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Check this shit out: a bunch of trans-humanists who think artificial intelligence is the biggest threat ever, so they want to slow it down by working out plans in detail to sabotage Intel. You gotta keep in mind that nerds are nuts, and engineers are terrorists alot more than other people.

3,000 dead versus 60,000,000. You are suffering from severe scope insensitivity.

For 100% certainty you need religion

Or math, the queen of all sciences (ducks from flames)

Really? I don't think 100% certainty means what you think it does. Have you ever made a mistake proving a theorem? Has a peer-reviewed published theorem ever later been found to have a mistake? Is it even remotely possible that it will happen in the future? If so, you need to assign a level of certainty to any given theorem: a probability that it has a mistake. As it gets used more a scrutinized more, that probability declines dramatically, but it can't reach zero. Zero and one are not probabilities. There's a big difference between 0.99999999, or any other finite number of nines, and infinite nines. For the same reasons that infinity is not a real number, zero and one are not probabilities or certainties.

When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/mm/the_fallacy_of_gray/

I would direct you to Less Wrong on this particular logical fallacy.

To some.

Politics is the Mind-Killer

Excellent point. A rationalist writer came up with a parable to explain this phenomenon: http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller

psychopaths used more conjunctions such as “because “ or “since,”

Sounds like another attempt to label left-brain people as psychopaths.

Uh... the old "left brain is logical, right brain is creative" stuff is out the window. Please refer to Dr. Ramachandran's work on anosognosia in stroke victims.

I haven't had much time to dig in yet, but I hear good things about Less Wrong from some friends who are into game theory, ai, and sociology.

Here's their front page blurb:

Thinking and deciding are central to our daily lives. The Less Wrong community aims to gain expertise in how human brains think and decide, so that we can do so more successfully. We use the latest insights from cognitive science, social psychology, probability theory, and decision theory to improve our understanding of how the world works and what we can do to achieve our goals.

Yeah, you're wrong.

Face it, a representative sample of "the elites" made it there through superior intellect and rationality, not luck, inheritance or chance. "The system" is fundamentally just, fair and meritocratic.

Um, most of that is based on his "touch and feel" assessment of CEOs at dinner parties. He disregards charisma, then talks about how these CEOs seemed to "sparkle" with their overflowing "life force".

I'm sure the average CEO is a little smarter than the average bear. But that doesn't mean they don't have an excess of charisma (and a cynical ability to do whatever it takes to be rewarded), while other smart (but less charismatic / greedy) people don't get so high up the ladder.

One of his main ideas - that people like to dislike and underestimate CEOs just because it makes them feel better) is sound. But the other - CEOs *are* all amazingly smart, because the few he remembers meeting seemed pretty bright (selection bias - he met them at humanist conferences, and recall bias - who would remember a boring guy who talked about efficient capital allocations, and the importance of trustworthy lieutenants?), is not so sound.

Lawyers and doctors crying over their salaries? Talk to me when my IT job can be replaced with an automated service that tells them to "turn it off, then turn it on again."

Oh wait...

(CEOs could totally be replaced by machines. Oh yes.)

Yeah, you're wrong.
Face it, a representative sample of "the elites" made it there through superior intellect and rationality, not luck, inheritance or chance. "The system" is fundamentally just, fair and meritocratic.

There are no images in the mind. And no dogs in dog biscuits.

There was a debate, in the late 1800s, about whether "imagination" was simply a turn of phrase or a real phenomenon. That is, can people actually create images in their minds which they see vividly, or do they simply say "I saw it in my mind" as a metaphor for considering what it looked like?

The debate was resolved by Francis Galton, a fascinating man who among other achievements invented eugenics, the "wisdom of crowds", and standard deviation. Galton gave people some very detailed surveys, and found that some people did have mental imagery and others didn't. The ones who did had simply assumed everyone did, and the ones who didn't had simply assumed everyone didn't, to the point of coming up with absurd justifications for why they were lying or misunderstanding the question. There was a wide spectrum of imaging ability, from about five percent of people with perfect eidetic imagery to three percent of people completely unable to form mental images.

Perhaps you are one of the people who do not see images in your mind. Then you would think that nobody saw them and post what you did here.

Actually, I did respond to that, but apparently not clearly enough, so I'll highlight it:

There's a number of different ways Jesus and the Bible could be extraordinary, but they fail to be. That's not a flaw in my argument, it's just the nature of the myth of the culture you grew up in. It is clear to everyone in every other culture that there's nothing special about the myths of yours.

Yes, I know of the excuses given for why things must be that way, but it is clear to 2/3 of the world that they are just that: excuses. If there was a way to know, the world would long ago have converged on the true religion.

I make the meta-argument that there is nothing to recommend the Bible as better than the Koran or the Vedas, or the hundreds of other earlier tales of demigods that die and come back to life. John Loftus calls the the "Outsider Test For Faith". I reject Christianity because it is not in fact remarkable enough to clearly show the world that it is in fact the one true way, and claims an eternal punishment for not believing that it is. The fact that I give multiple kinds of ways God could have communicated better and established clearly the truth of the Bible and hence of Jesus does not undermine that argument. There is no reason to choose one of the sub-arguments, as you claim.

Christianity is about a continuing relationship with God, and yes, the events within that relationship can possibly be explained by things like coincidence, selective memory and so forth. But there comes a point where that just does not make sense any more. Either I am incredibly "lucky", incredibly selective in my memory of experiences or I actually have a relationship with God. While I don't expect you to trust my judgment in this matter, I must trust my own because if I reject it, I how can I trust my judgment in say, accepting your judgment?

I recommend reading a book like "50 Reasons People Give For Believing In a God" or the anthropological chapters in The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails. Heck, read any modern anthropological textbook. Every major religion gives this kind of evidence for their God. If it was only Christianity that did, I admit it would be good evidence, and the world would have converged on that religion instead of 2/3s of the people rejecting it, and Christianity splintering into smaller and smaller sects. If the Holy Spirit enlightens us like the bible says, he does terrible job of it. Things like the 30 years war are god's fault if he does exist, because he clearly could have communicated the truth better, or even what parts were essential and what was debatable. He didn't.

I have given God many opportunities to show himself, but he only does so in a matter that is exactly the same as chance. In the OT, he is supposed to have sent fire from heaven, and a simple lack of the Baal to act was proof that he was not the true god, and in the tale his prophets were murdered. Elijah didn't say, "Oh, I understand, my god values divine hiddenness also." No, simple failure of a god to respond to a challenge was definitive proof of his non-existence in the test YHWH himself designed. Somehow, once modern science and good record-keeping came about, god no longer shows up in any measurable way, and the theological sausage grinder comes up with ideas like "divine hiddenness" and the soul making theodicy. Strange that. I have yet to meet a Christian who is willing to anticipate future consequences of God's existence. No,belief in belief is the belief of the day, and even Christians recognize it.

The reason I am an atheist is the Chrisitianity does not stand up to the "Outsider Test for Faith", which it must if god is good and universalism is not correct. Either Christianity is false, god is not good and not worthy

Do me a favor and find out if the user "Clippy" on LessWrong.com is one of the other posters and who that asshole is. Will pay in Bitcoins.

-- long time angry member of LessWrong.com pissed off at the fucking paperclip maximizer.

I was reading a posting about evaporative cooling of group beliefs. Basically, more moderate people leave a group due to it degrading, which accelerates its degradation because they served to keep it in check. What's left is a more-distilled version of the degradation. Repeat.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/ks/the_wonder_of_evolution/

You need to keep in mind that all of quantum mechanics is exclusively about probabilities, and no "reality" separate from the probabilities can exist. Niels Bohr repeatedly stated that quantum mechanics forbids any ontological questions to be raised; "is it real?" is simply not a question that this theory can answer. Unfortunately, people have been attempting to do just that ever since '37 and confused the issue beyond repair, because a quantum probability really is a purely epistemological quantity, describing what you believe about what you are measuring. When people start talking about "collapsing the wavefunction", they are confusing what happens in their mind with what happens in the real world, an error called the mind projection fallacy.

Before you make a measurement on the electron, you know nothing about it. In your mind, there is no information about its properties, so in your mind the electron does not exist (the definition of existence being that it has measurable properties) until you get some of that information. This does not mean that the electron does not exist in the real world, where it does indeed have all the properties that your experiment is about to measure.

Your mind does not have any definite information about the electron, but it does have a probability wavefunction for it. When you calculate a probability of something, you do so based on whatever prior information you have about it. For example, if you have measured the properties of other electrons before, you might make the assumption that the particular electron you are about to measure has a mass or charge similar to that of the other electrons, adjusted by the distribution of occurence of particular values. You know that all electrons have the same mass and charge, so our prior and posterior probability distributions (a graph of probability against measurement) are a single spike at the known value. Position and momentum, on the other hand, are unconstrained, so our prior probability distribution is a flat line infinitely close to zero. When you measure an electron's position or momentum, you are using that information to update your probability distribution into a single spike whose width is determined by the uncertainty of your measurement. You might view this update as a "collapsing" of your previous flat zero-knowledge distribution into this spike. A complete set of these probability distributions comprises the wavefunction of the electron, hence the term "wavefunction collapse".

It must be emphasized that this "collapse" happens entirely in your mind! While the electron's state may have been perturbed by your measurement, that has nothing do with it. The electron had a position before you measured it and still has one after you measured it. If you were to plot its position against the likelihood of finding it at that position, it would be a single spike at its real position with no uncertainty whatsoever. The uncertainty only occurs because you do not have perfect information about what the real position is, and it is only in the probability distribution in your mind does the spike have width.

It's the same with entanglement. You create two particles with correlated states, like say a production of an electron-positron pair. If you measure one particle and discover that it's an electron, you know for certain that the other one is a positron. All the ballihoo about "spooky action at a distance" is merely a mind projection fallacy; the second particle does not magically become a positron from nothing. It was a positron all along; you just didn't know that. When the probability wavefunction "collapsed" in your mind, you did not make any FTL measurements. The positron did not send you any information; you deduced it from w

http://lesswrong.com/lw/nz/arguing_by_definition/

The idea that this particular style of AI will somehow achieve consciousness is what Eliezer Yudkowsky refers to as the Detached Lever Fallacy. In brief, you can have a relationship (apple is-a fruit), but unless the proto-AI has an experiential model of what an apple is and what is possible with an apple, and some kind of decision-making process, then it's just a lever with nothing attached. For instance, would NELL ever know how to make an apple pie?

And it doesn't matter how many relationships you build, without the "programs" for using the apple, it's just a lot of loose, dangling levers.

That's not to say that an auto-classification system doesn't have its uses, I'm just not preparing for transhumanism just yet.

Hardly. Quantum mechanics isn't non-deterministic at all; that's a common misconception. I won't go into the details here; you can read this if you want the details.

A google search for "tea party racism study" turns up a survey which found a measurable difference in racial attitudes between the tea party folks and the general population, as the very first result. And criticizing someone for not doing research is not a proof or disproof of anything; what matters is the evidence that *exists*, not the evidence that was provided. And while you shouldn't accept conjectures without evidence for them, you shouldn't *reject* conjectures without evidence against them, either.

The rules of reasoning and evidence are not as obvious as most people think, and most people, including you and me, get at least a few of them wrong. (It is especially hard to think clearly about politics). I recommend reading the Less Wrong sequences for guidance on how to evaluate hypotheses.

If this becomes accurate to predict anything of actual use, the markets themselves will start using it... which renders the predictions themselves useless.

This phenomenon is called Goodhart's Law.

Sounds like a restatement of the simultaneously-discovered Goodhart's Law, Lucas critique, and Campbell's Law.

Basically, once you start measuring something as a proxy for what you really want to know, people start to take the proxy into account when making decisions, to the point where it becomes useless as a measure for whatever it was intended.

A few years back I was working for a major corporation that was pushing Six Sigma as the holy grail for all problems, and I was forced to attend some seminars. (Afterwards I christened the program Six Sigmoidoscopies , which may have even underestimated the pain involved.) One of the presenters talked about the difficulty of applying hard statistical quality analysis to something as abstract as software development, but more or less proceeded to say that the solution was to find whatever metrics could be easily measured, however flawed, and use those, and then try to perfect better metrics as time progressed. My gut reaction was that what would happen in practice is that people would simply focus their work on meeting the flawed metric, then be rewarded based on the flawed metric whether or not it actually made your product any better, and then make decisions based on the metric and thus establish a culture based on that flawed metric. I left before I ever saw if any Sig Sigma initiative was implemented, successfully or not, so I never found out if my reaction was correct or not.

I was unaware until reading this post that my gut reaction had essentially been formally recognized. Good to know if I'm ever in that situation again.

Sounds like a restatement of the simultaneously-discovered Goodhart's Law, Lucas critique, and Campbell's Law.

Basically, once you start measuring something as a proxy for what you really want to know, people start to take the proxy into account when making decisions, to the point where it becomes useless as a measure for whatever it was intended.

Here, people take these cancer tests as a measure of their probability of cancer. But once they start to treat them as reliable, they start doing more self-destructive things, destroying the correlation between the proxy (the cancer test) and the actual probability of cancer.

This is why you can't have self-selecting samples.

Also, this applies a lot more broadly. They call it Goodhart's Law. For example, there's an example about a fictitious Communist factory making nails. When they were told that they had to make X nails, they made small and useless ones to meet the goal. When they were told that they had to make them by weight, they made a few ridiculously large ones.

You are privileging the hypothesis. Amanda Knox and her Boyfriend are obviously innocent. Rudy Guede is obviously the sole perpetrator.

That's the obvious tag.

Seeing as they seem to be going for something biological, I'm going to guess they'll regret summoning Azathoth.

Exactly. Another way to think about it is this: the speed of light is the maximum speed information can travel. Since the escape velocity of a black hole is greater than the speed of light, information cannot escape either.

Because information cannot escape, it means you cannot infer what went into a black hole by looking at what comes out. (Note: information being "destroyed" in a black hole doesn't prevent you from e.g. keeping a record of what you tossed into a black hole. Once it goes inside, it won't somehow destroy your records, as I used to believe was the implication.)

Interestingly, this is wrong, and Stephen Hawking lost a bet over it.

The Second Law is actually very tightly coupled to Shannon-style Information Entropy: if you knew enough information (as a fait accompli) about the current state of a system at equilibrium, you could successfully build a Maxwell's Demon that used that information to separate the system into hot and cold reservoirs, allowing you to cancel out the entropy of the system with your information's "negentropy" (as it's called). Learning the information in the first place causes your information entropy (i.e. correlation with the system, negentropy) to increase, which by physical necessity also causes your thermodynamic entropy to increase in tandem. This is why a Maxwell's Demon doesn't work: the entropy undone in using the information is always less than (or, in a perfect system, equal to) the entropy done while learning it. (If blind faith provided non-tautological and accurate information about the universe with better-than-random chance, then you could build a Maxwell's Demon that broke the Second Law -- and since the Second Law is inviolable, it must be the case that blind faith tells you nothing... except possibly tautologies if your brain uses reversible computing. If you think hard enough about it, it also disproves substance dualism.)

In the specific case of information entropy and black holes, it turns out that the information never crosses the event horizon, and thus never has to break the speed of light limits when leaving it. As modern physics and Stephen Hawking have both discovered, all the entropy of a black hole's formative mass/energy is encoded in two dimensions as ripples in the event horizon of the black hole. Black holes have also been discovered to be maximum-entropy objects in modern physics, containing the largest amount of entropy physically possible for the volume of space enclosed by the event horizon. (This has interesting implications on the nature of reality -- look up the anti-de Sitter/CFT correspondence for all sorts of 2D/3D weirdness, like the universe being equivalent to a 2D hologram.) When a quantum of Hawking Radiation emerges from the event horizon, it carries off precisely the amount of entropy equal to the entropy carried by the change in the surface area of the event horizon when expelling the quantum, thus maintaining the invariant that the black hole is a maximum-entropy object. Because "information entropy" is another way of saying "too random to predict ahead of time" -- that's what information is, by Shannon's definition of it -- the radiation looks quite random indeed. But that doesn't mean it's uncorrelated with the history of the black hole.

Short stories are good!

The Last Question
The Babyeating Aliens
They're made out of Meat

For some short(er) novels try:

Slaughterhouse Five and/or The Sirens of Titan and/or Cat's Cradle
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz(for a well known fairy tale)
Then you can follow it up with the longer Wicked or The Ugly Stepsister or some other modern retelling so you can discuss the clash of a mundane world with a fantasy world.

For longer books I would recommend:
Ender's Game
Stranger in a Strange Land
and maybe The Dragon Never Sleeps

If there was a preferred reference frame such that the laws of physics only had to apply to it, but causality could be broken elsewhere, then the Theory of Relativity would be very different.

Yes, but like Newtonian mechanics, modern relativity would still be a useful first order approximation. Plus, to the best of my knowledge relativity has only rarely been tested to more than first order effects.

I'm also going to wait until we have some reason to actually prefer the many world interpretation over others before I agree with that. Just because it would be convenient for solving time travel paradoxes in a universe where FTL travel is possible doesn't mean its actually true.

I agree; at the moment there's no watertight reason to prefer one interpretation over another. But the alternatives are hidden variables (local variables are ruled out by Bell inequality experiments and nonlocal variables would violate relativity), or the literal Copenhagen interpretation. (There are others, but these are the most popular.)

The Copenhagen interpretation is almost certainly wrong. (My only correction to his list is that #6 also applies to the No Hair theorem.)

"... the real point about the Singularity is that one would want to derive the core, productive algorithms of intelligence and consciousness, and merely implement these in computer code. I think the whole idea of trying to replicate in a computer the biological processing of the human brain down to the molecular level or whatever will never amount to anything more than an academic exercise. That would be like trying to use evolutionary algorithms to evolve an intelligence on a computer, or other such insanity that sounds like the idea of Hugo de Garis."
-me
 
"There are lots of people who think that if they can just get enough of something, a mind will magically emerge. Facts, simulated neurons, ..., raw CPU power, whatever. It's an impressively idiotic combination of mental laziness and wishful thinking."
-Michael Wilson
 
There are three schools of Singularity thought. This article is primarily about one of them. Please read these articles
 
  http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/schools
 
"I find it very annoying, therefore, when these three schools of thought are mashed up into Singularity paste. Clear thinking requires making distinctions.
 
But what is still more annoying is when someone reads a blog post about a newspaper article about the Singularity, comes away with none of the three interesting theses, and spontaneously reinvents the dreaded fourth meaning of the Singularity:
 
Apocalyptism: Hey, man, have you heard? There's this bunch of, like, crazy nerds out there, who think that some kind of unspecified huge nerd thing is going to happen. What a bunch of wackos! It's geek religion, man."
 
  http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2009/02/the-three-singularity-schools-kurzweil-and-superintelligence/
 
"The point of this article is to remind the reader that there are three schools of Singularity thought - this is so fundamental, but so few people are aware of it. It should be the first thing that people learn when introduced to the concept. As I argued in 2007, the word "Singularity" has lost all meaning, but if we're stuck with it, we should at least pull apart three of the major meanings it tends to have."