Alan_Crowe
100
22
Alan_Crowe has not written any posts yet.
Alan_Crowe has not written any posts yet.
A similar phenomenon arises in trying to bound the error of a numerical computation by running it using interval arithmetic. The result is conservative, but sometimes useful. However, once in a while one applies it to a slowly converging iterative process that produces an accurate answer. Lots of arithmetic leads to large intervals even though the error to be bounded is small.
I think I can answer the question about Ayn Rand. Turn away from her heroes and look at her villains. They seem realistic and scary. How did she manage it? Well, she left Russia in 1926, having seen the aftermath of the revolution up close and personal. So I guessed that she attained realism by drawing on her own real life experiences. I wasn't happy with this answer, because her villains were too redolent of the corporatist new-speak of the Heath-Wilson years, too Westernised for Bolsheviks. I knew little of the Lenin years, so I left this little puzzle on the back burner.
Recent financial turmoil has sparked interest in the causes of... (read more)
This seems closely related to inside-view versus outside-view. The think-lobe of the brain comes up with a cunning plan. The plan breaks an ethical rule but calculation shows it is for the greater good. The executive-lobe of the brain then ponders the outside view. Every-one who has executed an evil cunning plan has run a calculation of the greater good and had their plan endorsed. So the calculation lack outside-view credibility.
What kind of evidence could give outside-view credibility? Consider a plan with lots of traceability to previous events. If it goes badly, past events will have to be re-interpreted, and much learning will take place. Well, people generally don't learn from the... (read more)
On the question of blocking thoughts, may I offer a personal anecdote, conscious that readers of Overcoming Bias will read it heterophenomenologically?
Years ago, when my health was good, I had a Buddhist meditation practice of great vigour and depth. Sitting on my cushion, noticing my train of thought pull into the station of consciousness, refusing to board the train and watching the thoughts leave, I would become more and more aware that it was the same old crap coming round again and again.
Forcibly stopping my thoughts had always worked badly. I coined a meditation slogan encapsulating what I had learned: When thoughts spin round in your head, like the wheels on a... (read more)
Study this deranged rant. Its ardent theism is expressed by its praise of the miracles God can do, if he choses.
And yet,... There is something not quite right here. Isn't it merely cloakatively theistic? Isn't the ringing denounciation of "Crimes against silence" militant atheism at its most strident?
So here is my idea: Don't try to doubt a whole core belief. That is too hard. Probe instead for the boundary. Write a little fiction, perhaps a science fiction of first contact, in which you encounter a curious character from a different culture. Write him a borderline belief, troublingly odd to both sides in a dispute about which your own mind is made up. He sits on one of our culture's fences. What is his view like from up there?
Is he "really" on your side, or "really" on the other side. Now there is doubt you can actually be curious about. You have a thread to pull on; what unravels if you tug?
Wearing my mechanical engineer's hat I say "Don't be heavy handed.". Set your over-force trips low. When the switch is hard to flip or the mechanism is reluctant to operate, fail and signal the default over-force exception.
You can always wiggle it, or lubricate it and try again, provided you haven't forced it and broken it. For me, trying is about running the compiler with the switches set to retain debugging information and running the code in verbose mode. It is about setting up a receiver down-range. Maybe the second rocket will blow up, just like the first did, but at least I will still be recording the telemetry.
I think that Plan A will be stymied by Problem Y, but I try it... (read more)
The interesting question is "What would it be like if we lived for 700 years instead of 70 years?". This is more interesting than contemplating immortality because it pries open the issue of scaling. What changes by a factor of 10? What changes by a factor of 100? What changes by a factor of 3.162?
Presumably acient towers get a straight ten times less impressive.
Speed limits would be set much lower. You lose ten times as much when you die in a car accident so you would be willing to spend more time on your journey to avoid that.
An academic could go into his subject ten times as deeply, or study ten different... (read more)
When someone sets out to write an atheistic hymn - "Hail, oh unintelligent universe," blah, blah, blah - the result will, without exception, suck.
I've just submitted my Militant Atheists' Marching Song to Reddit. Does it suck? Since I wrote the words, it is not my place to judge.
Whether not there is a good definition of intelligence depends on whether there is a sufficiently unitary concept there to be defined. That is crucial because it also determines whether AI is seedable or not.
Think about a clever optimising compiler that runs a big search looking for clever ways of coding the source that it is compiling. Perhaps it is in a competitions based on compiling a variety of programs, running them and measuring their performance. Now use it to compile itself. It runs faster, so it can search more deeply, and produce cleverer, faster code. So use it to compile itself again!
One hopes that the speed ups from successive self-compilations keep... (read more)