That's true, but the change a strong AI would make would be probably completely irreversible and unmodifiable.
This brings up an interesting ethical dilemma. If strong AI will ever be possible, it will be probably designed with the values of what you described as a small minority. Does this this small minority have the ethical right to enforce a new world upon the majority which will be against their values?
I usually look out for the surveys, but until I opened this article I never even knew there was a survey for this year... so yeah, poor advertising.
"services that go visit the customer outcompete ones that the customer has to go visit" - and what does this have to do with self-driving cars? Whether the doctor has to actively drive the car to travel to the patient, or can just sit there in the car while the car drives all the way, the same time is still lost due to the travel, and the same fuel is still used up. A doctor or a hairdresser would be able to spend significantly less time with customers, if most of the working day would be taken up by traveling. And what about all the tools which ...
I know about the first one having been mentioned on this site, I've read about it plenty of times, but it was not named as such. Therefore it's advisable if you use a rare term (or especially one made up by you) that you also tell what it means.
Could you please put some links to "Hacker's joke" and "Indexical blackmail"? Both use words common enough to not yield obvious results for a google search.
Another Christian here, raised as a Calvinist, but consider myself more of a non-denominational, ecumenical one, with some very slight deist tendencies.
I don't want to sound rude, but I don't know how to formulate it in a better way: if you think you have to choose between christianity and science, you have a very incomplete information about what Christianity is about, and also incomplete knowledge about the history of science itself. I wonder how many who call themselves Bayesians know that Bayes was a very devout Christian, similar to many other founder...
If you make 100 loaves and sell them for 99 cents each, you've provided 1 dollar of value to society, but made 100 dollars for yourself.
Not 99 dollars?
Anyone who is reading this should take this survey, even if you don't identify as an "effective altruist".
Why? The questions are too much centered not only on effective altruists, but also on left- or far-left-leaning ideologies. I stopped filling it when it assumed only movements of that single political spectrum are considered social movements.
Even with the limited AGI with very specific goals (build 1000 cars) the problem is not automatically solved.
The AI might deduce that if humans still exist, there is a higher than zero probability that a human will prevent it from finishing the task, so to be completely safe, all humans must be killed.
Those "very real, very powerful security regimes around the world" are surprisingly inept at handling a few million people trying to migrate to other countries, and similarly inept at handling the crime waves and the political fallout generated by it.
And if you underestimate how much a threat could a mere "computer" be, read the "Friendship is Optimal" stories.
This is a well-presented article, and even though most (or maybe all) of the information is easily available else-where, this is a well-written summary. It also includes aspects which are not talked about much, or which are often misunderstood. Especially the following one:
...Debating the beliefs is a red herring. There could be two groups worshiping the same sacred scripture, and yet one of them would exhibit the dramatic changes in its members, white the other would be just another mainstream faith with boring compartmentalizing believers; so the differen
This comment was very insightful, and made me think that the young-earth creationist I talked about had a similar motivation. Despite this outrageous argument, she is a (relatively speaking) smart and educated person. Not academic-level, but neither grown up on the streets level.
I always thought the talking snakes argument was very weak, but being confronted by a very weird argument from a young-earth creationist provided a great example for it:
If you believe in evolution, why don't you grow wings and fly away?
The point here is not about the appeal to ridicule (although it contains a hefty dose of that too). It's about a gross misrepresentation of a viewpoint. Compare the following flows of reasoning:
I'm not surprised Dawkins makes a cameo in it. The theist in the discussion is a very blunt strawman, just as Dawkins usually likes to invite the dumbest theists he can find, who say the stupidest things about evolution or global warming, thereby allegedly proving all theists wrong.
I'm sorry if I might have offended Dawkins, I know many readers here are a fan of him. However, I have to state that although I have no doubts about the values of his scientific work and his competence in his field, he does make a clown of himself with all those stawman attacks against theism.
For many people, religion helps a lot in replenishing willpower. Although, what I observed, it's less about stopping procrastination, and more about not despairing in a difficult or depressing situation. I might even safely guess that for a lot of believers this is among the primary causes of their beliefs.
I know that religious beliefs on this site are significantly below the offline average, I didn't want to convince anyone of anything, I just pointed out that for many people it helps. Maybe by acknowledging this fact we might understand why.
we'd only really need the 5 big crops + plants for photosynthesis , insects and impollinators in order to survive and thrive
Time and time it turned out that we underestimated the complexity of the biosphere. And time and time again our meddling backfired horribly.
Even if we were utterly selfish and had no moral objections, wiping out all but a handful of "useful" species would almost certainly lead to unforeseen consequences ending in the total destruction of the planet's biosphere. We did not yet manage to fully map the role each species pla...
True, the scenario is not implausible for a non-hostile alien civilization to arrive who are more efficient than us, and in the long term they will out-compete and out-breed us.
Such non-hostile assimilation is not unheard of in real life. It is happening now (or at least claimed by many to be happening) in Europe, both in the form of the migrant crisis and also in the form of smaller countries fearing that their cultural identities and values are being eroded by the larger, richer countries of the union.
I'm surprised to find such rhetoric on this site. There is an image now popularized by certain political activists and ideologically-driven cartoons, which depict the colonization of the Americas as a mockery of the D-Day landing, with peaceful Natives standing on the shore and smiling, while gun-toting Europeans jump out of the ships and start shooting at them. That image is even more false than the racist depictions in the late 19th century glorifying the westward expansion of the USA while vilifying the natives.
The truth is much more complicated than t...
If we developed practical interstellar travel, and went to a star system with an intelligent species somewhat below our technological level, our first choice would probably not be annihilating them. Why? Because it would not fit into our values to consider exterminating them as the primary choice. And how did we develop our values like this? I guess at least in some part it's because we evolved and built our civilizations among plenty of species of animals, some of which we hunted for food (and not all of them to extinction, and even those which got extinc...
First of all, IQ tests aren't designed for high IQ, so there's a lot of noise there and this is probably mainly noise.
Indeed. If an IQ test claims to provide accurate scores outside of the 70 to 130 range, you should be suspicious.
There are so many misunderstandings about IQ in the general population, ranging from claims like "the average IQ is now x" (where x is different from 100), to claims of a famous scientist having had an IQ score over 200, and claims of "some scientists estimating" the IQ of a computer, an animal, or a fictio...
Also, many people on this site seem to have come from a liberal / libertarian upbringing, where it is a very popular trend to believe in. The survey supports this, by presenting support for BI for each political group.
Isn't the "Do I live in a simulation?" question practically indistinguishable from the question "does God exist?", for a sufficiently flexible definition for "God"?
For the latter, there are plenty of ethical frameworks, as well as incentives for altruism, developed during the history of mankind.
And it seems the community is not interested enough to counter the ten or so accounts which do this... :(
it's more like 20+. And the community is not active enough to fight. Once a post is invisible to a large fraction of the community there are significantly less people able to fight.
There is something I don't understand. Are people voting now on the person instead of the article? I see that all of Elo's recent activity is massively down-voted, and some of the posts might have deserved it. But certainly not all. I'm just curious whether if this post has been written by someone else, would it have been similarly down-voted.
It might not be among the core principles of this site, but it's certainly not an uninteresting topic.
In this case, we should really define "coercion". Could you please elaborate what you meant through that word?
One could argue, that if someone holds a gun to your head and demands your money, it's not coercion, just a game, where the expected payoff of not giving the money is smaller than the expected payoff of handing it over.
(Of course, I completely agree with your explanation about taxes. It's just the usage of "coercion" in the rest of your comment which seems a little odd)
Parenting might be even worse, with plenty of contradictions between self-proclaimed experts, one claiming something is very important to do, the other claiming you must never do it under any circumstances.
Has anyone heard about the book "The egg-laying dog" from Beck-Bornholdt? I don't know about an English translation, I freely translated the title from German. It is a book about fallacies in statistics, research, especially in medicine, written in a style to be comprehensible by the layman.
It discusses at great length the problems plaguing modern research (well, the research of the 1990's when the book was written, but I doubt that very much has changed). For example, the required statistical significance for a publication is much more relaxed t...
Let's be conservative and say the ratio is 1 in a billion.
Why?
Why not 1 in 10? Or 1 in 3^^^^^^^^3?
Choosing an arbitrary probability has good chances of leading us unknowingly into circular reasoning. I've seen too many cases of using for example Bayesian reasoning about something we have no information about, which went like "assuming the initial probability was x", getting some result after a lot of calculations, then defending the result to be accurate because the Bayesian rule was applied so it must be infallible.
And why should we be utility maximization agents?
Assume the following situation. You are very rich. You meet a poor old lady in a dark alley who carries a purse with her, with some money which is a lot from her perspective. Maybe it's all her savings, maybe she just got lucky once and received it as a gift or as alms. If you mug her, nobody will ever find it out and you get to keep that money. Would you do it? As a utility maximization agent, based on what you just wrote, you should.
Would you?
There are some people who think punishment and reward work linearly.
If I remember correctly (please correct me if I'm wrong) even Eliezer himself believes that if we assign a pain value in the single digits to very slightly pinching someone so they barely feel anything, and a pain value in the millions to torturing someone with the worst possible torture, then you should choose torturing a thousand people over slightly pinching half of the planet's inhabitants, if your goal was to minimize suffering. With such a logic, you could assign rewards and punishments to anything, and calculate pretty strange things out of that.
Another problem would be, that unless this system suddenly and magically got applied to the whole world, it would not be competitive. It can't grow from a small set of members because the limits it imposes would hinder those who would have contributed the most to the size and power of the economy. By shrinking your economy, you will become less competitive against those who don't adopt this new system.
I fear some people will quickly learn how to game the system. No wonder our current society is so complicated, every time a group came up with a simple and brilliant way to create the perfect utopia, it always failed miserably.
(also, try selling your idea to the average voter, I would love to see their faces when you mention "logarithm of total social product")
Cars in the 1930's didn't have such crumple zones as modern cars do. Also, in the city they don't move as fast as on the freeway. Even a small difference might decide between life and death.
I would suggest giving the story the benefit of the doubt. It must stay at least somewhat true to the style of the comics, but at the same time explore the world in a more serious and realistic tone. And it manages that quite well, it's worth reading.
Imagine that you are literally the first organism who by random mutation achieved a gene for "helping those who help you"
Not all information is encoded genetically. Many kinds of information have to be learned from the parents or from society.
One problem I can see at first glance that the article doesn't look like a Wikipedia article, but as a textbook or part of a publication. The goal of a Wikipedia article should be for a wide audience to understand the basics of something, and not a treatise only experts can comprehend.
What you wrote seems to be an impressive work, but it should be simplified (or at least the introduction of it), so that even non-experts can have a chance to at least learn what it is about.
It's not only in social sciences where this phenomena is common. The most striking examples I've seen were in medicine. An article is published, for example "supplement xyz slightly reduces a few of the side effects encountered during radiotherapy used in cancer treatment", which is then published in the media and on social networks as "What the medical industry doesn't want you to know: supplement xyz instantly cures all forms of cancer!". And often there is a link to the original publication, but people still believe it and forward it. And what's even more sad, probably many people then buy that supplement and don't seek medical help, believing that it alone will help.
If this would be enough to prove the effectiveness of rain-dancing, then we would develop 30 different styles of rain-dance, test each of them, and with a very high chance we would get p<0.05 on at least one of them.
Sadly, the medical industry is full of such publications, because publishing new ideas is rewarded more than reproducing already published experiments.
Since then I found a partially relevant, but very simple and effective "puzzle".
There are four cards in front of you on the desk. It is known, that every card has a numerical digit on one side, and a letter from the English alphabet on the other side.
You have to verify the theory that "if one side of the card has a vowel, the other side has an even number", and you are only allowed to flip two cards.
The cards in front of you are:
A T 7 2
Which cards will you flip?
(I wrote partially relevant because this is not an example for an unfalsi...
I agree, but I see a connection to falsifiability in that most people don't even try to falsify their theories in this game, even if it would be possible.
A much better example than the 2-4-6 game would be one where the most obvious hypothesis was unfalsifiable.
This and Russel's teapot are just unverifiable claims, and not a study of understanding how a system works which would fail because we committed an innocent mistake.
Besides, they have strong ideological undertones, so all they would manage to do is to cater for the ego of those who agree with their ideological implications, and make angry those who don't. They won't really convince anyone.
I often encountered (when discussing politics, theology or similar subjective topics) a fallacy which is similar to this one, or maybe it can be seen as the reverse of it.
Also, sometimes A might try to prove 2+2=5 with the same strategy.
Not necessarily. One might sincerely believe in the core values promoted by Christianity (Do unto others as you would have them do unto you) without being a biblical literalist. Christianity includes a wide spectrum of views, not only what how some people define it, which might even be just a parody of Christianity.
To summarize it, I don't know her so I cannot judge whether she's just lying for a social benefit or not, but I find it plausible that she might not be lying, or might not behave like this solely as a facade for a social benefit.
You are right, I meant bihacking, my mistake.
My concern was based on the observation how the word phobia (especially in cases of homophobia and xenophobia) is increasingly applied to cases of mild dislike, or even to cases of failing to show open support.
I fear a time will come when people who don't want to try polyhacking bihacking will be labeled as homophobic. And that will just further dilute the term.
Besides saying that I have taken the survey...
I would also like to mention that the predictions of probabilities of unobservable concepts was the hardest one for me. Of course, there are some in which i believe more than in some others, but still, any probability besides 0% or 100% seems really strange for me. For something like being in a simulation, if I would believe it but have some doubts, saying 99%, or if I would not believe but being open to it and saying 1%, these seem so arbitrary and odd for me. 1% is really huge in the scope of very probable o...
Please explain what you mean by saying "it is easier to...".
Judging by the examples, for me the opposite seems to be much easier, if we define easiness as how easy it is to identify with a view, select a view, or represent a view among other people.
Do you instead use the term as "it will be more useful for me"? For the average person, it is much easier to identify oneself with a label, because it signifies a loyalty to a well-defined group of people, which can lead to benefits within that group.
Saying "I'm a democrat" or &q...
Insurance for small consumer products are not rational for the buyer, for the very reasons which were presented in the question. If you can afford the loss of the item, it's better to not buy insurance and just buy the item again in the case it is lost or destroyed. Why insurance companies are still making money out of extended warranties for consumer products, is because they have good marketing and people are not perfectly rational. Gambling, lottery, etc. exist for the same reasons, despite having a negative expected value.
However, if you cannot afford ...
I didn't say I had an answer. I only said it can be an interesting dilemma.