We are not discussing what I think are good things. We are discussing what an average European nobleman 500 years ago might think. I think they would be pleased to hear how much more straightforward it is to buy influence these days, and how unlikely it is that buying that from the wrong person is likely to end up with your head in a basket.
jhuffman
Karma: 944
We are talking about a specific time and place. 500 years ago in Europe a lot of duels were still deadly.
Also, just because duels may have been necessary for gaining and maintaining status at that time doesn’t mean that individuals would prefer that the most successful status seeking strategies were so dangerous. Today, you do not risk your life in the status games, and yes I think that would appeal to many average noblemen even 500 years ago.
The wealthy elite is sharing power?
With each other, yes.
I hate to admit it but sometimes I hope that is what I’m doing.
Yes but one of the reasons this is true is we tend to greatly discount all the suffering for ourselves that has been alleviated. Even if we are cynical, there is still less suffering.
They might approve of the elite not being driven by boredom to constantly murder each other in useless duels. They might approve of the wealthy elite sharing the power rather than consolidating it with a king or emperor. They’d probably approve of Cinemax After Dark.
What is the point of this?
I agree with deleting Q5 and Q6 because not only would I not expect useful responses but also because it may come off as “extremist” if any respondents are not already familiar with UFAI concepts (or if they are familiar and overtly dismissive of them).
Thanks for writing this, it is a very good analysis of what I sometimes find to be a pretty creepy trend. It helps me understand some of my reservations about this story link that was posted recently.
History is full of new things coming to pass, but they have never yet led to utopia.
This is not convincing because 10,000 years is a pretty small sample size.
This article isn’t about intelligence, its about innovation. He’s talking specifically about the “lightbulb moment”—the inspriation part of invention. I don’t think there is anything at all original about the article except the tortured analogy to evolution.
Well, I don’t know how other programmers do things, but what I do is I create models at various levels of abstractions, and play with those models until it occurs to me what ought to happen next. Like, I draw on the whiteboard with someone, and we generate all the known solutions we have and usually a known solution or pattern just needs to be adapted. So we’re copying. Often, the adaptions aren’t immediately obvious when you go down a couple levels and start actually coding it, and so I play around with a couple of different ideas, or maybe I’m guided by theory and just have to think it through and problem solve for this circumstance—which would be copying.
If I’m dissatisfied at any point and have exhausted my search space, what I’m going to do next is enlarge that search space by talking to more people or doing research. Copying.
Every now and then—but pretty rarely - something novel will occur to me that will out-compete all the ideas I already have or can find in research. And so there a new idea made it into the code. And if someone asks me how I came up with, I’ll just describe the problem, and the search space and the research and so on, and then shrug. Because the idea seems pretty obvious in hindsight I just shrug away this question of where the idea came from.
It would be difficult to overstate the power of our abstraction and modeling, because it allows us to quickly test for fitness a rash of approaches iteratively. And in the process of that novel ideas do occur and get worked in and then communicated. But I am not at all certain the genesis of most of those ideas isn’t more or less random, in the sense the author means it. Indeed most engineering work is copying, as the author terms it.
It is very presumptuous of you to assume that I have an intiative like this. What I was really asking you is if there is any utilons offset that would change your mind—but I guess that really just amounts to asking if you are a utilitarian.
I suppose that is one thing. I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what it is that bothers me about it, and I think my problem is that it suggests that Transhumanists are looking for some authoritative feedback that they are on the right path. Not that anyone would confuse this story for such feedback—but if it fills a hole then I guess I’m not happy to find out that I or anyone else in the target audience has a hole there for it fill.
Yes I did, thanks!
Yeah I can just imagine the coyote thinking “oh weird I’m running away from this snake and yiping. I wonder what thats all about.”.
I agree let’s euphemise them.
I’ve heard it said that animal cruelty should be avoided for what it does to us as the perpetrator more than for what it is actually doing to the animal.
What if we sold African hunting licenses for enough money that for each victim, enough money would be raised for a charity that would save two African children’s lives?
I think many intelligent people will start with a bias that they are smarter than the average of a market, but the idea of risking property maybe boosts our awareness of the uncertainties we have about our own knowledge.
GPG seems to be gaining mindshare. It is an open-source set of libraries and command line tools that inherits a lot of the interface from PGP (which is proprietary).
I have used the Cryptophane interface on windows and it makes it pretty easy to generate keys and manage them in your local keystore as well as to sign, encrpyt and decrypt arbitrary text. This would get tedious if you did a lot of email though but based on what you described I think it would work well for you.
Here is a link to other front-end tools for GPG: http://www.gnupg.org/related_software/frontends.html