I was considering modifying holidays to make them support these values and remind us of them.
wubbles
Karma: 114
That’s correct. But I worry that some projects in the rationalistsphere are about turning our backs on modernity in very strong ways.
Does popularization produce the goods? Lots of people have the background and skill to contribute to this problem who aren’t currently in our community and don’t have day jobs.
But we are a community that faces a choice about what values we want: insularity and strong group membership, or openness and intellectualism. This seems fairly analogous to me, and after all don’t we need strong new ideas to stop the AI apocalypse or improve lives all over the world? Perhaps the Amish vs. liberal German judaism would be a better analogy.
Dysgenesis is worrying, but we have the means to fight it: subsidized egg freezing and childcare, changes to employment culture, and it is a very slow prospect. I don’t think that is a correct summary of the essay at all, which is really pointing to a problem with how we think about coordination.
I am interested! Note that zoning might make this hard, but maybe we could buy adjacent bungalows and reconfigure them. Wasn’t the bay supposed to be commune friendly?
The logarithmic scoring rule measures the information carried by the event given your predictions. Reducing its expectation corresponds to reducing the information carried by the event when it arrives.
I was using it to describe my own comment. I’ll try to think of a way to make that clearer in the future.
Epistemic status: probably BS This could be a causal explanation for why engineers are seen as having poor social skills and the usefullness of ASD traits in engineering. If you aren’t sensitive to the productive conversations being bad socially, and so don’t disrupt them, you will learn more.
As for salons the fact that a hostess lead the conversation and selected the guests meant that the conversation had to be interesting to her. Those who didn’t have anything interesting to say, or disrupted interesting conversations, wouldn’t be invited back. Sadly wikipedia doesn’t say much about how they were run. They seem to also have selected books to read, which would steer the conversation towards those books.
I’m not sure how much of this was CFAR and x-risk vs. programming and autism. Certainly a lot of the people at the SF meetup were not CFARniks based on my completely unscientific examination of my memory. The community’s survival and growth is secondary to X-risk solving now, even if before the goal was to make a community devoted to these arts.
Humans share our values and can generally be overwhelmed with sheer numbers should they not. Making them is unlikely to be dangerous. The same cannot be said for unfriendly AIs. We still have no idea how to make a friendly AI, and it could easily be a century before we begin to have an idea. Even if biology cannot keep up, improving intelligence in the short run will have positive effects on human productivity in the short run, which will get the goal of making a friendly AI closer.
I’m not saying that biological modification will ultimately bring about singularity or even extremely dramatic changes in human capabilities. Rather I think it will address many talent shortages simultaneously, for not that much money. I’m proposing it as an idea we can implement now.
Look at the cost of IVF: According to http://www.momjunction.com/articles/much-ivf-treatment-cost-india_0074672/ it is $450,000 Rs, which is $6,000 dollars. IVF is a prerequisite for the sort of genetic tampering we are talking about, unless you want to use rabies as a carrier. IVF is widely practiced and has few barriers to entry, making me think it won’t get much cheaper. That is a lot of money for many parts of the world. To think this cost will come down in the next 10-20 years significantly requires believing that significant advances in automation of the process are possible: that might be true.
Financial incentives to have smarter children are likely to work better in those regions where $6,000 is a lot of money. It’s possible that combining both strategies works even better.
I don’t agree with this line of argument. Suppose there are five employes, and they all press the button. Each receives 100 utils, and loses 4, leading to a net gain of 96 each. Why is this not the ethically correct outcome, even for a deontologist?
I can consume text at a rate sometimes as high as 26 words a second. I cannot do that with audio. If we had text-to-speech, I would use it for turning audio into text, and consuming the text. Or the author could use it and produce text, which they could then edit. Frequently when talking we do all sorts of things we don’t do when writing: repeat ourselves, use funny turns of phrase, search for words, etc. The bandwidth advantage to the consumer of a small amount of work for the producer makes text continue to be valuable.
As far as diagrams go in technical areas, there are some famous pictures in mathematics. These pictures inevitably mean nothing without text. Transmitting abstract ideas, and in particular transmitting subtle variations in how solid something is, doesn’t seem compatible with diagrams. Diagrams are good for some concepts, but it’s still an art to get good ones. Creating them is expensive, and sometimes they don’t work. On the other hand it’s hard to beat a good graph for communicating numerical data easily and letting the viewer draw appropriate inferences.
What if some policies correlate with kinds of arguments people find appealing? An argument from natural law against the legality of homosexuality is unlikely to convince anyone who doesn’t love St. Thomas Aquinas, while the liberty principle won’t convince a single Dominican. Then again this is more a problem of ethical foundations than factual arguments, so perhaps by separating values from beliefs you can finesse this difficulty.
Mordecai Kaplan would be unhappy to hear that commitment to ritual and tradition requires belief . Committing oneself to a hard line to avoid backsliding is justifiable without divine command theory.
Plus, it increases the price of food. The net effect is a transfer of wealth from poor people to agribusiness that grow and process raisins..
However, they seem not to have examined the impact of starting a new political movement or political philosophy in the same way. Even higher variance, potentially even bigger rewards. Institutional change in particular can be extremely difficult to do without a clear mandate, which alliances in existing parties might not give.
I’m not sure I agree with 9. There is a lot of SF out there, and some of it (Roadside Picnic, Stanislaw Lem’s works) presents the idea that the universe is inherently uncaring in a very real way. Anthropomorphization is not an inherent feature of the genre, and fiction might enable directly understanding these ideas in a way that argument doesn’t make real for some people.
Temporarily: their allies turned on them and Athens soon rebuilt its navy. Ultimately Alexander and Rome ended the whole struggle permanently.