(This post won't make much sense if you don't know about the game Cards Against Humanity. Fortunately it has a web site. If you know the game Apples to Apples, well, CAH's gameplay is almost identical to Apples to Apples ... but the cards range from snarky to perverted to...
No, not psychoactive drugs: allergy drugs. This is my attempt to come to grips with the idea of self-modification. I'm interested to know of any flaws folks might spot in this analogy or reasoning. Gandhi wouldn't take a pill that would make him want to kill people. That is to...
Are you claiming that a being must be a moral agent in order to be a moral patient?
I was on an Android tablet, which I use in a laptop-like fashion (landscape mode, with keyboard) but which usually gets the mobile version of sites that try to be mobile-friendly.
The section presumes that the audience agrees wrt veganism. To an audience who isn't on board with EA veganism, that line comes across as the "arson, murder, and jaywalking" trope.
Advanced rationality techniques, at least when applied to one's self-conception and life choices, are basically therapy. "Failures of basic rationality" are often better described as "mental health issues". Therapy is how you deal with mental health issues. People with mental health issues need more therapy/advanced rationality, not less! I've seen it hypothesized that one reason we have so many mentally ill rationalists is because people with mental health issues must learn rationality in order to function, at least to some degree that is more than most people need.
This reminds me of Romeo's comment over here:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/oym/how_id_introduce_lesswrong_to_an_outsider/dryk
I'm curious if there's much record of intentional communities that aren't farming communes.
Oneida comes to mind. They had some farming (it was upstate New York in the 1850s, after all) but also a lot of manufacturing — most famously silverware. The community is long gone, but the silverware company is still around.
We should increase awareness of old fairy tales with a jinn who misinterprets wishes.
The most popular UFAI story I'm aware of is "The Sorcerer's Apprentice".
Sticking with European folktales that were made into classic Disney cartoons, maybe the analogy to be made is "AI isn't Pinocchio. It's Mickey's enchanted brooms. It doesn't want to be a Real Boy; it just wants to carry water. The danger isn't that it will grow up to be a naughty boy if it doesn't listen to its conscience. It's that it cannot care about anything other than carrying water; including whether or not it's flooding your home."
Thing is, much of the popular audience doesn't really know what... (read more)
Why do you care if you're running in a simulation? Well, if you're a piece of malware, like a computer virus or Internet worm, you care whether you're being analyzed by an anti-malware researcher. If you're running in a researcher's lab instead of actually infecting target systems, you'd want to shut down so the researcher can't observe your real behavior and find out how to exterminate you. However, this means that if you can be fooled into believing you're running in a simulation when you're not, you can be made to shut down in the wild.
Yep, that happened. It's not even the first time.
The WannaCrypt worm contained logic that basically said,... (read more)
Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit" introduced the distinction between lies and bullshit. The liar wants to deceive you about the world (to get you to believe false statements), whereas the bullshitter wants to deceive you about his intentions (to get you to take his statements as good-faith efforts, when they are merely meant to impress).
We may need to introduce a third member of this set. Along with lies told by liars, and bullshit spread by bullshitters, there is also spam emitted by spambots.
Like the bullshitter (but unlike the liar), the spambot doesn't necessarily have any model of the truth of its sentences. However, unlike the bullshitter, the spambot doesn't particularly care what (or whether) you think of it. But it optimizes its sentences to cause you to do a particular action.
Thank you.
(This post won't make much sense if you don't know about the game Cards Against Humanity. Fortunately it has a web site. If you know the game Apples to Apples, well, CAH's gameplay is almost identical to Apples to Apples ... but the cards range from snarky to perverted to shockingly un-PC.)
After the LW meetup in Mountain View yesterday, the idea came up of a Less Wrong expansion set for Cards Against Humanity ... with a roughly Shit Rationalists Say theme, with a little help from Eliezer Yudkowsky Facts. Regardless of whether this ever happens, we felt the need to share the pain with the rest of the community.
These are meant to be mixed with the... (read 885 more words →)
No, not psychoactive drugs: allergy drugs.
This is my attempt to come to grips with the idea of self-modification. I'm interested to know of any flaws folks might spot in this analogy or reasoning.
Gandhi wouldn't take a pill that would make him want to kill people. That is to say, a person whose conscious conclusions agree with their moral impulses wouldn't self-modify in such a way that they no longer care about morally significant things. But, what about morally insignificant things? Specifically, is willingness to self-modify about X a good guide to whether X is morally significant?
A person with untreated pollen allergies cares about pollen; they have to. In order to have a coherent... (read 588 more words →)
We do really conspire! Conspiring is at best a handy social and economic coordination activity. At worst it is a big bunch of no fun, where people have to pretend to be conspiring while they'd really rather be working on personal projects, flirting, or playing video games; and everyone comes out feeling like they need to hide their freakish incompetence at pursuing the goals of the conspiracy.
We usually call it "having meetings" though.