All of nykos's Comments + Replies

Why not donate to people promoting neocolonialism, if you are really concerned about efficient malaria eradication and the well-being of Black people? I for one refuse to donate any amount of money to treat symptoms rather than causes, at least in in the case of strangers; it is an inefficient allocation of resources.

If I were a scientist, I would ask for evidence of the existence of omega-level beings before further considering the questions. We can of course debate how many Omega-level beings are there on the tip of a pin, but I believe our limited time in this Universe is better spent asking different kinds of questions.

Maybe the forces of human nature make the future in some sense inevitable, conspiring to keep the long-term probability of eutopia very low?

If you took a freezing, dirty European peasant in winter ca. 1000 AD, and transported him to 0 AD Rome and its public thermae, he would also be heading towards eutopia - only in the 'wrong' direction of time. The worship of many gods in particular would probably strike him as horrifying.

If you transported Thomas Carlyle through time to the present, he would be horrified and disgusted, probably also frightened. But he ... (read more)

I do think Progressive like memes would have developed in a non-Christian descended implementation of what is often called The Cathedral

I think this is quite likely to be the case, since Progressivism (which one might think of as "altruism gone rampant") might actually emerge in time from the mating patterns and the resulting genetic structure of a population.

What are the experimental predictions of the various string theories?

Have any of those been experimentally verified so far?

Is belief in string theory paying any rent?

What about individual IQ? It's not at all clear that learning methods yield uniform results across the bell curve. What might work for a 130+ IQ individual may not work for a 110 IQ individual - and vice-versa.

Intelligent people are more likely to think on the consequences when deciding to have a child. But there is a prisoner's dilemma type of situation here:

One reason smart people forego reproduction is because they might feel children make them more unhappy overall for at least the first few years (a not unreasonable assumption). Or simply because they are not religious (smart religious people do still have lots of children) As a consequence, in 20 years, the average IQ of that society will fall (bar some policy reversals encouraging eugenic breeding, or adva... (read more)

I do not understand how this has anything to do with FAI

It has to do because FAI is currently a branch of pure philosophy. Without constant experimental feedback and contact with reality, philosophy simply cannot deliver useful results like science can.

This is not in fact "simple" to do. It's not even clear what level of details will be needed- just a neural network? Hormones? Glial cells? Modelling of the actual neurons?

Are there any other current proposals to build AGI that don't start from the brain? From what I can tell, people don't e... (read more)

Is a "vegetative-state life-support cripple" a person at all?

I concede that, under some really extreme environmental conditions, any genetic advantages would be canceled out. So, you might actually be right if the IQ 80 mother is really bad. Money should be provided to poor families by the state, but only as long as they raise their child well - as determined by periodic medical checks. Any person, no matter the IQ, can do one thing reasonably well, and that is to raise children to maturity.

But I believe you are taking the importance of parenthood way too far, and disregarding the hereditarian point of view too easi... (read more)

The society will be listening to its Einsteins and Feynmans once they band together and figure out how to use the dark arts to take control of the mass-media and universities away from their present owners and use them for their own, more enlightened goals. Or at least ingratiate themselves before the current rulers. They could promise to build new bombs or drones, for example. As for not being interested in solving FAI and these kinds of problems, that's really not a very convincing argument IMO. Throughout history, in societies of high average IQ and a c... (read more)

Good luck explaining Bayes' law to people with IQs below 90.

Rationalism may not be heritable, but intelligence surely is.

Let's face it, LessWrong and rationalism in general appeal mostly to people with at least 1 SD above average IQ.

Given that the burden of proof regarding the equality of intelligence of human populations that have evolved in reproductive isolation from each other for thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years, and in radically different environments (of varying survival difficulty), lies with the egalitarians claiming that all human populations have the same intelligence distribution - I'd say that this article doesn't even belong on LessWrong.

What we need instead is either: a) An article explaining natural selection to those who don't understand where people who ... (read more)

More quotes by Mencius Moldbug:

When they say things like "in cognitive science, Bayesian reasoner is the technically precise codeword that we use to mean rational mind," they really do mean it. Move over, Aristotle!

Of course, in Catholicism, Catholic is the technically precise codeword that they use to mean rational mind. I am not a Catholic or even a Christian, but frankly, I think that if I had to vote for a dictator of the world and the only information I had was whether the candidate was an orthodox Bayesian or an orthodox Catholic, I'd go

Even though his prescription may be lacking (here is some criticism to neocameralism: http://unruled.blogspot.com/2008/06/about-fnargocracy.html ), his description and diagnosis of everything wrong with the world is largely correct. Any possble political solution must begin from Moldbug's diagnosis of all the bad things that come with having Universalism as the most dominant ideology/religion the world has ever experienced.

One example of a bad consequence of Universalism is the delay of the Singularity. If you, for example, want to find out why Jews are m... (read more)

To achieve the Singularity in as fast a time as possible, we need not only money, but lots of smart, hard-working people (who will turn out to be mostly White and Asian males). The thing is, those traits are to a large part genetic; and we know that Ashkenazi Jews are smarter on average than other human groups. I am writing this at the risk of further inflating Eliezer's already massive ego :)

So, an obvious interim solution until we get to the point of enhancing our intelligence through artificial, non-genetic means (or inventing a Seed AI) is to populari... (read more)

I think that it pays to be rationally ignorant. It is an economic fact that the more people specialize, the more they get paid and the chance of making a significant contribution in their particular field increases. You can't achieve your best in being a doctor if you spend valuable time reading textbooks about Western philosophy or quantum computing instead of reading textbooks about diseases. There is a saying capturing this thought: "jack of all trades and master of none". Sure, there are some fields such as AI at the intersection of many scie... (read more)