All of BethMo's Comments + Replies
I can agree that most of "science and other fields" came out of what was called "philosophy" if you go back far enough. It just seems that once you pull out all the "science and other fields" what is left has no use for solving practical problems -- including AI. Like the pages and pages of debate I've seen here on Less Wrong about "philosophical" stuff like the nature of morality, or free will, or "zombies" with no consciousness. Obviously a lot of people feel that discussing these topics is worthwhile,...
Note the distinction between those things being done in the field of "Philosophy", versus philosophy itself. Note that this:
philosophy really is important, but it is only practiced effectively from within a science
is an endorsement of philosophy itself, though the quote goes on to say that the way that much philosophy is done in academia is pretty useless. So I'm not seeing anything that should generate confusion. When Wei Dai said that the problems are philosophical, that does not entail that the problems should be solved by people with d...
The definition of art begins to matter a lot when governments have bizarre laws that require spending public funds on it -- e.g. Seattle's SMC 20.32.030 "Funds for works of art" which states that "All requests for appropriations for construction projects from eligible funds shall include an amount equal to one (1) percent of the estimated cost of such project for works of art..."
Of course, the law doesn't even attempt to define what is and isn't "art". They leave that up to the Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs... and I'm sure those folks spend PLENTY of time (also at public expense) debating exactly that question.
Yes! Thank you, Poke. I've been thinking something vaguely like the above while reading through many, many posts and replies and arguments about morality, but I didn't know how to express it. I've copied this post into a quotes file.
I'm still going through the Sequences too. I've seen plenty of stuff resembling the top part of your post, but nothing like the bottom part, which I really enjoyed. The best "how to get to paperclips" story I've seen yet!
I suspect the problem with the final paragraph is that any AI architecture is unlikely to be decomposable in such a well-defined fashion that would allow drawing those boundary lines between "the main process" and "the paperclip subroutine". Well, besides the whole "genie" problem of defining what is a Friendly goal in the first place, as discussed through many, many posts here.
My sense is that currently the main problems in FAI are philosophical. Skill in math is obviously very useful, but secondary to skill in philosophy...
Philosophy? Really???
My impression of philosophy has been that it is entirely divorced from anything concrete or reality-based with no use in solving concrete, reality-based problems -- that all the famous works of philosophy are essentially elaborate versions of late-night college bull sessions, like irresistible forces vs. immovable objects, or trees falling in forests that do/don't make a sound.
After w...
As lukeprog has pointed out, almost everything Eliezer has written on LW is philosophy.
What have I missed? How does philosophy bring anything useful to the table?
You appear to have missed philosophy. If you take a historical view, all of our contemporary subjects come from philosophy. The core of philosophy is precisely the sort of things we care about here - having an accurate picture of the world and understanding its true nature. To that end, ancient philosophers such as Aristotle invented logic, studied the natural world, discovered the inner workings of the human body, and started to investigate the laws that tie together everythi...
On another note, I've been wanting to write a sci-fi story where a person slowly discovers they are an artificial intelligence led to believe they're human and are being raised on a virtual earth. The idea is that they are designed to empathize with humanity to create a Friendly AI. The person starts gaining either superpowers or super-cognition as the simulators start become convinced the AI person will use their power for good over evil. Maybe even have some evil AIs from the same experiment to fight. If anyone wants to steal this idea, go for it.
I want to read that story! Has anyone written it yet?
Don't know how many M:TG players are still around, since I'm replying to a two-year-old post, but I found this thread very interesting. I used to play Magic (a little) and write about Magic (a lot), and I was the head M:TG rules guru for a while. The M:TG community is certainly a lovely place to see a wide variety of rationality and irrationality at work. For seriously competitive players, the game itself provides a strong payoff for being able to rapidly calculate probabilities and update them as new information becomes available.
Greetings! I'm a relatively new reader, having spent a month or two working my way through the Sequences and following lots of links, and finally came across something interesting to me that no one else had yet commented on.
Eleizer wrote "Those who dream do not know they dream; but when you wake you know you are awake." No one picked out or disagreed with this statement.
This really surprised me. When I dream, if I bother to think about it I almost always know that I dream -- enough so that on the few occasions when I realize I was dreaming wit...
Interesting... all the places I've seen the word, it meant a winged unicorn*. But reading this post drove me to look it up, and I did find both definitions. Less Wrong: raising new interest in definitions of mythological creature parts! :)
*Speaking of mythological definitions, I learned somewhere to distinguish between an alicorn, which has the goat-like body, lion's tail, beard, etc. of a unicorn, vs a horned pegasus, which has horse-like features. Not sure where that came from, but it's firmly implanted in my stores of useless knowledge.