I think you’re highly delusional about how malleable people’s opinions really are… Are you aware of what’s going on in politics and the religious sphere? As if just talking really thoroughly about AGI and appealing to rationality is going to get the majority of people from all over the world on our side. Are you serious?
The point I made about creationism wasn’t just that most people who believe in god probably won’t want to see one being built, but that you cannot change people’s opinions easily. Even completely ridiculous and unworldly ideas like creationism have hardly budged an inch in the last decade—they are rationalityproof. If you really thoroughly explained to people what this self-improving AGI was good for and how powerful it could really become… they’d totally lose it. They won’t welcome “our robot overlords”, regardless of how nice you make the resulting utopias sound. People fear the unknown and on a gut-level they will immediately reject our idea and rationalize in the blink of an eye why we’re wrong, and crazy, and have to be stopped.
I’m all for thoroughly educating people about rationality (you’ve read my suggestion in the other topic), but seriously getting the majority of people behind us? Sorry, but my psychological model of how people and masses behave tells me that this will never happen. At least not without brain-augmentation, and even then a global 50% +1 vote seems quite unlikely to me.
Would it be better if people knew in detail about self-improving AGI and could objectively discuss this matter in order to rationally make a decision and responsibly vote on whether or not it should be developed? Hell yeah I’d love that! I’d also love to ride on a flying pig but that’s not gonna happen either.
I’d prefer it if you used “mistaken” rather than “delusional”, thank you very much. Ascribing opposing opinions to madness usually signals weakness in your own stance.
Are you aware of what’s going on in politics and the religious sphere?
Quite, see my next paragraph.
Are you serious?
I am positive that talking about it publicly and rationally will bring humanity, eventually, to the side of reason, whomsoever it may lie with. Maybe as a US citizen you see things differently (although from here I see education improving somewhat, steps being taken towards giving citizens the minimum necessary services, political awareness developing, racial and sexual and gender issues being slowly abolished...)
But as a resident of Europe and the Middle East, I see religion and partisanship shriveling into a husk, intelligence and culture extending and growing, triumphant, as they never have before, and the citizenry reclaiming power over the aloof governments, and over their futures.
Humanism wins. And rationalism cannot lose, on the long term, because, as its name indicates, it is the art of being right.
creationism has hardly budged an inch in the last decade
That’s not what I heard at all. Creationism only became acknowledged as a problem recently. Which means it was secure before, and it is now being challenged, and singing it’s swan song. Lack of visible, spectacular budging doesn’t mean that it isn’t crumbling from the inside. And it’s really a problem that is endemic to the USA: across the pond, virtually no one believes in Creationism. I suspect this has something to do with the education of the masses, which is very overlooked in the USA. Once the US society will feel the need to raise their own education level, for any economic reasons, the problems derived from ignorance will just extinguish themselves by sheer lack of combustible.
People fear the unknown and on a gut-level they will immediately reject our idea and rationalize in the blink of an eye why we’re wrong, and crazy, and have to be stopped.
That’s why the improvement of public, mass education, and the spreading of our Art must be a priority, if not our number one priority. That’s why I said “explaining things thoroughly: by that I mean raising the level of awareness of the general public*.
Here in Spain, France, the UK, the majority of people are Atheists. In the USSR virtually everyone were atheists. Beliefs are extremely malleable. By Raising The Sanity Waterline, we’ll make it so that they are only malleable through empirical evidence, and, if we do it right, people won’t even notice ).
I’d also love to ride on a flying pig but that’s not gonna happen either.
You believe in Transhuman-level cybernetics and brain expansions and you don’t believe we can make pigs fly and carry people on their backs?
I’d prefer it if you used “mistaken” rather than “delusional”
Funny, on my second read-through I thought about editing it, but then my mind went “whatever, a healthy ego can probably take it”. No hurt feelings I hope.
I’m also living in the EU, but I’m very aware and constantly following what’s going on in the US, because their erratic development concerns me. As far as evolution and creationism goes, I’m drawing my statistics from the Gallup polls: in the last 30 years creationism went down to 40% from 45%, “evolution through divine intervention” remained stagnant at 40% and “plain natural selection” went up about 5% to 15%.
There is a positive movement here, but I don’t see how in another 30 years the collapse of religion will be imminent. And that’s just the US, to a resident of the Middle East I shouldn’t need to point out, that there are plenty of countries out there much more religious than the US. (Essentially all of them, apart from a few developed countries—and even those countries have usually only around 20% confirmed atheists. Many don’t visit the church, but they’re still holding on to a mountain of superstitious garbage → http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_atheism#Europe )
You’re of course also right that here in Europe there’s hardly any creationists—unlike in the US it’s just too damaging to one’s reputation, so people conveniently adapt their views. I doubt however, that this has all that much to do with the quality of education, and a lot more with cultural attitudes towards religion. As far as Europe goes, I can imagine that the church in the biggest countries (France, Germany, Spain, UK...) will be essentially dead in another 30 years, but what has that to say about people’s ability to make rational decisions? There’s a lot more to rationality than not believing in obvious bs.
There’s gonna be close to 9 billion people in 30 years and you think we -a tiny speck of nerds like LW- could hope to reach out and educate a sizable portion (almost half no less) of the world’s people in the art of rationality and in scientific understanding, so we can put AGI up for vote? And it’s not just simply educating them mind you—in a struggle of memes the application of rationality would require them to throw out just about all of their cherished beliefs about life and the world! And you also seem to be forgetting, that the average LW-IQ may perhaps lie somewhere around 120, and that most people aren’t actually all that clever.
I’m an optimist, but I’m afraid without brain-augmentation something like this just isn’t in the realm of possibilities. There’s no way how you could polish our message to a point where it could stick for so many different people.
You believe in Transhuman-level cybernetics and brain expansions and you don’t believe we can make pigs fly and carry people on their backs?
Damn it! I knew someone would say that and ruin my rhetoric.
As a resident of the Middle East, I can tell you that mentalities are changing fast. Regardless, the attitude towards Science isn’t the same as Christians, since they don’t feel threatened by it, believing that the Qur’an not only isn’t in conflict with science, but actually anticipated some discoveries. They also reclaim the development of modern scientific research as a proud heritage they are enthusiastic to live up to again, and believe researchers should be left alone to investigate, no matter how outrageous the stuff they come up with is (if i remember well think there’s even a command in the Qran specifically to that effect).
As for countries that have been converted to major religions by colonialism, I have a strong feelings that they would actually convert to whatever looks coolest, most Western and most high-status-signalling. We just need to be about 20% cooler than everyone else. Seems manageable.
you also seem to be forgetting, that the average LW IQ may lie somewhere around 120 and that most people aren’t actually all that clever
We should be able to teach rationality to anyone capable of deliberative thought. That is, anyone with an IQ over 70. that the original developers and vanguard be more fast-learning than average is not surprising at all.
Our stuff is simpler, less confusing, far clearer, and far more useful, than anything any religion can teach. I think people could definitely be attracted to our lack of bullshit, if we sell it right.
Checks his numbers Forgive me. I should have said the majority of young people (below 30) who, for our uses and purposes, are those who count, and the target demographic. It has come to the point that self-declared Christian kids get bullied and insulted [which is definitely wrong and stupid and not a very good sign that the Sanity Waterline was raised much].
Then again, I have this rule of thumb that I don’t count people who don’t attend church as believers, and automatically lump them into the “atheist in the making” category, a process that is definitely not legitimate nor fair. I sincerely apologize for this, and retract the relevant bits.
Now let’s see. For one thing
Statistics on atheism are often difficult to represent accurately for a variety of reasons. Atheism is a position compatible with other forms of identity. Some atheists also consider themselves Agnostic, Buddhist, Jains, Taoist or hold other related philosophical beliefs. Therefore, given limited poll options, some may use other terms to describe their identity. Some politically motivated organizations that report or gather population statistics may, intentionally or unintentionally, misrepresent atheists. Survey designs may bias results due to the nature of elements such as the wording of questions and the available response options. Also, many atheists, particularly former Catholics and former Mormons, are still counted as Christians in church rosters, although surveys generally ask samples of the population and do not look in church rosters. Other Christians believe that “once a person is [truly] saved, that person is always saved”, a doctrine known as eternal security.[5] Statistics are generally collected on the assumption that religion is a categorical variable. Instruments have been designed to measure attitudes toward religion, including one that was used by L. L. Thurstone. This may be a particularly important consideration among people who have neutral attitudes, as it is more likely prevailing social norms will influence the responses of such people on survey questions which effectively force respondents to categorize themselves either as belonging to a particular religion or belonging to no religion. A negative perception of atheists and pressure from family and peers may also cause some atheists to disassociate themselves from atheism. Misunderstanding of the term may also be a reason some label themselves differently.
The fact that Jedi outnumber Jews in the UK should be a sign that people don’t take that part of the polls very seriously.
That said
Several studies have found Sweden to be one of the most atheist countries in the world. 23% of Swedish citizens responded that “they believe there is a God”, whereas 53% answered that “they believe there is some sort of spirit or life force” and 23% that “they do not believe there is any sort of spirit, God, or life force”. This, according to the survey, would make Swedes the third least religious people in the 27-member European Union, after Estonia and the Czech Republic. In 2001, the Czech Statistical Office provided census information on the ten million people in the Czech Republic. 59% had no religion, 32.2% were religious, and 8.8% did not answer.[16]
A 2006 survey in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten (on February 17), saw 1,006 inhabitants of Norway answering the question “What do you believe in?”. 29% answered “I believe in a god or deity,” 23% answered “I believe in a higher power without being certain of what,” 26% answered “I don’t believe in God or higher powers.” and 22% answered “I am in doubt.” Still, some 85% of the population are members of the Norwegian state’s official Lutheran Protestant church. This may result from Norwegians being registered into the church at birth, yet having to intentionally unregister after becoming adults.
In France, about 12% of the population reportedly attends religious services more than once per month. In a 2003 poll 54% of those polled in France identified themselves as “faithful,” 33% as atheist, 14% as agnostic, and 26% as “indifferent.”[17] According to a different poll, 32% declared themselves atheists, and an additional 32% declared themselves agnostic.[18]
In Spain, 81.7% are believers, 11% are non-believers and 6% are atheists (according to the 2005 poll of the public Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas).[19]
This last bit i found particularly troubling because I do not recall metting a single person, in all my time in Spain, who declared themselves a Christian except in name only (as in, embarassingly confessing they only got baptized or went to Communion to please the grandparents). Some entertained some vague fuzziness, but simply telling them a little about “belief in belief” and some reductionist notions has been enough to throw them in serious doubt. I may very well be mistaken, but my perception is that they are really ripe for the taking, and only need to hear the right words.
My perception as a young Arab-European is that the trend is overwhelmingly in the direction of faithlessness, and that it is an accelerating process with no stopping force in sight.
I think you’re highly delusional about how malleable people’s opinions really are… Are you aware of what’s going on in politics and the religious sphere? As if just talking really thoroughly about AGI and appealing to rationality is going to get the majority of people from all over the world on our side. Are you serious?
The point I made about creationism wasn’t just that most people who believe in god probably won’t want to see one being built, but that you cannot change people’s opinions easily. Even completely ridiculous and unworldly ideas like creationism have hardly budged an inch in the last decade—they are rationalityproof. If you really thoroughly explained to people what this self-improving AGI was good for and how powerful it could really become… they’d totally lose it. They won’t welcome “our robot overlords”, regardless of how nice you make the resulting utopias sound. People fear the unknown and on a gut-level they will immediately reject our idea and rationalize in the blink of an eye why we’re wrong, and crazy, and have to be stopped.
I’m all for thoroughly educating people about rationality (you’ve read my suggestion in the other topic), but seriously getting the majority of people behind us? Sorry, but my psychological model of how people and masses behave tells me that this will never happen. At least not without brain-augmentation, and even then a global 50% +1 vote seems quite unlikely to me.
Would it be better if people knew in detail about self-improving AGI and could objectively discuss this matter in order to rationally make a decision and responsibly vote on whether or not it should be developed? Hell yeah I’d love that! I’d also love to ride on a flying pig but that’s not gonna happen either.
I’d prefer it if you used “mistaken” rather than “delusional”, thank you very much. Ascribing opposing opinions to madness usually signals weakness in your own stance.
Quite, see my next paragraph.
But as a resident of Europe and the Middle East, I see religion and partisanship shriveling into a husk, intelligence and culture extending and growing, triumphant, as they never have before, and the citizenry reclaiming power over the aloof governments, and over their futures.
Humanism wins. And rationalism cannot lose, on the long term, because, as its name indicates, it is the art of being right.
That’s not what I heard at all. Creationism only became acknowledged as a problem recently. Which means it was secure before, and it is now being challenged, and singing it’s swan song. Lack of visible, spectacular budging doesn’t mean that it isn’t crumbling from the inside. And it’s really a problem that is endemic to the USA: across the pond, virtually no one believes in Creationism. I suspect this has something to do with the education of the masses, which is very overlooked in the USA. Once the US society will feel the need to raise their own education level, for any economic reasons, the problems derived from ignorance will just extinguish themselves by sheer lack of combustible.
That’s why the improvement of public, mass education, and the spreading of our Art must be a priority, if not our number one priority. That’s why I said “explaining things thoroughly: by that I mean raising the level of awareness of the general public*.
Here in Spain, France, the UK, the majority of people are Atheists. In the USSR virtually everyone were atheists. Beliefs are extremely malleable. By Raising The Sanity Waterline, we’ll make it so that they are only malleable through empirical evidence, and, if we do it right, people won’t even notice ).
You believe in Transhuman-level cybernetics and brain expansions and you don’t believe we can make pigs fly and carry people on their backs?
Funny, on my second read-through I thought about editing it, but then my mind went “whatever, a healthy ego can probably take it”. No hurt feelings I hope.
I’m also living in the EU, but I’m very aware and constantly following what’s going on in the US, because their erratic development concerns me. As far as evolution and creationism goes, I’m drawing my statistics from the Gallup polls: in the last 30 years creationism went down to 40% from 45%, “evolution through divine intervention” remained stagnant at 40% and “plain natural selection” went up about 5% to 15%.
There is a positive movement here, but I don’t see how in another 30 years the collapse of religion will be imminent. And that’s just the US, to a resident of the Middle East I shouldn’t need to point out, that there are plenty of countries out there much more religious than the US. (Essentially all of them, apart from a few developed countries—and even those countries have usually only around 20% confirmed atheists. Many don’t visit the church, but they’re still holding on to a mountain of superstitious garbage → http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_atheism#Europe )
You’re of course also right that here in Europe there’s hardly any creationists—unlike in the US it’s just too damaging to one’s reputation, so people conveniently adapt their views. I doubt however, that this has all that much to do with the quality of education, and a lot more with cultural attitudes towards religion. As far as Europe goes, I can imagine that the church in the biggest countries (France, Germany, Spain, UK...) will be essentially dead in another 30 years, but what has that to say about people’s ability to make rational decisions? There’s a lot more to rationality than not believing in obvious bs.
There’s gonna be close to 9 billion people in 30 years and you think we -a tiny speck of nerds like LW- could hope to reach out and educate a sizable portion (almost half no less) of the world’s people in the art of rationality and in scientific understanding, so we can put AGI up for vote? And it’s not just simply educating them mind you—in a struggle of memes the application of rationality would require them to throw out just about all of their cherished beliefs about life and the world! And you also seem to be forgetting, that the average LW-IQ may perhaps lie somewhere around 120, and that most people aren’t actually all that clever.
I’m an optimist, but I’m afraid without brain-augmentation something like this just isn’t in the realm of possibilities. There’s no way how you could polish our message to a point where it could stick for so many different people.
Damn it! I knew someone would say that and ruin my rhetoric.
As a resident of the Middle East, I can tell you that mentalities are changing fast. Regardless, the attitude towards Science isn’t the same as Christians, since they don’t feel threatened by it, believing that the Qur’an not only isn’t in conflict with science, but actually anticipated some discoveries. They also reclaim the development of modern scientific research as a proud heritage they are enthusiastic to live up to again, and believe researchers should be left alone to investigate, no matter how outrageous the stuff they come up with is (if i remember well think there’s even a command in the Qran specifically to that effect).
As for countries that have been converted to major religions by colonialism, I have a strong feelings that they would actually convert to whatever looks coolest, most Western and most high-status-signalling. We just need to be about 20% cooler than everyone else. Seems manageable.
We should be able to teach rationality to anyone capable of deliberative thought. That is, anyone with an IQ over 70. that the original developers and vanguard be more fast-learning than average is not surprising at all.
Our stuff is simpler, less confusing, far clearer, and far more useful, than anything any religion can teach. I think people could definitely be attracted to our lack of bullshit, if we sell it right.
LOL at the last bit!
I would be interested in knowing where you got your numbers because the statistics I found definitively disagreed with this.
Checks his numbers Forgive me. I should have said the majority of young people (below 30) who, for our uses and purposes, are those who count, and the target demographic. It has come to the point that self-declared Christian kids get bullied and insulted [which is definitely wrong and stupid and not a very good sign that the Sanity Waterline was raised much].
Then again, I have this rule of thumb that I don’t count people who don’t attend church as believers, and automatically lump them into the “atheist in the making” category, a process that is definitely not legitimate nor fair. I sincerely apologize for this, and retract the relevant bits.
Now let’s see. For one thing
The fact that Jedi outnumber Jews in the UK should be a sign that people don’t take that part of the polls very seriously.
That said
This last bit i found particularly troubling because I do not recall metting a single person, in all my time in Spain, who declared themselves a Christian except in name only (as in, embarassingly confessing they only got baptized or went to Communion to please the grandparents). Some entertained some vague fuzziness, but simply telling them a little about “belief in belief” and some reductionist notions has been enough to throw them in serious doubt. I may very well be mistaken, but my perception is that they are really ripe for the taking, and only need to hear the right words.
My perception as a young Arab-European is that the trend is overwhelmingly in the direction of faithlessness, and that it is an accelerating process with no stopping force in sight.