saxonklaxon

His subtitling in English of Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) was a major part of why I fell in love with that film.

The most dangerous one being when educated, middle class young men can't find wives or a middle class income. Then revolutionary forces start to brew.

Apart from getting enough sleep, any tips for how to support or enhance this maintenance process?

Which branch of science or philosophy did you apply to reach your non-squishy conclusion?

Option (a) create a 'motherly' machine which is guaranteed compassionate towards children and small furry mammals,

Option (b) create a Buddha-like machine which is guaranteed benevolent towards everyone and everything in the Universe.

Neither of these work! Wrt (a) the flip side of maternal empathy is a ferocious attitude towards potential predators who threaten her cubs. How does the programmer guarantee no human will be placed in this category, mistakenly or otherwise? Besides, before one attains motherhood one must pass the 'terrible twos' which many psychologists regard as the peak stage of physical violence.

Wrt (b) an AI with no desires has no incentive to interact with the world. So its mind will not develop.

Is there a third option?

Why should we need to attend universities? Apart from the inexplicit or hands-on component of technical training, learning can be done via the web. Leaving home and becoming independent can be rehearsed by travelling or taking a job elsewhere. Finding a spouse can be done online. Credibility and commitment can be measured by some combination of IQ testing and sitting outside the employer's office (a la Fight Club). The idea that universities will help you to think independently is untrue. They create conformity. Indeed, as historical religious institutions, they were founded for this purpose.

Some people might like the idea of all transactions being monitored and controlled. Ensuring that people behave ethically, that they don't avoid tax, etc. The problem is that elitists can't help believing that they know how to run everybody's lives. So it wouldn't stop there and what future regulators claim to be ethical will morph into supporting a tyrannical status quo.

It's great that we have access to ancient and historical genomes. Because of the development of medicine we've probably accumulated a lot of random mutations in our present-day genomes and at some point we'll need to identify them.

"If a thing be really good, it can be shown to be such. If you cannot demonstrate its excellence, it may well be suspected that you are no proper judge of it."

-- William Godwin

goo.gl/wylZZm

Good point. However cargo-culting other surgeons subtly and fashionably and well enough to fool promotion committees into overlooking mediocre performance might take more creativity than you think. For one thing surgeons are intelligent, status-oriented, complicated creatures. It's not just about picking the right clothing. Not giving the game away by your demeanour may require that you fool yourself too. Such narcissism might take a herculean effort to maintain because your ideas about yourself are connected to other, more objective, ideas. You might have to organise professional conferences and get involved in politics, which always take a psychological toll. If your attention is on the wrong things this could indicate that privately you don't believe your surgical performance is up to much or that it can be improved. Which may turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

'Modern psychometrics' are empiricist nonsense I'm afraid.

It takes creativity and effort to look the part. It takes creativity and effort to be normal. Which means less creativity has been applied elsewhere like to something important.

Being ashamed of not being able to do X is not a good reason or motivation for learning it!

Another mistake is the idea which the article rightly denies, namely that you have to be smart enough to learn X.

The author makes a mistake too: she thinks she can predict the rest of her life. ("I realized I actually wanted to study physics for the rest of my life.") This last idea is related to the question adults frequently ask children, "What do you want to do when you grow up?"

The limiting factor in all these cases is how genuinely interesting you find the field and how much you want to learn it now. Which is a property of the ideas and the problems as much as of your personality.

I agree with the rude man that accusations of rudeness are themselves rude! (Even where they are true).

This reflexive property is interesting, for example:

Hatred is harmful. Accusation of hatred is a form of hatred. Racism is harmful. Accusation of racism is also harmful. Rape is harmful. Accusation of rape is harmful. Pedophilia is harmful. Accusation of pedophilia is harmful. Blasphemy is harmful. Accusation of blasphemy is harmful.

Obviously the harm isn't generally equal. Does the disparity say something about how honest a society is?

>when nuclear power fails, it tends to fail catastrophically.

Nuclear fission, right? And let's not forget that coal mining accidents are equally catastrophic for the families of the victims.

>theres no clear reason why humans should be consuming so much electricity and energy

On the contrary, we have no choice but to consume more power. This isn't just a matter of wanting more things: it's about survival.

The talk is about climate change and animal extinctions right now but there's an unlimited number of additional environmental problems to solve if we and our fellow organisms are to survive. Warming, meteor strikes, supervolcanoes, the next ice age -- these are are just four of the known problems.

So we have no choice but to continue to increase our scientific knowledge, technology and wealth. This entails the efficient and safe wielding of greater and greater quantities of energy.