Eliezer, are you familiar with Carol Dweck's research on intelligence, or has that corner of psychology eluded you? It matches up very closely with what you say here about maturity. Dweck says: some people (like your parents on maturity) have an "entity theory" of intelligence - they think of it as something fixed that you either have or you don't - while others (like you on maturity) have an "incremental theory" - they think of it as continually developing. Incremental theorists tend to learn better and be more eager to face challen...
It's interesting that Eliezer ties intelligence so closely to action ("steering the future"). I generally think of intelligence as being inside the mind, with behaviors & outcomes serving as excellent cues to an individual's intelligence (or unintelligence), but not as part of the definition of intelligence. Would Deep Blue no longer be intelligent at chess if it didn't have a human there to move the pieces on the board, or if it didn't signal the next move in a way that was readily intelligible to humans? Is the AI-in-a-box not intelligen...
I think a simpler explanation is just that people are not absolutists about following social norms, so they'll regularly violate a norm if it comes into conflict with another norm or something else. To take one example, there is a clear social norm against lying which children learn (they are told not to lie and chastised when they are caught lying). But people still lie all the time, and not just for personal benefit but also to spare other people's feelings and, perhaps most commonly, to make social interactions go more smoothly. And instead of seeing...
I'll echo Hofstadter and a few of the commenters. The mouse/chimp/VI/Einstein scale seems wrong to me; I think Einstein should be further off to the right. It all depends on what you mean by intelligence and how you define the scale, of course, but if intelligence is something like the generalized ability to learn, understand things, and solve problems, then the range of problems that Einstein is able to solve, and the set of things that Einstein is able to understand well, seem many times larger than what the village idiot is able to do.
The village idio...
You're a few years behind on this research, Eliezer.
The point of the research program of Mussweiler and Strack is that anchoring effects can occur without any adjustment. "Selective Accessibility" is their alternative, adjustment-free process that can produce estimates that are too close to the anchor. The idea is that, when people are testing the anchor value, they bring to mind information that is consistent with the correct answer being close to the anchor value, since that information is especially relevant for answering the comparative que...
Length contraction was proposed by George FitzGerald in 1889, in response to the Michelson-Morley experiment, and it gained greater circulation in the physicist community after Hendrik Lorentz independently proposed it in 1892. I imagine that most top physicists would have been familiar with it by 1901. Lorentz's paper included the ideas that the relative motion of reference frames was important, and that funny things were going on with time (like non-simultaneity in different reference frames), and his 1899 follow-up included time dilation equations (as...
This topic was posted at Less Wrong (by Phil Goetz), but apparently Eliezer thought it would fit better here.
If the goal is to encourage aid to become more effective and evidence-based, I don't think that shouting "Stop the aid!" will help. Setting yourself up in opposition to aid will just make the pro-aid team rally together against you, and in a head-to-head matchup the anti-aid side is at a huge disadvantage in winning over public opinion and celebrity culture (pro-aid forces have better ties to establishment power, emotions, common sense, a... (read more)