Try reading the sequences all the way through. You’ll find that you make a lot of common assumptions and mistakes that make the argument weaker than you’d like.
Even if you’re trying to get someone to read the Bible, just saying “read the BIble!” may not result in the highest probability of them actually doing so.
Assuming you could know for sure whether the “Bible” has indeed been produced by that God, and is not just some pretender book. We have quite a few contenders for that title even in our non-counterfactual world after all.
Knowing for sure is not possible: even if there was only a 0.01 chance God wrote it, you’d still want to read it, given the 1) low cost of reading and 2) high potential payoff. Reading the bible would probably also be helpful in establishing authorship.
Knowing for sure doesn’t actually matter here. The problem is with singling out a single target from a universe of alternatives, and then justifying the choice of that target with an argument that can just as readily be used to justify any of the alternatives.
Just to highlight the difficulty, imagine someone arguing that if God exists you should read “Mein Kampf,” because even if there’s only a very small chance that God wrote it, you can’t be sure He didn’t, and the cost of reading it is low, and there’s a high potential payoff, and reading it would help establish authorship.
I expect you don’t find that argument compelling, even though it’s the same argument you cite here. So if you find that argument compelling as applied to the Bible, I expect that’s because you’re attributing other attributes to the Bible that you haven’t mentioned here.
I didn’t say “read the bible” would be compelling, I said it would be good advice. “Stop doing heroin” is good advice for a destructive heroin addict, but unlikely to be followed.
By “God” I mean “the all powerful being who flung Adam and Eve from Eden, spoke to Abraham, fathered Jesus, etc., etc., etc.”, as is the common meaning of “God” in our culture. Had I said “god” things would have been different. As it is, I think we can say that, if God existed, he wrote the bible, and that my injunction would be better advice than the Mein Kampf advice.
I didn’t say “read the bible” would be compelling, I said it would be good advice. “Stop doing heroin” is good advice for a destructive heroin addict, but unlikely to be followed.
I don’t think it makes much sense to call advice which is unlikely to be useful to the recipient good advice. The standard people generally measure advice by is its helpfulness, not how good the results would be if it were followed.
(shrug) If they can agree that (X & ¬Y), it terminates pretty quickly. I find it’s only a serious failure mode if Alice and Bob insist on continuing to disagree about something.
Even if God existed, “read the Bible!” would not convince me about it.
Telling someone to read a thousand page book is a poor advice as answer to a mistake they’ve just made, even if the book may be well worth reading. Many people react to such advices with a mix of
Damn, I have to read all this to understand the point?
I’m offendend, he’s implying that I’m uneducated when I haven’t read that.
He’s willing to tell me that I’m wrong without being able to tell me where exactly.
Unconvincing but valid advice nonetheless. If (the protestant) God existed, people who hadn’t read the Bible would be uneducated for that reason, and would gain a great deal from reading the entire thing. I can’t just tell you the one portion relevant because 1) you might need to read the rest to understand and 2) reading the rest would be good for you anyway.
Although it is not impossible that a topic is such complex and “irreducible” that the understanding of it can only be acquired as a whole and no partial understanding is accessible, I don’t find it probable even in case of counterfactual God’s existence.
Thanks for the pointers—this post is still more at the “random idea” stage, not the “well-constructed argument stage”, so I do appreciate feedback on where I might have gone astray.
I’ve read some of the Sequences, but they’re quite long. What particular articles did you mean?
Sorry for the terse comment, it’s finals week soon so things are busy around sweet apple acres.
Essentially what you’ve done is take the mysterious problem of intelligence and shoved it under a new ill-defined name (living). Pretty much any programmer can write a self-replicating program, or a program that modifies its own source code, or other such things. But putting it as simply as that doesn’t actually bring you any closer to actually making AI. You have to explain exactly how the program should modify itself in order to make progress.
Mysterious answers will make this clear. A Human’s Guide to Words will maybe show you what’s wrong with using “living” like that. EY gave a presentation in which he noted that all the intelligence in the universe that we know of has so far been formed by evolution, and it took a long time. AI will be the first designed intelligence and it’ll go much quicker. You seem to base your entire argument on evolution though, which seems unnecessary.
Also, be careful with your wording in phrases like “computers don’t have intrinsic goals so they aren’t alive.” As other peoples mentioned, this is dangerous territory. Be sure to follow a map. Cough cough.
Try reading the sequences all the way through. You’ll find that you make a lot of common assumptions and mistakes that make the argument weaker than you’d like.
I like Qiaochu’s answer better, because yours sounds like “read the Bible!”
If God existed, “read the Bible!” would be excellent advice.
Even if you’re trying to get someone to read the Bible, just saying “read the BIble!” may not result in the highest probability of them actually doing so.
You’re right; it works best said with repetition, fervor and pitchforks.
So are you then advocating repetition, fervor and pitchforks for promoting EY’s writing?
No, Larks wasn’t. This is a silly question.
Assuming you could know for sure whether the “Bible” has indeed been produced by that God, and is not just some pretender book. We have quite a few contenders for that title even in our non-counterfactual world after all.
Knowing for sure is not possible: even if there was only a 0.01 chance God wrote it, you’d still want to read it, given the 1) low cost of reading and 2) high potential payoff. Reading the bible would probably also be helpful in establishing authorship.
Knowing for sure doesn’t actually matter here. The problem is with singling out a single target from a universe of alternatives, and then justifying the choice of that target with an argument that can just as readily be used to justify any of the alternatives.
Just to highlight the difficulty, imagine someone arguing that if God exists you should read “Mein Kampf,” because even if there’s only a very small chance that God wrote it, you can’t be sure He didn’t, and the cost of reading it is low, and there’s a high potential payoff, and reading it would help establish authorship.
I expect you don’t find that argument compelling, even though it’s the same argument you cite here. So if you find that argument compelling as applied to the Bible, I expect that’s because you’re attributing other attributes to the Bible that you haven’t mentioned here.
I didn’t say “read the bible” would be compelling, I said it would be good advice. “Stop doing heroin” is good advice for a destructive heroin addict, but unlikely to be followed.
By “God” I mean “the all powerful being who flung Adam and Eve from Eden, spoke to Abraham, fathered Jesus, etc., etc., etc.”, as is the common meaning of “God” in our culture. Had I said “god” things would have been different. As it is, I think we can say that, if God existed, he wrote the bible, and that my injunction would be better advice than the Mein Kampf advice.
I don’t think it makes much sense to call advice which is unlikely to be useful to the recipient good advice. The standard people generally measure advice by is its helpfulness, not how good the results would be if it were followed.
I agree that you didn’t say that.
I agree that if the God described in the Bible exists, then “read the Bible” is uniquely good advice.
It is an interesting failure mode conversations can get in:
Alice: X
Bob: ¬Y
Alice: I didn’t say Y
Bob: I didn’t say you said Y!
Alice: I didn’t say you said I said Y!!
(shrug) If they can agree that (X & ¬Y), it terminates pretty quickly. I find it’s only a serious failure mode if Alice and Bob insist on continuing to disagree about something.
Even if God existed, “read the Bible!” would not convince me about it.
Telling someone to read a thousand page book is a poor advice as answer to a mistake they’ve just made, even if the book may be well worth reading. Many people react to such advices with a mix of
Damn, I have to read all this to understand the point?
I’m offendend, he’s implying that I’m uneducated when I haven’t read that.
He’s willing to tell me that I’m wrong without being able to tell me where exactly.
Unconvincing but valid advice nonetheless. If (the protestant) God existed, people who hadn’t read the Bible would be uneducated for that reason, and would gain a great deal from reading the entire thing. I can’t just tell you the one portion relevant because 1) you might need to read the rest to understand and 2) reading the rest would be good for you anyway.
Although it is not impossible that a topic is such complex and “irreducible” that the understanding of it can only be acquired as a whole and no partial understanding is accessible, I don’t find it probable even in case of counterfactual God’s existence.
Thanks for the pointers—this post is still more at the “random idea” stage, not the “well-constructed argument stage”, so I do appreciate feedback on where I might have gone astray.
I’ve read some of the Sequences, but they’re quite long. What particular articles did you mean?
Sorry for the terse comment, it’s finals week soon so things are busy around sweet apple acres.
Essentially what you’ve done is take the mysterious problem of intelligence and shoved it under a new ill-defined name (living). Pretty much any programmer can write a self-replicating program, or a program that modifies its own source code, or other such things. But putting it as simply as that doesn’t actually bring you any closer to actually making AI. You have to explain exactly how the program should modify itself in order to make progress.
Mysterious answers will make this clear. A Human’s Guide to Words will maybe show you what’s wrong with using “living” like that. EY gave a presentation in which he noted that all the intelligence in the universe that we know of has so far been formed by evolution, and it took a long time. AI will be the first designed intelligence and it’ll go much quicker. You seem to base your entire argument on evolution though, which seems unnecessary.
Also, be careful with your wording in phrases like “computers don’t have intrinsic goals so they aren’t alive.” As other peoples mentioned, this is dangerous territory. Be sure to follow a map. Cough cough.