I recalled the strangest thing an AI could tell you thread, and I came up with another one in a dream. Tell me how plausible you think this one is:

Claim: "Many intelligent mammals (e.g. dogs, cats, elephants, cetaceans, and apes) act just as intelligently as feral humans, and would be capable of human-level intelligence with the right enculturation."

That is, if we did to pet mammals something analogous to what we do to feral humans when discovered, we could assimilate them; their deficiencies are the result of a) not knowing what assimilation regimen is necessary for pets/zoo mammals; and b) mammals in the wild being currently at a lower level of cultural development, but which humans at one time passed through.

Thoughts?

Widening the spread of your mentors should reduce this bias, as long as you didn't choose mentors that agree with each other. Obviously, there isn't really enough time to be taught from a wide enough sample of perspectives to properly eliminate it.

Of course, there are probably strong egalitarians who would prefer (9,9) to (10,9). Are such people necessarily crazy?

Libertarian answer: "Crazy or evil, yes."

Fred has a 'Jesus' machine. It is a machine that can take one fish and turn it into three units of foodstuff, where a fish usually has one unit.

Fred starts with three fish. I start with 9. It costs a fixed 0.5 units of food to transport between me and Fred, payable at the end of the month.

Sally the Senator, she's neither crazy nor evil and she's also good at basic arithmetic. She proposes a law that says I must give one fish to Fred for him to manufacture into three units of food. Fred is to split the produce between the two of us evenly.

Sally can see that this outcome will give 10, 9 to Fred and myself respectively, where without Sally's coercion we would have got 9,9.

I think the libertarian answer is "No comment".

Folks here seem to buy into the folk anthropology notion that successful men become successful specifically in order to attract a mate, presumably the most conventionally attractive one. I'm not sure that idea is going to go away, regardless of how disgusting it sounds to those of us who married for love.

One problem I have with hesitation to downvote is that some mediocre comments are necessary. Healthy discussion should have the right ratio of good comments to mediocre comments, so that people may feel relaxed, and make simple observations, increasing rate of communication. And current downvote seems too harsh for this role. On the other hand, people who only make tedious comments shouldn't feel welcome. This is a tricky balance problem to solve with comment-to-comment voting.

I would downvote more, if we had a separate button, saying "mediocre", that would downvote the comment, say, by 0.3 points (or less, it needs calibration). The semantics of this button is basically that I acknowledge that I have read the comment, but wasn't impressed either way. From the interface standpoint, it should be a very commonly used button, so it should be very easy to use. Bringing this to a more standard setting, this is basically graded voting, --, - and ++ (not soft/hard voting as I suggested before though).

An average mediocre comment should have (a bit of) negative Karma. This way, people may think of good comments they make as currency for buying the right to post some mediocre ones. In this situation, being afraid to post any mediocre comments corresponds to excessive frugality, an error of judgment.

Also, this kind of economy calls for separation of comment Karma and article Karma, since the nature of contributions and their valuation are too different between these venues.