Moreover, we know of examples where natural selection has caused drastic decreases in organismal complexity – for example, canine venereal sarcoma, which today is an infectious cancer, but was once a dog.
Or human selection. Henrietta Lax (or her cancer) is now many tonnes of cultured cells; she has become an organism that reproduces by mitosis and thrives in the niche environment of medical research labs.
I love the idea of an intelligence explosion but I think you have hit on a very strong point here:
In fact, as it picks off low-hanging fruit, new ideas will probably be harder and harder to think of. There's no guarantee that "how smart the AI is" will keep up with "how hard it is to think of ways to make the AI smarter"; to me, it seems very unlikely.
In fact, we can see from both history and paleontology that when a new breakthrough was made in "biologicial technology" like the homeobox gene or whatever triggered the PreC...
Even if such worlds do 'exist', whether I believe in magic within them is unimportant, since they are so tiny;
Since there is a good deal of literature indicating that our own world has a surprisingly tiny probabilty (ref: any introduction to the Anthropic Principle), I try not to dismiss the fate of such "fringe worlds" as completely unimportant.
army1987's argument above seems very good though, I suggest you look at his comment very seriously
Is there an underlying problem of crying wolf; too many warning messages obscure the ones that are really matters of life and death?
This is certainly an enormous problem for interface design in general for many systems where there is some element of danger. The classic "needle tipping into the red" is an old and brilliant solution for some kinds of gauges - an analogue meter where you can see the reading tipping toward a brightly marked "danger zone", usually with a 'safe' zone and an intermediate zone also marked, has surely preven...
"There is an object one foot across in the asteroid belt composed entirely of chocolate cake."
This is a lovely example, which sounds quite delicious. It reminds me strongly of the famous example of Russell's Teapot (from his 1952 essay "Is There a God?"). Are you familiar with his writing?
You'll just subconsciously avoid any Devil's arguments that make you genuinely nervous, and then congratulate yourself for doing your duty.
Yes, I have noticed that many of my favorite people, myself included, do seem to spend a lot of ti...
stay away from this community I responded to this suggestion but deleted the response as unsuitable because it might embarass you. I would be happy to email my reply if you are interested.
we'd probably convince you such perma-death would be the highly probable outcome
Try reading what I said in more detail in both the post I made that you quoted and my explanation of how there might be a set of worlds of very small measure. Then go read Eliezer Yudkowsky's posts on Many Worlds (or crack a book by Deutsch or someone, or check Wikipedia.) Then reread the c...
Now, whether that distributed information is 'experiencing' anything is arguable,
As far as I know, the latter is what people are worrying about when they worry about ceasing to exist.
Ahhh... that never occurred to me. I was thinking entirely in terms of risk of data loss.
(Which is presumably a reason why your comment's been downvoted a bunch; most readers would see it as missing the point.)
I don't understand the voting rules or customs. Downvoting people who see things from a different perspective is... a custom designed to keep out the undesir...
People talk about the grey goo scenario, but I actually think that is quite silly because there is already grey goo all over the planet in the form of life" ... " nothing CAN do this, because nothing HAS done it."
The grey goo scenario isn't really very silly. We seem to have had a green goo scenario around 1.5 to 2 billion years ago that killed off many or most critters around due to release of deadly deadly oxygen; if the bacterial ecosystem were completely stable against goo scenarios this wouldn't have happened. We have had mini go...
Yes, I am sorry for the mistakes, not sure if I can rectify them. I see now about protecting special characters, I will try to comply.
I am sorry, I have some impairments and it is hard to make everything come out right.
Thank you for your help
On rereading this I feel I should vote myself down if I knew how, it seems a little over the top.
Let me post about my emotional state since this is a rationality discussion and if we can't deconstruct our emotional impulses and understand them we are pretty doomed to remaining irrational.
I got quite emotional when I saw a post that seemed like intellectual bullying followed by self congratulation; I am very sensitive to this type of bullying, more so when directed at others than myself as due to freakish test scores and so on as a child I feel fairly secur...
Private_messaging, can you explain why you open up with such a hostile question at eli? Why the implied insult? Is that the custom here? I am new, should I learn to do this?
For example, I could have opened with your same question, because Monte Carlo methods are very different from what you describe (I happened to be a mathematical physicist back in the day). Let me quote an actual definition:
Monte Carlo Method: A problem solving technique used to approximate the probability of certain outcomes by running multiple trial runs, called simulations, using r...
The only scenario where a financial argument makes sense is if you're shortening your life by spending more than you can afford, or if spending money on cryonics prevents you from buying some future tech that would save your life.
What if I am facing death and have an estate in the low six figures, and I can afford one cryonic journey to the future, or my grandchildren's education plus, say, charitable donations enough to save 100 young children who might otherwise live well into a lovely post-Singularity world that would include life extension, uploadi...
I think cryonics is very promising but the process of bringing people back from frozen state will need a lot of research and practice.
I would like to volunteer to go in as a research subject if someone else will pay and if any data mined from my remains is released as open source historical data under some reasonable license, for example the Perl Artistic License, with myself listed as the author of the raw recovered data. (I wrote it into my memories, no?)
People could then use the mined data, such as it is, for research on personality reconstruction or an...
It depends on the actual situation and my goal.
Imagine I were a ship captain assigned to try to If rescue a viable sample of a culture from a zone that was about to be genocided, I would be very likely to take the 400 peopleweights (including books or whatever else they valued as much as people) of evacuees, unless someone made a convincing case that the extra 100 people were vital cultural or genetic carriers. For definiteness, imagine my ship is rated to carry up to 400 peopleweight worth of passengers in almost any weather, but 500 people would overlo...
It seems very likely to me that tribal groups in prehistory observed that "eating some things leads to illness and sometimes death; eating other things seems to lead to health or happiness or greater utility" and some very clever group of people starting compiling a system of eating rules that seemed to work. It became traditional to hand over rules for eating, and other activities, to their children. Rules like "If a garment has a visible spot of mildew, either cut out the mildewed spot with a specified margin around it or discard it enti...
Note that I anticipate not Cessation of Existence but "occasional interruptions of my linear consciousness, which may last up till or beyond the Omega Point", if the current leading models of physical law prove to be for real in the long run. One or more of these interruptions may look exactly like death to the naive observer, but since I've experienced many previous interruptions in consciousness without too much inconvenience, I expect I can get used to death as well.
I chose more_wrong as a name because I'm in disagreement with a lot of the lesswrong posters about what constitutes a reasonable model of the world. Presumably my opinions are more wrong than opinions that are lesswrong, hence the name :)
My rationalist origin story would have a series of watershed events but as far as I can tell, I never had any core beliefs to discard to become rational, because I never had any core beliefs at all. Do not have a use for them, never picked them up.
As far as identifying myself as an aspiring rationalist, the main events t...
Eliezer seems absurdly optimistic to me. He is relying on some unseen entity to reach in and keep the laws of physics stable in our universe. We already see lots of evidence that they are not truly stable, for example we believe in both the electroweak transition and earlier transitions, of various natures depending on your school of physics. We /just saw/ in 1998 that unknown laws of physics can creep up and spring out by surprise, suddenly 'taking over' 74 percent of the Universe's postulated energ... (read more)