All of seank's Comments + Replies

seank10

I keep wondering if there is an afterlife, and if there is will they be able to break a twenty?

seank21

If this were to result in a Yes, I would be more inclined to believe that factors like media control or a significant number of people in positions of power going mad, possibly due to mind-hack content, are more likely than aliens hanging around Earth instead of being grabby. A probability of ~1% for this scenario seems reasonable to me.

I'm wondering if there are more reliable ways to verify claims about aliens or supernatural phenomena. It seems like OP is trying to solve this problem by requiring an ontological shift in the community, which can still be manipulated either intentionally or unintentionally. However, there is probably less motivation for such manipulation compared to mainstream media.

seank10

what if things are precarious forever?

I'm reminded of The Last Paperclip

seank30

I've wondered what it would mean to have defeated the second law of thermodynamics. Maybe this is accomplished by a yet unknown exploit of nature, or maybe we get entropy-free reversible computing.

Whatever low probability events that could disrupt the self-perpetuating utilitronium, even improbable quantum perturbations bubbling up to reality, become probable over long enough timelines.

If we're satisfied that the universe has been spread thin enough that invasion from alien computronium is impossible, and if time truly becomes a renewable resource, we can ... (read more)

seank20

Do you remember the Bill Nye–Ken Ham debate of 2014? I'm relying on my memories from when I first watched it, so apologies if I get something wrong.

I wish someone more talented than me would write something that draws parallels between Kinds vs. Species and Narrow AI vs. General AI, if the comparison is actually accurate and doesn't create confusion.

My impression is that Kinds share a property with Narrow AI in that when people talk about how Narrow AI can't do X (presumably due to perceived technical limitations), I'm reminded of Ken Ham saying something ... (read more)

1[anonymous]
If it’s fine for me to enter the discussion It seems to me that:   A very effective narrow AI is an AI that can solve certain closed-ended problems very effectively, but can’t generalise.   Since agents are necessarily limited in the number of factors that they can account for in their calculations, open-ended problems are fundamentally closed-ended problems but with influxes of mixed more-or-less undetermined data that affect what solutions are viable (so we can’t easily compute how that data will affect the space of possible actions, at least initially). But there are open-ended problems that have so many possible factors that need to be accounted for (like ‘solving the economy and increasing growth’), that the space of possible actions that a general system (like a human) can conceivably take to solve one of those problems effectively IS the space of all possible actions that a narrow AI need to consider to solve the problem as effectively as a human would, at the very least.   At that point, a “narrow AI that can solve an open-ended problem” is at least as general as an average human. If the number of possible actions that it can take increases then it's even more general than the average human.  Kinds and species are fundamentally the same thing.
seank10

For a salient example, look no further than the politics board of 4chan. Stickied for the last five years is a list of 24 logical fallacies. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to dissuade the conspiratorial ramblings, but rather, lends an appearance of sophistication to their arguments for anyone unfamiliar with the subject. It's how you get otherwise curious and bright 15 year olds parroting anti-semitic rhetoric.

1Edward Pascal
I find on the internet that people treat logical fallacies like moves on a Chessboard. Meanwhile, IRL, they're sort of guidelines you might use to treat something more carefully. An example I often give is that in court we try to establish the type of person the witness is -- because we believe so strongly that Ad Hominem is a totally legitimate matter. But Reddit or 4chan politics and religion is like, "I can reframe your argument into a form of [Fallacy number 13], check and mate!" It's obviously a total misunderstanding of what a logical fallacy even is. They treat it like rules of logical inference, which it is definitely not (and would disprove what someone said, however outside of exotic circumstances, such a mistake would be trivial to spot).