If they want to come here and talk about prisoners dilemmas or the Singularity or something, then of course we should welcome their opinions.
also disagreeing here. I don’t value a religious person’s arguments relating to the singularity at all, and whilst I think we should tolerate them in the interest of free speech, this should be done grudgingly and with disclaimers like “this person cannot have a sensible view on the singularity, treat their output on the subject as noise”.
This is because, if you are religious (in the theistic sense, which is really what we’re likely to encounter and what I’m talking about), you believe that there is a divine agent watching over us. This has obvious false implications concerning the singularity.
Suppose you tell a theist that there’s a serious risk that smarter than human AI could wipe out the whole human race. They’ll be thinking “this couldn’t happen, God would prevent it” or “oh, it’s ok, I’ll go to heaven if this happens”. Wherever the argument goes next, you are talking to someone who has such radically different background assumptions to you that you won’t get anything useful out of them.
Why is this differs from most other subjects is that the religious conception of divine intervention is tailored so that it is consistent with our everyday observations. Thus any religious person who is vaguely sane will have some argument as to why God doesn’t prevent earthquakes from killing random people. So God allows small injustices and crimes, but the main point is that everything will be OK in the end, i.e. the ultimate fate of our world is not in question. The debate concerning the Singularity is directly about this question.
There are other failure modes which theists will have disproportionately over atheists, of course. To me it seems that an unerring and (essentially) non-evidence based belief that everything will turn out OK is indictment enough.
Amongst the other failure modes: belief in existence of souls and of the divine place of human intelligence is likely to produce skewed beliefs about the possibility of synthetic intelligence. Various results of dark-side epistemology such as disbelief of evolution, belief in “free will”, belief in original sin and belief in moral realism (“god given morality”) preventing something like CEV. I’ve heard the following fallacious argument against the transhumanist project from a lot of theists: humans are imperfect, so the only way to improve ourselves is to take advice from a perfect being. Imperfection cannot lead to less-imperfection.
Treat everyone’s opinions as noise, unless you are about to make a decision. Consider each argument on its own merits, not as data, but as a metaphorical construction that allows you to recognize a way to move forward your own understanding of the facts you already know.
The fact that a believer in a loving and all powerful god can’t really be taken seriously on the singularity is not a claim about their character, and thus doesn’t qualify as ad-hominem. It is a claim about the arguments they are going to put forward: in the presence of the background assumption that there’s a loving god watching over us, you can’t make sensible decisions about the singularity.
Discounting an argument because of the person making it is pretty much the textbook definition of ad hominem fallacy.
Also, it should go without saying that being a theist doesn’t automatically mean one believes in a loving and all-powerful god watching over us. And anyway, I still don’t follow the logic that being a theist means one can’t make sensible decisions about the Singularity (insofar as one can say there are “sensible decisions” to be made about something that’s basically a sci-fi construct at this point.)
What distinguishes the topic of singularity from any other pursuits in which theists are empirically known to be able to excel? In each case, knowing that a person is a theist somewhat decreases your confidence in the accuracy of their judgment, but not dramatically. Is there something specific that places this topic in different light? (I think there is, but I don’t feel like spinning a lengthy argument right now, and I’m curious about how thought-through that harshly-downvoted sentiment above was.)
If you are religious (in the theistic sense, which is really what we’re likely to encounter and what I’m talking about), you believe that there is a divine agent watching over us. This has obvious false implications concerning the singularity.
Suppose you tell a theist that there’s a serious risk that smarter than human AI could wipe out the whole human race.They’ll be thinking “this couldn’t happen, God would prevent it” or “oh, it’s ok, I’ll go to heaven if this happens”. Wherever the argument goes next, you are talking to someone who has such radically different background assumptions to you that you won’t get anything useful out of them.
Why is this differs from most other subjects is that the religious conception of divine intervention is tailored so that it is consistent with our everyday observations. Thus any religious person who is vaguely sane will have some argument as to why God doesn’t prevent earthquakes from killing random people. So God allows small injustices and crimes, but the main point is that everything will be OK in the end, i.e. the ultimate fate of our world is not in question.
The debate concerning the Singularity is directly about this question.
I don’t believe this is a valid thought in this form, or maybe you failed to formalize your intuition enough to communicate it. You list a few specific failure modes, which I don’t believe can cover enough of the theistic people to reduce the probability of a theistic person producing valid singularity thinking down to nothingness. Also, some of these failure modes overlap with related failure modes of non-theistic people, thus not figuring into the likelihood ratio as much as they would otherwise.
There are other failure modes which theists will have disproportionately over atheists, of course. To me it seems that an unerring and (essentially) non-evidence based belief that everything will turn out OK is indictment enough.
Amongst the other failure modes: belief in existence of souls and of the divine place of human intelligence is likely to produce skewed beliefs about the possibility of synthetic intelligence. Various results of dark-side epistemology such as disbelief of evolution, belief in “free will”, belief in original sin and belief in moral realism (“god given morality”) preventing something like CEV. I’ve heard the following fallacious argument against the transhumanist project from a lot of theists: humans are imperfect, so the only way to improve ourselves is to take advice from a perfect being. Imperfection cannot lead to less-imperfection.
Also, I didn’t claim that the average atheist has sensible opinions about the subject. Just that “theist” is a useful filter.
Your conception of “theism”—a tremendously broad concept—is laughably caricatured and narrow, and it pollutes whatever argument you’re trying to make: absolutely none of the logic in the above post follows in the way you think it does.
also disagreeing here. I don’t value a religious person’s arguments relating to the singularity at all, and whilst I think we should tolerate them in the interest of free speech, this should be done grudgingly and with disclaimers like “this person cannot have a sensible view on the singularity, treat their output on the subject as noise”.
This is because, if you are religious (in the theistic sense, which is really what we’re likely to encounter and what I’m talking about), you believe that there is a divine agent watching over us. This has obvious false implications concerning the singularity.
Suppose you tell a theist that there’s a serious risk that smarter than human AI could wipe out the whole human race. They’ll be thinking “this couldn’t happen, God would prevent it” or “oh, it’s ok, I’ll go to heaven if this happens”. Wherever the argument goes next, you are talking to someone who has such radically different background assumptions to you that you won’t get anything useful out of them.
Why is this differs from most other subjects is that the religious conception of divine intervention is tailored so that it is consistent with our everyday observations. Thus any religious person who is vaguely sane will have some argument as to why God doesn’t prevent earthquakes from killing random people. So God allows small injustices and crimes, but the main point is that everything will be OK in the end, i.e. the ultimate fate of our world is not in question. The debate concerning the Singularity is directly about this question.
There are other failure modes which theists will have disproportionately over atheists, of course. To me it seems that an unerring and (essentially) non-evidence based belief that everything will turn out OK is indictment enough.
Amongst the other failure modes: belief in existence of souls and of the divine place of human intelligence is likely to produce skewed beliefs about the possibility of synthetic intelligence. Various results of dark-side epistemology such as disbelief of evolution, belief in “free will”, belief in original sin and belief in moral realism (“god given morality”) preventing something like CEV. I’ve heard the following fallacious argument against the transhumanist project from a lot of theists: humans are imperfect, so the only way to improve ourselves is to take advice from a perfect being. Imperfection cannot lead to less-imperfection.
Treat everyone’s opinions as noise, unless you are about to make a decision. Consider each argument on its own merits, not as data, but as a metaphorical construction that allows you to recognize a way to move forward your own understanding of the facts you already know.
You’ve never heard of the ad hominem fallacy, I take it?
The fact that a believer in a loving and all powerful god can’t really be taken seriously on the singularity is not a claim about their character, and thus doesn’t qualify as ad-hominem. It is a claim about the arguments they are going to put forward: in the presence of the background assumption that there’s a loving god watching over us, you can’t make sensible decisions about the singularity.
Discounting an argument because of the person making it is pretty much the textbook definition of ad hominem fallacy.
Also, it should go without saying that being a theist doesn’t automatically mean one believes in a loving and all-powerful god watching over us. And anyway, I still don’t follow the logic that being a theist means one can’t make sensible decisions about the Singularity (insofar as one can say there are “sensible decisions” to be made about something that’s basically a sci-fi construct at this point.)
What distinguishes the topic of singularity from any other pursuits in which theists are empirically known to be able to excel? In each case, knowing that a person is a theist somewhat decreases your confidence in the accuracy of their judgment, but not dramatically. Is there something specific that places this topic in different light? (I think there is, but I don’t feel like spinning a lengthy argument right now, and I’m curious about how thought-through that harshly-downvoted sentiment above was.)
If you are religious (in the theistic sense, which is really what we’re likely to encounter and what I’m talking about), you believe that there is a divine agent watching over us. This has obvious false implications concerning the singularity.
Suppose you tell a theist that there’s a serious risk that smarter than human AI could wipe out the whole human race.They’ll be thinking “this couldn’t happen, God would prevent it” or “oh, it’s ok, I’ll go to heaven if this happens”. Wherever the argument goes next, you are talking to someone who has such radically different background assumptions to you that you won’t get anything useful out of them.
Why is this differs from most other subjects is that the religious conception of divine intervention is tailored so that it is consistent with our everyday observations. Thus any religious person who is vaguely sane will have some argument as to why God doesn’t prevent earthquakes from killing random people. So God allows small injustices and crimes, but the main point is that everything will be OK in the end, i.e. the ultimate fate of our world is not in question.
The debate concerning the Singularity is directly about this question.
I don’t believe this is a valid thought in this form, or maybe you failed to formalize your intuition enough to communicate it. You list a few specific failure modes, which I don’t believe can cover enough of the theistic people to reduce the probability of a theistic person producing valid singularity thinking down to nothingness. Also, some of these failure modes overlap with related failure modes of non-theistic people, thus not figuring into the likelihood ratio as much as they would otherwise.
There are other failure modes which theists will have disproportionately over atheists, of course. To me it seems that an unerring and (essentially) non-evidence based belief that everything will turn out OK is indictment enough.
Amongst the other failure modes: belief in existence of souls and of the divine place of human intelligence is likely to produce skewed beliefs about the possibility of synthetic intelligence. Various results of dark-side epistemology such as disbelief of evolution, belief in “free will”, belief in original sin and belief in moral realism (“god given morality”) preventing something like CEV. I’ve heard the following fallacious argument against the transhumanist project from a lot of theists: humans are imperfect, so the only way to improve ourselves is to take advice from a perfect being. Imperfection cannot lead to less-imperfection.
Also, I didn’t claim that the average atheist has sensible opinions about the subject. Just that “theist” is a useful filter.
Your conception of “theism”—a tremendously broad concept—is laughably caricatured and narrow, and it pollutes whatever argument you’re trying to make: absolutely none of the logic in the above post follows in the way you think it does.