Given that one of the sparks of the American Revolution was a tax/rent seeking handout to the British East India company, maybe they were far from clueless on the matter.
Also, where does the NSA fit in this "oligarchy of huge corporations"?
I think it's more likely the contract allowed the insurance companies to avoid paying as much as possible.
Except that the poster indicated the insurance company eventually paid out. Again, this is a game they can play right now. It's still not in the interest of the insurance company to pay out.
You already have my opinion on that. Again, I think it would be enlightening to actually read about such attempts.
About 300 experiments have tried to determine the value of the Newtonian gravitational constant, G, so far, but large discrepancies in the results have made it impossible to know its value precisely. The weakness of the gravitational interaction and the impossibility of shielding the effects of gravity make it very difficult to measure G while keeping systematic effects under control. Most previous experiments performed were based on the torsion pendulum or torsion balance scheme as in the experiment by Cavendish in 1798, and in all cases macroscopic masses were used. Here we report the precise determination of G using laser-cooled atoms and quantum interferometry. We obtain the value G = 6.67191(99) x 10^-11 m^3 kg^-1 s^-2 with a relative uncertainty of 150 parts per million (the combined standard uncertainty is given in parentheses). Our value differs by 1.5 combined standard deviations from the current recommended value of the Committee on Data for Science and Technology. A conceptually different experiment such as ours helps to identify the systematic errors that have proved elusive in previous experiments, thus improving the confidence in the value of G. There is no definitive relationship between G and the other fundamental constants, and there is no theoretical prediction for its value, against which to test experimental results. Improving the precision with which we know G has not only a pure metrological interest, but is also important because of the key role that G has in theories of gravitation, cosmology, particle physics and astrophysics and in geophysical models.
A personal example was my mom's employer was constantly changing insurance companies to "save money". My mom was sometimes paying ever so slightly less, yay, save $20/month, but every time she went into the doctors, she had to fight tooth and nail to get the insurance to pay, during which time she couldn't go back to the hospital because of her outstanding "debt", that her insurance was supposed to cover 100%.
In other words, the insurance offered plenty, but refused to honor its contract. What has changed about that? It's just as illegal to violate a contract now as it was then.
It's these insurance companies that were effectively fraudulent shell companies that got removed from the market. My mom's insurance premium went up with the law change, but now she has a semi-decent insurance company to work with because her employer is forced to only select from government regulated companies.
Again, what has changed? Those past insurance plans were just as "government regulated" as current insurance plans. My belief is that we will find the same games played now as were played then.
If the IPCC had said that the long term temperature forcing from a doubling of CO2 was 15C instead of 3C, then I would have said "something like 5%" instead of "something like 1%". I'm well aware of where absolute zero is and what a 1% change in temperature is.
Going back to my original post, the slashdotter I was replying to made a ridiculous claim that "The heat isn't going anywhere" even though the vast majority of heat absorbed by atmosphere and ground, something like 240 watts, goes into space (the eventual imbalance between heat absorbed and radiated per unit time is something like 0.5 watts). Sure that imbalance, whatever it turns out to be, adds up, but it's nothing like the original claim implies.
Well, that's a problem right there. I understood that your thinking was that if it were done poorly, then it would be immoral. But if it were done by a non-sociopath who understood what they were doing (and cared for and was able to care for the well-being of the intelligence that they were bringing into existence), then it would be moral. After all, haven't we found moral ways to raise human children?
Of course giving power to anyone who does not understand that power is immoral.
Here, you propose to give exclusively the power of creating artificial species or whatever to "sociopaths". Now, maybe these sociopaths "understand" that power better than the alleged non-sociopaths do, but that does seem a bit backwards to me and more than a little immoral.
A paper about the 12th decimal place of a century old observation written by 35 authors so the university/employer market can keep expanding?
You ought to read up on some of the crazy things you have to account for in order to make extremely accurate observations. It's not as trivial as you make it sound.
I quickly came to the (perhaps overly stereotypical) conclusion that creating a new species of life would necessarily be such a morally portentous event that it was not something that any non-sociopath would want to be involved in
When the wise stay away, only the fools play. So who would you rather develop the first new species of intelligent life? A sociopath or a non-sociopath?
Many/. posts strike me like this. True I don't know the backgrounds of the posters, but imagine most have less knowledge about any discussed subject that the article author / researcher / whatever, yet we all see posts that start with "I disagree" or something similar.
There's a simple explanation: observation bias. One generally doesn't post if one doesn't have strong opinions on the matter. And disagreement is more likely to result in a post than agreement. Hence, most posts are disagreements.
For a personal example, my wife was a gifted education teacher (before she died in 2006) and once had a ninth-grade student who wanted interview Steven Hawking so she could "prove him wrong" (literally), based on what she learned in Sunday school.
So what? "The Death of Expertise" implies something relatively new. Not a typical religious behavior that's been kicking around for a few millennia.
We certainly desire cooperative behavior, and I'm not saying we shouldn't try to encourage it or prevent the opposite, but you can't worry about every possible potential uncooperative behavior.
Somehow I doubt this thread is about the many possible ways that uncooperative behavior can be uncooperative. Is anyone worried because the AI controlling their country's nuclear forces cheats at cards? The worry is about the harm that could be caused by uncooperative behavior.
Instead of worrying about failing to achieve the Pareto optimal between humans and some other intelligence, maybe we should worry about finding the Pareto optimal between fellow humans. Again, that's what we say about climate science: the serious harm to global warming MIGHT happen in some distant future. The serious harm of poverty and disease is happening NOW.
A couple of remarks. First, if we were close to some sort of Pareto optimal, then it's really not worth the extra effort to perfect that. Obviously, you don't think we're close and I don't either. But I do want to point out that actually achieving optimums is generally not a good use of effort and resources unless the situation is simple enough that an optimum can be easily calculated and achieved.
Second, there usually is not just one Pareto optimum but a whole range. A contrived example of this is a payoff scheme between two parties where the sum of the squares of their payoffs is less than or equal to a certain amount. Namely, it's the quarter wedge of a circle centered at (0,0) payoff with positive payoffs and a fixed radius.
For any point in the interior of the wedge, one can always find a payoff that is better for both parties. Hence, no point in the interior of the wedge is Pareto optimal. However, every point on the rind of the wedge is Pareto optimal because any change in payoff results in a loss for one of the two parties.
If/when we get to the point we're close to those AI, we can talk more about it then.
How do you know that we don't already have an AI capable of causing such harm? One of the problems here is the paranoid, secretive environment of national security. For example, it is commonly asserted that the US intelligence agencies are at least ten years ahead of the commercial world in computing power, algorithms, and other such things. AI may also become a thing secretly regulated (or the experts consumed by the national security apparatus) so that outside progress is hindered.
Aside from leading to movies with interesting premises, this means that we may not actually learn of such problems with AI until the problems become large and obvious enough that they can't be kept secret. So now seems as good a time as any to discuss potential problems with AI which may already be happening.
and is one of the few people to predict and profit from the banking collapse
Says all I need to know about your judgment. Anyone who was paying attention would have been able to anticipate the banking collapse. The real estate crisis was roundly ignored by most of the involved parties because it was in their interest to ignore it. And a lot of them profited by that ignorance.
For example, bonuses paid to mortgage industry employees and executives for risky loans with inadequate documentation (sometimes to the point of being unable to determine that anyone actually owns the loan!) don't get reversed just because the industry collapses.
It's a glaring example of the greater risks taken when the people making the decisions have access to vast quantities of other peoples' money and incentive to take advantage of that.
And I'm sure the next crisis will happen and there will be another idiot telling me that some blowhard was"one of the few" who could predict and profit from that crisis.
He actually believes so strongly in eating your own dog food ("having skin in the game") that he nearly advocates a system where engineers have to spend time in buildings they design, politicians who vote on war should have relatives in the military, and so on.
Engineers already have a more effective system than that, their professional licenses, liability, and regulation. For example, the chief designer of the RMS Titanic went down with the ship when it hit an iceberg. That didn't stop him from making a poor design decision. And if the ship hadn't been unlucky, it wouldn't have sunk that trip and the design decision might have propagated to many other ships before its drawbacks were understood.
He also harbors intense loathing for statisticians, preferring actual science
Uh huh. Statistics is just a tool like any other scientific tool. And it can be misused like any other scientific tool.
Again, if you use the PP on itself, then "never" is how often you should apply it. Opportunity cost is the most subtle of harms since it is the one never seen. And as was noted elsewhere, proving a negative (absence of sufficient harm) is typically impossible work except for a few contrived situations.
Also, go back and analyze the banking crisis with your bullshit logic and see how far you get before your brain explodes.
The banking crisis is easily explained by conflict of interest. It wasn't in the interest of the many involved parties to avoid a banking crisis, because they profited from it, it was their job to ignore it, and it wasn't their money at stake. So will that be the case for the many economic and market crises that follow in the future.
And PP has nothing to say about banking crises. Are we supposed to not have a society and starve in caves in order to avoid the threats of banking crises? Are we supposed to only have economic growth and not have economic declines no matter how irrationally the growth overbuilt certain areas?
And such an observation ignores that the greatest harms are rather "in your face". Collapse of industries and markets is a common factor in large declines and contrary to a couple of the assertions here not that hard to anticipate. Similarly, the consequences of bailouts of said industries and markets is pretty well known.
And then there's this straw man argument about the conflict being between knowledgeable experts and the completely ignorant. It's not. It's between experts in some fields and knowledgeable outsiders. The outright ignorant play no serious role aside from adding noise and never has. And I can't overemphasize the importance of conflict of interest.
For example, I once sat on a murder trial as a juror. During that time, various experts were brought in to testify on various aspects of the case, particularly the physics of the slaying in question (a son struck down his father with a baseball bat, a fact which wasn't disputed, the key consideration being instead whether the killing was justified and if not, what level of punishment to apply if it were not).
At one point, blood spatter experts were brought in by both sides (there were numerous blood spatter evidence throughout the father's house where the slaying occurred). Each one had testified numerous times, I got the impression dozens or even hundreds of times each. I believe the prosecutor's witness was a technician working with a large city coroner's office while the defendant's expert admitted on the stand to testifying for numerous court defenses.
Not only did their respective testimonies slant in favor of the respective arguments of the prosecution and defense which had employed them, but they had made careers of providing expert testimony exclusively to prosecution or defense in many court cases outside of the case I attended.
That's why I don't buy the claims of "The Death of Expertise". A heavily biased expert is not necessarily going to be more correct than a knowledgeable, relatively objective layperson though it could happen.
The obvious rebuttal to "The Death of Expertise" is conflict of interest combined with the opportunity to exploit that conflict of interest. It has never been so easy to buy and monetize expertise in the furtherance of propaganda as it is now.
But I mean, it was a very very... very VERY small possibility.
Zero is a very small probability. And notice that one can test the idea of ignition of the atmosphere without actually burning the entire atmosphere.
I see. A harm. Caused by a choice not to do something.
Sometimes this harm is quite blatant such as people suffering under the various communist and fascist ideologies of the 20th century. Nuclear weapons played an instrumental role in undoing one of the great evils of humanity (by curbing the aggression of the various countries in question) even though that wasn't their original use.
So you have to weigh the unknown, but zero probability chance of ignition of the atmosphere against the suffering of tens of millions of people and later, during the Cold War, a full billion people. This is why the precautionary principle is so deeply flawed. You can always invent an unknown risk of large enough magnitude to nix a benefit, no matter how huge the benefit is.
And even when a harm can't be realized, a imaginary harm can be manufactured, for example, a common claim is that longer life expectancy will result in people losing their humanity. Similarly, same sex marriage will result in God's wrath.
The Precautionary Principle is the ultimate conservative argument. In a nutshell, don't do change because you can never fully know the consequences of change and hence, it is always possible for a harm to be imagined in that zone of ignorance which outweighs any benefit.
Taleb's precautionary principle comes from the acknowledgement that tiny, insignificant changes can become huge changes quite quickly, and quite suddenly, and that risk is a much more complex thing than most modern scientists acknowledge.
Most modern scientists fail to acknowledge this threat because this idea is bullshit. I think the great irony of the Precautionary Principle is that the advocates don't eat their own dog food. For if they did, then they would have to rule out use of the Precautionary Principle on the grounds that the harm caused by the rule inherently can't be quantified or understood
While I don't disagree with what you wrote, I think there's other reasons for why things happened.
Not deleting it in the fucking editor.
If you're sniffing key strokes, then it's not that much additional effort to insert your own key strokes in. I'd also look at the "computer experts" and "sources" that she consulted as the potential originators of the problem.
She almost certainly held down control and backspace by accident and blamed it on the government.
Or a keyboard or software malfunction. It need not be an ID10T problem in order to be innocuous. I think this story would be far less frivolous if we actually were told what spyware was allegedly installed on the computer. Merely saying that experts looked at the computer and found stuff is not terribly relevant.
All in all, this is a boxing-at-shadows story. There's nothing material here to tell us whether something actually happened or not.
Realistically, I give a one in ten billion chance that her machine was black-bagged specifically, and far less odds in the manner that she described.
I give even odds that her "source" is the one responsible (since they actually had access to the machine). The source may have done so for the federal government (for which I give a lot more than 1 in 10 billion odds) or to exploit a gullible reporter for personal gain.
I believe it is highly dubious to think we have mastered our own intelligence to even consider a second.
Nonsense. Our societies demonstrate otherwise. Human behavior is heavily regulated in these societies in order to reduce the harm that we can cause. And most of them work quite well at it.
We have not had an epiphany of global proportions in how to respect everything we come across.
Why do you think such a global epiphany is possible or even desirable?
Until we have complete concensus on such an issue we cannot consider ourselves that intelligent as a species IMHO.
The perfect is the enemy of the good. You won't get complete consensus without squashing humanity's initiative.
This strikes me as arguing over whether or not Batman could beat Superman in a fight.
No, there are several differences. First, intelligence exists. Creating artificial versions of natural phenomena is a much easier problem. We aren't doing something that's never been done before.
Second, the most likely reason for creating a powerful AI is to so that it can do something for us. That means cooperative behavior is desired. But when we look at natural intelligences, we see a lot of non-cooperative behavior. Further, this non-cooperative behavior often has a rational basis independent of being human (such as the greedy algorithm (two or more parties using that can end up with solutions that aren't Pareto optimal, that is, for which difference choices can provide better outcomes for all involved parties), the Prisoners' Dilemma, and economic externalities).
Slashdot Mirror
Given that one of the sparks of the American Revolution was a tax/rent seeking handout to the British East India company, maybe they were far from clueless on the matter.
Also, where does the NSA fit in this "oligarchy of huge corporations"?
I think it's more likely the contract allowed the insurance companies to avoid paying as much as possible.
Except that the poster indicated the insurance company eventually paid out. Again, this is a game they can play right now. It's still not in the interest of the insurance company to pay out.
About 300 experiments have tried to determine the value of the Newtonian gravitational constant, G, so far, but large discrepancies in the results have made it impossible to know its value precisely. The weakness of the gravitational interaction and the impossibility of shielding the effects of gravity make it very difficult to measure G while keeping systematic effects under control. Most previous experiments performed were based on the torsion pendulum or torsion balance scheme as in the experiment by Cavendish in 1798, and in all cases macroscopic masses were used. Here we report the precise determination of G using laser-cooled atoms and quantum interferometry. We obtain the value G = 6.67191(99) x 10^-11 m^3 kg^-1 s^-2 with a relative uncertainty of 150 parts per million (the combined standard uncertainty is given in parentheses). Our value differs by 1.5 combined standard deviations from the current recommended value of the Committee on Data for Science and Technology. A conceptually different experiment such as ours helps to identify the systematic errors that have proved elusive in previous experiments, thus improving the confidence in the value of G. There is no definitive relationship between G and the other fundamental constants, and there is no theoretical prediction for its value, against which to test experimental results. Improving the precision with which we know G has not only a pure metrological interest, but is also important because of the key role that G has in theories of gravitation, cosmology, particle physics and astrophysics and in geophysical models.
A personal example was my mom's employer was constantly changing insurance companies to "save money". My mom was sometimes paying ever so slightly less, yay, save $20/month, but every time she went into the doctors, she had to fight tooth and nail to get the insurance to pay, during which time she couldn't go back to the hospital because of her outstanding "debt", that her insurance was supposed to cover 100%.
In other words, the insurance offered plenty, but refused to honor its contract. What has changed about that? It's just as illegal to violate a contract now as it was then.
It's these insurance companies that were effectively fraudulent shell companies that got removed from the market. My mom's insurance premium went up with the law change, but now she has a semi-decent insurance company to work with because her employer is forced to only select from government regulated companies.
Again, what has changed? Those past insurance plans were just as "government regulated" as current insurance plans. My belief is that we will find the same games played now as were played then.
It has nothing to do with the IPCC.
If the IPCC had said that the long term temperature forcing from a doubling of CO2 was 15C instead of 3C, then I would have said "something like 5%" instead of "something like 1%". I'm well aware of where absolute zero is and what a 1% change in temperature is.
Going back to my original post, the slashdotter I was replying to made a ridiculous claim that "The heat isn't going anywhere" even though the vast majority of heat absorbed by atmosphere and ground, something like 240 watts, goes into space (the eventual imbalance between heat absorbed and radiated per unit time is something like 0.5 watts). Sure that imbalance, whatever it turns out to be, adds up, but it's nothing like the original claim implies.
Doing this is immoral
Well, that's a problem right there. I understood that your thinking was that if it were done poorly, then it would be immoral. But if it were done by a non-sociopath who understood what they were doing (and cared for and was able to care for the well-being of the intelligence that they were bringing into existence), then it would be moral. After all, haven't we found moral ways to raise human children?
But it's hardly "new", is it?
If it weren't new, then that digit would already be known.
Of course giving power to anyone who does not understand that power is immoral.
Here, you propose to give exclusively the power of creating artificial species or whatever to "sociopaths". Now, maybe these sociopaths "understand" that power better than the alleged non-sociopaths do, but that does seem a bit backwards to me and more than a little immoral.
Well if that is your attitude, obviously you are already a sociopath and the question is moot.
Seriously? It's an obvious question and worthy of consideration no matter my attitude or capacity for non-sociopathic behavior.
And that is merely wrong. While a lot of engineering goes into these experiments, accounting for error is also a scientific process.
A paper about the 12th decimal place of a century old observation written by 35 authors so the university/employer market can keep expanding?
You ought to read up on some of the crazy things you have to account for in order to make extremely accurate observations. It's not as trivial as you make it sound.
I quickly came to the (perhaps overly stereotypical) conclusion that creating a new species of life would necessarily be such a morally portentous event that it was not something that any non-sociopath would want to be involved in
When the wise stay away, only the fools play. So who would you rather develop the first new species of intelligent life? A sociopath or a non-sociopath?
Yes. That is what the IPCC claims.
Many /. posts strike me like this. True I don't know the backgrounds of the posters, but imagine most have less knowledge about any discussed subject that the article author / researcher / whatever, yet we all see posts that start with "I disagree" or something similar.
There's a simple explanation: observation bias. One generally doesn't post if one doesn't have strong opinions on the matter. And disagreement is more likely to result in a post than agreement. Hence, most posts are disagreements.
For a personal example, my wife was a gifted education teacher (before she died in 2006) and once had a ninth-grade student who wanted interview Steven Hawking so she could "prove him wrong" (literally), based on what she learned in Sunday school.
So what? "The Death of Expertise" implies something relatively new. Not a typical religious behavior that's been kicking around for a few millennia.
We certainly desire cooperative behavior, and I'm not saying we shouldn't try to encourage it or prevent the opposite, but you can't worry about every possible potential uncooperative behavior.
Somehow I doubt this thread is about the many possible ways that uncooperative behavior can be uncooperative. Is anyone worried because the AI controlling their country's nuclear forces cheats at cards? The worry is about the harm that could be caused by uncooperative behavior.
Instead of worrying about failing to achieve the Pareto optimal between humans and some other intelligence, maybe we should worry about finding the Pareto optimal between fellow humans. Again, that's what we say about climate science: the serious harm to global warming MIGHT happen in some distant future. The serious harm of poverty and disease is happening NOW.
A couple of remarks. First, if we were close to some sort of Pareto optimal, then it's really not worth the extra effort to perfect that. Obviously, you don't think we're close and I don't either. But I do want to point out that actually achieving optimums is generally not a good use of effort and resources unless the situation is simple enough that an optimum can be easily calculated and achieved.
Second, there usually is not just one Pareto optimum but a whole range. A contrived example of this is a payoff scheme between two parties where the sum of the squares of their payoffs is less than or equal to a certain amount. Namely, it's the quarter wedge of a circle centered at (0,0) payoff with positive payoffs and a fixed radius.
For any point in the interior of the wedge, one can always find a payoff that is better for both parties. Hence, no point in the interior of the wedge is Pareto optimal. However, every point on the rind of the wedge is Pareto optimal because any change in payoff results in a loss for one of the two parties.
If/when we get to the point we're close to those AI, we can talk more about it then.
How do you know that we don't already have an AI capable of causing such harm? One of the problems here is the paranoid, secretive environment of national security. For example, it is commonly asserted that the US intelligence agencies are at least ten years ahead of the commercial world in computing power, algorithms, and other such things. AI may also become a thing secretly regulated (or the experts consumed by the national security apparatus) so that outside progress is hindered.
Aside from leading to movies with interesting premises, this means that we may not actually learn of such problems with AI until the problems become large and obvious enough that they can't be kept secret. So now seems as good a time as any to discuss potential problems with AI which may already be happening.
and is one of the few people to predict and profit from the banking collapse
Says all I need to know about your judgment. Anyone who was paying attention would have been able to anticipate the banking collapse. The real estate crisis was roundly ignored by most of the involved parties because it was in their interest to ignore it. And a lot of them profited by that ignorance.
For example, bonuses paid to mortgage industry employees and executives for risky loans with inadequate documentation (sometimes to the point of being unable to determine that anyone actually owns the loan!) don't get reversed just because the industry collapses.
It's a glaring example of the greater risks taken when the people making the decisions have access to vast quantities of other peoples' money and incentive to take advantage of that.
And I'm sure the next crisis will happen and there will be another idiot telling me that some blowhard was"one of the few" who could predict and profit from that crisis.
He actually believes so strongly in eating your own dog food ("having skin in the game") that he nearly advocates a system where engineers have to spend time in buildings they design, politicians who vote on war should have relatives in the military, and so on.
Engineers already have a more effective system than that, their professional licenses, liability, and regulation. For example, the chief designer of the RMS Titanic went down with the ship when it hit an iceberg. That didn't stop him from making a poor design decision. And if the ship hadn't been unlucky, it wouldn't have sunk that trip and the design decision might have propagated to many other ships before its drawbacks were understood.
He also harbors intense loathing for statisticians, preferring actual science
Uh huh. Statistics is just a tool like any other scientific tool. And it can be misused like any other scientific tool.
Also, go back and analyze the banking crisis with your bullshit logic and see how far you get before your brain explodes.
The banking crisis is easily explained by conflict of interest. It wasn't in the interest of the many involved parties to avoid a banking crisis, because they profited from it, it was their job to ignore it, and it wasn't their money at stake. So will that be the case for the many economic and market crises that follow in the future.
And PP has nothing to say about banking crises. Are we supposed to not have a society and starve in caves in order to avoid the threats of banking crises? Are we supposed to only have economic growth and not have economic declines no matter how irrationally the growth overbuilt certain areas?
And such an observation ignores that the greatest harms are rather "in your face". Collapse of industries and markets is a common factor in large declines and contrary to a couple of the assertions here not that hard to anticipate. Similarly, the consequences of bailouts of said industries and markets is pretty well known.
And then there's this straw man argument about the conflict being between knowledgeable experts and the completely ignorant. It's not. It's between experts in some fields and knowledgeable outsiders. The outright ignorant play no serious role aside from adding noise and never has. And I can't overemphasize the importance of conflict of interest.
For example, I once sat on a murder trial as a juror. During that time, various experts were brought in to testify on various aspects of the case, particularly the physics of the slaying in question (a son struck down his father with a baseball bat, a fact which wasn't disputed, the key consideration being instead whether the killing was justified and if not, what level of punishment to apply if it were not).
At one point, blood spatter experts were brought in by both sides (there were numerous blood spatter evidence throughout the father's house where the slaying occurred). Each one had testified numerous times, I got the impression dozens or even hundreds of times each. I believe the prosecutor's witness was a technician working with a large city coroner's office while the defendant's expert admitted on the stand to testifying for numerous court defenses.
Not only did their respective testimonies slant in favor of the respective arguments of the prosecution and defense which had employed them, but they had made careers of providing expert testimony exclusively to prosecution or defense in many court cases outside of the case I attended.
That's why I don't buy the claims of "The Death of Expertise". A heavily biased expert is not necessarily going to be more correct than a knowledgeable, relatively objective layperson though it could happen.
The obvious rebuttal to "The Death of Expertise" is conflict of interest combined with the opportunity to exploit that conflict of interest. It has never been so easy to buy and monetize expertise in the furtherance of propaganda as it is now.
But I mean, it was a very very... very VERY small possibility.
Zero is a very small probability. And notice that one can test the idea of ignition of the atmosphere without actually burning the entire atmosphere.
I see. A harm. Caused by a choice not to do something.
Sometimes this harm is quite blatant such as people suffering under the various communist and fascist ideologies of the 20th century. Nuclear weapons played an instrumental role in undoing one of the great evils of humanity (by curbing the aggression of the various countries in question) even though that wasn't their original use.
So you have to weigh the unknown, but zero probability chance of ignition of the atmosphere against the suffering of tens of millions of people and later, during the Cold War, a full billion people. This is why the precautionary principle is so deeply flawed. You can always invent an unknown risk of large enough magnitude to nix a benefit, no matter how huge the benefit is.
And even when a harm can't be realized, a imaginary harm can be manufactured, for example, a common claim is that longer life expectancy will result in people losing their humanity. Similarly, same sex marriage will result in God's wrath.
The Precautionary Principle is the ultimate conservative argument. In a nutshell, don't do change because you can never fully know the consequences of change and hence, it is always possible for a harm to be imagined in that zone of ignorance which outweighs any benefit.
Taleb's precautionary principle comes from the acknowledgement that tiny, insignificant changes can become huge changes quite quickly, and quite suddenly, and that risk is a much more complex thing than most modern scientists acknowledge.
Most modern scientists fail to acknowledge this threat because this idea is bullshit. I think the great irony of the Precautionary Principle is that the advocates don't eat their own dog food. For if they did, then they would have to rule out use of the Precautionary Principle on the grounds that the harm caused by the rule inherently can't be quantified or understood
Not deleting it in the fucking editor.
If you're sniffing key strokes, then it's not that much additional effort to insert your own key strokes in. I'd also look at the "computer experts" and "sources" that she consulted as the potential originators of the problem.
She almost certainly held down control and backspace by accident and blamed it on the government.
Or a keyboard or software malfunction. It need not be an ID10T problem in order to be innocuous. I think this story would be far less frivolous if we actually were told what spyware was allegedly installed on the computer. Merely saying that experts looked at the computer and found stuff is not terribly relevant.
All in all, this is a boxing-at-shadows story. There's nothing material here to tell us whether something actually happened or not.
Realistically, I give a one in ten billion chance that her machine was black-bagged specifically, and far less odds in the manner that she described.
I give even odds that her "source" is the one responsible (since they actually had access to the machine). The source may have done so for the federal government (for which I give a lot more than 1 in 10 billion odds) or to exploit a gullible reporter for personal gain.
I believe it is highly dubious to think we have mastered our own intelligence to even consider a second.
Nonsense. Our societies demonstrate otherwise. Human behavior is heavily regulated in these societies in order to reduce the harm that we can cause. And most of them work quite well at it.
We have not had an epiphany of global proportions in how to respect everything we come across.
Why do you think such a global epiphany is possible or even desirable?
Until we have complete concensus on such an issue we cannot consider ourselves that intelligent as a species IMHO.
The perfect is the enemy of the good. You won't get complete consensus without squashing humanity's initiative.
This strikes me as arguing over whether or not Batman could beat Superman in a fight.
No, there are several differences. First, intelligence exists. Creating artificial versions of natural phenomena is a much easier problem. We aren't doing something that's never been done before.
Second, the most likely reason for creating a powerful AI is to so that it can do something for us. That means cooperative behavior is desired. But when we look at natural intelligences, we see a lot of non-cooperative behavior. Further, this non-cooperative behavior often has a rational basis independent of being human (such as the greedy algorithm (two or more parties using that can end up with solutions that aren't Pareto optimal, that is, for which difference choices can provide better outcomes for all involved parties), the Prisoners' Dilemma, and economic externalities).
That's the basis in reality.