eyudkowsky

Re: Domain name: That's bias as in "cognitive bias" not "racial bias".

OK, so you're a physicist, and you know that, when the dust settles and the true theory whatever-it-may-be is found, it's going to have multiple worlds in it, rather than violating relativity.

At what point, in your opinion, should physicists go ahead and announce this fact to the public as the official verdict of Science?

Make no mistake, quantum gibberish has trickle-down negative effects on the rest of the planet - people watching "What the Bleep Do We Know?" and losing hope in Reason. It may not hurt them any less than disbelief in natural selection, on average.

At what point should physicists get together and say: "Oops! Werner Heisenberg was wrong about the special role of consciousness. We now know this for sure. Everyone stop reading 'The Secret'."?

It's easy to say "Don't be too emphatic about that truth there" when you're a physicist and you can see the arguments clear as sunlight. If we were all evolutionary biologists we wouldn't need emphatic defenses of evolution, either.

I remember how I learned to program. My parents had a Timex Sinclair with no tape drive and 4K of RAM, so if you wanted to use a program, you had to type it in, in BASIC, from scratch. The computer came with a book of programs. I just looked at the programs, figured out what they did, and started writing my own modifications. I think I was around 5 years old.

I guess I must have just been "born rational", if you're going to equate programming ability with rationality.

But what makes you think that the "programming gear" I had - the quality of a born hacker, by which the first time we look at any piece of code, anywhere, any time in our life, at any age, we instantly know how to program - is equivalent to "rationality"? Or even "intelligence"?

There are physicists who cannot learn to program, apparently. This shocks me. But if I can learn to program at age five without instruction, and a physicist cannot learn to program with instruction, that makes it pretty darn plausible to me that yes, there is a "programming gear".

PS: How the hell can you be a physicist and not be able to write computer programs? WTF, human brain?

You know, I seriously, seriously think that transhumanists have an easier time dealing with death. We're not all conflicted about death. We have no concept that we ought to be bottling up the anger. We don't think we ought to be "coming to terms" with death. Making peace with death is not a goal. Death is horrible and we have to stop it.

There, that's it, you're done. That's the resolution.

http://yudkowsky.net/yehuda.html

(my little brother, he was 19)

With a traditional publisher and a good book, you can easily get more than 4-6 times the sales. Sorry, gatekeepers can still be pretty effective, even in this day and age.

If you listen to a busker on the subway, and you enjoy the music, but you don't tip them anything, is that just as wrong, or less wrong?

Would copyright infringement still seem intuitively, morally wrong, if there were no copyright laws to begin with? If creators were never promised a legal expectation of control over their work, would you be violating any legitimate expectation by copying?

Let's say that someone produces a musical album, and, knowing they cannot legally stop you from downloading it, they ask you not to copy it unless you send them $5. Would it be morally wrong to copy without paying?

Is it the same amount of moral wrong as copying the work of someone who produced an album relying on the promise of legal protection for it?

Look, I don't mean to spam or anything, but there's at least three different major logically incompatible concepts being called the "Singularity" by different schools of the debate.

Every time you say "Singularity" without defining what you think that word means, God kills a catgirl.

Please think of the catgirls.

Other resources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

http://singinst.org/AIRisk.pdf

http://www.transhumanism.org/index.php/WTA/faq21/64/

Whose act of rhetorical jujitsu? Ever seen anyone define the Singularity this exact way besides you?

Um, just read the linked article. "The population of smart machines would explode even faster than the economy. So even though total wealth would increase very rapidly, wealth per machine would fall rapidly." Robin Hanson is not a self-declared "Singularitarian", but I, his co-blogger, certainly am, and we had a discussion about the effects of future resource constraints on intelligence here:

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/05/biting-evolutio.html

With a few bright exceptions like Robin Hanson and Paul Wallich, the IEEE Spectrum issue follows the usual pattern: People who have no engagement with the serious Singularity analysts, making up stuff at random and saying "This is what the Singularitarians must believe."

The term now has at least three major separate meanings, by the way. See http://www.singinst.org/blog/2007/09/30/three-major-singular... for preliminary disambiguation.

At some point it becomes economical to synthesize fuel using nuclear power plants. I would expect this to be well short of $100/gal.

Fair point, GavinB. If you defined "efficiency" in terms of achieving the most benefit from an eyeball using the fewest computations, then I'm not sure whether a Bayesian superintelligence could approach "efficiency". Maybe the theoretically optimal program to run on the eyeball's input, would itself require exponentially vast brainpower to calculate!

But I would concede a much higher chance that a Bayesian superintelligence could get bored at exactly the right time, than that it could simulate all possible universes.

Oh, dear. Now I feel obliged to say something, but all the original reasons against discussing the AI-Box experiment are still in force...

All right, this much of a hint:

There's no super-clever special trick to it. I just did it the hard way.

Something of an entrepreneurial lesson there, I guess.

Aw, shucks.

That's what I entered, but it came out on Scribd!

Had this problem once here. Got a portable AC.

Next time I moved, I made sure I had (central!) AC. I think if you're working from home in the Bay Area, it's not really optional - maybe it used to be, but not any more.

PG: "I think they've deliberately avoided learning about certain things. Certainly I do. I used to think I wanted to know everything. Now I know I don't."

Can you give us some examples of things you don't want to know and avoid learning about? Also, you must already have some idea of what horrible truths you might discover if you learned further, so can you give us a general idea of what those are?

Um, no, that is a quantum mysterianism line.

This might have been true in the days before anyone had the concept of macroscopic decoherence (popularly known as many-worlds) but quantum physics is pretty normal these days. See the recent series at Overcoming Bias.