“What takes real courage is braving the outright incomprehension of the people around you,”
I suspect that autistics are far more willing than neurotypicals to be true iconoclast because many neurotypicals find autistics incomprehensible regardless of what the autistics believe. So the price of being an intellectual iconoclast is lower for autistics than for most other people.
Carl,
Are you sure the dilution of Hellworlds would work if, given that you do something today that causes you to be damned, all future copies you make of yourself will spend eternity in Hell?
Eliezer, it was irrational of you to write this post. You must assign a non-zero probability to the proposition that the Biblical Mary was the mother of God. This is especially true since so many people believe that she was and by your own beliefs you must give this some weight. Well, if Mary is the mother of God and if Hell is real then you have just decreased your afterlife utility by an amount greater than being tortured for 3^^^3 years. Thus, there was a significant negative utility to your having written this post. So to prove that you are committed to rationality, please write another post apologizing for insulting Mary.
The Soviet new “man” that Stalin wanted to create was a half-ape, half-man super-warrior.
See http://news.scotsman.com/ViewArticle.aspx?articleid=2688011
I think that militarily President Bush under-reacted to 9/11. The U.S. faces a tremendous future threat of being attacked by weapons of mass destruction. Unfortunately, before 9/11 it was politically difficult for the President to preemptively use the military to reduce such threats. 9/11 gave President Bush more political freedom and he did use it to some extent. But I fear he has not done enough. I would have preferred, for example, that the U.S., Russia, China, UK, Israel and perhaps France announced that in one year they will declare war an any other nation that either has weapons of mass destruction or doesn’t allow highly intrusive inspections to make sure they don’t have weapons of mass destruction. After 9/11 Bush might have been able to negotiate this. Now it is probably too late.
Perhaps firms should conduct “blind” interviews of potential employees in which the potential employee is interviewed while behind a screen.
TGGP,
I have not read the Myth of the Rule of Law.
In the first year of law school students learn that for every clear legal rule there always exists situations for which either the rule doesn’t apply or for which the rule gives a bad outcome. This is why we always need to give judges some discretion when administering the law.
Eliezer, you wrote:
“Or else what would we do with the future? What would we do with the billion galaxies in the night sky? Fill them with maximally efficient replicators? Should our descendants deliberately obsess about maximizing their inclusive genetic fitness, regarding all else only as a means to that end?”
Won’t our descendants who do have genes or code that causes them to maximize their genetic fitness come to dominate the billions of galaxies. How can there be any other stable long term equilibrium in a universe in which many lifeforms have the ability to choose their own utility functions?
Eliezer,
Your posts on evolution are fantastic. I hope there will be many more of them.
Torture,
Consider three possibilities:
(a) A dusk speck hits you with probability one, (b) You face an additional probability 1/( 3^^^3) of being tortured for 50 years, (c) You must blink your eyes for a fraction of a second, just long enough to prevent a dusk speck from hitting you in the eye.
Most people would pick (c) over (a). Yet, 1/( 3^^^3) is such a small number that by blinking your eyes one more time than you normally would you increase your chances of being captured by a sadist and tortured for 50 years by more than 1/( 3^^^3). Thus, (b) must be better than (c). Consequently, most people should prefer (b) to (a).
This is a very general problem. If the government decides to give away $X to someone, people are willing to spend up to $X to get it. If people intensively compete for the money then you would expect people to collectively spend $X trying to get the $X.
The main purpose of medical tort law is to enrich trial lawyers. Doctors and trial lawyers play legal games in which the doctors try to minimize their liability with disclosures and the trial lawyers argue that the disclosures don’t offer legal protection for the doctors. There is little political incentive for anyone to care about the value of disclosure to patients. This is especially true since patients who care about such information will do their own research.
I find certain types of video games far more addictive than the average human does. This, however, reduces my demand for these video games. I have never bought or played World of Warcraft because I strongly suspect that I would become addicted to the game. If enough potential addicts are like me then games that become too addictive will suffer in the marketplace.
If we assume that Omega almost never makes a mistake and we allow the chooser to use true randomization (perhaps by using quantum physics) in making his choice, then Omega must make his decision in part through seeing into the future. In this case the chooser should obviously pick just B.