Not art so much as philosophy. The average scientist today literally doesn't know what philosophy is. They do things like try to speak authoritatively about epistemology of science while dismissing the entire field of epistemology. Hence you get otherwise intelligent people saying things like "We just need people who are willing to look at reality", or appeals to "common sense" or any number of other absolutely ridiculous statements.
Debate seems like a dubious method of alignment because you can just indefinitely keep adjusting or introducing new auxiliary assumptions, and overarching frameworks are very rarely abandoned in this context.
Popper points out that successful hypotheses just need to be testable, they don't need to come from anywhere in particular. Scientists used to consistently be polymaths educated in philosophy and the classics. A lot of scientific hypotheses borrowed from reasoning cultivated in that context. Maybe it's that context that's been milked for all it's worth. Or maybe it's that more and more scientists are naive empiricists/inductionists and don't believe in the primacy of imagination anymore, and thus discount entirely other modes of thinking that might lead to the introduction of new testable hypotheses. There are a lot of possibilities besides the ones expounded on in OP.
I am in favor of change. I am not in favor of existence without boundaries. I don't have a moral justification for this, just an aesthetic one: a painting that contained arbitrary combinations of arbitrarily many colors might be technically sophisticated or interesting, but is unlikely to have any of the attributes that make a painting good imo. Purely subjective. I neither fault nor seek to limit those who think differently.
I am not in favor of existence without boundaries. I don’t have a moral justification for this, just an aesthetic one …
I share your aesthetic preference (and I consider such preferences to be no less valid, and no less important, than any “moral” ones). But no one here is advocating anything like that. Certainly Eliezer isn’t, and nor am I.
I was remembering an article in The Atlantic from a while ago, but I can't seem to find it now. All I can find now is this, which doesn't have the same power because it's the result of an after-the-fact search: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/brain.2013.0172
Religion might not be, but religious thinking is, and given the general continuity of culture over time that amounts to religion being heritable in most cases. By worse than existential threat I mean Christians burning a simulated copy of you in hell for potentially k-large time; it is objectively worse than dying. Dying is just the cessation of future utility, while this would be extremely large negative utility indefinitely.
In the long run nothing looks human that follows this logic. Preserving humanity might not be utilitarian optimal, but there is something to be said for aesthetics.
Indeed; hence the term “transhumanism” (and, relatedly, “posthumanism”).
Change is terrifying. This is to be expected, not least because most change is bad; in fact, change is inherently bad. Any change must be an improvement, must justify itself, to be worthwhile. And any such justification can only be uncertain. When we look out along a line of successive changes, what we see on the horizon terrifies us—all the more so because we can only see it dimly, as a vague shape, whose outlines are provided more by our imagination than our vision.
But the alternativ
...Transhumanism imposes on territory that's traditionally been metaphysical or philosophical. The assumption is that it does so because of or in accompaniment with metaphysical or philosophical reasoning. Part of the reason a special disposition is assumed is because the alternative, that you don't think about what other people are thinking about at all, is probably distressing to them. This is also one of the reasons people don't like atheists. Yes, there are those who think atheists are actually all satan worshippers, but mostly they are...
[I think that in general, comments with less than -10 karma should have at least one comment explaining why.]
I downvoted you because I believe you to be strongly false: either lying or deluded. This is due to my prior for “somebody solves two Hard Problems in a matter of days” being much lower than my prior for “somebody claims to have solved two Hard Problems in a matter of days”. In particular, people in altered mental states are often much more susceptible to false feelings of enlightenment. (See “Mysticism and Pattern-Matching” by Scott Alexander for r
...I've achieved several different kinds of contradictory enlightenment. It's pretty overrated to me at this point.
It would also help if they understood what a joke was
People would have to actually engage with me for that to happen.
In the future there will be dragons
I've won practically every interaction I've ever had. I've become so good at winning that most people won't actually interact with me anymore.
" For example, while there’s a lot of talk about Trump being a potential autocrat, few Americans are responding by stockpiling food or investing in foreign currencies or emigrating. This suggests that hostility towards Trump is driven primarily by partisan politics, rather than genuine concern about democratic collapse. "
Alternatively it suggests that the demographics most effected by Trump's autocratic tendencies are economically poor and have limited international mobility.
Interesting. You know, Karl Popper gives a similar argument about the self-refuting nature of hard determinism: Once you accept that everything is determinate, the concept of an argument, a position, communication, or even information at all, all becomes kind of superfluous and incoherent.
That's probably true but it still doesn't explain what happened to me in Europe.
Well that's sensible enough, and I can only rebut it, not refute it. My counterargument is basically this:
1. At the speed at which technology is going forward, it seems entirely possible that the opinions of cranks will eventually drive real world actions of some sort, and so engaging with them ahead of those actions might be a good thing.
2. Without airing dirty laundry, it's impossible to know how prevalent crank-ish ideas are in a community.
That's fair. I still think the post is relevant though.
As far as I can tell, actually, there is no real reason for us (i.e. the Less Wrong commentariat) to care about these Terasem people. They seem to be weird, and rather confused about some things. That is hardly an exclusive crowd. (And “they once paid Eliezer Yudkowsky to speak at their conference” is not an interesting connection.)
I don’t say this to pick on you, by the way; it’s just that I think it’s important for us not to get distracted by analyzing what every group of cranks (or even every group of AI cranks) out there thinks, says, and does.
http://www.terasemjournals.org/PCJournal/PC0102/yudkowsky_01a.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terasem_Movement
My internet boyfriend. Because he thinks I am philosophically competent and wants me to engage more with others, ostensibly.
The Terasem Movement is a sort of new-agey technophile organization that Yudkowsky once wrote for, I would have thought it would be known here already (and this also sort of answers why you should care about it)
I wrote this post because someone told me to!
I am the legendary dragon Alephwyr, whose name is Alephwyr!
That's true. I shouldn't have discounted the role of art so heavily.