a connection between Azkaban and Muggle prisons, probably by running it through my black-box mental model of Eliezer, but I don't feel any kind of justified in the connection.