...you have to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what you want from being contaminated by what seems possible.This is isomorphic to the principle that you should prevent your beliefs about how things are from being contaminated by how you wish they were. Most people let them mix pretty promiscuously. The continuing popularity of religion is the most visible index of that.
-- pg
I can come this Sunday.
Regarding 2, I think the default setting (Popular) is to display comments as a function of karma and time since posting. As comments get old, newer comments float to the top even if the older ones have some positive karma. If some comment has very high karma, I guess it outweighs the time constraint and stays at the top.
Ok I don’t mind. Richard, your call?
I will come. By usual venue, do you mean 5th View cafe on top of Waterstones bookstore near Piccadilly Circus?
Is there something specific we are going to discuss or is it pretty casual?
I would prefer late morning (say after 11).
This might help—http://sl4.org/wiki/CoherentExtrapolatedVolition
Thanks Yvain, you have inspired me to commit to some important things for the next month. I have written them down.
I promise to write about my achievements here on LW on the 18th July.
When giving a security clearance, for example, you would rather give it to someone who loved his country emotionally, than to someone who loved his country rationally;
Can you clarify how you distinguish between loving one’s country emotionally as opposed to rationally?
It reminds me very much of this quote attributed to Gautam Buddha:
“Believe nothing merely because you have been told it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be kind, conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings—that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide.”
Related post and discussion over at OB—http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/06/lazy-hurt-less-than-stupid.html
It’s interesting speculation but it assumes that people use all of their current intelligence. There is still the problem of akrasia—a lot of people are perfectly capable of becoming ‘smarter’ if only they cared to think about things at all. Sure, they could still go mad infallibly but it would be better than not even trying.
Are you implying that more IQ may help in overcoming akrasia?
Yes that’s how I meant it.
The True Trolley Dilemma would be where the child is Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Then what would you do?
EDIT: Sorry if that sounds trollish, but I meant it as a serious question.
The bored teenager who finally puts together an AGI in his parents’ basement will not have read any of these deep philosophical tracts.
That truly would be a sad day.
Are you seriously suggesting hypothetical AGIs built by bored teenagers in basements are “things which are actually useful in the creation of our successors”?
Is that your plan against intelligence stagnation?
You make a lot of big claims in this thread. I’m interested in reading your detailed thoughts on these. Could you please point to some writings?
stagnation is as real and immediate a threat as ever there was, vastly dwarfing any hypothetical existential risks from rogue AI.
How is blindly looking for AGI in a vast search space better than stagnation?
How does working on FAI qualify as “stagnation”?
I am convinced that resource depletion is likely to lead to social collapse—possibly within our lifetimes.
What convinced you and how convinced are you?
That looks wicked!
Or just plain wrong.
What expert timing, Luke! Just two days ago, I came across the fascinating practice of clicker training for horses—http://www.theclickercenter.com, while reading Kathy Sierra’s old blog—http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/03/clicker_trained.html.
My only problem is that I need to train my own behaviour rather than someone else’s. I’m going to try to use these techniques on myself, although I’m not sure if that’s supposed to work.