Wow, one could write a story about a civilization of beings who find coherent radio-frequency radiation extremely painful (for instance), because of precisely this artificial selection.
dclayh
Karma: 1,679
Obviously. Clippy said it was giving reasons for humans to prefer paper clips; I’d expect Clippy to be the first to admit those are not its own reasons.
Okay, the people who promote a certain cluster of ideas centering on skepticism, rationalism, atheism and libertarianism, in the U.S. and culturally connected nations. (Which, yes, is quite close to “people I admire”. I wasn’t trying to claim it was especially surprising, although I am often surprised at just how tight it is.) In particular:
Eliezer
Robin Hanson
Steve Landsburg
Peter Thiel
Patri Friedman
James Randi
Penn Jillette (and Teller)
Adam Savage & Jamie Hynaman
Trey Parker & Matt Stone
Dawkins
Hitchens
and probably some others I can’t think of right now.
I’ve observed that the world’s most awesome people are pretty strongly connected, graph-theoretically. I would bet that there are well fewer than six degrees between, say, Eliezer and Hitchens under the relation “good friends with”.
I don’t think it’s even that hard. Presumably an arbitrarily stronger intelligence could build arbitrarily subtle disaster-making flaws into whatever “helpful” technology/science it gives us. They could even have a generalized harmful sensation, as was discussed in another thread recently.
Such an entity would have special interest in Earth, not because of special interest in acquiring its resources, but because Earth has intelligent lifeforms which may eventually thwart its ends.
Well put. Certainly if humans achieve a positive singularity we’ll be very interested in containing other intelligences.
But there seems to me to be no reason to believe that it’s more likely that our signals will reach friendly extraterrestrials than it is that our signals will reach unfriendly extraterrestrials.
In fact, as Eliezer never tires of pointing out, the space of unfriendliness is much larger than the space of friendliness.
It’s true, every orgy is better with a half-giant.
MoR!Harry / canon!Harry. Must be done. (Maybe a three-way with Clarence the Angel, who was clearly responsible for bringing them together.)
Hermione/Umbridge/dementor.
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
—L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between
The past is now truly like a foreign country. They do things exactly the same there.
—Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe, and Everything (commenting on the effect of time-travel)
The past is like a foreign country: they smoke cigarettes there.
—yours truly
Ah, I see. Certainly it would be better if he made the choice well before he’s at death’s door/in terrible pain/etc..
Would Hitchens not be able to afford cryonics without donations?
perception that he was just grasping at any straw available
What’s wrong with this? Isn’t that exactly what cryonics is: grasping the only available straw?
(Hm, how do I get a sentence inside the numbering indentation but outside the quotation?)
Oh, good point. I always forget that HP isn’t technically in the present day.
we see ever less of zombie-mode
A very good point. I wonder if that’s intentional on Eliezer’s part, or if he’s simply forgotten to write about zombie-Quirrell because he (z-Q) is uninteresting.
Now, I don’t recall, is there any tangible motivation for the generals to keep winning these games now that the wish has been decided?
They do still win Quirrell points, which translate to House points among other things. (Harry probably doesn’t care about House points, especially with Hermione’s wish, but he does care about impressing Quirrell.)
and used obscene displays of corpses to punish their dead
Just occurred to me: if magic ability is genetic, it should in theory be possible to use gene therapy/retroviruses/etc. (and perhaps some magic) to make all the Muggles into wizards! (Or at least all the ones yet to be conceived or something.) I can just imagine Harry creating a Plague of Magic.
Muggles don’t have special abilities that let them be particularly useful to wizards.
Um, I rather thought the whole point of MoR was to falsify this claim. Unless you’re claiming rationality is not “special” because anyone can in principle have it.
Indeed, and while we’re on the subject of idiolects: my preference is for the spelling to follow the pronunciation. Hence either “Charles’s tie” or “Charles’ tie” is correct, depending on how you want it to be pronounced (in this case I usually prefer the latter option, but the meter of the sentence may sometimes make the other a better choice).