From transhumanist at goldenfuture.net Sun Oct 1 01:01:02 2006 From: transhumanist at goldenfuture.net (Joseph Bloch) Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 21:01:02 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> Personally I find all this talk about "tyranny" to be little more than hyperbole. The Supreme Court said that Congress needed to establish the rules for treatment of terrorist suspects being detained by the United States, and so Congress did. It was not tyranny when thousands of Japanese and Germans (yes, Germans too) were interred during World War II. Was it illegal and misguided? Arguably so. But not tyranny. Not a usurpation of the government. Not an unconstitutional suspension of rights of American citizens (nothing in the article originally referenced supports the notion that ordinary Americans can be detained under this bill as far as I can tell). The right of Habeus Corpus, according to the Constitution, cannot be suspended except in times of invasion or insurrection. We have seen both of those things. Foreign terrorists attacking our shores on 9-11. Americans going to join their cause in armed militancy supporting Al Quaeda and the Taliban. I think there's a case to be made that the conditions for the suspension of Habeus Corpus have been met. Others may disagree, but it's hardly the case that it's an open-and-shut "no." If the Bush administration were determined to overthrow the rule of law, they would have started with the first Supreme Court ruling that said the military tribunals as originally composed were illegal. Talk to me about true tyranny when George W. Bush is still in the White House on January 21st, 2009. Until then, I see nothing more than a possibly over-zealous (and only possibly so), but still well-intentioned, attept to protect the United States from an enemy which is determined to eradicate our way of life and in the process stifle forever the Transhumanist dream, if only incidentally as a part of its attempt to drag the world back to the 13th Century. The goal of the Islamists; a global Caliphate which places all of humanity under strict Islamic law, is a scenario which must be avoided at all costs. Joseph spike wrote: >>bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl >>Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place >> >>On Fri, Sep 29, 2006 at 11:18:48PM +0200, Amara Graps wrote: >> >> >> >>>There should be massive demonstrations over this. Why isn't there?! >>> >>> >... > > >>Those who don't care about impeaching a criminal don't care >>about their country turned into a dictatorship... >> >> > > >My understanding is that it was congress that did this, not the executive >branch. I would interpret it as empty electioneering: the congressmonsters >do not want to appear soft on terrorism right before the election. >Legislative branch grandstanding is done all the time, but it is still >meaningless. What counts is if the supreme court upholds it. I predict >that the court will knock it down without a second thought. > >Regarding massive demonstrations, we have congressional elections in a few >weeks. We will see what happens there. > >spike > > > > > > > > > >_______________________________________________ >extropy-chat mailing list >extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkhenson at rogers.com Sun Oct 1 04:01:09 2006 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2006 00:01:09 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again Resend 2 In-Reply-To: References: <5.1.0.14.0.20060930154125.044a41d0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20060930154125.044a41d0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20060930234518.04515d70@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 11:49 PM 9/30/2006 +0100, you wrote: >On 9/30/06, Keith Henson wrote: > > > And the *most important* element is to reduce the birth rate to below the > > growth of the economy. That's what happened in Northern Ireland and I make > > the case it is the reason for the IRA going out of business. > > > >I think you have a general claim that has a lot of substance. > >I'm just a bit worried that using Northern Ireland as your main >example may weaken your case, as many objections can be raised against >that specific example. And if someone produces strong arguments >against NI, your more general claim may be weakened. A similar terror campaign that burned out in roughly the same time frame is the Basque. Anyone have income and birth rate data for that group? While I think birth rate was the substantial factor, oil income for the UK which increased the income per capita, could have also contributed to the general brightening of future prospects and (according to the model) that ration is the key to terror or war support. >NI is one economy containing two intermingled warring groups. >Not two competing economies / nations. I think your claim would be >better demonstrated by using nations as examples. e.g. Germany and >'Lebensraum'. >(I don't know if this is a good example. I'll leave that up to you). :) > >The NI birth rate peaked in the 1961-65 period at 23 / 1000, then fell >fairly steadily in every 5yr period until 1996-2000 when it was 13.9 / >1000. This is roughly in line with the steadily falling birthrate for >the UK as a whole. >i.e. the troubles didn't cause the fall in the birth rate. I agree, the causal arrow in the model goes the other way, the falling birth rate increased income per capita, which made the future seem brighter, which reduced the support for wars and related such as terrorism >The fall >was caused by being part of a modern European state, as all European >birth rates were falling during that period. The matter of total mystery to me is *why.* I don't have the least idea of why women would restrict family size at the times they did. Any ideas would be appreciated. >And the fighting was only >in NI, not in the UK and other European states. > True. But the IRA supporters in the time frame when they were most active were (in theory) looking at a bleak future, more so than other places in the UK or other European states. As you mention discrimination is a big factor in feeling you have a bleak future. >I could make more suggestions about why the troubles have reduced, but >I doubt it really matters for the purposes of this argument. Some >claim the IRA is still there. It has just switched away from bombing >to more gangster-like criminal activities. And they are making a very >nice living from these activities, as their armoury tends to >discourage the civil police from investigating too closely. Political >changes may have stopped the Catholic IRA supporters from feeling as >persecuted as they used to be. It is a very complex situation, with no >neat 'sound-bite' solutions. Everyone is really holding their breath >and keeping their fingers crossed over there. I am sure they are. But the model predicts that as long as the future prospects are good, the IRA or some other terrorist organization will not get popular support. Keith Henson From spike66 at comcast.net Sun Oct 1 04:44:50 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 21:44:50 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> Message-ID: <200610010445.k914j5lX006584@andromeda.ziaspace.com> bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Joseph Bloch Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place ... It was not tyranny when thousands of Japanese and Germans (yes, Germans too) were interred during World War II. Was it illegal and misguided? Arguably so... That depends. If they were dead when they were interred, then it was legal. If not, then not. {8^D Sorry Joseph, it was a funny typo, I couldn't resist. {8^D ... an enemy which is determined to eradicate our way of life and in the process stifle forever the Transhumanist dream, if only incidentally as a part of its attempt to drag the world back to the 13th Century. The goal of the Islamists; a global Caliphate which places all of humanity under strict Islamic law, is a scenario which must be avoided at all costs. Joseph Ja, I often get the feeling that the radical Islamists, if they ruled the planet, would be less enthusiastic than we are about thawing frozen infidels. I suspect they might have little interest in environmental protection, nor free speech, nor free anything. spike From thespike at satx.rr.com Sun Oct 1 04:46:41 2006 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 23:46:41 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again References: <5.1.0.14.0.20060930154125.044a41d0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20060930154125.044a41d0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20060930234153.0224e1c0@satx.rr.com> At 12:01 AM 10/1/2006 -0400, Keith H. wrote: > >The fall > >was caused by being part of a modern European state, as all European > >birth rates were falling during that period. > >The matter of total mystery to me is *why.* I don't have the least idea of >why women would restrict family size at the times they did. Any ideas >would be appreciated. I should have thought it's obvious: so they could do things with their lives in addition to producing and looking after one child after another after another... What's more interesting, in the context of this thread, is how Catholics raised in these two famously pious nations (Ireland and Spain) managed to find workarounds to the clamoring condemnation of birth control from their supposedly virginal prelates, not to mention the urgings of their baby-mad genes. Damien Broderick From neomorphy at gmail.com Sun Oct 1 06:09:10 2006 From: neomorphy at gmail.com (Olie Lamb) Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 16:09:10 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Why "Commandments" In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20060929003623.0222c358@satx.rr.com> References: <6E423681-26D3-4B74-BD4D-6B7645D5E5B5@bonfireproductions.com> <200609290525.k8T5PSFF006725@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20060929003623.0222c358@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: On 9/29/06, Damien Broderick wrote: > > At 10:08 PM 9/28/2006 -0700, spike jests > > >The ten suggestments? Somehow that just lacks the > >punch of the original. > > Yes. Getting rid of punches is a great idea. > > Getting rid of moral commands from above is a great idea. Getting rid > of the far too definite *the* and the far too limited *ten* are great > ideas. Getting rid of *Way* would be good, too, although that seems a > touch less pernicious. "Some suggestions," yes indeed. "A few > recommendations." "A mixed bunch of hints, clues and possible > shortcuts, offered IMHO; check my credentials with people who know > me." Like that? Indeed, it would be challenge enough to create a list: "Generally-agreed Extropian Ideas" --Olie -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jef at jefallbright.net Sun Oct 1 06:51:18 2006 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 23:51:18 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Why "Commandments" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Damien wrote: Getting rid of moral commands from above is a great idea. Getting rid of the far too definite *the* and the far too limited *ten* are great ideas. Getting rid of *Way* would be good, too, although that seems a touch less pernicious. "Some suggestions," yes indeed. "A few recommendations." "A mixed bunch of hints, clues and possible shortcuts, offered IMHO; check my credentials with people who know me." Like that? Then Olie Lamb wrote: Indeed, it would be challenge enough to create a list: "Generally-agreed Extropian Ideas" What an improvement it would be if we changed our focus from ends (what we think our future selves would want) to instead focus on increasingly effective principles of problem-solving (the problem being how best to promote our values into the future) trusting that the outcome, whatever the particulars, is the best we could have done at that point. Then rinse, lather, repeat. - Jef -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sjatkins at mac.com Sun Oct 1 07:25:23 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Samantha=A0_Atkins?=) Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 00:25:23 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <9672F35A-2683-4ECC-86A8-218C2C0F0FAF@mac.com> On Sep 30, 2006, at 2:26 PM, spike wrote: >> bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl >> Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place >> >> On Fri, Sep 29, 2006 at 11:18:48PM +0200, Amara Graps wrote: >> >>> There should be massive demonstrations over this. Why isn't there?! > ... >> Those who don't care about impeaching a criminal don't care >> about their country turned into a dictatorship... > > > My understanding is that it was congress that did this, not the > executive > branch. What, you missed that the executive has been pushing hard for this? Every administration attempts to get Congress to play ball with its wishes. > I would interpret it as empty electioneering: the congressmonsters > do not want to appear soft on terrorism right before the election. Sorry but these laws will remain long after the election even if they are eventually successfully challenged. And this is hardly the point. The point is that so-called public servants sworn to uphold the Constitution and supposedly in office to protect the rights of the people are violating that oath and putting the people in far more jeopardy than we ever faced from the extremely unlikely scenario of dying at the hands of a terrorist. Much of the population is very tired of the whole "war on terrorism" thing in the ways it is playing out anyway. This administration is at an all time (well since 9/11) low in public approval. It is certainly not unpopular to stand up against Bush and company getting out of hand rr to stand for the people for a change. So this is a pretty lame attempt to explain this away. > Legislative branch grandstanding is done all the time, but it is still > meaningless. What counts is if the supreme court upholds it. I > predict > that the court will knock it down without a second thought. > Guess again. The court is being loaded. And again the people should never stand for a Congress that would pass such an affront in the first place. > Regarding massive demonstrations, we have congressional elections in > a few > weeks. We will see what happens there. > So what will it take for you to consider doing something more than "wait and see"? - samantha From eugen at leitl.org Sun Oct 1 08:33:25 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 10:33:25 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> Message-ID: <20061001083325.GF21640@leitl.org> On Sat, Sep 30, 2006 at 09:01:02PM -0400, Joseph Bloch wrote: > > Personally I find all this talk about "tyranny" to be little more than > hyperbole. Yet. But the legislation is there. As far as the law is concerned, U.S. can now be a tyranny. > The Supreme Court said that Congress needed to establish the rules for > treatment of terrorist suspects being detained by the United States, > and so Congress did. The Congress rubberstamped a president's bill. One they probably didn't even read before -- this happens quite often recently. One Conservative opposed it, and some 32 Democrats. If your representative did not oppose this bill, you might want to make your displeasure heard. It would be even better if you would protest in the streets. Fat chance. > It was not tyranny when thousands of Japanese and Germans (yes, > Germans too) were interred during World War II. Was it illegal and > misguided? Arguably so. But not tyranny. Not a usurpation of the Have you read the bill? It doesn't say anything about terrorists. As stated, it could apply to *everybody*. Read it. Who's eligible is completely open to interpretation. > The right of Habeus Corpus, according to the Constitution, cannot be > suspended except in times of invasion or insurrection. We have seen > both of those things. Foreign terrorists attacking our shores on 9-11. The U.S. has been invaded? There is an insurrection? You can't honestly believe this. > Americans going to join their cause in armed militancy supporting Al > Quaeda and the Taliban. I think there's a case to be made that the *Where*? Are you nuts? The U.S. is not Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq or Iran. > conditions for the suspension of Habeus Corpus have been met. Others > may disagree, but it's hardly the case that it's an open-and-shut > "no." If the Bush administration were determined to overthrow the rule > of law, they would have started with the first Supreme Court ruling > that said the military tribunals as originally composed were illegal. > Talk to me about true tyranny when George W. Bush is still in the > White House on January 21st, 2009. Until then, I see nothing more than Now that would be a little bit too late then, don't you think. And don't get hung up on a particular person, you need to get Habeas Corpus reinstated lickety-split, or you're playing sitting duck for anyone that chooses to exploit that gaping hole. > a possibly over-zealous (and only possibly so), but still > well-intentioned, attept to protect the United States from an enemy > which is determined to eradicate our way of life and in the process Poppycock. The enemy you describe is entirely fabricated. The threat is only in your mind. > stifle forever the Transhumanist dream, if only incidentally as a part > of its attempt to drag the world back to the 13th Century. > The goal of the Islamists; a global Caliphate which places all of > humanity under strict Islamic law, is a scenario which must be avoided > at all costs. Are you truly believing what you're writing? -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From sjatkins at mac.com Sun Oct 1 08:59:03 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Samantha=A0_Atkins?=) Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 01:59:03 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> Message-ID: On Sep 30, 2006, at 6:01 PM, Joseph Bloch wrote: > Personally I find all this talk about "tyranny" to be little more > than hyperbole. > > The Supreme Court said that Congress needed to establish the rules > for treatment of terrorist suspects being detained by the United > States, and so Congress did. > Read the rules and think through the implications. That should be enough. If it isn't then nothing I or anyone else says is likely to reach you. > It was not tyranny when thousands of Japanese and Germans (yes, > Germans too) were interred during World War II. Was it illegal and > misguided? Arguably so. But not tyranny. Not a usurpation of the > government. Not an unconstitutional suspension of rights of American > citizens (nothing in the article originally referenced supports the > notion that ordinary Americans can be detained under this bill as > far as I can tell). > Actually this bill allows anyone at all, including you and I, to be declared an "enemy combatant" by government fiat and many of our rights and protections removed simply on that basis. This is leaving the barn door wide open to unspeakable abuse. > The right of Habeus Corpus, according to the Constitution, cannot be > suspended except in times of invasion or insurrection. We have seen > both of those things. Foreign terrorists attacking our shores on > 9-11. Americans going to join their cause in armed militancy > supporting Al Quaeda and the Taliban. I think there's a case to be > made that the conditions for the suspension of Habeus Corpus have > been met. Others may disagree, but it's hardly the case that it's an > open-and-shut "no." If the Bush administration were determined to > overthrow the rule of law, they would have started with the first > Supreme Court ruling that said the military tribunals as originally > composed were illegal. > There is no invasion. 9/11 was no invasion. There is no limit in this bill that will cause it to only pertain to those who join actual terrorist groups. It is an open and shut no. The Bush administration has admitted to acting outside the rule of law and now seeks (and gets) retroactive law approving those illegal acts such as mass warrantless wiretaps. The administration has no been given new laws that allow it to do more of what it pleases outside of judicial review or any meaningful constraints. Do you not see this as dangerous? > Talk to me about true tyranny when George W. Bush is still in the > White House on January 21st, 2009. Until then, I see nothing more > than a possibly over-zealous (and only possibly so), but still well- > intentioned, attept to protect the United States from an enemy which > is determined to eradicate our way of life and in the process stifle > forever the Transhumanist dream, if only How about when the election of 2004 was quite possibly stolen? Bush ossibly over-zealous but nothing more? I am rendered speechless. We are destroying our own way of life with our apparent willingness to dismantle our own freedom and protections in order to stop a few nutcase terrorist groups. If you care about preserving our way of life, as I do, then you must be on guard against this clear danger also. > incidentally as a part of its attempt to drag the world back to the > 13th Century. > Sheesh. All the Jihadists and Islamists (whatever that is) in the world haven't a tiny part of the power required to do any such thing. But rampant fear-mongering plus our own heavy increasing influence of religion based politics may destroy our way of life. > The goal of the Islamists; a global Caliphate which places all of > humanity under strict Islamic law, is a scenario which must be > avoided at all costs. > What a silly fantasy this is. Besides, in this most powerful nation on earth there are far more in positions of great power who want all to live under Old Testament law. - samantha > Joseph > > spike wrote: >>> bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl >>> Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place >>> >>> On Fri, Sep 29, 2006 at 11:18:48PM +0200, Amara Graps wrote: >>> >>> >>>> There should be massive demonstrations over this. Why isn't there?! >>>> >> ... >> >>> Those who don't care about impeaching a criminal don't care >>> about their country turned into a dictatorship... >>> >> My understanding is that it was congress that did this, not the >> executive >> branch. I would interpret it as empty electioneering: the >> congressmonsters >> do not want to appear soft on terrorism right before the election. >> Legislative branch grandstanding is done all the time, but it is >> still >> meaningless. What counts is if the supreme court upholds it. I >> predict >> that the court will knock it down without a second thought. >> >> Regarding massive demonstrations, we have congressional elections >> in a few >> weeks. We will see what happens there. >> >> spike >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> >> >> > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Sun Oct 1 12:51:45 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 08:51:45 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20060930234153.0224e1c0@satx.rr.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20060930154125.044a41d0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20060930234153.0224e1c0@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: > At 12:01 AM 10/1/2006 -0400, Keith H. wrote: > > I should have thought it's obvious: so they could do things with > their lives in addition to producing and looking after one child > after another after another... K-selection. Fewer offspring, more resources invested in those. I suspect as things like vaccinations, emergency room care, etc. increased the probability of children surviving women may have chosen to invest more resources in individual children. As fewer children were needed for harvesting, feeding the chickens, milking the cows, etc. the need for slave labor diminished. College is an expensive proposition, better to save so a few can go rather than none at all. It is important to keep in mind that the decline in children per family is not a Irish, Spanish, or even European or U.S. phenomena. It has taken place in Russia and Japan such an extent that the governments are providing large subsidies to have children. In both of those cases the economic/K-selection arguments appear to be playing a very large role. In Russia one cannot afford to raise more than one or two children. In Japan I believe there is a high priority placed on the mother functioning as a teacher/tutor over a much longer period (something that would be restricted by time requirements of caring for younger children). It would be interesting to speculate whether those principles would hold and as lifespans are extended one might see parents having more children but spaced over ten or fifteen year intervals rather than two or three. On 10/1/06, Damien Broderick wrote: What's more interesting, in the context of this thread, is how > Catholics raised in these two famously pious nations (Ireland and > Spain) managed to find workarounds to the clamoring condemnation of > birth control from their supposedly virginal prelates, not to mention > the urgings of their baby-mad genes. > Indeed. I suspect there would be interesting lessons here as to when local cultural practicality (perhaps even rational thought?!?) trumps indoctrinated meme sets (aka belief systems). Understanding this might give one hope that irrational belief systems are not unstoppable. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at comcast.net Sun Oct 1 14:12:38 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 07:12:38 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <9672F35A-2683-4ECC-86A8-218C2C0F0FAF@mac.com> Message-ID: <200610011413.k91ED0uD021532@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Samantha? Atkins ... > > ... And again the people should > never stand for a Congress that would pass such an affront in the > first place... Roger that. I will be voting against Feinstein and Honda, then at my earliest opportunity voting against Boxer. spike From pharos at gmail.com Sun Oct 1 14:17:31 2006 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 15:17:31 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again Resend 2 In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20060930234518.04515d70@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20060930154125.044a41d0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20060930234518.04515d70@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: On 10/1/06, Keith Henson wrote: > A similar terror campaign that burned out in roughly the same time frame is > the Basque. Anyone have income and birth rate data for that group? While > I think birth rate was the substantial factor, oil income for the UK which > increased the income per capita, could have also contributed to the general > brightening of future prospects and (according to the model) that ration is > the key to terror or war support. > > I agree, the causal arrow in the model goes the other way, the falling > birth rate increased income per capita, which made the future seem > brighter, which reduced the support for wars and related such as terrorism > > True. But the IRA supporters in the time frame when they were most active > were (in theory) looking at a bleak future, more so than other places in > the UK or other European states. As you mention discrimination is a big > factor in feeling you have a bleak future. > > I am sure they are. But the model predicts that as long as the future > prospects are good, the IRA or some other terrorist organization will not > get popular support. > That is why I am saying that NI is a bad example for you to use. The NI troubles were not a 'war' and killed a tiny percentage of the population. The same falling birth rates applied in many places where there were no 'troubles'. So NI is not an example that supports your theory that nations go into 'war' mode and fight until they have killed sufficient people that the survivors can live better. Even though the war itself will destroy resources that support people. Think 'scorched earth'. Terrorism never kills in sufficient numbers to fit into your theory. I don't think you really want to weaken your claim to say that sometimes small groups of people start killing when they feel a bit miserable and stop killing when they cheer up. But that seems to be the direction you are heading. That claim is correct, of course, but not of great significance. BillK From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Sun Oct 1 15:15:44 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 11:15:44 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Uses of Religion In-Reply-To: <200609301633.k8UGXJ2G008697@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20060930004433.021ed6b0@satx.rr.com> <200609301633.k8UGXJ2G008697@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: On 9/30/06, spike wrote: > > The duller, gullible and acquiescent win that race by many furlongs. > Reasoning: in modern times we speak almost constantly of wars. But if we > actually break down the numbers of those slain, 3000 American soldiers in > the past 3 years, perhaps half as many Europeans, 20 or so a day in > suicide bombings and related violence in the middle east. Spike, your numbers are slightly off. Read, the URL Eliezer posted on "Iraq: the world's first Suicide State" (quite interesting). At ~3,000/month its more like 100 a day and works out to ~35,000/year and I suspect those numbers don't include the non-public deaths carried out by militias or gangs. However, I do agree that the impact on the U.S., Europe (or Japan, S. Korea, Taiwan, India or China) is relatively small in the grand scheme of things. I shake my head at the $500 billion [1] spent as a result of the deaths of ~3000 people in comparison to the 2.478 million people per year who could be saved if one really got serious about lifespan extension [2]. Particularly when the estimate I did for developing a protein based system to jump start molecular nanotechnology came out at $1+ trillion and I set the idea aside as being an "unreasonable to hope for" expenditure in our current reality [3]. Robert 1. This is equal to ~10 years of NIH expenditures on medical research. 2. Presumably the $500 billion is rationalized on the basis of it being better to sacrifice ~3000 people who are getting paid to be in "harm's way" "over there" than to have thousands (or tens of thousands) of people "over here" die who would like to continue living their fantasy that they are out of "harm's way". 3. The implicit assumption here is that if you demonstrate real molecular assembly (mechanosynthesis) as being feasible, then the leap from molecular nanoassembly to actual nanorobots capable of completely correcting or augmenting ones genetic code to eliminate natural causes of death becomes much smaller. Mind you I and some others on the list can make that "leap", but the large majority of people cannot. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Oct 1 15:47:12 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 08:47:12 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> Message-ID: <049b01c6e571$16dd39e0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Joseph wrote > Not an unconstitutional suspension of rights of American citizens > (nothing in the article originally referenced supports the notion that > ordinary Americans can be detained under this bill as far as I can tell). And then someone flatly contradicted this. (And before Joseph wrote someone flatly contradicted this. )Sounds like a pretty clear-cut question to me. Would someone please admit that they were incorrect, and that either the bill does or does not apply to American citizens? If it *does* apply to American citizens also, then what about American citizens serving overseas in enemy organizations? (E.g. the Taliban or Al Queda.) When things get grim enough again---and they will---I certainly won't have any problem with the latter. Thanks, Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Oct 1 15:52:29 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 08:52:29 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Why "Commandments" References: Message-ID: <04b201c6e571$ee1c8730$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Jef writes > What an improvement it would be if we changed our focus from ends > (what we think our future selves would want) to instead focus on > increasingly effective principles of problem-solving (the problem > being how best to promote our values into the future) trusting that > the outcome, whatever the particulars, is the best we could have > done at that point. Hear, hear. Spoken like a true Hayekian. The problem in so many cases---and none so paramount as social "engineering"---is that we cannot be sure of what ends will actually obtain, and so means can rarely justify ends. Lee From jonkc at att.net Sun Oct 1 15:41:20 2006 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 11:41:20 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again (resend 2) References: <5.1.0.14.0.20060930154103.045485a8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <00c801c6e570$42501440$22084e0c@MyComputer> "Keith Henson" > It is useless to denounce religion I do not believe it is useless to denounce evil, in fact I believe it is rather despicable not to. > and it is *not* the root cause of human misery. I would never be so foolish as to say religion is the cause of all human misery, but I would say that with the exception of death itself religion has caused more misery than any other single thing. > Human reproduction in excess of what the ecosystem/economy can support > *is* the cause of misery. Human reproduction has never been in a higher gear than it is right now, so if you were right we would expect the average standard of living to be lower than its ever been. However the exact opposite is true, human beings have never had it so good. Despite what the tree huggers say the ecosystem/economy is doing quite well thank you very much. >Easter Island was a case where war a few generations earlier would have >been much better. You don't need anything as drastic as war. If the Easter Islander's religion hadn't caused them to use all their time energy recourses and imagination making all those incredibly stupid statues they would have been one hell of a lot better off. > It is truly bizarre, but I make the case that there are times when the > interest of a person and the interest of their genes diverge. I don't think it's bizarre to say that the genes interests and the individual's are not identical, I think it's a keen grasp of the obvious. After all, if it were not true the condom would never have been invented. >what situations in the stone age made those who could be infested with >religion more likely to survive (in the gene centered inclusive fitness >sense) than those who were not? I'm not at all sure that the religious meme got started because it conveyed some survival advantage, rather it may just be the result of being mortal and being intelligent. Contemplating death, especially your own death, is unpleasant. So people try to think of ways to fool themselves to reduce that unpleasantness (maybe death isn't really the end). Given that the religious meme is likely to be present, at least to some degree, in any population, an individual who knows how to exploit that meme (God speaks through me!) would have a huge reproductive advantage. And it's still true, the religious cult leader Warren Jeffs who was just arrested had 80 wives and 250 children. John K Clark From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Oct 1 15:59:44 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 08:59:44 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again References: <5.1.0.14.0.20060930154125.044a41d0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com><7.0.1.0.2.20060930234153.0224e1c0@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <04bd01c6e572$c63e6c50$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Robert writes > At 12:01 AM 10/1/2006 -0400, Keith H. wrote: > I should have thought it's obvious: so they could do things with > their lives in addition to producing and looking after one child > after another after another... No, 'twas Damien who spake thus. Robert continues > [The explanation is] K-selection. Fewer offspring, more resources > invested in those. > I suspect as things like vaccinations, emergency room care, etc. > increased the probability of children surviving women may have > chosen to invest more resources in individual children. As fewer > children were needed for harvesting, feeding the chickens, milking > the cows, etc. the need for slave labor diminished. College is an > expensive proposition, better to save so a few can go rather than > none at all. Right---that supplied the motive, and contraception provided the means. > It is important to keep in mind that the decline in children per family > is not a Irish, Spanish, or even European or U.S. phenomena... It's taken place wherever the average IQ is near 100 or over. Damien had gone on > > Indeed. I suspect there would be interesting lessons here as > > to when local cultural practicality (perhaps even rational thought?!?) > > trumps indoctrinated meme sets (aka belief systems). Understanding > > this might give one hope that irrational belief systems are not unstoppable. Evil triumphs when good men do nothing. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Oct 1 16:20:32 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 09:20:32 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Uses of Religion References: <7.0.1.0.2.20060930004433.021ed6b0@satx.rr.com><200609301633.k8UGXJ2G008697@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <04c301c6e575$b7b62620$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Robert writes > Read the URL Eliezer posted on " Iraq: the world's first Suicide State" (quite interesting). > At ~3,000/month its more like 100 a day and works out to ~35,000/year I agree---it's an interesting link: Eliezer had written: "frustration - ideology = staged images of chaos for media" http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/1700/ "Iraq: the world's first Suicide State" But Robert's figure seems correct also, although that's about what it was before Iraq was invaded: "Iraq, a country approximately the size of California... suffered more than a million violent deaths under Saddam Hussein's regime. That would average out at about 50,000 deaths a year in a population of 25 million before the Americans got involved. In the two years since the Americans have been fighting in Iraq, 13,650 Iraqis, have been killed, many of them by terrorist attacks by their own countrymen. Others were by military action. That averages out at 6, 825 deaths per year in a population of 25 million." But that was written in early 2005 http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/mostert/050117. Earlier I had heard that Saddam and his thugs murdered about 30,000 Iraqis a year. So what's the difference between Saddam killing them and Iraqi's killing each other? There are many. But probably the most important is indeed media related: It simply didn't matter *how* many people in Iraq were murdered each year because it wasn't in our face every night. ln exactly the same way that it simply doesn't matter *how* many people die in Sudan. The important thing in the West---and now to the rest of the world---is, for the billion or so bystanders, whether the nightly news is painful or merely interesting. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Oct 1 16:29:26 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 09:29:26 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again (resend 2) References: <5.1.0.14.0.20060930154103.045485a8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <00c801c6e570$42501440$22084e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <04c401c6e576$fac00e30$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> John Clark writes > I would never be so foolish as to say religion is the cause of all human > misery, but I would say that with the exception of death itself religion has > caused more misery than any other single thing. But how do you know? How do you know what history would have been like in the absense of religion? So far as *I* know, we don't have a lot of data. The 20th century did seem to indicate that the fervently anti-religious socialist regimes of the Soviet Union and Red Chinese killed people at at least the same rate if not much greater. My own suspicion is that tribal conflict (which evolves to wars when the tribes are big enough) is an ESS under primitive enough conditions, i.e. pre 19th century technology and pre 19th century democracy. Take for example the countless combative American Indian tribes whose wars were woven into their cultures, religion or no. And that there are plenty of other interesting mechanisms, as Joe and Mao discovered, for keeping people in line in modern big-government states that have nothing to do with religion, but which are very expensive in terms of human misery. Lee From thespike at satx.rr.com Sun Oct 1 16:32:51 2006 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2006 11:32:51 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again In-Reply-To: <04bd01c6e572$c63e6c50$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20060930154125.044a41d0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20060930234153.0224e1c0@satx.rr.com> <04bd01c6e572$c63e6c50$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20061001113135.02245710@satx.rr.com> At 08:59 AM 10/1/2006 -0700, Lee wrote: >Damien had gone on > > > > Indeed. I suspect there would be interesting lessons here as > > > to when local cultural practicality (perhaps even rational thought?!?) > > > trumps indoctrinated meme sets (aka belief systems). Understanding > > > this might give one hope that irrational belief systems are not > unstoppable. No, 'twas Robert who spake thus. From fauxever at sprynet.com Sun Oct 1 16:52:35 2006 From: fauxever at sprynet.com (Olga Bourlin) Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 09:52:35 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Uses of Religion References: <7.0.1.0.2.20060930004433.021ed6b0@satx.rr.com><200609301633.k8UGXJ2G008697@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <04c301c6e575$b7b62620$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <008f01c6e57a$00f84800$6600a8c0@brainiac> From: "Lee Corbin" Sent: Sunday, October 01, 2006 9:20 AM > >> So what's the difference between Saddam killing them and Iraqi's killing >> each other? >There are many. But probably the most important is indeed media related[:] IMO one of the crucial differences is that the blood used to be mainly on Saddam's hands. Now it is on George Bush's hands (and he's added many sons and daughters of Westerners to the pile). Another important difference is that the reputation of the USA has sunk to a very low level (Abu Ghraib: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_prison) Guantanamo: http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1371609,00.html I needn't belabor the slide we've taken down to the "bad guys'" level, as well as the downslide our democrary is taking. > It simply didn't matter *how* many people in Iraq were murdered each year > because it wasn't in our face every night. ln exactly the same way that > it simply doesn't matter *how* many people die in Sudan. The important > thing in the West---and now to the rest of the world---is, for the billion > or so bystanders, whether the nightly news is painful or merely > interesting. No. It mattered then and it matters now. Olga From andrew at ceruleansystems.com Sun Oct 1 17:23:52 2006 From: andrew at ceruleansystems.com (J. Andrew Rogers) Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 10:23:52 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <9672F35A-2683-4ECC-86A8-218C2C0F0FAF@mac.com> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <9672F35A-2683-4ECC-86A8-218C2C0F0FAF@mac.com> Message-ID: <7822F317-5D58-4D8D-B9F0-44CB1598D771@ceruleansystems.com> On Oct 1, 2006, at 12:25 AM, Samantha Atkins wrote: > On Sep 30, 2006, at 2:26 PM, spike wrote: >> My understanding is that it was congress that did this, not the >> executive branch. > > What, you missed that the executive has been pushing hard for this? > Every administration attempts to get Congress to play ball with its > wishes. The executive branch lobbies, but they often only get their way with Congress when interests intersect and particularly in the House. The wishes of the executive branch have been flatly ignored by Congress enough times even when the wishes made good sense that I would assert there is plenty of blame to go around for all. > Sorry but these laws will remain long after the election even if they > are eventually successfully challenged. And this is hardly the > point. The point is that so-called public servants sworn to uphold > the Constitution and supposedly in office to protect the rights of the > people are violating that oath and putting the people in far more > jeopardy than we ever faced from the extremely unlikely scenario of > dying at the hands of a terrorist. The idea that it is okay to pass obviously unconstitutional laws and let the Supreme Court clean up later is one of the more evil and stupid things Congress does. It amounts to taking a second pull on the trigger when playing Russian roulette -- it does not improve the odds of a good outcome. > Guess again. The court is being loaded. I guess it depends on what you mean by "loaded". There were plenty of real clowns on the SCOTUS (and still are) before the current appointments routinely making egregiously poorly reasoned decisions, and frankly the current appointments do not seem to be any worse and in some ways apparently better. I am open to revising that opinion when one of them makes a flagrantly stupid or venal decision. The only person on SCOTUS that seems to have a consistently reasonable perspective that reflects constitutional history (even when I disagree with the outcome in some fashion) is Clarence Thomas, but that may be nothing but a reflection of his personality and temperament rather than a conscious effort to do the job correctly. J. Andrew Rogers From andrew at ceruleansystems.com Sun Oct 1 17:55:54 2006 From: andrew at ceruleansystems.com (J. Andrew Rogers) Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 10:55:54 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> Message-ID: <8DB17411-1546-4575-94DE-A75EA8275413@ceruleansystems.com> On Oct 1, 2006, at 1:59 AM, Samantha Atkins wrote: > Actually this bill allows anyone at all, including you and I, to be > declared an "enemy combatant" by government fiat and many of our > rights and protections removed simply on that basis. This is > leaving the barn door wide open to unspeakable abuse. It is more a new variation on the same theme. The term "enemy combatant" just gets added to a long list of other denotations and connotations that the government can apply to a person on a flimsy and/or unreasonable basis that leaves them pretty much permanently hosed. Very little about this is new in the abstract sense, they are just casting a somewhat wider net. I have limited sympathy for those who just now are having their Martin Niem?ller moment. There is very little that is new here, and many of the same people who are up in arms now tacitly supported the building of the groundwork for decades. > How about when the election of 2004 was quite possibly stolen? Oh puh-lease, tinfoil claptrap mostly argued from specious innuendo. Let's not go down this path. > Sheesh. All the Jihadists and Islamists (whatever that is) in the > world haven't a tiny part of the power required to do any such > thing. But rampant fear-mongering plus our own heavy increasing > influence of religion based politics may destroy our way of life. Very true. The Islamic Hordes(tm) were never going to be anything but a major nuisance that arguably could have been managed much more inexpensively (on many levels) than any attempt at eradication. J. Andrew Rogers From brentn at freeshell.org Sun Oct 1 20:18:13 2006 From: brentn at freeshell.org (Brent Neal) Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 16:18:13 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <049b01c6e571$16dd39e0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> <049b01c6e571$16dd39e0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On Oct 1, 2006, at 11:47, Lee Corbin wrote: > And then someone flatly contradicted this. (And before Joseph wrote > someone flatly contradicted this. )Sounds like a pretty clear-cut > question > to me. Would someone please admit that they were incorrect, and that > either the bill does or does not apply to American citizens? That's the beauty of the bill in terms of trying to stealth pass the Bill of Rights: it doesn't apply to American citizens. Unless they've been declared unlawful enemy combatants by the President or his designees, a status that you can not appeal and which has no judicial review. Fabulous. :P You can dig this up on the internet in a quite a few places, including the full text of the bill. Google turned up this story as first in the list: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6167856 Please note, before making snide comments about NPR's coverage, that a -White House lawyer- flat out says that the President intends to use this against American citizens. Of course, the appropriate weasel words about "higher standards" are in there (which probably means 'more secrecy'), but the statement is there: the administration is prepared to violate the Constitution. I've given up hoping for impeachment. Most of our Congresscritters are too corrupt and too stupid. At this point, I can only hope that some civic minded intern will give him a blowjob so we can get rid of him. :) B -- Brent Neal Geek of all Trades http://brentn.freeshell.org "Specialization is for insects" -- Robert A. Heinlein From jonkc at att.net Sun Oct 1 20:25:42 2006 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 16:25:42 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again. References: <5.1.0.14.0.20060930154103.045485a8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com><00c801c6e570$42501440$22084e0c@MyComputer> <04c401c6e576$fac00e30$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <002801c6e598$088e21c0$07094e0c@MyComputer> "Lee Corbin" > How do you know what history would have been like in the absense of religion? It rained an hour ago and now the street is wet. I deduce that if it hadn't rained the street wouldn't be wet. True I can't go back in time one hour, stop it from raining, and then observe the results; but I still think my deduction is entirely reasonable. In a similar way I think it is entirely reasonable to deduce that without religion History would be less bloody. Much less bloody. > So far as *I* know, we don't have a lot of data. Unfortunately we have an avalanche of data, as terrifying as it is depressing. > The 20th century did seem to indicate that the fervently anti-religious > socialist regimes of the Soviet Union and Red Chinese killed people > at at least the same rate if not much greater. A good point I readily concede. But I never said religion was the root of ALL evil. I would estimate that in general about 2/3 of all mortal combat is religious based. Less than that in the 20th century in Europe because Europe is the one place on Earth where nobody takes religion very seriously anymore. I think people just got tired of killing each other over about whether you should open an egg at the big end or the small. Let us hope that happy state of affairs is contagious. John K Clark From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Sun Oct 1 21:35:06 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 17:35:06 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Uses of Religion In-Reply-To: <008f01c6e57a$00f84800$6600a8c0@brainiac> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20060930004433.021ed6b0@satx.rr.com> <200609301633.k8UGXJ2G008697@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <04c301c6e575$b7b62620$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <008f01c6e57a$00f84800$6600a8c0@brainiac> Message-ID: On 10/1/06, Olga Bourlin wrote: > > > The important thing in the West---and now to the rest of the world---is, > > for the billion or so bystanders, whether the nightly news is painful or > > merely interesting. > > No. It mattered then and it matters now. If it really did matter then you would see much more on the nightly news regarding the person in the U.S. that dies every 12 seconds (4.7 a minute, 6700 a day) due to so called natural causes [1]. Those guilty of causing death due to acts of commission and those causing deaths due to acts of omission are only two letters apart. Robert 1. They remain "natural" because we haven't chosen yet to really apply ourselves to solving them. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From transhumanist at goldenfuture.net Sun Oct 1 21:55:17 2006 From: transhumanist at goldenfuture.net (Joseph Bloch) Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2006 17:55:17 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> Message-ID: <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> Samantha Atkins wrote: >> Talk to me about true tyranny when George W. Bush is still in the >> White House on January 21st, 2009. Until then, I see nothing more >> than a possibly over-zealous (and only possibly so), but still >> well-intentioned, attept to protect the United States from an enemy >> which is determined to eradicate our way of life and in the process >> stifle forever the Transhumanist dream, if only > > > How about when the election of 2004 was quite possibly stolen? Bush ossibly over-zealous but nothing more? I am rendered speechless. We are destroying our own way of life with our apparent willingness to dismantle our own freedom and protections in order to stop a few nutcase terrorist groups. If you care about preserving our way of life, as I do, then you must be on guard against this clear danger also. > Don't be ridiculous. Stolen elections? Dismantling freedoms? You sound like the worst posters on dailykos... >> incidentally as a part of its attempt to drag the world back to the >> 13th Century. >> > > Sheesh. All the Jihadists and Islamists (whatever that is) in the world haven't a tiny part of the power required to do any such thing. But rampant fear-mongering plus our own heavy increasing influence of religion based politics may destroy our way of life. I am appalled at your ignorance as to what an Islamist is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamism will provide a starting point. http://www.jihadwatch.org will yield a wealth of further information. And as far as their having no power to attain their ends, I direct your attention to their successful usurpation of a sovereign nation (Afghanistan), and their ongoing attempts to repeat that feat in other nations (Afghanistan again, Iraq, Somalia, Indonesia, Pakistan, et al). If they can take over one nation, and have a credible shot at taking over others, then they are a threat that must be addressed. And if you don't think Iran's ongoing attempts to secure the ability to produce nuclear weapons are part of this threat, then I must conclude that you are simply so blinded by your partisanship that you will not see the threat until you are faced with a law requiring the burqa in California (if then). > >> The goal of the Islamists; a global Caliphate which places all of >> humanity under strict Islamic law, is a scenario which must be >> avoided at all costs. >> > > > What a silly fantasy this is. Besides, in this most powerful nation on earth there are far more in positions of great power who want all to live under Old Testament law. > I hope, I truly hope, that you wake up from your Republican-hating ways to realize that this nation really does face an external threat of hitherto-unseen proportions. It's not about people in power in the U.S. And, for the record, I am well aware of, and highly concerned about, the Dominionist movement, but I daresay that a handful of well-connected Dominionists don't quite rise to the level of threat posted by millions of Islamists inspired by their ridiculous faith (as all faiths are ridiculous) to impose their vision of their faith on every single human being on this planet by deadly force, and being willing to kill themselves to advance that goal. Unless I have somehow missed the hordes of Baptist suicide bombers publically calling for the use of nuclear weapons against Democrats... Joseph From fauxever at sprynet.com Sun Oct 1 23:25:20 2006 From: fauxever at sprynet.com (Olga Bourlin) Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 16:25:20 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Uses of Religion References: <7.0.1.0.2.20060930004433.021ed6b0@satx.rr.com><200609301633.k8UGXJ2G008697@andromeda.ziaspace.com><04c301c6e575$b7b62620$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677><008f01c6e57a$00f84800$6600a8c0@brainiac> Message-ID: <001901c6e5b0$dd5221f0$6600a8c0@brainiac> From: Robert Bradbury Sent: Sunday, October 01, 2006 2:35 PM >On 10/1/06, Olga Bourlin wrote: > > > The important thing in the West---and now to the rest of the world---is, for the billion or so bystanders, whether the nightly news is painful or merely interesting. >> No. It mattered then and it matters now. > If it really did matter then you would see much more on the nightly news regarding the person in the U.S. that dies every 12 seconds ( 4.7 a minute, 6700 a day) due to so called natural causes [1]. [1. They remain "natural" because we haven't chosen yet to really apply ourselves to solving them.] > Those guilty of causing death due to acts of commission and those causing deaths due to acts of omission are only two letters apart. So, do you mean there is no such thing as murder? Olga I understand what you mean by "natural" death - and there are people working on -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From moulton at moulton.com Mon Oct 2 02:08:37 2006 From: moulton at moulton.com (Fred C. Moulton) Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2006 19:08:37 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Oct 30 - Richard Dawkins In conversation with Roy Eisenhardt Message-ID: <1159754917.4895.275.camel@localhost.localdomain> I have already bought my ticket and it appears to be more that half sold so if people want to attend they should get their tickets ASAP. Richard Dawkins - 10/30/2006, 8:00 pm Special Event Richard Dawkins In conversation with Roy Eisenhardt Monday, October 30, 2006 at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, CA. I expect that the discussion will focus on The God Delusion which is the most recent book by Richard Dawkins. The talk is part of the City Arts http://www.cityarts.net/ program. I have just received a copy of The God Delusion and have read the first chapter. I expect the arguments which Dawkins makes about the nature of religion and for atheism will be in general familiar to every one on this list. However in the first chapter I think Dawkins does a really good job of discussing the term "religion" and how it is often misused. Also Dawkins does an excellent job of explaining Einstein's use of the term and how many theists misquote or selectively quote Einstein in an effort to make him appear to be a theist. If you can not make the event in San Francisco then you might be able to hear a rebroadcast on radio http://www.cityarts.net/radio.html. Dawkins will also be at Keplers in Menlo Park on Oct 29 see: http://www.keplers.com/?sec=programs-events&subsec=calendar Fred From thespike at satx.rr.com Mon Oct 2 02:27:15 2006 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2006 21:27:15 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again In-Reply-To: <451EC22D.2000304@pobox.com> References: <00ea01c6e3ee$d65b7f40$290a4e0c@MyComputer> <20060929211452.39597.qmail@web60514.mail.yahoo.com> <03ca01c6e4a3$ed3c1de0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <451EC22D.2000304@pobox.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20061001212625.02282fd8@satx.rr.com> At 12:14 PM 9/30/2006 -0700, Eliezer wrote: >+1 insightful: >http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/1700/ >"Iraq: the world's first Suicide State" A learned friend writes: Damien Broderick From hkhenson at rogers.com Mon Oct 2 02:37:02 2006 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2006 22:37:02 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again Resend 2 In-Reply-To: References: <5.1.0.14.0.20060930234518.04515d70@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20060930154125.044a41d0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20060930234518.04515d70@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20061001222218.04549908@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 03:17 PM 10/1/2006 +0100, you wrote: > > > > I am sure they are. But the model predicts that as long as the future > > prospects are good, the IRA or some other terrorist organization will not > > get popular support. > > >That is why I am saying that NI is a bad example for you to use. The >NI troubles were not a 'war' and killed a tiny percentage of the >population. Agreed, but I don't distinguish between war, terror, riots and other such social disruptions. >The same falling birth rates applied in many places where >there were no 'troubles'. The causal arrow is that the falling birth rates and economic growth contributed to a rising income per capita and *that's* what pulled the motivation. Obviously if there are no terror groups, then rising income per capita isn't going to shut off support for them. >So NI is not an example that supports your theory that nations go into >'war' mode and fight until they have killed sufficient people that the >survivors can live better The theory is not at all about nations and modern wars. The theory is about human psychological traits that evolved during the long time that human ancestors lived in hunter-gatherer groups. It happens that those traits still exist in humans and contribute causally to modern wars and related social disruptions. >. Even though the war itself will destroy >resources that support people. Think 'scorched earth'. Terrorism never >kills in sufficient numbers to fit into your theory. Agree on all your points. See the corn farmer example in the EP, Memes and the origin of war paper for an example of how war can be ill adapted to societies more advanced than hunter gathers. >I don't think you really want to weaken your claim to say that >sometimes small groups of people start killing when they feel a bit >miserable and stop killing when they cheer up. But that seems to be >the direction you are heading. That claim is correct, of course, but >not of great significance. It seems to me that a predictive theory of when and where wars are likely to start would be of considerable significance. If for no other reason than being able to get out of the way. Keith Henson From sentience at pobox.com Mon Oct 2 02:45:55 2006 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2006 19:45:55 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20061001212625.02282fd8@satx.rr.com> References: <00ea01c6e3ee$d65b7f40$290a4e0c@MyComputer> <20060929211452.39597.qmail@web60514.mail.yahoo.com> <03ca01c6e4a3$ed3c1de0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <451EC22D.2000304@pobox.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20061001212625.02282fd8@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <45207D63.5070005@pobox.com> Damien Broderick wrote: > At 12:14 PM 9/30/2006 -0700, Eliezer wrote: > >>+1 insightful: >>http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/1700/ >>"Iraq: the world's first Suicide State" > > A learned friend writes: > > or colonizers, to restore the historical dominance of one ethnic or > religious group or to establish a new structure of dominance, or to impose a > particular set of religious rules--goals which are held by the various > indigenous factions who are killing people in Iraq--is hardly "fighting for > nothing in particular." There isn't one manifesto that fits everybody > toting a gun or a bomb--there are a number of contending factions--but the > fact that it can't all be summed up easily in this guy's PowerPoint > presentation doesn't make it "aimless." Different participants have > different aims. This is far from unusual--consider the various factions > involved in the South African resistance.> Fair enough. - E -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From hkhenson at rogers.com Mon Oct 2 03:08:56 2006 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2006 23:08:56 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again (resend 2) In-Reply-To: <00c801c6e570$42501440$22084e0c@MyComputer> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20060930154103.045485a8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20061001224012.04548038@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 11:41 AM 10/1/2006 -0400, you wrote: >"Keith Henson" > > > It is useless to denounce religion > >I do not believe it is useless to denounce evil, in fact I believe it is >rather despicable not to. It is like denouncing a fever. Xenophobic memes simple arise when they are called for by the situation. Think Pol Pot's version of communism, Nazi memes, Rwanda. > > and it is *not* the root cause of human misery. > >I would never be so foolish as to say religion is the cause of all human >misery, but I would say that with the exception of death itself religion has >caused more misery than any other single thing. It is just distracting to denounce something which is caused by something else. You are never going to understand what is the correct action to take that way. > > Human reproduction in excess of what the ecosystem/economy can support > > *is* the cause of misery. > >Human reproduction has never been in a higher gear than it is right now, so >if you were right we would expect the average standard of living to be lower >than its ever been. However the exact opposite is true, human beings have >never had it so good. You are dead wrong about human reproduction. Over the entire developed populations it is at near replacement rates. But read what I said, "in excess of what the ecosystem/economy can support." >Despite what the tree huggers say the >ecosystem/economy is doing quite well thank you very much. I have no problem with a solar system population of trillions of people, in fact, I think it would be a good idea. The earth could support the current and even the projected population with considerable advances in technology. But if you look at the places where the problems come from they are parts of the world with high birth rates and stagnant economies. > >Easter Island was a case where war a few generations earlier would have > >been much better. > >You don't need anything as drastic as war. If the Easter Islander's religion >hadn't caused them to use all their time energy recourses and imagination >making all those incredibly stupid statues they would have been one hell >of a lot better off. Well, please tell me what they could have done with the "time energy resources and imagination"? I have played this game a number of times and even with full scale modern knowledge I don't see how Easter Island would have played out any better. > > It is truly bizarre, but I make the case that there are times when the > > interest of a person and the interest of their genes diverge. > >I don't think it's bizarre to say that the genes interests and the >individual's are not identical, I think it's a keen grasp of the obvious. >After all, if it were not true the condom would never have been invented. A more spectacular example was that stand of the Spartans at Thermopylae. > >what situations in the stone age made those who could be infested with > >religion more likely to survive (in the gene centered inclusive fitness > >sense) than those who were not? > >I'm not at all sure that the religious meme got started because it conveyed >some survival advantage, rather it may just be the result of being mortal >and being intelligent. The psychological trait of being able to be "captured" by a religious class meme has to be either something that was directly selected or a side effect of something what was directly selected. That's your choice in EP theory. >Contemplating death, especially your own death, is >unpleasant. So people try to think of ways to fool themselves to reduce that >unpleasantness (maybe death isn't really the end). Given that the religious >meme is likely to be present, at least to some degree, in any population, an >individual who knows how to exploit that meme (God speaks through me!) >would have a huge reproductive advantage. And it's still true, the religious >cult leader Warren Jeffs who was just arrested had 80 wives and 250 >children. Interesting speculation backed up by some data is that descendents of the early Mormons are more susceptible than the rest of the population to cult class memes. What you would expect with a big genetic contribution. Keith Henson From sjatkins at mac.com Mon Oct 2 04:51:30 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2006 21:51:30 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> Message-ID: <45209AD2.2080002@mac.com> Joseph Bloch wrote: > Samantha Atkins wrote: > > >>> Talk to me about true tyranny when George W. Bush is still in the >>> White House on January 21st, 2009. Until then, I see nothing more >>> than a possibly over-zealous (and only possibly so), but still >>> well-intentioned, attept to protect the United States from an enemy >>> which is determined to eradicate our way of life and in the process >>> stifle forever the Transhumanist dream, if only >>> >> How about when the election of 2004 was quite possibly stolen? Bush ossibly over-zealous but nothing more? I am rendered speechless. We are destroying our own way of life with our apparent willingness to dismantle our own freedom and protections in order to stop a few nutcase terrorist groups. If you care about preserving our way of life, as I do, then you must be on guard against this clear danger also. >> >> > > Don't be ridiculous. Stolen elections? Dismantling freedoms? You sound > like the worst posters on dailykos... > > > Sigh. Now who is ignorant? >>> incidentally as a part of its attempt to drag the world back to the >>> 13th Century. >>> >>> >> Sheesh. All the Jihadists and Islamists (whatever that is) in the world haven't a tiny part of the power required to do any such thing. But rampant fear-mongering plus our own heavy increasing influence of religion based politics may destroy our way of life. >> > > > I am appalled at your ignorance as to what an Islamist is. > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamism will provide a starting point. > http://www.jihadwatch.org will yield a wealth of further information. > I am not ignorant at all. Just bemused about "Islamists" being the demons in every woodshed that "commies" once were. I am not at all bemused or amused by this country destroying itself through fear-mongering. I am not amused by an administration that lies shamelessly to the people, spends us to oblivion in unending war and seems bent on removing freedoms from the people and any and all checks on its power. I am not amused it takes it upon itself to largely ignore science, teach abstinence only as "sex education" and sexually transmitted disease prevention and nearly stops dead what is arguably the most important medical innovation of our generation. It does not matter that they are Republicans. I have little use for either of the major parties. It does matter to me and matter very much that they are a real danger to what I hold dear. > And as far as their having no power to attain their ends, I direct your > attention to their successful usurpation of a sovereign nation > (Afghanistan), and their ongoing attempts to repeat that feat in other > nations (Afghanistan again, Iraq, Somalia, Indonesia, Pakistan, et al). > If they can take over one nation, and have a credible shot at taking > over others, then they are a threat that must be addressed. And if you > don't think Iran's ongoing attempts to secure the ability to produce > nuclear weapons are part of this threat, then I must conclude that you > are simply so blinded by your partisanship that you will not see the > threat until you are faced with a law requiring the burqa in California > (if then). > > Afghanistan? I am quaking in my tennies. One of the poorest, most miserable and strife-torn nations on earth. Iran by all respected opinions can not produce its own nukes in less than 5-10 years ever if the entire world simply paid no attention, which ain't going to happen. If that had them why would they be more likely to use them than Pakistan who already has them? How would they manage to bring the world to its knees in front of Allah even if they had a few nukes and decent delivery systems? Are you using this to excuse what is happening in the most powerful country on earth and arguably the most important for freedom and continuing technological advance? >>> The goal of the Islamists; a global Caliphate which places all of >>> humanity under strict Islamic law, is a scenario which must be >>> avoided at all costs. >>> >>> >> What a silly fantasy this is. Besides, in this most powerful nation on earth there are far more in positions of great power who want all to live under Old Testament law. >> >> > > > I hope, I truly hope, that you wake up from your Republican-hating ways > to realize that this nation really does face an external threat of > hitherto-unseen proportions. The threat of hitherto-unseen proportions is much nearer than you think. It is a common tactic in a country headed away from freedom to focus all attention on an external enemy. If the enemy is elusive, everywhere and nowhere and can never really be defeated then all the better for the smokescreen behind which unanswerable nearly unstoppable power over its own people amasses. I hope that you and others who think likewise wake up before it is far too late. > It's not about people in power in the U.S. > And, for the record, I am well aware of, and highly concerned about, the > Dominionist movement, but I daresay that a handful of well-connected > Dominionists don't quite rise to the level of threat posted by millions > of Islamists inspired by their ridiculous faith (as all faiths are > ridiculous) to impose their vision of their faith on every single human > being on this planet by deadly force, and being willing to kill > themselves to advance that goal. > That handful has it hands on real power that those millions cannot touch. They are also far more than a handful. - s Do you really believe there is nothing about the people in power in the US to worry about? Really? Those millions of Islamists don't have a decent armed forces among them and they don't run this country. So I don't consider them the most likely threat vector to what I care about. > Unless I have somehow missed the hordes of Baptist suicide bombers > publically calling for the use of nuclear weapons against Democrats... > > Joseph > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From sjatkins at mac.com Mon Oct 2 04:55:49 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2006 21:55:49 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> Message-ID: <45209BD5.6040403@mac.com> Joseph, Before you dismiss the idea of a stolen election you might want to read a bit, perhaps starting with the following. http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen From russell.wallace at gmail.com Mon Oct 2 05:04:07 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 06:04:07 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> Message-ID: <8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com> On 10/1/06, Joseph Bloch wrote: > > I hope, I truly hope, that you wake up from your Republican-hating ways > to realize that this nation really does face an external threat of > hitherto-unseen proportions. It's not about people in power in the U.S. > But this sort of thing isn't hitherto-unseen at all. Hitler and Mussolini used the argument that they needed power to protect the people against communism. Communism was a real threat (it killed tens of millions of people, far more than the Islamic fundamentalists have) - but fascism was not the answer. It isn't the answer to Islamic fundamentalism today either. I think the threat of terrorism is greatly overstated, but I agree there is a threat and it has to be fought. It does not at all follow that we in the West should tolerate erosion of our civil liberties by our own governments. It's not just that it's not necessary - _it's also not helpful_. If you have a problem, and you try to solve it by surrendering your freedom, you now have two problems. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lcorbin at rawbw.com Mon Oct 2 05:36:22 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 22:36:22 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again. References: <5.1.0.14.0.20060930154103.045485a8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com><00c801c6e570$42501440$22084e0c@MyComputer> <04c401c6e576$fac00e30$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <002801c6e598$088e21c0$07094e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <050501c6e5e4$ccb70b10$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> John Clark writes > > How do you know what history would have > > been like in the absense of religion? > > It rained an hour ago and now the street is wet. I deduce that if it hadn't > rained the street wouldn't be wet. Surely you don't think that this is a satisfactory analogy. We know the cause and effect in the case of wet streets from time immemorial. > > So far as *I* know, we don't have a lot of data. > > Unfortunately we have an avalanche of data, as terrifying as it is > depressing. Well, I wish that you'd mention some of it---in other words, for every instance that you can find that religion *may* have added extra suffering to the history of humanity, I believe that I can provide an example where just as much misery occurred with religion playing no role. For example, in Europe while the 16th and 17th centuries are well know for their religious wars, the 18th and 19th centuries for their nationalistic wars, and the 20th century for its ideological wars. Granted, on the whole there is an improvement per-capita, but I suspect that the greater ferocity of the religious era was simply due to it being further back in time. (One can easily tell many stories about ancient Rome, Mesopotamia, central Mexico, Japan, India, and China that prove the undeniable advance of the human race in this regard.) >> The 20th century did seem to indicate that the fervently anti-religious >> socialist regimes of the Soviet Union and Red Chinese killed people >> at at least the same rate if not much greater. > > A good point I readily concede. But I never said religion was the root of > ALL evil. I would estimate that in general about 2/3 of all mortal combat is > religious based. Less than that in the 20th century in Europe because Europe > is the one place on Earth where nobody takes religion very seriously > anymore. It's possible. But how do you explain, to pick a hemisphere at random :-) the wars of the western hemisphere? The worst by far was the Lopez War, fought entirely by Catholics and not at all for religious reasons. Next comes the U.S. Civil War that had only a little to do with religion. Now, let's take a breath and note that we have replaced your original claim about religion being the worst cause of humanity's trials and tribulations, with the claim that it's the cause of most of the wars. Maybe they're the same; maybe not. > I think people just got tired of killing each other over about whether > you should open an egg at the big end or the small. I simply cannot believe that---rather, you really aren't really explaining anything here. (Yes, I realize that it may have been a flippant remark.) Humanity has fewer and less ghastly wars (per capita and per century) simply because, I assert, we are so much richer now, and it is now easier and more profitable to create wealth than to seize your neighbor's. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Mon Oct 2 05:48:50 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 22:48:50 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Uses of Religion References: <7.0.1.0.2.20060930004433.021ed6b0@satx.rr.com><200609301633.k8UGXJ2G008697@andromeda.ziaspace.com><04c301c6e575$b7b62620$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <008f01c6e57a$00f84800$6600a8c0@brainiac> Message-ID: <050801c6e5e6$7b9c2fb0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Olga writes the difference between Saddam killing Iraqis and Iraqi's killing Iraqies. > [Lee writes] > > There are many differences. But probably the most important is indeed media > > related[:] meaning to say, as I did, that we seem to want not being upset by our daily news more than we want fewer deaths and less suffering all around. > IMO one of the crucial differences is that the blood used to be mainly on > Saddam's hands. Now it is on George Bush's hands Why is it so important whose blood is on whose hands? That is, if we are interested in less suffering, everything else being equal we should applaud actions that reduce casualties. (Yes---I know that not everything else is equal.) It reminds me of the chain of reasoning pacifists use. They are disturbed, yes, by killings, but it's whether or not their own hands are clean that is to them what's crucial. > Another important difference is that the reputation of the USA has sunk to > a very low level (Abu Ghraib: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_prison) Please find me a major conflict without incidents of this kind (or, usually, much worse) any time in human history. Even when sociopaths are not drawn into armies and police forces---and it's estimated that about four percent of people are sociopaths---wars invariably coarsen all involved. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Mon Oct 2 05:58:51 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 22:58:51 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com><451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net><45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> <8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Russell writes > I think the threat of terrorism is greatly overstated, but I agree there is a threat and it has to be fought. It does not at all > follow that we in the West should tolerate erosion of our civil liberties by our own governments. It's not just that it's not > necessary - _it's also not helpful_. If you have a problem, and you try to solve it by surrendering your freedom, you now have two > problems. < That could be true, but I believe it depends on future events. Do you almost daily think about what your reactions would be if a terrorist nuke was to go off in a large American city? Do you think that your feelings and intuitions would change at all? The glorious thing about democracy is that it seems to periodically adjust itself in terms of mood just the way that a person does. Right after 9-11, "America" as an entity behaved angrily, just as natural selection made people so act. There is less cause for anger now. There may be more cause later. Whatever happens, the choices made will be strongly criticized---which, up to a point, is exactly what should happen. Lee P.S. My apologies if you aren't an American; please pretend that you are for the sake of the questions. From russell.wallace at gmail.com Mon Oct 2 06:26:05 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 07:26:05 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> <8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com> <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <8d71341e0610012326y66fde0f3h3795e07362235e64@mail.gmail.com> On 10/2/06, Lee Corbin wrote: > > That could be true, but I believe it depends on future events. Do you > almost > daily think about what your reactions would be if a terrorist nuke was to > go > off in a large American city? > > Do you think that your feelings and intuitions would change at all? My feelings and intuitions, like yours, say anything that hints of enemy action should be assigned the highest priority. I know exactly why they say that. They evolved in conditions where intraspecies violence was the main cause of death that we could do something about. That circumstance no longer obtains, and our feelings and intuitions therefore give completely the wrong answer when we evaluate today's problems. Since we _know_ they give the wrong answer, and we know why, we should use reason instead. Look at the cold numbers: how many people worldwide have been killed by terrorists from 2001 to today? Some thousands, maybe into five digits. How many lives have been lost from all causes in that same time? Nearly _three hundred million_. Even a nuclear explosion in a major city would be a drop in the ocean on that scale. Note also that you only answered the lesser half of my argument. My primary point was that however small or large the external threat, compromising our most basic civil liberties - allowing our governments to turn inward against ourselves, not outward against the enemy - is _not effective_ as a response. It adds a second problem _without doing anything to solve the first_. Whatever happens, the choices made will be strongly criticized---which, up > to > a point, is exactly what should happen. But it is very dangerous to allow a situation to arise where criticism of certain policies is no longer permitted. P.S. My apologies if you aren't an American; please pretend that you are > for > the sake of the questions. > No apology needed; I'm not, but I am a member of Western civilization, and I believe it matters greatly - quite possibly unto the entire future of our visible universe - how well our civilization and the values it represents endure this century. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sjatkins at mac.com Mon Oct 2 06:32:15 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2006 23:32:15 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> <8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com> <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <1159770735.13119.4.camel@localhost> On Sun, 2006-10-01 at 22:58 -0700, Lee Corbin wrote: > Russell writes > > > I think the threat of terrorism is greatly overstated, but I agree there is a threat and it has to be fought. It does not at all > > follow that we in the West should tolerate erosion of our civil liberties by our own governments. It's not just that it's not > > necessary - _it's also not helpful_. If you have a problem, and you try to solve it by surrendering your freedom, you now have two > > problems. > < > > That could be true, but I believe it depends on future events. Do you almost > daily think about what your reactions would be if a terrorist nuke was to go > off in a large American city? > Of course not. Do you? What for? Seems like a terrible waste of emotional energy. There are much more immediate problems and much more likely dangers. > Do you think that your feelings and intuitions would change at all? > Such hypotheticals are utterly useless to the issues at hand. > The glorious thing about democracy is that it seems to periodically adjust itself > in terms of mood just the way that a person does. Right after 9-11, "America" > as an entity behaved angrily, just as natural selection made people so act. > There is less cause for anger now. There may be more cause later. > Civil rights will be every bit as important as now. Let's deal with now, shall we? > Whatever happens, the choices made will be strongly criticized---which, up to > a point, is exactly what should happen. > What do you mean "up to a point"? Criticism is always in order in a free country. - samantha From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Mon Oct 2 09:17:47 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 05:17:47 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> Message-ID: On 10/1/06, Samantha Atkins wrote: > How about when the election of 2004 was quite possibly stolen? > I was puzzled by this statement as well but not enough to go investigating. As it so happened I ran across some sources for this [1,2] and it would appear there is some merit to the argument. It is interesting that this is getting to the level of discussion that there is speculation (fact?) that computerized voting machines are being "rigged" to allow back door tampering [3]. After all we *know* that software which is supposed to be secure is never faulty. When I, who probably reads more news than the average person, isn't aware of this I would suspect is a problem which the general public is clueless about [4]. Kudos to Samantha for pointing this out. Robert 1. http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen 2. http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/17/1845248 3. http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/01/2141222 4. One does of course have to be careful that the primary source is a prominent Democrat. It remains to be seen whether anyone (TV news channel, the Washington Post, etc.) will be diligent enough to verify the accuracy of an article citing 208 references and determine whether it is "biased". But the fact that the references are cited does make a reasonably strong case. There is also the three books cited in [5] which make this appear that it is a reasonably well researched topic. 5. http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10463875/was_the_2004_election_stolen_sources_and_commentary -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From alex at ramonsky.com Mon Oct 2 10:02:20 2006 From: alex at ramonsky.com (Alex Ramonsky) Date: Mon, 02 Oct 2006 11:02:20 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wireheading References: <200609290452.k8T4qWMP001849@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451CFF7A.8030608@ramonsky.com> <20060929112008.GM21640@leitl.org> Message-ID: <4520E3AC.1030607@ramonsky.com> Yo Eugen : ) I did LSD for an average of four days per week from 1983-84. [Despite heroic attempts, we couldn't get it to work more often than that]. I personally felt pretty blissed out in very much the same way I have on heroin. Maybe other people don't. I've only ever done heroin a couple of times, and that orally; so that may make a difference too. Drugs have very different effects on different people. I can only say what it was like for me. I do have colleagues who have done both and claim a similar experience, but perhaps the real answer here lies in one's personal semantics for the meaning of "blissed out". To me it means "Totally anxiety-free". Or these days, perhaps I should say, "Normal". Best, AR ************ Eugen Leitl wrote: >On Fri, Sep 29, 2006 at 12:11:54PM +0100, Alex Ramonsky wrote: > > > >> totally blissed out and getting nothing done whatsoever, as I'm sure >> many LSD or Heroin fans would agree...but it's not as enjoyable >> >> > >From your comments, it seems that you have never tried LSD. >Calling an acid experience "blissed out" (especially, the assumption >that you could drop one hit after another for days and weeks) and >putting hallucinogens with the opiates into the same bin doesn't >strike me as informed. > > > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >_______________________________________________ >extropy-chat mailing list >extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From alex at ramonsky.com Mon Oct 2 10:15:18 2006 From: alex at ramonsky.com (Alex Ramonsky) Date: Mon, 02 Oct 2006 11:15:18 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wireheading References: <200609290452.k8T4qWMP001849@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451CFF7A.8030608@ramonsky.com> <2589.163.1.72.81.1159541656.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <4520E6B6.8020901@ramonsky.com> If I understand you correctly, how do you prevent eventual downgrading of dopaminergic receptors? I used to get a tedious anhedonic period after a long creative squawk. I did one month's worth of selegiline, and it stopped being a problem. I'm still trying to figure out why. : ) Best, AR ********** Anders Sandberg wrote: >Life in dopaminergic overdrive is far more fun. I still remember the very >enjoyable experience of being blissed out on opiates and some >tranquilizers before going in for surgery many years ago, but it doesn't >compare to the feeling of flow when you are up at 2 in the morning writing >your academic masterpiece using every part of your mind. Flow/eudaimonia >beats plain pleasure. > >Of course, we should be able to get that more if we can just stimulate the >right motivation subsystems. Panksepp's SEEKING and PLAY systems look like >a good place to start. >http://www.thinkbody.co.uk/papers/Panic%20Seeking%20%20play.htm >http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=15766890&query_hl=1&itool=pubmed_docsum > > >And I feel fantastic >And I never felt as good as how I do right now >Except for maybe when I think of how I felt that day >When I felt the way that I do right now, right now, right now. > >(Jonathan Coulton, I Feel Fantastic, >http://www.jonathancoulton.com/lyrics/i-feel-fantastic ) > > > From eugen at leitl.org Mon Oct 2 10:11:11 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 12:11:11 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wireheading In-Reply-To: <4520E3AC.1030607@ramonsky.com> References: <200609290452.k8T4qWMP001849@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451CFF7A.8030608@ramonsky.com> <20060929112008.GM21640@leitl.org> <4520E3AC.1030607@ramonsky.com> Message-ID: <20061002101111.GK21640@leitl.org> On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 11:02:20AM +0100, Alex Ramonsky wrote: > > Yo Eugen : ) Allright, I take back that uninformed. You're definitely more informed than I. > I did LSD for an average of four days per week from 1983-84. [Despite > heroic attempts, we couldn't get it to work more often than that]. I It's amazing you could get it to work 4 days out of 7. It's more 2 days out of 7 for most people. > personally felt pretty blissed out in very much the same way I have on > heroin. Maybe other people don't. I'm hazarding that most other people don't. How's for a poll, here? Would you call it blissed out, or something else? (If yes, how would you describe it?). > I've only ever done heroin a couple of times, and that orally; so that > may make a difference too. > Drugs have very different effects on different people. I can only say > what it was like for me. I do have colleagues who have done both and > claim a similar experience, but perhaps the real answer here lies in > one's personal semantics for the meaning of "blissed out". To me it > means "Totally anxiety-free". Or these days, perhaps I should say, -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From pharos at gmail.com Mon Oct 2 10:16:15 2006 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 11:16:15 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wireheading In-Reply-To: <4520E6B6.8020901@ramonsky.com> References: <200609290452.k8T4qWMP001849@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451CFF7A.8030608@ramonsky.com> <2589.163.1.72.81.1159541656.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> <4520E6B6.8020901@ramonsky.com> Message-ID: On 10/2/06, Alex Ramonsky wrote: You do realise that anything significant that you post on extropy-chat (or anywhere on the internet) is likely to immediately update your Homeland Security Profile? Unencrypted emails probably go there as well. We live in interesting times. BillK From john.heritage at v21.me.uk Mon Oct 2 10:27:41 2006 From: john.heritage at v21.me.uk (John) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 11:27:41 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wireheading / psychoactives References: <200609290452.k8T4qWMP001849@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451CFF7A.8030608@ramonsky.com><20060929112008.GM21640@leitl.org> <4520E3AC.1030607@ramonsky.com> Message-ID: <00b501c6e60d$69a40cc0$6d010751@heritagekd9czj> Four days a week, I'm quite impressed you haven't been sectioned by now. Magic mushroom tend to require quite a lot of recovery time afterwards to reach full potential again, most people leave it weeks before they eat anymore. I've not tried LSD, so I'm not sure just how long the recovery time on that is. One of the first things Hoffmann noted about LSD was that the day after he woke up feeling particularly sensitive to the world. This, combined with knowing that these molecules are metabolised out of the synapses and that immediately afterwards their potential for effect decreases suggests to me that they trigger an increase in the 'esterase metabolic pathways in the synapses. E.g. you take LSD, your body senses that it's become lodged in the post-synaptic boutons (atropine does this I believe, and is used to treat nerve agent exposure by 'clogging' the synapses to prevent spasmodic firing) and increases the levels of esterase to break it down. Afterwards, those level likely remain elevated for a while, allowing the synapse to carry a higher bandwidth of signals, allowing for a greater level of sensitivity. This is all pure speculation, but it seems like the most likely way these effects would emerge to me. I've noticed something similar after trying psilocybin mushrooms. Just out of interest, do you get a headache the morning after with LSD? I've often wondered about the possibility of mixing psychoactives to achieve greater effects. As you pointed out, sooner or later you reach a peak that's difficult to go beyond due to pathways being saturated / metabolism wiping out the active material etc. However, if multiple actives where used, one might expect the experience to be orders of magnitude more diverse - mescaline, psilocybin and salvinorin say, which all work on different receptor sites (off the top of my head, I think it's mainly... muscarine, serotonin and kappa opoid respectively). And finish it off with a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. Never tried Heroin. I tend not to believe too much of the anti-drugs stuff I read but there certainly does seem to be a correlation between Heroin and bin diving. In light of Bill's note, I live in the UK, where magic mushrooms were legal fodder until recently. John BullGuard Anti-virus has scanned this e-mail and found it clean. Try BullGuard for free: www.bullguard.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Mon Oct 2 11:05:18 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 13:05:18 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wireheading In-Reply-To: <4520E6B6.8020901@ramonsky.com> References: <200609290452.k8T4qWMP001849@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451CFF7A.8030608@ramonsky.com> <2589.163.1.72.81.1159541656.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> <4520E6B6.8020901@ramonsky.com> Message-ID: <20061002110518.GL21640@leitl.org> On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 11:15:18AM +0100, Alex Ramonsky wrote: > after a long creative squawk. I did one month's worth of selegiline, and > it stopped being a problem. I'm still trying to figure out why. : ) Why did you stop with selegiline? Equivalent of 1 mg/day from 40 years upwards seems to show benefits across several animal models. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From Luke.Ferris at emimusic.com Mon Oct 2 10:52:41 2006 From: Luke.Ferris at emimusic.com (Ferris, Luke) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 11:52:41 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Reply to Joseph in message 2 of extropy-chat Digest, Vol 37, Issue 2 In-Reply-To: Message-ID: "of Islamists inspired by their ridiculous faith (as all faiths are ridiculous) to impose their vision of their faith on every single human being on this planet by deadly force, and being willing to kill themselves to advance that goal." Can you please provide some citations to back up this claim? All of my research so far indicates that Islamic terrorism (and indeed terrorism in general) is a tactic used to achieve an outcome (such as troop withdrawal) in response to a particular stimulus (such as the occupation of a homeland). Certainly this is the case with Al-Qaeda, who spare no lengths to broadcast there grievances (Troops on the Arabian peninsular, troops in Iraq, the persecution of Palestinians etc.) although the Western media pays little attention to it. I am yet to find significant evidence to suggest that they want to "Islamicise" us as your statement suggests. Luke -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of extropy-chat-request at lists.extropy.org Sent: 02 October 2006 11:28 To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org Subject: extropy-chat Digest, Vol 37, Issue 2 Send extropy-chat mailing list submissions to extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to extropy-chat-request at lists.extropy.org You can reach the person managing the list at extropy-chat-owner at lists.extropy.org When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of extropy-chat digest..." Today's Topics: 1. Re: Uses of Religion (Robert Bradbury) 2. Re: Tyranny in place (Joseph Bloch) 3. Re: Uses of Religion (Olga Bourlin) 4. Oct 30 - Richard Dawkins In conversation with Roy Eisenhardt (Fred C. Moulton) 5. Re: Islamic morons win yet again (Damien Broderick) 6. Re: Islamic morons win yet again Resend 2 (Keith Henson) 7. Re: Islamic morons win yet again (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) 8. Re: Islamic morons win yet again (resend 2) (Keith Henson) 9. Re: Tyranny in place (Samantha Atkins) 10. Re: Tyranny in place (Samantha Atkins) 11. Re: Tyranny in place (Russell Wallace) 12. Re: Islamic morons win yet again. (Lee Corbin) 13. Re: Uses of Religion (Lee Corbin) 14. Re: Tyranny in place (Lee Corbin) 15. Re: Tyranny in place (Russell Wallace) 16. Re: Tyranny in place (Samantha Atkins) 17. Re: Tyranny in place (Robert Bradbury) 18. Re: Wireheading (Alex Ramonsky) 19. Re: Wireheading (Alex Ramonsky) 20. Re: Wireheading (Eugen Leitl) 21. Re: Wireheading (BillK) 22. Re: Wireheading / psychoactives (John) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 17:35:06 -0400 From: "Robert Bradbury" Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Uses of Religion To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" On 10/1/06, Olga Bourlin wrote: > > > The important thing in the West---and now to the rest of the world---is, > > for the billion or so bystanders, whether the nightly news is painful or > > merely interesting. > > No. It mattered then and it matters now. If it really did matter then you would see much more on the nightly news regarding the person in the U.S. that dies every 12 seconds (4.7 a minute, 6700 a day) due to so called natural causes [1]. Those guilty of causing death due to acts of commission and those causing deaths due to acts of omission are only two letters apart. Robert 1. They remain "natural" because we haven't chosen yet to really apply ourselves to solving them. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20061001/540 1961f/attachment-0001.html ------------------------------ Message: 2 Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2006 17:55:17 -0400 From: Joseph Bloch Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place To: ExI chat list Message-ID: <45203945.1030206 at goldenfuture.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Samantha Atkins wrote: >> Talk to me about true tyranny when George W. Bush is still in the >> White House on January 21st, 2009. Until then, I see nothing more >> than a possibly over-zealous (and only possibly so), but still >> well-intentioned, attept to protect the United States from an enemy >> which is determined to eradicate our way of life and in the process >> stifle forever the Transhumanist dream, if only > > > How about when the election of 2004 was quite possibly stolen? Bush ossibly over-zealous but nothing more? I am rendered speechless. We are destroying our own way of life with our apparent willingness to dismantle our own freedom and protections in order to stop a few nutcase terrorist groups. If you care about preserving our way of life, as I do, then you must be on guard against this clear danger also. > Don't be ridiculous. Stolen elections? Dismantling freedoms? You sound like the worst posters on dailykos... >> incidentally as a part of its attempt to drag the world back to the >> 13th Century. >> > > Sheesh. All the Jihadists and Islamists (whatever that is) in the world haven't a tiny part of the power required to do any such thing. But rampant fear-mongering plus our own heavy increasing influence of religion based politics may destroy our way of life. I am appalled at your ignorance as to what an Islamist is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamism will provide a starting point. http://www.jihadwatch.org will yield a wealth of further information. And as far as their having no power to attain their ends, I direct your attention to their successful usurpation of a sovereign nation (Afghanistan), and their ongoing attempts to repeat that feat in other nations (Afghanistan again, Iraq, Somalia, Indonesia, Pakistan, et al). If they can take over one nation, and have a credible shot at taking over others, then they are a threat that must be addressed. And if you don't think Iran's ongoing attempts to secure the ability to produce nuclear weapons are part of this threat, then I must conclude that you are simply so blinded by your partisanship that you will not see the threat until you are faced with a law requiring the burqa in California (if then). > >> The goal of the Islamists; a global Caliphate which places all of >> humanity under strict Islamic law, is a scenario which must be >> avoided at all costs. >> > > > What a silly fantasy this is. Besides, in this most powerful nation on earth there are far more in positions of great power who want all to live under Old Testament law. > I hope, I truly hope, that you wake up from your Republican-hating ways to realize that this nation really does face an external threat of hitherto-unseen proportions. It's not about people in power in the U.S. And, for the record, I am well aware of, and highly concerned about, the Dominionist movement, but I daresay that a handful of well-connected Dominionists don't quite rise to the level of threat posted by millions of Islamists inspired by their ridiculous faith (as all faiths are ridiculous) to impose their vision of their faith on every single human being on this planet by deadly force, and being willing to kill themselves to advance that goal. Unless I have somehow missed the hordes of Baptist suicide bombers publically calling for the use of nuclear weapons against Democrats... Joseph ------------------------------ Message: 3 Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 16:25:20 -0700 From: "Olga Bourlin" Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Uses of Religion To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: <001901c6e5b0$dd5221f0$6600a8c0 at brainiac> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" From: Robert Bradbury Sent: Sunday, October 01, 2006 2:35 PM >On 10/1/06, Olga Bourlin wrote: > > > The important thing in the West---and now to the rest of the world---is, for the billion or so bystanders, whether the nightly news is painful or merely interesting. >> No. It mattered then and it matters now. > If it really did matter then you would see much more on the nightly news regarding the person in the U.S. that dies every 12 seconds ( 4.7 a minute, 6700 a day) due to so called natural causes [1]. [1. They remain "natural" because we haven't chosen yet to really apply ourselves to solving them.] > Those guilty of causing death due to acts of commission and those causing deaths due to acts of omission are only two letters apart. So, do you mean there is no such thing as murder? Olga I understand what you mean by "natural" death - and there are people working on -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20061001/964 24a1c/attachment-0001.html ------------------------------ Message: 4 Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2006 19:08:37 -0700 From: "Fred C. Moulton" Subject: [extropy-chat] Oct 30 - Richard Dawkins In conversation with Roy Eisenhardt To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org Message-ID: <1159754917.4895.275.camel at localhost.localdomain> Content-Type: text/plain I have already bought my ticket and it appears to be more that half sold so if people want to attend they should get their tickets ASAP. Richard Dawkins - 10/30/2006, 8:00 pm Special Event Richard Dawkins In conversation with Roy Eisenhardt Monday, October 30, 2006 at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, CA. I expect that the discussion will focus on The God Delusion which is the most recent book by Richard Dawkins. The talk is part of the City Arts http://www.cityarts.net/ program. I have just received a copy of The God Delusion and have read the first chapter. I expect the arguments which Dawkins makes about the nature of religion and for atheism will be in general familiar to every one on this list. However in the first chapter I think Dawkins does a really good job of discussing the term "religion" and how it is often misused. Also Dawkins does an excellent job of explaining Einstein's use of the term and how many theists misquote or selectively quote Einstein in an effort to make him appear to be a theist. If you can not make the event in San Francisco then you might be able to hear a rebroadcast on radio http://www.cityarts.net/radio.html. Dawkins will also be at Keplers in Menlo Park on Oct 29 see: http://www.keplers.com/?sec=programs-events&subsec=calendar Fred ------------------------------ Message: 5 Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2006 21:27:15 -0500 From: Damien Broderick Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again To: ExI chat list Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20061001212625.02282fd8 at satx.rr.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed At 12:14 PM 9/30/2006 -0700, Eliezer wrote: >+1 insightful: >http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/1700/ >"Iraq: the world's first Suicide State" A learned friend writes: Damien Broderick ------------------------------ Message: 6 Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2006 22:37:02 -0400 From: Keith Henson Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again Resend 2 To: ExI chat list Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20061001222218.04549908 at pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed At 03:17 PM 10/1/2006 +0100, you wrote: > > > > I am sure they are. But the model predicts that as long as the future > > prospects are good, the IRA or some other terrorist organization will not > > get popular support. > > >That is why I am saying that NI is a bad example for you to use. The >NI troubles were not a 'war' and killed a tiny percentage of the >population. Agreed, but I don't distinguish between war, terror, riots and other such social disruptions. >The same falling birth rates applied in many places where >there were no 'troubles'. The causal arrow is that the falling birth rates and economic growth contributed to a rising income per capita and *that's* what pulled the motivation. Obviously if there are no terror groups, then rising income per capita isn't going to shut off support for them. >So NI is not an example that supports your theory that nations go into >'war' mode and fight until they have killed sufficient people that the >survivors can live better The theory is not at all about nations and modern wars. The theory is about human psychological traits that evolved during the long time that human ancestors lived in hunter-gatherer groups. It happens that those traits still exist in humans and contribute causally to modern wars and related social disruptions. >. Even though the war itself will destroy >resources that support people. Think 'scorched earth'. Terrorism never >kills in sufficient numbers to fit into your theory. Agree on all your points. See the corn farmer example in the EP, Memes and the origin of war paper for an example of how war can be ill adapted to societies more advanced than hunter gathers. >I don't think you really want to weaken your claim to say that >sometimes small groups of people start killing when they feel a bit >miserable and stop killing when they cheer up. But that seems to be >the direction you are heading. That claim is correct, of course, but >not of great significance. It seems to me that a predictive theory of when and where wars are likely to start would be of considerable significance. If for no other reason than being able to get out of the way. Keith Henson ------------------------------ Message: 7 Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2006 19:45:55 -0700 From: "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again To: ExI chat list Message-ID: <45207D63.5070005 at pobox.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Damien Broderick wrote: > At 12:14 PM 9/30/2006 -0700, Eliezer wrote: > >>+1 insightful: >>http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/1700/ >>"Iraq: the world's first Suicide State" > > A learned friend writes: > > or colonizers, to restore the historical dominance of one ethnic or > religious group or to establish a new structure of dominance, or to impose a > particular set of religious rules--goals which are held by the various > indigenous factions who are killing people in Iraq--is hardly "fighting for > nothing in particular." There isn't one manifesto that fits everybody > toting a gun or a bomb--there are a number of contending factions--but the > fact that it can't all be summed up easily in this guy's PowerPoint > presentation doesn't make it "aimless." Different participants have > different aims. This is far from unusual--consider the various factions > involved in the South African resistance.> Fair enough. - E -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence ------------------------------ Message: 8 Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2006 23:08:56 -0400 From: Keith Henson Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again (resend 2) To: ExI chat list Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20061001224012.04548038 at pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed At 11:41 AM 10/1/2006 -0400, you wrote: >"Keith Henson" > > > It is useless to denounce religion > >I do not believe it is useless to denounce evil, in fact I believe it is >rather despicable not to. It is like denouncing a fever. Xenophobic memes simple arise when they are called for by the situation. Think Pol Pot's version of communism, Nazi memes, Rwanda. > > and it is *not* the root cause of human misery. > >I would never be so foolish as to say religion is the cause of all human >misery, but I would say that with the exception of death itself religion has >caused more misery than any other single thing. It is just distracting to denounce something which is caused by something else. You are never going to understand what is the correct action to take that way. > > Human reproduction in excess of what the ecosystem/economy can support > > *is* the cause of misery. > >Human reproduction has never been in a higher gear than it is right now, so >if you were right we would expect the average standard of living to be lower >than its ever been. However the exact opposite is true, human beings have >never had it so good. You are dead wrong about human reproduction. Over the entire developed populations it is at near replacement rates. But read what I said, "in excess of what the ecosystem/economy can support." >Despite what the tree huggers say the >ecosystem/economy is doing quite well thank you very much. I have no problem with a solar system population of trillions of people, in fact, I think it would be a good idea. The earth could support the current and even the projected population with considerable advances in technology. But if you look at the places where the problems come from they are parts of the world with high birth rates and stagnant economies. > >Easter Island was a case where war a few generations earlier would have > >been much better. > >You don't need anything as drastic as war. If the Easter Islander's religion >hadn't caused them to use all their time energy recourses and imagination >making all those incredibly stupid statues they would have been one hell >of a lot better off. Well, please tell me what they could have done with the "time energy resources and imagination"? I have played this game a number of times and even with full scale modern knowledge I don't see how Easter Island would have played out any better. > > It is truly bizarre, but I make the case that there are times when the > > interest of a person and the interest of their genes diverge. > >I don't think it's bizarre to say that the genes interests and the >individual's are not identical, I think it's a keen grasp of the obvious. >After all, if it were not true the condom would never have been invented. A more spectacular example was that stand of the Spartans at Thermopylae. > >what situations in the stone age made those who could be infested with > >religion more likely to survive (in the gene centered inclusive fitness > >sense) than those who were not? > >I'm not at all sure that the religious meme got started because it conveyed >some survival advantage, rather it may just be the result of being mortal >and being intelligent. The psychological trait of being able to be "captured" by a religious class meme has to be either something that was directly selected or a side effect of something what was directly selected. That's your choice in EP theory. >Contemplating death, especially your own death, is >unpleasant. So people try to think of ways to fool themselves to reduce that >unpleasantness (maybe death isn't really the end). Given that the religious >meme is likely to be present, at least to some degree, in any population, an >individual who knows how to exploit that meme (God speaks through me!) >would have a huge reproductive advantage. And it's still true, the religious >cult leader Warren Jeffs who was just arrested had 80 wives and 250 >children. Interesting speculation backed up by some data is that descendents of the early Mormons are more susceptible than the rest of the population to cult class memes. What you would expect with a big genetic contribution. Keith Henson ------------------------------ Message: 9 Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2006 21:51:30 -0700 From: Samantha Atkins Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place To: ExI chat list Message-ID: <45209AD2.2080002 at mac.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Joseph Bloch wrote: > Samantha Atkins wrote: > > >>> Talk to me about true tyranny when George W. Bush is still in the >>> White House on January 21st, 2009. Until then, I see nothing more >>> than a possibly over-zealous (and only possibly so), but still >>> well-intentioned, attept to protect the United States from an enemy >>> which is determined to eradicate our way of life and in the process >>> stifle forever the Transhumanist dream, if only >>> >> How about when the election of 2004 was quite possibly stolen? Bush ossibly over-zealous but nothing more? I am rendered speechless. We are destroying our own way of life with our apparent willingness to dismantle our own freedom and protections in order to stop a few nutcase terrorist groups. If you care about preserving our way of life, as I do, then you must be on guard against this clear danger also. >> >> > > Don't be ridiculous. Stolen elections? Dismantling freedoms? You sound > like the worst posters on dailykos... > > > Sigh. Now who is ignorant? >>> incidentally as a part of its attempt to drag the world back to the >>> 13th Century. >>> >>> >> Sheesh. All the Jihadists and Islamists (whatever that is) in the world haven't a tiny part of the power required to do any such thing. But rampant fear-mongering plus our own heavy increasing influence of religion based politics may destroy our way of life. >> > > > I am appalled at your ignorance as to what an Islamist is. > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamism will provide a starting point. > http://www.jihadwatch.org will yield a wealth of further information. > I am not ignorant at all. Just bemused about "Islamists" being the demons in every woodshed that "commies" once were. I am not at all bemused or amused by this country destroying itself through fear-mongering. I am not amused by an administration that lies shamelessly to the people, spends us to oblivion in unending war and seems bent on removing freedoms from the people and any and all checks on its power. I am not amused it takes it upon itself to largely ignore science, teach abstinence only as "sex education" and sexually transmitted disease prevention and nearly stops dead what is arguably the most important medical innovation of our generation. It does not matter that they are Republicans. I have little use for either of the major parties. It does matter to me and matter very much that they are a real danger to what I hold dear. > And as far as their having no power to attain their ends, I direct your > attention to their successful usurpation of a sovereign nation > (Afghanistan), and their ongoing attempts to repeat that feat in other > nations (Afghanistan again, Iraq, Somalia, Indonesia, Pakistan, et al). > If they can take over one nation, and have a credible shot at taking > over others, then they are a threat that must be addressed. And if you > don't think Iran's ongoing attempts to secure the ability to produce > nuclear weapons are part of this threat, then I must conclude that you > are simply so blinded by your partisanship that you will not see the > threat until you are faced with a law requiring the burqa in California > (if then). > > Afghanistan? I am quaking in my tennies. One of the poorest, most miserable and strife-torn nations on earth. Iran by all respected opinions can not produce its own nukes in less than 5-10 years ever if the entire world simply paid no attention, which ain't going to happen. If that had them why would they be more likely to use them than Pakistan who already has them? How would they manage to bring the world to its knees in front of Allah even if they had a few nukes and decent delivery systems? Are you using this to excuse what is happening in the most powerful country on earth and arguably the most important for freedom and continuing technological advance? >>> The goal of the Islamists; a global Caliphate which places all of >>> humanity under strict Islamic law, is a scenario which must be >>> avoided at all costs. >>> >>> >> What a silly fantasy this is. Besides, in this most powerful nation on earth there are far more in positions of great power who want all to live under Old Testament law. >> >> > > > I hope, I truly hope, that you wake up from your Republican-hating ways > to realize that this nation really does face an external threat of > hitherto-unseen proportions. The threat of hitherto-unseen proportions is much nearer than you think. It is a common tactic in a country headed away from freedom to focus all attention on an external enemy. If the enemy is elusive, everywhere and nowhere and can never really be defeated then all the better for the smokescreen behind which unanswerable nearly unstoppable power over its own people amasses. I hope that you and others who think likewise wake up before it is far too late. > It's not about people in power in the U.S. > And, for the record, I am well aware of, and highly concerned about, the > Dominionist movement, but I daresay that a handful of well-connected > Dominionists don't quite rise to the level of threat posted by millions > of Islamists inspired by their ridiculous faith (as all faiths are > ridiculous) to impose their vision of their faith on every single human > being on this planet by deadly force, and being willing to kill > themselves to advance that goal. > That handful has it hands on real power that those millions cannot touch. They are also far more than a handful. - s Do you really believe there is nothing about the people in power in the US to worry about? Really? Those millions of Islamists don't have a decent armed forces among them and they don't run this country. So I don't consider them the most likely threat vector to what I care about. > Unless I have somehow missed the hordes of Baptist suicide bombers > publically calling for the use of nuclear weapons against Democrats... > > Joseph > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > ------------------------------ Message: 10 Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2006 21:55:49 -0700 From: Samantha Atkins Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place To: ExI chat list Message-ID: <45209BD5.6040403 at mac.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Joseph, Before you dismiss the idea of a stolen election you might want to read a bit, perhaps starting with the following. http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_st olen ------------------------------ Message: 11 Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 06:04:07 +0100 From: "Russell Wallace" Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: <8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994 at mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" On 10/1/06, Joseph Bloch wrote: > > I hope, I truly hope, that you wake up from your Republican-hating ways > to realize that this nation really does face an external threat of > hitherto-unseen proportions. It's not about people in power in the U.S. > But this sort of thing isn't hitherto-unseen at all. Hitler and Mussolini used the argument that they needed power to protect the people against communism. Communism was a real threat (it killed tens of millions of people, far more than the Islamic fundamentalists have) - but fascism was not the answer. It isn't the answer to Islamic fundamentalism today either. I think the threat of terrorism is greatly overstated, but I agree there is a threat and it has to be fought. It does not at all follow that we in the West should tolerate erosion of our civil liberties by our own governments. It's not just that it's not necessary - _it's also not helpful_. If you have a problem, and you try to solve it by surrendering your freedom, you now have two problems. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20061002/356 f5a91/attachment-0001.html ------------------------------ Message: 12 Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 22:36:22 -0700 From: "Lee Corbin" Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again. To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: <050501c6e5e4$ccb70b10$6701a8c0 at homeef7b612677> Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1"; reply-type=response John Clark writes > > How do you know what history would have > > been like in the absense of religion? > > It rained an hour ago and now the street is wet. I deduce that if it hadn't > rained the street wouldn't be wet. Surely you don't think that this is a satisfactory analogy. We know the cause and effect in the case of wet streets from time immemorial. > > So far as *I* know, we don't have a lot of data. > > Unfortunately we have an avalanche of data, as terrifying as it is > depressing. Well, I wish that you'd mention some of it---in other words, for every instance that you can find that religion *may* have added extra suffering to the history of humanity, I believe that I can provide an example where just as much misery occurred with religion playing no role. For example, in Europe while the 16th and 17th centuries are well know for their religious wars, the 18th and 19th centuries for their nationalistic wars, and the 20th century for its ideological wars. Granted, on the whole there is an improvement per-capita, but I suspect that the greater ferocity of the religious era was simply due to it being further back in time. (One can easily tell many stories about ancient Rome, Mesopotamia, central Mexico, Japan, India, and China that prove the undeniable advance of the human race in this regard.) >> The 20th century did seem to indicate that the fervently anti-religious >> socialist regimes of the Soviet Union and Red Chinese killed people >> at at least the same rate if not much greater. > > A good point I readily concede. But I never said religion was the root of > ALL evil. I would estimate that in general about 2/3 of all mortal combat is > religious based. Less than that in the 20th century in Europe because Europe > is the one place on Earth where nobody takes religion very seriously > anymore. It's possible. But how do you explain, to pick a hemisphere at random :-) the wars of the western hemisphere? The worst by far was the Lopez War, fought entirely by Catholics and not at all for religious reasons. Next comes the U.S. Civil War that had only a little to do with religion. Now, let's take a breath and note that we have replaced your original claim about religion being the worst cause of humanity's trials and tribulations, with the claim that it's the cause of most of the wars. Maybe they're the same; maybe not. > I think people just got tired of killing each other over about whether > you should open an egg at the big end or the small. I simply cannot believe that---rather, you really aren't really explaining anything here. (Yes, I realize that it may have been a flippant remark.) Humanity has fewer and less ghastly wars (per capita and per century) simply because, I assert, we are so much richer now, and it is now easier and more profitable to create wealth than to seize your neighbor's. Lee ------------------------------ Message: 13 Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 22:48:50 -0700 From: "Lee Corbin" Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Uses of Religion To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: <050801c6e5e6$7b9c2fb0$6701a8c0 at homeef7b612677> Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1"; reply-type=original Olga writes the difference between Saddam killing Iraqis and Iraqi's killing Iraqies. > [Lee writes] > > There are many differences. But probably the most important is indeed media > > related[:] meaning to say, as I did, that we seem to want not being upset by our daily news more than we want fewer deaths and less suffering all around. > IMO one of the crucial differences is that the blood used to be mainly on > Saddam's hands. Now it is on George Bush's hands Why is it so important whose blood is on whose hands? That is, if we are interested in less suffering, everything else being equal we should applaud actions that reduce casualties. (Yes---I know that not everything else is equal.) It reminds me of the chain of reasoning pacifists use. They are disturbed, yes, by killings, but it's whether or not their own hands are clean that is to them what's crucial. > Another important difference is that the reputation of the USA has sunk to > a very low level (Abu Ghraib: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_prison) Please find me a major conflict without incidents of this kind (or, usually, much worse) any time in human history. Even when sociopaths are not drawn into armies and police forces---and it's estimated that about four percent of people are sociopaths---wars invariably coarsen all involved. Lee ------------------------------ Message: 14 Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 22:58:51 -0700 From: "Lee Corbin" Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0 at homeef7b612677> Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1"; reply-type=original Russell writes > I think the threat of terrorism is greatly overstated, but I agree there is a threat and it has to be fought. It does not at all > follow that we in the West should tolerate erosion of our civil liberties by our own governments. It's not just that it's not > necessary - _it's also not helpful_. If you have a problem, and you try to solve it by surrendering your freedom, you now have two > problems. < That could be true, but I believe it depends on future events. Do you almost daily think about what your reactions would be if a terrorist nuke was to go off in a large American city? Do you think that your feelings and intuitions would change at all? The glorious thing about democracy is that it seems to periodically adjust itself in terms of mood just the way that a person does. Right after 9-11, "America" as an entity behaved angrily, just as natural selection made people so act. There is less cause for anger now. There may be more cause later. Whatever happens, the choices made will be strongly criticized---which, up to a point, is exactly what should happen. Lee P.S. My apologies if you aren't an American; please pretend that you are for the sake of the questions. ------------------------------ Message: 15 Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 07:26:05 +0100 From: "Russell Wallace" Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: <8d71341e0610012326y66fde0f3h3795e07362235e64 at mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" On 10/2/06, Lee Corbin wrote: > > That could be true, but I believe it depends on future events. Do you > almost > daily think about what your reactions would be if a terrorist nuke was to > go > off in a large American city? > > Do you think that your feelings and intuitions would change at all? My feelings and intuitions, like yours, say anything that hints of enemy action should be assigned the highest priority. I know exactly why they say that. They evolved in conditions where intraspecies violence was the main cause of death that we could do something about. That circumstance no longer obtains, and our feelings and intuitions therefore give completely the wrong answer when we evaluate today's problems. Since we _know_ they give the wrong answer, and we know why, we should use reason instead. Look at the cold numbers: how many people worldwide have been killed by terrorists from 2001 to today? Some thousands, maybe into five digits. How many lives have been lost from all causes in that same time? Nearly _three hundred million_. Even a nuclear explosion in a major city would be a drop in the ocean on that scale. Note also that you only answered the lesser half of my argument. My primary point was that however small or large the external threat, compromising our most basic civil liberties - allowing our governments to turn inward against ourselves, not outward against the enemy - is _not effective_ as a response. It adds a second problem _without doing anything to solve the first_. Whatever happens, the choices made will be strongly criticized---which, up > to > a point, is exactly what should happen. But it is very dangerous to allow a situation to arise where criticism of certain policies is no longer permitted. P.S. My apologies if you aren't an American; please pretend that you are > for > the sake of the questions. > No apology needed; I'm not, but I am a member of Western civilization, and I believe it matters greatly - quite possibly unto the entire future of our visible universe - how well our civilization and the values it represents endure this century. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20061002/a73 2a588/attachment-0001.html ------------------------------ Message: 16 Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2006 23:32:15 -0700 From: Samantha Atkins Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place To: Lee Corbin , ExI chat list Message-ID: <1159770735.13119.4.camel at localhost> Content-Type: text/plain On Sun, 2006-10-01 at 22:58 -0700, Lee Corbin wrote: > Russell writes > > > I think the threat of terrorism is greatly overstated, but I agree there is a threat and it has to be fought. It does not at all > > follow that we in the West should tolerate erosion of our civil liberties by our own governments. It's not just that it's not > > necessary - _it's also not helpful_. If you have a problem, and you try to solve it by surrendering your freedom, you now have two > > problems. > < > > That could be true, but I believe it depends on future events. Do you almost > daily think about what your reactions would be if a terrorist nuke was to go > off in a large American city? > Of course not. Do you? What for? Seems like a terrible waste of emotional energy. There are much more immediate problems and much more likely dangers. > Do you think that your feelings and intuitions would change at all? > Such hypotheticals are utterly useless to the issues at hand. > The glorious thing about democracy is that it seems to periodically adjust itself > in terms of mood just the way that a person does. Right after 9-11, "America" > as an entity behaved angrily, just as natural selection made people so act. > There is less cause for anger now. There may be more cause later. > Civil rights will be every bit as important as now. Let's deal with now, shall we? > Whatever happens, the choices made will be strongly criticized---which, up to > a point, is exactly what should happen. > What do you mean "up to a point"? Criticism is always in order in a free country. - samantha ------------------------------ Message: 17 Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 05:17:47 -0400 From: "Robert Bradbury" Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" On 10/1/06, Samantha Atkins wrote: > How about when the election of 2004 was quite possibly stolen? > I was puzzled by this statement as well but not enough to go investigating. As it so happened I ran across some sources for this [1,2] and it would appear there is some merit to the argument. It is interesting that this is getting to the level of discussion that there is speculation (fact?) that computerized voting machines are being "rigged" to allow back door tampering [3]. After all we *know* that software which is supposed to be secure is never faulty. When I, who probably reads more news than the average person, isn't aware of this I would suspect is a problem which the general public is clueless about [4]. Kudos to Samantha for pointing this out. Robert 1. http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_st olen 2. http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/17/1845248 3. http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/01/2141222 4. One does of course have to be careful that the primary source is a prominent Democrat. It remains to be seen whether anyone (TV news channel, the Washington Post, etc.) will be diligent enough to verify the accuracy of an article citing 208 references and determine whether it is "biased". But the fact that the references are cited does make a reasonably strong case. There is also the three books cited in [5] which make this appear that it is a reasonably well researched topic. 5. http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10463875/was_the_2004_election_st olen_sources_and_commentary -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20061002/67d 4cad6/attachment-0001.html ------------------------------ Message: 18 Date: Mon, 02 Oct 2006 11:02:20 +0100 From: Alex Ramonsky Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Wireheading To: ExI chat list Message-ID: <4520E3AC.1030607 at ramonsky.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Yo Eugen : ) I did LSD for an average of four days per week from 1983-84. [Despite heroic attempts, we couldn't get it to work more often than that]. I personally felt pretty blissed out in very much the same way I have on heroin. Maybe other people don't. I've only ever done heroin a couple of times, and that orally; so that may make a difference too. Drugs have very different effects on different people. I can only say what it was like for me. I do have colleagues who have done both and claim a similar experience, but perhaps the real answer here lies in one's personal semantics for the meaning of "blissed out". To me it means "Totally anxiety-free". Or these days, perhaps I should say, "Normal". Best, AR ************ Eugen Leitl wrote: >On Fri, Sep 29, 2006 at 12:11:54PM +0100, Alex Ramonsky wrote: > > > >> totally blissed out and getting nothing done whatsoever, as I'm sure >> many LSD or Heroin fans would agree...but it's not as enjoyable >> >> > >From your comments, it seems that you have never tried LSD. >Calling an acid experience "blissed out" (especially, the assumption >that you could drop one hit after another for days and weeks) and >putting hallucinogens with the opiates into the same bin doesn't >strike me as informed. > > > >----------------------------------------------------------------------- - > >_______________________________________________ >extropy-chat mailing list >extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20061002/b2b 5d982/attachment-0001.html ------------------------------ Message: 19 Date: Mon, 02 Oct 2006 11:15:18 +0100 From: Alex Ramonsky Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Wireheading To: ExI chat list Message-ID: <4520E6B6.8020901 at ramonsky.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed If I understand you correctly, how do you prevent eventual downgrading of dopaminergic receptors? I used to get a tedious anhedonic period after a long creative squawk. I did one month's worth of selegiline, and it stopped being a problem. I'm still trying to figure out why. : ) Best, AR ********** Anders Sandberg wrote: >Life in dopaminergic overdrive is far more fun. I still remember the very >enjoyable experience of being blissed out on opiates and some >tranquilizers before going in for surgery many years ago, but it doesn't >compare to the feeling of flow when you are up at 2 in the morning writing >your academic masterpiece using every part of your mind. Flow/eudaimonia >beats plain pleasure. > >Of course, we should be able to get that more if we can just stimulate the >right motivation subsystems. Panksepp's SEEKING and PLAY systems look like >a good place to start. >http://www.thinkbody.co.uk/papers/Panic%20Seeking%20%20play.htm >http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&do pt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=15766890&query_hl=1&itool=pubmed_docsum > > >And I feel fantastic >And I never felt as good as how I do right now >Except for maybe when I think of how I felt that day >When I felt the way that I do right now, right now, right now. > >(Jonathan Coulton, I Feel Fantastic, >http://www.jonathancoulton.com/lyrics/i-feel-fantastic ) > > > ------------------------------ Message: 20 Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 12:11:11 +0200 From: Eugen Leitl Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Wireheading To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org Message-ID: <20061002101111.GK21640 at leitl.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 11:02:20AM +0100, Alex Ramonsky wrote: > > Yo Eugen : ) Allright, I take back that uninformed. You're definitely more informed than I. > I did LSD for an average of four days per week from 1983-84. [Despite > heroic attempts, we couldn't get it to work more often than that]. I It's amazing you could get it to work 4 days out of 7. It's more 2 days out of 7 for most people. > personally felt pretty blissed out in very much the same way I have on > heroin. Maybe other people don't. I'm hazarding that most other people don't. How's for a poll, here? Would you call it blissed out, or something else? (If yes, how would you describe it?). > I've only ever done heroin a couple of times, and that orally; so that > may make a difference too. > Drugs have very different effects on different people. I can only say > what it was like for me. I do have colleagues who have done both and > claim a similar experience, but perhaps the real answer here lies in > one's personal semantics for the meaning of "blissed out". To me it > means "Totally anxiety-free". Or these days, perhaps I should say, -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature Url : http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20061002/0ae 5baad/attachment-0001.bin ------------------------------ Message: 21 Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 11:16:15 +0100 From: BillK Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Wireheading To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed On 10/2/06, Alex Ramonsky wrote: You do realise that anything significant that you post on extropy-chat (or anywhere on the internet) is likely to immediately update your Homeland Security Profile? Unencrypted emails probably go there as well. We live in interesting times. BillK ------------------------------ Message: 22 Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 11:27:41 +0100 From: "John" Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Wireheading / psychoactives To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: <00b501c6e60d$69a40cc0$6d010751 at heritagekd9czj> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Four days a week, I'm quite impressed you haven't been sectioned by now. Magic mushroom tend to require quite a lot of recovery time afterwards to reach full potential again, most people leave it weeks before they eat anymore. I've not tried LSD, so I'm not sure just how long the recovery time on that is. One of the first things Hoffmann noted about LSD was that the day after he woke up feeling particularly sensitive to the world. This, combined with knowing that these molecules are metabolised out of the synapses and that immediately afterwards their potential for effect decreases suggests to me that they trigger an increase in the 'esterase metabolic pathways in the synapses. E.g. you take LSD, your body senses that it's become lodged in the post-synaptic boutons (atropine does this I believe, and is used to treat nerve agent exposure by 'clogging' the synapses to prevent spasmodic firing) and increases the levels of esterase to break it down. Afterwards, those level likely remain elevated for a while, allowing the synapse to carry a higher bandwidth of signals, allowing for a greater level of sensitivity. This is all pure speculation, but it seems like the most likely way these effects would emerge to me. I've noticed something similar after trying psilocybin mushrooms. Just out of interest, do you get a headache the morning after with LSD? I've often wondered about the possibility of mixing psychoactives to achieve greater effects. As you pointed out, sooner or later you reach a peak that's difficult to go beyond due to pathways being saturated / metabolism wiping out the active material etc. However, if multiple actives where used, one might expect the experience to be orders of magnitude more diverse - mescaline, psilocybin and salvinorin say, which all work on different receptor sites (off the top of my head, I think it's mainly... muscarine, serotonin and kappa opoid respectively). And finish it off with a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. Never tried Heroin. I tend not to believe too much of the anti-drugs stuff I read but there certainly does seem to be a correlation between Heroin and bin diving. In light of Bill's note, I live in the UK, where magic mushrooms were legal fodder until recently. John BullGuard Anti-virus has scanned this e-mail and found it clean. Try BullGuard for free: www.bullguard.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20061002/a74 e30b1/attachment.html ------------------------------ _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat End of extropy-chat Digest, Vol 37, Issue 2 ******************************************* - -------------------------------------------------------------------- Music from EMI This e-mail including any attachments is confidential and may be legally privileged. If you have received it in error please advise the sender immediately by return email and then delete it from your system. The unauthorised use, distribution, copying or alteration of this email is strictly forbidden. If you need assistance please contact us on +44 20 7795 7000. This email is from a unit or subsidiary of EMI Group plc. Registered Office: 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5SW Registered in England No 229231. - -------------------------------------------------------------------- From eugen at leitl.org Mon Oct 2 11:21:23 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 13:21:23 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wireheading In-Reply-To: References: <200609290452.k8T4qWMP001849@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451CFF7A.8030608@ramonsky.com> <2589.163.1.72.81.1159541656.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> <4520E6B6.8020901@ramonsky.com> Message-ID: <20061002112123.GN21640@leitl.org> On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 11:16:15AM +0100, BillK wrote: > You do realise that anything significant that you post on extropy-chat > (or anywhere on the internet) is likely to immediately update your > Homeland Security Profile? Really? Does this supposed to make us afraid enough to start self-censoring? What next, kauft nicht bei Juden? > Unencrypted emails probably go there as well. Encrypted, especially. I recommend doing everything through VPN initialized with a preshared secret. The sheer volume of it makes storing it all prohibitive. > We live in interesting times. Not nearly lousy enough, if some people get what they want. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From eugen at leitl.org Mon Oct 2 12:06:29 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 14:06:29 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Reply to Joseph in message 2 of extropy-chat Digest, Vol 37, Issue 2 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20061002120629.GO21640@leitl.org> On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 11:52:41AM +0100, Ferris, Luke wrote: Ferris, please trim your posts. You included the entire digest in your reply. > I am yet to find significant evidence to suggest that they want to > "Islamicise" us as your statement suggests. Do you agree that those Muslims who're living in Western socities are not particularly tolerant of their hosts' values? I'm not particularly keen to live a society regulated by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shariat At currently 6.6%/year increase (mostly through higher birth rate and immigration) of Muslim population in Germany alone that possibility is not at all far-fetched (2045 would be a break-even point, the pending integration of Turkey into EU not considered). The strict separation of believers and a secular society is a fiction. This worked more or less for for established, nonexpansive (shrinking actually, and good riddance) "native" religions like Christianity, Judaism, etc. But Islam at this stage in history is an expansive, politically active religion. A religion with core values which are frankly incompatible with transhumanism. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From sentience at pobox.com Mon Oct 2 15:51:50 2006 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Mon, 02 Oct 2006 08:51:50 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0610012326y66fde0f3h3795e07362235e64@mail.gmail.com> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> <8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com> <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <8d71341e0610012326y66fde0f3h3795e07362235e64@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <45213596.2010608@pobox.com> Russell Wallace wrote: > > That circumstance no longer obtains, and our feelings and intuitions > therefore give completely the wrong answer when we evaluate today's > problems. Since we _know_ they give the wrong answer, and we know why, > we should use reason instead. Look at the cold numbers: how many people > worldwide have been killed by terrorists from 2001 to today? Some > thousands, maybe into five digits. How many lives have been lost from > all causes in that same time? Nearly _three hundred million_. Even a > nuclear explosion in a major city would be a drop in the ocean on that > scale. I agree with Wallace. Death doesn't wear a turban. The only thing terrorists could conceivably do that would cause any significant amount of direct damage - as opposed to autoimmune disorders - would be designing a planetary pandemic. And fighting in Iraq is not an effective strategy for stopping that. > Note also that you only answered the lesser half of my argument. My > primary point was that however small or large the external threat, > compromising our most basic civil liberties - allowing our governments > to turn inward against ourselves, not outward against the enemy - is > _not effective_ as a response. It adds a second problem _without doing > anything to solve the first_. Indeed so. Politicians who want to appear effective will make great sacrifices, so that people reason: surely we must buy something, if we pay the cost of all our liberties. Of course this is a non-sequitur. Competent people sacrifice less. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From hibbert at mydruthers.com Mon Oct 2 17:33:08 2006 From: hibbert at mydruthers.com (Chris Hibbert) Date: Mon, 02 Oct 2006 10:33:08 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again In-Reply-To: <45207D63.5070005@pobox.com> References: <00ea01c6e3ee$d65b7f40$290a4e0c@MyComputer> <20060929211452.39597.qmail@web60514.mail.yahoo.com> <03ca01c6e4a3$ed3c1de0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <451EC22D.2000304@pobox.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20061001212625.02282fd8@satx.rr.com> <45207D63.5070005@pobox.com> Message-ID: <45214D54.8090206@mydruthers.com> Damien cites "A learned friend" thusly: > or colonizers, to restore the historical dominance of one ethnic or > religious group or to establish a new structure of dominance, or to impose a > particular set of religious rules--goals which are held by the various > indigenous factions who are killing people in Iraq--is hardly "fighting for > nothing in particular." There isn't one manifesto that fits everybody > toting a gun or a bomb--there are a number of contending factions--but the > fact that it can't all be summed up easily in this guy's PowerPoint > presentation doesn't make it "aimless." Different participants have > different aims. This is far from unusual--consider the various factions > involved in the South African resistance.> Eliezer's response was "Fair enough.", but I don't agree. In the South African resistance, even though there were various factions and many voices, one could easily hear over the general uproar a cry to stop the policies that made the blacks second class citizens in their own native country. Some wanted socialist solutions while others looked for tribal solutions, some voices may have called for the death or expulsion of all whites while others looked for a pluralist outcome, but a common underlying theme was coherent. In Iraq, when you can get official spokesmen or the results of credible polling, there aren't any coherent themes. Sometimes you hear "all westerners out", and other times "the Americans must stay until we can stabilize our nation". Some call for a strict imposition of Sharia law, others for a non-secular state. But most important of all, the factions committing the violence, for the most part, aren't talking at all. We don't hear anyone taking responsibility for dropping 9 severed heads out of the back of a car, for killing police recruits en masse, for killing worshipers in mosques or people waiting in line to buy gas. They are killed and no message is delivered. No actors are identified. No one takes responsibility and says "until *our* demands are met, we will continue to make Iraq unlivable". We don't know what the demands are, or who wants to be appeased. The people who talk in public (various clerics and politicians) don't take responsibility for the violence. (They often refuse to denounce it, but that doesn't tell us which factions are committing it.) This is unlike South Africa. I can't think of another conflict in which the aggrieved parties were so scattered, so violent, and so silent. Chris -- It is easy to turn an aquarium into fish soup, but not so easy to turn fish soup back into an aquarium. -- Lech Walesa on reverting to a market economy. Chris Hibbert hibbert at mydruthers.com Blog: http://pancrit.org http://zocalo.sourceforge.net Prediction Market Software From asa at nada.kth.se Mon Oct 2 23:21:45 2006 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 01:21:45 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Wireheading In-Reply-To: <4520E6B6.8020901@ramonsky.com> References: <200609290452.k8T4qWMP001849@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451CFF7A.8030608@ramonsky.com> <2589.163.1.72.81.1159541656.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> <4520E6B6.8020901@ramonsky.com> Message-ID: <3305.130.237.122.245.1159831305.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Alex Ramonsky wrote: > If I understand you correctly, how do you prevent eventual downgrading > of dopaminergic receptors? I used to get a tedious anhedonic period > after a long creative squawk. Ah, yes, that could be a problem. Hmm, do you think your anhedonia was due to dopaminergic receptor changes or just regression towards the mean? I have the feeling that preventing downregulation or upregulation would be pretty pharmacologically useful, anybody know how well we have learned to control such functions? -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From transhumanist at goldenfuture.net Tue Oct 3 00:19:34 2006 From: transhumanist at goldenfuture.net (Joseph Bloch) Date: Mon, 02 Oct 2006 20:19:34 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Reply to Joseph in message 2 of extropy-chat Digest, Vol 37, Issue 2 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4521AC96.8000307@goldenfuture.net> Ferris, Luke wrote: >"of Islamists inspired by their ridiculous faith (as all faiths are >ridiculous) to impose their vision of their faith on every single human >being on this planet by deadly force, and being willing to kill >themselves to advance that goal." > >Can you please provide some citations to back up this claim? > >All of my research so far indicates that Islamic terrorism (and indeed >terrorism in general) is a tactic used to achieve an outcome (such as >troop withdrawal) in response to a particular stimulus (such as the >occupation of a homeland). >Certainly this is the case with Al-Qaeda, who spare no lengths to >broadcast there grievances (Troops on the Arabian peninsular, troops in >Iraq, the persecution of Palestinians etc.) although the Western media >pays little attention to it. > >I am yet to find significant evidence to suggest that they want to >"Islamicise" us as your statement suggests. > >Luke > A quick scan of only the most recent stories on this subject yields the following (this is of course only representative; I'll leave it to others to provide a complete list of citations, for they are simply too numerous). The quote by Ahmadinejad is particularly direct and all the more chilling therefor. Philadelphia Inquirer (http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/special_packages/sunday_review/15648243.htm): ""The war with Israel is not about a treaty, a cease-fire agreement, Sykes-Picot borders, national zeal, or disputed borders," Ayman al-Zawahiri explained this year. "It is rather a jihad for the sake of God until the religion of God is established." ... "Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proclaimed in 2005: "[We] will soon experience a world without the United States, and Zionism and will breathe in the brilliant time of Islamic sovereignty over today's world."" SITE Institute (http://siteinstitute.org/bin/articles.cgi?ID=publications215406&Category=publications&Subcategory=0): "On the pope's comments directly, Zawahiri adds: "if Benedict attacked us, we will respond to his insults with good things. We will call upon him, and all of the Christians to become Muslims who do not recognize the Trinity or the crucifixion, and say that Allah united with the human."" The Age (http://www.theage.com.au/news/war-on-terror/alqaeda-chiefs-reveal-world-domination-design/2005/08/23/1124562861654.html?oneclick=true): "THE al-Qaeda master plan to take over the world and turn it into an Islamic state has been revealed for the first time. For a new book, Jordanian journalist Fouad Hussein interviewed top lieutenants of the terrorist network, including the mastermind of many atrocities in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. ... "Hussein writes that in the terrorists' eyes, because the rest of the world will be so beaten down by the "One-and-a-half billion Muslims", the caliphate will undoubtedly succeed. This phase should be completed by 2020, although the war should not last longer than two years." Joseph From transhumanist at goldenfuture.net Tue Oct 3 01:22:50 2006 From: transhumanist at goldenfuture.net (Joseph Bloch) Date: Mon, 02 Oct 2006 21:22:50 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> <8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4521BB6A.2030403@goldenfuture.net> Russell Wallace wrote: > On 10/1/06, *Joseph Bloch* > wrote: > > I hope, I truly hope, that you wake up from your Republican-hating > ways > to realize that this nation really does face an external threat of > hitherto-unseen proportions. It's not about people in power in the > U.S. > > > But this sort of thing isn't hitherto-unseen at all. Hitler and > Mussolini used the argument that they needed power to protect the > people against communism. Communism was a real threat (it killed tens > of millions of people, far more than the Islamic fundamentalists have) > - but fascism was not the answer. It isn't the answer to Islamic > fundamentalism today either. > > I think the threat of terrorism is greatly overstated, but I agree > there is a threat and it has to be fought. It does not at all follow > that we in the West should tolerate erosion of our civil liberties by > our own governments. It's not just that it's not necessary - _it's > also not helpful_. If you have a problem, and you try to solve it by > surrendering your freedom, you now have two problems. I disagree with the false dichotomy you have presented. Fascism and Communism were not opposites. Rather, they were both merely forms of Totalitarianism with the window-dressing changed. In allying themselves with the Soviet Union against the Axis, the Allies were merely using one form of Totalitarianism to help defeat another. They could just as easily have reversed the process, allying themselves with Nazi Germany against the USSR, and then fought the Axis thereafter. Islamist totalitarianism is no different in its goal and broad form than either Naziism or Soviet Communism. It seeks global domination, and does through through the totalitarian control of the populace (in this specific case, that control is achieved through politico-religious, rather than purely political ideology). The West managed to tolerate "erosion of our civil liberties" during both World War II and the Cold War, in the name of survival. We managed to escape with those liberties relatively unscathed. It is indeed a conundrum. The very civil liberties we hold dear are used as a weapon against the societies which embrace them, with the goal of using the forms of Western civilization to cause its downfall. History has shown us that as the threats to Western civilization by those who would use its institutions to destroy it grows, the freedoms granted by those institutions are restricted, lessening the threat. Once the threat is removed, the restrictions are loosened. I see no reason to believe that same self-correcting mechanism is not still in operation. Joseph From russell.wallace at gmail.com Tue Oct 3 01:37:55 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 02:37:55 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <4521BB6A.2030403@goldenfuture.net> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> <8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com> <4521BB6A.2030403@goldenfuture.net> Message-ID: <8d71341e0610021837s45da7e4ek62481f7057ac4a72@mail.gmail.com> On 10/3/06, Joseph Bloch wrote: > > I disagree with the false dichotomy you have presented. Fascism and > Communism were not opposites. Rather, they were both merely forms of > Totalitarianism with the window-dressing changed. My point precisely. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From transhumanist at goldenfuture.net Tue Oct 3 01:48:58 2006 From: transhumanist at goldenfuture.net (Joseph Bloch) Date: Mon, 02 Oct 2006 21:48:58 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <1159770735.13119.4.camel@localhost> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> <8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com> <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1159770735.13119.4.camel@localhost> Message-ID: <4521C18A.1010907@goldenfuture.net> Samantha Atkins wrote: >What do you mean "up to a point"? Criticism is always in order in a >free country. > >- samantha > Indeed! One wonders if the activities of the German-American Bund should not have been allowed after Germany declared war on the United States in 1941. Or the various Japanese "patriotic" organizations. And yet, innumerable individuals and organizations make all manner of excuses and lend support to the Islamists who would see Sharia law imposed on the entire world, with never a word of condemnation for bombings, hijackings, beheadings, burnings, and outright murders. (How many Muslim organizations condemned the slaying of that Italian nun a week or two ago, compared to the number who condemned the Pope for quoting some obscure Byzantine source in a highly complex philosophical argument?) All in the name of those civil liberties you claim are being taken away. If your hypothesis were true, surely there would be mass arrests of Muslims and Democrats by now. You are allowing your hatred of the current administration to blind you to the force which really wants to destroy the Western way of life. What do you think would be more conducive to seeing the Transhumanist vision come to fulfillment? A Taliban-like state imposed over all the peoples of the world? Or a stridently pro-business Western democracy? Joseph From brentn at freeshell.org Tue Oct 3 02:17:21 2006 From: brentn at freeshell.org (Brent Neal) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 22:17:21 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <4521C18A.1010907@goldenfuture.net> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> <8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com> <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1159770735.13119.4.camel@localhost> <4521C18A.1010907@goldenfuture.net> Message-ID: On Oct 2, 2006, at 21:48, Joseph Bloch wrote: > You are allowing your hatred of the current administration to blind > you > to the force which really wants to destroy the Western way of life. > What > do you think would be more conducive to seeing the Transhumanist > vision > come to fulfillment? A Taliban-like state imposed over all the peoples > of the world? Or a stridently pro-business Western democracy? I think the point that is being made here is that you are letting your love of the current administration blind you to the force that really wants to destroy the Western way of life; that is, an out of control right-wing administration bent on destroying the rule of law and our civil liberties in the name of political gain and Christian fundamentalism, amongst other things. If what the current government was working toward was, as you say, a "pro-business Western democracy," then I think most of us wouldn't be as up in arms as we are. I don't think that anyone alive is smart enough to predict the exact path to Singularity, but I'll place a large wager that the anti- rationalism of religious fundamentalism and dictatorial rule are not on the high-probability paths. Given thatI personally see no real difference between insanity of Islamic fundamentalism and the insanity of Christian fundamentalism. You do, apparently, and on that we'll have to disagree. B -- Brent Neal Geek of all Trades http://brentn.freeshell.org "Specialization is for insects" -- Robert A. Heinlein From transhumanist at goldenfuture.net Tue Oct 3 02:33:37 2006 From: transhumanist at goldenfuture.net (Joseph Bloch) Date: Mon, 02 Oct 2006 22:33:37 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> <8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com> <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1159770735.13119.4.camel@localhost> <4521C18A.1010907@goldenfuture.net> Message-ID: <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> Brent Neal wrote: >I think the point that is being made here is that you are letting >your love of the current administration blind you to the force that >really wants to destroy the Western way of life; that is, an out of >control right-wing administration bent on destroying the rule of law >and our civil liberties in the name of political gain and Christian >fundamentalism, amongst other things. > I will thank you to not attempt to ascribe motives to me, nor try to divine my loves and hates. I have no "love" for the current adminitration. I have many staunch disagreements with current policy across a broad spectrum. However, I do agree with them on one overriding point; that the threat posed by Islamist extremists is one which threatens the very existence of the United States and Western culture as a whole, and I find that ensuring the overall survival of Western civilization, which I believe to be the most conducive to achieving a PostHuman future, is paramount. Joseph From fauxever at sprynet.com Tue Oct 3 03:01:13 2006 From: fauxever at sprynet.com (Olga Bourlin) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 20:01:13 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Uses of Religion References: <7.0.1.0.2.20060930004433.021ed6b0@satx.rr.com><200609301633.k8UGXJ2G008697@andromeda.ziaspace.com><04c301c6e575$b7b62620$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677><008f01c6e57a$00f84800$6600a8c0@brainiac> <050801c6e5e6$7b9c2fb0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <028201c6e698$30331770$6600a8c0@brainiac> From: "Lee Corbin" Sent: Sunday, October 01, 2006 10:48 PM > Olga writes the difference between Saddam killing Iraqis and Iraqi's > killing Iraqies. >> Saddam's hands. Now it is on George Bush's hands > Why is it so important whose blood is on whose hands? That is, if we are > interested in less suffering, everything else being equal we should > applaud actions that reduce casualties. (Yes---I know that not everything > else is equal.) Doesn't integrity count for something? And isn't a good reputation important? How can the USA hope to hold on to any respect it may have with other countries in the world - unless it acts honorably? The importance is that before the war in Iraq Saddam was considered the "bad guy." Now - by many more people in many more countries than before the war in Iraq - the USA is considered the "bad guy." It is not clear that the Iraqi war will show a reduction in casualties - the conflict seems far from over, and who knows over how many borders the blood will keep spilling? The USA went to "free" the Iraqis ... but ended up "freeing" a lot of Iraqis from ... their lives. > It reminds me of the chain of reasoning pacifists use. They are > disturbed, yes, by killings, but it's whether or not their own hands are > clean that is to them what's crucial. I don't think you'll find all that much agreement among pacifists, and there are degrees of pacifism even among so-called pacifists. >> Another important difference is that the reputation of the USA has sunk >> to a very low level (Abu Ghraib: >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_prison) > > Please find me a major conflict without incidents of this kind (or, > usually, much worse) any time in human history. Even when sociopaths are > not drawn into armies and police forces---and it's estimated that about > four percent of people are sociopaths---wars invariably coarsen all > involved. If that's the problem, then that scenario would have needed to be placated in advance - call it a "defensive strategy." Because the bottom line is ... the USA cannot lead by example if we are not exemplary ourselves. Olga From brentn at freeshell.org Tue Oct 3 03:04:21 2006 From: brentn at freeshell.org (Brent Neal) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 23:04:21 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> <8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com> <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1159770735.13119.4.camel@localhost> <4521C18A.1010907@goldenfuture.net> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> Message-ID: <5A00360A-2453-48AC-8388-7498CC95E5B1@freeshell.org> On Oct 2, 2006, at 22:33, Joseph Bloch wrote: > However, I do agree with them on one overriding point; that the threat > posed by Islamist extremists is one which threatens the very existence > of the United States and Western culture as a whole, Ahh, but once you've paid that Danegeld.... B -- Brent Neal Geek of all Trades http://brentn.freeshell.org "Specialization is for insects" -- Robert A. Heinlein From hkhenson at rogers.com Tue Oct 3 03:24:50 2006 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 02 Oct 2006 23:24:50 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again (send 2) Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20061002232431.04560eb8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 10:33 AM 10/2/2006 -0700, Chris wrote: snip >The people who talk in public (various clerics and politicians) don't >take responsibility for the violence. (They often refuse to denounce >it, but that doesn't tell us which factions are committing it.) This is >unlike South Africa. I can't think of another conflict in which the >aggrieved parties were so scattered, so violent, and so silent. Unfortunately, from an EP model viewpoint senseless violence makes sense. :-( Keith Henson From spike66 at comcast.net Tue Oct 3 03:35:11 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 20:35:11 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <200610030335.k933ZMMx029845@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Brent Neal > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place > > > On Oct 2, 2006, at 21:48, Joseph Bloch wrote: > > > You are allowing your hatred of the current administration to blind > > you to the force which really wants to destroy ... > > ... you are letting > your love of the current administration blind you to the force that > really wants to destroy ... This is a paradox that we cannot solve with our usual tools. Logic simply fails. What happens when a society of religious freedom is confronted by a religion that does not allow religious freedom? Does universal tolerance mean we tolerate intolerance? spike From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Tue Oct 3 03:37:18 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 23:37:18 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> <8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com> <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1159770735.13119.4.camel@localhost> <4521C18A.1010907@goldenfuture.net> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> Message-ID: On 10/2/06, Joseph Bloch wrote: > However, I do agree with them on one overriding point; that the threat > posed by Islamist extremists is one which threatens the very existence > of the United States and Western culture as a whole, and I find that > ensuring the overall survival of Western civilization, which I believe > to be the most conducive to achieving a PostHuman future, is paramount. Given that we are within a generation of a "real" posthuman future I would like to see someone propose *any* scenario through which external actions of any group with the possible exception of Russia could bring about the downfall of either the United States or Western culture. The only scenarios I can imagine are completely shooting ourselves in our feet (which the recent executive and legislative actions seem to be *slightly* leaning towards) or completely sticking our heads in the sand and not taking the necessary actions when things may be really serious. Yes, there are tens, maybe hundreds of millions of people who are or could be brainwashed to take action against us -- but they *do not* currently have and as far as I can run forward scenarios, *cannot* develop, the means to do "us" serious harm before we are *well* into or past the rapid change phase of the singularity. I believe, as Eliezer points out, that only a global pandemic due to an engineered bioweapon with significantly greater ill effects than the 1918 influenza epidemic could cause such a problem. It would be very difficult to engineer a weapon with that kind of lethality and impossible to engineer it in such a way that it would not come back and cause significant harm to ones own "tribe" [1]. I is a case, as MC Hammer once put it, of "You can't touch this." Robert 1. It is one thing to send in 1 in 100 as suicide bombers, its entirely another to sacrifice 50, 60, or 70% of ones own population to take down 70, 80, or 90% of another population. Particularly when the people left standing are likely to respond with overwhelming force. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fauxever at sprynet.com Tue Oct 3 03:57:28 2006 From: fauxever at sprynet.com (Olga Bourlin) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 20:57:28 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place References: <200610030335.k933ZMMx029845@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <02a801c6e6a0$0c29a710$6600a8c0@brainiac> From: "spike" Sent: Monday, October 02, 2006 8:35 PM > This is a paradox that we cannot solve with our usual tools. Logic simply > fails. What happens when a society of religious freedom is confronted by > a religion that does not allow religious freedom? Does universal > tolerance mean we tolerate intolerance? Freedom of religion in the USA only guarantees that one can believe in a religion of one's choosing or one's ethnic background - that is not to say that the religions themselves are necessarily very "free" (as their devotees may voluntarily subject themselves to a host of privations - sexual abstinence, fasts, prohibition on eating certain foods, etc.). It is our freedom of speech that allows for tolerating intolerance, e.g.: http://www.kansaspress.ku.edu/strwhe.html However, respecting one's right to a particular view does not mean we necessarily must respect that - or any particular - view. Olga From spike66 at comcast.net Tue Oct 3 04:19:01 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 21:19:01 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <02a801c6e6a0$0c29a710$6600a8c0@brainiac> Message-ID: <200610030419.k934JJGU000171@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Olga Bourlin > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place > > From: "spike" > ... Does universal tolerance mean we tolerate intolerance? > ... > > It is our freedom of speech that allows for tolerating intolerance, e.g.: > > http://www.kansaspress.ku.edu/strwhe.html > > However, respecting one's right to a particular view does not mean we > necessarily must respect that - or any particular - view. Olga Thanks Olga, this is indeed a strange and interesting case. The ACLU defended the Nazis! Perhaps it was a trap. When a bunch of the brown-shirts are marching down a public street, one of the holocaust surviving Jews could sit up in the woods a mile away with a high powered scoped rifle. Heeeere nazi nazi nazi... spike From moulton at moulton.com Tue Oct 3 09:29:21 2006 From: moulton at moulton.com (Fred C. Moulton) Date: Tue, 03 Oct 2006 02:29:21 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <200610030419.k934JJGU000171@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200610030419.k934JJGU000171@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <1159867761.4892.96.camel@localhost.localdomain> On Mon, 2006-10-02 at 21:19 -0700, spike wrote: > Thanks Olga, this is indeed a strange and interesting case. The ACLU > defended the Nazis! The stand by the ACLU was very controversial at the time and the news reports of the time mentioned the internal strife that this caused the ACLU as an organization. There are differences between the positions that I hold and those of the ACLU but in general the stand of the ACLU improved my opinion of the organization. The ACLU is not perfect but they are useful on some issues. Fred From hkhenson at rogers.com Tue Oct 3 14:44:36 2006 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 03 Oct 2006 10:44:36 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <1159867761.4892.96.camel@localhost.localdomain> References: <200610030419.k934JJGU000171@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <200610030419.k934JJGU000171@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20061003104213.044dc210@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 02:29 AM 10/3/2006 -0700, you wrote: >On Mon, 2006-10-02 at 21:19 -0700, spike wrote: > > Thanks Olga, this is indeed a strange and interesting case. The ACLU > > defended the Nazis! > >The stand by the ACLU was very controversial at the time and the news >reports of the time mentioned the internal strife that this caused the >ACLU as an organization. There are differences between the positions >that I hold and those of the ACLU but in general the stand of the ACLU >improved my opinion of the organization. The ACLU is not perfect but >they are useful on some issues. And utterly useless on any issue that even remotely involves the scientology cult. Also it eventually came out why the ACLU didn't support any of the tobacco litigation. ($) Keith Henson From brentn at freeshell.org Tue Oct 3 16:15:57 2006 From: brentn at freeshell.org (Brent Neal) Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 12:15:57 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20061003104213.044dc210@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <200610030419.k934JJGU000171@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <200610030419.k934JJGU000171@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20061003104213.044dc210@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: On Oct 3, 2006, at 10:44, Keith Henson wrote: > Also it eventually came out why the ACLU didn't support any of the > tobacco > litigation. ($) I'm curious how the tobacco lawsuits had anything to do with civil liberties? B -- Brent Neal Geek of all Trades http://brentn.freeshell.org "Specialization is for insects" -- Robert A. Heinlein From user at dhp.com Tue Oct 3 15:53:59 2006 From: user at dhp.com (Ensel Sharon) Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 11:53:59 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] clarifications RE: CR and free-rad theory of aging... Message-ID: As you may have guessed from my recent postings, I am delving into the free-rad theory of aging and calorie restriction. I have some basic questions that I am not finding clear answers for: 1. What accounting does CR and CR theory take of physical output in relation to calories consumed ? Is it an absolute reduction in calories that is pursued, or relative to ones activity ? Does a large person that maintains "healthy CR'd bodyweight" get the same benefit as a small person that maintains "healthy CR'd bodyweight" ? If so, wouldn't that suggest that an athlete burning a CR'd 2000 calories per day would get the same benefit as a lightly active or inactive person burning a CR'd 1200 calories per day ? (assuming that a comparable athlete not doing CR would consume something like 2800-3200, and a comparable non-athlete would consume something like 2000) 2. What about the age issue ? The claim that CR benefits "only the young" is very interesting, but always very vague. Define young. On the wikipedia page, it cites that rats that started CR at age 18 months showed no benefit. Let's assume that this is true - what is the human age equivalent for 18 rat months ? If I am 31 years old, is it too late ? Is it binary, as in, if you get it young enough you get full benefits, but if you don't you get none OR is it on a scale wherein you can get some benefit if you start late (beyond the simple benefit of simply being healthier at that period) All comments/suggestions appreciated. I realize this is not a CR list - I just like the quality of discussion here. From sentience at pobox.com Tue Oct 3 17:40:01 2006 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Tue, 03 Oct 2006 10:40:01 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <200610030335.k933ZMMx029845@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200610030335.k933ZMMx029845@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <4522A071.7090607@pobox.com> spike wrote: > > This is a paradox that we cannot solve with our usual tools. Logic simply > fails. Heinlein had a sympathetic character say, in one of his stories: "Logic is a fine thing, but I have seen a perfectly logical proof that 2 = 1." (If anyone remembers which story this is from, please let me know.) Heinlein was probably thinking of this: x = y = 1 x = y x^2 = xy x^2 - y^2 = xy - y^2 (x+y)(x-y) = y(x-y) x+y = y 2 = 1 Now you could look at that, shrug, and say, like Heinlein, "See, I told you logic doesn't always work." Or, if you felt that math had justly earned a bit more credibility than that over the last three thousand years, you might suspect that the flaw lay in your use of math, rather than Math Itself. You might suspect, perhaps, that the proof was not "perfectly logical". The novice goes astray and says: "The Art failed me." The expert goes astray and says: "I failed my Art." > What happens when a society of religious freedom is confronted by a > religion that does not allow religious freedom? Does universal tolerance > mean we tolerate intolerance? Does the set of all sets that do not contain themselves, contain itself? Who says there's such a thing as "universal tolerance"? -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From transhumanist at goldenfuture.net Tue Oct 3 21:56:14 2006 From: transhumanist at goldenfuture.net (Joseph Bloch) Date: Tue, 03 Oct 2006 17:56:14 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> <8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com> <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1159770735.13119.4.camel@localhost> <4521C18A.1010907@goldenfuture.net> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> Message-ID: <4522DC7E.3020503@goldenfuture.net> Robert Bradbury wrote: > Given that we are within a generation of a "real" posthuman future I > would like to see someone propose *any* scenario through which > external actions of any group with the possible exception of Russia > could bring about the downfall of either the United States or Western > culture. The only scenarios I can imagine are completely shooting > ourselves in our feet (which the recent executive and legislative > actions seem to be *slightly* leaning towards) or completely sticking > our heads in the sand and not taking the necessary actions when things > may be really serious. I see us, as a collective culture with obvious exceptions, as doing just that. Sticking out heads in the sands. Whether or not we will be _able_ to take the necessary actions once things get really serious is another question entirely. > > Yes, there are tens, maybe hundreds of millions of people who are or > could be brainwashed to take action against us -- but they *do not* > currently have and as far as I can run forward scenarios, *cannot* > develop, the means to do "us" serious harm before we are *well* into > or past the rapid change phase of the singularity. I disagree. I can think of many scenarios by which a hundred million people willing to kill themselves to take out a number of the enemy (which in this scenario is us) could completely devastate Europe and North America without the benefit of any sophisticated weapons of mass destruction. As the Iranians proved against the Iraqis during the (truly) first Gulf War, a large enough force of amateurs can at the very least hold a more capable but less numerous opponent to a standstill. > > I believe, as Eliezer points out, that only a global pandemic due to > an engineered bioweapon with significantly greater ill effects than > the 1918 influenza epidemic could cause such a problem. It would be > very difficult to engineer a weapon with that kind of lethality and > impossible to engineer it in such a way that it would not come back > and cause significant harm to ones own "tribe" [1]. Engineering isn't necessary. Get a few (or not so few) volunteers infected with smallpox (or something equally virulent and deadly) and have them wander around the main concourses of a score or so major air travel hubs, coughing. You don't need any fancy genetic engineering to get a devastating effect out of THAT (and I am frankly shocked, although pleasantly so, that they haven't thought of it yet). Remember, these are people keenly adept at using low-tech means to achieve great destructive ends. A handful of $1.99 box cutters are leveraged into devices capable of killing 3,000 or so innocent people, in the right hands. You don't need fancy labs and technology to inflict great damage. That's been proven over and over again. > > I is a case, as MC Hammer once put it, of "You can't touch this." > > Robert > > 1. It is one thing to send in 1 in 100 as suicide bombers, its > entirely another to sacrifice 50, 60, or 70% of ones own population to > take down 70, 80, or 90% of another population. Particularly when the > people left standing are likely to respond with overwhelming force. That, of course, is a different matter, and one dealt with in George R.R. Martin's short story "Call Him Moses." In it, the main character re-creates the Biblical plagues on an enemy, and only threatens to inflict the death of the first-born. It turns out that his solution is somewhat less surgical than that of the God of the Old Testament, in that it does indeed kill the first born, but everybody else as well. The enemy surrenders. I think that a fanatical enough adversary wouldn't care about such things, or would see them as a further proof of the protection of their god, who would doubtless protect the faithful against the plague. (The fact that the architects of such a scheme would doubtless be hold up in very isolated regions where the threat of the plague would be far less than, say, Boston or Rome, would of course not be lost upon them.) Some, indeed, such as Iranian President Ahmadinejad, are said to actively _seek_ a catastrophic confrontation, believing that worldly chaos will usher in the return of the Twelfth Imam, who will set the world to rights. I wouldn't count on the squeamishness of the Islamists to inflict casualities on their own side, to prevent them from doing something like that. Joseph From hkhenson at rogers.com Tue Oct 3 21:31:36 2006 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 03 Oct 2006 17:31:36 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place (resend 1) Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20061003173126.045e7e58@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 09:22 PM 10/2/2006 -0400, Joseph wrote: >Russell Wallace wrote: snip > > But this sort of thing isn't hitherto-unseen at all. Hitler and > > Mussolini used the argument that they needed power to protect the > > people against communism. Communism was a real threat (it killed tens > > of millions of people, far more than the Islamic fundamentalists have) I take a different view of such ideologies, considering them to be window dressing on a deeper problem. But even so, the original Islamic expansion resulted in an awful lot of deaths on a considerably smaller population base. > > - but fascism was not the answer. It isn't the answer to Islamic > > fundamentalism today either. If there is a perceived need to kill vast numbers of people, some "justification," rationalization will be found. It's the human way, we can't go fully into war mode madness without it. > > I think the threat of terrorism is greatly overstated, but I agree > > there is a threat and it has to be fought. The problem being that darn near nobody understands the cause or what to do about it. > > It does not at all follow > > that we in the West should tolerate erosion of our civil liberties by > > our own governments. It's not just that it's not necessary - _it's > > also not helpful_. If you have a problem, and you try to solve it by > > surrendering your freedom, you now have two problems. Yep. >I disagree with the false dichotomy you have presented. Fascism and >Communism were not opposites. Rather, they were both merely forms of >Totalitarianism with the window-dressing changed. And what is "Totalitarianism" and what are the conditions in which it arises? Put another way, Hitler would have stayed a watercolor painter if _________. >In allying themselves >with the Soviet Union against the Axis, the Allies were merely using one >form of Totalitarianism to help defeat another. They could just as >easily have reversed the process, allying themselves with Nazi Germany >against the USSR, and then fought the Axis thereafter. Not possible unless the USSR had attacked. And though there was lots of noise about it, and fighting around the edges, in the post WWII years USSR (with its expansionist communist memes) never attacked. I think I know the reason. Anyone else want to state it? >Islamist totalitarianism is no different in its goal and broad form than >either Naziism or Soviet Communism. It seeks global domination, and does >through through the totalitarian control of the populace (in this >specific case, that control is achieved through politico-religious, >rather than purely political ideology). Ok. Why is this happening *now* rather than say 40 years ago? I.e., what has changed? snip Keith Henson From transhumanist at goldenfuture.net Tue Oct 3 23:06:53 2006 From: transhumanist at goldenfuture.net (Joseph Bloch) Date: Tue, 03 Oct 2006 19:06:53 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place (resend 1) In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20061003173126.045e7e58@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20061003173126.045e7e58@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <4522ED0D.2000708@goldenfuture.net> Keith Henson wrote: >At 09:22 PM 10/2/2006 -0400, Joseph wrote: > > >>In allying themselves >>with the Soviet Union against the Axis, the Allies were merely using one >>form of Totalitarianism to help defeat another. They could just as >>easily have reversed the process, allying themselves with Nazi Germany >>against the USSR, and then fought the Axis thereafter. >> >> > >Not possible unless the USSR had attacked. > >And though there was lots of noise about it, and fighting around the edges, >in the post WWII years USSR (with its expansionist communist memes) never >attacked. I think I know the reason. Anyone else want to state it? > > Hitler beat him to it. Stalin would've invaded Germany within months if not sooner. See Viktor Suvorov, ?Who was Planning to Attack Whom in June 1941, Hitler or Stalin?? /Journal of the Royal United Services Institute/ (June 1985), and /Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War/ (London: 1990). > > >>Islamist totalitarianism is no different in its goal and broad form than >>either Naziism or Soviet Communism. It seeks global domination, and does >>through through the totalitarian control of the populace (in this >>specific case, that control is achieved through politico-religious, >>rather than purely political ideology). >> >> > >Ok. Why is this happening *now* rather than say 40 years ago? I.e., what >has changed? > > I am rather embarassed that it needs to be spelled out. The USSR collapsed, the Cold War ended, the threat of nuclear annihilation (temporarily) was withdrawn, and the dampening effect of the global quasi-military/political/economic struggle between communism and capitalsm was removed. One cannot under-estimate the effect of the Cold War on all the nations of the world, especially those who were proxies of one side or another. There were no _major_ conflicts during that period (Korea, Viet Nam, Afghanistan, El Salvador, etc. not rising anywhere close, even collectively, to the level of a World War II or I-- hence the term "Cold War"). In that context, the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq may be seen as a prelude to the new "major" conflict between Islamist extremism and the West, in the same way that the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, or the Japanese invasion of China was seen as the prelude to World War II. I can find very little to add to the discussion at this point, so barring some super-repliable comment, I will consider my points made and get back to working on the new project. Joseph From nvitamore at austin.rr.com Tue Oct 3 18:28:15 2006 From: nvitamore at austin.rr.com (nvitamore at austin.rr.com) Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 14:28:15 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place Message-ID: <380-22006102318281578@M2W030.mail2web.com> From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky >spike wrote: >>This is a paradox that we cannot solve with our usual tools. Logic simply >>fails. >Heinlein had a sympathetic character say, in one of his stories: "Logic >is a fine thing, but I have seen a perfectly logical proof that 2 = 1." >(If anyone remembers which story this is from, please let me know.) >Heinlein was probably thinking of this: >x = y = 1 >x = y >x^2 = xy >x^2 - y^2 = xy - y^2 >(x+y)(x-y) = y(x-y) >x+y = y >2 = 1 Proof that 2 equals 1 1) Given: X=Y 2) Multiply both sides by X: X^2=XY 3) Subtract Y^2 from both sides: X^2-Y^2=XY-Y^2 4) Factorise: (X+Y)(X-Y)=Y(X-Y) 5) Cancel out (X-Y) term: X+Y=Y 6) Substitute X for Y, by equation 1 2Y=Y 7)Divide both sides by Y 2=1 ? "Omni" Natasha -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web - Check your email from the web at http://mail2web.com/ . From transhumanist at goldenfuture.net Wed Oct 4 01:41:06 2006 From: transhumanist at goldenfuture.net (Joseph Bloch) Date: Tue, 03 Oct 2006 21:41:06 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <45209BD5.6040403@mac.com> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> <45209BD5.6040403@mac.com> Message-ID: <45231132.6050007@goldenfuture.net> Oh, I've read it, and others like it. I still dismiss it. In regards to the first point, which is the most potentially damning in an objective sense, I can speak as an expert in the field, being Manager of Election Polling for one of the largest (and most accurate in the 2004 election cycle) public opinion polling companies in the country. The argument that exit polls in 2004 bespoke of any wrongdoing is completely inaccurate. It completely misses the point of what exit polls are supposed to do; not predict winners and losers, but give insight into the characteristics of the supporters of each candidate. Indeed, the man in charge of the exit polling in 2004 made a spectacularly public mia culpa at an AAPOR conference, where he admitted that the exit polls were dead wrong. See: http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2005/05/aapor_exit_poll.html The rest I dismiss as the same sort of partisan wrangling that one sees in any election. I can put forth accusations of Democrats bussing in homeless people into Ohio, and bribing them to vote Democratic. I can cite instances where military personnel (who traditionally vote more Republican than Democratic) were systematically denied their vote in places controlled by Democratic operatives. Ad nauseum. It is the usual partisan nonsense, and one sees that particular Medusa's head raised after every election, where the losing side cannot possibly believe that they couldn't have _really_ lost. If you persist in such feelings, though, you might find this of use: http://zapatopi.net/afdb/ Quite done with this particular conversation. Joseph Samantha Atkins wrote: >Joseph, > >Before you dismiss the idea of a stolen election you might want to read >a bit, perhaps starting with the following. > >http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen > >_______________________________________________ >extropy-chat mailing list >extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > > > From moulton at moulton.com Wed Oct 4 05:03:04 2006 From: moulton at moulton.com (Fred C. Moulton) Date: Tue, 03 Oct 2006 22:03:04 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Robert Anton Wilson is ill Message-ID: <1159938184.4890.169.camel@localhost.localdomain> Per this: http://www.rushkoff.com/2006/10/robert-anton-wilson-needs-our-help.php and http://www.boingboing.net/2006/10/02/robert_anton_wilson_.html and http://www.rawilson.com/ RAW is in bad health and needs some financial support. I expect that many of you have read and enjoyed his books over the years. I remember reading each volume of the Illuminatus Trilogy as they were published and enjoying them deeply. It is easy to use use PayPal (that is what I did). Use the info given on the URLs above. Fred From spike66 at comcast.net Wed Oct 4 03:20:28 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 20:20:28 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] clarifications RE: CR and free-rad theory of aging... In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <200610040331.k943VWZX023808@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Ensel Sharon > Subject: [extropy-chat] clarifications RE: CR and free-rad theory of > aging... > > > As you may have guessed from my recent postings, I am delving into the > free-rad theory of aging and calorie restriction. I have some basic > questions that I am not finding clear answers for:... > All comments/suggestions appreciated. I realize this is not a CR list - I > just like the quality of discussion here. No apologies necessary Ensel. Many of us here are all about surviving to see the singularity, or if not that, living long enough to see some waaay cool new technologies that promise to make our final years more comfortable, more fun, and more numerous. CR is apparently in first place for current known life extension techniques. The following is not a direct answer to any of your questions, but rather a commentary or theory I would like to toss into extro-space for the cluey ones to devour. Fat cells need to form from stem cells, right? And stem cells that are used up forming flab are not available for more health-restoring purposes, such as repairing damaged organs and such. So perhaps one of the reasons CR results in life extension is that it keeps more stem cells available. I expect this effect to be second to the more obvious advantage: if one does CR, one is thin, so one can walk more easily, therefore one is more likely to do more the form of exercise that is most available to the elderly: walking. Consider that you don't many see really old geezers pumping iron down at the gym, not many of them playing soccer or skating, but plenty of them (or 'us' depending on one's point of view) out walking the trails, and nearly all of those elderly walkers are thin. This observation tempts one to theorize that CR isn't what actually extends life, but rather the immediate and direct side effect: thinness, resulting in more exercise, along with all the well known side benefits, such a protection from the long list of flab-related diseases that we have come to know so very well in these well-fed and sedentary times. spike From spike66 at comcast.net Wed Oct 4 03:30:18 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 20:30:18 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <4522A071.7090607@pobox.com> Message-ID: <200610040350.k943opg1015419@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Eliezer S. Yudkowsky ... > > Heinlein had a sympathetic character say, in one of his stories: "Logic > is a fine thing, but I have seen a perfectly logical proof that 2 = 1." > (If anyone remembers which story this is from, please let me know.) > > Heinlein was probably thinking of this: > > x = y = 1 > x = y > x^2 = xy > x^2 - y^2 = xy - y^2 > (x+y)(x-y) = y(x-y) > x+y = y > 2 = 1 > > Now you could look at that, shrug, and say, like Heinlein, "See, I told > you logic doesn't always work."... Eliezer S. Yudkowsky Thanks Mr. Heinlein, love your stories, and I agree that logic does not always work. But logic worked perfectly in the example you provided: x = y = 1 x = y x^2 = xy x^2 - y^2 = xy - y^2 (x+y)(x-y) = y(x-y) (2)*(0)= (1)*(0) 0=0 QED. Or if you insist on dividing by zero in step 6, then undefined = undefined. QED spike From hkhenson at rogers.com Wed Oct 4 03:56:11 2006 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 03 Oct 2006 23:56:11 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place (resend 1) In-Reply-To: <4522ED0D.2000708@goldenfuture.net> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20061003173126.045e7e58@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20061003173126.045e7e58@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20061003235115.04608fe0@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 07:06 PM 10/3/2006 -0400, you wrote: >Keith Henson wrote: snip > >And though there was lots of noise about it, and fighting around the edges, > >in the post WWII years USSR (with its expansionist communist memes) never > >attacked. I think I know the reason. Anyone else want to state it? > > > >Hitler beat him to it. Stalin would've invaded Germany within months if >not sooner. > >See Viktor Suvorov, "Who was Planning to Attack Whom in June 1941, >Hitler or Stalin?" /Journal of the Royal United Services Institute/ >(June 1985), and /Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War/ (London: >1990). You utterly miss the point. The reason the USSR didn't go to war was that easy birth control (mostly abortion) kept the population growth in reasonable bounds--even given poor economic growth. > >>Islamist totalitarianism is no different in its goal and broad form than > >>either Naziism or Soviet Communism. It seeks global domination, and does > >>through through the totalitarian control of the populace (in this > >>specific case, that control is achieved through politico-religious, > >>rather than purely political ideology). > >> > >Ok. Why is this happening *now* rather than say 40 years ago? I.e., what > >has changed? > > >I am rather embarassed that it needs to be spelled out. The USSR >collapsed, the Cold War ended, the threat of nuclear annihilation >(temporarily) was withdrawn, and the dampening effect of the global >quasi-military/political/economic struggle between communism and >capitalsm was removed. Fluff. The real problem is the growth of the Islamic population without much economic growth. Keith Henson From spike66 at comcast.net Wed Oct 4 04:00:09 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 21:00:09 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <45231132.6050007@goldenfuture.net> Message-ID: <200610040400.k9440HgS026867@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Joseph Bloch ... > > The rest I dismiss as the same sort of partisan wrangling that one sees > in any election. I can put forth accusations of Democrats bussing in > homeless people into Ohio, and bribing them to vote Democratic... Joseph Joseph this comment reminds me of the dilemma the exit pollsters face. Those areas in which most of the voters are likely to vote to the left are often too dangerous for pollster to enter alone. (Think outskirts of Washington DC for instance.) Should the pollster carry along sufficient armed protection to ensure a reasonable degree of safety, a significant fraction of the local voters would be frightened away from the polls by the presence of the police. I would be interested to hear if it works that way in Europe too. spike From moulton at moulton.com Wed Oct 4 08:54:30 2006 From: moulton at moulton.com (Fred C. Moulton) Date: Wed, 04 Oct 2006 01:54:30 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <200610040400.k9440HgS026867@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200610040400.k9440HgS026867@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <1159952070.4890.245.camel@localhost.localdomain> Spike Do you have any hard data or references that the scenario that you describe actually occurs? If so how frequently? Out of how many pollsters? Please provide the references. Thanks. Fred On Tue, 2006-10-03 at 21:00 -0700, spike wrote: > Joseph this comment reminds me of the dilemma the exit pollsters face. > Those areas in which most of the voters are likely to vote to the left are > often too dangerous for pollster to enter alone. (Think outskirts of > Washington DC for instance.) Should the pollster carry along sufficient > armed protection to ensure a reasonable degree of safety, a significant > fraction of the local voters would be frightened away from the polls by the > presence of the police. > > I would be interested to hear if it works that way in Europe too. > > spike > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From scerir at libero.it Wed Oct 4 06:15:17 2006 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2006 08:15:17 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place References: <200610040400.k9440HgS026867@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <001901c6e77c$773300b0$64b91f97@nomedxgm1aalex> > I would be interested to hear > if it works that way in Europe too. > spike In Italy police controls every voting station. And every citizen has a pre-assigned voting station (in general close to home). From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Wed Oct 4 14:32:06 2006 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2006 10:32:06 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> <8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com> <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1159770735.13119.4.camel@localhost> <4521C18A.1010907@goldenfuture.net> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> Message-ID: <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> On 10/2/06, Joseph Bloch wrote: > > However, I do agree with them on one overriding point; that the threat > posed by Islamist extremists is one which threatens the very existence > of the United States and Western culture as a whole, and I find that > ensuring the overall survival of Western civilization, which I believe > to be the most conducive to achieving a PostHuman future, is paramount. > ### I don't see it this way. Islamic extremists a just a bunch of, to use a racist term, despicable, stupid ragheads who couldn't stare down a brigade of Marines, much less destroy Western civilization. In terms of firepower they are not in the same league as the SS or the Red Army, by orders of magnitude. They are a trifle. However, dismantling the legal devices that protect the freedom of the Americans may result in severe disruption of our way of life without ever making the slightest difference in reducing the jihadist threat. The Vingean singularity may occur within the next 30 years, and I am genuinely curious if it will be delayed, or worse, perverted by the rise of the security state. How is the likelihood of the rise of an unfriendly AI impacted by increased secrecy, and out-of-control spending on nefarious projects? We know that the opportunity to exercise unbridled control over others attracts the most vicious humans - will therefore our guardians (now less guarded by judges and citizens) become more vicious on average? What will be the AI like, if its makers are psychopaths with unlimited budgets in a black project? Current scuffles in distant and unsavory parts of the world do not worry me directly. What worries me is their possible indirect impact, through inducing deleterious changes in our political culture, on the course of AI research. Rafal From spike66 at comcast.net Wed Oct 4 14:47:05 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2006 07:47:05 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <1159952070.4890.245.camel@localhost.localdomain> Message-ID: <200610041447.k94ElCXO002804@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Fred, it was a commentary I saw in the Mercury News last election cycle, don't know where it referred. You and I live near San Jose. Can you think of any areas, such as just south of Commercial and east of the freeway, that you would be reluctant to enter alone? I can assure you that my home town of Titusville Florida contains areas waaay more dangerous than that one. Now in those areas, how do you suppose the locals will vote? My notion is that typically any election is nearly balanced, with voters 45-55-ish split. But some areas will go 80 to 90 percent one way (think DC again). Those areas are highly influential in the balance, because they also tend to be very densely packed. If pollsters are afraid to go in there, they don't get counted in exit polls. spike > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat- > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Fred C. Moulton > Sent: Wednesday, October 04, 2006 1:55 AM > To: ExI chat list > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place > > Spike > > Do you have any hard data or references that the scenario that you > describe actually occurs? If so how frequently? Out of how many > pollsters? > > Please provide the references. Thanks. > > Fred > > On Tue, 2006-10-03 at 21:00 -0700, spike wrote: > > Joseph this comment reminds me of the dilemma the exit pollsters face. > > Those areas in which most of the voters are likely to vote to the left > are > > often too dangerous for pollster to enter alone. (Think outskirts of > > Washington DC for instance.) Should the pollster carry along sufficient > > armed protection to ensure a reasonable degree of safety, a significant > > fraction of the local voters would be frightened away from the polls by > the > > presence of the police. > > > > I would be interested to hear if it works that way in Europe too. > > > > spike > > > > > > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > extropy-chat mailing list > > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From spike66 at comcast.net Wed Oct 4 14:48:24 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2006 07:48:24 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <001901c6e77c$773300b0$64b91f97@nomedxgm1aalex> Message-ID: <200610041448.k94EmUGr010489@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of scerir ... > > In Italy police controls every voting station. > And every citizen has a pre-assigned voting > station (in general close to home)... If that is done here, there are accusations of one party scaring away voters with cops. spike From john.heritage at v21.me.uk Wed Oct 4 16:03:27 2006 From: john.heritage at v21.me.uk (John) Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2006 17:03:27 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Nanobatteries References: <200610041448.k94EmUGr010489@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <00c401c6e7ce$a703c840$c02b0751@heritagekd9czj> Don't know if anyone else has noticed this yet but there's an article here; http://www.physorg.com/news3539.html It's not nanosized batteries, it's a regular lithium-ion prismatic battery with nano particles on the cathode that soak up the lithium ions and prevent the cell from loosing electrolyte during heating. What's impressive is the performance you can achieve with the enhanced cathode. Recharge times of 1 minute! 1% cell degradation after 1,000 charge cycles, that's twenty times better than NiMH if my memory is right (seriously impressive - that would realistically mean one battery per product lifetime). If you've ever considered the practicalities of designing high quality, portable electronics, you'll know how good these specifications are. I'd be interested to know more about the pulse performance of these. If they're better than regular lithium-ions, it could be a good challenge for the supercapacitor enhanced regular cells (supercapacitors leak charge from the cell during storage) - especially where volume is an issue. Pulse performance is particularly important if the cell is powering a switch mode supply, where amp sized pulsing transients can be drawn to drive the magnetics for supplies outputting much lower currents. In that example, the battery has a tendancy to go 'flat' as soon as the impedance increases just enough to reduce the pulses below the regulation cutoff point. Or in electric cars where you need the huge pulse to produce interia during acceleration. I think these will almost certainly contend with fuel cells in lots of portable applications. Reminds me of computer games. Being able to plug into wall mounted chargers whilst you're out and about and juice your PDA up for 10p. Very cool. John BullGuard Anti-virus has scanned this e-mail and found it clean. Try BullGuard for free: www.bullguard.com From thespike at satx.rr.com Wed Oct 4 16:02:52 2006 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Wed, 04 Oct 2006 11:02:52 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] exit polls In-Reply-To: <200610041447.k94ElCXO002804@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <1159952070.4890.245.camel@localhost.localdomain> <200610041447.k94ElCXO002804@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20061004105920.0213c5b0@satx.rr.com> At 07:47 AM 10/4/2006 -0700, Spike wrote: >My notion is that typically any election is nearly balanced, with voters >45-55-ish split. But some areas will go 80 to 90 percent one way (think DC >again). Those areas are highly influential in the balance, because they >also tend to be very densely packed. If pollsters are afraid to go in >there, they don't get counted in exit polls. And this explains the *under*-representation of voters for "rightist" candidates in such exit polls? (Or have I misunderstood your claim?) Damien Broderick From eugen at leitl.org Wed Oct 4 16:25:56 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2006 18:25:56 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <200610041447.k94ElCXO002804@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <1159952070.4890.245.camel@localhost.localdomain> <200610041447.k94ElCXO002804@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <20061004162556.GF21640@leitl.org> On Wed, Oct 04, 2006 at 07:47:05AM -0700, spike wrote: > My notion is that typically any election is nearly balanced, with voters > 45-55-ish split. But some areas will go 80 to 90 percent one way (think DC > again). Those areas are highly influential in the balance, because they > also tend to be very densely packed. If pollsters are afraid to go in > there, they don't get counted in exit polls. Of course black voters intercepted by the police in the electoral dysfunction states and active vote manipulation in papertrailless fake-your-vote Diebolds could be another explanation for the phenomenon. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From sentience at pobox.com Wed Oct 4 18:01:38 2006 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Wed, 04 Oct 2006 11:01:38 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> <8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com> <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1159770735.13119.4.camel@localhost> <4521C18A.1010907@goldenfuture.net> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > > How is the likelihood of the rise of an unfriendly AI impacted by > increased secrecy, and out-of-control spending on nefarious projects? > We know that the opportunity to exercise unbridled control over others > attracts the most vicious humans - will therefore our guardians (now > less guarded by judges and citizens) become more vicious on average? > What will be the AI like, if its makers are psychopaths with unlimited > budgets in a black project? Paperclips are paperclips, whether the AI is built by terrorists trying to create a Sharia enforcer, or eager idealistic researchers who don't understand the concept of "back off until you know what you're doing". No one gives a damn about AI research, and until that changes, changes in other government policies aren't going to affect anything one way or the other. Save your strength for things that (a) matter and (b) you can make a personal difference on. Some things are just not relevant to the Singularity, people. Get over it. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Wed Oct 4 19:30:07 2006 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2006 15:30:07 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> <8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com> <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1159770735.13119.4.camel@localhost> <4521C18A.1010907@goldenfuture.net> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> Message-ID: <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> On 10/4/06, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote: > No one gives a damn about AI research, and until that changes, changes > in other government policies aren't going to affect anything one way or > the other. ### You are right here, but you may dismiss my worries a bit too early: One day in the not-too-distant future some high-level government officers will approve major funding for a general AI, and today's changes in political culture are likely to have an impact on the moral and intellectual qualities of these officers. As you note, even the best intentions of idealistic researchers may backfire horribly, but the intellectual offspring of evil functionaries is simply guaranteed to fry us all. Rafal From sentience at pobox.com Wed Oct 4 21:04:04 2006 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Wed, 04 Oct 2006 14:04:04 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs (was: Tyranny in place) In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> <8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com> <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1159770735.13119.4.camel@localhost> <4521C18A.1010907@goldenfuture.net> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > On 10/4/06, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote: > >>No one gives a damn about AI research, and until that changes, changes >>in other government policies aren't going to affect anything one way or >>the other. > > ### You are right here, but you may dismiss my worries a bit too > early: One day in the not-too-distant future some high-level > government officers will approve major funding for a general AI, and > today's changes in political culture are likely to have an impact on > the moral and intellectual qualities of these officers. It really doesn't matter whether an improperly shaped intelligence explosion is set off by altruistic idealists, or patriots, or bureaucrats, or terrorists. A galaxy turned into paperclips is just as much of a tragedy either way. > As you note, > even the best intentions of idealistic researchers may backfire > horribly, but the intellectual offspring of evil functionaries is > simply guaranteed to fry us all. Not "may" backfire horribly. Rafal, you work in biology. You know from experience that biology is difficult. You've probably also met people who think that biology is easy enough for them to make up cool-sounding theories about it. Think about what behavior you've witnessed from most AGI wannabes. Ask yourself if they seem to understand intelligence as solidly as you understand biology. Now imagine someone with that degree of understanding of biology, trying to build something really wonderful and exotic - say, a retrovirus that reverses Alzheimer's disease. It doesn't matter if they're motivated by the will to heal, or pure greed - they can't do it at that level of understanding, end of story. If some high-level government officers approve major funding for a general AI, they'll find a prestigious AI researcher, someone who's been failing at the problem longer than anyone else, and appoint a blue-ribbon committee containing not a single researcher under the age of 40 to oversee the project. Google might be worrisome someday. But for now, Google's founders apparently believe that it is Google's destiny to become an AI and this will happen by magic, when their databases grow large enough to be blessed by the Emergence Fairy. I am more worried about a single one of Google's resident geniuses spending their days off on an AI project. Partial understanding is dangerous; great big computer clusters are not. Which would you be more afraid of, Rafal, an environmental extremist with a grade school education and a multibillion dollar state-of-the-art medical research lab, or an environmental extremist with a Ph.D. and a hundred thousand dollars? Newton wasted much of his life on Christian mysticism, so it's possible to make great discoveries and still not understand how to think. But the art of an FAI creator is thought itself - to see cognition as an engine which accomplishes work. I cannot visualize someone discovering the basic organizing principles of intelligence, in a scientific field presently full of confusion and dismay, without their having an *intuitive* appreciation of how rationality works. It would be like Newton not being able to see mathematics incarnate in a falling apple. It would be like Carnot not being able to visualize heat flows. Maybe someday there'll be textbooks that teach idiots how to build AI, but to discover it yourself, you need an *intuitive* appreciation of the results achieved by cognitive workflows. You cannot master that art *from scratch* and afterward still be so poor a rationalist as Newton. No Sharia zombie could get one tenth of the way to independently discovering how to build and shape an AGI, and still remain a Sharia zombie. A genius fool might stumble over powerful forces they can't control. A genius fool might build something that sorta works, in a poorly understood way, but works just well enough to cross the threshold of recursive self-improvement. A genius fool might spend their days working with evolutionary algorithms, knowing nothing of Bayescraft. After all, natural selection originally built humans using no abstract understanding whatsoever. So, yes, genius fools are dangerous - but not because they might decide to shape a Sharia enforcer. Genius fools are dangerous because they can't shape minds at all. It doesn't matter whether their intentions are good or bad, because the outcome bears no relation to their intentions for it. It requires a precise understanding to master the shaping art, to set off an intelligence explosion that relates *at all* to your original intentions. If there is any recognizable resemblance you must have known a very great deal indeed. It requires considerably *less* understanding than that, to appreciate how powerful the forces are which you intend to mess with. No one can know how to build a nuclear reactor that operates in a state of controlled criticality, without being able to calculate the doubling time of a chain reaction. No one can understand intelligence and still think of an intelligence explosion as a weapon in short-term political squabbles. An astrophysicist knows the power output of a star, and that a star is brighter than a campfire. An astrophysicist is not going to say, "Hey, let's set off a supernova to bust in that terrorist bunker." Maybe the astrophysicist's superiors fail to comprehend anything about a supernova except that it makes a bang - but the astrophysicist can't help but know what would happen. If the astrophysicist is ordered to do it anyway, told to set off a supernova or face a court martial, the astrophysicist is not going to shrug and go ahead with it. Imagine this as a *literal* scenario, not a metaphor. If you want to keep your job, you might try all sorts of dodges, but you wouldn't actually set off a supernova - not when you knew damned well that the Earth would end up as not-even-vapor. So can we have enough of this silly scenario where someone creates *and successfully shapes* an intelligence explosion, while simultaneously not noticing that they are messing with powers vast enough to reconfigure galaxies? Can we stop pretending that someone might build *and shape* an AGI, by the exercise of their precise understanding, for the sake of a cute little toy weapons system? A genius fool might accidentally fry the planet, turn our galaxy into paperclips. But no genius fool could accomplish any specific purpose, anything with a nonzero correlation to what they originally had in mind. Paperclips are paperclips - whether that outcome is brought about by terrorists or patriots, universities or Google, idealists or villains. All you're arguing about is whose logo will look the prettiest on the tombstone. This is a counterintuitive point, I know. It is much more satisfying to cheer the Blues, or boo the Greens, or whatever your accustomed chariot-racing allegiance may be. But this problem is more difficult than that, and old habits will not solve it. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From nvitamore at austin.rr.com Thu Oct 5 01:27:05 2006 From: nvitamore at austin.rr.com (nvitamore at austin.rr.com) Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2006 21:27:05 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] TRENDS: Email is so yesterday Message-ID: <380-2200610451275281@M2W024.mail2web.com> Anyone have thoughts on this? http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061002-7877.html Natasha Natasha Vita-More http://www.natasha.cc -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web - Check your email from the web at http://mail2web.com/ . From neomorphy at gmail.com Thu Oct 5 02:10:19 2006 From: neomorphy at gmail.com (Olie Lamb) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 12:10:19 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs (was: Tyranny in place) In-Reply-To: <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1159770735.13119.4.camel@localhost> <4521C18A.1010907@goldenfuture.net> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> Message-ID: Oh, that was comic gold. *Snork* Just one point, tho: On 10/5/06, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote: > > No Sharia zombie could get one tenth of the way to independently > discovering how to build and shape an AGI, and still remain a Sharia > zombie. The key word there being _independent_ Otherwise, I wouldn't share quite so much... uh... "optimism". The emergence fairy might not do much with raw data, but I can't prove that {AGI can't be built from lots of separate (incomplete) tools/narrow AI bits / other stuff}, and that an idiot with only dodgy rationality might try to do just that. Possibly not a problem for now, but maybe a problem in a decade or several. That's the idiot-at-Google.Inc scenario that I worry about. --Olie -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at comcast.net Thu Oct 5 02:07:39 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2006 19:07:39 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] exit polls In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20061004105920.0213c5b0@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <200610050220.k952KJBu000921@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Damien Broderick > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] exit polls > > At 07:47 AM 10/4/2006 -0700, Spike wrote: > > >... If pollsters are afraid to go in > >there, they don't get counted in exit polls. > > And this explains the *under*-representation of voters for "rightist" > candidates in such exit polls? (Or have I misunderstood your claim?) > > Damien Broderick I need to review what I posted, but my intention was that this mechanism would account for under-representation of voters in the exit polls for left-leaning candidates. I am thinking of a list of factors that account for inaccuracies in exit polls. There were factors on both sides, but this one looked like a biggie to me, or perhaps my view is being influenced by the bad section of town where I grew up. My memory is vague, it is entirely possible that the list I am referring to was partly derived on ExI. Did we discuss this before? spike From transhumanist at goldenfuture.net Thu Oct 5 02:40:41 2006 From: transhumanist at goldenfuture.net (Joseph Bloch) Date: Wed, 04 Oct 2006 22:40:41 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] exit polls In-Reply-To: <200610050220.k952KJBu000921@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200610050220.k952KJBu000921@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <452470A9.3080502@goldenfuture.net> Bear in mind that exit polls are _not_ designed to predict winners, but rather to determine demographics and attitudes of voters (which is why objections that exit polls don't match vote counts are nonsense; they are not meant to measure the same thing). Traditionally, the precincts which are subjected to exit polls are very carefully selected so that in aggregate they represent a viable cross-section of the voting population. Just because one particular precinct isn't exit polled doesn't mean that the voters in that precinct are not represented in the exit poll; there is an intricate means of determining which precincts to poll, so that the entire electorate is represented. See http://www.exit-poll.net/ for some more info. Joseph spike wrote: > > >>bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Damien Broderick >>Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] exit polls >> >>At 07:47 AM 10/4/2006 -0700, Spike wrote: >> >> >> >>>... If pollsters are afraid to go in >>>there, they don't get counted in exit polls. >>> >>> >>And this explains the *under*-representation of voters for "rightist" >>candidates in such exit polls? (Or have I misunderstood your claim?) >> >>Damien Broderick >> >> > >I need to review what I posted, but my intention was that this mechanism >would account for under-representation of voters in the exit polls for >left-leaning candidates. I am thinking of a list of factors that account >for inaccuracies in exit polls. There were factors on both sides, but this >one looked like a biggie to me, or perhaps my view is being influenced by >the bad section of town where I grew up. My memory is vague, it is entirely >possible that the list I am referring to was partly derived on ExI. Did we >discuss this before? > >spike > > > > > > >_______________________________________________ >extropy-chat mailing list >extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > > > From spike66 at comcast.net Thu Oct 5 02:28:59 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2006 19:28:59 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] edison's experimentation In-Reply-To: <20061004162556.GF21640@leitl.org> Message-ID: <200610050248.k952mgqp012253@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Here's a number of Thomas Edison stories that had me ROTFLing: {8^D http://www.lateralscience.co.uk/edison/index.html From spike66 at comcast.net Thu Oct 5 02:49:15 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2006 19:49:15 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] TRENDS: Email is so yesterday In-Reply-To: <380-2200610451275281@M2W024.mail2web.com> Message-ID: <200610050249.k952nMgU012777@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of nvitamore at austin.rr.com > Subject: [extropy-chat] TRENDS: Email is so yesterday > > > Anyone have thoughts on this? > > http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061002-7877.html > > > Natasha I have difficulty imagining that instant messages would have very much memetic content. You wouldn't bother thinking out and typing your deepest ideas into a medium so evanescent, gone like a wisp of vapor in an instant. I can easily imagine however, content such as "how r u?" followed by whatever is the mod hip appropriate response to that profound inquiry. I expect that our own conversations were not terribly deep when we were teenagers. It was all about mating at that age, a mostly unsuccessful and pointless exercise I might add. This is one way being an adult really is better than being a teen. Friends I have no issues at all with being considered an old geezer. Give me my email, use groups, my fovorite websites, and I will cheerfuly let the younger set how-r-u each other's brains out with no interference, objection, or trace of envy. spike From msd001 at gmail.com Thu Oct 5 03:02:54 2006 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2006 23:02:54 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] TRENDS: Email is so yesterday In-Reply-To: <380-2200610451275281@M2W024.mail2web.com> References: <380-2200610451275281@M2W024.mail2web.com> Message-ID: <62c14240610042002k6bebc6dbha1681a9a9029fb36@mail.gmail.com> On 10/4/06, nvitamore at austin.rr.com wrote: > > Anyone have thoughts on this? > http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061002-7877.html > my thought is that convergence isn't happening quickly enough. We don't need to distinguish between IM and Email. We need only to express an idea towards a recipient. If you are available via IM, we should be communicating with a low latency of about every 5 words to a full sentence. If you are not available, my entire stream of IM idea-a-grams should automatically coalesce into the notion of an email which you catch up on when you return to availability. If I then want that message to be consumed by a group, the thoughts should be tagged in a way that authenticates the group members to have access to the content. If I want no access restrictions, then my IM/email/blog is world-readable. I want a Wiki-style page that I can grant R/W/RW access to nobody/one friend/all friends/everybody or any combination. The same slow convergence trend is in personal electronics too. Why do I have to decide if I want the 40Gb or 60Gb iPod - If you put wi-fi in it then I wouldn't need more than 2Gb and my media could live on a server and stage the 'next 3' songs on the device for playback. Caching software is smart enough to anticipate my playlist requirements. If you network enable the music player, why not put a phone in it? Oh yeah, that's already been done. But then why doesn't that device have a good camera? 1.3megapixels? that's not good, that's pre-Y2K. Let's start with a 5MP camera and add phone, no lets add PDA, no music, etc. Why can't we have one device that has all these things in it? Because people keep spending their money to get the next cooler gadget in an effort to stay on the cutting edge. I'm sure this is similar to "kids" adoption of the telephone 60+ years ago. Or radio however many more years ago, or any technology that was once unavailable until it became ubiquitous. the only people who worry about being "old" because they haven't adopted the "hip" thing are already hopelessly uncool anyway. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sentience at pobox.com Thu Oct 5 03:48:50 2006 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Wed, 04 Oct 2006 20:48:50 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs In-Reply-To: References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1159770735.13119.4.camel@localhost> <4521C18A.1010907@goldenfuture.net> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> Message-ID: <452480A2.4020502@pobox.com> Olie Lamb wrote: > Oh, that was comic gold. *Snork* > > Just one point, tho: > > On 10/5/06, *Eliezer S. Yudkowsky* > wrote: > > No Sharia zombie could get one tenth of the way to independently > discovering how to build and shape an AGI, and still remain a Sharia > zombie. > > The key word there being _independent_ > > Otherwise, I wouldn't share quite so much... uh... "optimism". Well, yes, if someone else does the geniusing and then writes it up as a textbook, odd things might happen. > The emergence fairy might not do much with raw data, but I can't prove > that {AGI can't be built from lots of separate (incomplete) tools/narrow > AI bits / other stuff}, and that an idiot with only dodgy rationality > might try to do just that. Possibly not a problem for now, but maybe a > problem in a decade or several. > > That's the idiot-at-Google.Inc scenario that I worry about. That's the point I was trying to make - the key phrase above is "build *and shape*", that is, solve FAI not just AGI. That's what you can't do and remain a Sharia zombie, because to do that, you have to understand what you're doing, not just throw around a bunch of tools. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From thespike at satx.rr.com Thu Oct 5 04:10:07 2006 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Wed, 04 Oct 2006 23:10:07 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] exit polls In-Reply-To: <200610050220.k952KJBu000921@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20061004105920.0213c5b0@satx.rr.com> <200610050220.k952KJBu000921@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20061004230738.02133088@satx.rr.com> At 07:07 PM 10/4/2006 -0700, Spike wrote: >I need to review what I posted, but my intention was that this mechanism >would account for under-representation of voters in the exit polls for >left-leaning candidates. I am thinking of a list of factors that account >for inaccuracies in exit polls. Yes, but isn't the usual complaint quite the reverse: that exit polls suggested a *larger* number of votes for the left than appeared in the final count? Why else would the left cry stinking fish (aka "we wuz robbed") on this basis? Damien Broderick From spike66 at comcast.net Thu Oct 5 04:56:11 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2006 21:56:11 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] exit polls In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20061004230738.02133088@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <200610050456.k954uHCe002824@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Damien Broderick ... > > Yes, but isn't the usual complaint quite the reverse: that exit polls > suggested a *larger* number of votes for the left than appeared in > the final count? Why else would the left cry stinking fish (aka "we > wuz robbed") on this basis? > > Damien Broderick Hmmm, that I don't know, but would guess that the side that complains depends on which way the elections go. spike From emlynoregan at gmail.com Thu Oct 5 06:13:39 2006 From: emlynoregan at gmail.com (Emlyn) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 15:43:39 +0930 Subject: [extropy-chat] TRENDS: Email is so yesterday In-Reply-To: <62c14240610042002k6bebc6dbha1681a9a9029fb36@mail.gmail.com> References: <380-2200610451275281@M2W024.mail2web.com> <62c14240610042002k6bebc6dbha1681a9a9029fb36@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <710b78fc0610042313i4cf115b3ne2da835c6117dc4f@mail.gmail.com> I find that Skype is pretty much like this. We've got ongoing multi-person chat sessions for our dev team in Skype, and I find that if I miss a day or two, when I come back it's all automagically available in the chat history (which is all available inline anyway). Our day to day trivial "water cooler" stuff happens in IM. More complex ideas get communicated in email. If I'm really forced to, I might actually use Word to write something up, but pretty much only when required by external forces (eg: a client wants a "document"). When people need to really interact, we use voip + gotomeeting (for voice communication + shared desktop). Emlyn On 05/10/06, Mike Dougherty wrote: > > On 10/4/06, nvitamore at austin.rr.com wrote: > > > > Anyone have thoughts on this? > > http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061002-7877.html > > > > my thought is that convergence isn't happening quickly enough. We don't > need to distinguish between IM and Email. We need only to express an idea > towards a recipient. If you are available via IM, we should be > communicating with a low latency of about every 5 words to a full sentence. > If you are not available, my entire stream of IM idea-a-grams should > automatically coalesce into the notion of an email which you catch up on > when you return to availability. If I then want that message to be consumed > by a group, the thoughts should be tagged in a way that authenticates the > group members to have access to the content. If I want no access > restrictions, then my IM/email/blog is world-readable. I want a Wiki-style > page that I can grant R/W/RW access to nobody/one friend/all > friends/everybody or any combination. > > The same slow convergence trend is in personal electronics too. Why do I > have to decide if I want the 40Gb or 60Gb iPod - If you put wi-fi in it then > I wouldn't need more than 2Gb and my media could live on a server and stage > the 'next 3' songs on the device for playback. Caching software is smart > enough to anticipate my playlist requirements. If you network enable the > music player, why not put a phone in it? Oh yeah, that's already been > done. But then why doesn't that device have a good camera? 1.3megapixels? > that's not good, that's pre-Y2K. Let's start with a 5MP camera and add > phone, no lets add PDA, no music, etc. Why can't we have one device that > has all these things in it? Because people keep spending their money to get > the next cooler gadget in an effort to stay on the cutting edge. > > > > I'm sure this is similar to "kids" adoption of the telephone 60+ years > ago. Or radio however many more years ago, or any technology that was once > unavailable until it became ubiquitous. the only people who worry about > being "old" because they haven't adopted the "hip" thing are already > hopelessly uncool anyway. > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Thu Oct 5 06:50:38 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 08:50:38 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs (was: Tyranny in place) In-Reply-To: References: <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1159770735.13119.4.camel@localhost> <4521C18A.1010907@goldenfuture.net> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> Message-ID: <20061005065038.GM21640@leitl.org> On Thu, Oct 05, 2006 at 12:10:19PM +1000, Olie Lamb wrote: > The key word there being _independent_ > Otherwise, I wouldn't share quite so much... uh... "optimism". > The emergence fairy might not do much with raw data, but I can't prove > that {AGI can't be built from lots of separate (incomplete) > tools/narrow AI bits / other stuff}, and that an idiot with only dodgy I'm pretty certain that a heap of man-made blocks which weren't designed for emergence will never remain anything but a random pile of legos. > rationality might try to do just that. Possibly not a problem for > now, but maybe a problem in a decade or several. > That's the idiot-at-Google.Inc scenario that I worry about. The only advantage of Google is lots of hardware, and the 20% rule. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From eugen at leitl.org Thu Oct 5 06:59:34 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 08:59:34 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] exit polls In-Reply-To: <200610050456.k954uHCe002824@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20061004230738.02133088@satx.rr.com> <200610050456.k954uHCe002824@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <20061005065934.GN21640@leitl.org> On Wed, Oct 04, 2006 at 09:56:11PM -0700, spike wrote: > Hmmm, that I don't know, but would guess that the side that complains > depends on which way the elections go. It would be pretty hard to bully WASPs that way: http://www.alternet.org/story/10589/ -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From sjatkins at mac.com Thu Oct 5 07:05:30 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 00:05:30 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wireheading In-Reply-To: <4520E3AC.1030607@ramonsky.com> References: <200609290452.k8T4qWMP001849@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451CFF7A.8030608@ramonsky.com> <20060929112008.GM21640@leitl.org> <4520E3AC.1030607@ramonsky.com> Message-ID: <50F7DCAC-C0D2-4EB7-AA8B-A45A3692ABB4@mac.com> On Oct 2, 2006, at 3:02 AM, Alex Ramonsky wrote: > Yo Eugen : ) > I did LSD for an average of four days per week from 1983-84. > [Despite heroic attempts, we couldn't get it to work more often than > that]. Hmm. Every few days was about the max as I remember it from my a lost period in my youth long past and then only if you ate reasonably well and took vitamins. No more than once a week for a relatively good trip. Once every two - four weeks was better still. > I personally felt pretty blissed out in very much the same way I > have on heroin. Bliss is only a small corner of what can/does happen with acid. It usually happens, if it happens, about 2-3 hours in but sometimes on the way back down. With acid a lot depends on "set and setting" and of course on dosage. Never took heroin but as the mechanism is *very* different I would expect they aren't that similar generally. I have never heard of heroin having set and setting dependencies either. > Maybe other people don't. > I've only ever done heroin a couple of times, and that orally; so > that may make a difference too. > Drugs have very different effects on different people. I can only > say what it was like for me. I do have colleagues who have done both > and claim a similar experience, but perhaps the real answer here > lies in one's personal semantics for the meaning of "blissed out". > To me it means "Totally anxiety-free". That is hardly "bliss" in my book. Bliss is more than absence of anxiety. > Or these days, perhaps I should say, "Normal". Bliss is not normal. Or perhaps I should say that what is generally, and the word implies/invokes generality, "normal" is not bliss. - samantha From sjatkins at mac.com Thu Oct 5 07:08:33 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 00:08:33 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wireheading In-Reply-To: References: <200609290452.k8T4qWMP001849@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451CFF7A.8030608@ramonsky.com> <2589.163.1.72.81.1159541656.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> <4520E6B6.8020901@ramonsky.com> Message-ID: <855ECAFE-AF01-4893-8EA7-1DB3D2B867B2@mac.com> On Oct 2, 2006, at 3:16 AM, BillK wrote: > On 10/2/06, Alex Ramonsky wrote: > > > You do realise that anything significant that you post on extropy-chat > (or anywhere on the internet) is likely to immediately update your > Homeland Security Profile? The day I live in fear of these meat heads and their silly profiles is the day I disappear completely. - samantha From sjatkins at mac.com Thu Oct 5 07:12:05 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 00:12:05 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Reply to Joseph in message 2 of extropy-chat Digest, Vol 37, Issue 2 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Oct 2, 2006, at 3:52 AM, Ferris, Luke wrote: > "of Islamists inspired by their ridiculous faith (as all faiths are > ridiculous) to impose their vision of their faith on every single > human > being on this planet by deadly force, and being willing to kill > themselves to advance that goal." > > Can you please provide some citations to back up this claim? > > All of my research so far indicates that Islamic terrorism (and indeed > terrorism in general) is a tactic used to achieve an outcome (such as > troop withdrawal) in response to a particular stimulus (such as the > occupation of a homeland). Not quite. At least Islam in particular encourages its followers to react violently to any perceived slight to the faith, even from those who do not share it. This is malignant and must be stopped. - samantha > From sjatkins at mac.com Thu Oct 5 07:23:49 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 00:23:49 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <4521BB6A.2030403@goldenfuture.net> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> <8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com> <4521BB6A.2030403@goldenfuture.net> Message-ID: <024847E8-1102-43C6-9187-2C3ED54388B2@mac.com> On Oct 2, 2006, at 6:22 PM, Joseph Bloch wrote: > The West managed to tolerate "erosion of our civil liberties" during > both World War II and the Cold War, in the name of survival. We > managed > to escape with those liberties relatively unscathed. > That was against much more clear enemies and dangers with a much clearer notion of what winning meant in the case of WWI. Even with that we see some things done then as very much wrong today. Today we are also putting into place mechanisms not used then and freedom to be left alone by the government is much deteriorated compared to what it was then. Actually, except for the commie witch hunt period we didn't lose much in the way of civil liberties in the Cold War afaik. What do you have in mind? Besides, saying they were restricted back then and we did ok does not make it right and/or not dangerous then or now. > It is indeed a conundrum. The very civil liberties we hold dear are > used > as a weapon against the societies which embrace them, with the goal of > using the forms of Western civilization to cause its downfall. If we give them up then the downfall has already occurred. So this cannot be an option. > History > has shown us that as the threats to Western civilization by those who > would use its institutions to destroy it grows, the freedoms granted > by > those institutions are restricted, lessening the threat. Once the > threat > is removed, the restrictions are loosened. I see no reason to believe > that same self-correcting mechanism is not still in operation. > As the machinery for utterly ubiquitous monitoring of the population is much refined now I think it is much more dangerous to flirt with such restrictions on freedom and much more difficult to correct, if necessary by force, run away excesses of restriction in the direction of tyranny. - samantha From sjatkins at mac.com Thu Oct 5 07:37:09 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 00:37:09 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> <8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com> <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1159770735.13119.4.camel@localhost> <4521C18A.1010907@goldenfuture.net> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> Message-ID: On Oct 2, 2006, at 7:33 PM, Joseph Bloch wrote: > Brent Neal wrote: > >> I think the point that is being made here is that you are letting >> your love of the current administration blind you to the force that >> really wants to destroy the Western way of life; that is, an out of >> control right-wing administration bent on destroying the rule of law >> and our civil liberties in the name of political gain and Christian >> fundamentalism, amongst other things. >> > > I will thank you to not attempt to ascribe motives to me, nor try to > divine my loves and hates. So what is good for the goose does not apply to you eh? You have gone out of your way repeatedly to ascribe motives and loves and hates to me. You have done so despite having known me online long enough to realize I am not the simpleton you make me out to be. Nor am I wearing the cartoonish blinders you keep attempting to paint on me. Apply the golden rule please. - samantha From sjatkins at mac.com Thu Oct 5 07:40:48 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 00:40:48 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <200610030335.k933ZMMx029845@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200610030335.k933ZMMx029845@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <5CA8F39E-55DB-43C8-B261-E0FB5854FF03@mac.com> On Oct 2, 2006, at 8:35 PM, spike wrote: > > This is a paradox that we cannot solve with our usual tools. Logic > simply > fails. What happens when a society of religious freedom is > confronted by a > religion that does not allow religious freedom? Does universal > tolerance > mean we tolerate intolerance? > We do not tolerate the initiation of force. We tolerate all matter of wanky opinions but not physical attacks or the serious threat of such attacks. It isn't all that complicated. - s From sjatkins at mac.com Thu Oct 5 07:57:34 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 00:57:34 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <380-22006102318281578@M2W030.mail2web.com> References: <380-22006102318281578@M2W030.mail2web.com> Message-ID: x = y => (x-y) = 0 so division by zero is being done when dividing by (x - y) x + y = y => x = 0 On Oct 3, 2006, at 11:28 AM, nvitamore at austin.rr.com wrote: > > From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky > >> spike wrote: >>> This is a paradox that we cannot solve with our usual tools. >>> Logic simply >>> fails. > >> Heinlein had a sympathetic character say, in one of his stories: >> "Logic >> is a fine thing, but I have seen a perfectly logical proof that 2 = >> 1." >> (If anyone remembers which story this is from, please let me know.) > >> Heinlein was probably thinking of this: >> x = y = 1 >> x = y >> x^2 = xy >> x^2 - y^2 = xy - y^2 >> (x+y)(x-y) = y(x-y) >> x+y = y >> 2 = 1 > > Proof that 2 equals 1 > > 1) Given: > X=Y > 2) Multiply both sides by X: > X^2=XY > 3) Subtract Y^2 from both sides: > X^2-Y^2=XY-Y^2 > 4) Factorise: > (X+Y)(X-Y)=Y(X-Y) > 5) Cancel out (X-Y) term: > X+Y=Y > 6) Substitute X for Y, by equation 1 > 2Y=Y > 7)Divide both sides by Y > 2=1 > > ? "Omni" > > Natasha > > > -------------------------------------------------------------------- > mail2web - Check your email from the web at > http://mail2web.com/ . > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From sjatkins at mac.com Thu Oct 5 08:08:31 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 01:08:31 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <45231132.6050007@goldenfuture.net> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> <45209BD5.6040403@mac.com> <45231132.6050007@goldenfuture.net> Message-ID: <6DBA145C-18B6-4B90-A475-FFED2224BFDA@mac.com> On Oct 3, 2006, at 6:41 PM, Joseph Bloch wrote: > Oh, I've read it, and others like it. > > I still dismiss it. > > In regards to the first point, which is the most potentially damning > in > an objective sense, I can speak as an expert in the field, being > Manager > of Election Polling for one of the largest (and most accurate in the > 2004 election cycle) public opinion polling companies in the country. > The argument that exit polls in 2004 bespoke of any wrongdoing is > completely inaccurate. It completely misses the point of what exit > polls > are supposed to do; not predict winners and losers, but give insight > into the characteristics of the supporters of each candidate. Indeed, > the man in charge of the exit polling in 2004 made a spectacularly > public mia culpa at an AAPOR conference, where he admitted that the > exit > polls were dead wrong. See: > http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2005/05/aapor_exit_poll.html Well that is a problem because the exit polls historically and statistically are not so dead wrong. So why this time? That is the problem. This statement without explaining the discrepancy this time adequately is not evidence that the polls were wrong. Also the use of the exit polls is not limited in the way you claim. > > The rest I dismiss as the same sort of partisan wrangling that one > sees > in any election. Fine. You are not competent by reason of obvious prejudice to judge the matter. - samantha From sjatkins at mac.com Thu Oct 5 08:14:03 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 01:14:03 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <200610040400.k9440HgS026867@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200610040400.k9440HgS026867@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: On Oct 3, 2006, at 9:00 PM, spike wrote: >> bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Joseph Bloch > ... >> >> The rest I dismiss as the same sort of partisan wrangling that one >> sees >> in any election. I can put forth accusations of Democrats bussing in >> homeless people into Ohio, and bribing them to vote Democratic... >> Joseph > > Joseph this comment reminds me of the dilemma the exit pollsters face. > Those areas in which most of the voters are likely to vote to the > left are > often too dangerous for pollster to enter alone. Left???? Voting against Bush in 2004 took being way out on the left somewhere or likely living in a bad part of town? Sounds like cheap classist argumentation to me. The polls are not in particularly unsafe places by design. Last I checked exit pollsters worked at the polling places. The race was extremely close so it certainly cannot be that predominantly Democrats were found in very dangerous places. - s From sjatkins at mac.com Thu Oct 5 08:15:45 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 01:15:45 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> <8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com> <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1159770735.13119.4.camel@localhost> <4521C18A.1010907@goldenfuture.net> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Hear, hear! Well said. - s On Oct 4, 2006, at 7:32 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > On 10/2/06, Joseph Bloch wrote: > >> >> However, I do agree with them on one overriding point; that the >> threat >> posed by Islamist extremists is one which threatens the very >> existence >> of the United States and Western culture as a whole, and I find that >> ensuring the overall survival of Western civilization, which I >> believe >> to be the most conducive to achieving a PostHuman future, is >> paramount. >> > ### I don't see it this way. Islamic extremists a just a bunch of, to > use a racist term, despicable, stupid ragheads who couldn't stare down > a brigade of Marines, much less destroy Western civilization. In terms > of firepower they are not in the same league as the SS or the Red > Army, by orders of magnitude. They are a trifle. > > However, dismantling the legal devices that protect the freedom of the > Americans may result in severe disruption of our way of life without > ever making the slightest difference in reducing the jihadist threat. > The Vingean singularity may occur within the next 30 years, and I am > genuinely curious if it will be delayed, or worse, perverted by the > rise of the security state. > > How is the likelihood of the rise of an unfriendly AI impacted by > increased secrecy, and out-of-control spending on nefarious projects? > We know that the opportunity to exercise unbridled control over others > attracts the most vicious humans - will therefore our guardians (now > less guarded by judges and citizens) become more vicious on average? > What will be the AI like, if its makers are psychopaths with unlimited > budgets in a black project? > > Current scuffles in distant and unsavory parts of the world do not > worry me directly. What worries me is their possible indirect impact, > through inducing deleterious changes in our political culture, on the > course of AI research. > > Rafal > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From sjatkins at mac.com Thu Oct 5 08:33:41 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 01:33:41 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> <8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com> <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1159770735.13119.4.camel@localhost> <4521C18A.1010907@goldenfuture.net> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> Message-ID: On Oct 4, 2006, at 11:01 AM, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote: > Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: >> >> How is the likelihood of the rise of an unfriendly AI impacted by >> increased secrecy, and out-of-control spending on nefarious projects? >> We know that the opportunity to exercise unbridled control over >> others >> attracts the most vicious humans - will therefore our guardians (now >> less guarded by judges and citizens) become more vicious on average? >> What will be the AI like, if its makers are psychopaths with >> unlimited >> budgets in a black project? > > Paperclips are paperclips, whether the AI is built by terrorists > trying > to create a Sharia enforcer, or eager idealistic researchers who don't > understand the concept of "back off until you know what you're doing". > Below you say that research into AI matters and not much else does. Sharia enforcers are not very likely to do AI research. An ultra- secretive full-bore paranoid US military is very likely to do advanced AI research. Both would likely be deadly. > No one gives a damn about AI research, and until that changes, changes > in other government policies aren't going to affect anything one way > or > the other. > False. Changes in government policies could make it impossible to even have the choice to do such research. Changes in government policy could so impoverish the nation that funds dry up. > Save your strength for things that (a) matter and (b) you can make a > personal difference on. > Most of us can make a personal difference at anything we consider important enough and have enough brains and determination to tackle and enough persuasiveness to enroll others in. So the above boils down to determining what is really important. > Some things are just not relevant to the Singularity, people. Get > over it. > If certain types of mistakes are made widely enough there will not be a Singularity. Get over that. - samantha From eugen at leitl.org Thu Oct 5 10:41:37 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 12:41:37 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] TRENDS: Email is so yesterday In-Reply-To: <62c14240610042002k6bebc6dbha1681a9a9029fb36@mail.gmail.com> References: <380-2200610451275281@M2W024.mail2web.com> <62c14240610042002k6bebc6dbha1681a9a9029fb36@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20061005104137.GQ21640@leitl.org> On Wed, Oct 04, 2006 at 11:02:54PM -0400, Mike Dougherty wrote: > > On 10/4/06, [1]nvitamore at austin.rr.com <[2]nvitamore at austin.rr.com> > wrote: > > Anyone have thoughts on this? > [3]http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061002-7877.html Not really a recent trend. What to do depends on whether a new medium offers advantages and/or the community around a legacy medium declines (should I personally adopt it?) or whether you're interested in outreach to new audiences (should I adopt new comm stuff in order to talk to the new kids? -- I must admit I don't, they just have nothing worthwhile to say). > my thought is that convergence isn't happening quickly enough. We > don't need to distinguish between IM and Email. We need only to The convergence doesn't happen at all, it's a bunch of protocols and according implementations completely lacking glue. Until somebody sets out to build it, roll it out in a wide enough scale to get people interested. Are you trying to do that? > express an idea towards a recipient. If you are available via IM, we > should be communicating with a low latency of about every 5 words to a If I was available via IM I couldn't get anything done because of constant interruptions. I banish email if I have to do something requiring some concentration. > full sentence. If you are not available, my entire stream of IM > idea-a-grams should automatically coalesce into the notion of an email > which you catch up on when you return to availability. If I then want Realtime and email don't mix. > that message to be consumed by a group, the thoughts should be tagged > in a way that authenticates the group members to have access to the > content. If I want no access restrictions, then my IM/email/blog is > world-readable. I want a Wiki-style page that I can grant R/W/RW > access to nobody/one friend/all friends/everybody or any combination. You can't get anything done on a blog. Wikis are reasonably useful. > The same slow convergence trend is in personal electronics too. Why > do I have to decide if I want the 40Gb or 60Gb iPod - If you put wi-fi I don't have to decide. I just don't need overpriced mp3 players. I can't afford to insulate myself from the environment when riding a bike, and my hearing survived in a reasonably good shape, which I'd rather like to keep. Whenever I use audio I just use a radio news-only channel, to keep in touch with mundanes. > in it then I wouldn't need more than 2Gb and my media could live on a > server and stage the 'next 3' songs on the device for playback. > Caching software is smart enough to anticipate my playlist I don't have a playlist. I rarely listen to music at all anymore. > requirements. If you network enable the music player, why not put a > phone in it? Oh yeah, that's already been done. But then why doesn't > that device have a good camera? 1.3megapixels? that's not good, I have such a thing, but the trouble isn't megapixels. The trouble is getting decent optics in a small and short-focus enough package. That's optics, which you can't fix well with megapixels. > that's pre-Y2K. Let's start with a 5MP camera and add phone, no lets > add PDA, no music, etc. Why can't we have one device that has all Thanks, I already wear a brick at my belt with a short enough battery lifetime (less than a week) as is. > these things in it? Because people keep spending their money to get > the next cooler gadget in an effort to stay on the cutting People don't. Some novelty-seekers with disposable income do. > edge. > > I'm sure this is similar to "kids" adoption of the telephone 60+ years > ago. Or radio however many more years ago, or any technology that was > once unavailable until it became ubiquitous. the only people who > worry about being "old" because they haven't adopted the "hip" thing > are already hopelessly uncool anyway. Oh yeah, how we all are worried about peer pressure and always trying so hard to emulate whatever hip is these days. Or not. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From pharos at gmail.com Thu Oct 5 11:42:16 2006 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 12:42:16 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wireheading In-Reply-To: <855ECAFE-AF01-4893-8EA7-1DB3D2B867B2@mac.com> References: <200609290452.k8T4qWMP001849@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451CFF7A.8030608@ramonsky.com> <2589.163.1.72.81.1159541656.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> <4520E6B6.8020901@ramonsky.com> <855ECAFE-AF01-4893-8EA7-1DB3D2B867B2@mac.com> Message-ID: On 10/5/06, Samantha Atkins wrote: > > On Oct 2, 2006, at 3:16 AM, BillK wrote: > > You do realise that anything significant that you post on extropy-chat > > (or anywhere on the internet) is likely to immediately update your > > Homeland Security Profile? > > The day I live in fear of these meat heads and their silly profiles is > the day I disappear completely. > That is an admirable political posture to take, but back in the real world a higher level of caution is more advisable. You don't seem to appreciate the power of surveillance and information gathering available to the authorities now or in the very near future. Advances in DNA analysis are now expected to solve tens of thousands of crimes from many years ago and many more future crimes. Advances in data-mining accumulate people's online incriminating history so that it is available at the press of a key. In the 'war on terror' environment, self-censorship seems just common sense to avoid attracting unnecessary attention from officialdom. You certainly don't want to get on the list for special attention by airport security. Obviously the authorities cannot send the hit squads after every member of the population. Posting on the web won't get your door kicked in at 4 am by police in riot gear. Not unless you are *very* criminal in your postings. But just in case the police ever call me in for an 'interview', or I am caught dropping litter someday, I would prefer that their computer file on me didn't display lots of stuff about x, y or z. For some activities, running a computer security check is now standard. Working with children is a hot button issue at present in the UK. As security checks become easier and more detailed, getting the job you want will get more difficult. Like getting a political appointment, or on a School Board, or a local government post, or helping with kids holidays or school trips, etc. They don't have to tell you why you don't get the job, either. You will just find more doors being closed to you. I think a lot of the kids on MySpace are going to have some growing-up pains when all the personal stuff they dump there comes back to haunt them. Government security people are not the only ones who can run web searches. Employers, lawyers, press, finance companies, banks, you name it. Searching someone's history will soon become standard procedure. Google knows (nearly) everything. And Echelon (or whatever they call it now) has access to much more than Google. I am not saying that you have to redesign your whole lifestyle to become Mr Average in all opinions and activities. Just be careful and think before you self-incriminate yourself. Take the Fifth. Your mother was right. Never, ever, put something in writing unless you would be happy to see it as front page news. BillK From mbb386 at main.nc.us Thu Oct 5 11:07:12 2006 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 07:07:12 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] exit polls In-Reply-To: <200610050456.k954uHCe002824@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20061004230738.02133088@satx.rr.com> <200610050456.k954uHCe002824@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <33959.72.236.103.90.1160046432.squirrel@main.nc.us> I've never *answered* an exit poll. I walk on past and tell them it's not their business, it's a secret ballot. Which, IMHO, it is supposed to be. Perhaps more libertarian or conservative voters feel that way? Regards, MB >> bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Damien Broderick > ... >> >> Yes, but isn't the usual complaint quite the reverse: that exit polls >> suggested a *larger* number of votes for the left than appeared in >> the final count? Why else would the left cry stinking fish (aka "we >> wuz robbed") on this basis? >> >> Damien Broderick > > Hmmm, that I don't know, but would guess that the side that complains > depends on which way the elections go. > > spike > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From spike66 at comcast.net Thu Oct 5 14:06:19 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 07:06:19 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Reply to Joseph in message 2 of extropy-chatDigest, Vol 37, Issue 2 In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <200610051406.k95E6O4O005439@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Samantha Atkins ... > > At least Islam in particular encourages its followers to > react violently to any perceived slight to the faith, even from those > who do not share it. This is malignant and must be stopped. > > - samantha How? From spike66 at comcast.net Thu Oct 5 14:11:00 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 07:11:00 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <200610051411.k95EB6Dw015856@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat- > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Samantha Atkins ... > > Left???? Voting against Bush in 2004 took being way out on the left > somewhere or likely living in a bad part of town? ... > > - s The other way around Samantha. Voting left does not mean living in a dangerous part of town. But dangerous parts of town are likely to vote predominantly to the left. Example: Washington DC. spike From eugen at leitl.org Thu Oct 5 15:42:48 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 17:42:48 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Reply to Joseph in message 2 of extropy-chatDigest, Vol 37, Issue 2 In-Reply-To: <200610051406.k95E6O4O005439@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200610051406.k95E6O4O005439@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <20061005154248.GS21640@leitl.org> On Thu, Oct 05, 2006 at 07:06:19AM -0700, spike wrote: > > who do not share it. This is malignant and must be stopped. > > How? By a number of unpopular decisions. I could make a list here, but it would draw flak towards this community, even if I declare them as private ideas. (Preemptively: none of this involves violence towards minorities, just policy changes). -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From sjatkins at mac.com Thu Oct 5 16:52:32 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 09:52:32 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] exit polls In-Reply-To: <452470A9.3080502@goldenfuture.net> References: <200610050220.k952KJBu000921@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <452470A9.3080502@goldenfuture.net> Message-ID: <43AB14C8-0878-433E-91AD-E791008FDF31@mac.com> On Oct 4, 2006, at 7:40 PM, Joseph Bloch wrote: > Bear in mind that exit polls are _not_ designed to predict winners, > but > rather to determine demographics and attitudes of voters (which is why > objections that exit polls don't match vote counts are nonsense; they > are not meant to measure the same thing). Repeating a lie does not make it so. Exit polls have worked really well here and abroad to predict winners in *fair* elections. - s From sjatkins at mac.com Thu Oct 5 16:55:45 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 09:55:45 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] TRENDS: Email is so yesterday In-Reply-To: <710b78fc0610042313i4cf115b3ne2da835c6117dc4f@mail.gmail.com> References: <380-2200610451275281@M2W024.mail2web.com> <62c14240610042002k6bebc6dbha1681a9a9029fb36@mail.gmail.com> <710b78fc0610042313i4cf115b3ne2da835c6117dc4f@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <391B2A37-A95B-4F84-9A3B-88B18D129280@mac.com> On Oct 4, 2006, at 11:13 PM, Emlyn wrote: > I find that Skype is pretty much like this. We've got ongoing multi- > person chat sessions for our dev team in Skype, and I find that if I > miss a day or two, when I come back it's all automagically available > in the chat history (which is all available inline anyway). > > Our day to day trivial "water cooler" stuff happens in IM. More > complex ideas get communicated in email. If I'm really forced to, I > might actually use Word to write something up, but pretty much only > when required by external forces (eg: a client wants a "document"). > When people need to really interact, we use voip + gotomeeting (for > voice communication + shared desktop). > I have noticed an unfortunate trend that companies seem to have less and less corporate memory because not much is committed to documents. Email is often either not kept on not formally archived and made fully searchable. - samantha From sjatkins at mac.com Thu Oct 5 17:05:14 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 10:05:14 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wireheading In-Reply-To: References: <200609290452.k8T4qWMP001849@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451CFF7A.8030608@ramonsky.com> <2589.163.1.72.81.1159541656.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> <4520E6B6.8020901@ramonsky.com> <855ECAFE-AF01-4893-8EA7-1DB3D2B867B2@mac.com> Message-ID: <47F15B6D-ABDC-443B-936E-EDFB0381C158@mac.com> On Oct 5, 2006, at 4:42 AM, BillK wrote: > On 10/5/06, Samantha Atkins wrote: >> >> On Oct 2, 2006, at 3:16 AM, BillK wrote: >>> You do realise that anything significant that you post on extropy- >>> chat >>> (or anywhere on the internet) is likely to immediately update your >>> Homeland Security Profile? >> >> The day I live in fear of these meat heads and their silly profiles >> is >> the day I disappear completely. >> > > That is an admirable political posture to take, but back in the real > world a higher level of caution is more advisable. > I don't think so. > You don't seem to appreciate the power of surveillance and information > gathering available to the authorities now or in the very near future. I appreciate it quite fully but I refuse to be cowed by it. If I am doing something actually illegal I will take countermeasures but not for mere opinion posts. At least not yet. > Advances in DNA analysis are now expected to solve tens of thousands > of crimes from many years ago and many more future crimes. What does that have to do with what I write online? > > Advances in data-mining accumulate people's online incriminating > history so that it is available at the press of a key. > So? > In the 'war on terror' environment, self-censorship seems just common > sense to avoid attracting unnecessary attention from officialdom. You > certainly don't want to get on the list for special attention by > airport security. > I will not live in that much fear of my own government without more provocation that to date. YMMV. With sufficient provocation I would be more cautious. Screw TAS. I don't need to fly enough to censor myself. > Obviously the authorities cannot send the hit squads after every > member of the population. Posting on the web won't get your door > kicked in at 4 am by police in riot gear. Not unless you are *very* > criminal in your postings. > > But just in case the police ever call me in for an 'interview', or I > am caught dropping litter someday, I would prefer that their computer > file on me didn't display lots of stuff about x, y or z. > So you are already accepting lost freedom. What are you getting in exchange? > For some activities, running a computer security check is now > standard. Working with children is a hot button issue at present in > the UK. As security checks become easier and more detailed, getting > the job you want will get more difficult. Like getting a political > appointment, or on a School Board, or a local government post, or > helping with kids holidays or school trips, etc. They don't have to > tell you why you don't get the job, either. You will just find more > doors being closed to you. > Again I refuse to live in fear of nameless strangers. > I think a lot of the kids on MySpace are going to have some growing-up > pains when all the personal stuff they dump there comes back to haunt > them. Government security people are not the only ones who can run web > searches. Employers, lawyers, press, finance companies, banks, you > name it. Searching someone's history will soon become standard > procedure. Google knows (nearly) everything. And Echelon (or whatever > they call it now) has access to much more than Google. > As surveillance becomes deeper and more pervasive we must pass laws to severely restrain how the growing information pool may be used against us. We also must repeal a lot of laws whose effects would be extremely pernicious if more widely enforced as improved surveillance makes possible. Without that we are in deep danger. But self- censorship is not a viable solution. - samantha From jef at jefallbright.net Thu Oct 5 17:17:27 2006 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 10:17:27 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] TRENDS: Email is so yesterday In-Reply-To: <391B2A37-A95B-4F84-9A3B-88B18D129280@mac.com> Message-ID: Samantha wrote: > > I have noticed an unfortunate trend that companies seem to have less > and less corporate memory because not much is committed to > documents. > Email is often either not kept on not formally archived and > made fully searchable. Very few companies invest the resources necessary to properly structure their various sources of "tribal" knowledge. It's very difficult to satisfy stakeholders interested in near-term gain, and at the same time put significant resources into something as long-term and ephemeral as "information." Also, unstructured information such as employee emails can be a huge liability to a company that might be sued, however frivolous the motivation might be. Theses observations highlight that there's something paradoxical about the structure of our society and its support and promotion of enterprise. - Jef From neuronexmachina at gmail.com Thu Oct 5 18:50:33 2006 From: neuronexmachina at gmail.com (Neil H.) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 11:50:33 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] TRENDS: Email is so yesterday In-Reply-To: <62c14240610042002k6bebc6dbha1681a9a9029fb36@mail.gmail.com> References: <380-2200610451275281@M2W024.mail2web.com> <62c14240610042002k6bebc6dbha1681a9a9029fb36@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 10/4/06, Mike Dougherty wrote: > > On 10/4/06, nvitamore at austin.rr.com wrote: > > > > Anyone have thoughts on this? > > http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061002-7877.html > > > > my thought is that convergence isn't happening quickly enough. We don't > need to distinguish between IM and Email. We need only to express an idea > towards a recipient. If you are available via IM, we should be > communicating with a low latency of about every 5 words to a full sentence. > If you are not available, my entire stream of IM idea-a-grams should > automatically coalesce into the notion of an email which you catch up on > when you return to availability. If I then want that message to be consumed > by a group, the thoughts should be tagged in a way that authenticates the > group members to have access to the content. If I want no access > restrictions, then my IM/email/blog is world-readable. I want a Wiki-style > page that I can grant R/W/RW access to nobody/one friend/all > friends/everybody or any combination. Have you tried gmail? It does at least the first part of what you describe, integrating IM and email. -- Neil -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From alex at ramonsky.com Thu Oct 5 19:47:42 2006 From: alex at ramonsky.com (Alex Ramonsky) Date: Thu, 05 Oct 2006 20:47:42 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wireheading References: <200609290452.k8T4qWMP001849@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451CFF7A.8030608@ramonsky.com> <2589.163.1.72.81.1159541656.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> <4520E6B6.8020901@ramonsky.com> <3305.130.237.122.245.1159831305.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <4525615E.7020603@ramonsky.com> Anders Sandberg wrote: > do you think your anhedonia was due >to dopaminergic receptor changes or just regression towards the mean? > There was a bit too much 'teeter-totter' for it to be an homeostasis attempt -I actually got physical motor problems too for the first couple days. After that everything was just 'flat' -there was no depression, but no inspiration either -an advert for the local window cleaner was just as interesting as New Scientist magazine or a good novel. I ate the entire contents of my fridge based on 'best-before' dates as I had no idea what I'd prefer to eat, and couldn't find any aesthetic difference between Mozart, Mendelsohn or Marilyn Manson. >I have the feeling that preventing downregulation or upregulation would be >pretty pharmacologically useful, anybody know how well we have learned to >control such functions? > > > Well if 'we' means 'the scientific community' I have no idea. If 'we' means the neurohackers community there are various approaches including using biofeedback, acetylcholinesterase inhibitors and 'pacing' [you take serotonin on the way up, for a slower takeoff and softer landing]. A lot seems to depend on sleep regulation too. Ha! Discipline! : ) Best, AR ************ From alex at ramonsky.com Thu Oct 5 19:30:32 2006 From: alex at ramonsky.com (Alex Ramonsky) Date: Thu, 05 Oct 2006 20:30:32 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wireheading References: <200609290452.k8T4qWMP001849@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451CFF7A.8030608@ramonsky.com> <2589.163.1.72.81.1159541656.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> <4520E6B6.8020901@ramonsky.com> <20061002110518.GL21640@leitl.org> Message-ID: <45255D58.9000409@ramonsky.com> Eugen Leitl wrote: >Why did you stop with selegiline? Equivalent of 1 mg/day from 40 years upwards >seems to show benefits across several animal models. > > > Because in some ways I am a slow, methodical, tediously suspicious sort of creature who likes to try things out for a short time in various different circumstances before taking them on board for long term trials. This does not work for me with relationships involving people, but with drugs it seems a fairly reliable method, so I will no doubt return to selegiline for a long term relationship after I'm satisfied that our flings had no strings attached : ) Best, AR ******** From asa at nada.kth.se Thu Oct 5 19:43:44 2006 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 21:43:44 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Cognition enhancement in fiction Message-ID: <4081.163.1.72.91.1160077424.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> For my cognition enhancement project, I have decided to not just put together a bibliography of research papers and ethics papers, but also fiction that deals with cognition enhancement - improved memory, attention, intelligence, creativity etc - in an intelligent way. So I would be interested in what novels and short stories (and poems for that matter) deals with the subject of technologically enhanced cognition. In particular discussion of the social effects in a nontrival way is intesting. Hopefully I can turn it into something like the nanotech in sf bibliography at http://www.geocities.com/asnapier/nano/n-sf/ Any suggestions? -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From alex at ramonsky.com Thu Oct 5 19:57:46 2006 From: alex at ramonsky.com (Alex Ramonsky) Date: Thu, 05 Oct 2006 20:57:46 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wireheading References: <200609290452.k8T4qWMP001849@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451CFF7A.8030608@ramonsky.com> <2589.163.1.72.81.1159541656.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> <4520E6B6.8020901@ramonsky.com> <855ECAFE-AF01-4893-8EA7-1DB3D2B867B2@mac.com> Message-ID: <452563BA.8020602@ramonsky.com> Samantha Atkins wrote: >The day I live in fear of these meat heads and their silly profiles is >the day I disappear completely. > I did this twice [disappeared completely], and can thoroughly recommend it. Reappearing is a lot of fun too, especially after a decade or so when nobody remembers you from the last time. There are still meat heads, but they are young, fresh meat heads who have no memory of what happened to their predecessors or how people used to file things. I'm currently working on being apparently in two places at the same time, which is quite a lot more challenging than just disappearing but could have even greater amusement potential. Anyway, it keeps them off the streets. Stay cool : ) AR ***************** > >- samantha > >_______________________________________________ >extropy-chat mailing list >extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sentience at pobox.com Thu Oct 5 19:59:40 2006 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Thu, 05 Oct 2006 12:59:40 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] exit polls In-Reply-To: <43AB14C8-0878-433E-91AD-E791008FDF31@mac.com> References: <200610050220.k952KJBu000921@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <452470A9.3080502@goldenfuture.net> <43AB14C8-0878-433E-91AD-E791008FDF31@mac.com> Message-ID: <4525642C.1000905@pobox.com> Samantha Atkins wrote: > > Repeating a lie does not make it so. Exit polls have worked really > well here and abroad to predict winners in *fair* elections. Hm. Don't want to get involved in this, but I do see a potential experimental-design flaw in the above statement. What gold standard did you use to decide whether the election was fair, aside from the exit poll itself? By the way, I'm quite willing to believe that the 2004 US election was broken, that most US elections have been broken, that both parties cheated, that the 2004 election was the worst yet in the series, that things will keep getting worse, that electronic voting marks a qualitative line of demarcation, and that there's nothing I can do about it *directly* and I probably shouldn't even have spent the seconds writing this sentence. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From asa at nada.kth.se Thu Oct 5 20:41:23 2006 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 22:41:23 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Wireheading In-Reply-To: <4525615E.7020603@ramonsky.com> References: <200609290452.k8T4qWMP001849@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451CFF7A.8030608@ramonsky.com> <2589.163.1.72.81.1159541656.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> <4520E6B6.8020901@ramonsky.com> <3305.130.237.122.245.1159831305.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> <4525615E.7020603@ramonsky.com> Message-ID: <4330.163.1.72.91.1160080883.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Alex Ramonsky wrote: >>I have the feeling that preventing downregulation or upregulation would >> be >>pretty pharmacologically useful, anybody know how well we have learned to >>control such functions? > > Well if 'we' means 'the scientific community' I have no idea. If 'we' > means the neurohackers community there are various approaches including > using biofeedback, acetylcholinesterase inhibitors and 'pacing' [you > take serotonin on the way up, for a slower takeoff and softer landing]. > A lot seems to depend on sleep regulation too. Ha! Discipline! : ) Hmm, while sleep and biofeedback likely are healthy it seems more efficient to directly try to prevent the receptors from going into the cytosol, being proteased and all that happens to them. This paper suggests that at least in some cases other drugs can prevent downregulaton (in this case of adrenergic receptors): "Prevention by theophylline of beta-2-receptor down regulation in healthy subjects." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11420887&dopt=Abstract -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From alex at ramonsky.com Thu Oct 5 20:57:07 2006 From: alex at ramonsky.com (Alex Ramonsky) Date: Thu, 05 Oct 2006 21:57:07 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cognition enhancement in fiction References: <4081.163.1.72.91.1160077424.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <452571A3.2000808@ramonsky.com> Would you wish to include humor in this collection? AR ******** Anders Sandberg wrote: >For my cognition enhancement project, I have decided to not just put >together a bibliography of research papers and ethics papers, but also >fiction that deals with cognition enhancement - improved memory, >attention, intelligence, creativity etc - in an intelligent way. So I >would be interested in what novels and short stories (and poems for that >matter) deals with the subject of technologically enhanced cognition. In >particular discussion of the social effects in a nontrival way is >intesting. > >Hopefully I can turn it into something like the nanotech in sf >bibliography at http://www.geocities.com/asnapier/nano/n-sf/ > >Any suggestions? > > > From asa at nada.kth.se Thu Oct 5 21:12:18 2006 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 23:12:18 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Wireheading Message-ID: <4332.163.1.72.91.1160082738.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> BillK wrote: > On 10/5/06, Samantha Atkins wrote: >> >> On Oct 2, 2006, at 3:16 AM, BillK wrote: >> > You do realise that anything significant that you post on extropy-chat >> > (or anywhere on the internet) is likely to immediately update your >> > Homeland Security Profile? >> >> The day I live in fear of these meat heads and their silly profiles is >> the day I disappear completely. >> > > That is an admirable political posture to take, but back in the real > world a higher level of caution is more advisable. I think it is better to err on the side of being too open and radical than being too cautious. Sure, it increases the risk of being logged in various lists of 'subversives' and maybe getting uncomfortable employment interviews. But do we really want to work for companies that can't stand our true persona? Do we want to make it easier for the Powers That Be to scan the subversive lists, or do we salt them with lots of not-quite-subversives? The chilling effects of self-censorship are nasty. When nobody else expresses your view you will not dare speak it either, either because you think there is something wrong with it or because you will be noticed by nasties. And the more areas nobody dares to talk about the more fearful we will be. I think part of the self-censorship we see among some people about Islam right now was primed by the self-censorship due to political correctness. Once you internalise the idea that one should never say anything that might upset some group (either because they might get sad or violent or because others might criticise oneself) you become a force for instilling this meme in others. > Your mother was right. Never, ever, put something in writing unless > you would be happy to see it as front page news. Exactly. And I think this is reason to dare to be radical, because that is the only way to spread the counter-memes of open, sometimes noisy, debate. I'd gladly admit on this list that I had used illegal drugs, but to my embarrasment I haven't. But I have indeed mocked Allah (and most other deities and religions I have ever heard of), questioned the democratic system, the War on Terror, the War on Drugs, the EU farming subsidies and the Swedish Model. I have dreamt erotic dreams about blue anodized zinc cubes. As well as squeezed past the (Swedish) Queen in a doorway somewhat rudely. So there! -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From asa at nada.kth.se Thu Oct 5 21:21:55 2006 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 23:21:55 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Cognition enhancement in fiction In-Reply-To: <452571A3.2000808@ramonsky.com> References: <4081.163.1.72.91.1160077424.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> <452571A3.2000808@ramonsky.com> Message-ID: <4365.163.1.72.91.1160083315.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Alex Ramonsky wrote: > Would you wish to include humor in this collection? As long as the enhancement angle is reasonably there. I guess Gyro Gearloose's thinking cap belongs on the list. -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Thu Oct 5 22:58:23 2006 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 18:58:23 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs (was: Tyranny in place) In-Reply-To: <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1159770735.13119.4.camel@localhost> <4521C18A.1010907@goldenfuture.net> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> Message-ID: <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> On 10/4/06, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote: ### I do think we are talking past each other to some extent. Above you thoroughly discuss the notion that given widespread lack of understanding of the art of rationality, most attempts at building a GAI will either fizzle, or produce an UFAI, independently of the motives of the would-be builders. I do not take issue with this claim. You also seem to assume (but not say so explicitely) that the sets "all people capable of independently shaping a GAI so as to act according to their wishes" and "all evil people (i.e. people whose goal is a net loss of utility)" are non-intersecting. This is where I disagree with you. I can visualize the mind with an excellent intuitive grasp of rationality, a mind that understands itself, knows where its goals came from, knows where it is going, and yet wishes nothing but to fulfill the goals of dominance, and destruction. I am not talking about the Sharia zombie, who may have benign goals (personal happiness with virgins, etc.) perverted by ignorance and lack of understanding. I am referring to people who are evil, know it, and like it so. Of course, I may be wrong. Perhaps there is a cognitive sieve that separates GAI builders and Dr. Evil. I also think that present understanding of the issue is generally insufficient to allow confident prediction. Therefore, until proven otherwise, the prospect of truly evil geniuses with large AI budgets will continue to worry me, more than the dangers of asteroid impacts but less than a flu pandemic. Rafal From transhumanist at goldenfuture.net Thu Oct 5 23:17:33 2006 From: transhumanist at goldenfuture.net (Joseph Bloch) Date: Thu, 05 Oct 2006 19:17:33 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cognition enhancement in fiction In-Reply-To: <4081.163.1.72.91.1160077424.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> References: <4081.163.1.72.91.1160077424.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <4525928D.40604@goldenfuture.net> Just off the top of my head... "Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future". Gardner Dozois (ed.) "Iron Sunrise", "Singularity Sky", "Accelerando". Charles Stross. "Revelation Space", "Chasm City", "Redemption Ark", "Absolution Gap". Alastair Reynolds. Dune Series. Frank Herbert. (Mentats, Guild Navigators, and the Bene Gesserit) Not much, but it's a start. Joseph Anders Sandberg wrote: >For my cognition enhancement project, I have decided to not just put >together a bibliography of research papers and ethics papers, but also >fiction that deals with cognition enhancement - improved memory, >attention, intelligence, creativity etc - in an intelligent way. So I >would be interested in what novels and short stories (and poems for that >matter) deals with the subject of technologically enhanced cognition. In >particular discussion of the social effects in a nontrival way is >intesting. > >Hopefully I can turn it into something like the nanotech in sf >bibliography at http://www.geocities.com/asnapier/nano/n-sf/ > >Any suggestions? > > > From transhumanist at goldenfuture.net Thu Oct 5 23:58:31 2006 From: transhumanist at goldenfuture.net (Joseph Bloch) Date: Thu, 05 Oct 2006 19:58:31 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] exit polls In-Reply-To: <43AB14C8-0878-433E-91AD-E791008FDF31@mac.com> References: <200610050220.k952KJBu000921@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <452470A9.3080502@goldenfuture.net> <43AB14C8-0878-433E-91AD-E791008FDF31@mac.com> Message-ID: <45259C27.6020706@goldenfuture.net> A "lie"? If so, it's a lie perpetrated by the guy who actually _does_ the exit polls! See http://www.exit-poll.net/ , but no doubt you'll think that's just part of the conspiracy. You are just so twisted by your hatred of everything Republican as to make all attempts at civil and rational discussion impossible. Therefore, I will cease to make the attempt. Joseph Samantha Atkins wrote: >On Oct 4, 2006, at 7:40 PM, Joseph Bloch wrote: > > > >>Bear in mind that exit polls are _not_ designed to predict winners, >>but >>rather to determine demographics and attitudes of voters (which is why >>objections that exit polls don't match vote counts are nonsense; they >>are not meant to measure the same thing). >> >> > >Repeating a lie does not make it so. Exit polls have worked really >well here and abroad to predict winners in *fair* elections. > >- s >_______________________________________________ >extropy-chat mailing list >extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > > > From emlynoregan at gmail.com Fri Oct 6 00:14:47 2006 From: emlynoregan at gmail.com (Emlyn) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 09:44:47 +0930 Subject: [extropy-chat] TRENDS: Email is so yesterday In-Reply-To: <391B2A37-A95B-4F84-9A3B-88B18D129280@mac.com> References: <380-2200610451275281@M2W024.mail2web.com> <62c14240610042002k6bebc6dbha1681a9a9029fb36@mail.gmail.com> <710b78fc0610042313i4cf115b3ne2da835c6117dc4f@mail.gmail.com> <391B2A37-A95B-4F84-9A3B-88B18D129280@mac.com> Message-ID: <710b78fc0610051714p355d446by1cf7b1a0b6ae954b@mail.gmail.com> > I have noticed an unfortunate trend that companies seem to have less > and less corporate memory because not much is committed to documents. > Email is often either not kept on not formally archived and made fully > searchable. > > - samantha You are right about email. Our company uses Outlook + Exchange, which effectively means you lose your entire email history every so often ;-) That's why I use gmail. I don't want to be trapped by a corporate email account ever again. I redirect everything into my gmail, and my ongoing email memory is my concern from then on, excellently searchable, accessible everywhere. If only I could pay google some pittance to ensure that my email was going to stick around into the long term, or at least have an archiving mechanism to give me some insurance. But the app is so good, I'm willing to keep taking that chance. Emlyn From sentience at pobox.com Fri Oct 6 00:28:13 2006 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Thu, 05 Oct 2006 17:28:13 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1159770735.13119.4.camel@localhost> <4521C18A.1010907@goldenfuture.net> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4525A31D.6080002@pobox.com> Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > On 10/4/06, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote: > You also seem to assume (but not say so explicitely) that the sets > "all people capable of independently shaping a GAI so as to act > according to their wishes" and "all evil people (i.e. people whose > goal is a net loss of utility)" are non-intersecting. This is where I > disagree with you. I think it is likely that the intersection is small - bear in mind, set 1 is damned small to begin with - but I do not claim that it is zero summed up over all Everett branches. It's probably zero in any given Everett branch. But the point is that the set of people capable of building and shaping an AGI, who are going to do it on command from their military superiors to blow up a terrorist bunker somewhere, is "essentially zero". > I can visualize the mind with an excellent intuitive grasp of > rationality, a mind that understands itself, knows where its goals > came from, knows where it is going, and yet wishes nothing but to > fulfill the goals of dominance, and destruction. A *human* mind? I think most people in this set would not be running on strictly normal brainware; but maybe you could, for example, have a genuine genius psychopath. I do not deny the possibility, but it seems to have a low frequency. > I am not talking > about the Sharia zombie, who may have benign goals (personal happiness > with virgins, etc.) perverted by ignorance and lack of understanding. > I am referring to people who are evil, know it, and like it so. That's pretty damn rare at IQ140+. Evil people who know they're evil and like being evil are far more rare than evil people. Most famous super-evil people are not in that small set. > Of course, I may be wrong. Perhaps there is a cognitive sieve that > separates GAI builders and Dr. Evil. I also think that present > understanding of the issue is generally insufficient to allow > confident prediction. Therefore, until proven otherwise, the prospect > of truly evil geniuses with large AI budgets will continue to worry > me, more than the dangers of asteroid impacts but less than a flu > pandemic. Well, yes, but: Problem of truly evil geniuses who can build and shape AGI << problem of misguidedly altruistic geniuses who pick the wrong F << problem of genius-fools who turn their future light cones into paperclips where << is the standard "much less than" symbol. In my experience thus far, the notion of someone deliberately building an evil AGI, is much appealed to by genius-fools searching for a plausible-sounding excuse not to slow down: "We've got to beat those bastards in the military! We don't have time to perfect our AI theory!" Now this is a nonzero risk but the risk of genius-fools is far greater, in the sense that I expect most AI-blasted Everett branches to be wiped out by genius-fools, not truly evil supergeniuses. Because of the vastly larger base prior favoring the former catastrophe scenario, the partial derivative of dead Everett branches with respect to caution, is negative with respect to a policy change that makes it even a tiny bit easier to be an altruistic genius-fools, no matter how much harder it makes it to be a truly evil supergenius. In fact, I expect (with lower confidence) that many more dead Everett branches are wiped out by genius-fool AI programmers than by nanotech or superviruses. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From pj at pj-manney.com Fri Oct 6 00:30:33 2006 From: pj at pj-manney.com (pjmanney) Date: Thu, 05 Oct 2006 20:30:33 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cognition enhancement in fiction Message-ID: <27171205.1279621160094633534.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> I may take your technological enhancement definition a little broadly, but you can decide what works for you: Man Plus - Frederick Pohl Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes Lord of Light - Zelazny (an enhanced society gets to play at gods) Nova Express -- William S. Burroughs (the promise of enhancement with addiction) Brain Wave - Poul Anderson (although the enhancement is not really 'technological' and not of our own making...) Gap Series - Stephen R. Donaldson (I think Angus Thermopyle is enhanced by the 2nd book) Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell (although the enhancement of the clone was not planned...) Camp Concentration - Thomas Disch Wm. Gibson, generally What about uplift of non-human creatures? There's a bunch of those. Does that topic fit your mandate? As I think of more, I'll send them on. PJ >So I >would be interested in what novels and short stories (and poems for that >matter) deals with the subject of technologically enhanced cognition. In >particular discussion of the social effects in a nontrival way is >intesting. > From sjatkins at mac.com Fri Oct 6 00:41:26 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 17:41:26 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] exit polls In-Reply-To: <4525642C.1000905@pobox.com> References: <200610050220.k952KJBu000921@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <452470A9.3080502@goldenfuture.net> <43AB14C8-0878-433E-91AD-E791008FDF31@mac.com> <4525642C.1000905@pobox.com> Message-ID: On Oct 5, 2006, at 12:59 PM, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote: > Samantha Atkins wrote: >> >> Repeating a lie does not make it so. Exit polls have worked really >> well here and abroad to predict winners in *fair* elections. > > Hm. Don't want to get involved in this, but I do see a potential > experimental-design flaw in the above statement. What gold standard > did > you use to decide whether the election was fair, aside from the exit > poll itself? Generally there is no 'gold standard' to be had in such situations of course. But the evidence, which is certainly not limited to exit polls, is pretty damning. But in the above I was referring to the lie that exit polls are not used to predict election outcomes. They have been used for such purposes, usually with high accuracy, for some time. > > By the way, I'm quite willing to believe that the 2004 US election was > broken, that most US elections have been broken, that both parties > cheated, that the 2004 election was the worst yet in the series, that > things will keep getting worse, that electronic voting marks a > qualitative line of demarcation, and that there's nothing I can do > about > it *directly* and I probably shouldn't even have spent the seconds > writing this sentence. > I don't believe it was just business as usual and I do believe the problem is getting much worse. As to what to do about I confess I haven't much clue except to demand a better and much more trustworthy voting system than what we have. I don't think it wise to remain silent about everything I don't know how to fix. Nor would it be wise to squawk about all of them. We have to pick our battles. - samantha From sjatkins at mac.com Fri Oct 6 00:48:36 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 17:48:36 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs (was: Tyranny in place) In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1159770735.13119.4.camel@localhost> <4521C18A.1010907@goldenfuture.net> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On Oct 5, 2006, at 3:58 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > I can visualize the mind with an excellent intuitive grasp of > rationality, a mind that understands itself, knows where its goals > came from, knows where it is going, and yet wishes nothing but to > fulfill the goals of dominance, and destruction. I am not talking > about the Sharia zombie, who may have benign goals (personal happiness > with virgins, etc.) perverted by ignorance and lack of understanding. > I am referring to people who are evil, know it, and like it so. > Perhaps they aren't even evil. Perhaps they are so disgusted with human foibles that they really don't care much anymore whether much brighter artificial minds are particularly friendly to humanity or not. - samantha From sjatkins at mac.com Fri Oct 6 00:51:00 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 17:51:00 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] exit polls In-Reply-To: <45259C27.6020706@goldenfuture.net> References: <200610050220.k952KJBu000921@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <452470A9.3080502@goldenfuture.net> <43AB14C8-0878-433E-91AD-E791008FDF31@mac.com> <45259C27.6020706@goldenfuture.net> Message-ID: On Oct 5, 2006, at 4:58 PM, Joseph Bloch wrote: > > You are just so twisted by your hatred of everything Republican as to > make all attempts at civil and rational discussion impossible. > Therefore, I will cease to make the attempt. There you go again with the same tired accusation. You may as well stop as you aren't making much of an attempt. - samantha From ben at goertzel.org Fri Oct 6 01:14:33 2006 From: ben at goertzel.org (Ben Goertzel) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 21:14:33 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs (was: Tyranny in place) In-Reply-To: References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <4521C18A.1010907@goldenfuture.net> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> > Perhaps they aren't even evil. Perhaps they are so disgusted with > human foibles that they really don't care much anymore whether much > brighter artificial minds are particularly friendly to humanity or not. > > - samantha Well put. I asked a friend recently what he thought about the prospect of superhuman beings annihilating humans to make themselves more processing substrate... His response: "It's about time." When asked what he meant, he said simply, "We're not so great, and we've been dominating the planet long enough. Let something better have its turn." I do not see why this attitude is inconsistent with a deep understanding of the nature of intelligence, and a profound rationality. -- Ben G From sentience at pobox.com Fri Oct 6 01:52:02 2006 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Thu, 05 Oct 2006 18:52:02 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs In-Reply-To: <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <4521C18A.1010907@goldenfuture.net> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4525B6C2.5050003@pobox.com> Ben Goertzel wrote: >>Perhaps they aren't even evil. Perhaps they are so disgusted with >>human foibles that they really don't care much anymore whether much >>brighter artificial minds are particularly friendly to humanity or not. >> >>- samantha > > Well put. > > I asked a friend recently what he thought about the prospect of > superhuman beings annihilating humans to make themselves more > processing substrate... > > His response: "It's about time." > > When asked what he meant, he said simply, "We're not so great, and > we've been dominating the planet long enough. Let something better > have its turn." > I do not see why this attitude is inconsistent with a deep > understanding of the nature of intelligence, and a profound > rationality. Hell, Ben, you aren't willing to say publicly that Arthur T. Murray is a fool. In general you seem very reluctant to admit that certain things are inconsistent with rationality - a charity level that *I* think is inconsistent with rationality. But anyway: "In addition to standard biases, I have personally observed what look like harmful modes of thinking specific to existential risks. The Spanish flu of 1918 killed 25-50 million people. World War II killed 60 million people. 107 is the order of the largest catastrophes in humanity's written history. Substantially larger numbers, such as 500 million deaths, and especially qualitatively different scenarios such as the extinction of the entire human species, seem to trigger a different mode of thinking - enter into a "separate magisterium". People who would never dream of hurting a child hear of an existential risk, and say, "Well, maybe the human species doesn't really deserve to survive." There is a saying in heuristics and biases that people do not evaluate events, but descriptions of events - what is called non-extensional reasoning. The extension of humanity's extinction includes the death of yourself, of your friends, of your family, of your loved ones, of your city, of your country, of your political fellows. Yet people who would take great offense at a proposal to wipe the country of Britain from the map, to kill every member of the Democratic Party in the U.S., to turn the city of Paris to glass - who would feel still greater horror on hearing the doctor say that their child had cancer - these people will discuss the extinction of humanity with perfect calm. "Extinction of humanity", as words on paper, appears in fictional novels, or is discussed in philosophy books - it belongs to a different context than the Spanish flu. We evaluate descriptions of events, not extensions of events. The clich? phrase end of the world invokes the magisterium of myth and dream, of prophecy and apocalypse, of novels and movies. The challenge of existential risks to rationality is that, the catastrophes being so huge, people snap into a different mode of thinking. Human deaths are suddenly no longer bad, and detailed predictions suddenly no longer require any expertise, and whether the story is told with a happy ending or a sad ending is a matter of personal taste in stories." -- "Cognitive biases potentially affecting judgment of global risks" I seriously doubt that your friend is processing that question with the same part of his brain that he uses to decide e.g. whether to deliberately drive into oncoming traffic or throw his three-year-old daughter off a hotel balcony. I've seen plenty of half-skilled rationalists fail by adopting separate magisteria for different questions; they hold "spiritual" questions to a different standard than they would use when writing a journal article. Your friend, I suspect, is carrying out a form of non-extensional reasoning which consists of reacting to verbal descriptions of events quite differently than how he would react to witnessing even a small sample of the human deaths involved. This entire class of mistakes is harder to make, or at least much harder to endorse in principle, if you have translated mathematics into intuition, and now see thought processes as engines for achieving work - once you reach this level, it does not seem as plausible to you that you can get good models by various spiritual means, because this is analogous to being able to draw a good map of a distant city by sitting in your living room with your blinds drawn - there's no causal explanation for how you are drawing a map by interacting with the territory, which is how a properly functioning cognitive engine works. When you understand intelligence properly, you will not deliberately endorse separate magisteria, because you know in principle that divisions separating e.g. biology from physics, are divisions that humans make in academic subjects, not divisions in the things themselves; Bayes's Theorem is not going to operate any differently in the two cases. Or as Richard Feynman put it: "A poet once said, "The whole universe is in a glass of wine." We will probably never know in what sense he said that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look in glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth's rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe's age, and the evolution of the stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If in our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts - physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on - remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let us give one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!" Highly skilled rationalists who understand intelligence are going to be on guard against: Separate magisteria; Extensional neglect; Scope neglect; Inconsistent evaluations of different verbal descriptions of the same events; not to mention, Failure to search for better third alternatives; Fatuous philosophy that sounds like deep wisdom; and Self-destructive impulses. As usual, people who don't understand the above and have already committed such mistakes, may be skeptical that modes of reasoning committing these mistakes could be justifiably rejected by a more skilled rationalist, just as creationists are skeptical that a more skilled rationalist could justifiably reject creationism. But a skilled rationalist who knows about extensional neglect is not likely to endorse the destruction of Earth unless they also endorse the death of Human_1, Human_2, Human_3, ... themselves, their mother, ... Human_6e9. Also I expect that your friend is making a mistake of simple fact, with respect to what kind of superhumans these are likely to be - he thinks they'll be better just because they've got more processing power, an old old mistake I once made myself. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From sentience at pobox.com Fri Oct 6 01:59:34 2006 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Thu, 05 Oct 2006 18:59:34 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs In-Reply-To: References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1159770735.13119.4.camel@localhost> <4521C18A.1010907@goldenfuture.net> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4525B886.6010102@pobox.com> Samantha Atkins wrote: > > Perhaps they aren't even evil. Perhaps they are so disgusted with > human foibles that they really don't care much anymore whether much > brighter artificial minds are particularly friendly to humanity or not. Sounds to me like an affective evaluation by respect to biased recall and biased search on particular, negative characteristics, with a few exemplars dominating the affective evaluation of the whole - in other words, carrying out a biased search for negative examples, then remembering a few outstanding negative examples rather than attending to the vast statistical majority of cases. Anyone who knows about heuristics and biases is going to be on their guard against that. Then the reaction is more of an instinctive expression of disgust, not an attempt to solve anything or optimize anything. If you were trying to seriously search for a plan, you wouldn't stop after deciding that exterminating humanity was superior to leaving it exactly as it is now (itself a rather unlikely conclusion!) but would continue your search for a third alternative. Also a rationalist would know about the Bayesian value of information, so they'd be willing to spend some time thinking about the problem, rather than reacting in 0.5 seconds. "Disgusted with human foibles" makes a nice little snappy phrase. But someone seriously capable of building and shaping an AGI would know better, I suspect. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From spike66 at comcast.net Fri Oct 6 02:09:35 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 19:09:35 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] TRENDS: Email is so yesterday In-Reply-To: <710b78fc0610051714p355d446by1cf7b1a0b6ae954b@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200610060209.k9629xNE004545@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Emlyn ... > > You are right about email. Our company uses Outlook + Exchange, which > effectively means you lose your entire email history every so often > ;-) ... > Emlyn Ja Emlyn there is a way to rig Exchange + Lookout to dump all your email into an archive on your hard drive. I don't know how to do it myself, but I have my IT guru fix it for me. We get along fine: I don't know from computers, he doesn't know from rocket science. {8^] spike From spike66 at comcast.net Fri Oct 6 02:22:02 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 19:22:02 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] exit polls In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <200610060222.k962MFO4026197@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Samantha Atkins > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] exit polls > > > On Oct 5, 2006, at 4:58 PM, Joseph Bloch wrote: > > > > You are just so twisted by your hatred of everything Republican as to > > make all attempts at civil and rational discussion impossible. > > Therefore, I will cease to make the attempt. > > There you go again with the same tired accusation. You may as well > stop as you aren't making much of an attempt. > > - samantha My friends, do let us maintain civil discourse in political topics in this election season. These difficult and contentious subjects should be handled with care, doing as the chessplayers say: play the board, not the human. spike From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Oct 6 02:36:29 2006 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 22:36:29 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] TRENDS: Email is so yesterday In-Reply-To: References: <380-2200610451275281@M2W024.mail2web.com> <62c14240610042002k6bebc6dbha1681a9a9029fb36@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <62c14240610051936u56876b88mcd1f7f3221a1566f@mail.gmail.com> On 10/5/06, Neil H. wrote: > > > Have you tried gmail? It does at least the first part of what you > describe, integrating IM and email. > Yes. I am using gmail now. Gmail is sill beta. It probably always will be. Not because it isn't good enough, but because to leave beta would require the tedious part of finishing a project. So as long as Gmail, chat, etc are all 'open' and in beta status, they new features do not have to be impact tested before deployment. I think this is bad because google has enough influence to set the standard for others to follow. I don't believe this is good behavior. Those who defend Google do not want to here anything negative, and those who would likely agree with me just don't really care that much about it. (As I myself do not care much past pointing out the observation with no intention of making it my 'cause') As Eugen pointed out, none of it really matters that much. Do what you want to do. Use the right tool for the job. It doesn't matter if someone else likes their tool more. It reminds me of the PC vs Mac dichotomy. Mac is trying to defend their superiority in a war that PC users have mostly stopped fighting 10 years ago. Computers are consumer appliances much like TV, microwaves or air conditioners. When the one you have doesn't work like you think it should, you replace it - probably with whatever is the best 'deal' you can find that week. Beyond the question of whether or not the machine provides the service you want, it makes no difference who produces it. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Oct 6 02:57:29 2006 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 22:57:29 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cognition enhancement in fiction In-Reply-To: <4081.163.1.72.91.1160077424.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> References: <4081.163.1.72.91.1160077424.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <62c14240610051957j6ceaf5bbn694e6fd7496a384c@mail.gmail.com> On 10/5/06, Anders Sandberg wrote: > > > For my cognition enhancement project, I have decided to not just put > together a bibliography of research papers and ethics papers, but also > fiction that deals with cognition enhancement - improved memory, > attention, intelligence, creativity etc - in an intelligent way. So I > would be interested in what novels and short stories (and poems for that > matter) deals with the subject of technologically enhanced cognition. In > particular discussion of the social effects in a nontrival way is > intesting. > Julian May's "Galactic Milieu" Trilogy (wikipedia ) Even if it doesn't make your list, check out the wikipedia link. Julian May is one of my favorite authors. an this excerpt (chapter one) of Greg Egan's "Diaspora" (Hopefully this chapter convinces you to read the others, or buy the book) Also check out "Permutation City" - Greg Egan may BE my favorite author. You do plan on posting your compilation here, right? Anything you can do to isolate the gems from the great pile of rubbish that is available would be a veritable service to humanity. :) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From emlynoregan at gmail.com Fri Oct 6 03:23:26 2006 From: emlynoregan at gmail.com (Emlyn) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 12:53:26 +0930 Subject: [extropy-chat] exit polls In-Reply-To: References: <200610050220.k952KJBu000921@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <452470A9.3080502@goldenfuture.net> <43AB14C8-0878-433E-91AD-E791008FDF31@mac.com> <4525642C.1000905@pobox.com> Message-ID: <710b78fc0610052023qa5abcd7h1335fed74a713373@mail.gmail.com> > > By the way, I'm quite willing to believe that the 2004 US election was > > broken, that most US elections have been broken, that both parties > > cheated, that the 2004 election was the worst yet in the series, that > > things will keep getting worse, that electronic voting marks a > > qualitative line of demarcation, and that there's nothing I can do > > about > > it *directly* and I probably shouldn't even have spent the seconds > > writing this sentence. > > > > I don't believe it was just business as usual and I do believe the > problem is getting much worse. As to what to do about I confess I > haven't much clue except to demand a better and much more trustworthy > voting system than what we have. I don't think it wise to remain > silent about everything I don't know how to fix. Nor would it be > wise to squawk about all of them. We have to pick our battles. > > - samantha > Open Source Electronic Voting System. Emlyn From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Oct 6 03:25:11 2006 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 23:25:11 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs In-Reply-To: <4525B6C2.5050003@pobox.com> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> <4525B6C2.5050003@pobox.com> Message-ID: <62c14240610052025h39989898v332ede91108ed484@mail.gmail.com> On 10/5/06, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote: > > Highly skilled rationalists who understand intelligence are going to be > on guard against: > > Separate magisteria; > Extensional neglect; > Scope neglect; > Inconsistent evaluations of different verbal descriptions of the same > events; > not to mention, > Failure to search for better third alternatives; > Fatuous philosophy that sounds like deep wisdom; and > Self-destructive impulses. > > I do not claim to be a highly skilled rationalist. So I will only ask a question. What if the superior processing power was something similar to the Star Trek Borg? I know, this is "science [sic] fiction" but the concept is akin to forced upload into a Matrioshka Brain. Would we collectively be "better off" in terms of escaping the zero-sum life experience? Each individual in the collective could feasibly believe they were at the top of the hierarchy. Rather than fighting amongst ourselves over the limited biochemicals contained on this rock called Earth, we could simulate the misery of earthly existence for the nostalgic masochists who refuse to move on. I know the 'Borg' were depicted as horrible enemies of humanity - but once you get over the serialization-upload-deserialization procedure, "life" as the uploaded are concerned could be at least equal if not infinitely easier. If this is an amusing enough thought to point out which of the above enumerated rational failures were employed, I would actually appreciate the insight. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sentience at pobox.com Fri Oct 6 03:38:13 2006 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Thu, 05 Oct 2006 20:38:13 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs In-Reply-To: <62c14240610052025h39989898v332ede91108ed484@mail.gmail.com> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> <4525B6C2.5050003@pobox.com> <62c14240610052025h39989898v332ede91108ed484@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4525CFA5.8070704@pobox.com> Mike Dougherty wrote: > > I do not claim to be a highly skilled rationalist. So I will only ask a > question. > > What if the superior processing power was something similar to the Star > Trek Borg? I know, this is "science [sic] fiction" but the concept is > akin to forced upload into a Matrioshka Brain. Would we collectively be > "better off" in terms of escaping the zero-sum life experience? Each > individual in the collective could feasibly believe they were at the top > of the hierarchy. Rather than fighting amongst ourselves over the > limited biochemicals contained on this rock called Earth, we could > simulate the misery of earthly existence for the nostalgic masochists > who refuse to move on. I know the 'Borg' were depicted as horrible > enemies of humanity - but once you get over the > serialization-upload-deserialization procedure, "life" as the uploaded > are concerned could be at least equal if not infinitely easier. I don't understand your "what if". What if what? What if the above is the actual outcome? (Answer: it's a complex scenario with no specific support given so it's very improbable a priori.) What about the above as an optimal solution from a humane standpoint? (Answer: it seems easier to conceive of third alternatives which are better.) -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From riel at surriel.com Fri Oct 6 03:46:58 2006 From: riel at surriel.com (Rik van Riel) Date: Thu, 05 Oct 2006 23:46:58 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] TRENDS: Email is so yesterday In-Reply-To: <380-2200610451275281@M2W024.mail2web.com> References: <380-2200610451275281@M2W024.mail2web.com> Message-ID: <4525D1B2.40904@surriel.com> nvitamore at austin.rr.com wrote: > Anyone have thoughts on this? > > http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061002-7877.html It really depends. IRC is a lot better for some discussions than email, while email works better when you have more complex arguments to explain. Neither really works for collaborative creation, though. Discussion has its place, but we tend to discuss the same few things over and over again without making real progress. Wikis are great for collaborative content creation. They mostly work when people know what they're writing about... I'm hosting public wikis on http://wikiwall.org/ some of which are turning out successful. Deepamehta looks like it should work even when people do not exactly know yet what they're thinking about. http://www.deepamehta.de/ has information on the program. Collaborative mindmapping could fill in a nice gap between email / chat and wikis. I want to set up a public Deepamehta server soon to see if that works better for collaborative brainstorming. -- Who do you trust? The people with all the right answers? Or the people with the right questions? From lcorbin at rawbw.com Fri Oct 6 06:07:41 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 23:07:41 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> <8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com> <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1159770735.13119.4.camel@localhost> Message-ID: <059901c6e90d$be9c9fa0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Samantha wrote (Sent: Sunday, October 01, 2006 11:32 PM) > Lee Corbin wrote: > >> That could be true, but I believe it depends on future events. Do you almost >> daily think about what your reactions would be if a terrorist nuke was to go >> off in a large American city? > > Of course not. Do you? What for? Seems like a terrible waste of > emotional energy. Thank you for your generous interest in how I spend my time. It's nice when you know that others care; and I'll be sure to consult you whenever I begin to feel unable to manage my time sensibly. For your information, I try to confine such thinking to odd moments. Actually, there are dozens of items like this that I ponder any number of times each week. Even more often I mentally prepare myself for The Big One, or (!) if it turns out that Elvis Is Still Alive. >> Do you think that your feelings and intuitions would change at all? > > Such hypotheticals are utterly useless to the issues at hand. No, they're not. They're the only insurance against panic. No guarantee, of course, but it helps. Please also see my remarks to Russell. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Fri Oct 6 06:03:01 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 23:03:01 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com><451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net><45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net><8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com><051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <8d71341e0610012326y66fde0f3h3795e07362235e64@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <059801c6e90d$1753c390$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Russell wrote (Sent: Sunday, October 01, 2006 11:26 PM) [Lee wrote] > > what [would be] your reactions would be if a terrorist nuke was to go > > off in a large American city? Do you think that your feelings and intuitions > > would change at all? > > My feelings and intuitions, like yours, say anything that hints of enemy action > should be assigned the highest priority. I know exactly why they say that. > They evolved in conditions where intraspecies violence was the main cause > of death that we could do something about. That is correct. > That circumstance no longer obtains, With the faint-hearted, sickening, and virulent memes you're peddling, that circumstance [we revert to barbarism] is made more likely. > and our feelings and intuitions therefore give completely the wrong answer > when we evaluate today's problems. Since we _know_ they give the wrong > answer, Begging the question. > and we know why, we should use reason instead. Hmm. Well, lessee..... on the one hand we can use our rational faculties..., or abandon reason and be like the beasts we were before. I wonder which choice should be made...? Rationality is extremely complicated---or rather, attempts to be fully rational are *not* simple. It's absurd to believe that you can instantly apply a numbers calculus in the easy way you propose. Please take a look at "The Robot's Rebellion" if you've not already read it. Even though written by a non-libertarian (choke, a socialist!), it splendidly assays the difficulties. > Look at the cold numbers: how many people worldwide have been > killed by terrorists from 2001 to today? Some thousands, maybe into > five digits. How many lives have been lost from all causes in that same > time? Nearly _three hundred million_. You are, of course, referring (in a most praiseworthy way) to the Deathoid Holocaust. Yes indeed: some 50-100 million die each year unfrozen, and with no hope whatsoever. > Even a nuclear explosion in a major city would be a drop in the ocean on > that scale. Yass..., of course it would. I am sure that *you* at least and your sympathizers on this list would react most calmly say, if that nuclear bomb devastated central London. Even were 100,000 people killed, that's on the order of one-tenth of one percent of the Deathoid Holocaust's yearly ravage. (And besides, like 9-11, it's not likely to recur every year.) Well... okay, so you wouldn't? You'd panic, most likely, and unlike me your emotions would be a cauldron that'd probably entirely interfere with rational thought. I know exactly how I'd feel; I daresay you don't. And I know what I'd think and what I'd advise. > Note also that you only answered the lesser half of my argument. Sorry I don't have time for everything I'd like to opine on. Returning to the above argument, failure to recognize enemies for what they are, and failure to make personal sacrifices (call them irrational for your vehicle if you like) will be the death of civilization. Would you really be willing to in any way to hazard your honor, your fortune, and your sacred life to come to the aid of your country? (The order there, sad to say, is different today.) No, I'm sure you would not. That, after all, would be patriotic. Okay, then what about coming to the aid of your civilization instead? Same answer? Some people thought it wasn't rational in 1938 to "fight for King and country" and look what happened next. There is causality, and you *are* making the West weak, both in appearance and reality. Lee P.S. My apologies if you aren't British; please pretend that you are for the sake of the questions. From eugen at leitl.org Fri Oct 6 06:39:41 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 08:39:41 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] TRENDS: Email is so yesterday In-Reply-To: <710b78fc0610051714p355d446by1cf7b1a0b6ae954b@mail.gmail.com> References: <380-2200610451275281@M2W024.mail2web.com> <62c14240610042002k6bebc6dbha1681a9a9029fb36@mail.gmail.com> <710b78fc0610042313i4cf115b3ne2da835c6117dc4f@mail.gmail.com> <391B2A37-A95B-4F84-9A3B-88B18D129280@mac.com> <710b78fc0610051714p355d446by1cf7b1a0b6ae954b@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20061006063941.GW21640@leitl.org> On Fri, Oct 06, 2006 at 09:44:47AM +0930, Emlyn wrote: > That's why I use gmail. I don't want to be trapped by a corporate > email account ever again. I redirect everything into my gmail, and my You've only swapped one corporate jail for another. (And one with a company that has a history of playing fast and loose with privacy). If you want email done right, you have to do it yourself. There might be no IM/mail integration, but there are open source solutions you can run on your own servers. > ongoing email memory is my concern from then on, excellently > searchable, accessible everywhere. If only I could pay google some So is http://www.zimbra.com/products/hosted_demo.php > pittance to ensure that my email was going to stick around into the > long term, or at least have an archiving mechanism to give me some > insurance. But the app is so good, I'm willing to keep taking that > chance. My main beef with Google is surrendering privacy. It's the one-stop shop for any TLA on the information superhighway. And anyone who trusts a corporation with anything not related to maximizing revenue is walking on very thin ice. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From ben at goertzel.org Fri Oct 6 07:15:39 2006 From: ben at goertzel.org (Ben Goertzel) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 03:15:39 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs In-Reply-To: <4525B6C2.5050003@pobox.com> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> <4525B6C2.5050003@pobox.com> Message-ID: <638d4e150610060015m13485a37kf435ddaaa136ea88@mail.gmail.com> Eli wrote: > > I do not see why this attitude is inconsistent with a deep > > understanding of the nature of intelligence, and a profound > > rationality. > > Hell, Ben, you aren't willing to say publicly that Arthur T. Murray is a > fool. In general you seem very reluctant to admit that certain things > are inconsistent with rationality - a charity level that *I* think is > inconsistent with rationality. Heh.... Eli, this is a very humorous statement about me, and one that definitely would not be written by anyone who knew me well in person !!!! I have to say that making this kind of generalization about me, based on your very limited knowledge of me as a human being, is rather irrational on your part ;-) ... My ex-wife would **really** get a kick out of the idea that I am "reluctant to admit that certain things are inconsistent with rationality" ;-) I think there are a LOT of things that are inconsistent with rationality ... though it's also true that some humans can be highly rational in some domains and highly irrational in others, and effectively maintain a strict separation between the domains. (For example, I know some excellent scientists who are also deeply religious, but separate the two domains verrry strictly so their rationality in science is not pragmatically affected by their irrationality in personal and spiritual life.) However, I don't think that advocating the creation of superhuman AI even in the face of considerable risk that it will annihilate humanity, is **irrational**. It is simply a choice of goals that is different from your, Eliezer's, currently preferred choice. > -- "Cognitive biases potentially affecting judgment of global risks" > > I seriously doubt that your friend is processing that question with the > same part of his brain that he uses to decide e.g. whether to > deliberately drive into oncoming traffic or throw his three-year-old > daughter off a hotel balcony. No, but so what? The part of his mind that decides whether to throw someone off a balcony or to drive into traffic is his EMOTIONS ... the part of his mind that decides whether a potentially dangerous superhuman AI should be allowed to be created is his REASON which is more dispassionately making judgments based on less personal and emotional aspects of his value system... It is not logically inconsistent to a) value being alive more than being dead b) value a superhuman AI's life more than the human race's life > Your friend, I suspect, is carrying out a form of non-extensional > reasoning which consists of reacting to verbal descriptions of events > quite differently than how he would react to witnessing even a small > sample of the human deaths involved. Well, but why do you consider it irrational for someone to make a considered judgment that contradicts their primal emotional reactions? In this case, the person may just be making a decision to adopt a supergoal that contradicts their emotional reactions, even though they are not able to actually extinguish their emotional reactions... > But a skilled rationalist who knows about extensional neglect is not > likely to endorse the destruction of Earth unless they also endorse the > death of Human_1, Human_2, Human_3, ... themselves, their mother, ... > Human_6e9. But it is quite consistent to endorse the destruction of all these humans (individually or en masse) IN EXCHANGE FOR AN ALTERNATIVE PERCEIVED AS BETTER, but not to endorse the destruction of all these humans FOR NO REASON AT ALL ... > Also I expect that your friend is making a mistake of simple fact, with > respect to what kind of superhumans these are likely to be - he thinks > they'll be better just because they've got more processing power, an old > old mistake I once made myself. No, he is not making this mistake. He thinks they'll be better because he thinks our evolutionary "design" sucks and appropriately engineered AI systems can be ethically as well as intellectually superior by design... Ben From sentience at pobox.com Fri Oct 6 07:46:25 2006 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Fri, 06 Oct 2006 00:46:25 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs In-Reply-To: <638d4e150610060015m13485a37kf435ddaaa136ea88@mail.gmail.com> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> <4525B6C2.5050003@pobox.com> <638d4e150610060015m13485a37kf435ddaaa136ea88@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <452609D1.5090709@pobox.com> Ben Goertzel wrote: > Eli wrote: > >>>I do not see why this attitude is inconsistent with a deep >>>understanding of the nature of intelligence, and a profound >>>rationality. >> >>Hell, Ben, you aren't willing to say publicly that Arthur T. Murray is a >>fool. In general you seem very reluctant to admit that certain things >>are inconsistent with rationality - a charity level that *I* think is >>inconsistent with rationality. > > Heh.... Eli, this is a very humorous statement about me, and one that > definitely would not be written by anyone who knew me well in person > !!!! I have to say that making this kind of generalization about me, > based on your very limited knowledge of me as a human being, is rather > irrational on your part ;-) ... My ex-wife would **really** get a kick > out of the idea that I am "reluctant to admit that certain things are > inconsistent with rationality" ;-) Oh, I'm sure there are plenty of things which you admit are inconsistent with rationality. Arthur T. Murray is apparently not one of them, which suggests your standards are a bit lax. You are too charitable, and this is also a flaw. > I think there are a LOT of things that are inconsistent with > rationality ... though it's also true that some humans can be highly > rational in some domains and highly irrational in others, and > effectively maintain a strict separation between the domains. (For > example, I know some excellent scientists who are also deeply > religious, but separate the two domains verrry strictly so their > rationality in science is not pragmatically affected by their > irrationality in personal and spiritual life.) > > However, I don't think that advocating the creation of superhuman AI > even in the face of considerable risk that it will annihilate > humanity, is **irrational**. It is simply a choice of goals that is > different from your, Eliezer's, currently preferred choice. Heh. Considerable risk? Your friend spoke of the *desirability* of such an outcome, not the risk of it. Both of these are foolishness but they are foolish in different ways. In the former case it is a moral error, pure and simple. In the latter case, it is a result of vague ideas leading you to not know the rigorous reasons which show why rigor, i.e., theories strong enough to formally calculate extremely low failure probabilities, is required in order to succeed. If you don't know the rules, you don't know the rule whereby you could see that not knowing the rules definitely kills you. But that's a separate issue. >> -- "Cognitive biases potentially affecting judgment of global risks" >> >>I seriously doubt that your friend is processing that question with the >>same part of his brain that he uses to decide e.g. whether to >>deliberately drive into oncoming traffic or throw his three-year-old >>daughter off a hotel balcony. > > No, but so what? > > The part of his mind that decides whether to throw someone off a > balcony or to drive into traffic is his EMOTIONS ... the part of his > mind that decides whether a potentially dangerous superhuman AI should > be allowed to be created is his REASON which is more dispassionately > making judgments based on less personal and emotional aspects of his > value system... The comfort of cynicism is an emotion, though it is mistaken by many for rationality. "The second virtue is relinquishment. P. C. Hodgell said: "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be." Do not flinch from experiences that might destroy your beliefs. The thought you cannot think controls you more than thoughts you speak aloud. Submit yourself to ordeals and test yourself in fire. Relinquish the emotion which rests upon a mistaken belief, and seek to feel fully that emotion which fits the facts. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is hot, and it is cool, the Way opposes your fear. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is cool, and it is hot, the Way opposes your calm. Evaluate your beliefs first and then arrive at your emotions. Let yourself say: "If the iron is hot, I desire to believe it is hot, and if it is cool, I desire to believe it is cool." Beware lest you become attached to beliefs you may not want." > It is not logically inconsistent to > > a) value being alive more than being dead > b) value a superhuman AI's life more than the human race's life What kind of AI? How hard is it to build this kind of AI? Is that kind of AI likely to wipe out humans in the first place? But this of course is a dispute of fact. >>Your friend, I suspect, is carrying out a form of non-extensional >>reasoning which consists of reacting to verbal descriptions of events >>quite differently than how he would react to witnessing even a small >>sample of the human deaths involved. > > Well, but why do you consider it irrational for someone to make a > considered judgment that contradicts their primal emotional reactions? That depends on the *why* of the considered judgment. We form deliberative moral principles through an essentially emotional process, even though those principles may later override other emotions. If the moral principle itself is formed through flawed reasoning - reasoning which could be destroyed by some particular truth - then the process as a whole is irrational. "A chain of a thousand links will arrive at a correct conclusion if every step is correct, but if one step is wrong it may carry you anywhere. In mathematics a mountain of good deeds cannot atone for a single sin. Therefore, be careful on every step." > In this case, the person may just be making a decision to adopt a > supergoal that contradicts their emotional reactions, even though they > are not able to actually extinguish their emotional reactions... And Arthur T. Murray *may* be secretly a genius, but it is not likely. I once constructed an incorrect moral ontology (Eliezer_1996-1999) that forced me to consider a similar tradeoff, but I never thought it was *likely* that a nice superintelligence would kill people because it was the right thing to do. In those days I thought it was a serious possibility, because in those days I didn't understand how I was evaluating "right thing to do", so for all I knew it would end up anywhere. But I never thought murder was a *likely* good deed. That, to me, suggests a different category of mistake. > No, he is not making this mistake. He thinks they'll be better > because he thinks our evolutionary "design" sucks So it does. For example, it leads people to try to solve problems by murder, without even looking for a third alternative. > and appropriately > engineered AI systems can be ethically as well as intellectually > superior by design... I believe the children are our future, but only if they're very carefully designed; I believe I'm more ethical than my own parents, and somehow, I don't want to kill them because of that; And if I did want to kill my parents for the crime of still having things yet to learn, then I would have gone wrong, and certainly my life would not be worth more than theirs, or so my present self judges. Anyway. I'm not interested in arguing with your friend secondhand. Say what you yourself think is *optimal* reasoning, and I may be interested in disputing it. As for what you think *may* be rational, that's a class large enough to include Mentifex, so I may have to say that we have different standards for what "may" be "rational" and close it at that. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From eugen at leitl.org Fri Oct 6 08:03:31 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 10:03:31 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] exit polls In-Reply-To: <710b78fc0610052023qa5abcd7h1335fed74a713373@mail.gmail.com> References: <200610050220.k952KJBu000921@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <452470A9.3080502@goldenfuture.net> <43AB14C8-0878-433E-91AD-E791008FDF31@mac.com> <4525642C.1000905@pobox.com> <710b78fc0610052023qa5abcd7h1335fed74a713373@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20061006080331.GX21640@leitl.org> On Fri, Oct 06, 2006 at 12:53:26PM +0930, Emlyn wrote: > Open Source Electronic Voting System. No computers. Just plain pencil and paper. I don't trust any electronic system with anything as important as the decision which clowns run the asylum next. There is some limited use for smart-card based *very well designed and debugged system which are under constant public scrutiny* for a direct democracy, especially local-scale. There must be a law that this channel must invalid for top-level decision, effectively irreversibly so. If you think I'm going overboard, then you probably less familiar with the problem space than you think. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From ben at goertzel.org Fri Oct 6 08:10:48 2006 From: ben at goertzel.org (Ben Goertzel) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 04:10:48 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs In-Reply-To: <452609D1.5090709@pobox.com> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> <4525B6C2.5050003@pobox.com> <638d4e150610060015m13485a37kf435ddaaa136ea88@mail.gmail.com> <452609D1.5090709@pobox.com> Message-ID: <638d4e150610060110x60a929a5m78c1e944d50ec89b@mail.gmail.com> Hi, > Anyway. I'm not interested in arguing with your friend secondhand. Say > what you yourself think is *optimal* reasoning, and I may be interested > in disputing it. As for what you think *may* be rational, that's a > class large enough to include Mentifex, so I may have to say that we > have different standards for what "may" be "rational" and close it at that. I do not know what is optimal reasoning, and I don't believe you know either, nor does any human.... I definitely do not find your own reasoning optimal... For instance, you have repeatedly claimed quite confidently that "any AI not provably Friendly is very very likely to wind up extremely unFriendly", without ever presenting any remotely convincing reasoning in favor of this contention ;-) As for my friend's reasoning, I know him pretty well and find his reasoning and attitudes quite rational. However, it may be that I am using the word "rational" differently than you are. It is definitely the case that his emotional reactions to many situations do not agree with his considered evaluations of these situations. In this sense he is an inconsistent system: there are many situations to which parts of his mind react positively but parts react negatively. However, he does not seem to maintain any statements that are logically contradictory to each other, nor does he seem to mis-estimate odds of events in a systematic or extreme way. I am not sure in what sense you are claiming his attitude is "irrational." As for Mentifex, I see no purpose to draw him into this discussion extensively. I must state that although Mentifex has made many claims I don't believe, and has sometimes irritated me by excessive spamming, I do find I have some odd affection for the chap ;-) ... If I ever start drinking alcohol again (it's been a few years) perhaps I will invite him out for a beer! And generally: I have not found that my emotional affection for an individual is anywhere near proportional to my perception of their rationality.... (if this were the case, my love-life would have gone quite differently in many instances!!) -- Ben G From eugen at leitl.org Fri Oct 6 08:23:59 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 10:23:59 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs (was: Tyranny in place) In-Reply-To: <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> References: <4521C18A.1010907@goldenfuture.net> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20061006082359.GZ21640@leitl.org> On Thu, Oct 05, 2006 at 09:14:33PM -0400, Ben Goertzel wrote: > I asked a friend recently what he thought about the prospect of > superhuman beings annihilating humans to make themselves more > processing substrate... > > His response: "It's about time." Not quite, I hope. I'd like my kids to grow up. > When asked what he meant, he said simply, "We're not so great, and Not so great in comparison to what? > we've been dominating the planet long enough. Let something better Better in which sense? Fitter doesn't mean better, especially if you're at the receiving end. > have its turn." I understand Moravec is of a similiar persuasion. Well, it's an opinion, and I'm glad people with that opinion are not in charge of the world. > I do not see why this attitude is inconsistent with a deep > understanding of the nature of intelligence, and a profound > rationality. I don't know what profound rationality is, but your brand of it seems to exclude such basic fare like self-preservation. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Oct 6 08:40:27 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 10:40:27 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs In-Reply-To: <638d4e150610060110x60a929a5m78c1e944d50ec89b@mail.gmail.com> References: <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> <4525B6C2.5050003@pobox.com> <638d4e150610060015m13485a37kf435ddaaa136ea88@mail.gmail.com> <452609D1.5090709@pobox.com> <638d4e150610060110x60a929a5m78c1e944d50ec89b@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20061006084027.GA21640@leitl.org> On Fri, Oct 06, 2006 at 04:10:48AM -0400, Ben Goertzel wrote: > I do not know what is optimal reasoning, and I don't believe you know > either, nor does any human.... I definitely do not find your own > reasoning optimal... The word optimal is meaningless without context and a metric. > For instance, you have repeatedly claimed quite confidently that "any > AI not provably Friendly is very very likely to wind up extremely > unFriendly", without ever presenting any remotely convincing reasoning > in favor of this contention ;-) The point is that a population of uncaring high-fitness beings will cause extinctions on a very large scale. We do. I wouldn't call it unfriendly, because unfriendly means to actually seek out and terminate with extreme prejudice. If you're missing reasoning for that, then I suggest you look into evolutionary biology and human history, and take a look out of your window. > As for my friend's reasoning, I know him pretty well and find his > reasoning and attitudes quite rational. However, it may be that I am > using the word "rational" differently than you are. Again, rational doesn't mean much without further decoration. > I am not sure in what sense you are claiming his attitude is "irrational." Most people tend to value life. I would call a person who's indifferent or hostile to his own well-being at least slightly pathological. I don't see why you're so fixated on that rational thing, whatever that is. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From mbb386 at main.nc.us Fri Oct 6 10:45:41 2006 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 06:45:41 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] exit polls In-Reply-To: <20061006080331.GX21640@leitl.org> References: <200610050220.k952KJBu000921@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <452470A9.3080502@goldenfuture.net> <43AB14C8-0878-433E-91AD-E791008FDF31@mac.com> <4525642C.1000905@pobox.com> <710b78fc0610052023qa5abcd7h1335fed74a713373@mail.gmail.com> <20061006080331.GX21640@leitl.org> Message-ID: <34399.72.236.103.244.1160131541.squirrel@main.nc.us> > > No computers. Just plain pencil and paper. > Thank you, Eugen! :) It goes counter to my desire, but sometimes an old tried and true way works best. At least for the time being. It's easier for ordinary folks (most of the people overseeing elections and polling places) to deal with - and to see when things aren't right. Elections must aim for being clear, plain, obvious, open-for-all-to-see, that there is no "funny stuff"... At this place in time, pencil and paper seem the best fit to me. Regards, MB From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Oct 6 12:42:46 2006 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 08:42:46 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs In-Reply-To: <4525CFA5.8070704@pobox.com> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> <4525B6C2.5050003@pobox.com> <62c14240610052025h39989898v332ede91108ed484@mail.gmail.com> <4525CFA5.8070704@pobox.com> Message-ID: <62c14240610060542y17c4e7cfkd89b5c5685983813@mail.gmail.com> On 10/5/06, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote: > > I don't understand your "what if". What if what? What if the above is > the actual outcome? (Answer: it's a complex scenario with no specific > support given so it's very improbable a priori.) What about the above > as an optimal solution from a humane standpoint? (Answer: it seems > easier to conceive of third alternatives which are better.) > in response to: > I asked a friend recently what he thought about the prospect of > superhuman beings annihilating humans to make themselves more > processing substrate... > > His response: "It's about time." > > When asked what he meant, he said simply, "We're not so great, and > we've been dominating the planet long enough. Let something better > have its turn." true the scenario is unlikely - as much as superhuman beings would ever annihilate humans. There is a much greater likelihood that we will annihilate ourselves first. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ben at goertzel.org Fri Oct 6 15:48:17 2006 From: ben at goertzel.org (Ben Goertzel) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 11:48:17 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs In-Reply-To: <20061006084027.GA21640@leitl.org> References: <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> <4525B6C2.5050003@pobox.com> <638d4e150610060015m13485a37kf435ddaaa136ea88@mail.gmail.com> <452609D1.5090709@pobox.com> <638d4e150610060110x60a929a5m78c1e944d50ec89b@mail.gmail.com> <20061006084027.GA21640@leitl.org> Message-ID: <638d4e150610060848l1ee07f4bi6e536c90221aca9f@mail.gmail.com> Hi, > > For instance, you have repeatedly claimed quite confidently that "any > > AI not provably Friendly is very very likely to wind up extremely > > unFriendly", without ever presenting any remotely convincing reasoning > > in favor of this contention ;-) > > The point is that a population of uncaring high-fitness beings will cause > extinctions on a very large scale. We do. I wouldn't call it unfriendly, > because unfriendly means to actually seek out and terminate with extreme > prejudice. If you're missing reasoning for that, then I > suggest you look into evolutionary biology and human history, > and take a look out of your window. You are missing my point ... there is a difference between a) not provably caring and b) uncaring I agree that a superhuman AI that doesn't give a shit about us is reasonably likely to be dangerous. What I don't see is why Eliezer thinks an AI that is apparently not likely to be dangerous, but about whose benevolence it's apparently formidably different to construct a formal proof, is highly likely to be dangerous. I also think that looking to evolutionary biology for guidance about superhuman AI's is a mistake, BTW. > Most people tend to value life. I would call a person who's indifferent > or hostile to his own well-being at least slightly pathological. > I don't see why you're so fixated on that rational thing, whatever that is. This thread began as a discussion of whether or not rationality rules out a certain attitude toward the preservation of human life. I don't find it accurate to say that I'm fixated on rationality, though I do consider it important. -- Ben From ben at goertzel.org Fri Oct 6 15:53:30 2006 From: ben at goertzel.org (Ben Goertzel) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 11:53:30 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs (was: Tyranny in place) In-Reply-To: <20061006082359.GZ21640@leitl.org> References: <4521C18A.1010907@goldenfuture.net> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> <20061006082359.GZ21640@leitl.org> Message-ID: <638d4e150610060853o76ed64f8lace4c32fcaebb4bb@mail.gmail.com> > > I do not see why this attitude is inconsistent with a deep > > understanding of the nature of intelligence, and a profound > > rationality. > > I don't know what profound rationality is, but your brand > of it seems to exclude such basic fare like self-preservation. No... it just doesn't GUARANTEE a value being placed on self-preservation... Ben From eugen at leitl.org Fri Oct 6 16:10:34 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 18:10:34 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs (was: Tyranny in place) In-Reply-To: <638d4e150610060853o76ed64f8lace4c32fcaebb4bb@mail.gmail.com> References: <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> <20061006082359.GZ21640@leitl.org> <638d4e150610060853o76ed64f8lace4c32fcaebb4bb@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20061006161034.GL21640@leitl.org> On Fri, Oct 06, 2006 at 11:53:30AM -0400, Ben Goertzel wrote: > > I don't know what profound rationality is, but your brand > > of it seems to exclude such basic fare like self-preservation. > > No... it just doesn't GUARANTEE a value being placed on self-preservation... Then it would tend to be really fragile long-term, no? -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From russell.wallace at gmail.com Fri Oct 6 16:12:16 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 17:12:16 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <059801c6e90d$1753c390$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> <8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com> <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <8d71341e0610012326y66fde0f3h3795e07362235e64@mail.gmail.com> <059801c6e90d$1753c390$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <8d71341e0610060912n29ce3919obe40cec30f1b43f5@mail.gmail.com> On 10/6/06, Lee Corbin wrote: > > With the faint-hearted, sickening, and virulent memes you're peddling, > that > circumstance [we revert to barbarism] is made more likely. What you're doing here is reading my words for their affect value. I quite carefully formulated a number of paragraphs in an attempt to say precisely what I meant and not what I didn't mean, and you're using only a single bit: good guy vs bad guy. As it happens, you have tagged my sympathies entirely incorrectly; if you look at what I actually wrote, you'll note that I specifically stated the likes of al-Qaida are our enemies and have to be fought. What I am opposed to is autoimmune disease: allowing our supposed protectors to turn inwards and target us instead of our enemies. Perhaps more fundamentally, I'm arguing precisely against making decisions by affect value. Not every proposal that wraps itself in stirring words about fighting the bad guys is actually going to be helpful against said bad guys. (Reader's home exercise: think of 57 historical examples.) Well... okay, so you wouldn't? You'd panic, most likely, and unlike me your > emotions would be a cauldron that'd probably entirely interfere with > rational > thought. I know exactly how I'd feel; I daresay you don't. And I know > what > I'd think and what I'd advise. As it happens, I do know what I would feel, think and advocate in that event, though I don't spend time contemplating it every day; I think it better to spend my mental energy on things that have a significant chance of being actually helpful. Returning to the above argument, failure to recognize enemies for what they > are, and failure to make personal sacrifices (call them irrational for > your > vehicle if you like) will be the death of civilization. Would you really > be willing > to in any way to hazard your honor, your fortune, and your sacred life to > come > to the aid of your country? (The order there, sad to say, is different > today.) > > No, I'm sure you would not. That, after all, would be patriotic. Okay, > then > what about coming to the aid of your civilization instead? Same answer? I'm afraid you are entirely incorrect. I could claim (and happen to believe) that if the primary threat today came from armed men speaking a foreign language, I would have volunteered for military service, but boasts are wind and deeds are hard, so I will note instead what I have chosen to spend my life, fortune and sacred honor on: attempting to figure out how to develop AI. It's not glamorous, it doesn't earn the respect of my fellow man, it's a very long way past the difficulty level at which it stopped being fun, and an objective assessment of the probability of success indicates that I'm going to die trying, but as far as I can see it has a higher expected (success probability times value if successful) contribution to the survival and welfare of my country, civilization and species than anything else I could do. Some people thought it wasn't rational in 1938 to "fight for King and > country" > and look what happened next. There is causality, and you *are* making the > West weak, both in appearance and reality. > If you're looking to criticize someone for trying to make the West weak, you've got the wrong guy I'm afraid. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ben at goertzel.org Fri Oct 6 16:22:23 2006 From: ben at goertzel.org (Ben Goertzel) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 12:22:23 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs (was: Tyranny in place) In-Reply-To: <20061006161034.GL21640@leitl.org> References: <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> <20061006082359.GZ21640@leitl.org> <638d4e150610060853o76ed64f8lace4c32fcaebb4bb@mail.gmail.com> <20061006161034.GL21640@leitl.org> Message-ID: <638d4e150610060922g3a82094qc553dd39efb4df67@mail.gmail.com> Rationality, as I see it, is not intrinsically correlated with either fragility or stability. Coupled with a goal of self-preservation, rationality can of course lead to highly effective self-preservation... ?? ben On 10/6/06, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Fri, Oct 06, 2006 at 11:53:30AM -0400, Ben Goertzel wrote: > > > > I don't know what profound rationality is, but your brand > > > of it seems to exclude such basic fare like self-preservation. > > > > No... it just doesn't GUARANTEE a value being placed on self-preservation... > > Then it would tend to be really fragile long-term, no? > > -- > Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org > ______________________________________________________________ > ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com > 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE > > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (GNU/Linux) > > iD8DBQFFJn/6dbAkQ4sp9r4RAqpoAJ9zfx13xGnllxK4swVWGB7oI8KnRgCfYa0L > NmRyD7Pv1HqRPHN57/AyMYg= > =TYrz > -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > > From russell.wallace at gmail.com Fri Oct 6 17:24:23 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 18:24:23 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs (was: Tyranny in place) In-Reply-To: <20061006082359.GZ21640@leitl.org> References: <4521C18A.1010907@goldenfuture.net> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> <20061006082359.GZ21640@leitl.org> Message-ID: <8d71341e0610061024v22985852j1f7cb68b58eb9643@mail.gmail.com> On 10/6/06, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > I understand Moravec is of a similiar persuasion. > Well, it's an opinion, and I'm glad people with that > opinion are not in charge of the world. > I agree completely. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From femmechakra at gmail.com Mon Oct 2 03:12:29 2006 From: femmechakra at gmail.com (Anna Taylor) Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2006 20:12:29 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again In-Reply-To: <45207D63.5070005@pobox.com> References: <00ea01c6e3ee$d65b7f40$290a4e0c@MyComputer> <20060929211452.39597.qmail@web60514.mail.yahoo.com> <03ca01c6e4a3$ed3c1de0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <451EC22D.2000304@pobox.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20061001212625.02282fd8@satx.rr.com> <45207D63.5070005@pobox.com> Message-ID: <11cc03d50610012012t1c1b41c6x75f0d0431734c5d9@mail.gmail.com> Damien wrote: they could do things with their lives in addition to producing and looking after one child after another after another...The Somebody wrote: matter of total mystery to me is *why.* I don't have the least idea of why women would restrict family size at the times they did. Any ideas would be appreciated. Anna writes: I think that's a good beginning:) Why is it that man or woman would not want to reproduce? Just curious Anna:) On 10/1/06, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote: > Damien Broderick wrote: > > At 12:14 PM 9/30/2006 -0700, Eliezer wrote: > > > >>+1 insightful: > >>http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/1700/ > >>"Iraq: the world's first Suicide State" > > > > A learned friend writes: > > > > invaders > > or colonizers, to restore the historical dominance of one ethnic or > > religious group or to establish a new structure of dominance, or to impose > a > > particular set of religious rules--goals which are held by the various > > indigenous factions who are killing people in Iraq--is hardly "fighting > for > > nothing in particular." There isn't one manifesto that fits everybody > > toting a gun or a bomb--there are a number of contending factions--but the > > fact that it can't all be summed up easily in this guy's PowerPoint > > presentation doesn't make it "aimless." Different participants have > > different aims. This is far from unusual--consider the various factions > > involved in the South African resistance.> > > Fair enough. > > - E > > -- > Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ > Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From nlbarna at gmail.com Fri Oct 6 17:04:03 2006 From: nlbarna at gmail.com (Nathan Barna) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 12:04:03 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs (was: Tyranny in place) In-Reply-To: <638d4e150610060922g3a82094qc553dd39efb4df67@mail.gmail.com> References: <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> <20061006082359.GZ21640@leitl.org> <638d4e150610060853o76ed64f8lace4c32fcaebb4bb@mail.gmail.com> <20061006161034.GL21640@leitl.org> <638d4e150610060922g3a82094qc553dd39efb4df67@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <761b6df90610061004i5e8f25bo3ddc4ba565152094@mail.gmail.com> Ben Goertzel wrote: > Rationality, as I see it, is not intrinsically correlated with either > fragility or stability. Right. My own understanding, so far, of rationality is that it's intrinsically correlated with coherence, though. Given an explicit willingness to be rational, it would be hard to be willfully incoherent. Then given this bare-bones presupposition, it's hard to be coherent and be selective about knowledge, when you should want to know it all (or outsource to entities that can), which I believe underlies Eliezer's points in guarding against, specifically, /separate magisteria/ and /scope neglect/. From eugen at leitl.org Fri Oct 6 17:58:35 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 19:58:35 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs (was: Tyranny in place) In-Reply-To: <638d4e150610060853o76ed64f8lace4c32fcaebb4bb@mail.gmail.com> References: <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> <20061006082359.GZ21640@leitl.org> <638d4e150610060853o76ed64f8lace4c32fcaebb4bb@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20061006175835.GM21640@leitl.org> On Fri, Oct 06, 2006 at 11:53:30AM -0400, Ben Goertzel wrote: > No... it just doesn't GUARANTEE a value being placed on self-preservation... I still don't know what you mean when you use 'rational'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationality says several things, some of them being "In economics, sociology, and political science, a decision or situation is often called rational if it is in some sense optimal, and individuals or organizations are often called rational if they tend to act somehow optimally in pursuit of their goals. Thus one speaks, for example, of a rational allocation of resources, or of a rational corporate strategy. In this concept of "rationality", the individual's goals or motives are taken for granted and not made subject to criticism, ethical or otherwise. Thus rationality simply refers to the success of goal attainment, whatever those goals may be. Sometimes, in this context, rationality is equated with behavior that is self-interested to the point of being selfish. Sometimes rationality implies having complete knowledge about all the details of a given situation. It might be said that because the goals are not important in definition of rationality, it really only demands logical consistency in choice making. See rational choice theory. Debates arise in these three fields about whether or not people or organizations are "really" rational, as well as whether it make sense to model them as such in formal models. Some have argued that a kind of bounded rationality makes more sense for such models. Others think that any kind of rationality along the lines of rational choice theory is a useless concept for understanding human behavior; the term homo economicus (economic man: the imaginary logically consistent but amoral being assumed in economic models) was coined largely in honor of this view. Sociologist Max Weber's writing can be interpreted as suggesting an increasing irrationality of rationality. Rationality is a central principle in artificial intelligence, where a rational agent is specifically defined as an agent which always chooses the action which maximises its expected performance, given all of the knowledge it currently possesses." Perhaps you want to define your use of the term. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From benboc at lineone.net Fri Oct 6 18:01:59 2006 From: benboc at lineone.net (ben) Date: Fri, 06 Oct 2006 19:01:59 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cognition enhancement in fiction In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <45269A17.109@lineone.net> Anders asked: > Any suggestions? Well, here's a tentative one (tentative because i haven't finished reading it yet): Vernor Vinge, "The Peace War" (and i think "Marooned in Realtime" as well, that's next on my list) The protagonist uses IA to beat the baddies (or not. Maybe i should say 'fight the baddies'). Uses rather a poor concept of using scalp electrodes, rather than proper neural interfacing, but the idea's there. ben zaiboc From eugen at leitl.org Fri Oct 6 18:43:05 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 20:43:05 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs In-Reply-To: <638d4e150610060848l1ee07f4bi6e536c90221aca9f@mail.gmail.com> References: <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> <4525B6C2.5050003@pobox.com> <638d4e150610060015m13485a37kf435ddaaa136ea88@mail.gmail.com> <452609D1.5090709@pobox.com> <638d4e150610060110x60a929a5m78c1e944d50ec89b@mail.gmail.com> <20061006084027.GA21640@leitl.org> <638d4e150610060848l1ee07f4bi6e536c90221aca9f@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20061006184305.GN21640@leitl.org> On Fri, Oct 06, 2006 at 11:48:17AM -0400, Ben Goertzel wrote: > You are missing my point ... there is a difference between > > a) not provably caring Sorry, proofs don't work at all in the real physical world. They work more or less in the formal domain, where their reach is still very limited (but also very flattening). Since AIs have to operate in the physical domain to be of any use (even theoretical physics is not very theoretical, being grounded in constraints from empirical observations) I don't see how proofs are of any use there. You certainly can't prove your way of a literal (brown, wrinkled, slightly soggy) paper bag. > and > > b) uncaring > > I agree that a superhuman AI that doesn't give a shit about us is > reasonably likely to be dangerous. What I don't see is why Eliezer It's never a single being, it's always a population. Given the speed of evolution in the solid state, it's going to be a highly diverse population of agents, very soon. Of all levels of complexity and motivations. What a single (especially superhuman) agent is going to do can't be predicted at all. What a population of diverse critters with metabolism roaming the countryside can do of that we do have at least some slight idea. We've been soaking in it for quite some time now, and the results are entirely rational and quite deadly to anything not on two legs, and a few war profiteers. > thinks an AI that is apparently not likely to be dangerous, but about How can an artificial species (especially, a superintelligent one) suddenly operating in the here and now not be dangerous? Even conventional invasive species wreck havoc to select parts of the ecosystem. The most invasive species of them all, us, makes much less distinctions. It crashes biodiversity without discrimination, and regresses entire ecosystem under human impact stress. We could end up at the receiving end of it quite suddenly, if bigger players than us were to burst upon the scene. > whose benevolence it's apparently formidably different to construct a > formal proof, is highly likely to be dangerous. Since you can't define benevolence formally, it's not possible to build a chain of logic giving information about benevolence in any meaningful way. (Even in a really limited formal system like chess proofs are pure toilet paper). > I also think that looking to evolutionary biology for guidance about > superhuman AI's is a mistake, BTW. I'm never arguing about motivations of superhuman AIs but only deriving some very loose constraints upon a population of postbiological beings emerged locally, and then radiated/speciated, some of them superhuman, some dumb as dirt, operating in this solar system, using physical laws as we know them. Having this said, evolutionary biology does give us some answers. Unless you're proposing an alternative theory with a better success track, there's yet no point in abandoning this particular (cracked, blind, astigmatic) crystall ball. I'm curious why you think evolutionary theory (a superset of game theory) and usual physics are not applicable to a population of postbiological critters. You must have reasons for your position. > This thread began as a discussion of whether or not rationality rules > out a certain attitude toward the preservation of human life. My flavor of rationality does. Perhaps I should switch to Coke, though. > I don't find it accurate to say that I'm fixated on rationality, > though I do consider it important. I'm considering it very important personally; but also only one strategy of many. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From neuronexmachina at gmail.com Fri Oct 6 19:11:18 2006 From: neuronexmachina at gmail.com (Neil H.) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 12:11:18 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cognition enhancement in fiction In-Reply-To: <45269A17.109@lineone.net> References: <45269A17.109@lineone.net> Message-ID: Of course, there's also Vinge's "True Names." Vinge's "Deepness in the Sky" also had those monomaniacal "Focus" slaves. On 10/6/06, ben wrote: > > Anders asked: > > > Any suggestions? > > Well, here's a tentative one (tentative because i haven't finished > reading it yet): > > Vernor Vinge, "The Peace War" (and i think "Marooned in Realtime" as > well, that's next on my list) > > The protagonist uses IA to beat the baddies (or not. Maybe i should say > 'fight the baddies'). > > Uses rather a poor concept of using scalp electrodes, rather than proper > neural interfacing, but the idea's there. > > ben zaiboc > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From michaelanissimov at gmail.com Fri Oct 6 19:59:10 2006 From: michaelanissimov at gmail.com (Michael Anissimov) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 12:59:10 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wireheading In-Reply-To: <20061002101111.GK21640@leitl.org> References: <200609290452.k8T4qWMP001849@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451CFF7A.8030608@ramonsky.com> <20060929112008.GM21640@leitl.org> <4520E3AC.1030607@ramonsky.com> <20061002101111.GK21640@leitl.org> Message-ID: <51ce64f10610061259v6fa373dfnebea5f5203f09aff@mail.gmail.com> On 10/2/06, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > I'm hazarding that most other people don't. How's for a poll, here? > Would you call it blissed out, or something else? (If yes, how would > you describe it?). Borderline overrevelatory... momentarily confusing... unavoidably microanalyzing... ego fade... perceptual embellishments... melty and twisty. Snazzle frazzle zip woop. Definitely not 'blissed out'... Changing the mind makes things more different than spatial displacement ever could. Once you have the two points of reference you can draw a line and imagine all the other possibilities. On 10/2/06, BillK wrote: > > You do realise that anything significant that you post on extropy-chat > (or anywhere on the internet) is likely to immediately update your > Homeland Security Profile? JIHAD!!!! -- Michael Anissimov Lifeboat Foundation http://lifeboat.com http://acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog From eugen at leitl.org Fri Oct 6 20:14:39 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 22:14:39 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wireheading In-Reply-To: <51ce64f10610061259v6fa373dfnebea5f5203f09aff@mail.gmail.com> References: <200609290452.k8T4qWMP001849@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451CFF7A.8030608@ramonsky.com> <20060929112008.GM21640@leitl.org> <4520E3AC.1030607@ramonsky.com> <20061002101111.GK21640@leitl.org> <51ce64f10610061259v6fa373dfnebea5f5203f09aff@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20061006201439.GR21640@leitl.org> On Fri, Oct 06, 2006 at 12:59:10PM -0700, Michael Anissimov wrote: > JIHAD!!!! Hey, don't give away all my Google searches (it was jihad about 10 min ago, and just prior to that it was fedaykin). -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From michaelanissimov at gmail.com Fri Oct 6 20:55:39 2006 From: michaelanissimov at gmail.com (Michael Anissimov) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 13:55:39 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] TRENDS: Email is so yesterday In-Reply-To: <380-2200610451275281@M2W024.mail2web.com> References: <380-2200610451275281@M2W024.mail2web.com> Message-ID: <51ce64f10610061355k462b7936t8581aeb9883c39a2@mail.gmail.com> On 10/4/06, nvitamore at austin.rr.com wrote: > > Anyone have thoughts on this? > > http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061002-7877.html My thought is, why don't extropians have chats on IRC ever? If we're all best buds like we're supposed to be, we ought to chat in realtime rather than just this touch-and-go email shiz. The only problem is getting the time-synch in order... and also finding a suitable topic. And also making it so that the more talkative types don't totally dominate the conversation. And encourage the un-IM-inclined types to log on. You know, the people who are "too busy" to get acquainted with IMing even though they spend hours a day on email. I propose Thursday evenings, America-ish time, as a general time for people to go on #extropians and hang out for chatting... I know that Keith Henson is frequently on, for example. There's also a WTA-SL chapter forming, though of course extropians and WTA-ians are not necessarily the same thing. Because of differences in politics and history. That can be fun to talk about because it's controversial, by the way. On 10/4/06, spike wrote: > > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of nvitamore at austin.rr.com > > I have difficulty imagining that instant messages would have very much > memetic content. You wouldn't bother thinking out and typing your deepest > ideas into a medium so evanescent, gone like a wisp of vapor in an instant. > I can easily imagine however, content such as "how r u?" followed by > whatever is the mod hip appropriate response to that profound inquiry. Hardly gone in an instant... as Florida's beloved congressman discovered this week. Your above comments could easily have been put into IM form. In fact, I think that IM form can be superior in certain contexts. Sending out emails is like preaching to a captive audience - I get no feedback, so I can't be sure if I'm pissing people off, boring them, confusing them, or whatever. With IMing, you get the feedback. It's somewhere between F2F and mailing lists. Personal experience with Friendly AI: I read 'Creating Friendly AI' three times from beginning to end, but still kept asking, "how can you predict the actions of an AI after it modifies itself a billion times over?", and other questions-missing-the-point. *Only* after a long IM convo with Eli did it all really sink in, the short answer being, "the point is not about predicting its exact actions way off in the future, but sparking the Singularity in the most beneficial way possible". > I expect that our own conversations were not terribly deep when we were > teenagers. It was all about mating at that age, a mostly unsuccessful and > pointless exercise I might add. This is one way being an adult really is > better than being a teen. Because of reliable access to a mate? Seriously though, I was deep as a teenager because I wanted to be, and got plenty of respect as a result. In some ways I wish I were still a teenager. Most of my present-day intellectual activity is actually just embellishment on fundamental concepts I picked up as a teen. The teens nowadays get laid more, and think more, and are more mature than they were back in your time. This is an unequivocally good thing, it's a worldwide trend, and is particularly powerful in the area where we live. Google Ben Casnocha if you want an example of the type of kid Bay Area schools can produce. The funny thing about most adults is that they're slaves to their paychecks. I believe the way you once put it was "busting our asses to buy a tract shack". It's hilarious how adults 1) look around for a job to get money, 2) join up and work hard, 3) see their company as important just because it happens to be THEIR company now. But if they joined a different company, they could have just as easily had the same experience there, which dispels the so-called importance and uniqueness of the place where they actually are working. Egocentric bias at its finest. > Friends I have no issues at all with being considered an old geezer. Give > me my email, use groups, my fovorite websites, and I will cheerfuly let the > younger set how-r-u each other's brains out with no interference, objection, > or trace of envy. You seem to have some negative stereotypes regarding instant messaging in your head! Just because inarticulate people use a technology doesn't mean that that technology is inherently useless. Inarticulate people use email too, doesn't mean that email is useless. On 10/5/06, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > Not really a recent trend. What to do depends on whether a new > medium offers advantages and/or the community around a legacy medium > declines (should I personally adopt it?) or whether you're interested in > outreach to new audiences (should I adopt new comm stuff in order > to talk to the new kids? -- I must admit I don't, they just have > nothing worthwhile to say). The new kids in transhumanism have nothing worthwhile to say? Or new kids in general? > My main beef with Google is surrendering privacy. It's the > one-stop shop for any TLA on the information superhighway. > And anyone who trusts a corporation with anything not related > to maximizing revenue is walking on very thin ice. Haven't you heard? Privacy is dead. Participatory Panopticon, baby! http://lifeboat.com/ex/security.preserver -- Michael Anissimov Lifeboat Foundation http://lifeboat.com http://acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog From michaelanissimov at gmail.com Fri Oct 6 21:37:34 2006 From: michaelanissimov at gmail.com (Michael Anissimov) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 14:37:34 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs (was: Tyranny in place) In-Reply-To: <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <51ce64f10610061437q38e85483ufab0fd9ced0aaea2@mail.gmail.com> On 10/5/06, Ben Goertzel wrote: > > I asked a friend recently what he thought about the prospect of > superhuman beings annihilating humans to make themselves more > processing substrate... > > His response: "It's about time." > > When asked what he meant, he said simply, "We're not so great, and > we've been dominating the planet long enough. Let something better > have its turn." I hope you're not talking about Hugo de Garis here... > I do not see why this attitude is inconsistent with a deep > understanding of the nature of intelligence, and a profound > rationality. It isn't inconsistent with those things, but neither are a lot of attitudes. I can have a deep understanding of the nature of intelligence, and a profound rationality, and still spend my days as a pedophile stalking grade school children... or work on a mathematical problem with zero expected value when there are other opportunities with great value...or whatever. The problem with rationality and understanding is that they can be coupled to something like 2^10^17 goal systems/attitudes, or more, sometimes making them meaningless in the context of examining goals. The problem is that the phrases "understanding" and "rationality" are frequently value-loaded, when to make things simpler we should use them just to describe the ability to better predict the next blip of perceptual input. A better question might be, "as rationality increases asymptotically, does a generic human goal system have the urge to eliminate humans by replacing them with something better?" If the answer is "yes", then CEV, if implemented, would wipe everyone out, as would a human upload, and as might a Joyous Growth AI (not that I understand the last one too well...) In which case, it would be prudent to try a different approach. I personally happen to think that the position of your friend is inconsistent with profound rationality and understanding of intelligence. Genocide is genocide, even if you replace the victims with ubervariants. Justify mass murder in the name of global improvement, and you might as well be practicing your seig heils in public. Part of the problem with discouraging people to build UFAIs is that no one will be around to hold them responsible if they actually do it. -- Michael Anissimov Lifeboat Foundation http://lifeboat.com http://acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog From michaelanissimov at gmail.com Fri Oct 6 21:47:15 2006 From: michaelanissimov at gmail.com (Michael Anissimov) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 14:47:15 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cognition enhancement in fiction In-Reply-To: <4081.163.1.72.91.1160077424.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> References: <4081.163.1.72.91.1160077424.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <51ce64f10610061447h7eeb2dc5yefee6246db97a79@mail.gmail.com> On 10/5/06, Anders Sandberg wrote: > > > Any suggestions? "Understand" by Ted Chiang is a real winner. http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm And the following is not about cognition enhancement per se, because the main character already starts off with extreme rationality... but it does brush on many of the subjects you'd typically see in a story about intelligence enhancement: "On Self-Delusion and Bounded Rationality" by Scott Aaronson http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/selfdelusion.html -- Michael Anissimov Lifeboat Foundation http://lifeboat.com http://acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog From nlbarna at gmail.com Fri Oct 6 21:52:08 2006 From: nlbarna at gmail.com (Nathan Barna) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 16:52:08 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs (was: Tyranny in place) In-Reply-To: <20061006175835.GM21640@leitl.org> References: <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> <20061006082359.GZ21640@leitl.org> <638d4e150610060853o76ed64f8lace4c32fcaebb4bb@mail.gmail.com> <20061006175835.GM21640@leitl.org> Message-ID: <761b6df90610061452w5d793373ic70514ed615d92ec@mail.gmail.com> Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Fri, Oct 06, 2006 at 11:53:30AM -0400, Ben Goertzel wrote: > > > No... it just doesn't GUARANTEE a value being placed on self-preservation... > > I still don't know what you mean when you use 'rational'. > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationality says several things http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/ArchiveFolder/Research%20Group/Publications/Reason/ReasonRationality.htm Additionally, this seems like a good paper, nicely reflective of the conflict. While it's slightly more sympathetic to Ben's position, the other side is raised to the bar if we assume that existential threats are involved and that technology as decision-making assistance and agency, to accommodate human handicaps against the Standard Picture, is plausible. In other words, if this were 1900 and hopeless, this paper would be more relevant to its purpose. Not that it isn't relevant to its purpose, it just would be more so if it had enlarged the context. I doubt anyone's believing that it's possible to predict eternity. No one we know can or is processing reality, after all. The question is about rationality's maximum effectiveness, presuming 2006 and prospective techniques ? the awareness of which could make it /incoherent/ to deny normative ideals such as SP, and their potential power for either sensical stability or nonsensical danger ? and whether it's exclusively better to account for it as a genius or genius-fool, as it were. From riel at surriel.com Fri Oct 6 22:56:43 2006 From: riel at surriel.com (Rik van Riel) Date: Fri, 06 Oct 2006 18:56:43 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] TRENDS: Email is so yesterday In-Reply-To: <200610050249.k952nMgU012777@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200610050249.k952nMgU012777@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <4526DF2B.1020203@surriel.com> spike wrote: > I have difficulty imagining that instant messages would have very much > memetic content. Email has a lot less memetic content than books, but we still write them. The smaller the message, the faster we can read and reply and the faster a conversation can go. For some discussions, IRC does work better than email. -- Who do you trust? The people with all the right answers? Or the people with the right questions? From asa at nada.kth.se Sat Oct 7 01:09:42 2006 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sat, 7 Oct 2006 03:09:42 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Cognition enhancement in fiction In-Reply-To: <27171205.1279621160094633534.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> References: <27171205.1279621160094633534.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: <4238.163.1.72.81.1160183382.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Great! Keep on posting! pjmanney wrote: > What about uplift of non-human creatures? There's a bunch of those. Does > that topic fit your mandate? Good question. I think the proper answer is "not really", but as an eminent philosopher criticized our current project outlook as being too antropocentric at an workshop, I think it is a good complement. That will of course immediately add Vinge's "Run, Bookworm, Run!" and Sterlings "Our Neural Chernobyl" to the list. "Mike Dougherty" msd001 at gmail.com >You do plan on posting your compilation here, right? Anything you can do >to isolate the gems from the great pile of rubbish that is available would > be a veritable service to humanity. :) Sure! Of course, gems in this case means novels with interesting ideas and treatments rather than being great reads. Ah, that reminded me of Stanislaw Lem's _Golem XIV_ ;-) -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From sjatkins at mac.com Sat Oct 7 01:34:56 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 18:34:56 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs (was: Tyranny in place) In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0610061024v22985852j1f7cb68b58eb9643@mail.gmail.com> References: <4521C18A.1010907@goldenfuture.net> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> <20061006082359.GZ21640@leitl.org> <8d71341e0610061024v22985852j1f7cb68b58eb9643@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <0A02AB6B-B4D9-4130-97C8-07D8B0524F66@mac.com> Actually what I know of his opinion in simply that when AGI arrives humans, even uploaded and augmented post- but former humans, will eventually not be competitive in comparison. He has said that if humanity is to disappear someday then he would much rather that it be because it is replaced by something more intelligent. He has said that in his opinion this would not be such a bad outcome. I don't see anything all that objectionable in that. Nor do I see much room to challenge his conclusion about humans relative to AIs in competitiveness. - samantha On Oct 6, 2006, at 10:24 AM, Russell Wallace wrote: > On 10/6/06, Eugen Leitl wrote: > I understand Moravec is of a similiar persuasion. > Well, it's an opinion, and I'm glad people with that > opinion are not in charge of the world. > > I agree completely. > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From russell.wallace at gmail.com Sat Oct 7 01:41:26 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Sat, 7 Oct 2006 02:41:26 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs (was: Tyranny in place) In-Reply-To: <0A02AB6B-B4D9-4130-97C8-07D8B0524F66@mac.com> References: <4521C18A.1010907@goldenfuture.net> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> <20061006082359.GZ21640@leitl.org> <8d71341e0610061024v22985852j1f7cb68b58eb9643@mail.gmail.com> <0A02AB6B-B4D9-4130-97C8-07D8B0524F66@mac.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0610061841i13d8b688sdf1d8a318c83bb00@mail.gmail.com> On 10/7/06, Samantha Atkins wrote: > > > Actually what I know of his opinion in simply that when AGI arrives humans, even uploaded and augmented post- but former humans, will eventually not be competitive in comparison. He has said that if humanity is to disappear someday then he would much rather that it be because it is replaced by something more intelligent. He has said that in his opinion this would not be such a bad outcome. I don't see anything all that objectionable in that. Nor do I see much room to challenge his conclusion about humans relative to AIs in competitiveness. > I see plenty of room to challenge it, starting with, even if you postulate the existence of superintelligent AI in some distant and unknowable future, why would anyone program it to start exterminating humans? I'm certainly not going to do any such thing in the unlikely event my lifespan extends that long. Then there's the whole assumption that more intelligence keeps conferring more competitive ability all the way up without limit, for which there is no evidence. There are various arguments from game theory and offense versus defense. There are a great many reasons to doubt the conclusion, even based on what I can think of in 2006, let alone what else will arise that nobody has thought of yet. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Sat Oct 7 03:12:47 2006 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 23:12:47 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cognition enhancement in fiction In-Reply-To: <4238.163.1.72.81.1160183382.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> References: <27171205.1279621160094633534.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> <4238.163.1.72.81.1160183382.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <62c14240610062012q705da9f2h942e9cd375bbc126@mail.gmail.com> On 10/6/06, Anders Sandberg wrote: > > "Mike Dougherty" msd001 at gmail.com > >You do plan on posting your compilation here, right? Anything you can do > >to isolate the gems from the great pile of rubbish that is available > would > be a veritable service to humanity. :) > > Sure! Of course, gems in this case means novels with interesting ideas and > treatments rather than being great reads. Ah, that reminded me of > Stanislaw Lem's _Golem XIV_ ;-) > Doesn't one imply the other? :) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ben at goertzel.org Sat Oct 7 03:25:58 2006 From: ben at goertzel.org (Ben Goertzel) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 23:25:58 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs (was: Tyranny in place) In-Reply-To: <20061006175835.GM21640@leitl.org> References: <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> <20061006082359.GZ21640@leitl.org> <638d4e150610060853o76ed64f8lace4c32fcaebb4bb@mail.gmail.com> <20061006175835.GM21640@leitl.org> Message-ID: <638d4e150610062025u39e754a4i436c2f45fdc32701@mail.gmail.com> Hi, > "In economics, sociology, and political science, a decision or situation is often called rational if it is in some sense optimal, and individuals or organizations are often called rational if they tend to act somehow optimally in pursuit of their goals. Acting optimally in pursuit of one's goals is a decent interpretation of the "rationality" concept. At least, it makes clear that rationality is not tied to any particular goal system (e.g. individual survival). I would temper it though to "Acting optimally in pursuit of one's goals, where the optimization takes into account one's intrinsic computational constraints." Another sense of rationality could be defined in terms of logic: If a person is rational, and they accept a set of premises, they should accept all logical conclusions of those premises, if the proofs of these conclusions are short OR if they are explicitly shown the proofs. This logic-based definition of rationality also is not tied to any particular goal system... -- Ben From ben at goertzel.org Sat Oct 7 03:32:16 2006 From: ben at goertzel.org (Ben Goertzel) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 23:32:16 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs (was: Tyranny in place) In-Reply-To: <51ce64f10610061437q38e85483ufab0fd9ced0aaea2@mail.gmail.com> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> <51ce64f10610061437q38e85483ufab0fd9ced0aaea2@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <638d4e150610062032i7fa59c21ge17ad2576e8fab80@mail.gmail.com> Hi, > > When asked what he meant, he said simply, "We're not so great, and > > we've been dominating the planet long enough. Let something better > > have its turn." > > I hope you're not talking about Hugo de Garis here... No, the person I was referring to is not Hugo, is not famous. and has not published his views on the Singularity... > > I do not see why this attitude is inconsistent with a deep > > understanding of the nature of intelligence, and a profound > > rationality. > > It isn't inconsistent with those things, but neither are a lot of > attitudes. I can have a deep understanding of the nature of > intelligence, and a profound rationality, and still spend my days as a > pedophile stalking grade school children... or work on a mathematical > problem with zero expected value when there are other opportunities > with great value...or whatever. > > The problem with rationality and understanding is that they can be > coupled to something like 2^10^17 goal systems/attitudes, or more, > sometimes making them meaningless in the context of examining goals. > The problem is that the phrases "understanding" and "rationality" are > frequently value-loaded, when to make things simpler we should use > them just to describe the ability to better predict the next blip of > perceptual input. Thanks. That is exactly the point I was trying to make. > A better question might be, "as rationality increases asymptotically, > does a generic human goal system have the urge to eliminate humans by > replacing them with something better?" I don't really believe in the idea of a "generic human goal system." It seems that some human goal systems, if pursued consistently, would have this conclusions, whereas others would not... > I personally happen to think that the position of your friend is > inconsistent with profound rationality and understanding of > intelligence. Can you explain why you think this? This statement seems inconsistent with your own discussion of rationality, above. I stress that I am opposed to the annihilation of humanity! I am just pointing out the very basic point that a value judgement like this has nothing to do with rationality... rationality is about logical consistency and optimal goal pursuit, not about what one's values and goals are. So long as one's goals are not logically inconsistent, they are consistent with rationality... -- Ben From ben at goertzel.org Sat Oct 7 03:36:18 2006 From: ben at goertzel.org (Ben Goertzel) Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 23:36:18 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs In-Reply-To: <20061006184305.GN21640@leitl.org> References: <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> <4525B6C2.5050003@pobox.com> <638d4e150610060015m13485a37kf435ddaaa136ea88@mail.gmail.com> <452609D1.5090709@pobox.com> <638d4e150610060110x60a929a5m78c1e944d50ec89b@mail.gmail.com> <20061006084027.GA21640@leitl.org> <638d4e150610060848l1ee07f4bi6e536c90221aca9f@mail.gmail.com> <20061006184305.GN21640@leitl.org> Message-ID: <638d4e150610062036k5a7939casfa081187b45cbd5b@mail.gmail.com> > I'm curious why you think evolutionary theory (a superset of game theory) > and usual physics are not applicable to a population of postbiological > critters. You must have reasons for your position. Usual physics, if it is correct, will of course apply to postbiological critters. I have little faith that current physics is completely correct, and expect radical physics discoveries in future once we have superhuman AI's, but that's another story... Evolutionary theory applies to populations of critters that reproduce or survive differentially based on some fitness criterion ... but it doesn't help much in understanding a hard takeoff scenario where one AI becomes superpowerful before a population of other approximate-equals can come about. Physics, if current physics is correct, is universal ... evolutionary theory only applies to certain kinds of situations, which may not be the ones that obtain post-Singularity... ben From sentience at pobox.com Sat Oct 7 04:11:57 2006 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Fri, 06 Oct 2006 21:11:57 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs In-Reply-To: <638d4e150610062032i7fa59c21ge17ad2576e8fab80@mail.gmail.com> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> <51ce64f10610061437q38e85483ufab0fd9ced0aaea2@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610062032i7fa59c21ge17ad2576e8fab80@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4527290D.6090207@pobox.com> Ben Goertzel wrote: >> >>The problem with rationality and understanding is that they can be >>coupled to something like 2^10^17 goal systems/attitudes, or more, >>sometimes making them meaningless in the context of examining goals. >>The problem is that the phrases "understanding" and "rationality" are >>frequently value-loaded, when to make things simpler we should use >>them just to describe the ability to better predict the next blip of >>perceptual input. > > Thanks. That is exactly the point I was trying to make. I was talking about humans. So was Rafal. Plans interpretable as consistent with rationality for at least one mind in mindspace may be, for a human randomly selected from modern-day Earth, *very unlikely* to be consistent with that human's emotions and morality. Especially if we interpret "consistency" as meaning "satisficing" or "at least not being antiproductive" with respect to a normalization of the human's emotions and morality, i.e., the morality they would have if their otherwise identical emotions were properly aggregative over extensional events rather than suffering from scope neglect and fast evaluation by single salient features, etc. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From amara at amara.com Sat Oct 7 09:07:24 2006 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Sat, 7 Oct 2006 11:07:24 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] FRA security theatre Message-ID: Well well. After passing through the US Security Theatre at Frankfurt Airport.. Each time I travel to the US, I think that the security checks can not possibly become more ridiculous (and humiliating). The next time I discover that indeed it can, and it is. Here (at FRA), there seems to be a focus on a particular plastic bag that indicates to all that your item is approved, so if your toothpaste is already inside of a plastic bag, then it must be bagged again (the handler was laughing while double-bagging, so I'm glad he could see the humor). He seemed impressed that I drank my bottle-of-water-bought-Rome inside of putting it inside of the liquid bin. And for some reason the vendor selling food and drinks cannot sell the (identical-to-my_Rome) bottle of the water displayed in their case. Apparently they are for display only, but if you want to _drink_ the water, well, then they can only pour some fraction from the bottle into a styrofoam cup for you. from your embedded airport reporter, Amara From alex at ramonsky.com Sat Oct 7 15:26:47 2006 From: alex at ramonsky.com (Alex Ramonsky) Date: Sat, 07 Oct 2006 16:26:47 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Wireheading References: <200609290452.k8T4qWMP001849@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451CFF7A.8030608@ramonsky.com> <2589.163.1.72.81.1159541656.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> <4520E6B6.8020901@ramonsky.com> <3305.130.237.122.245.1159831305.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> <4525615E.7020603@ramonsky.com> <4330.163.1.72.91.1160080883.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <4527C737.9000100@ramonsky.com> Well, dive in anywhere : ) http://darwin.nap.edu/books/0309064015/html/193.html [Go to the actual page snap] And you'll notice there is a lot going on here; I have the feeling it's another area where "scientific opinion" may be strongly in transition -actual experiments exploring exactly what you propose are on the go...but there's not much funding there, y'know : ) The main [funded] exploration is still looking at downregulation in the context of stopping people becoming addicted to "illegal substances" or sleeping tablets [benzodiazepines]. If you're into this idea though, it's a great opportunity to go fishing. We've both got labs at our disposal so how about let's look for our own answer? : ) Best, AR *********** PS you play 'Homeworld' at all? : ) Anders Sandberg wrote: >Alex Ramonsky wrote: > > >>>I have the feeling that preventing downregulation or upregulation would >>>be >>>pretty pharmacologically useful, anybody know how well we have learned to >>>control such functions? >>> >>> >>Well if 'we' means 'the scientific community' I have no idea. If 'we' >>means the neurohackers community there are various approaches including >>using biofeedback, acetylcholinesterase inhibitors and 'pacing' [you >>take serotonin on the way up, for a slower takeoff and softer landing]. >>A lot seems to depend on sleep regulation too. Ha! Discipline! : ) >> >> > >Hmm, while sleep and biofeedback likely are healthy it seems more >efficient to directly try to prevent the receptors from going into the >cytosol, being proteased and all that happens to them. > >This paper suggests that at least in some cases other drugs can prevent >downregulaton (in this case of adrenergic receptors): >"Prevention by theophylline of beta-2-receptor down regulation in healthy >subjects." >http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11420887&dopt=Abstract > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sjatkins at mac.com Sat Oct 7 19:31:47 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Sat, 7 Oct 2006 12:31:47 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs (was: Tyranny in place) In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0610061841i13d8b688sdf1d8a318c83bb00@mail.gmail.com> References: <4521C18A.1010907@goldenfuture.net> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> <20061006082359.GZ21640@leitl.org> <8d71341e0610061024v22985852j1f7cb68b58eb9643@mail.gmail.com> <0A02AB6B-B4D9-4130-97C8-07D8B0524F66@mac.com> <8d71341e0610061841i13d8b688sdf1d8a318c83bb00@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <053B837A-AADB-44B7-8AC4-4505885B2A44@mac.com> On Oct 6, 2006, at 6:41 PM, Russell Wallace wrote: > On 10/7/06, Samantha Atkins wrote: > Actually what I know of his opinion in simply that when AGI arrives > humans, even uploaded and augmented post- but former humans, will > eventually not be competitive in comparison. He has said that if > humanity is to disappear someday then he would much rather that it > be because it is replaced by something more intelligent. He has > said that in his opinion this would not be such a bad outcome. I > don't see anything all that objectionable in that. Nor do I see > much room to challenge his conclusion about humans relative to AIs > in competitiveness. > > I see plenty of room to challenge it, starting with, even if you > postulate the existence of superintelligent AI in some distant and > unknowable future, why would anyone program it to start > exterminating humans? I'm certainly not going to do any such thing > in the unlikely event my lifespan extends that long. Then there's > the whole assumption that more intelligence keeps conferring more > competitive ability all the way up without limit, for which there is > no evidence. There are various arguments from game theory and > offense versus defense. There are a great many reasons to doubt the > conclusion, even based on what I can think of in 2006, let alone > what else will arise that nobody has thought of yet. > Russell, I am very surprised at you. Almost no one here believes that AGI is in some unknowably distant future. I am certain you know full well that it is not what the humans program the AGI to do that is likely the concern. Hell, if it was just matter of rot programming the AGI to exterminate humans explicitly there would be nothing to worry about and FAI would be easy! In any field where success is largely a matter of intelligence, information and its timely application the significantly faster, brighter and more well informed will exceed what can be done by others. And that doesn't even touch on the depth of Moravec's argument which you could easily read for yourself. What is this blunt denial of the obvious about? - samantha -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From russell.wallace at gmail.com Sat Oct 7 20:42:16 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Sat, 7 Oct 2006 21:42:16 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs (was: Tyranny in place) In-Reply-To: <053B837A-AADB-44B7-8AC4-4505885B2A44@mac.com> References: <4521C18A.1010907@goldenfuture.net> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> <20061006082359.GZ21640@leitl.org> <8d71341e0610061024v22985852j1f7cb68b58eb9643@mail.gmail.com> <0A02AB6B-B4D9-4130-97C8-07D8B0524F66@mac.com> <8d71341e0610061841i13d8b688sdf1d8a318c83bb00@mail.gmail.com> <053B837A-AADB-44B7-8AC4-4505885B2A44@mac.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0610071342q2150dcbcg85112cd4ec0ee0e5@mail.gmail.com> On 10/7/06, Samantha Atkins wrote: > > Russell, I am very surprised at you. Almost no one here believes that AGI is in some unknowably distant future. I am certain you know full well that it is not what the humans program the AGI to do that is likely the concern. Hell, if it was just matter of rot programming the AGI to exterminate humans explicitly there would be nothing to worry about and FAI would be easy! In any field where success is largely a matter of intelligence, information and its timely application the significantly faster, brighter and more well informed will exceed what can be done by others. And that doesn't even touch on the depth of Moravec's argument which you could easily read for yourself. > Samantha, recall that you are talking to one of the people who's been actually working on this stuff. The idea that human-equivalent AI is just around the corner was a story we told ourselves because we wanted it to be true and we didn't know enough about the problem to come up with any form of realistic estimate, like the eighteenth century artisans who made mechanical animals and imagined all the functionality of a real animal might be just a little harder to do. In reality human-equivalent AI is not one but several technological generations away, each generation requiring a set of major related breakthoughs and the development of an industry to follow through on them; and we'll need to cover most of that distance before we know enough to do more than philosophize about what might make an AI Friendly or Unfriendly. This is not, mind you, a counsel of despair, nor a call to retreat to narrow-AI projects of the kind we already know how to do. Smart-tool AI in particular is, I think, only one generation away; it will be harder to create than I once dreamed a Transcendent Power might be, but _if_ we approach it in the right way, it looks just barely doable. And smart-tool AI would suffice for a great deal; it looks to me both necessary and sufficient for radical advances in nanotechnology, life extension, space colonization. What is this blunt denial of the obvious about? > It's about my opinion that real progress will be assisted if we acknowledge reality and face up to the full complexity of the tasks ahead of us, neither contenting ourselves with small narrow-AI projects nor needing to believe in the modern-day equivalent of the shoemaker's elves. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From andrew at ceruleansystems.com Sat Oct 7 22:02:35 2006 From: andrew at ceruleansystems.com (J. Andrew Rogers) Date: Sat, 7 Oct 2006 15:02:35 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] FRA security theatre In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <6854C64D-7254-45E5-9A3D-52D0172C6BA5@ceruleansystems.com> On Oct 7, 2006, at 2:07 AM, Amara Graps wrote: > Well well. After passing through the US Security Theatre at Frankfurt > Airport.. Each time I travel to the US, I think that the security > checks > can not possibly become more ridiculous (and humiliating). The next > time > I discover that indeed it can, and it is. For whatever it is worth, a few European countries (e.g. the UK, and from what I hear, Belgium) have more asinine rules and restrictions than the US. Not many, but a few. The US is very sensitive to business travels and does seem to change the rules to accommodate them. Unfortunately, the most restrictive hop of a flight apparently determines what you have to do for the whole trip. For example, my upcoming business trip from the US to Switzerland passes through Heathrow, which means that I have to comply with the pathologically stupid UK rules that make travel very unpleasant for business travelers that neither the US nor Switzerland employ. If I had more time, I would have avoided the UK altogether which over the long term is going to impact economies. I do not find US air travel significantly worse than other countries most times these days, partly because the US has gotten more efficient at it and the rest of the world has gotten worse. I pine for the pre-9/11 days when flying was like riding a bus more often than not. To think I had complaints about the hassles then... J. Andrew Rogers From sjatkins at mac.com Sun Oct 8 06:41:51 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Sat, 7 Oct 2006 23:41:51 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs (was: Tyranny in place) In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0610071342q2150dcbcg85112cd4ec0ee0e5@mail.gmail.com> References: <4521C18A.1010907@goldenfuture.net> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> <20061006082359.GZ21640@leitl.org> <8d71341e0610061024v22985852j1f7cb68b58eb9643@mail.gmail.com> <0A02AB6B-B4D9-4130-97C8-07D8B0524F66@mac.com> <8d71341e0610061841i13d8b688sdf1d8a318c83bb00@mail.gmail.com> <053B837A-AADB-44B7-8AC4-4505885B2A44@mac.com> <8d71341e0610071342q2150dcbcg85112cd4ec0ee0e5@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <8906BEBC-8F5E-4559-8F73-E52F93634C72@mac.com> On Oct 7, 2006, at 1:42 PM, Russell Wallace wrote: > On 10/7/06, Samantha Atkins wrote: > Russell, I am very surprised at you. Almost no one here believes > that AGI is in some unknowably distant future. I am certain you > know full well that it is not what the humans program the AGI to do > that is likely the concern. Hell, if it was just matter of rot > programming the AGI to exterminate humans explicitly there would be > nothing to worry about and FAI would be easy! In any field where > success is largely a matter of intelligence, information and its > timely application the significantly faster, brighter and more well > informed will exceed what can be done by others. And that doesn't > even touch on the depth of Moravec's argument which you could easily > read for yourself. > > Samantha, recall that you are talking to one of the people who's > been actually working on this stuff. Precisely why I was surprised to say the least. I do not remember you being such a naysayer on the subject. > The idea that human-equivalent AI is just around the corner was a > story we told ourselves because we wanted it to be true and we > didn't know enough about the problem to come up with any form of > realistic estimate, like the eighteenth century artisans who made > mechanical animals and imagined all the functionality of a real > animal might be just a little harder to do. In reality human- > equivalent AI is not one but several technological generations away, > each generation requiring a set of major related breakthoughs and > the development of an industry to follow through on them; and we'll > need to cover most of that distance before we know enough to do more > than philosophize about what might make an AI Friendly or Unfriendly. > That is one opinion. I very much doubt it is that difficult. Also did you factor in accelerating change fully in these "generations"? In some fields a generation is about a month long. > This is not, mind you, a counsel of despair, nor a call to retreat > to narrow-AI projects of the kind we already know how to do. Smart- > tool AI in particular is, I think, only one generation away; it will > be harder to create than I once dreamed a Transcendent Power might > be, but _if_ we approach it in the right way, it looks just barely > doable. And smart-tool AI would suffice for a great deal; it looks > to me both necessary and sufficient for radical advances in > nanotechnology, life extension, space colonization. > > What is this blunt denial of the obvious about? > > It's about my opinion that real progress will be assisted if we > acknowledge reality and face up to the full complexity of the tasks > ahead of us, neither contenting ourselves with small narrow-AI > projects nor needing to believe in the modern-day equivalent of the > shoemaker's elves. > Eh, it is fun to attempt to build elves. But I was talking there about denying that whether the AGI is "friendly" or not is a bit more difficult than merely refraining from explicitly programming in the goal of exterminating humanity. - samantha -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From russell.wallace at gmail.com Sun Oct 8 07:03:03 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2006 08:03:03 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs (was: Tyranny in place) In-Reply-To: <8906BEBC-8F5E-4559-8F73-E52F93634C72@mac.com> References: <4521C18A.1010907@goldenfuture.net> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> <20061006082359.GZ21640@leitl.org> <8d71341e0610061024v22985852j1f7cb68b58eb9643@mail.gmail.com> <0A02AB6B-B4D9-4130-97C8-07D8B0524F66@mac.com> <8d71341e0610061841i13d8b688sdf1d8a318c83bb00@mail.gmail.com> <053B837A-AADB-44B7-8AC4-4505885B2A44@mac.com> <8d71341e0610071342q2150dcbcg85112cd4ec0ee0e5@mail.gmail.com> <8906BEBC-8F5E-4559-8F73-E52F93634C72@mac.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0610080003r3c8b8d36vc59ff432a5317f3c@mail.gmail.com> On 10/8/06, Samantha Atkins wrote: > > Precisely why I was surprised to say the least. I do not remember you being such a naysayer on the subject. > My assessment has become more realistic over the last few years :) Though I don't think I'm being that much of a naysayer - I'm not writing off the enterprise, after all, merely noting that it's going to take a lot longer than we'd hoped. That is one opinion. I very much doubt it is that difficult. Also did you factor in accelerating change fully in these "generations"? In some fields a generation is about a month long. > By "generation" here I mean the period of time in which a major advance is invented, polished, widely deployed and integrated as part of the overall technology base, so that it becomes a routine building block for future advances. Things like structured programming, microcomputers, the Internet. Now, timescale is a different matter. Human-level AGI will take several generations of technological advance from where we are now, not just one - you can take that prediction to the bank, because it's not a prediction per se, it's about the nature of the problem itself. For what that translates to in calendar years... well, that's getting into foretelling the future, which like non-psychic people in general I have some difficulty with :) It seems to me that a typical ballpark figure is a couple of decades per technological generation, with the speed at which people can think and learn being the rate-limiting step, and I'm skeptical that the rate of change is actually accelerating. However, I'm not certain of this; you could claim it might come down to one decade or less per generation, and I can't be sure it won't. Eh, it is fun to attempt to build elves. But I was talking there about denying that whether the AGI is "friendly" or not is a bit more difficult than merely refraining from explicitly programming in the goal of exterminating humanity. > > My position isn't "we need merely refrain from explicitly programming such a goal" (presumably things will be more complicated than that - they always are), but "it will be a long while yet before we know enough about AGI to do more about Friendliness than make up stories". -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mfj.eav at gmail.com Sun Oct 8 15:58:08 2006 From: mfj.eav at gmail.com (Morris Johnson) Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2006 10:58:08 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place and AGI / the "Military Commissions Act" of 2006 Message-ID: <61c8738e0610080858u31c26e15p13d50f48ddfe0f50@mail.gmail.com> Yes I agree that the new war to end war is the race to develop autonomous general artificial intelligence (AGI). Like any child, the mores of the parents may be critical to an AGI's juvenile developing years. So, the source code and other methods that can give it a positive worldview are critical to its handling of its human relations in a pro-human manner. It appears to me that each major nation state will ramp up programs to develop an AGI which incorporates their societies cultural worldview. Given our great reliance on electronic mediated communication an AGI could carefully manipulate individual life outcomes if it deemed that to be useful towards accomplishing a larger plan. The key to friendly AGI staying friendly is to keep its thought processes and actions as transparent as technically feasible. Security and secrecy firewalls in place today allow every one privacy, except those who are deemed ultra vires of this requirement. If only a handful of military , government, and corporate persons are going to have a transparent window of oversight and communication with the AGI , this group becomes societies trustees. If power corrupts and ultimate power ultimately corrupts, one solution is to eliminate privacy and secrecy to eliminate potential tyranny. The other factor with AGI's is whether like in the 1970's movie "Collosus, the Forbin Project" individual AGI's will collaborate and rationally manage human differences or whether they will retain the desire for terrritorialism and domination which has caused their human creators to make war. As we create AGI in our own image, let us not allow human history to repeat itself. Morris &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& Habeas Fascismus: The Terrorists Win By Michael I Niman ArtVoice (etc.) 10/5/06 Last week was one that will go down in infamy as one of the most important and shameful weeks in western history. While future Americans might not be allowed to freely discuss such subversive topics as history, school children in other countries will learn what happened in the last week of September, 2006. A mere five years after a band of razor wielding two-bit terrorists declared war on America by destroying the World Trade Center, both houses of the US Congress finished their job and voted to end all pretenses of democracy and begin the transition to an imperial form of governance backed by state terror. Habeas Corpus: 1215-2006 On Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of last week, while most Americans were busy discussing the possibilities of the new football season, the US Senate and Congress voted on and passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Of course, unless you're reading The Christian Science Monitor or Al Jazeerah, you probably weren't even privy to the proper name of the bill that ended our 791 year-old British-American legal tradition of Habeas Corpus ? the foundation of all human rights legislation since before the Magna Carta. Habeas Corpus, which is Latin for "you may have the body," is, according to the US Supreme Court, "the fundamental instrument for safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action." It is the basic requirement, formerly at least rhetorically respected, by almost every legal system on earth, that states that people who are arrested must be charged with a crime, and eventually have their day in court to defend themselves. The British Parliament adopted Habeas Corpus as the law of the land across the empire in 1679, while historians trace the first appearance of Habeas Corpus in British law to 1215. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 ends all of that, placing the United States at the bottom of the dung heap when it comes to legal protections of the most basic of human rights ? the right not to be "disappeared" by one's own government. On the subject of disappearances, it seems all references to The Military Commissions Act of 2006 were preemptively disappeared before the bill was voted on. Talk about obfuscation ? according to a Lexis/Nexis database search of all major US newspapers, only five articles mentioned the bill by name, and of the five, only two mentioned it before it was voted on. Quisling Genuflection to Fascism Bill of 2006 The rest of the US press, according to another Lexis/Nexis search, made up euphemistically loaded names for the bill, such as The Detainee Bill, Interrogation Legislation, or the Terror Bill, as if this law would only affect "terrorists." Of course, all this confusion made it quite difficult to locate a copy of the actual bill before it was voted on, and to locate a roll call for the vote after it was passed. It shouldn't require a sleuth to find out something as simple as the name of the bill that essentially ends our pretenses toward democracy. In any event, I'll join the rest of the press corps and rename the bill for my own purposes as well, hereon in calling it the Quisling Genuflection to Fascism Bill of 2006, which I'll simply gloss as the "Quisling Act." According to the New York Times, the Quisling Act (s3930) creates an undefined category of people called "enemy combatants," a designation which can be arbitrarily doled out by the Bush administration or their minions. According to The Times, once designated as an enemy combatant, a person can be subjected "to arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal." The bill strips the legislative branch of government of any oversight over disappearances ordained by an imperial presidency. According to The Times, All Mr. Bush would have to do to lock anyone up forever is to declare him [sic.] an illegal combatant . . ." With the elimination of Habeas Corpus, the Times points out, the disappeared "would lose the basic right to challenge their imprisonment." And while in prison, the Quisling Act allows for the disappeared to be tortured and gives the Bush administration the legal authority to decide what does and does not constitute torture, while drawing the line only at rape, murder, waterboarding and a few other of the more vile acts American interrogators have recently been accused of. Of course, if someone else, say the "democratic" government of Iraq, waterboards a prisoner, the Quisling Act states that any testimony obtained can be used as evidence in American courts. The bill doesn't specifically mention beating detainees with pikes, stretching them on racks, or feeding them to lions ? so the ultimate determination as to whether those forms of interrogation would be prohibited lies with the imperial president. A Law to Negate the Rule of Law The Quisling Act brings the US into uncharted legal territory. It essence, it is a law to negate the rule of law. According to legal scholars, the Bush administration can designate US citizens as enemy combatants using purposely vague guidelines under which someone can be disappeared for lending an undefined sort of material aid to a group or person unilaterally determined by the Bush administration to fall under the "terrorism" rubric. The Bush administration can also determine someone to be an enemy combatant for "purposefully and materially supporting hostilities against the United States." Of course, this term is not defined. And if you are disappeared for allegedly providing such support, you will not have the right to argue that you didn't. It gets worse. Recent laws have attempted to define terrorism in corporate friendly terms so that anyone protesting against commercial activities could be designated a terrorist. Utah, for example, passed a "commercial terrorism" bill that identified anyone picketing a business with the intent of discouraging people from entering it, as engaging in terrorism. Under this law, for instance, the now celebrated 1960 sit-in at a segregated North Carolina Woolworth's lunch counter would be considered terrorism. If that law and the new Quisling Act were in place in 1960, the four black civil rights heroes who demanded their right to be served lunch along with white patrons would have simply been disappeared off to gulags. A federal court struck down Utah's law in 2001 and many people are certain that the Supreme Court will strike down the Quisling Act. But, in case you haven't noticed, the courts are a changing. The Supreme Court has nine members. Four of them, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Bush appointees Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito, have already shown themselves to line up with the Bush junta even when this meant undermining the rule of law. One more Bush appointee, and this could happen if the Republicans retain control of the Senate, and the Supreme Court could swing to becoming a 5-4 rubber stamp for whatever insanity the Bush administration sends their way. Predictive Assassination So lets go back and revisit what constitutes a terrorist supporter ? someone who, under the laws passed this week, can be disappeared into a system of secret Gulags. Journalist Robert Parry points out that in a recent speech given by George W. Bush in the lead-up to the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, he blamed the Russian revolution and the rise of the Nazis on the fact that no one took out Lenin when he first stated publishing pamphlets on communism, or Hitler, when he first started writing about Nazism. Hence, it appears, Bush is now advocating preemptive strikes against speech ? what Parry calls, the end of free speech and free thought. According to Parry, Bush's fantasy of "wiping out some future Lenin or Hitler would require killing or imprisoning anyone who wrote about political change in a way that rulers considered objectionable at that time." Such "predictive assassination," Parry argues, might kill, along with a Hitler or a Lenin, a Mandela or a Jefferson. And if you're wondering who the new targets for predictive assassination might be, you don't have to look too far. In the same September 5 th speech (available at whitehouse.gov), Bush warns that intelligence evidence shows "al Qaeda intends to [launch], in [bin Laden's] words, 'a media campaign to create a wedge between the American people and their government.'" Bush goes on to explain that such a campaign would paint the War on Terror as causing financial losses and casualties, ultimately, with the aim of ? and he explains that these are bin Laden's words ? "creating pressure from the American people on the American government to stop their campaign against Afghanistan." Duck and Cover Get it. It's the free press, reporting ridiculous notions about the costs of war, and perhaps its ineffectiveness at making us safer from anything, that are out there supporting hostilities against the United States by spreading what Bush deems as al Qaeda propaganda ? or more accurately, by reporting the news of the day. How much more clear does the writing on the wall have to be? Why were we supposed to think it was a joke when Bush, early in his judicially imposed presidency, said that things would be a lot easier if this was a dictatorship, as long as he was the dictator. The Quisling Act isn't about locking up terrorists. We've always done that. It's about locking up innocent people. People who can't be convicted of a crime because there's no evidence that they committed a crime. This is the only new class of people who will be detained under this new law ? people who were never, nor would they likely ever be, convicted of a crime. This is a bill about locking up innocent people and terrorizing the population by holding the threat of disappearance and torture over our heads. The Senate approved the Quisling Act 65-34, with 12 Democrats joining in with an almost unanimous pack of Republicans. The Congress approved it 250-170, with 34 Democrats supporting the Republican mob. Among them was Buffalo's own Brian Higgins. Shame on us. -- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From benboc at lineone.net Sun Oct 8 17:16:34 2006 From: benboc at lineone.net (ben) Date: Sun, 08 Oct 2006 18:16:34 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <45293272.3060409@lineone.net> "Russell Wallace" wrote: > What I am opposed to is autoimmune disease: allowing our supposed > protectors to turn inwards and target us instead of our enemies. This raises an idea that i think is very relevant, and leads to some rather depressing conclusions. Biology has 'solved' (or is in an ever-ongoing process of solving), many of the same types of problems we face in the realms of communications/IT, and these same solutions are probably applicable not only to tackling computer viruses etc., but also to facing threats from terrorists. Strategies for defence against computer viruses are tending towards the same sort of solutions that our immune systems use, and those strategies could probably be applied to societies as well. The depressing part is that biology seems to indicate that the most effective solutions centre on identifying what's friendly ('self'), and regarding everything else ('not-self') as an enemy, and treating it accordingly (i.e. destroy it if it gets too close), rather than the other way round (identify what's harmful, and regard that as the enemy. Tolerate everything else). Actually, i just realised something. I've recently switched from a 'black list' strategy to a 'white list' one for dealing with spam, and find it much more effective. That's exactly the same thing. I find this worrying. How long will it be before we have to prove 'friendliness' in order to travel about? Autoimmune disease, unfortunately, is part of the price you have to pay for an effective immune system. I'm just grateful my surname's not Buttle. ben zaiboc From benboc at lineone.net Sun Oct 8 17:37:22 2006 From: benboc at lineone.net (ben) Date: Sun, 08 Oct 2006 18:37:22 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Reproducing (was: Islamic morons) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <45293752.8000705@lineone.net> Anna writes: > Why is it that man or woman would not want to reproduce? You're joking, surely? Do you know how much it costs to bring up a kid? Have you ever seen a baby? Have you ever HEARD a baby? I can think of much better things to do with 18 years of my life, thanks. OK, i don't want to insult the breeders on this list, i'm sure there are plenty of them, and i'm sure that some of them, at least, get a blast out of having kids and bringing them up, but i really think it's a matter of asking "Why _would_ you want to reproduce?", rather than why wouldn't you. I suppose it's a bit like asking why would you sign up for the military. You're doing society a service at the expense of your own well-being (yeah, i know we are programmed to 'feel good' about the whole baby thing, but that doesn't mean it actually is good for you). We all know the real reason why most people have babies, so your question boils down to "Why would somebody want to rebel against the dictates of nature?". I think the name of this list adequately answers that. Ask the question again when reproduction is a matter of data-processing. ben zaiboc From asa at nada.kth.se Sun Oct 8 18:30:23 2006 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2006 20:30:23 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] FRA security theatre In-Reply-To: <6854C64D-7254-45E5-9A3D-52D0172C6BA5@ceruleansystems.com> References: <6854C64D-7254-45E5-9A3D-52D0172C6BA5@ceruleansystems.com> Message-ID: <1734.163.1.72.81.1160332223.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Amara is right, this is theatre rather than security. Or maybe ritual: http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2004/08/sacred_airports.html The purpose of airport security is to make sure everybody gets into the right paranoid, "travel is a privilege and not a right" mindset that convinces them that it is safe and worthwhile. I have been thinking of writing a paper on airport security ethics for a while now, in particular how it pertains to enhancements like wearables and implanted magnets. -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Oct 8 19:02:55 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2006 12:02:55 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com><451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net><45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net><8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com><051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <8d71341e0610012326y66fde0f3h3795e07362235e64@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <064501c6eb0c$8c1fd870$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Russell had written > Note also that you only answered the lesser half of my argument. My primary > point was that however small or large the external threat, compromising our > most basic civil liberties - allowing our governments to turn inward against > ourselves, not outward against the enemy - is _not effective_ as a response. > It adds a second problem _without doing anything to solve the first_. First, let me apologize to you and to Samantha for the highly sarcastic tone I took in my last missive. (I haven't yet read your reply; which is probably why I'm calm right now :-) Second, I readily admit that I pay too little attention to your "primary point" above. I am ready to learn, and there are probably other readers too who are ready to learn. Isn't it a question of balancing risks? I.e., threats from "enemies" within (our governments) must be weighed against threats from, say, Islamic terrorists, right? Is the point that the two western governments (the U.S. and the U.K.) have now adopted policies which pose a danger to their own citizens that surpasses ourside threats to their societies? But neither the Blair government nor the Bush administration is likely to declare their internal political opponents "enemy combattants", or are they? What is the chance that a citizen of one of those two countries (who, say, is inside the country) will be so prosecuted? (Frankly, I consider the probability to be near zero that any particular citizen is at risk from either terrorists or from his government; do you agree?) Thanks for your ready replies to people's posts, Russell. (Of course, I appreciate careful and reasoned explanation from anybody.) Lee P.S. > But it is very dangerous to allow a situation to arise where criticism > of certain policies is no longer permitted. Oh, well, sorry, but I'm lost here too. Have many people been arrested for so doing? Or is it just that it appears that things could dramatically change soon, and that the arrests could begin? What prohibitions against criticism are you talking about, anyway? From natasha at natasha.cc Sun Oct 8 22:28:23 2006 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Sun, 08 Oct 2006 17:28:23 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Teleportation Question Message-ID: <6.2.1.2.2.20061008172043.03020878@pop-server.austin.rr.com> A week ago I was reading an article online about new research and findings concerning further steps toward teleportation. It covered a couple of scientists working with non-biological matter and their ability to transport it to another environment and how this could one day possibly apply to biological matter. Does anyone know about this? If not, does anyone have any information about the state of the art in teleportation? Thanks, Natasha Natasha Vita-More Cultural Strategist - Design Media Artist - Futurist PhD Candidate, Planetary Collegium Proactionary Principle Core Group, Extropy Institute Member, Association of Professional Futurists Founder, Transhumanist Arts & Culture If you draw a circle in the sand and study only what's inside the circle, then that is a closed-system perspective. If you study what is inside the circle and everything outside the circle, then that is an open system perspective. - Buckminster Fuller -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From russell.wallace at gmail.com Sun Oct 8 23:59:41 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Mon, 9 Oct 2006 00:59:41 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <064501c6eb0c$8c1fd870$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> <8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com> <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <8d71341e0610012326y66fde0f3h3795e07362235e64@mail.gmail.com> <064501c6eb0c$8c1fd870$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <8d71341e0610081659m443aa0aaof95b7dfdc651a81@mail.gmail.com> On 10/8/06, Lee Corbin wrote: > > First, let me apologize to you and to Samantha for the highly sarcastic > tone > I took in my last missive. (I haven't yet read your reply; which is > probably > why I'm calm right now :-) No worries; please do read my reply, hopefully it will help make my position clearer. Second, I readily admit that I pay too little attention to your "primary > point" > above. I am ready to learn, and there are probably other readers too who > are ready to learn. Isn't it a question of balancing risks? I.e., threats > from > "enemies" within (our governments) must be weighed against threats from, > say, Islamic terrorists, right? Partly it is (which is why I quoted the numbers to put the actual magnitude of the terrorism threat in perspective), but partly it isn't - some "antiterrorism" measures harm us _without_ doing anything to defend us against terrorism. As Eliezer remarked, there's a tendency to assume that because we're making sacrifices, we must be getting something of commensurate value in return - and this assumption can be very far from true. Is the point that the two western governments (the U.S. and the U.K.) have > now adopted policies which pose a danger to their own citizens that > surpasses > ourside threats to their societies? Well what started this thread was the US government overturning habeas corpus (the foundation of civil rights since medieval times). Europe has its own problems - you can now be imprisoned for "hate speech", which can mean pretty much anything the government wants it to mean, and in practice means being sufficiently politically incorrect to attract notice. But neither the Blair government nor the Bush administration is likely to > declare their internal political opponents "enemy combattants", or are > they? What is the chance that a citizen of one of those two countries > (who, say, is inside the country) will be so prosecuted? (Frankly, I > consider the probability to be near zero that any particular citizen is > at risk from either terrorists or from his government; do you agree?) As yet, the vast majority of people haven't been on the receiving end of this sort of thing, or even seriously threatened with it - and the reason for that is that there are established principles of law and civil rights that protect us. But once those protections are eroded, history shows unchecked power is _always_ abused sooner or later, and usually sooner. It's too late to protest after you've been thrown into a concentration camp. The time to speak out is when you see civil rights being eroded, not when you've been hit with the consequences. Thanks for your ready replies to people's posts, Russell. Welcome! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From extropy at unreasonable.com Mon Oct 9 00:41:16 2006 From: extropy at unreasonable.com (David Lubkin) Date: Sun, 08 Oct 2006 20:41:16 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Extropian party on October 21 Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20061008203859.10854150@unreasonable.com> Another party coming up. If you are going to be in the Boston area, you're welcome to attend. There's crash-space here, if you need it. You may be able to get a ride from NYC or other parts south; ask me if you need assist. My house. Hudson, New Hampshire. A couple miles from the MA border and the Nashua malls. Roughly 20 minutes north of Rt. 128. Saturday, October 21. 2 PM until the last person not me leaves. OK to arrive late if you have other commitments; most everyone will still be here. Anyone on this list is specifically invited. If you have someone else in mind, run it by me. It will probably be okay, whether you're able to come or not. I also invite friends-of-extropy, such as sf writers, nano, LP, MIT, Alcor types. Bring to augment existing: food, drink; musical instruments; interesting stuff to show people. We'll order Chinese food at some point. The next two parties will be January 20 and April 21.We'll wiggle the dates further as needed. If you are interested in attending either of these, let me know as your other commitments make one weekend in those vicinities better or worse than another. If you're not around but coming to town in the future, let us know. We can usually lure a quorum of Bostropians. RSVP. -- David Lubkin. lubkin at unreasonable.com From lcorbin at rawbw.com Mon Oct 9 01:59:57 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2006 18:59:57 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Goldbach's Conjecture Resolved! A Story Message-ID: <065301c6eb46$9fcdf1b0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> The singularity happened all right. Everyone got uploaded, even the dead people, and lived happily ever after. Only that *wasn't* the end of the story. The vast superhuman intelligences whose influence had radiated out from the Milky Way had other things on their minds besides keeping tiny patterns of ancient life alive and happy. There was still the vexing problem of unifying forces and particles. And somehow, despite millions of years, mysteries yet remained about black holes. Finally, however, there was progress, and an ultimate explanation uncovered. As had been guessed by even the primitive parental life forms at the dawn of time, our entire infinite cosmos itself is just the grown-up version of a little baby universe. Moreover, our universe was no accident, but the contrivance of a yet larger mother universe. Specifically, entities perhaps not unlike the intelligences of our universe had deliberately spawned Bruno. (Our universe had always been called "Bruno" in the honor of the spot of dawn-life protoplasm which had first suspected its infinitude). The values of the physical constants were unambiguous, and there was, after all, a reason for our universe to exist. A very specific reason: our mission was to settle Goldbach's conjecture. This numerical conjecture was formulated in our universe in 1742 by one Christian Goldbach, an amateur mathematician who occasionally corresponded with Euler. The peculiarity he'd noticed is that every even number beyond 2 seems to be the sum of two primes. 4 = 2 + 2, 6 = 3 + 3, 8 = 3 + 5, and so on. (The interested reader should find the primes that add up to 98.) Despite some mathematicians, like Lev Landau who snorted "prime numbers are meant to be multiplied, not added!", the problem remained tantalizing. Somehow, often just barely, the proof, if there was one, evaded all attempts to find it ever since the first day Goldbach and Euler had sought it. Not even the local-cluster superintelligences circa ten million A.D. had been able to crack it. Still, it was terribly shocking---if it can be said that such august intelligences can undergo anything like shock---to find that the physical constants from a whole range of interweaving theories actually coded up a request from the laboratory of the sentients who created our universe! The request was simple. Determine whether the particular number 428 08791 39342 94963 22581 56917 17541 83578 75376 65202 30935 79270 91986 99286 45236 44720 81915 70881 45886 43213 49789 97081 16075 20517 69980 25310 91953 01759 67635 88933 54558 18395 73375 62251 58871 09870 70538 48936 07757 90374 70335 18884 54411 23218 12023 05189 70669 55571 78420 44007 97817 88202 06270 36316 53840 91881 16009 21247 22901 38941 58239 27805 49141 57583 96679 43990 11760 58746 35093 08313 72354 56592 67977 51532 61668 96711 41036 71134 71509 10799 51406 57480 08102 60459 24867 28134 75408 07101 68550 79511 59551 94957 92832 00848 71220 64809 08250 76660 36595 80118 50816 25608 19626 95631 55333 85186 93223 20588 05216 04250 61353 76722 80519 48499 26442 15542 34664 37800 65787 71306 65777 22276 33654 29778 40999 46652 97751 17836 51838 37896 04227 00830 16324 19256 33927 15039 50507 69866 98133 86990 61439 63020 57279 11017 62260 12829 34206 75441 39698 81813 72912 44241 61421 17920 22848 68700 71139 87233 02937 69048 35630 08745 94170 61178 16545 95515 60049 13814 80083 97215 27350 06826 70114 17405 69154 64851 57318 16358 46942 59186 34226 06427 73694 77673 33441 20156 34436 31512 24280 73615 59712 38780 62647 40933 49338 91831 49401 29600 33633 94829 11705 37774 43834 86045 54417 56377 23385 77367 55138 85611 82640 36179 42736 61012 34102 12296 56058 91195 75411 07815 16789 86115 49187 12812 55606 44925 73938 74517 78859 73627 15945 35118 79582 03377 29331 61615 09411 26993 53856 86440 60411 82745 33726 31970 84558 02325 18014 26638 75442 09328 27453 34357 01020 13765 77838 05223 90178 99824 36756 18708 38180 65976 45518 23708 00000 56319 38851 68670 74234 55867 06495 01958 87811 29618 61051 77381 96741 38997 38430 84260 12366 99757 06711 97604 36860 72720 38282 23614 76723 10217 76292 07219 97214 69233 44691 01597 13884 31217 90811 08935 16527 92701 25590 65111 05580 56461 08618 10462 07467 32005 40944 46299 34679 25340 94871 30861 84123 95728 76596 27683 08719 92930 19326 76049 82379 98582 77499 68297 56203 26289 42185 22528 84434 83676 36579 48079 08317 23567 90955 92648 19977 84374 56968 81569 95674 23876 52827 33131 52802 82397 77050 18678 58735 55448 13527 23499 28271 64870 19095 05899 35087 45698 16275 72819 79894 23004 15926 53589 79323 84600 56631 88862 30487 38794 36079 32712 11130 55451 25137 38785 83558 31960 69473 45950 18225 09871 88502 75179 11551 75664 74321 67351 27703 83717 18913 42470 08816 37627 14288 62831 44047 67612 72738 26995 50933 63758 50003 43693 52661 55852 52372 59042 37595 04931 73622 68387 86478 40997 05245 75300 24902 59609 35653 15970 37681 69365 22236 86374 65550 00343 98377 35354 65770 15365 41422 71356 16630 40044 19290 66449 53629 79452 71674 30260 97303 06487 62789 13005 70152 22501 49867 89294 59232 31776 54919 99851 05438 01096 72269 50486 16719 06144 82041 38332 64452 31840 99287 59928 25503 08407 46970 45907 99238 74547 19704 72035 26542 54600 79172 58779 35747 78956 11478 41195 58135 63856 33037 45753 60159 25193 71838 07526 07985 60714 88627 75790 38454 96110 39237 19792 34534 70169 24805 63215 38175 38784 38855 24826 50917 25147 17082 26997 32295 10894 21805 65245 85407 37926 69214 38579 84721 23544 88548 65626 75517 69737 55626 52175 21697 19453 16908 82841 24060 40285 19195 80281 89322 15232 70043 60691 86370 91949 19017 83846 77869 14321 95102 87073 71467 31305 64677 80358 52629 79419 22359 87867 48296 50141 46807 82184 95812 84665 74511 59914 04146 90417 58508 62875 17630 21868 09199 30322 33352 43374 25473 04119 63086 14147 14863 38020 44757 98628 57916 22199 11865 42911 62651 78290 09392 77294 63168 21043 17409 13786 27475 75979 89668 43596 74316 84489 54941 95992 45445 41059 55142 15214 42903 16799 88254 95984 48575 77822 21067 57238 35352 96779 89564 23797 99937 46379 27119 16060 30302 95327 12849 38111 97090 07598 78473 63079 18570 72803 70040 91385 96436 96263 17368 56188 85999 50026 36050 73736 13351 48321 28357 51718 65636 72903 21584 21060 39829 15564 04716 14594 22363 97639 65937 17802 31535 42767 98761 30987 57657 33398 63053 25926 20944 19306 81727 02695 97479 79172 72764 66446 78864 12698 15812 97209 38827 91016 91281 57875 45228 49211 69755 99224 43999 62879 08879 80015 74396 57146 64665 31159 06980 79069 37409 75037 69977 85919 42826 06974 61063 97640 13433 92528 91311 08440 38840 22362 93929 01836 36590 75052 89475 15437 65648 99012 70236 12307 83585 00414 62851 48787 28447 21702 57033 29633 44760 34165 27548 37516 24343 63046 02081 20378 19510 42226 97134 68739 32982 56455 53129 77693 25022 55534 99375 30086 98001 07432 67126 76656 29347 28492 43108 64736 32278 84816 80440 30461 00818 09136 01952 48442 91058 92590 10443 05195 34009 32141 62209 43740 54102 76895 98172 31583 04155 66492 58981 16591 11331 06838 03818 77063 12523 45570 68970 70055 77751 73743 71732 04704 61384 57343 66682 44500 89745 10436 67202 36455 42467 88801 91280 01056 27534 81619 79004 25824 66362 33280 20706 31929 57422 18730 96197 22101 47592 02180 18287 82310 60430 59627 26471 07794 60475 76713 45427 89654 14370 81674 41246 98416 08669 48883 77154 09806 94015 60347 20027 08405 33150 27368 53375 70181 59431 66642 is the sum is the sum of two primes, or not! If it is the sum of two primes, then execute plan A. If, on the other hand, it is not the sum of two primes, go to plan B. On Plan A, quadrillions of years from now simply arrange the collapse parameters of our universe so that after the sentients have all had infinite run time, our universe ends in such a way that the one-bit answer "True" is embedded in the final limit curvature. It's fun to think about how that actually works, there being no "last" baby-universe involved. On Plan B---the case that the Conjecture is false---then spawn a new sub- universe that instructs the new baby universe to consider the next number which is 2 greater than the one above. And for them as well there is to be a corresponding Plan A and Plan B. As you can see by induction, this may ultimately involve infinitely many nested baby universes. The above number is really pitifully small (as are almost all numbers) and of course didn't require much work to determine that yes, it is the sum of two primes. Now, do you suppose that the hyper-intelligences of the local cluster were insulted by this request from the mother universe? Or dismayed that the entire point of our existence had been to make a trivial computation? Not in the least, because millions of years earlier they had fully intended to do the very same thing thing themselves if only they could figure out how. With bated-breath---or whatever passes for bated-breath among hyper- intelligences---the "subroutine call" to the baby universe was made. A tiny little micro universe was born, grew, collapsed and died, all in less than a second of local time. And as it died, it embedded The Answer to the final quest around which our entire existence is predicated. And in this way it became known: Goldbach's Conjecture is... false! Not only was the one-bit answer returned, but---as instructed---the number on which it failed was returned as well. Unfortunately, this medium is too small to record the answer. For it's a number larger than ten to the ten to the ten to the ten to the ten... , iterated altogether 42 times! And that *was* the end of the story. From hkhenson at rogers.com Mon Oct 9 03:39:09 2006 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sun, 08 Oct 2006 23:39:09 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs In-Reply-To: <4527290D.6090207@pobox.com> References: <638d4e150610062032i7fa59c21ge17ad2576e8fab80@mail.gmail.com> <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> <51ce64f10610061437q38e85483ufab0fd9ced0aaea2@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610062032i7fa59c21ge17ad2576e8fab80@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20061008233356.046aecf8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 09:11 PM 10/6/2006 -0700, Eliezer wrote: snip >I was talking about humans. So was Rafal. > >Plans interpretable as consistent with rationality for at least one mind >in mindspace may be, for a human randomly selected from modern-day >Earth, *very unlikely* to be consistent with that human's emotions and >morality. Unless the mind was designed to be consistent with that random human mind or grew out of a human upload of that mind. >Especially if we interpret "consistency" as meaning "satisficing" or "at >least not being antiproductive" with respect to a normalization of the >human's emotions and morality, i.e., the morality they would have if >their otherwise identical emotions were properly aggregative over >extensional events rather than suffering from scope neglect and fast >evaluation by single salient features, etc. Hmm. Keith Henson From hkhenson at rogers.com Mon Oct 9 03:31:22 2006 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sun, 08 Oct 2006 23:31:22 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs (was: Tyranny in place) In-Reply-To: <638d4e150610062032i7fa59c21ge17ad2576e8fab80@mail.gmail.co m> References: <51ce64f10610061437q38e85483ufab0fd9ced0aaea2@mail.gmail.com> <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> <51ce64f10610061437q38e85483ufab0fd9ced0aaea2@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20061008220434.04675008@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> At 11:32 PM 10/6/2006 -0400, Ben wrote: >Hi, snip > > A better question might be, "as rationality increases asymptotically, > > does a generic human goal system have the urge to eliminate humans by > > replacing them with something better?" > >I don't really believe in the idea of a "generic human goal system." >It seems that some human goal systems, if pursued consistently, would >have this conclusions, whereas others would not... > > > I personally happen to think that the position of your friend is > > inconsistent with profound rationality and understanding of > > intelligence. > >Can you explain why you think this? This statement seems inconsistent >with your own discussion of rationality, above. > >I stress that I am opposed to the annihilation of humanity! I am just >pointing out the very basic point that a value judgement like this has >nothing to do with rationality... rationality is about logical >consistency and optimal goal pursuit, not about what one's values and >goals are. So long as one's goals are not logically inconsistent, >they are consistent with rationality... I sincerely doubt anyone who has passing familiarity of the subject would give an AI the goal "eliminate human misery." Or even minimize human misery. Keith Henson From sentience at pobox.com Mon Oct 9 05:07:50 2006 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Sun, 08 Oct 2006 22:07:50 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20061008233356.046aecf8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> References: <638d4e150610062032i7fa59c21ge17ad2576e8fab80@mail.gmail.com> <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> <51ce64f10610061437q38e85483ufab0fd9ced0aaea2@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610062032i7fa59c21ge17ad2576e8fab80@mail.gmail.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20061008233356.046aecf8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> Message-ID: <4529D926.4040902@pobox.com> Keith Henson wrote: > At 09:11 PM 10/6/2006 -0700, Eliezer wrote: > >>I was talking about humans. So was Rafal. >> >>Plans interpretable as consistent with rationality for at least one mind >>in mindspace may be, for a human randomly selected from modern-day >>Earth, *very unlikely* to be consistent with that human's emotions and >>morality. > > Unless the mind was designed to be consistent with that random human mind > or grew out of a human upload of that mind. I think the thread of argument is getting lost here. The thread was as follows (my summary): Ben: "My friend thinks the human species *should* die." EY: "Then your friend doesn't strike me as a frontrunner for World's Clearest Thinker." Ben: "But that plan *could* be consistent with rationality, given different goals." EY: "We're not talking about an arbitrary nonhuman mind, we're talking about your friend." -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From jonkc at att.net Mon Oct 9 08:06:38 2006 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Mon, 9 Oct 2006 04:06:38 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] North Korea has the bomb References: <638d4e150610062032i7fa59c21ge17ad2576e8fab80@mail.gmail.com> <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <4521CC01.3020805@goldenfuture.net> <7641ddc60610040732i19cf7542h38708cae3635c037@mail.gmail.com> <4523F702.6050107@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> <51ce64f10610061437q38e85483ufab0fd9ced0aaea2@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610062032i7fa59c21ge17ad2576e8fab80@mail.gmail.com><5.1.0.14.0.20061008233356.046aecf8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <4529D926.4040902@pobox.com> Message-ID: <00e501c6eb79$ed0bc6e0$c2084e0c@MyComputer> Well sort of. More than sixty years after the first nuclear bomb exploded with a force of 15,000 tons of TNT, North Korea just tested a nuclear bomb equivalent to 550 tons of TNT. That's a dud. Still, this is not a happy day. John K Clark From ben at goertzel.org Mon Oct 9 12:09:42 2006 From: ben at goertzel.org (Ben Goertzel) Date: Mon, 9 Oct 2006 08:09:42 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs In-Reply-To: <4529D926.4040902@pobox.com> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> <51ce64f10610061437q38e85483ufab0fd9ced0aaea2@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610062032i7fa59c21ge17ad2576e8fab80@mail.gmail.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20061008233356.046aecf8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <4529D926.4040902@pobox.com> Message-ID: <638d4e150610090509g3e4acd99ua0c2e18459e6c684@mail.gmail.com> > I think the thread of argument is getting lost here. Agree >The thread was as > follows (my summary): The thread has been beaten far enough into the ground IMO but I will offer a clarification... > Ben: "My friend thinks the human species *should* die." This is not a fair paraphrase. The opinion expressed was more along the lines that it is correct and appropriate for the human race to be replaced with something superior. Not that a priori the human species should die.... > EY: "Then your friend doesn't strike me as a frontrunner for World's > Clearest Thinker." > Ben: "But that plan *could* be consistent with rationality, given > different goals." > EY: "We're not talking about an arbitrary nonhuman mind, we're talking > about your friend." I still believe my friend, under discussion here, is a clear thinker and simply has a goal system that doesn't place extremely high value on the perpetuation of the human race. I see nothing inconsistent nor surprising here. Human nature is diverse in spite of its common evolutionary underpinnings. -- Ben From asa at nada.kth.se Mon Oct 9 18:20:04 2006 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 9 Oct 2006 20:20:04 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Goldbach's Conjecture Resolved! A Story In-Reply-To: <065301c6eb46$9fcdf1b0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <065301c6eb46$9fcdf1b0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <1264.163.1.72.81.1160418004.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> What a wonderful story. Reminds me of Brin's _Stones of Significance_, although that protagonist didn't have an equally well-defined problem. Would it be OK to include it in the transhuman humour collection later on? -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From asa at nada.kth.se Mon Oct 9 18:51:39 2006 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 9 Oct 2006 20:51:39 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Transhuman warning signs Message-ID: <1546.163.1.72.81.1160419899.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> I had some fun this weekend by making warning signs for transhuman technologies: http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2006/10/warning_signs_for_tomorrow.html (as well as make graphs of who influenced who: http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2006/10/colorful_academic_genealogies.html - maybe we should make a similar kind of graph for transhumanism?) -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From russell.wallace at gmail.com Mon Oct 9 18:57:47 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Mon, 9 Oct 2006 19:57:47 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Goldbach's Conjecture Resolved! A Story In-Reply-To: <065301c6eb46$9fcdf1b0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <065301c6eb46$9fcdf1b0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <8d71341e0610091157r5ddf0d9bqdd9a3148dbef27ca@mail.gmail.com> ...and people accuse us 00s programmers of writing inefficient code :) Good story! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sentience at pobox.com Mon Oct 9 19:42:09 2006 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Mon, 09 Oct 2006 12:42:09 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Transhuman warning signs In-Reply-To: <1546.163.1.72.81.1160419899.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> References: <1546.163.1.72.81.1160419899.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <452AA611.4050001@pobox.com> Anders Sandberg wrote: > I had some fun this weekend by making warning signs for transhuman > technologies: > http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2006/10/warning_signs_for_tomorrow.html This reminds me of some signs I made up for SIAI's future lab: http://yudkowsky.net/humor/ptb.pdf http://yudkowsky.net/humor/nfts.pdf -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From alex at ramonsky.com Mon Oct 9 20:14:00 2006 From: alex at ramonsky.com (Alex Ramonsky) Date: Mon, 09 Oct 2006 21:14:00 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Transhuman warning signs References: <1546.163.1.72.81.1160419899.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <452AAD88.4000801@ramonsky.com> Class humor; thankyou : ) ...Where I work there is a room containing a divider disguised as a wall. When it's up, the room looks half its actual size. People get used to this and then come in one day and find the room is twice as large. There is a consequently a sign on the door that reads "Warning -This facility is subject to sudden changes in scale". ...Whatever icon could we use for that, I wonder? AR ************** Anders Sandberg wrote: >I had some fun this weekend by making warning signs for transhuman >technologies: >http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2006/10/warning_signs_for_tomorrow.html > >(as well as make graphs of who influenced who: >http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2006/10/colorful_academic_genealogies.html >- maybe we should make a similar kind of graph for transhumanism?) > > > From neuronexmachina at gmail.com Mon Oct 9 20:15:12 2006 From: neuronexmachina at gmail.com (Neil H.) Date: Mon, 9 Oct 2006 13:15:12 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Transhuman warning signs In-Reply-To: <1546.163.1.72.81.1160419899.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> References: <1546.163.1.72.81.1160419899.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: On 10/9/06, Anders Sandberg wrote: > > > (as well as make graphs of who influenced who: > > http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2006/10/colorful_academic_genealogies.html > - maybe we should make a similar kind of graph for transhumanism?) Interesting stuff. A few things I wonder about: * If you use the "influences" and "influenced by" information in the Wikipedia templates, does it have similar results? * How similar are the results if you simply rely on which person articles have wiki links to each other? -- Neil -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From estropico at gmail.com Mon Oct 9 21:22:05 2006 From: estropico at gmail.com (estropico) Date: Mon, 9 Oct 2006 22:22:05 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] ExtroBritannia's October event - Aubrey de Grey on the Mprize and SENS research Message-ID: <4eaaa0d90610091422t46d6d567xf162708a386791b0@mail.gmail.com> ExtroBritannia's October event - Aubrey de Grey on the Mprize and SENS research Saturday the 21st of October 2006 at 2pm, Conway Hall (Bertrand Russell's Room) in Holborn, London. The event is free and everyone is welcome. This month, Aubrey de Grey will update us on progress on the Mprize and on new developments in SENS research. From the Mprize's website: "The Mprize is the premiere effort of the Methuselah Foundation and is being offered to the scientific research team which develops the longest living Mus musculus, the breed of mouse most commonly used in scientific research. Developing interventions which work in mice is a critical precursor to the development of human anti-aging techniques, for once it is demonstrated that aging in mice can be effectively delayed or reversed, popular attitudes towards aging as 'inevitable' will no longer be possible. When aging in mice is shown to be 'treatable' the funding necessary for a full-line assault on the aging process will be made available. This is the true power of the Mprize, to demonstrate a proof of principle, and give hope to the world that decline in function and age-related disease are no longer guarantees, for us, or for future generations, if we work together now." And if you want to meet before the event, we'll be at the Penderel's Oak from 12.30 for lunch (we also move back to the pub for drinks and conversation after the event). If it is your first time at an ExtroBritannia event, look out for a copy of Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near" at our table (picture: http://tinyurl.com/eejgx) CONWAY HALL 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL tel 020 7242 8032 www.conwayhall.org.uk Nearest tube: Holborn MAP: http://tinyurl.com/8syus The Penderel's Oak 283-288 High Holborn London WC1V 7HJ Tel: 0207 242 5669 Nearest tube: Holborn MAP: http://tinyurl.com/29swq --- The ExtroBritannia mailing list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/extrobritannia The ExtroBritannia Blog: http://www.extrobritannia.blogspot.com ExtroBritannia is the monthly public event of the UK Transhumanist Association: http://www.transhumanist.org.uk From asa at nada.kth.se Mon Oct 9 22:21:29 2006 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 00:21:29 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Intellectual influence In-Reply-To: References: <1546.163.1.72.81.1160419899.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <2995.163.1.72.81.1160432489.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Neil H. wrote: > > Interesting stuff. A few things I wonder about: > > * If you use the "influences" and "influenced by" information in the > Wikipedia templates, does it have similar results? I didn't know the Big W had that feature, and now I'm itching to try. Just simple pattern matching in a python script and I could make a crawler to harvest the graph. I just have to figure out the best way of download a copy of the Wikipedia to play with locally. Anybody who has done it? > * How similar are the results if you simply rely on which person articles > have wiki links to each other? My guess is that the influence links will have a higher signal-to-noise ratio, especially since many person references relate more to interactions and family than intellectual links. It also depends on how well you can disambiguate persons from other articles. I didn't see any "person" category, which means it is likely that it will be tricky to automatically determine whether a link is another person (I'd love to have a good named entity reference detector for English to integrate in my software - in Swedish capitalisation can do a surprisingly decent job, but it fails for English). Even if we just accept philosopher category pages it will be somewhat messy. Still, in the long run every link is sacred: it contains a deliberate relation to another document we can mine if we can just dig out enough context around it. Why am I looking at this problem in the first place? Let's just say the Future of Humanity Institute has a few empty walls screaming for beautiful visualisations of the world and our understanding of it. -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From nvitamore at austin.rr.com Mon Oct 9 20:34:51 2006 From: nvitamore at austin.rr.com (nvitamore at austin.rr.com) Date: Mon, 9 Oct 2006 16:34:51 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Transhuman warning signs Message-ID: <380-220061019203451390@M2W009.mail2web.com> From: Anders Sandberg >I had some fun this weekend by making warning signs for transhuman >technologies: >http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2006/10/warning_signs_for_tomorrow.html >... Another excellent body of creative work Anders! Natasha -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web - Check your email from the web at http://mail2web.com/ . From fauxever at sprynet.com Tue Oct 10 01:13:44 2006 From: fauxever at sprynet.com (Olga Bourlin) Date: Mon, 9 Oct 2006 18:13:44 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] JURY DUTY SCAM Message-ID: <002801c6ec09$54e01430$6600a8c0@brainiac> This has been validated at http://www.snopes..com/crime/fraud/juryduty.asp Please pass this on to everyone in your email address book. It is spreading fast, so be prepared should you get this call. Most of us take those summons for jury duty seriously, but enough people skip out on their civic duty, that a new and ominous kind of scam has surfaced. Fall for it and your identity could be stolen, reports CBS. In this con, someone calls pretending to be a court official who threateningly says a warrant has been issued for your arrest because you didn't show up for jury duty. The caller claims to be a jury coordinator. If you protest that you never received a summons for jury duty, the scammer asks you for your Social Security number and date of birth so he or she can verify the information and cancel the arrest warrant. Sometimes they even ask for credit card numbers. Give out any of this information and bingo! Your identity just got stolen. The scam has been reported so far in 11 states. This (scam) is particularly insidious because they use intimidation over the phone to try to bully people into giving information by pretending they're with the court system. The FBI and the federal court system have issued nationwide alerts on their web sites, warning consumers about the fraud. Please. Pass this! on! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at comcast.net Tue Oct 10 02:32:20 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Mon, 9 Oct 2006 19:32:20 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Teleportation Question In-Reply-To: <6.2.1.2.2.20061008172043.03020878@pop-server.austin.rr.com> Message-ID: <200610100242.k9A2giGT004314@andromeda.ziaspace.com> ________________________________________ ...bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Natasha Vita-More Subject: [extropy-chat] Teleportation Question A week ago I was reading an article online about new research and findings concerning further steps toward teleportation.? ... Does anyone know about this?? If not, does anyone have any information about the state of the art in teleportation? Thanks, Natasha Natasha Vita-More Natasha that article made the mainstream media, but it was nothing profound as far as I could tell from what they actually said, no profound breakthroughs. Scotty won't be beaming us aboard any time soon. spike From spike66 at comcast.net Tue Oct 10 02:54:18 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Mon, 9 Oct 2006 19:54:18 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Transhuman warning signs In-Reply-To: <452AA611.4050001@pobox.com> Message-ID: <200610100307.k9A37nVx022386@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat- > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Eliezer S. Yudkowsky > Sent: Monday, October 09, 2006 12:42 PM > To: ExI chat list > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Transhuman warning signs > > Anders Sandberg wrote: > > I had some fun this weekend by making warning signs for transhuman > > technologies: > > > http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2006/10/warning_signs_for_tomorrow.htm > l > > This reminds me of some signs I made up for SIAI's future lab: > > http://yudkowsky.net/humor/ptb.pdf > http://yudkowsky.net/humor/nfts.pdf > > -- > Eliezer S. Yudkowsky Thanks guys! This reminds me of that sign at the Singularity Summit this past May at Stanford. As I entered the campus I saw someone had made up a nice professional-looking sign that read "SINGULARITY AHEAD" with an arrow pointing up, indicating the appropriate parking lot. I have always considered myself an honest man, but temptation gnawed at me until my sense of moral behavior collapsed under the strain. I decided I would go out at the first intermission and steal that sign, then get the local cognoscenti to autograph it. So I ran out there, but to my utter dismay, the sign was gone! I have but one message to the lowlife thief who got to that sign before I did: have you no decency, sir or madam? Do you think that you are morally justified in this blatant and reprehensible act of larceny? What part of THOU SHALT NOT STEAL do you not understand? If you auction the sign on eBay, would you consider allowing me to bid on it before it goes public? spike From transcend at extropica.com Tue Oct 10 02:34:24 2006 From: transcend at extropica.com (Brandon Reinhart) Date: Mon, 9 Oct 2006 21:34:24 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Transhuman warning signs In-Reply-To: <452AAD88.4000801@ramonsky.com> Message-ID: <200610100317.k9A3H3oe006947@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Does this mean when I join up with a group-mind, I'm going to have to wear one of your warning signs like a star of david? Feh! Brandon -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Alex Ramonsky Sent: Monday, October 09, 2006 3:14 PM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Transhuman warning signs Class humor; thankyou : ) ...Where I work there is a room containing a divider disguised as a wall. When it's up, the room looks half its actual size. People get used to this and then come in one day and find the room is twice as large. There is a consequently a sign on the door that reads "Warning -This facility is subject to sudden changes in scale". ...Whatever icon could we use for that, I wonder? AR ************** Anders Sandberg wrote: >I had some fun this weekend by making warning signs for transhuman >technologies: >http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2006/10/warning_signs_for_tomorrow.html > >(as well as make graphs of who influenced who: >http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2006/10/colorful_academic_genealogies.h tml >- maybe we should make a similar kind of graph for transhumanism?) > > > _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From spike66 at comcast.net Tue Oct 10 03:27:46 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Mon, 9 Oct 2006 20:27:46 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] TRENDS: Email is so yesterday In-Reply-To: <51ce64f10610061355k462b7936t8581aeb9883c39a2@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200610100338.k9A3cpDr018741@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat- > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Michael Anissimov ... > > > > I expect that our own conversations were not terribly deep when we were > > teenagers. It was all about mating at that age, a mostly unsuccessful > and > > pointless exercise I might add... > > ... Seriously though, I was deep as > a teenager because I wanted to be, and got plenty of respect as a > result... Ja I can relate. Michael, you are an exception to many rules. I was too. {8-] Of course I was not smart or rich enough to make the rank of eccentric, so I had to settle for weird. ... > > The teens nowadays get laid more, and think more, and are more mature > than they were back in your time... WHAT? Whaddya mean "back in your time"? Now is my time. Anyone who thinks otherwise, why I'll just whack em with my walker. {8^D ... > > The funny thing about most adults is that they're slaves to their > paychecks. I believe the way you once put it was "busting our asses > to buy a tract shack"... Ja, and as you know from living around here, those tract shacks are dear indeed. I gaze upon my infant son and wonder, boy how on evolution's green earth are you EVER going to be able to afford something like what you grew up in? > It's hilarious how adults ... > ... 3) see their company as > important just because it happens to be THEIR company now... That is part of it perhaps, or more exactly, my company is important because I own stock in it from the company profit sharing plan, and that this particular company is holding the bag for my particular pension fund. This takes on a whole new meaning for people of my age, because we know that social security is scheduled to go bust right when I reach my late youth. Think about this just a bit. Some may think of this problem as being smaller than it really is, perhaps by imagining that the government can simply raise taxes to cover the cost, or just print more money and hand it out. But try to estimate what will really happen when that fund is outta money. Michael people of your age (and mine) need to think about what actually happens when you are about 50, still in the middle of your earning years, and now there are skerjillions of retired geezers with their hands out. What will this country do? What will France, Germany, Japan, Australia and Sweden do? I hear they are in a worse jam than we are. ... ... > ...let the younger set how-r-u each other's brains out with no > interference, objection, or trace of envy. > > You seem to have some negative stereotypes regarding instant messaging > in your head! Just because inarticulate people use a technology > doesn't mean that that technology is inherently useless. Inarticulate > people use email too, doesn't mean that email is useless... Point well taken. I have been driven away from some otherwise interesting email groups because of piles of rubbish from people who couldn't spell, put together a single grammatically correct sentence, or even produce any solid evidence that they could think. As I write, I note that in my own previous post, the sentence in which I complained the most loudly contained to absurd typos, this in spite of Bill's offering me the squiggly red lines under the most blatant examples. Some emailers also make comments such as How R U. Oy vey, must we communicate in license plate? I am tempted to reply to "How R U" with O, I M V-R-E O-L 2-D. N O R U? O-L 2? ... {8^D spike From brian at posthuman.com Tue Oct 10 04:00:08 2006 From: brian at posthuman.com (Brian Atkins) Date: Mon, 09 Oct 2006 23:00:08 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cognition enhancement in fiction In-Reply-To: <4081.163.1.72.91.1160077424.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> References: <4081.163.1.72.91.1160077424.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <452B1AC8.4020302@posthuman.com> Here's some ideas: Schroeder, Lady of Mazes - Enhanced humans can work with advanced nano environment to enforce very localized or even physically overlapping ideas of a perfect world. Wright, Golden Age series - Various enhanced stuff including mass mentalities, memory redaction, self-aware characters created accidentally during games, more. Egan, Schild's Ladder - More Egan-posthumans flitting about, this time into some unusual places. Peter F. Hamilton - Night's Dawn series has various bits, including an "affinity" gene which allows for mental communication, uploads, controlling engineered species, etc. More recent Commonwealth series also has plenty of bits including various enhancements. Geodesica series - Various upgraded characters including the highly upgraded Exarchs who can control multiple bodies, manage complete societies, and some bits regarding giving everyone access to a highly transparent society. Vinge, Rainbow's End - Haven't read it yet, but sounds like it might meet your criterion if you consider external devices as enhancements. -- Brian Atkins Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence http://www.singinst.org/ From spike66 at comcast.net Tue Oct 10 04:15:52 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Mon, 9 Oct 2006 21:15:52 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] nuclear power for all In-Reply-To: <200610100338.k9A3cpDr018741@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <200610100428.k9A4S944005937@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of spike ... > the sentence in which I complained the most loudly contained to > absurd typos... spike Oh dear, this is getting two funny. On another topic entirely, it appears the U.S. is trying to spread nuclear technology to, well, pretty much everywhere including such places as Yemen: http://fpc.state.gov/fpc/61808.htm Someone who is up to speed on their nuke tech, do remind me. As I recall from the physics lectures so very long ago that a heavy water reactor requires slightly more highly enriched uranium, and makes as a byproduct plutonium 235 which can be used to make fission bombs? And a light water reactor can use slightly less enriched uranium, requires a less sophisticated control system but does not produce plutonium? Or is that an oversimplification? I suppose the scheme makes sense if the U.S. is helping nations build light water reactors, because that would help mop up excess uranium without producing bomb stuff, while simultaneously reducing greenhouse gases. spike From sjatkins at mac.com Tue Oct 10 04:38:14 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Samantha=A0_Atkins?=) Date: Mon, 9 Oct 2006 21:38:14 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs - A New Take In-Reply-To: <638d4e150610090509g3e4acd99ua0c2e18459e6c684@mail.gmail.com> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <7641ddc60610041230m637a8a0byc8c73ed5f12d8af1@mail.gmail.com> <452421C4.7050602@pobox.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> <51ce64f10610061437q38e85483ufab0fd9ced0aaea2@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610062032i7fa59c21ge17ad2576e8fab80@mail.gmail.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20061008233356.046aecf8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <4529D926.4040902@pobox.com> <638d4e150610090509g3e4acd99ua0c2e18459e6c684@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20F8F1BF-2709-4B33-8E52-6FEC94224C38@mac.com> On Oct 9, 2006, at 5:09 AM, Ben Goertzel wrote: > I still believe my friend, under discussion here, is a clear thinker > and simply has a goal system that doesn't place extremely high value > on the perpetuation of the human race. I see nothing inconsistent nor > surprising here. Human nature is diverse in spite of its common > evolutionary underpinnings. > It seems to me that the majority of the people here actually do want the human race to be replaced by something superior. Most want that superior something to have continuity with existing humans, especially themselves through augmentation, uploading and such. But those future ex-humans will not be human in body, are unlikely to keep human emotions as we know them, will have eschewed most human limits, will think perhaps millions of times faster and will most likely think and exist so radically differently as to be a completely different type of being. I dare say that most of us are rather in a hurry to go beyond the current rather sorry human state no matter how much we may enjoy parts of it along the way. If this so then the argument boils down to whether humans as we know them go away by choice and whether they get transformed into something better or are simply replaced. - samantha From brian at posthuman.com Tue Oct 10 04:56:36 2006 From: brian at posthuman.com (Brian Atkins) Date: Mon, 09 Oct 2006 23:56:36 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cognition enhancement in fiction In-Reply-To: <452B1AC8.4020302@posthuman.com> References: <4081.163.1.72.91.1160077424.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> <452B1AC8.4020302@posthuman.com> Message-ID: <452B2804.2090403@posthuman.com> TV show: Stargate SG-1: Season 3, Ep 5 "Learning Curve" interesting story idea, luddish ending http://www.gateworld.net/sg1/s3/305.shtml Season 4, Ep 3 "Upgrades" may be slightly interesting http://www.gateworld.net/sg1/s4/403.shtml Season 7, ep 5 "Revisions" when things go wrong... http://www.gateworld.net/sg1/s7/705.shtml Few more bits: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity#Popular_culture -- Brian Atkins Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence http://www.singinst.org/ From sjatkins at mac.com Tue Oct 10 05:14:38 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Samantha=A0_Atkins?=) Date: Mon, 9 Oct 2006 22:14:38 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cognition enhancement in fiction In-Reply-To: <452B1AC8.4020302@posthuman.com> References: <4081.163.1.72.91.1160077424.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> <452B1AC8.4020302@posthuman.com> Message-ID: <1154D255-C44D-4DC8-AE8C-6F57CC412313@mac.com> David Zindell's Neverness series, Neverness, The Broken God, The Wild, War in Heaven. The set is full of post-human "gods", machine "gods", post-Singularity (or several) cultures, augmented more or less humans, etc. I found it much richer and more engaging than the Dune series and much more imaginative. Plenty of food for thought. - samantha On Oct 9, 2006, at 9:00 PM, Brian Atkins wrote: > Here's some ideas: > > Schroeder, Lady of Mazes - Enhanced humans can work with advanced nano > environment to enforce very localized or even physically overlapping > ideas of a > perfect world. > > Wright, Golden Age series - Various enhanced stuff including mass > mentalities, > memory redaction, self-aware characters created accidentally during > games, more. > > Egan, Schild's Ladder - More Egan-posthumans flitting about, this > time into some > unusual places. > > Peter F. Hamilton - Night's Dawn series has various bits, including an > "affinity" gene which allows for mental communication, uploads, > controlling > engineered species, etc. More recent Commonwealth series also has > plenty of bits > including various enhancements. > > Geodesica series - Various upgraded characters including the highly > upgraded > Exarchs who can control multiple bodies, manage complete societies, > and some > bits regarding giving everyone access to a highly transparent society. > > Vinge, Rainbow's End - Haven't read it yet, but sounds like it might > meet your > criterion if you consider external devices as enhancements. > -- > Brian Atkins > Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence > http://www.singinst.org/ > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From russell.wallace at gmail.com Tue Oct 10 05:32:44 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 06:32:44 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cognition enhancement in fiction In-Reply-To: <4081.163.1.72.91.1160077424.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> References: <4081.163.1.72.91.1160077424.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <8d71341e0610092232p53e2e4c4o74a11f0d60e0cdd8@mail.gmail.com> Not sure if this is in accordance with the letter of the request, but I think it's definitely in the spirit: 'Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell'. When I was reading it I was going "bloody heck, did the author hire an AI researcher as a technical consultant or something?". Highly recommended. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Tue Oct 10 07:31:46 2006 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 00:31:46 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] North Korea has the bomb In-Reply-To: <00e501c6eb79$ed0bc6e0$c2084e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <20061010073146.12945.qmail@web60524.mail.yahoo.com> --- John K Clark wrote: > Well sort of. More than sixty years after the first > nuclear bomb exploded > with a force of 15,000 tons of TNT, North Korea just > tested a nuclear bomb > equivalent to 550 tons of TNT. That's a dud. Still, > this is not a happy day. 550 tons? I can see why the white house is so reluctant to confirm the news. After all it is not inconceivable that they could have scraped together 550 tons of TNT to mess with our heads. Still, it's not wise to call a nuclear bluff. That's the beauty of the nuke. Cheer up, John. What with China, India, and Pakistan, non-whites have had the nuke for some time. I look forward to the day when anybody can walk into walmart and purchase a nuke. That will be the day when respect is universal and interpersonal problems will be solved without the use of force. Can you blame North Korea, Iran, or the rest for wanting to sit at the grown-up's table for a change? Or do you buy into the whole "axis-of-insane-evil" malarky? You do realize that the entire Korean peninsula was a civilized nation-state for over a thousand years before George Washington was a glimmer in his father's eye don't you? The some 50 odd years of a separate North and South Korea is a historical fluke resulting from the cold war which was spawned by nukes in the first place. Korea was of course a vassal of the Japanese empire for few decades, but we ended that with 2 small nukes. It seems that much of Korea's fortunes the last century have revolved around nukes in one way or another. The interesting question what will your commander-in-chief do, when Greater Korea makes a bid for reuinification, which it it inevitably must as all people do when they are artificially separated from their brothers and sisters? What will China and Japan do? Oh the delicious beauty of the human drama as it unfolds. Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." -Galileo Galilei __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From russell.wallace at gmail.com Tue Oct 10 08:32:18 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 09:32:18 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fools building AIs - A New Take In-Reply-To: <20F8F1BF-2709-4B33-8E52-6FEC94224C38@mac.com> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <7641ddc60610051558t4b3a367dga0ec8f17f7a5d8d5@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610051814g31ebd7e4oa762380f39bd31e6@mail.gmail.com> <51ce64f10610061437q38e85483ufab0fd9ced0aaea2@mail.gmail.com> <638d4e150610062032i7fa59c21ge17ad2576e8fab80@mail.gmail.com> <5.1.0.14.0.20061008233356.046aecf8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> <4529D926.4040902@pobox.com> <638d4e150610090509g3e4acd99ua0c2e18459e6c684@mail.gmail.com> <20F8F1BF-2709-4B33-8E52-6FEC94224C38@mac.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0610100132k7c134fcdm5b9565147d41563e@mail.gmail.com> On 10/10/06, Samantha Atkins wrote: > > It seems to me that the majority of the people here actually do want > the human race to be replaced by something superior. There is a difference between "species X is no longer around because it evolved into species Y" and "species X is no longer around because it became extinct, leaving no descendants". I remember one night when I was I don't know, maybe 10 years old, and sick with one of those bugs that children pick up that's really trivial, but is utter misery from the first person viewpoint, and I couldn't sleep all night, but I stayed awake with the printed version of David Attenborough's 'Life on Earth', and the physical misery just didn't matter because I was so entranced with the beauty of the vision, life crawling out of the primordial slime and climbing ever upwards; and I began dimly to appreciate the moral freight on our - my - shoulders, to pass on the torch, not only for the welfare of future generations (which isn't something a 10 year old, however smart, can get that much of a grip on) but to make all those lives before us have meaning, not only those who died in the sky over Britain in 1940 AD and in the pass of Thermopylae in 480 BC, but all those who suffered and died with defective genes that the handful with lucky mutations might do better, back to the first fish that struggled out of the ocean. If our descendants a thousand years from now feel the same, I think our generation will have done its job. One of the most moving passages for me in all of Christian mythology has been this (where I take God as a metaphor for the principles of evolution and self-organization, Adam as a metaphor for our predecessors and the foe to be entropy): "O Loving wisdom of our God When all was sin and shame A second Adam to the fight And to the rescue came. O wisest love! that flesh and blood Which did in Adam fail, Should strive afresh against the foe, Should strive and should prevail." -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From asa at nada.kth.se Tue Oct 10 08:35:16 2006 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 10:35:16 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Transhuman warning signs In-Reply-To: <200610100317.k9A3H3oe006947@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200610100317.k9A3H3oe006947@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <1211.86.143.28.237.1160469316.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Brandon Reinhart wrote: > Does this mean when I join up with a group-mind, I'm going to have to wear > one of your warning signs like a star of david? Feh! Exactly my thought when I made the sign. Could the warning sign threaten individual liberty? I might have to wear one of those cognitive hazard signs myself. But as I write in the text it is unlikely real borganisms would be risky this way. If they are normal, law abiding citiens they will not assimilate people left and right. This is for the assimilation incontinent borgs. -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From alito at organicrobot.com Tue Oct 10 10:08:57 2006 From: alito at organicrobot.com (Alejandro Dubrovsky) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 20:08:57 +1000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Intellectual influence In-Reply-To: <2995.163.1.72.81.1160432489.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> References: <1546.163.1.72.81.1160419899.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> <2995.163.1.72.81.1160432489.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <1160474938.14108.34.camel@alito.homeip.net> On Tue, 2006-10-10 at 00:21 +0200, Anders Sandberg wrote: > I didn't know the Big W had that feature, and now I'm itching to try. Just > simple pattern matching in a python script and I could make a crawler to > harvest the graph. I just have to figure out the best way of download a > copy of the Wikipedia to play with locally. Anybody who has done it? > http://download.wikimedia.org/ I haven't actually tried it but I'm assuming it's the same file as what the human knowledge compression people (http://prize.hutter1.net/) are supplying, with the latter just being truncated to the first hundred megs. If it is, it's an easily understandable xml file. Whole thing doesn't seem that big either if you restrict to current articles (2.8 gigs compressed for the english version). From russell.wallace at gmail.com Tue Oct 10 11:09:17 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 12:09:17 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity Message-ID: <8d71341e0610100409s14ca402dp929f3ff7dd220bc7@mail.gmail.com> I saw this when rummaging through the archives, and didn't see a reply, and it's been gnawing at me as the one such paradox I don't have a satisfactory answer for. I'm going to rephrase it in more vivid terms that I find help make it clearer: You're sitting down one evening with a ritual to summon Satan and bind him to your will, because you're annoyed the Playstation 3 is delayed and you want one _this_ Christmas, dammit. Unfortunately, you miss a bar over one variable of the binding ritual. "Muhahaha, foolish mortal!" mocks Satan. "Now you are mine to do with as I will!" "Erg... I just wanted a PS3," grumbleth you. "Too bad. Now being evil and all I'm going to do something nasty to you, but in accordance with tradition, I will give you a logical chance. So, here are your options: A: I turn you into a frog. B: I run off a copy of you. In case you're a threadist, I'll do it atom by atom, neuron by neuron, symmetrically, with thread of consciousness unbroken throughout, such that there will be two of you at the end and neither objectively nor subjectively will it be possible to tell which is the original and which is the copy (and in case you're a substratist, all copies will continue to be made of carbon compounds in water just like before, no uploading into silicon chips), so you should equally expect to be either. Then I will let one copy go free, but similarly multiply the other into 999. And then I will take all 999 to hell and make them write essays on postmodernist literature! Muhahaha! Now being a reasonable devil, I'll let you think for a little while, then you have to make your choice." "Oh crap," says you. "If I get turned into a frog, I won't be able to fulfil many of my goals. Unless I get kissed by a princess. But princesses these days are few and far between and mostly not into any variant of rishathra. So the probability there is much less than 50%. Whereas if I choose option B, there's a 50% probability that I just get to go free. So I should take B..." "But," you continue to muse, "let's look at the situation tomorrow in that event. There will be 1 copy of me free, and 999 undergoing horrible torture. There will be no objective fact of the matter as to what the copying sequence was. The only objective fact will be that 0.1% of my instances will be free and 99.9% will be tortured. Therefore I should estimate a 99.9%probability that I'll be tortured. Compared to that, being turned into a frog doesn't sound so bad after all." I'm assuming for the sake of the thought experiment that you're Homo economicus, only concerned about what you personally will experience, that you don't value maximizing copies for its own sake etc; the question is whether in case B you should estimate the probability that you will be forced to write essays on postmodernist literature versus being allowed to go free at 50/50 or 99.9/0.1. Now to a threadist the first line of reasoning seems correct, the thread of consciousness splits 50/50 and after that who cares what happens to the other thread that isn't you? So I'll understand perfectly if threadists reply "fetchez la vache!". However, I have other reasons (which I won't bring up again here, that argument's been beaten so far into the ground as to contribute to landscape erosion) for disbelieving that philosophy. To us patternists, the second line of reasoning seems correct; 1 copy of our pattern is free and 999 copies are being tortured. But intuitively the threadist view seems correct here! There must be a 50% probability on the first copy that I'll go free. Once I'm subjectively experiencing myself as being free, how can it then make any difference how many copies of the tortured pattern are made? I can't suddenly find myself yanked into Satan's classroom just because more copies outside my light cone were made, can I? How do we reconcile intuition with the patternist view? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From scerir at libero.it Tue Oct 10 13:18:27 2006 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 15:18:27 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Teleportation Question References: <200610100242.k9A2giGT004314@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <000201c6ec6e$934c0bb0$00b91f97@nomedxgm1aalex> According to prof. Zeilinger it should be possible, but in the far future only, to teleport little molecules and perhaps viruses, with a good enough fidelity (this is an important factor!). There is, of course, a big difference between a quantum state of a photon (or of a particle, or of an ion-in-a-trap, or of an atom, or of a billion of atoms acting all together with a single phase as a single object) and a quantum state of a big molecule (where the sequences, the chirality, etc., are essential factors). Interesting experiments by Polzik confirm it is possibility to realize an entanglement between a sample of matter (a collective made of billions of atoms) and radiation (a laser propagating through that sample of matter). This kind of entanglement, between matter and radiation, allows one to perform the so called 'Bell measurement' on the superposition between the radiation (coming from the sample of matter) and the quantum state to be teleported back into the sample of matter. (In a science fiction story the above sample of matter would be a sort of primordial soup and the quantum state to be teleported would be the recipe to trasform the soup into a living organism. But this story has been written I suppose ...). http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/10/10/6 http://www.arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0605095 http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/10/2/15 http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/8/6/10 http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/15/9/8/1 http://www.arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0302114 From spike66 at comcast.net Tue Oct 10 14:05:13 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 07:05:13 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Transhuman warning signs In-Reply-To: <1211.86.143.28.237.1160469316.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <200610101417.k9AEHtKv017990@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Transhuman warning signs > > > Brandon Reinhart wrote: > > Does this mean when I join up with a group-mind, I'm going to have to > wear > > one of your warning signs like a star of david? Feh! > > Exactly my thought when I made the sign. Could the warning sign threaten > individual liberty? I might have to wear one of those cognitive hazard > signs myself... Anders Sandberg, Anders if you did that, you would hafta wear the supernova of David. spike From hemm at openlink.com.br Tue Oct 10 14:02:20 2006 From: hemm at openlink.com.br (Henrique Moraes Machado (oplnk)) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 11:02:20 -0300 Subject: [extropy-chat] Transhuman warning signs References: <1546.163.1.72.81.1160419899.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> <452AA611.4050001@pobox.com> Message-ID: <03a801c6ec74$b4ff75c0$fe00a8c0@cpd01> Loved the signs. Specially the "memetic hazard" which is really the most usefull today... :-) ----- Original Message ----- From: "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" To: "ExI chat list" Sent: Monday, October 09, 2006 4:42 PM Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Transhuman warning signs > Anders Sandberg wrote: >> I had some fun this weekend by making warning signs for transhuman >> technologies: >> http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2006/10/warning_signs_for_tomorrow.html > > This reminds me of some signs I made up for SIAI's future lab: > > http://yudkowsky.net/humor/ptb.pdf > http://yudkowsky.net/humor/nfts.pdf From bret at bonfireproductions.com Tue Oct 10 14:59:58 2006 From: bret at bonfireproductions.com (Bret Kulakovich) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 10:59:58 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Transhuman warning signs In-Reply-To: <1546.163.1.72.81.1160419899.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> References: <1546.163.1.72.81.1160419899.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <3909531D-0835-4FA6-8A7D-CB865B15A59C@bonfireproductions.com> Ok, Anders - I don't post this to the list often enough - these are brilliant! You should consider one for Meso-scale structures and their inherent weirdness. "Objects in mirror may be stranger than they appear" (Of course that's microscope mirror.) The warning for Autonomous Device hits the nail right on the head! Thanks for sharing! Bret On Oct 9, 2006, at 2:51 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > > I had some fun this weekend by making warning signs for transhuman > technologies: > http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2006/10/ > warning_signs_for_tomorrow.html > > (as well as make graphs of who influenced who: > http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2006/10/ > colorful_academic_genealogies.html > - maybe we should make a similar kind of graph for transhumanism?) > > -- > Anders Sandberg, > Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics > Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From michaelanissimov at gmail.com Tue Oct 10 16:28:44 2006 From: michaelanissimov at gmail.com (Michael Anissimov) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 09:28:44 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Intellectual influence In-Reply-To: <1160474938.14108.34.camel@alito.homeip.net> References: <1546.163.1.72.81.1160419899.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> <2995.163.1.72.81.1160432489.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> <1160474938.14108.34.camel@alito.homeip.net> Message-ID: <51ce64f10610100928k47eb4c4cq58bbdcf310cb91e9@mail.gmail.com> You can also use the new web service Webaroo to download a summarized version of Wikipedia for your own perusal. It's about 6GB large, and lacks images. -- Michael Anissimov Lifeboat Foundation http://lifeboat.com http://acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog From neuronexmachina at gmail.com Tue Oct 10 17:09:16 2006 From: neuronexmachina at gmail.com (Neil H.) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 10:09:16 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Intellectual influence In-Reply-To: <2995.163.1.72.81.1160432489.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> References: <1546.163.1.72.81.1160419899.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> <2995.163.1.72.81.1160432489.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: On 10/9/06, Anders Sandberg wrote: > > > Neil H. wrote: > > * How similar are the results if you simply rely on which person > articles > > have wiki links to each other? > > My guess is that the influence links will have a higher signal-to-noise > ratio, especially since many person references relate more to interactions > and family than intellectual links. Oh yes, certainly. However, the sheer quantity of information available may result in some interesting things. > It also depends on how well you can disambiguate persons from other > articles. I didn't see any "person" category, which means it is likely > that it will be tricky to automatically determine whether a link is > another person (I'd love to have a good named entity reference detector > for English to integrate in my software - in Swedish capitalisation can do > a surprisingly decent job, but it fails for English). Even if we just > accept philosopher category pages it will be somewhat messy. Still, in the > long run every link is sacred: it contains a deliberate relation to > another document we can mine if we can just dig out enough context around > it. Actually, if you go up through the Category links, I think each person subtype eventually leads up to "Category:People." For example, Category:Philosophers is in Category:People_known_in_connection_with_religion_or_philosophy, which is in Category:People. On another side note, it might be fun to try clustering everything in the categories and subcategories for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Transhumanism -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jef at jefallbright.net Tue Oct 10 17:11:07 2006 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 10:11:07 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity (resend) In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0610100409s14ca402dp929f3ff7dd220bc7@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Russell Wallace wrote on the perennial topic of personal identity: I saw this when rummaging through the archives, and didn't see a reply, and it's been gnawing at me as the one such paradox I don't have a satisfactory answer for. I'm going to rephrase it in more vivid terms that I find help make it clearer: So, here are your options: A: I turn you into a frog. B: I run off a copy of you. In case you're a threadist, I'll do it atom by atom, neuron by neuron, symmetrically, with thread of consciousness unbroken throughout, such that there will be two of you at the end and neither objectively nor subjectively will it be possible to tell which is the original and which is the copy (and in case you're a substratist, all copies will continue to be made of carbon compounds in water just like before, no uploading into silicon chips), so you should equally expect to be either. Then I will let one copy go free, but similarly multiply the other into 999. And then I will take all 999 to hell and make them write essays on postmodernist literature! Muhahaha! (Option A is ruled out since being a frog doesn't do much for one's future.) "But," you continue to muse, "let's look at the situation tomorrow in that event. There will be 1 copy of me free, and 999 undergoing horrible torture. There will be no objective fact of the matter as to what the copying sequence was. The only objective fact will be that 0.1% of my instances will be free and 99.9% will be tortured. Therefore I should estimate a 99.9% probability that I'll be tortured. Compared to that, being turned into a frog doesn't sound so bad after all." Here's where the confusion becomes apparent. It's the usual confusion between objective and subjective points of view, reinforced by culture, language, and personal experience. It's Descartes'' error in not so subtle disguise, the assumption within "cogito, ergo sum" that *I* am experiencing, rather than the more defensible assertion that *some process* seems to be reporting on an experience. I'm assuming for the sake of the thought experiment that you're Homo economicus, only concerned about what you personally will experience, What is this "you" that is spoken of, Human? The "Self" which is held so dearly is only a conceptual locus, not an intrinsic property of matter. that you don't value maximizing copies for its own sake etc; the question is whether in case B you should estimate the probability that you will be forced to write essays on postmodernist literature versus being allowed to go free at 50/50 or 99.9/0.1. Now to a threadist the first line of reasoning seems correct, the thread of consciousness splits 50/50 and after that who cares what happens to the other thread that isn't you? So I'll understand perfectly if threadists reply "fetchez la vache!". Thread of consciousness is a useful concept, but it's misused here. Earlier it was clearly stated that there would be no way to distinguish among the copies, so the (often useful) concept of Self can't apply here. Or if it were to apply, it would have to apply equally to all copies and therefore be equally meaningless. Self is not something intrinsic, it is only the point of view of an agent, and since an agent, by definition, must be able to intentionally affect its environment, the concept of agent (and by extension, Self) does not apply to independent copies. So, the logically consistent way to look at the above situation must be from the third party point of view: That the future scenario would contain one individual indistinguishable from you, and 99 new individuals being tortured. So the question (which must remain in the third person POV)is whether you would prefer a future with (A) your agency contained within the body of a frog, or (B) the creation of 99 individuals (who happen to be very similar to you) who are being tortured. Makes sense? Paradox is always a matter of insufficient context. In the bigger picture, all the pieces must fit. - Jef -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jef at jefallbright.net Tue Oct 10 17:06:22 2006 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 10:06:22 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0610100409s14ca402dp929f3ff7dd220bc7@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Russell Wallace wrote on the perennial topic of personal identity: I saw this when rummaging through the archives, and didn't see a reply, and it's been gnawing at me as the one such paradox I don't have a satisfactory answer for. I'm going to rephrase it in more vivid terms that I find help make it clearer: So, here are your options: A: I turn you into a frog. B: I run off a copy of you. In case you're a threadist, I'll do it atom by atom, neuron by neuron, symmetrically, with thread of consciousness unbroken throughout, such that there will be two of you at the end and neither objectively nor subjectively will it be possible to tell which is the original and which is the copy (and in case you're a substratist, all copies will continue to be made of carbon compounds in water just like before, no uploading into silicon chips), so you should equally expect to be either. Then I will let one copy go free, but similarly multiply the other into 999. And then I will take all 999 to hell and make them write essays on postmodernist literature! Muhahaha! (Option A is ruled out since being a frog doesn't do much for ones future.) "But," you continue to muse, "let's look at the situation tomorrow in that event. There will be 1 copy of me free, and 999 undergoing horrible torture. There will be no objective fact of the matter as to what the copying sequence was. The only objective fact will be that 0.1% of my instances will be free and 99.9% will be tortured. Therefore I should estimate a 99.9% probability that I'll be tortured. Compared to that, being turned into a frog doesn't sound so bad after all." Here's where the confusion becomes apparent. It's the usual confusion between objective and subjective points of view, reinforced by culture, language, and personal experience. It's Descartes'' error in not so subtle disguise, the assumption within "cogito, ergo sum" that *I* am experiencing, rather than the more defensible assertion that *some process* seems to be reporting on an experience. I'm assuming for the sake of the thought experiment that you're Homo economicus, only concerned about what you personally will experience, What is this "you" that is spoken of, Human? The "Self" which is held so dearly is only a conceptual locus, not an intrinsic property of matter. that you don't value maximizing copies for its own sake etc; the question is whether in case B you should estimate the probability that you will be forced to write essays on postmodernist literature versus being allowed to go free at 50/50 or 99.9/0.1. Now to a threadist the first line of reasoning seems correct, the thread of consciousness splits 50/50 and after that who cares what happens to the other thread that isn't you? So I'll understand perfectly if threadists reply "fetchez la vache!". Thread of consciousness is a useful concept, but it's misused here. Earlier it was clearly stated that there would be no way to distinguish among the copies, so the (often useful) concept of Self can't apply here. Or if it were to apply, it would have to apply equally to all copies and therefore be equally meaningless. Self is not something intrinsic, it is only the point of view of an agent, and since an agent, by definition, must be able to intentionally affect its environment, the concept of agent (and by extension, Self) does not apply to independent copies. So, the logically consistent way to look at the above situation must be from the third party point of view: That the future scenario would contain one individual indistinguishable from you, and 99 new individuals being tortured. So the question (which must remain in the third person POV)is whether you would prefer a future with (A) your agency contained within the body of a frog, or (B) the creation of 99 individuals (who happen to be very similar to you) who are being tortured. Makes sense? Paradox is always a matter of insufficient context. In the bigger picture, all the pieces must fit. - Jef -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Tue Oct 10 17:40:01 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 13:40:01 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Teleportation Question In-Reply-To: <000201c6ec6e$934c0bb0$00b91f97@nomedxgm1aalex> References: <200610100242.k9A2giGT004314@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <000201c6ec6e$934c0bb0$00b91f97@nomedxgm1aalex> Message-ID: On 10/10/06, scerir wrote: > > According to prof. Zeilinger it should be possible, but in the far future > only, to teleport little molecules and perhaps viruses, with a good enough > fidelity (this is an important factor!). But why do you care? I don't see what quantum teleportation has to do with classical teleportation. In classical teleportation you want an exact copy at a remote location. The disassembly of the original is commonly part of the equation but I can imagine processes where it might not be entirely necessary. The classical quantum states of all of the atoms in the original are IMO *irrelevant* from a human "teleportation" standpoint [1] -- the quantum state of my brain changes far more between going to sleep and waking up or letting my blood sugar get too low and I find neither of those upsetting. And a dumb rock doesn't care whether or not it is the "same" rock when it is moved from point A to point B. If you do this by turning matter into energy, transmitting a beam of energy and turning it back into matter I think you have *lots* of problems involving the difficulty of doing those conversions, the efficiency of those conversions, the non-trivial amount of energy required for 60kg of matter (a small fraction of that mass is converted to energy in an atomic bomb explosion), etc. So I think that is a non-starter until one is *well* into the singularity and perhaps not even then. If one uses "teleportation" of information through a worm hole, "subspace" or some other "magical" ether then one still has the problem of how to get it in an out and it doesn't make the object being teleported "magically" appear at some distant point in space -- there has to be a transporter, ring, etc. on both ends. (So you can never beam down to a planet without a transporter on the planet.) If you want the "same" atoms, you have a big problem with accelerating that much matter up to the speed of light and slowing it down again. If your purpose is simply to send someone from point A to point B they can walk or ride a boat or fly in a plane. If anyone can explain to me how any of these so-called "teleportation" experiments are in any way relevant to classical (i.e. Star Trek or Star Gate) teleportation please do so. I used to be able to stand on my head -- but it isn't useful for very much. I think that is how I classify experiments in this area as well. Robert 1. Of course if you start to drift off into Penrose or perhaps Tipler land you may consider them to be more important than I do. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From natasha at natasha.cc Tue Oct 10 17:13:01 2006 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 12:13:01 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Teleportation Question In-Reply-To: <000201c6ec6e$934c0bb0$00b91f97@nomedxgm1aalex> References: <200610100242.k9A2giGT004314@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <000201c6ec6e$934c0bb0$00b91f97@nomedxgm1aalex> Message-ID: <6.2.1.2.2.20061010121156.041472c8@pop-server.austin.rr.com> At 08:18 AM 10/10/2006, scerir wrote: >According to prof. Zeilinger it should be possible, >but in the far future only, to teleport little molecules >and perhaps viruses, with a good enough fidelity (this >is an important factor!). (snip) Thanks! Natasha Natasha Vita-More Cultural Strategist - Design Media Artist - Futurist PhD Candidate, Planetary Collegium Proactionary Principle Core Group, Extropy Institute Member, Association of Professional Futurists Founder, Transhumanist Arts & Culture If you draw a circle in the sand and study only what's inside the circle, then that is a closed-system perspective. If you study what is inside the circle and everything outside the circle, then that is an open system perspective. - Buckminster Fuller -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From natasha at natasha.cc Tue Oct 10 17:11:14 2006 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 12:11:14 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Teleportation Question In-Reply-To: <200610100242.k9A2giGT004314@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <6.2.1.2.2.20061008172043.03020878@pop-server.austin.rr.com> <200610100242.k9A2giGT004314@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <6.2.1.2.2.20061010121021.04147558@pop-server.austin.rr.com> >Natasha that article made the mainstream media, but it was nothing profound >as far as I could tell from what they actually said, no profound >breakthroughs. Scotty won't be beaming us aboard any time soon. spike Indeed. Although the article still holds value from a researcher's point of view. Do you have the URL? Thanks Spike - Natasha Natasha Vita-More Cultural Strategist - Design Media Artist - Futurist PhD Candidate, Planetary Collegium Proactionary Principle Core Group, Extropy Institute Member, Association of Professional Futurists Founder, Transhumanist Arts & Culture If you draw a circle in the sand and study only what's inside the circle, then that is a closed-system perspective. If you study what is inside the circle and everything outside the circle, then that is an open system perspective. - Buckminster Fuller -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From velvethum at hotmail.com Tue Oct 10 18:20:20 2006 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 14:20:20 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity References: Message-ID: Jef wrote: "So, the logically consistent way to look at the above situation must be from the third party point of view: That the future scenario would contain one individual indistinguishable from you, and 99 new individuals being tortured." Indeed. Hopefully, these sort of thought experiments begin to show why patternist view is logically inconsistent. Jef wrote: "So the question (which must remain in the third person POV)is whether you would prefer a future with (A) your agency contained within the body of a frog, or (B) the creation of 99 individuals (who happen to be very similar to you) who are being tortured." Clearly, the best solution from the original instance POV (that is, you) would be to preserve the first instance of you and send all the 99 new instances to Hell. Since all the 99 instances of your pattern are materially different, they won't affect subjective experience of the first instance, meaning, there is exactly zero chance that this original instance will feel any pain being suffered by new 99 instances. Materially (and, therefore, subjectively), the original instance continues his/her life as if nothing happened. Obviously, if the original instance has a capacity for compassion, it will certainly feel very sad about the awful fate of 99 people suffering, but the point is that it will not experience their pain directly. S. From natasha at natasha.cc Tue Oct 10 17:19:36 2006 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 12:19:36 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Transhuman warning signs In-Reply-To: <1211.86.143.28.237.1160469316.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> References: <200610100317.k9A3H3oe006947@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <1211.86.143.28.237.1160469316.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <6.2.1.2.2.20061010121358.04146d20@pop-server.austin.rr.com> At 03:35 AM 10/10/2006, you wrote: >Brandon Reinhart wrote: > > Does this mean when I join up with a group-mind, I'm going to have to wear > > one of your warning signs like a star of david? Feh! > >Exactly my thought when I made the sign. Could the warning sign threaten >individual liberty? I might have to wear one of those cognitive hazard >signs myself. Speaking of signs, yesterday I was reviewing art genres and practices, and came across a genre known as massurrealism. http://www.massurrealism.org/002.htm Natasha Vita-More Cultural Strategist - Design Media Artist - Futurist PhD Candidate, Planetary Collegium Proactionary Principle Core Group, Extropy Institute Member, Association of Professional Futurists Founder, Transhumanist Arts & Culture If you draw a circle in the sand and study only what's inside the circle, then that is a closed-system perspective. If you study what is inside the circle and everything outside the circle, then that is an open system perspective. - Buckminster Fuller -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From asa at nada.kth.se Tue Oct 10 19:50:39 2006 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 21:50:39 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Intellectual influence In-Reply-To: References: <1546.163.1.72.81.1160419899.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> <2995.163.1.72.81.1160432489.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <2189.163.1.72.81.1160509839.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Neil H. wrote: > Oh yes, certainly. However, the sheer quantity of information available > may > result in some interesting things. Exactly. Huge datasets are self-correcting in an interesting manner. I just went through some of the entries by hand to get a "feel" for the graph, and I think the main problem is that a lot of the important philosophers do not have the right templates or categories. So right now one either has to do it more or less by hand, or use links in the body of the articles. I haven't done anything with the subgraph I extracted, but it seems it branches out much more towards modern philosophers as well as mentions many truly old presocratics. Interesting bias. > On another side note, it might be fun to try clustering everything in the > categories and subcategories for > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Transhumanism Yummy. Hmm, read boring philosophy papers for the friday meeting or play with Wikipedia? -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From jef at jefallbright.net Tue Oct 10 20:19:07 2006 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 13:19:07 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Heartland wrote: > Clearly, the best solution from the original instance POV > (that is, you) would be to preserve the first instance of you > and send all the 99 new instances to Hell. Assuming you meant literally what you wrote above, I have the following comments: Self-preservation, while naturally a strong attractor in the goal systems of evolved agents, does not necessarily override all other goals. What is "best" from the POV of a self-aware agent is whatever actions it can expect to most effectively promote its present values into the future. "Best" does not necessarily imply its own survival, but does imply survival and growth of that which it values. [Supporting examples include parents sacrificing for their offspring, warriors sacrificing for their cause, and the general behavior of those culturally recognized as heroes.] This level of meta-thinking (or lack thereof) is at the root of many of present society's problems involving Tragedy of the Commons and extended Prisoners' Dilemma scenarios. > Obviously, if the original instance has a capacity > for compassion, it will certainly feel very sad about the > awful fate of 99 people suffering, but the point is that it > will not experience their pain directly. The pain of the 99 has no *direct* bearing on the actions of the original, but we can certainly expect a human in that situation to feel badly. It is the nature of humans -- again as a result of natural selection -- to react most strongly to local stimuli, but one thinking at a metalevel would be more concerned with the general causes and principles involved in such a scenario and seek to apply that understanding toward creating a more desirable future even though such actions may not improve quality of life for the currently suffering 99. [Supporting examples include our typical behavior in response to death of a friend, while feeling very little for the abstract deaths of thousands and millions of others, or the knee-jerk reaction to the plight of those starving in Africa of sending them more food while not addressing fundamental causes such as organizational corruption and lack of individual access to knowledge.] - Jef From jef at jefallbright.net Tue Oct 10 20:45:44 2006 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 13:45:44 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Heartland wrote: > Jef wrote: > "So, the logically consistent way to look at the above > situation must be from the third party point of view: That > the future scenario would contain one individual > indistinguishable from you, and 99 new individuals being tortured." > > Indeed. Hopefully, these sort of thought experiments begin to > show why patternist view is logically inconsistent. Looking back, I just realized that I let this statement implying agreement go unresponded. For the record, I think the "patternist" view of personal identity is consistent within a much greater context than the "threadist" view that you assert. My reasons are essentially the same as those expressed to you by John K Clark and others. While supporting the patternist view that "if the duplicate functions identically to me then for *all* practical purposes it can serve as me", I disagree with those who would extend the concept to say that all such duplicates "are" necessarily me. The distinction is based on the lack of shared agency, which is at the root of the concept of self. [Supporting examples: (1) If an exact duplicate and I were in an enclosure and only one could exit, it would make no difference (to anyone) which instance emerged. (2) If I could spawn copies of myself -- whether exact physical duplicates, physical copies with limited resemblance, or virtual copies in a computer system -- I would consider them to be instances of myself to the extent that they were acting on behalf of the instantiation which I considered to be myself.] - Jef From velvethum at hotmail.com Tue Oct 10 23:02:27 2006 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 19:02:27 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity References: Message-ID: Jef: > While supporting the patternist view that "if the duplicate functions > identically to me then for *all* practical purposes it can serve as me", > I disagree with those who would extend the concept to say that all such > duplicates "are" necessarily me. The distinction is based on the lack > of shared agency, which is at the root of the concept of self. But, Jef, these are mutually exclusive views. If you disagree that your duplicates are indistinguishable from the first instance of you, then that would be inconsistent with the patternist view. > [Supporting examples: (1) If an exact duplicate and I were in an > enclosure and only one could exit, it would make no difference (to > anyone) which instance emerged. If "anyone" includes an instance of you that stays behind, then it makes a big difference to that instance from its POV. > (2) If I could spawn copies of myself > -- whether exact physical duplicates, physical copies with limited > resemblance, or virtual copies in a computer system -- I would consider > them to be instances of myself to the extent that they were acting on > behalf of the instantiation which I considered to be myself.] Yes, but that reduces only to the notion of goal preservation and not material preservation of the first instance that produced those goals. If we view this situation only in terms of pure material (or physical) identity, patternist view breaks down very quickly. If we consider this only in terms of functional identity, threadist or other views that imply instance preservation break down. My personal preference is to maintain material identity as I don't see any value in preserving my functional identity. S. From jef at jefallbright.net Tue Oct 10 23:58:17 2006 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 16:58:17 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Heartland wrote: > Jef: >> While supporting the patternist view that "if the duplicate functions >> identically to me then for *all* practical purposes it can serve as >> me", I disagree with those who would extend the concept to say that >> all such duplicates "are" necessarily me. The distinction is based >> on the lack of shared agency, which is at the root of the concept of >> self. > > But, Jef, these are mutually exclusive views. If you disagree > that your duplicates are indistinguishable from the first > instance of you, then that would be inconsistent with the > patternist view. Well Swalomir, I'm hesitant to embark on a discussion that may need more time than I have available for it, but I'll tell you what: If you will paraphrase what you think I was trying to say about the crucial element of agency, then I'll work through it with you. If you recall, several months ago you agreed that I accurately represented your assertion about the importance of continuously threaded identity, and I think doing this is important in order to avoid talking past each other. >> [Supporting examples: (1) If an exact duplicate and I were in an >> enclosure and only one could exit, it would make no difference (to >> anyone) which instance emerged. > > If "anyone" includes an instance of you that stays behind, > then it makes a big difference to that instance from its POV. Of course you're right about that, and I knew I didn't close that loophole for the (intended) sake of brevity and because it seemed obvious that something with no output has no effect. The way that particular thought experiment usually goes is that only one person ever comes out because the other instantiation is instantly disintegrated or some such. - Jef From russell.wallace at gmail.com Wed Oct 11 00:28:31 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 01:28:31 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity In-Reply-To: References: <8d71341e0610100409s14ca402dp929f3ff7dd220bc7@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0610101728y7a8ef854x4fcf3c5dca178f4b@mail.gmail.com> On 10/10/06, Jef Allbright wrote: > Here's where the confusion becomes apparent. It's the usual confusion > between objective and subjective points of view, reinforced by culture, > language, and personal experience. It's Descartes'' error in not so subtle > disguise, the assumption within "cogito, ergo sum" that *I* am experiencing, > rather than the more defensible assertion that *some process* seems to be > reporting on an experience. > That's how I would be inclined to come at it too, but the problem is that we implicitly use this stuff to make predictions. In an infinite universe (at any of the Tegmark levels), there are infinitely many identical instances of you, and there is no fact of the matter as to which one of those instances you are; you are all of them. Because there is a finite (albeit very small) probability that a flock of giant albino penguins will materialize in your living room in five minutes, the number of instances that experience such an event is the same as the number that does not: infinity (of the same cardinality) in each case. In practice, we predict a giant albino penguinless future - and this prediction always comes true. Why? The best explanation is that in some obvious sense (cardinality notwithstanding) there are far _fewer_ penguin-experiencing instances than penguinless ones, so one's subjective probability of the latter experience is almost 1. Empirically this works: our subjective experiences are in fact those we would expect from the probability argument. But this explanation appears to break down here, because a count of instances gives 999:1, yet it seems that the actual subjective experience should be 50:50. In other words, this paradox appears to break the one explanation we have as to how the world manages to be a semi-predictable place. That's why I'm still chewing on it. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From russell.wallace at gmail.com Wed Oct 11 00:31:03 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 01:31:03 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <8d71341e0610101731v3441df60kfd1745f713d7a06f@mail.gmail.com> On 10/10/06, Jef Allbright wrote: > > Self-preservation, while naturally a strong attractor in the goal > systems of evolved agents, does not necessarily override all other > goals. In fairness he mightn't necessarily be claiming it should. I did say suppose for the sake of the thought experiment that the subject's motives are purely selfish; in practice one would assign strong negative utility to 999 people being tortured even if none of those people was oneself, but I'm looking at it from the self viewpoint to try to get at the paradox that appears to cast doubt on the philosophical explanation of how we can make predictions in an infinite universe. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Wed Oct 11 00:48:48 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 20:48:48 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Teleportation Question In-Reply-To: <6.2.1.2.2.20061010121021.04147558@pop-server.austin.rr.com> References: <6.2.1.2.2.20061008172043.03020878@pop-server.austin.rr.com> <200610100242.k9A2giGT004314@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <6.2.1.2.2.20061010121021.04147558@pop-server.austin.rr.com> Message-ID: > > > Indeed. Although the article still holds value from a researcher's point > of view. Do you have the URL? > At Yahoo: http://politics.yahoo.com/s/zd/20061005/tc_zd/190618 At /.: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/04/2026231 R. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From velvethum at hotmail.com Wed Oct 11 00:51:58 2006 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 20:51:58 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity References: Message-ID: Jef: > Well Swalomir, It's Slawomir, Jef. :) Jef: > I'm hesitant to embark on a discussion that may need more > time than I have available for it, but I'll tell you what: If you will > paraphrase what you think I was trying to say about the crucial element > of agency, then I'll work through it with you. If you recall, several > months ago you agreed that I accurately represented your assertion about > the importance of continuously threaded identity, and I think doing this > is important in order to avoid talking past each other. Yes, I remember. You accurately characterized my position, yet didn't agree with it for some reason. I'm not sure what was the source of disagreement. Correct me if I'm wrong but, based on what you've written in this thread, it seems like your definition of survival deals more with goal fulfillment through your future copies (in the same sense an artist hopes to influence the world through his/her work long after his/her material death) rather than preservation of physical processes that implement the first "you". But that's just an educated guess. Jef: >>> [Supporting examples: (1) If an exact duplicate and I were in an >>> enclosure and only one could exit, it would make no difference (to >>> anyone) which instance emerged. Heartland: >> If "anyone" includes an instance of you that stays behind, >> then it makes a big difference to that instance from its POV. Jef: > Of course you're right about that, and I knew I didn't close that > loophole for the (intended) sake of brevity and because it seemed > obvious that something with no output has no effect. The way that > particular thought experiment usually goes is that only one person ever > comes out because the other instantiation is instantly disintegrated or > some such. Obviously, at t3, dead mind remains dead regardless of whether the death occurred at t1 or t2. S. From jef at jefallbright.net Wed Oct 11 01:05:13 2006 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 18:05:13 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity, or "Am I missing your point entirely?" In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0610101728y7a8ef854x4fcf3c5dca178f4b@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Russell Wallace wrote: On 10/10/06, Jef Allbright wrote: Here's where the confusion becomes apparent. It's the usual confusion between objective and subjective points of view, reinforced by culture, language, and personal experience. It's Descartes'' error in not so subtle disguise, the assumption within "cogito, ergo sum" that *I* am experiencing, rather than the more defensible assertion that *some process* seems to be reporting on an experience. That's how I would be inclined to come at it too, but the problem is that we implicitly use this stuff to make predictions. In an infinite universe (at any of the Tegmark levels), there are infinitely many identical instances of you, and there is no fact of the matter as to which one of those instances you are; you are all of them. But as I tried to say earlier (above), the Self is not somehow outside and observing these processes that are your current focus of concern in this email. The self is a result of these processes and is not privileged is such a way that any of this matters. Or am I missing your point entirely? The scenario you described seems fully comprehensible in classical terms. Because there is a finite (albeit very small) probability that a flock of giant albino penguins will materialize in your living room in five minutes, the number of instances that experience such an event is the same as the number that does not: infinity (of the same cardinality) in each case. In practice, we predict a giant albino penguinless future - and this prediction always comes true. Why? The best explanation is that in some obvious sense (cardinality notwithstanding) there are far _fewer_ penguin-experiencing instances than penguinless ones, so one's subjective probability of the latter experience is almost 1. Empirically this works: our subjective experiences are in fact those we would expect from the probability argument. I would say our subjective experience is a *result* of the way these things work. Even if things were different behind the scenes, we would not be in a position to know any difference. This reminds me of the silly clich? found in many fictional stories involving time travel. Someone changes something in the past and a person in the present says, "That's strange, there wasn't a tree here a moment ago..." Or am I missing your point entirely? But this explanation appears to break down here, because a count of instances gives 999:1, yet it seems that the actual subjective experience should be 50:50. In other words, this paradox appears to break the one explanation we have as to how the world manages to be a semi-predictable place. That's why I'm still chewing on it. It seems like you're imagining some kind of Self that can be spread out over multiple instances. To me it seems almost a problem of semantics, but reflecting a misconception of reality: A point of view is a result of the processes producing it, not something that observes the show from some privileged position. Or am I missing your point entirely? ;-) - Jef -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jef at jefallbright.net Wed Oct 11 01:23:36 2006 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 18:23:36 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Heartland wrote: > It's Slawomir, Jef. :) Very sorry, S. ;) > Yes, I remember. You accurately characterized my position, > yet didn't agree with it for some reason. I'm not sure what > was the source of disagreement. Correct me if I'm wrong but, > based on what you've written in this thread, it seems like > your definition of survival deals more with goal fulfillment > through your future copies (in the same sense an artist hopes > to influence the world through his/her work long after > his/her material death) rather than preservation of physical > processes that implement the first "you". But that's just an educated > guess. Actually I believe "survival" as popularly conceived is an illusion, so there's nothing to hang on to anyway. The child I was at the age of eight is long gone, but I remember him fondly. To me, the key is to recognize that the Self doesn't inhabit the body, but rather is a construct of the body within its environment. The Self is just going along for the ride, and it feels like it's in control because that kind of functioning is what evolution settled on because it works. It's very difficult to break the illusion because our culture, our language, and our personal experience tells us that the Self is the center of the action. Oh well. Nothing new to see here. Move along now, move along... - Jef From James.Hughes at trincoll.edu Wed Oct 11 01:27:50 2006 From: James.Hughes at trincoll.edu (Hughes, James J.) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 21:27:50 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] FW: ETC Group: COMPETITION ANNOUNCEMENT: Design a Nano-Hazard Symbol Message-ID: <8CF6A92CB628444FB3C757618CD28039015D18E0@exbe1.cmpcntr.tc.trincoll.edu> Anders - Submit yours. It would be ironic for a transhumanist to win a Luddite contest. - J. ------------------ COMPETITION ANNOUNCEMENT: Design a Nano-Hazard Symbol ETC Group announces International Graphic Design Competition CALL FOR ENTRIES Biotechnology, nuclear power, toxic chemicals, electromagnetic radiation -- each of these technological hazards has a universally recognized warning symbol associated with it. So why not nanotechnology -- the world's most powerful (and potentially dangerous) technology? Concerned citizens everywhere are invited to submit their designs for a universal Nanotechnology Hazard Symbol at: http://www.etcgroup.org/ nanohazard Entries will be judged by a panel of eminent judges convened by the ETC Group (Action Group on Erosion Technology and Concentration, www.etcgroup.org). These judges include Dr. Vyvyan Howard (Editor of the Journal of Nanotoxicity), Dr. Gregor Wolbring (The Canadian Advisory Commitee on Nanotech Standardisation), Chee Yoke Ling (Third World Network), Claire Pentecost (Associate Professor and Chair of the Photography Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Rory O'Neill (Editor of Hazards magazine) and Dr. Alexis Vlandas (Nanotechnology Spokesperson for International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility). Entries will also be judged by participants at the World Social Forum, Nairobi, Kenya, 20-25 January 2007. The winning entry will be submitted to international standard-setting bodies responsible for hazard characterisation, to international governmental organisations and to national governments as a proposed symbol for nanotechnology hazards. Closing date: 8 January 2007 A gallery of entries submitted will be available at http:// www.etcgroup.org Why Do We Need a Nano-Hazard Symbol? Nanotechnology, the manipulation of matter at the tiny level of atoms and molecules, has created a new class of materials with unusual properties and new toxicities. It used to be that nanotechnology was the stuff of science fiction. Today, however, there are over one thousand nanotechnology companies worldwide. Nanoparticles, nanotubes and other engineered nanomaterials are already in use in hundreds of everyday consumer products, raising significant health, safety and environmental concerns. Nanoparticles are able to move around the body and the environment more readily than larger particles of pollution. Because of their extremely small size and large surface area nanoparticles may be more reactive and more toxic than larger particles of the same substance. They have been compared to asbestos by leading insurance companies who worry their health impact could lead to massive claims. At least one US-based insurance company has canceled coverage of small companies involved with nanotechnology. Unlike more familiar forms of pollution arising from new technologies, nano-hazards (potentially endangering consumers, workers and the environment) have yet to be fully characterized, regulated or even subject to safety testing. The US Food and Drug Administration will have its first public meeting about regulating nanomaterials on October 10, 2006. Most governments worldwide have yet to even begin thinking about nano- regulation. Nonetheless, nanoparticles invisible to the naked eye are already in foods, cosmetics, pesticides and clothing without even being labelled. Every day laboratory and factory workers could be inhaling and ingesting nanoparticles while the rest of us may be unwittingly putting them on our skin, in our body or in the environment. It's not just a safety question. Nanotechnology also raises new societal hazards: The granting of patents on nano-scale materials and processes, and even elements of the periodic table, allows for increased corporate power and monopoly over the smallest parts of nature. Some designer nanomaterials may come to replace natural products such as cotton, rubber and metals -- displacing the livelihoods of some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world. In the near future the merger of nanotechnology with biotechnology (in nano-biotechnology applications such as synthetic biology) will lead to new designer organisms, modified at the molecular level, posing new biosafety threats. Nano-enabled technologies also aim to 'enhance' human beings and 'fix' the disabled, a goal that raises troubling ethical issues and the specter of a new divide between the technologically "improved" and "unimproved." ETC Group has called for a moratorium on nanoparticle production and release to allow for a full societal debate and until such time as precautionary regulations are in place to protect workers, consumers and the environment. Standard setting bodies around the world are now scrambling to agree on nomenclature that can describe nanoparticles and nanomaterials. A common, internationally-recognized symbol warning of the presence of engineered nanomaterials is equally overdue. For a short and simple introduction to Nanotechnology see "A Tiny Primer on Nano-scale Technologies," available online: http:// www.etcgroup.org/en/materials/publications.html?id=55 Details Of The Competition: We are asking concerned people everywhere (including artists, designers, scientists, students, regulators and members of the public) to submit possible designs for an international Nano-Hazard warning symbol that could be used to identify the presence of nanmoaterials. This symbol could, for example, be placed on products containing nanomaterials, in laboratories or factories where workers handle nanoparticles, or on containers transporting nanomaterials. The symbol should be simple, easy to recognize and communicate clearly the new, potential hazards that result when matter is manipulated at the nanoscale (1 billionth of a metre -- the size of atoms and molecules). We encourage participants to be as creative as possible in inventing a new nano-hazard symbol. Images can be designed on computer or by hand, scanned, photographed or otherwise rendered in 2 dimensions -- either using colour or in black and white. Entries will be judged on their conceptual as well as artistic merit. Descriptions and explanations accompanying the entries will be very welcome. For examples of existing hazard warning symbols for comparison see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_symbol Participants can submit as many different entries as they wish. Each entry should be submitted seperately. Entries can be submitted in one of 3 ways: 1) Upload electronically using the upload form at http:// www.etcgroup.org/nanohazard 2) Email as a jpeg or gif file to nanohazard at etcgroup.org 3) Send by post to Nano-Hazard Competition, ETC Group, 431 Gilmour Street, Ottawa, Ontario, K2P 0R5. Canada Please include your name, country and a contact email or postal address. All submitted entries will be treated as non-copyright and in the public domain unless the submitter wishes to place them under a creative commons license allowing free non-commercial use (see details here http://www.creativecommons.org). Entries submitted with copyright conditions (other than creative commons) will not be considered. Entries sent by post will not be returned. The closing date for entries is 8th January 2007. Judging will be in two parts: Judging Panel: A selection of entries will first be made by a panel of eminent judges chosen by the ETC Group. This panel includes: Dr. Vyvyan Howard, Founding editor of the Journal of Nanotoxicology. Dr. Gregor Wolbring, The Canadian Advisory Commitee on Nanotech Standardisation. Chee Yoke Ling, Legal Advisor, Third World Network. Claire Pentecost, Artist, Writer, Associate Professor and Chair of the Photography Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Rory O Neill, Editor of Hazards (trade union workplace safety magazine). Dr. Alexis Vlandas, Nanotechnology spokesperson for International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility. Public Judging: The selected entries will then be displayed at the World Social Forum in Nairobi, Kenya (20- 25 January 2007) for civil society attendees to judge. We also encourage everyone to view the gallery of submitted artwork online and submit comments there. More Information: For a short introduction to nanotechnology see: "A Tiny Primer on Nano-scale Technologies" available online: http://www.etcgroup.org/ en/materials/publications.html?id=55 For an introduction to the toxicity of nanoscale materials see the following resources: "Size Matters" (2003), an ETC Occasional Paper which includes an appendix by Dr Vyvyan Howard, Founding Editor of the Journal of Nanotoxicology: http://www.etcgroup.org/upload/publication/165/01/ occ.paper_nanosafety.pdf ETC Group's 2004 Communique, 'Nano's Troubled Waters' http:// www.etcgroup.org/upload/publication/116/01/gt_troubledwater_april1.pdf A May 2006 report on nanotechnology in sunscreens and cosmetics by Friends of the Earth: http://www.foe.org/camps/comm/nanotech/ A recent scientific evaluation of nanoscale hazards by the European Commission's highest level scientific committee on toxicity, The Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks: http://ec.europa.eu/health/ph_risk/committees/04_scenihr/ scenihr_cons_01_en.htm A comprehensive overview (2004) of nanoparticle toxicity, "Small Matter, Many Unknowns" by Swiss Re, the world's second largest re- insurance company: http://www.swissre.com/INTERNET/pwsfilpr.nsf/ vwFilebyIDKEYLu/ULUR-5YNGET/$FILE/Publ04_Nanotech_en.pdf Take Action: The US Food and Drug Administration is holding its first-ever public hearing to discuss regulatory issues related to nanotechnology on October 10, 2006. Despite the fact that the US government spends approximately $1 billion per year on nanotech R&D and hundreds of consumer products are already on the market, the US government spends a paltry $11 million per year on nanotechnology related risk research (1.1% of the total budget). Go here for details: http:// www.nanotechproject.org/80/nanotechnology-development-suffers-from- lack-of-risk-research-plan In May 2006 ETC Group joined the International Center for Technology Assessment, Friends of the Earth and other consumer health and environmental groups in a legal petition challenging FDA's failure to regulate health and environmental threats from nanomaterials currently used in consumer products. The full petition and an executive summary are available here: http://www.icta.org/nanotech/ index.cfm You can send electronic comments to the FDA asking them to properly control, regulate and label nanomaterials. An online form is available to help you do this via The Center for Food Safety. Go to: http://ga3.org/campaign/Nano _______________________________________________ ETC Group mailing list http://lists.etcgroup.org/mailman/listinfo/etcgroup From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Wed Oct 11 01:18:37 2006 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 18:18:37 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Transhuman warning signs In-Reply-To: <1546.163.1.72.81.1160419899.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <20061011011838.26732.qmail@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> --- Anders Sandberg wrote: > > I had some fun this weekend by making warning signs > for transhuman > technologies: > http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2006/10/warning_signs_for_tomorrow.html > > (as well as make graphs of who influenced who: > http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2006/10/colorful_academic_genealogies.html > - maybe we should make a similar kind of graph for > transhumanism?) The signs are rather amusing. The philosophical phylogeny is rather interesting as well. Although I was surprised by a few branches that seemed to end prematurely. For example, Einstein and Kepler. Did they not influence any who came after them? I am certain that Newton was influenced by Kepler and Kepler's laws fare better under general relativity than Newton's. Also you have Daoism as its own little island yet Lao Tzu was a descendent of Confucius whose non-anglicized name was Kung Fu Tzu. You have him embedded amongst the Western thinkers, without acknowledging his influence on his own grandchildren which is kind of odd. Furthermore, I seemed to have missed any reference to the Stoics like Aurelius. Were they not as influential as other Greek/Roman philosophers? This is of course nit-picking on my part as the concept of a philosophical phylogeny itself is very original and praiseworthy. :) I would be interested in something similar for the sciences and even religion. Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "More persons, on the whole, are humbugged by believing in nothing, than by believing too much." - P. T. Barnum __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From velvethum at hotmail.com Wed Oct 11 01:46:53 2006 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 21:46:53 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity References: Message-ID: Jef: > To me, the key is to recognize that the Self doesn't inhabit the body, > but rather is a construct of the body within its environment. The Self > is just going along for the ride, and it feels like it's in control > because that kind of functioning is what evolution settled on because it > works. It's very difficult to break the illusion because our culture, > our language, and our personal experience tells us that the Self is the > center of the action. > > Oh well. Nothing new to see here. Move along now, move along... > > - Jef How do you define survival, Jef? S. From transcend at extropica.com Wed Oct 11 00:31:55 2006 From: transcend at extropica.com (Brandon Reinhart) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 19:31:55 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Transhuman warning signs In-Reply-To: <3909531D-0835-4FA6-8A7D-CB865B15A59C@bonfireproductions.com> Message-ID: <200610110156.k9B1uq9G019554@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Yes, despite my joking response I think the warning signs are cute as well. In fact, they might be a neat way to convey certain high shock level concepts to newbies. Brandon -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Bret Kulakovich Sent: Tuesday, October 10, 2006 10:00 AM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Transhuman warning signs Ok, Anders - I don't post this to the list often enough - these are brilliant! You should consider one for Meso-scale structures and their inherent weirdness. "Objects in mirror may be stranger than they appear" (Of course that's microscope mirror.) The warning for Autonomous Device hits the nail right on the head! Thanks for sharing! Bret On Oct 9, 2006, at 2:51 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > > I had some fun this weekend by making warning signs for transhuman > technologies: > http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2006/10/ > warning_signs_for_tomorrow.html > > (as well as make graphs of who influenced who: > http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2006/10/ > colorful_academic_genealogies.html > - maybe we should make a similar kind of graph for transhumanism?) > > -- > Anders Sandberg, > Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics > Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From transhumanist at goldenfuture.net Wed Oct 11 01:41:43 2006 From: transhumanist at goldenfuture.net (Joseph Bloch) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 21:41:43 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] FW: ETC Group: COMPETITION ANNOUNCEMENT: Design a Nano-Hazard Symbol In-Reply-To: <8CF6A92CB628444FB3C757618CD28039015D18E0@exbe1.cmpcntr.tc.trincoll.edu> References: <8CF6A92CB628444FB3C757618CD28039015D18E0@exbe1.cmpcntr.tc.trincoll.edu> Message-ID: <452C4BD7.2050407@goldenfuture.net> Ironic is an understatement. Joseph Hughes, James J. wrote: >Anders - Submit yours. It would be ironic for a transhumanist to win a >Luddite contest. - J. > >------------------ > >COMPETITION ANNOUNCEMENT: Design a Nano-Hazard Symbol > >ETC Group announces International Graphic Design Competition CALL FOR >ENTRIES > >Biotechnology, nuclear power, toxic chemicals, electromagnetic radiation >-- each of these technological hazards has a universally recognized >warning symbol associated with it. So why not nanotechnology -- the >world's most powerful (and potentially >dangerous) technology? > >Concerned citizens everywhere are invited to submit their designs for a >universal Nanotechnology Hazard Symbol at: http://www.etcgroup.org/ >nanohazard > >Entries will be judged by a panel of eminent judges convened by the ETC >Group (Action Group on Erosion Technology and Concentration, >www.etcgroup.org). These judges include Dr. Vyvyan Howard (Editor of the >Journal of Nanotoxicity), Dr. Gregor Wolbring (The Canadian Advisory >Commitee on Nanotech Standardisation), Chee Yoke Ling (Third World >Network), Claire Pentecost (Associate Professor and Chair of the >Photography Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago), >Rory O'Neill (Editor of Hazards magazine) and Dr. Alexis Vlandas >(Nanotechnology Spokesperson for International Network of Engineers and >Scientists for Global Responsibility). Entries will also be judged by >participants at the World Social Forum, Nairobi, Kenya, 20-25 January >2007. > >The winning entry will be submitted to international standard-setting >bodies responsible for hazard characterisation, to international >governmental organisations and to national governments as a proposed >symbol for nanotechnology hazards. > >Closing date: 8 January 2007 > >A gallery of entries submitted will be available at http:// >www.etcgroup.org > > >Why Do We Need a Nano-Hazard Symbol? > >Nanotechnology, the manipulation of matter at the tiny level of atoms >and molecules, has created a new class of materials with unusual >properties and new toxicities. > >It used to be that nanotechnology was the stuff of science fiction. >Today, however, there are over one thousand nanotechnology companies >worldwide. Nanoparticles, nanotubes and other engineered >nanomaterials are already in use in hundreds of everyday consumer >products, raising significant health, safety and environmental >concerns. Nanoparticles are able to move around the body and the >environment more readily than larger particles of pollution. Because >of their extremely small size and large surface area nanoparticles >may be more reactive and more toxic than larger particles of the same >substance. They have been compared to asbestos by leading insurance >companies who worry their health impact could lead to massive claims. >At least one US-based insurance company has canceled coverage of >small companies involved with nanotechnology. Unlike more familiar >forms of pollution arising from new technologies, nano-hazards >(potentially endangering consumers, workers and the environment) have >yet to be fully characterized, regulated or even subject to safety >testing. The US Food and Drug Administration will have its first >public meeting about regulating nanomaterials on October 10, 2006. >Most governments worldwide have yet to even begin thinking about nano- >regulation. Nonetheless, nanoparticles invisible to the naked eye are >already in foods, cosmetics, pesticides and clothing without even >being labelled. Every day laboratory and factory workers could be >inhaling and ingesting nanoparticles while the rest of us may be >unwittingly putting them on our skin, in our body or in the environment. > >It's not just a safety question. Nanotechnology also raises new >societal hazards: The granting of patents on nano-scale materials and >processes, and even elements of the periodic table, allows for >increased corporate power and monopoly over the smallest parts of >nature. Some designer nanomaterials may come to replace natural >products such as cotton, rubber and metals -- displacing the >livelihoods of some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the >world. In the near future the merger of nanotechnology with >biotechnology (in nano-biotechnology applications such as synthetic >biology) will lead to new designer organisms, modified at the >molecular level, posing new biosafety threats. Nano-enabled >technologies also aim to 'enhance' human beings and 'fix' the >disabled, a goal that raises troubling ethical issues and the specter >of a new divide between the technologically "improved" and "unimproved." > >ETC Group has called for a moratorium on nanoparticle production and >release to allow for a full societal debate and until such time as >precautionary regulations are in place to protect workers, consumers >and the environment. Standard setting bodies around the world are now >scrambling to agree on nomenclature that can describe nanoparticles >and nanomaterials. A common, internationally-recognized symbol >warning of the presence of engineered nanomaterials is equally overdue. > >For a short and simple introduction to Nanotechnology see "A Tiny >Primer on Nano-scale Technologies," available online: http:// >www.etcgroup.org/en/materials/publications.html?id=55 > > >Details Of The Competition: > >We are asking concerned people everywhere (including artists, >designers, scientists, students, regulators and members of the >public) to submit possible designs for an international Nano-Hazard >warning symbol that could be used to identify the presence of >nanmoaterials. This symbol could, for example, be placed on products >containing nanomaterials, in laboratories or factories where workers >handle nanoparticles, or on containers transporting nanomaterials. >The symbol should be simple, easy to recognize and communicate >clearly the new, potential hazards that result when matter is >manipulated at the nanoscale (1 billionth of a metre -- the size of >atoms and molecules). > >We encourage participants to be as creative as possible in inventing >a new nano-hazard symbol. Images can be designed on computer or by >hand, scanned, photographed or otherwise rendered in 2 dimensions -- >either using colour or in black and white. Entries will be judged on >their conceptual as well as artistic merit. Descriptions and >explanations accompanying the entries will be very welcome. > >For examples of existing hazard warning symbols for comparison see >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_symbol > >Participants can submit as many different entries as they wish. Each >entry should be submitted seperately. Entries can be submitted in one >of 3 ways: >1) Upload electronically using the upload form at http:// >www.etcgroup.org/nanohazard >2) Email as a jpeg or gif file to nanohazard at etcgroup.org >3) Send by post to Nano-Hazard Competition, ETC Group, 431 Gilmour >Street, Ottawa, Ontario, K2P 0R5. Canada > >Please include your name, country and a contact email or postal address. > >All submitted entries will be treated as non-copyright and in the >public domain unless the submitter wishes to place them under a >creative commons license allowing free non-commercial use (see >details here http://www.creativecommons.org). Entries submitted with >copyright conditions (other than creative commons) will not be >considered. Entries sent by post will not be returned. > >The closing date for entries is 8th January 2007. > >Judging will be in two parts: > >Judging Panel: A selection of entries will first be made by a panel >of eminent judges chosen by the ETC Group. >This panel includes: >Dr. Vyvyan Howard, Founding editor of the Journal of Nanotoxicology. >Dr. Gregor Wolbring, The Canadian Advisory Commitee on Nanotech >Standardisation. >Chee Yoke Ling, Legal Advisor, Third World Network. >Claire Pentecost, Artist, Writer, Associate Professor and Chair of >the Photography Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago >Rory O Neill, Editor of Hazards (trade union workplace safety magazine). >Dr. Alexis Vlandas, Nanotechnology spokesperson for International >Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility. > >Public Judging: The selected entries will then be displayed at the >World Social Forum in Nairobi, Kenya (20- 25 January 2007) for civil >society attendees to judge. We also encourage everyone to view the >gallery of submitted artwork online and submit comments there. > > >More Information: > >For a short introduction to nanotechnology see: "A Tiny Primer on >Nano-scale Technologies" available online: http://www.etcgroup.org/ >en/materials/publications.html?id=55 > >For an introduction to the toxicity of nanoscale materials see the >following resources: > >"Size Matters" (2003), an ETC Occasional Paper which includes an >appendix by Dr Vyvyan Howard, Founding Editor of the Journal of >Nanotoxicology: http://www.etcgroup.org/upload/publication/165/01/ >occ.paper_nanosafety.pdf > >ETC Group's 2004 Communique, 'Nano's Troubled Waters' http:// >www.etcgroup.org/upload/publication/116/01/gt_troubledwater_april1.pdf > >A May 2006 report on nanotechnology in sunscreens and cosmetics by >Friends of the Earth: http://www.foe.org/camps/comm/nanotech/ > >A recent scientific evaluation of nanoscale hazards by the European >Commission's highest level scientific committee on toxicity, The >Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks: >http://ec.europa.eu/health/ph_risk/committees/04_scenihr/ >scenihr_cons_01_en.htm > >A comprehensive overview (2004) of nanoparticle toxicity, "Small >Matter, Many Unknowns" by Swiss Re, the world's second largest re- >insurance company: http://www.swissre.com/INTERNET/pwsfilpr.nsf/ >vwFilebyIDKEYLu/ULUR-5YNGET/$FILE/Publ04_Nanotech_en.pdf > >Take Action: > >The US Food and Drug Administration is holding its first-ever public >hearing to discuss regulatory issues related to nanotechnology on >October 10, 2006. Despite the fact that the US government spends >approximately $1 billion per year on nanotech R&D and hundreds of >consumer products are already on the market, the US government spends >a paltry $11 million per year on nanotechnology related risk research >(1.1% of the total budget). Go here for details: http:// >www.nanotechproject.org/80/nanotechnology-development-suffers-from- >lack-of-risk-research-plan > >In May 2006 ETC Group joined the International Center for Technology >Assessment, Friends of the Earth and other consumer health and >environmental groups in a legal petition challenging FDA's failure to >regulate health and environmental threats from nanomaterials >currently used in consumer products. The full petition and an >executive summary are available here: http://www.icta.org/nanotech/ >index.cfm > >You can send electronic comments to the FDA asking them to properly >control, regulate and label nanomaterials. An online form is >available to help you do this via The Center for Food Safety. Go to: >http://ga3.org/campaign/Nano >_______________________________________________ >ETC Group mailing list >http://lists.etcgroup.org/mailman/listinfo/etcgroup > >_______________________________________________ >extropy-chat mailing list >extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > > > From jef at jefallbright.net Wed Oct 11 02:47:55 2006 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 19:47:55 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Heartland wrote: > How do you define survival, Jef? More relevant to this discussion, I think, is what survival is not. The common view of immortality [that's the implicit topic, right?] is a simple theme of preservation and continuation, but with little thought of growth, which, as the Red Queen observed, is necessary just to stay in the same relative position within any competitive environment. Growth over a significant period of time results in significant change, which might be a disappointment to some were dreaming of persistence. More directly to your question, the term "survival" can be used effectively when it refers to certain traits within a certain context, mutually understood. - Jef From russell.wallace at gmail.com Wed Oct 11 02:52:23 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 03:52:23 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity, or "Am I missing your point entirely?" In-Reply-To: References: <8d71341e0610101728y7a8ef854x4fcf3c5dca178f4b@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0610101952q1048fe60m7c40f0e2eec0b2d9@mail.gmail.com> On 10/11/06, Jef Allbright wrote: > It seems like you're imagining some kind of Self that can be spread out > over multiple instances. To me it seems almost a problem of semantics, but > reflecting a misconception of reality: A point of view is a result of the > processes producing it, not something that observes the show from some > privileged position. Or am I missing your point entirely? ;-) > Or I'm missing yours, or we're both missing each other's :) Let's see if I can try and get a handle on yours... You seem to be saying that the self is an illusion, that one can say e.g. about seeing the sun rise tomorrow that infinitely many people will, infinitely many people won't, and the ratio is (some large number):1, but any statement that "_I_ will see the sun rise tomorrow" is meaningless verbiage, or at best a metaphor for an imperfect picture of objective reality. That my paradox only looks like a paradox because I'm stressing the flimsy word "self" beyond its limits, and where it seems to generate a contradiction between the objective and subjective viewpoints, the subjective one is an illusion that should be ignored. Is that a correct paraphrase of your position? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jef at jefallbright.net Wed Oct 11 03:17:00 2006 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 20:17:00 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity, or "Am I missing your point entirely?" In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0610101952q1048fe60m7c40f0e2eec0b2d9@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Russell Wallace wrote: On 10/11/06, Jef Allbright wrote: It seems like you're imagining some kind of Self that can be spread out over multiple instances. To me it seems almost a problem of semantics, but reflecting a misconception of reality: A point of view is a result of the processes producing it, not something that observes the show from some privileged position. Or am I missing your point entirely? ;-) Or I'm missing yours, or we're both missing each other's :) Let's see if I can try and get a handle on yours... You seem to be saying that the self is an illusion, that one can say e.g. about seeing the sun rise tomorrow that infinitely many people will, infinitely many people won't, and the ratio is (some large number):1, but any statement that "_I_ will see the sun rise tomorrow" is meaningless verbiage, or at best a metaphor for an imperfect picture of objective reality. That my paradox only looks like a paradox because I'm stressing the flimsy word "self" beyond its limits, and where it seems to generate a contradiction between the objective and subjective viewpoints, the subjective one is an illusion that should be ignored. Is that a correct paraphrase of your position? You're really losing me here. The common theme I'm seeing is that you seem to be talking about applying events outside a system (the observations of other independent observers) as if they have some effect on the output of that particular system (a particular observer). I will say with certainty, and in the same sense as my earlier comments, perception of the sun "rising" is an illusion. ;-) - Jef -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From russell.wallace at gmail.com Wed Oct 11 03:25:10 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 04:25:10 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity, or "Am I missing your point entirely?" In-Reply-To: References: <8d71341e0610101952q1048fe60m7c40f0e2eec0b2d9@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0610102025k2681b4d6j9c9d57a9c68028d5@mail.gmail.com> On 10/11/06, Jef Allbright wrote: > You're really losing me here. The common theme I'm seeing is that you > seem to be talking about applying events outside a system (the observations > of other independent observers) as if they have some effect on the output > of that particular system (a particular observer). > *nods* If my paraphrase wasn't close to your point, then I don't understand your point at all I'm afraid, seems I was right and we are both missing each other :) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Wed Oct 11 03:31:19 2006 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 23:31:19 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0610100409s14ca402dp929f3ff7dd220bc7@mail.gmail.com> References: <8d71341e0610100409s14ca402dp929f3ff7dd220bc7@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <62c14240610102031v1ba180cfl31eeb16fdc14ceec@mail.gmail.com> On 10/10/06, Russell Wallace wrote: > > I saw this when rummaging through the archives, and didn't see a reply, > and it's been gnawing at me as the one such paradox I don't have a > satisfactory answer for. I'm going to rephrase it in more vivid terms that I > find help make it clearer: > > A: I turn you into a frog. > > B: I run off a copy of you. In case you're a threadist, I'll do it atom by > atom, neuron by neuron, symmetrically, with thread of consciousness unbroken > throughout, such that there will be two of you at the end and neither > objectively nor subjectively will it be possible to tell which is the > original and which is the copy (and in case you're a substratist, all copies > will continue to be made of carbon compounds in water just like before, no > uploading into silicon chips), so you should equally expect to be either. > Then I will let one copy go free, but similarly multiply the other into 999. > And then I will take all 999 to hell and make them write essays on > postmodernist literature! Muhahaha! > Has anyone considered the computational value of 999 copies of your current level of intellect and problem solving potential? I don't know what the break-even point is on the value of existentially "free" threads compared to hell-constrained threads, but it seems obvious that the Satanic motivation for this thought puzzle would violate any promise to clone only a minimal number of copies where this ratio would be in your favor. So I will assume that 999 extra copies is sufficiently many extra threads of subjective Hell to outweigh the value of your meager singular 'free' experience. Would this puzzle be any different if the 999 "others" were not clones of yourself? Is there a parallel here to the idea of licensing your pattern? If the evolved-over-(your-life)-time configuration of your brain is a pattern which determines your approach to problem-solving, then allowing a second party to possess a copy of that pattern gives them the ability to use it for their own purpose. Imagine everything you are capable of, including the things which you are morally opposed to doing despite having the capability. This Satan character is employing those copies to do exactly those jobs. (Assume Satan grew tired of you postmodernist literature essays) If the RIAA can protect the pattern of bits that make up a CD, surely we must be allowed to protect the pattern of our own neural algorithms. This puts a new spin on the term "Intellectual Property." -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From velvethum at hotmail.com Wed Oct 11 03:42:21 2006 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 23:42:21 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity, or "Am I missing your point entirely?" References: Message-ID: Jef: "I will say with certainty, and in the same sense as my earlier comments, perception of the sun "rising" is an illusion. ;-)" Some illusions are worth having. Let me also go on record to say that I prefer to experience "illusions" rather than nothing at all. :) S. From russell.wallace at gmail.com Wed Oct 11 03:46:42 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 04:46:42 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity In-Reply-To: <62c14240610102031v1ba180cfl31eeb16fdc14ceec@mail.gmail.com> References: <8d71341e0610100409s14ca402dp929f3ff7dd220bc7@mail.gmail.com> <62c14240610102031v1ba180cfl31eeb16fdc14ceec@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0610102046g3227b7c3xfd606b905855b891@mail.gmail.com> On 10/11/06, Mike Dougherty wrote: > > I don't know what the break-even point is on the value of existentially > "free" threads compared to hell-constrained threads, but it seems obvious > that the Satanic motivation for this thought puzzle would violate any > promise to clone only a minimal number of copies where this ratio would be > in your favor. So I will assume that 999 extra copies is sufficiently many > extra threads of subjective Hell to outweigh the value of your meager > singular 'free' experience. Oh, I agree. In this case though I'm trying to analyze, not the ethical issues, but the philosophical problem this paradox seems to cause with regard to the question of how we can make predictions in an infinite universe. If the RIAA can protect the pattern of bits that make up a CD, surely we > must be allowed to protect the pattern of our own neural algorithms. This > puts a new spin on the term "Intellectual Property." > Yep! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From fortean1 at mindspring.com Wed Oct 11 02:55:09 2006 From: fortean1 at mindspring.com (Terry Colvin) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 19:55:09 -0700 (GMT-07:00) Subject: [extropy-chat] FWD (SK) Re: Q. for Stan Schwartz [North Korea's weapon test] Message-ID: <5570758.1160535310257.JavaMail.root@mswamui-blood.atl.sa.earthlink.net> -----Forwarded Message----- > >On Mon, Oct 09, 2006 at 09:47:40AM -0700, Graeme Kennedy wrote: >> >> On 9-Oct-06, at 9:41 AM, b b wrote: >> >> >How difficult would it be for North Korea to fake a nuclear test >> >via seismographic evidence? >> >> 550mt? Seismic, maybe. Isotopes, unlikely. >> >> Underground tests are confirmable with atmospheric isotope tests. >> Usually iridium. > >Has this been confirmed yet? Apparently the seismic evidence >suggests this was something of a dud (less than a kiloton, >whereas it should have been over 10 and closer to 20 kilotons)... > >Arms Control Wonk suggests that this is evidence that it was genuine, >as if they were going to fake it they would have made it bigger: > >http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1230/nork-data-it-was-a-dud >http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1231/dropping-the-f-bomb-on-norks > >-- >Jim Lippard From jonkc at att.net Wed Oct 11 05:54:27 2006 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 01:54:27 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity. References: Message-ID: <00f501c6ecf9$fd1261d0$c4084e0c@MyComputer> Heartland, High Priest of the Unique Atom and Sacred Original Cult Wrote: > Clearly, the best solution from the original instance POV The original instance of an adjective is a pretty damn fuzzy concept, and the original point of view of that adjective is even fuzzier. It's so fuzzy that the phrase becomes just a sound one can make with your mouth. > would be to preserve the first instance of you and send all the 99 new > instances to Hell. The trouble is I have no way of knowing if I am your noble sacred original composed of the same holy original atoms. If I took your advice there is a 99% probability I'll end up in hell. > How do you define survival? How do you define "definition"? > If we view this situation only in terms of pure material (or physical) > identity, patternist view breaks down very quickly. That is certainly true, but so what? Why would anybody only be concerned with stuff made of matter? There are lots of very interesting things that have nothing to do with atoms, as any mathematician will tell you. And poets are armed with a powerful arsenal of adjectives and adverbs; they are not made of atoms either. John K Clark From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Wed Oct 11 05:50:49 2006 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 22:50:49 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0610100409s14ca402dp929f3ff7dd220bc7@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20061011055049.38666.qmail@web60519.mail.yahoo.com> --- Russell Wallace wrote: > A: I turn you into a frog. > > B: I run off a copy of you. In case you're a > threadist, I'll do it atom by > atom, neuron by neuron, symmetrically, with thread > of consciousness unbroken > throughout, such that there will be two of you at > the end and neither > objectively nor SUBJECTIVELY will it be possible to > tell which is the > original and which is the copy If this is taken as a premise of the problem, emphasis on SUBJECTIVELY being mine, then what you are saying is that there will be no way for ME to distinguish myself from my copies. Since my definition of self as an autonomous agent is: if qualia(self, perception A) = qualia(X, perception A) then X=self. If this is the case and I experience everything my so called "copies" experience exactly as they experience it, then my copies are ME. If however my copies don't experience the exact same qualia. i.e. I have no idea what my copy is experiencing at a given time, then my copy is simply a copy and not me. I think then it is important that one distinguish whether ones subjective experience of self is delocalized over multiple instances or whether the multiple instances are autonomous selves merely similar to you and not identical. So by this definition, if I copy myself right before lunch and one of my "selves" has a cheeseburger and the other other has a salad, then after lunch I try to determine whether or not my copy is me, then my criteria is simple: If I remember eating a cheeseburger then I am the one who ate the cheeseburger. If I remember eating a salad, then I am the one who ate the salad. If I remember eating both, then both are me. Ok, so working from the logic of above, from a purely self-interested and ruthlessly rational point of view, if I am either a patternist or a threadist, I shouldn't care. It would be as if 999 of my twin brothers met their doom but only I escaped. Yeah, it sucks and I feel bad for them but at least I made it out alive and in a harsh Darwinian world that is all that matters. If however I do indeed subjectively experience all of the qualia of the multiple instances of me, then the dilemma posed is practically identical to Satan offering to either: A: Turn you into a frog. B: Extend your lifespan a thousand fold and torture you for 99.9% of your preturnaturally long life. The frog option is looking pretty good at this point, unless I happen to be Hugh Hefner and Albert Einstein rolled into one, in which case I may still take B. Actually to be honest, I have read a zillion patternist vs. threadist debates on this list and I don't think my own view of self falls into either camp. What would you say? Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "More persons, on the whole, are humbugged by believing in nothing, than by believing too much." - P. T. Barnum __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From velvethum at hotmail.com Wed Oct 11 06:31:03 2006 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 02:31:03 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity. References: <00f501c6ecf9$fd1261d0$c4084e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: John K Clark: > Heartland, High Priest of the Unique Atom and Sacred Original Cult Wrote: Me: >How do you define survival? John K Clark: > How do you define "definition"? Forgive me, Mr. Clark, but I'll pass. Read the archives. Or maybe start with this: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-personal/ S. From lcorbin at rawbw.com Wed Oct 11 07:35:37 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 00:35:37 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Goldbach's Conjecture Resolved! A Story References: <065301c6eb46$9fcdf1b0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1264.163.1.72.81.1160418004.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <071701c6ed08$2492f590$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> > What a wonderful story. Reminds me of Brin's _Stones of Significance_, > although that protagonist didn't have an equally well-defined problem. > > Would it be OK to include it in the transhuman humour collection later on? Thanks Anders, and yes, I'd be pleased to have it included! And I really liked that Brin story too. Russell writes > ...and people accuse us 00s programmers of writing inefficient code :) > Good story! Thank you. What, we "naughty-naughty" programmers write inefficent code? :-) Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Wed Oct 11 08:18:55 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 01:18:55 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity. References: <00f501c6ecf9$fd1261d0$c4084e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <074f01c6ed0e$0c2d0580$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Russell put a nice twist into the usual run of thought experiments and, from my point of view, shows an additional reason to reject any notion of "probability" having objective significance as regards the anticipation paradox. I mean to assert that probability is just not the right way to look at identity or anticipation. Yes, you cannot but feel that "your odds" are such-and-such in certain circumstances. But objectively, that's not really the case, because (as someone who has been a "patternist" longer than anyone else here, since 1966!), I claim that one must simply integrate benefit over the runtime you get in the multiverse, wherever and whenever you get it, and that negative or bad experience must be weighed against the good. > But intuitively the threadist view seems correct here! There must > be a 50% probability on the first copy that I'll go free. Neat! But as I've always maintained, illusory, because there is a 100% chance that you will experience going free and a 100% chance that you will experience not going free. This is simply because you can be in two places at the same time. A detached, scientific examination of all the physical processes actually occurring forces the conclusion that there is a true version of you executing in each place. > How do we reconcile intuition with the patternist view? It has to be just runtime (or as some people insist on calling it, "observer moments"). Suppose that a person is duped into believing that after his first fork, half of his total future measure is safe, and that it is only the other half that gets further parceled up. A good way to refute that is to suppose that the bifurcations take place so fast that they're all done inside one milli-second. My apologies for not reading all the posts in this thread; after 40 years of this it's gotten old now, despite my having been obsessed by it for a decade or two. In the end, it matters whether one embraces most closely a higher level concept of who you are (your values, your beliefs, your memories) or the lower level aspects of who you are (your current sensations, your current moods, and your current thoughts). Those of us who most strongly adhere to the former tend to be patternists; those who can't help but identify with the latter, some sole instance somewhere, are not. Lee From scerir at libero.it Wed Oct 11 09:00:35 2006 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 11:00:35 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Teleportation Question References: <200610100242.k9A2giGT004314@andromeda.ziaspace.com><000201c6ec6e$934c0bb0$00b91f97@nomedxgm1aalex> Message-ID: <000201c6ed13$bacf09d0$0a901f97@nomedxgm1aalex> Robert Bradbury: > I don't see what quantum teleportation has to do > with classical teleportation. In quantum teleportation you need the entanglement between the quantum states of two separated systems, a third quantum state to be teleported from Alice to Bob, a certain measurement performed by Alice (Bell state measurement) which deletes the quantum state to be teleported (no cloning theorem) and re-creates the quantum state at Bob's location, and some additional classical information from Alice to Bob. (In the new experiment Polzik uses a similar protocol, to teleport a quantum state. The main difference is that the entangled systems are not two particles but a sample of atoms and radiation (a beam interacting with the sample of atoms). If the 'Star-Trek' teleportation is the classical one I think it should not be much different from the quantum teleportation (I read they also use entanglements and 'Heisenberg compensators'). > In classical teleportation you want an exact copy at a remote location. > The > disassembly of the original is commonly part of the equation but I can > imagine processes where it might not be entirely necessary. The classical > quantum states of all of the atoms in the original are IMO *irrelevant* > from > a human "teleportation" standpoint [1] -- the quantum state of my brain > changes far more between going to sleep and waking up or letting my blood > sugar get too low and I find neither of those upsetting. And a dumb rock > doesn't care whether or not it is the "same" rock when it is moved from > point A to point B. Well, I tend to agree here. The problem I see (using the usual quantum protocol) is this one. You can teleport only the 'soul' (the quantum state) and not the 'body' (the quantum system) [1]. So the questions (imo) are: - is it possible to teleport the quantum state of a big molecule? - are there problems due to quantum decoherence? - assuming that we have the quantum state of a big molecule and that we can teleport it, how can we re-create, at a distance, non just the 'soul' but also the 'body'? These are, perhaps, stupid questions, but I cannot give answers. s. [1] http://www.arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0408095 there are big problems even if we try to communicate, with quantum means, simple things like 'chirality'. From russell.wallace at gmail.com Wed Oct 11 13:47:50 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 14:47:50 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity. In-Reply-To: <074f01c6ed0e$0c2d0580$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <00f501c6ecf9$fd1261d0$c4084e0c@MyComputer> <074f01c6ed0e$0c2d0580$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <8d71341e0610110647g7decb37cte343982b277872ff@mail.gmail.com> On 10/11/06, Lee Corbin wrote: > > I mean to assert that probability is just not the right way to look > at identity or anticipation. Yes, you cannot but feel that "your odds" > are such-and-such in certain circumstances. But objectively, that's > not really the case, because (as someone who has been a "patternist" > longer than anyone else here, since 1966!), I claim that one must > simply integrate benefit over the runtime you get in the multiverse, > wherever and whenever you get it, and that negative or bad > experience must be weighed against the good. > *nods* Everything you say in this post makes sense, and that would be how I'd approach it too, at least as far as practical policy is concerned: if the situation described were to occur, I'd behave as though I believed the odds were 1:999 whatever my intuition told me. But there's still a philosophical problem. In an infinite universe, there will always be infinitely many instances that experience each possibility, and infinities of the same cardinality at that. So mathematically the integral is undefined; how then do you justify any conclusions? How do you explain the fact that empirically we can make predictions, and they come out the way intuitively reasonable theories of probability say they should? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From natasha at natasha.cc Wed Oct 11 14:54:34 2006 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 09:54:34 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Teleportation Question In-Reply-To: References: <200610100242.k9A2giGT004314@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <000201c6ec6e$934c0bb0$00b91f97@nomedxgm1aalex> Message-ID: <6.2.1.2.2.20061011095345.0401df10@pop-server.austin.rr.com> At 12:40 PM 10/10/2006, Robert wrote: >I used to be able to stand on my head -- but it isn't useful for very much. >I think that is how I classify experiments in this area as well. haha! Well, you certainly offered some worthwhile ideas. Thanks, Natasha Natasha Vita-More Cultural Strategist - Design Media Artist - Futurist PhD Candidate, Planetary Collegium Proactionary Principle Core Group, Extropy Institute Member, Association of Professional Futurists Founder, Transhumanist Arts & Culture If you draw a circle in the sand and study only what's inside the circle, then that is a closed-system perspective. If you study what is inside the circle and everything outside the circle, then that is an open system perspective. - Buckminster Fuller -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jef at jefallbright.net Wed Oct 11 16:06:22 2006 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 09:06:22 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] The Importance of Context [Was: Probability of identity] In-Reply-To: <074f01c6ed0e$0c2d0580$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: Russell brings up an interesting twist on the old topic of personal identity, reviving discussion of the "patternist" and "threadist" interpretations. Heartland (threadist) reminds us that what seems most significant to him is that the thread of identity appear to be unique and unbroken. Lee (patternist) reminds us that he's thought this through most carefully and that it's obvious that a copy of a person is necessarily and absolutely the same person. Jef offers strange and cryptic comments about agency and illusion which might make sense if anyone could understand what point he's trying to make. ------------------------------------------ It's all about context. * Without context there is no meaning; things simply are as they are. * Context and meaning necessarily imply an observer. There is no ultimate meaningful objective viewpoint. * Paradox is always a case of insufficient context. In the bigger picture, all of the pieces must fit. Alrighty then, so what? ------------------------------------------ Russell talks about paradox and asks how can predictions be made, given a context of infinite possibilities. I respond (in rather terse and mystical fashion) that no absolute predictions can ever be made about the real world, because any system of prediction is operating within a limited context. I offer reassurance by saying that there is no actual paradox because (as a matter of observation and faith) we exist in a rational universe and all the pieces must work together in a way that would make sense, if the observer system has context sufficient to model the observations of interest. * We can make highly confident statements about formally defined systems such as mathematics, but G?del, Chaitan and others have shown us that even in mathematics the context is open and expanding. * We can make useful but less confident statements about the behavior of engineered systems -- but we recognize that no matter how carefully and thoroughly we exercise our engineering knowledge, we can expect to be surprised and perplexed when they breakdown due to unmodeled interaction with the larger context of the environment. * We can make somewhat useful predictions about complex systems such a social interactions, but we are learning that rather than modeling the entire system of interest, we are able to exploit regularities in its behavior, while Hume's Problem of Induction looms in the distance, threatening a greater context within which the regularities no longer hold. * We can make useful predictions about the probabilities of quantum behavior, but as we look closer we find that the observer is an unavoidable element of the context of interest. * For many persons, the world is flat. They are able to make predictions effectively within this context. For persons with a greater context of geography, astronomy and so on, the world is certainly not flat, but space-time is flat - or isn't it? * We feel that we have free will, but we observe that everything appears to follow a cause and effect relationship. Simply a matter of context. My point is that every system of meaning is necessarily dependent on context and necessarily implies an observer. I also make a related comment about what we mean by Self -- more on this later. ------------------------------------------ Lee often explains how a copy of a person must be considered the same person. He points out that the copy is more similar to the original than the original was to its predecessor a day earlier. We have no difficulty maintaining personal identity through much greater differences over a lifetime, so why not acknowledge that an exact copy must be exactly the same person? He's quite right -- within the context of his argument. But what about within the context of social interaction? Does it really make sense to consider each copy to be precisely the same person, or within a larger context does it make sense to make distinctions? I brought up the issue of agency because it is fundamental to our concept of self. Moral and legal responsibility, our concept of "free will" (another useful illusion), all rest on a workable concept of agency. * If your exact copy, who has been out mining asteroids for the last ten years, comes home, should he (moral/legal "should") be entitled to an equal share and control of your property? [I could also mention spousal relations, but that carries a lot more extended ramifications than I have time for at this moment, so I won't mention it.] * If your copy is sued for gross negligence out on the asteroid (now you know why he came home), should you be equally liable? And does it make sense that personal identity (in a practical/social context) be established by physical/functional similarity or might agency be more relevant? * If I spawn a temporary copy of myself for the purpose of increasing my working bandwidth for an urgent project, then it seems clear that there are two of me working on the project, common agency and physical/functional being unquestionable. * If I spawn a temporary copy of myself for the purpose of increasing my working bandwidth for an urgent project, but I make the copy different from me in certain obvious physical ways such as having bright green skin, then it seems clear that there are still two of me working on the project, with common agency and functional similarity being unquestionable and physical similarity being irrelevant. * If I spawn a temporary copy of myself for the purpose of increasing my working bandwidth for an urgent project, but I make the copy different from me in the certain obvious functional ways such as not needing sleep and not caring about entertainment, (bear in mind that I can change my functionality as well via drugs, surgery, prosthetics, etc., without my identity being questioned) then it seems clear that there are two of me working on the project, common agency being unquestionable and physical/functional similarity being irrelevant. * [I could continue with an example of a copy in a computerized virtual reality, but I fear I risk boring the reader.] ------------------------------------------ Heartland asserts that identity is established always and only by continuity of the physical trajectory of the matter which performs the mind function. To most of us on this list, there appear many immediate and obvious exceptions and logical flaws with this reasoning, but despite much discussion, Heartland appears to continue to hold this sincere belief. Even when it is suggested that he believes this to be true because he wants it to be true, he has always shown the capability for further discussion. This is yet another example of system behavior within a specific context. ------------------------------------------ Time for me to get to work. - Jef From jef at jefallbright.net Wed Oct 11 17:16:04 2006 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 10:16:04 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity In-Reply-To: <62c14240610102031v1ba180cfl31eeb16fdc14ceec@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Mike Dougherty made some interesting observations: Has anyone considered the computational value of 999 copies of your current level of intellect and problem solving potential? I don't know what the break-even point is on the value of existentially "free" threads compared to hell-constrained threads, but it seems obvious that the Satanic motivation for this thought puzzle would violate any promise to clone only a minimal number of copies where this ratio would be in your favor. So I will assume that 999 extra copies is sufficiently many extra threads of subjective Hell to outweigh the value of your meager singular 'free' experience. Okay... then who is this person, necessarily outside the system, who is able to access and evaluate the value of these 999 + 1 subjective experiences? It doesn't matter whether you have duplicates throughout the earth or throughout the multiverse, decision-making implies agency, and agency implies a single point of view. Would this puzzle be any different if the 999 "others" were not clones of yourself? Good question. Might help clarify the point I've been trying to make that similarity does not imply shared agency. Is there a parallel here to the idea of licensing your pattern? If the evolved-over-(your-life)-time configuration of your brain is a pattern which determines your approach to problem-solving, then allowing a second party to possess a copy of that pattern gives them the ability to use it for their own purpose. Imagine everything you are capable of, including the things which you are morally opposed to doing despite having the capability. This Satan character is employing those copies to do exactly those jobs. (Assume Satan grew tired of you postmodernist literature essays) If the RIAA can protect the pattern of bits that make up a CD, surely we must be allowed to protect the pattern of our own neural algorithms. This puts a new spin on the term "Intellectual Property." Interesting idea, and the precedent is that we do license our problem solving capabilities when we act as paid consultants. A difficulty with licensing ones pattern with the same negligible cost as with duplicating software might be that one should be entitled to sell only the novel parts, not the parts acquired directly from other sources such as other consultants, schooling, books, movies, conversations with friends, the overall environment...oops, never mind. It appears that such growth opportunities must be evaluated within a more encompassing context than our current system of trade. - Jef -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From velvethum at hotmail.com Wed Oct 11 22:34:26 2006 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 18:34:26 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] The Importance of Context References: Message-ID: Jef: "Heartland asserts that identity is established always and only by continuity of the physical trajectory of the matter which performs the mind function. To most of us on this list, there appear many immediate and obvious exceptions and logical flaws with this reasoning, but despite much discussion, Heartland appears to continue to hold this sincere belief. Even when it is suggested that he believes this to be true because he wants it to be true, he has always shown the capability for further discussion. This is yet another example of system behavior within a specific context." Well, that's not quite fair, is it? You say that many on this list clearly see the "obvious exceptions and logical flaws" in my reasoning and that I simply choose to ignore them even when they are being pointed out to me. What usually happens is that people who argue with me already assume patternist view and evaluate the conclusions I provide entirely in terms of patternist view instead of showing evidence for why patternist view better approximates reality in the first place. It's little bit like arguing with a fundamental Christian who despite your perfectly logical explanations about how natural selection works says, "but the Bible says different," as if the Bible, not science based on evidence and provable predictions, is the fundamental and unquestionable assumption that a discussion about creation should be based on. So yes, I tend to ignore most of these arguments, not because I want to, but because they are simply circular, confused, and, most importanly, irrelevant to the real discussion about the fundamental nature of continued existence. S. From rhanson at gmu.edu Thu Oct 12 00:58:39 2006 From: rhanson at gmu.edu (Robin Hanson) Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 20:58:39 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0610100409s14ca402dp929f3ff7dd220bc7@mail.gmail.co m> References: <8d71341e0610100409s14ca402dp929f3ff7dd220bc7@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <0J7000HKR01SIHA0@caduceus1.gmu.edu> On 10/10/2006, Russell Wallace wrote: >Satan [says] ... "I run off a copy of you. ... atom by atom, neuron >by neuron, symmetrically, with thread of consciousness unbroken >throughout, such that there will be two of you at the end and >neither objectively nor subjectively will it be possible to tell >which is the original and which is the copy ... Then I will let one >copy go free, but similarly multiply the other into 999. And then I >will take all 999 to hell" ... there's a 50% probability that I just >get to go free. ... But. .. There will be 1 copy of me free, and 999 >undergoing horrible torture. There will be no objective fact of the >matter as to what the copying sequence was. The only objective fact >will be that 0.1% of my instances will be free and 99.9% will be >tortured. Therefore I should estimate a 99.9% probability that I'll >be tortured. ... I'm assuming for the sake of the thought experiment >that you're Homo economicus, only concerned about what you >personally will experience, ...To us patternists, the second line of >reasoning seems correct; 1 copy of our pattern is free and 999 >copies are being tortured. ... But intuitively the threadist view >seems correct here! There must be a 50% probability on the first >copy that I'll go free. Once I'm subjectively experiencing myself as >being free, how can it then make any difference how many copies of >the tortured pattern are made? I can't suddenly find myself yanked >into Satan's classroom just because more copies outside my light >cone were made, can I? I'm not sure what exactly the terms "threadist" or "patternist" mean, but it seems to me that the question you ask is well posed, and that the answer is 50%, for the reason you give. This is a case of indexical uncertainty, and rational beliefs under uncertainty simply do not need to be uniform distributions. That is, you can know everything there is to know about the physical work, and yet you can be subjectively uncertain about which person in that world you are. Such subjective beliefs are not arbitrary - there is a correct best belief, and the other beliefs are less than best. The correct beliefs will show themselves, for example, in the history any one person will see relating the beliefs he had and the actual frequencies he observed. For most people and long histories, the actual frequency seen should be pretty close to the subject belief held, when that belief is correct. Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323 From spike66 at comcast.net Thu Oct 12 03:28:11 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 20:28:11 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Goldbach's Conjecture Resolved! A Story In-Reply-To: <065301c6eb46$9fcdf1b0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <200610120338.k9C3cf24019347@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Lee Corbin > Subject: [extropy-chat] Goldbach's Conjecture Resolved! A Story > > The singularity happened all right... ... > The request was simple. Determine whether the particular number > > 428 08791 39342 94963 22581 56917 17541 83578 75376 65202... > 33150 27368 53375 70181 59431 66642 > > is the sum is the sum of two primes, or not! ... I have discovered something truly remarkable. While fooling with Lee's question of determining if 4.281E4228 (call it Lee's Number) is the sum of two primes, I have found a way to determine that Lee's Number can be expressed as the sum of two primes in approximately 4E3170 different ways. No kidding, for once. Let P(n) be the number of different ways a positive even integer n can be expressed as the sum of two primes. For consistency with previous work, let us assume 1 is not prime, but twice a prime counts in P. For instance, P(14) = 2 because 11+3 and 7+7 would count but not 13+1. I have found that P(n) ~ .15*n^0.75 So P(Lee's Number) ~ 4E3170 This approximation is good to within a factor of two 98.7% of the time and within a factor of 3 for all even integers above 2 up to 32000, which is as high as I have checked it. I found something even more cool that that, which I will post tomorrow. spike From amara at amara.com Thu Oct 12 03:25:15 2006 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 20:25:15 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Breathless in Saturn's Shadow Message-ID: I think that this must be the most stunning picture of a planetary ring system _ever_: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA08329.jpg Details on that spectacular image here: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA08329 Two new rings were discovered from the above Cassini camera observations. A "Janus/Epimetheus Ring" and a "Pallene Ring": http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/figures/PIA08328_fig1.jpg Amara -- Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com Istituto di Fisica dello Spazio Interplanetario (IFSI), Roma, ITALIA Associate Research Scientist, Planetary Science Institute (PSI), Tucson From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Thu Oct 12 05:10:24 2006 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 22:10:24 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Breathless in Saturn's Shadow In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20061012051024.98106.qmail@web60515.mail.yahoo.com> --- Amara Graps wrote: > > I think that this must be the most stunning picture > of a planetary > ring system _ever_: > http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA08329.jpg > > Details on that spectacular image here: > http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA08329 > > Two new rings were discovered from the above Cassini > camera observations. > A "Janus/Epimetheus Ring" and a "Pallene Ring": Ironic but true. It's kind of funny but being a biologist and trying to understand Fermi's Paradox has led me to astronomy where I am a duck out of water. And whereas I won't make make any pretense of having any true knowledge of astronomy (the most powerful telescope I ever had was a Tasco 12X refractor with maybe 7 sq in. lens), I can say that Saturn is an anomaly of a planet. The reason for this that I have been trying to understand the relationship between the role of environment in the generation of life (STP=standard temperature and pressure, a prerequite of the bizaarre carbon chemistry that makes life possible on earth). It turns out that Saturn is barely a planet having made the cut off for being a Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "More persons, on the whole, are humbugged by believing in nothing, than by believing too much." - P. T. Barnum __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From mbb386 at main.nc.us Thu Oct 12 11:09:13 2006 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2006 07:09:13 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Breathless in Saturn's Shadow In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <36553.72.236.103.200.1160651353.squirrel@main.nc.us> > > I think that this must be the most stunning picture of a planetary > ring system _ever_: > http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA08329.jpg > Thank you, Amara! That is a most amazing picture! I forwarded it on to an old friend who, some years back,worked with NASA. Regards, MB From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Thu Oct 12 13:00:49 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2006 09:00:49 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Teleportation Question In-Reply-To: <6.2.1.2.2.20061011095345.0401df10@pop-server.austin.rr.com> References: <200610100242.k9A2giGT004314@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <000201c6ec6e$934c0bb0$00b91f97@nomedxgm1aalex> <6.2.1.2.2.20061011095345.0401df10@pop-server.austin.rr.com> Message-ID: On 10/11/06, Natasha Vita-More wrote: > I used to be able to stand on my head -- but it isn't useful for very > much. > I think that is how I classify experiments in this area as well. > > haha! Well, you certainly offered some worthwhile ideas. > In that vein, from Vasanth on /. ... "Very funny Scotty, . . . now beam down my clothes!!!!!!!" R. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Thu Oct 12 17:23:56 2006 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2006 10:23:56 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Excuse the fragmentary post (was Saturn) In-Reply-To: <20061012051024.98106.qmail@web60515.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20061012172356.51641.qmail@web60516.mail.yahoo.com> Sorry about that, folks. I had something come up and I thought I hit "save as draft" with the thought of finishing later. I may still. :) Stu __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From asa at nada.kth.se Thu Oct 12 19:21:53 2006 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2006 21:21:53 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Philosophical phylogeny In-Reply-To: <20061011011838.26732.qmail@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> References: <20061011011838.26732.qmail@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1488.163.1.72.81.1160680913.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> The Avantguardian wrote: > The philosophical > phylogeny is rather interesting as well. Although I > was surprised by a few branches that seemed to end > prematurely. For example, Einstein and Kepler. Did > they not influence any who came after them? This is the problem with all such graphs - they are both finite, biased and somewhat arbitrary. In this case I can put all the blame (and praise) on Mike Love, who did the original dataset. In making such a graph one has both to decide who gets to be in there and what links to leave out. Personal expertise and biases will of course affect the graph greatly. I have just finished a first draft graph based on the Wikipedia philosopher pages; I'm going to post it soonish. The fun thing is to compare the two graphs. I can preliminarily say that Love's graph is much "tighter" than the Wikipedia one - he has fewer people, they are more well-known and the links seem to be more restrictive. Wikipedia has many more modern French philosophers and minor marxists, as well as a branch leading over straight into libertarian politics/economy/philosophy. But it seems to miss a lot of the renaissance and early thinkers. The clusters I get are also slightly messier than in Love's graph, but I get many new clusters that make sense like the Focault-Deluze gang and the Rothbard libertarians. Most likely I will refine the Wikipedia graph a bit by adding the information in the pages that are not formatted with clear "influenced by" boxes, although this will introduce me as an extra biasing factor. And I think the graph will become better if we leave out unneccessary A->C links if there are A->B->C links. Examining the advisor-student graph together with this kind of influence graph is another thing I hope to do. If we mark out the important thinkers and their influence links, do they move close to the academic tree or independent of it? If people just absorb research interests from advisors the trees would be very similar, if they pick them up from an open pool of debate they would be independent. > This is of course nit-picking on my part as the > concept of a philosophical phylogeny itself is very > original and praiseworthy. :) I would be interested in > something similar for the sciences and even religion. Yes, me too. It is great fun to do and very educational. Having recently moved into a philosophy department it is very useful for me to become acquainted with who's who. I will definitely try to make a transhumanist phylogeny in the near future, no doubt earning myself endless trouble :-) -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From asa at nada.kth.se Thu Oct 12 21:08:55 2006 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2006 23:08:55 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Goldbach's Conjecture Resolved! A Story Message-ID: <2038.163.1.72.81.1160687335.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> spike wrote: > Let P(n) be the number of different ways a positive even integer n can be > expressed as the sum of two primes. ... > I have found that P(n) ~ .15*n^0.75 Is that a numerical estimate? http://homepage.mac.com/billtomlinson/primes.html has a neat graph of P(n). It seems that numbers divisible by different small primes have their own "paths", I wonder if they all have 0.75 as exponent? Apparently P(n) is called the Goldbach partition, and it is sequence A001031 in the encyclopedia of integer sequences. But according to http://www.ieeta.pt/~tos/goldbach.html P(n) has the form C (n/(log(n)log(n-2))) prod_{p in odd prime factors of n}((p-1)/(p-2)) - which seems to grow roughly slightly faster than n/(log(n)^2). (assuming there are log(log(n)) prime factors http://mathworld.wolfram.com/DistinctPrimeFactors.html and their size grows as n http://www.springerlink.com/content/r52233680688x957/#search=%22%22average%20prime%20factor%22%22 ) However, http://www.primepuzzles.net/puzzles/GoldbachPartitions.pdf#search=%22Goldbach%20Partition%20asymptotics%22 suggests that it is bounded by exp(alpha x^beta) alpha>0, 0 I've been taking a fresh look at questions like Newcomb's paradox, quantum immortality and the doomsday argument because it seems to me that the paradox I recently commented on is related to some of them. One question I have is this: in the article at http://www.ephilosopher.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=printpage&artid=8 Nick Bostrom says: "For instance, it turns out that if there are many extraterrestrial civilizations and you interpret the self-sampling assumption as applying equally to all intelligent beings and not exclusively to humans, then another probability shift occurs that exactly counterbalances and cancels the probability shift that the Doomsday argument implies." Nick, if you're reading this, or anyone else who knows the reasoning applied - what's the motive for this statement? It doesn't seem to me to follow. (I think the doomsday argument is fallacious because it fudges the term "I", but that's a different thing; it doesn't seem to me that many civilizations has any bearing on it.) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From nanogirl at halcyon.com Fri Oct 13 03:35:54 2006 From: nanogirl at halcyon.com (Gina Miller) Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2006 20:35:54 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] New animation References: <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <00a601c6ee79$3142e940$0200a8c0@Nano> Hello Extropes - NEW Animation NEW Contest! My newest animation, The Mark is now a contender in the "Drama" category at the 25 thousand dollar Aniboom competition. My original footage is in hi definition, this means it has a wide screen, and since the Aniboom site has square windows for animation viewing, my footage has been squished together to fit, making things appear sort of skinny and tall. Here's what I recommend, watch the video (the large sized one) at my webpage here: http://www.nanogirl.com/personal/themark.htm (where you can also read a whole lot about this animation), after you watch it then go to the Aniboom site and rate it. Do this by going here: http://www.aniboom.com/Player.aspx?v=2556 and clicking the farthest right boom ball (by the "your vote"), they will ask you to register, but it's super easy to do! After that you can now rate it (click the ball again) and it will work, you will see a thank you window as proof! Or you can do this in reverse by just going to the http://www.aniboom.com/ front page and clicking the blue login button up in the top right corner, here you will be able to register, you can then go to my "The Mark" page http://www.aniboom.com/Player.aspx?v=2556 and vote right away the first time. I hope you enjoy the animation and that it gives you meaning, it was very cathartic to make. I invite your thoughts and comments here at the blog: http://maxanimation.blogspot.com/2006/10/mark.html And I thank you my dear friends and family for your votes and your support! Turn up your volume! P.S. My Odyssey fractal animation (http://www.nanogirl.com/personal/odyssey.htm) is also in this contest, in the "Experimental" category and you can vote for it here: http://www.aniboom.com/Pages/Application/Player/Player.aspx?animationID=1903 Thank you, thank you! Gina "Nanogirl" Miller Nanotechnology Industries http://www.nanoindustries.com Personal: http://www.nanogirl.com/index2.html Animation Blog: http://maxanimation.blogspot.com/ Craft blog: http://nanogirlblog.blogspot.com/ Foresight Participating Member http://www.foresight.org Nanotechnology Advisor Extropy Institute http://www.extropy.org Email: nanogirl at halcyon.com "Nanotechnology: Solutions for the future." -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From russell.wallace at gmail.com Fri Oct 13 04:37:15 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2006 05:37:15 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution? Message-ID: <8d71341e0610122137o2a060ea7ic41153f32c946caf@mail.gmail.com> (For anyone who hasn't read my earlier post: suppose you're copied into 2 copies, A and B, then B is copied into 999, should you subjectively expect to have a 1/2 probability of finding "yourself" as A, as intuition and causal logic would suggest, or 1/1000, as measure accounting would suggest?) I think I may have the solution now. It depends on what you choose as your reference class. "I" after all really refers to oneself _at the present time_. In practice for various reasons evolution not least among them we tend to extent that to one's future self also, but that's a rather arbitrary choice. Most of the time that doesn't matter because it's the obvious one (though note that Ethos can be taken as a form of extension of the reference class). The paradox can be taken as an exception to "most of the time". Specifically: if you choose to define your reference class by causal logic, then you get the causal logic conclusion. If you choose to define your reference class by measure accounting, then you get the measure accounting conclusion. If you want to know which "really" defines you - then the answer is, you'll "really" have died a second from now anyway, because "yourself" then will not be the same entity as "you" now (scare quotes because we're voiding the warranty on the words in question, but you get the idea). So decide what you care about, and aim for that. (This meshes nicely with the way the measure accounting viewpoint is consistent with morality - it gives the same policy decisions one would get if the 999 B's were randomly selected from your fellow humans rather than being copies of you.) And this is the kind of explanation one was looking for - in the absence of an undercutting defeater for one viewpoint against the other, one would philosophically expect different results to be explained by different premises. I think this one is satisfactory, though I'm open to counterarguments. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at comcast.net Fri Oct 13 04:25:54 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2006 21:25:54 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Goldbach's Conjecture Resolved! A Story In-Reply-To: <2038.163.1.72.81.1160687335.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <200610130444.k9D4iMWY004478@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Goldbach's Conjecture Resolved! A Story > > spike wrote: > > Let P(n) be the number of different ways a positive even integer n can > be > > expressed as the sum of two primes. > ... > > I have found that P(n) ~ .15*n^0.75 > > Is that a numerical estimate? Yes. > > http://homepage.mac.com/billtomlinson/primes.html has a neat graph of > P(n). It seems that numbers divisible by different small primes have their > own "paths", I wonder if they all have 0.75 as exponent?... Hmm, good question. This I will be able to answer as soon as I get back from vacation. The wicked cool thing I discovered is a really fast way to calculate S(n). I will adapt Tomlinson's terminology here, S(n) instead of P(n). I will share this approximately Monday evening if I get time to post. Oh it is cool, oh my. Anders thanks for the sites. That graph is one of the cool things I discovered while playing with this algorithm. I discovered the striations (which Tomlinson calls streaks). I have been puzzled until my puzzler is sore, more baffled than was the Grinch that time the Whos were singing cheerfully after he had ransacked Whoville. After I get back, anyone here who wants to play with those numbers can have at em. We might discover even more cool way stuff. ... > > Fun! Thanks, Spike for bringing it up! > > -- > Anders Sandberg... There's more. I will share the algorithm, or if you prefer a table of S(n) to 500,000. That table is too big to post on the ExI list, so I might make a website and post it there, or just email it to anyone who wants it. spike From lcorbin at rawbw.com Fri Oct 13 05:18:07 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2006 22:18:07 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity. References: <00f501c6ecf9$fd1261d0$c4084e0c@MyComputer><074f01c6ed0e$0c2d0580$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <8d71341e0610110647g7decb37cte343982b277872ff@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <002c01c6ee87$00c53e40$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Russell writes > > On 10/11/06, Lee Corbin wrote: > > I mean to assert that probability is just not the right way to look > > at identity or anticipation. Yes, you cannot but feel that "your odds" > > are such-and-such in certain circumstances. But objectively, that's > > not really the case because... (I claim) one must simply integrate > > benefit over the runtime you get in the multiverse, > *nods* Everything you say in this post makes sense, and that would be how I'd approach it too, at least as far as practical policy is concerned: if the situation described were to occur, I'd behave as though I believed the odds were 1:999 whatever my intuition told me. But there's still a philosophical problem. In an infinite universe, there will always be infinitely many instances that experience each possibility, and infinities of the same cardinality at that. So mathematically the integral is undefined; how then do you justify any conclusions? How do you explain the fact that empirically we can make predictions, and they come out the way intuitively reasonable theories of probability say they should? < I would use the same approach as, say, astronmers might if trying to determine the numerical ratio of a certain kind of galaxy to all galaxies. Namely, take a limit over larger and larger finite samples. The limiting process is always pretty good for avoiding infinities :-) May it simply be wished that throughout our infinite level-one universe, and throughout the Everett multiverse, your runtime in the main be pleasant and frequent! Lee From russell.wallace at gmail.com Fri Oct 13 05:24:22 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2006 06:24:22 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity. In-Reply-To: <002c01c6ee87$00c53e40$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <00f501c6ecf9$fd1261d0$c4084e0c@MyComputer> <074f01c6ed0e$0c2d0580$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <8d71341e0610110647g7decb37cte343982b277872ff@mail.gmail.com> <002c01c6ee87$00c53e40$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <8d71341e0610122224ndeaf89bya48caa9bdc9d4f22@mail.gmail.com> On 10/13/06, Lee Corbin wrote: > > I would use the same approach as, say, astronmers might if trying to > determine > the numerical ratio of a certain kind of galaxy to all galaxies. Namely, > take a > limit over larger and larger finite samples. The limiting process is > always pretty > good for avoiding infinities :-) And failing that, something like measure, or "microscopically different generating macroscopically the same outcome" in processes etc; I'm happy enough with that now that I can see how to reconcile the paradox with it. May it simply be wished that throughout our infinite level-one universe, and > throughout the Everett multiverse, your runtime in the main be pleasant > and > frequent! > Thanks, you too! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lcorbin at rawbw.com Fri Oct 13 05:35:00 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2006 22:35:00 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution? References: <8d71341e0610122137o2a060ea7ic41153f32c946caf@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <003e01c6ee89$884ce9b0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Russell recapitulates nicely: > (For anyone who hasn't read my earlier post: suppose you're copied > into 2 copies, A and B, then B is copied into 999, should you subjectively > expect to have a 1/2 probability of finding "yourself" as A, as intuition and > causal logic would suggest, or 1/1000, as measure accounting would suggest?) Earlier I wrote that *probability* doesn't provide a very good way of addressing these problems. I'll note an exception later, however. Another reason that probability is inappropriate is that probabilities sum to 1. In these cases, "your" experiences sum to 1000, not 1. What about my objection? It was (perhaps not well-described) along these lines: Suppose that the A/B split occurs after .0001 seconds, and the subsequent splits to B all occur in the next .0009 seconds. Then all the forking is over in a millisecond. In that case would it not seem peculiar to suppose that the single copy experiencing A was as representative of you as the 999? We must banish the notion that there is a soul and it's being divided into ever smaller pieces! The exception I spoke of before, where probability *must* rear its head is for *planning* purposes. Suppose that the 999 of you will be copied into a location several hundred feet under water, and only one of you copied into a location at STP. Then you should walk around all day long, even while driving to work and at the theatre, in your scuba gear. I explore the feelings that one would have while taking such steps in my old story http://www.leecorbin.com/PitAndDuplicate.html , a link I've posted here many times. > I think I may have the solution now. > Specifically: if you choose to define your reference class by causal logic, then you > get the causal logic conclusion. If you choose to define your reference class by > measure accounting, then you get the measure accounting conclusion. I guess that's one way to solve the problem. > If you want to know which "really" defines you - then the answer is, you'll "really" > have died a second from now anyway, Well, I can't go along with that. It's really not the case upon the usual meaning of words, to say that Smith has just died when Smith looks and sounds just the way he did ten minutes ago. We really are concerned with *survival*, and so we have to reject philosophical stances that introduce concepts that wouldn't be useful in any imagined situation. (At least in any situation I've ever been able to imagine.) Lee > because "yourself" then will not be the same entity as "you" now (scare quotes because we're voiding the warranty on the words in > question, but you get the idea). So decide what you care about, and aim for that. (This meshes nicely with the way the measure > accounting viewpoint is consistent with morality - it gives the same policy decisions one would get if the 999 B's were randomly > selected from your fellow humans rather than being copies of you.) > And this is the kind of explanation one was looking for - in the absence of an undercutting defeater for one viewpoint against the > other, one would philosophically expect different results to be explained by different premises. I think this one is satisfactory, > though I'm open to counterarguments. < From russell.wallace at gmail.com Fri Oct 13 06:03:36 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2006 07:03:36 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution? In-Reply-To: <003e01c6ee89$884ce9b0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <8d71341e0610122137o2a060ea7ic41153f32c946caf@mail.gmail.com> <003e01c6ee89$884ce9b0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <8d71341e0610122303i65da98f3tb7b3a12e8b5f5729@mail.gmail.com> On 10/13/06, Lee Corbin wrote: > > Earlier I wrote that *probability* doesn't provide a very good way of > addressing > these problems. I'll note an exception later, however. Another reason that > probability is inappropriate is that probabilities sum to 1. In these > cases, "your" > experiences sum to 1000, not 1. But the probabilities of "myself" ending up "being" one of those 1000 do sum to 1, so I'm not sure that's relevant. After all "myselves" across the Tegmark multiverse sum to infinity, but my probability of observing a flipped coin ending up heads is .5 just as standard theory predicts. What about my objection? It was (perhaps not well-described) along these > lines: Suppose that the A/B split occurs after .0001 seconds, and the > subsequent splits to B all occur in the next .0009 seconds. Then all the > forking is over in a millisecond. In that case would it not seem peculiar > to suppose that the single copy experiencing A was as representative > of you as the 999? We must banish the notion that there is a soul and > it's being > divided into ever smaller pieces! Sorry, that was part of what I meant by "what you say makes sense" - I agree that is a problem with the causal logic 50/50 prediction, and indeed as the time becomes short compared to the timescale of conscious thought, intuition becomes less sure of the 50/50 result. The exception I spoke of before, where probability *must* rear its head > is for *planning* purposes. Suppose that the 999 of you will be copied > into a location several hundred feet under water, and only one of you > copied into a location at STP. Then you should walk around all day long, > even while driving to work and at the theatre, in your scuba gear. I > explore > the feelings that one would have while taking such steps in my old story > http://www.leecorbin.com/PitAndDuplicate.html , a link I've posted here > many times. Sure. The inconvenience of such is less than 1/1000 of the cost of losing one's life. Well, I can't go along with that. It's really not the case upon the usual > meaning of words, to say that Smith has just died when Smith looks > and sounds just the way he did ten minutes ago. We really are concerned > with *survival*, and so we have to reject philosophical stances that > introduce concepts that wouldn't be useful in any imagined situation. > (At least in any situation I've ever been able to imagine.) Sure, but the usual meaning of words breaks down here. An outside observer nonetheless would say there ends up being 1 A-Smith and 999 B-Smiths. And that's a valid viewpoint. Smith before the first copy saying "its 50/50 I'll be A" is also a valid viewpoint. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From russell.wallace at gmail.com Fri Oct 13 06:18:13 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2006 07:18:13 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution? In-Reply-To: <003e01c6ee89$884ce9b0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <8d71341e0610122137o2a060ea7ic41153f32c946caf@mail.gmail.com> <003e01c6ee89$884ce9b0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <8d71341e0610122318sf24ef84pf08af20aecf65bcd@mail.gmail.com> On 10/13/06, Lee Corbin wrote: > > Well, I can't go along with that. It's really not the case upon the usual > meaning of words, to say that Smith has just died when Smith looks > and sounds just the way he did ten minutes ago. We really are concerned > with *survival*, and so we have to reject philosophical stances that > introduce concepts that wouldn't be useful in any imagined situation. > (At least in any situation I've ever been able to imagine.) To add, swiping a movie quote: "I don't know, I can _imagine_ quite a bit." I imagined this scenario, after all :) My point really is that in most circumstances there is a single notion of *survival* that we think we can concentrate on; this paradox I think exposes the fallacy of that single notion. And to extend: We normally think of e.g. immortality through one's descendants as a metaphor (at least until we step into the evolutionary perspective); one of the things I like about my solution to this paradox is that it extends to cover a lot of things that looked separate - immortality through one's descendants _isn't_ a metaphor, viewed from an appropriate choice of reference class. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Fri Oct 13 13:04:26 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2006 09:04:26 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Doomsday argument In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com> References: <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 10/12/06, Russell Wallace quoting Nick Bostrom wrote: > "For instance, it turns out that if there are many extraterrestrial > civilizations and you interpret the self-sampling assumption as applying > equally to all intelligent beings and not exclusively to humans, then > another probability shift occurs that exactly counterbalances and cancels > the probability shift that the Doomsday argument implies." I believe that the "probability shift" is due to the fact that if there are many extraterrestrial civilizations then the cubicles are all "full". The argument has lots of problems, not the least of which range from (1) since the transition from humankind to posthumankind (with a variety of AIs, IAs, normo-humans, being present simultaneously is significantly greater than zero) the definition for "doomsday" is extremely soft; (2) doomsday could occur for all the cubicles if all of the protons decay (but that is in the very far future); (3) a significant fraction of the possible doomsdays may already be behind us (if you look at the relative abundance of solar systems which could probably not support life and the number of mass extinctions on this planet already behind us then there may not be many coin tosses left [1]). Robert 1. A recent glance at Robin's pages suggestes that he may be working on a paper discussing this fact. This derives from the variety of reasons suggesting that it would be really difficult to eliminate humanity or its knowledge base at this point. (How would one take out *all* of the libraries, all of the search engine server farms, etc.) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rhanson at gmu.edu Fri Oct 13 15:40:11 2006 From: rhanson at gmu.edu (Robin Hanson) Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2006 11:40:11 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution? In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0610122137o2a060ea7ic41153f32c946caf@mail.gmail.co m> References: <8d71341e0610122137o2a060ea7ic41153f32c946caf@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <0J72004PHZJ09G90@caduceus1.gmu.edu> At 12:37 AM 10/13/2006, Russell Wallace wrote: >(For anyone who hasn't read my earlier post: suppose you're copied >into 2 copies, A and B, then B is copied into 999, should you >subjectively expect to have a 1/2 probability of finding "yourself" >as A, as intuition and causal logic would suggest, or 1/1000, as >measure accounting would suggest?) >I think I may have the solution now. ... >if you choose to define your reference class by causal logic, then >you get the causal logic conclusion. If you choose to define your >reference class by measure accounting, then you get the measure >accounting conclusion. If you want to know which "really" defines >you - then the answer is, you'll "really" have died a second from >now anyway, because "yourself" then will not be the same entity as >"you" now (scare quotes because we're voiding the warranty on the >words in question, but you get the idea). So decide what you care >about, and aim for that. At the foundation of decision theory is a key distinction, between beliefs and wants (i.e., probabilities and preferences). You can choose what you want anyway you like, but you are *not* free to choose your beliefs; beliefs are supposed to be your best estimate of the way the world is. When you ask "what is the chance that ..." you are asking about probabilities and beliefs, so the answer simply cannot depend on some value choice you make. The situation you describe is one that could be repeated again and again. After many repetitions you could compare the frequencies you see in your history to the probabilities you had assigned. Or you could make bets based on your probabilities and see whether such bets win or lose on average. These two related methods make clear that probabilities are not arbitrary value choices - they can be right or wrong. Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323 From russell.wallace at gmail.com Fri Oct 13 15:51:53 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2006 16:51:53 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution? In-Reply-To: <0J72004PHZJ09G90@caduceus1.gmu.edu> References: <8d71341e0610122137o2a060ea7ic41153f32c946caf@mail.gmail.com> <0J72004PHZJ09G90@caduceus1.gmu.edu> Message-ID: <8d71341e0610130851q146d7a67v9d4528c5835a8262@mail.gmail.com> On 10/13/06, Robin Hanson wrote: > > The situation you describe is one that could be repeated again and > again. After many repetitions you could compare the frequencies you > see in your history to the probabilities you had assigned. Or you > could make bets based on your probabilities and see whether such bets > win or lose on average. Ah, but which "you"? That having been said, what would be your answer to the paradox then? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From russell.wallace at gmail.com Fri Oct 13 16:04:11 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2006 17:04:11 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Doomsday argument In-Reply-To: References: <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0610130904g3d222fcfu2bef3b6726885d38@mail.gmail.com> On 10/13/06, Robert Bradbury wrote: > I believe that the "probability shift" is due to the fact that if there > are many extraterrestrial civilizations then the cubicles are all "full". > I still don't get it - if there are many civilizations (which there are, per Tegmark et al), there are many roomfuls of cubicles; that doesn't say anything about the percentage of rooms with many versus few cubicles occupied. The argument has lots of problems, not the least of which range from (1) > since the transition from humankind to posthumankind (with a variety of AIs, > IAs, normo-humans, being present simultaneously is significantly greater > than zero) the definition for "doomsday" is extremely soft; (2) doomsday > could occur for all the cubicles if all of the protons decay (but that is in > the very far future); (3) a significant fraction of the possible doomsdays > may already be behind us (if you look at the relative abundance of solar > systems which could probably not support life and the number of mass > extinctions on this planet already behind us then there may not be many coin > tosses left [1]). > Indeed so. The primary flaw in the doomsday argument itself, in my opinion, is that it fudges the reference class; essentially it assigns a prior probability to the proposition "I am me" - but the probability of that is necessarily 1. ("I" refers to the mind doing the contemplating, said mind being a product of history in a particular place and time. It makes no sense to say things like "I could have been Julius Caesar", but that's the sort of alternative the doomsday argument requires us to entertain.) 1. A recent glance at Robin's pages suggestes that he may be working on a > paper discussing this fact. This derives from the variety of reasons > suggesting that it would be really difficult to eliminate humanity or its > knowledge base at this point. (How would one take out *all* of the > libraries, all of the search engine server farms, etc.) > Unfortunately I can think of a rather easy way. The problem is that the K-selecting environment in which we evolved was the opposite of today's situation, therefore our brains are programmed to believe the opposite of the truth in such matters, therefore when people take the possibility of doomsday seriously they start talking about averting "nanowar", "bioterrorism" etc, whereas real life death and extinction have completely different causes, and nanotech and biotech are the only things that have a prayer of protecting us from them; the upshot of all this is that the greater the extent to which people believe in the possibility of doomsday and take actions they believe will avert it, the greater the obstacles to continued technological progress and the greater the probability that humanity will actually die out. Server farms do no good if the information on them isn't used. In my more pessimistic moments I sometimes imagine that every race smart enough to develop nanotechnology must be smart enough to first discover the doomsday argument and thereby snuff itself. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rhanson at gmu.edu Fri Oct 13 16:34:12 2006 From: rhanson at gmu.edu (Robin Hanson) Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2006 12:34:12 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution? In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0610130851q146d7a67v9d4528c5835a8262@mail.gmail.co m> References: <8d71341e0610122137o2a060ea7ic41153f32c946caf@mail.gmail.com> <0J72004PHZJ09G90@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <8d71341e0610130851q146d7a67v9d4528c5835a8262@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <0J7300MOD211WO00@caduceus2.gmu.edu> At 11:51 AM 10/13/2006, Russell Wallace wrote: >On 10/13/06, Robin Hanson <rhanson at gmu.edu> wrote: >The situation you describe is one that could be repeated again and >again. After many repetitions you could compare the frequencies you >see in your history to the probabilities you had assigned. Or you >could make bets based on your probabilities and see whether such bets >win or lose on average. > >Ah, but which "you"? For long enough histories, almost everyone should see statistics where frequencies are close to probabilities. >That having been said, what would be your answer to the paradox then? I'm not sure, not having thought about this in enough detail. But I'm more sure that there is a right answer. Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323 From rhanson at gmu.edu Fri Oct 13 15:50:31 2006 From: rhanson at gmu.edu (Robin Hanson) Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2006 11:50:31 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Doomsday argument In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com> References: <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <0J7300MG5007PJ40@caduceus2.gmu.edu> At 11:12 PM 10/12/2006, Russell Wallace wrote: >in the article at >http://www.ephilosopher.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=printpage&artid=8 > >Nick Bostrom says: >"For instance, it turns out that if there are many extraterrestrial >civilizations and you interpret the self-sampling assumption as >applying equally to all intelligent beings and not exclusively to >humans, then another probability shift occurs that exactly >counterbalances and cancels the probability shift that the Doomsday >argument implies." >Nick, if you're reading this, or anyone else who knows the reasoning >applied - what's the motive for this statement? It doesn't seem to >me to follow. If there are many aliens out there, then the total number of creatures that we could have been in the universe doesn't change much from scenarios where our civilization dies fast or lasts long. So if you are a random creature among all these creatures, then you are more likely to find yourself in our civilization if our civilization lasts long and has many creatures in it. This is the "other probability shift." Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323 From sentience at pobox.com Fri Oct 13 21:33:35 2006 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2006 14:33:35 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution? In-Reply-To: <0J72004PHZJ09G90@caduceus1.gmu.edu> References: <8d71341e0610122137o2a060ea7ic41153f32c946caf@mail.gmail.com> <0J72004PHZJ09G90@caduceus1.gmu.edu> Message-ID: <4530062F.3080503@pobox.com> Robin Hanson wrote: > > At the foundation of decision theory is a key distinction, between > beliefs and wants (i.e., probabilities and preferences). You can > choose what you want anyway you like, but you are *not* free to > choose your beliefs; beliefs are supposed to be your best estimate of > the way the world is. When you ask "what is the chance that ..." > you are asking about probabilities and beliefs, so the answer simply > cannot depend on some value choice you make. *Nods to Hanson.* I tried to make the reference class depend on the utility function, and while it helped clear up some parts of the problem, it didn't answer the ultimate scientific question: "What should we expect to *see*?" > The situation you describe is one that could be repeated again and > again. After many repetitions you could compare the frequencies you > see in your history to the probabilities you had assigned. Or you > could make bets based on your probabilities and see whether such bets > win or lose on average. These two related methods make clear that > probabilities are not arbitrary value choices - they can be right or wrong. The bizarre thing about these situations, as they work in our thought experiments, is that, on most assumptions you care to make about where the subjective probability mass goes (or as I sometimes say, where the realness-fluid flows, bearing in mind that we are almost certainly talking about some kind of phlogiston that isn't the actual solution) - anyway, regardless of which assumption you make, after N repetitions of the experiment, nearly all of your subjective probability mass is in a set of observers who, by applying induction, would end up with the assumption you started with - that is, under your assumption, all the probability mass would end up in observers who, given their experienced history, would strongly suspect your assumption - which is to say, after N repetitions of the experiment, then "you", wherever you are, would be almost certain of the answer. But an outside observer would have no idea where most of the "probability mass" had gone, so they can't learn anything by performing the experiment from outside - you would have to be inside it. > For long enough histories, almost everyone should see statistics where > frequencies are close to probabilities. But which subset of observers constitutes "almost everyone" and how can you tell from outside? Confusion exists in the mind, not in reality. All this mess has to be generated by a bad question - certainly we have to be doing *something* wrong. I find it highly suspicious that the central question revolves around a phlogiston-type substance, subjective (conditional) probability mass, that cannot be observed from the outside but which we imagine ending up in different amounts in different observers. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sat Oct 14 03:01:37 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2006 20:01:37 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution? References: <8d71341e0610122137o2a060ea7ic41153f32c946caf@mail.gmail.com><0J72004PHZJ09G90@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <4530062F.3080503@pobox.com> Message-ID: <007901c6ef3d$738298e0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Eliezer writes > Robin Hanson wrote: >> >> At the foundation of decision theory is a key distinction, between >> beliefs and wants (i.e., probabilities and preferences). You can >> choose what you want anyway you like, but you are *not* free to >> choose your beliefs; beliefs are supposed to be your best estimate of >> the way the world is. When you ask "what is the chance that ..." >> you are asking about probabilities and beliefs, so the answer simply >> cannot depend on some value choice you make. Yes, but of the two questions, "What is the probability that I will be be one of those under water?", and "what percent of my separate copies needs to wearing scuba gear half an hour from now?", the first is misleading enough to be called *wrong*, because it invites one to suppose that "I" will be experiencing one of the outcomes but not the other. You and I, Robin, have known better than that for a decade or two. Or, in my case, for forty years now. Robin continues >> The situation you describe is one that could be repeated again and >> again. After many repetitions you could compare the frequencies you >> see in your history to the probabilities you had assigned. Or you >> could make bets based on your probabilities and see whether such bets >> win or lose on average. These two related methods make clear that >> probabilities are not arbitrary value choices - they can be right or wrong. Quite right. Of course a single instance is only viscerally aware of one one path throughout the branches. Eliezer says > The bizarre thing about these situations, as they work in our thought > experiments, is that, on most assumptions you care to make about where > the subjective probability mass goes (or as I sometimes say, where the > realness-fluid flows, bearing in mind that we are almost certainly > talking about some kind of phlogiston that isn't the actual solution)... > > But an outside observer would have no idea where most of the > "probability mass" had gone, so they can't learn anything by performing > the experiment from outside - you would have to be inside it. But you make it sound as though there is a single substance (why not call it our soul?) which is being divided up into smaller and smaller segments that sum to one. Experience per second of solar system time does not necessarily add up to one unit per second in these thought experiments. Therefore as I said a day or two ago---and is really quite obvious and something I think you acknowledge---for *planning* purposes each instance who is about to branch must be prudent according to his anticipations of the coming moments, but ought to intellectually realize the truth: he'll really be equally in many different places. It will be true that he remembers making choice A and it will be true that he remembers making some choice other than A. > Confusion exists in the mind, not in reality. All this mess has to be > generated by a bad question - certainly we have to be doing *something* > wrong. What is wrong in duplication (or forking) experiments is to suppose that there is only a probability that the bad outcome will occur. We *know* that both outcomes occur. Therefore probability is an atrocious way to approach the problem. Probability can be used, as I say, only for planning purposes in that one might have to do something awkward in the present circumstance while a lot of copies of one are being made. > I find it highly suspicious that the central question revolves > around a phlogiston-type substance, subjective (conditional) probability > mass, that cannot be observed from the outside but which we imagine > ending up in different amounts in different observers. Exactly! Souls don't exist; we all know that. There isn't any real problem here except in the ways that some people occasionally try to prescribe actions. So long as one remembers that duplicates are selves, one will avoid making or prescribing erroneous action choices. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sat Oct 14 03:19:09 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2006 20:19:09 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Doomsday argument References: <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com> <0J7300MG5007PJ40@caduceus2.gmu.edu> Message-ID: <007a01c6ef3f$900a4c90$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Robin writes > If there are many aliens out there, then the total number of > creatures that we could have been in the universe doesn't change much > from scenarios where our civilization dies fast or lasts long. So if > you are a random creature among all these creatures, I think that this is probably exactly the point at which Russell demurs. That's what I've never been able to choke down myself. And I know that Eliezer has publically denigrated such a calculus of souls, rightly saying that it's bad to think about a sample space (made up, say, of all sentient entities) from which you were drawn at random--- in other words, that a priori, it was equally likely that you could have been born in the four centuries before Christ as that you were born in the U.S. in the 1960's. No way! You could not have been born anywhere except on Earth and in the 20th century at that. You are the result of a baby with certain genetic traits being raised in a 20th century type environment. It is not possible that you could have been born with twelve tentacles living in a methane atmosphere and holding absolute religious convictions concerning the Great Squid that preclude all scientific or rational thinking. It simple wouldn't be you. Therefore as Eliezer says, the sample space is bad; and Bostrom and others seem to have been thinking that its made of soul-like points in the space of all possible outcomes. Lee > then you are more likely to find yourself in our civilization if > our civilization lasts long and has many creatures in it. This > is the "other probability shift." From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Sat Oct 14 13:54:07 2006 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Sat, 14 Oct 2006 09:54:07 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution? In-Reply-To: <0J72004PHZJ09G90@caduceus1.gmu.edu> References: <8d71341e0610122137o2a060ea7ic41153f32c946caf@mail.gmail.com> <0J72004PHZJ09G90@caduceus1.gmu.edu> Message-ID: <7641ddc60610140654k65ec201au82cd2206bf9fad5f@mail.gmail.com> On 10/13/06, Robin Hanson wrote: > At 12:37 AM 10/13/2006, Russell Wallace wrote: > >(For anyone who hasn't read my earlier post: suppose you're copied > >into 2 copies, A and B, then B is copied into 999, should you > >subjectively expect to have a 1/2 probability of finding "yourself" > >as A, as intuition and causal logic would suggest, or 1/1000, as > >measure accounting would suggest?) > >I think I may have the solution now. ... > >if you choose to define your reference class by causal logic, then > >you get the causal logic conclusion. If you choose to define your > >reference class by measure accounting, then you get the measure > >accounting conclusion. If you want to know which "really" defines > >you - then the answer is, you'll "really" have died a second from > >now anyway, because "yourself" then will not be the same entity as > >"you" now (scare quotes because we're voiding the warranty on the > >words in question, but you get the idea). So decide what you care > >about, and aim for that. > > At the foundation of decision theory is a key distinction, between > beliefs and wants (i.e., probabilities and preferences). You can > choose what you want anyway you like, but you are *not* free to > choose your beliefs; beliefs are supposed to be your best estimate of > the way the world is. When you ask "what is the chance that ..." > you are asking about probabilities and beliefs, so the answer simply > cannot depend on some value choice you make. ### But value choices may change your definitions of terms: You can formulate a number of similar but distinct definitions of "self", all largely consistent with the quotidian usage, yet leading to widely divergent numerical estimates in imagined situations far removed from our daily experience. I actually *decide* to extend most of the rights and privileges of being myself to all entities structurally similar to my present structure (and those entities derived from them by certain transformations). Somebody else may insist on a different procedure - and our results of counting noses will diverge, not because of different beliefs about the physical world but because of putting different meanings in the same word, "I". > > The situation you describe is one that could be repeated again and > again. After many repetitions you could compare the frequencies you > see in your history to the probabilities you had assigned. Or you > could make bets based on your probabilities and see whether such bets > win or lose on average. These two related methods make clear that > probabilities are not arbitrary value choices - they can be right or wrong. > ### But definitions are neither. Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Sat Oct 14 14:39:58 2006 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Sat, 14 Oct 2006 10:39:58 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution? In-Reply-To: <007901c6ef3d$738298e0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <8d71341e0610122137o2a060ea7ic41153f32c946caf@mail.gmail.com> <0J72004PHZJ09G90@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <4530062F.3080503@pobox.com> <007901c6ef3d$738298e0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <7641ddc60610140739i5c7ec889q5cab74dd11082cba@mail.gmail.com> On 10/13/06, Lee Corbin wrote: > > Exactly! Souls don't exist; we all know that. There isn't any real problem > here except in the ways that some people occasionally try to prescribe > actions. So long as one remembers that duplicates are selves, one will > avoid making or prescribing erroneous action choices. > ### Lee, we agree in our respective definitions of self (i.e. "Rafal" and "Lee") but I don't agree with you that only our brand of definition is in some rigorous way objectively correct. Others may disregard the possible future experiences of entities structurally similar to them unless also connected by a continuous thread of existence (whatever that may mean, since it appears that a whole slew of notions are advanced here). It may lead them to actions that could increase the likelihood of duplicates suffering horribly. Well, that's their problem, not mine. As long as only their duplicates are involved, it's no skin off my back, by my definition, and I feel no desire to convert them. I general, there is indeed confusion in the mind (as Eli writes) whenever our desires interact with our rational mind in situations when feedback is insufficient (including our thought experiment). Our rational mind has a grab-bag of tricks that have been honed during evolution to improve attainment of desires. Even math feels true because of evolutionary feedback, since the math-challenged who can't work out the task "There are four of us, and five of them - Fight or Flight?" got weeded out. Pose a situation where the tricks cannot be evaluated by external feedback or by reference to known past, and the mind boggles, randomly pulling different rabbits out of the hat, trying to rewrite desires, creating internal feedbacks and long reams of email output. Rafal From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sat Oct 14 16:04:37 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sat, 14 Oct 2006 09:04:37 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution? References: <8d71341e0610122137o2a060ea7ic41153f32c946caf@mail.gmail.com> <0J72004PHZJ09G90@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <4530062F.3080503@pobox.com> <007901c6ef3d$738298e0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7641ddc60610140739i5c7ec889q5cab74dd11082cba@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <009401c6efaa$7d7e0f10$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Rafal writes > ### Lee, we [happen to] agree in our respective definitions of self (i.e. "Rafal" > and "Lee") but I don't agree with you that only our brand of definition is in some > rigorous way objectively correct. However, for what constitutes a *person* in our daily usage, we do have something pretty close to "objectively correct". If someone claims to be Napoleon, he is simply wrong, and if ten days from now I claim not to be Lee Corbin, then either I am objectively wrong or I have undergone extensive brain damage. You're right in that when we extend these concepts into heretofore unfamiliar ways, more latitude necessarily obtains when conceiving of what a person is. > Others may [deny they're the same person] unless also connected by a > continuous thread of existence (whatever that may mean... It may lead > them to actions that could increase the likelihood of duplicates suffering > horribly. Well, that's their problem, not mine. As long as only their > duplicates are involved, it's no skin off my back, by my definition, > and I feel no desire to convert them. That would be different if you loved them, of course. We are discussing to what extent a duplicate is you. Opinions do differ. But in my opinion, it is simply erroneous to contend that you are not the same person today as you were yesterday just because someone made a duplicate of you while you slept and killed the original. That's simply wrong. I'm fond of how I described it a few days ago: In the end, it matters whether one embraces most closely a higher level concept of who you are (your values, your beliefs, your memories) or the lower level aspects of who you are (your current sensations, your current moods, and your current thoughts). Those of us who most strongly adhere to the former tend to be patternists; those who cannot help but identify with the latter, a sole instance somewhere, are not. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sat Oct 14 16:27:49 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sat, 14 Oct 2006 09:27:49 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com><451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net><45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net><8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com><051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677><8d71341e0610012326y66fde0f3h3795e07362235e64@mail.gmail.com><059801c6e90d$1753c390$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <8d71341e0610060912n29ce3919obe40cec30f1b43f5@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <00b001c6efad$dba54560$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> At the risk of replying to the wrong email, I'm responding to Russell who wrote > As it happens, you have tagged my sympathies entirely incorrectly; > if you look at what I actually wrote, you'll note that I specifically stated > the likes of al-Qaida are our enemies and have to be fought. What I am > opposed to is autoimmune disease: allowing our supposed protectors to > turn inwards and target us instead of our enemies. I agree. In very many ways the government has become an enemy of its citizens, but this hasn't started just in the last decade. It remains to assess how much "we" are being targeted by government when those governments attempt to target Al Queda. > Perhaps more fundamentally, I'm arguing precisely against making decisions > by affect value. That's not true if you mean it in general. You know (and have described) very well why evolution implemented our emotions (and you described why you think that this EEA design isn't very useful right now). You are also familiar with the Damasio Card Experiment. Alas (for those who haven't read it) it doesn't appear to be on-line anymore. I'll post my saved text copy of "How to Think With Your Gut", which has a fair description of it, in another post. This entire delicious subject of rationality, hyper-rationality, and rational integration of our emotions, values, and abstract reasoning must be pursued. One of our main tasks may be to keep Jef Albright from becoming too excited by the prospect. :-) > Not every proposal that wraps itself in stirring words about fighting the > bad guys is actually going to be helpful against said bad guys. (Reader's > home exercise: think of 57 historical examples.) That's for sure. > I could claim (and happen to believe) that if the primary threat today came from > armed men speaking a foreign language, I would have volunteered for military > service, That's probably more than I would do at this stage... :-) > If you're looking to criticize someone for trying to make the West weak, you've > got the wrong guy I'm afraid. Sorry, but what is the key disagreement here? I'll post another email right now that I think may help. It will still be "Tyranny in place", but I want to sand back---since you appear to be willing---and see if we can objectively determine what our real differences are. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sat Oct 14 16:53:10 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sat, 14 Oct 2006 09:53:10 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com><451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net><45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> <45209AD2.2080002@mac.com> Message-ID: <00d401c6efb1$a4f02810$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> It seems to me that people's differences on this subject do not really pertain to what is *currently* happening anywhere. On both sides it's merely the perceived threats of future events that's causing the heat. Surely no one can deny, especially since 9/11, that a certain amount of havoc is being or has been thrreatened by Al Qaeda. On the other hand, no one can deny that the same thing that befell the Weimar Republic could happen here, either gradually or suddenly. Insofar as the actions of one particular government, that of the U.S., is in focus, it's noteworthy that there have been no serious attacks inside the country for over five years. It may be true that no one in the West knows exactly why, but it also may be because counter- measures have been so far effective. Samantha put it well, speaking of threats from our "protectors": > The threat of hitherto-unseen proportions is much nearer than you > think. It is a common tactic in a country headed away from freedom > to focus all attention on an external enemy. If the enemy is elusive, > everywhere and nowhere and can never really be defeated then all > the better for the smokescreen behind which unanswerable nearly > unstoppable power over its own people amasses. I hope that [those] > who think likewise wake up before it is far too late. That can be balanced from the other side by some of Joseph Bloch's posts, or by the very nice Mark Steyn essay in the Wall Street Journal http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007760 Just because the threatened actions (by Al Queda or the U.S. government) are not actually occuring at present---despite vocal outcries that they are ---is of course no reason for complacency. But let's keep it in perspective: Western governments *may* start declaring internal political enemies to be "enemy combattants" or *may* start posing a physical threat to a significant number of their citizens, and foreign terrorist organizations *may* start blowing up Western cities or *may* begin waging biowar etc. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sat Oct 14 17:11:40 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sat, 14 Oct 2006 10:11:40 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Broad vs. Narrow Rationality Message-ID: <00d901c6efb4$2cdbec80$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> For those unaware of the crucial role of emotions in good decision making: http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v5/n11/full/nn1102-1103.html For another article---memorably describing "The Marines vs. the Wall Street brokers" and related subjects---see the essay below (no longer on line so far as I can tell). Both describe the Damasio card experiment. First an excerpt from it, then included is the whole essay by Thomas A. Stewart. Lee Some tantalizing evidence in this regard comes from experiments by Antonio Damasio, head of neurology at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. In one experiment, Damasio gave subjects four decks of cards. They were asked to flip the cards, picking from any deck. Two decks were rigged to produce an overall loss (in play money), and two to produce a gain. At intervals, the participants were asked what they thought was going on in the game. And they were hooked up to sensors to measure skin conductance responses, or SCRs (which are also measured by lie-detector machines). By the time they'd turned about 10 cards, subjects began showing SCRs when they reached for a losing deck -- that is, they showed a physical reaction. But not until they had turned, on average, 50 cards could they verbalize their "hunch" that two decks were riskier. It took 30 more cards before they could explain why their hunch was right. Three players were never able to put their hunches into words -- yet they, too, showed elevated SCRs and they, too, picked the right decks. Even if they couldn't explain it, their bodies knew what was going on. Damasio was already aware of the astounding fact that people who suffer damage to parts of their brains where emotions are processed have difficulty making decisions. When such patients participated in Damasio's card experiment, they never expressed hunches. Remarkably, even if they figured out the game intellectually, they continued to pick from losing decks. In other words, they knew their behavior was a mistake but they couldn't make the decision to change it. Emotions, Damasio theorizes, get decision-making started, presenting the conscious, logical mind with a short list of possibilities. Without at least a little intuition, then, the decision process never leaves the gate. ======================================================== The Entire Essay: How to Think With Your Gut How the geniuses behind the Osbournes, the Mini, Federal Express, and Starbucks followed their instincts and reached success. By Thomas A. Stewart, November 2002 Getting in Touch With Your Gut. It's simple, really: Just get out of your own way. Psychologists have a term to describe people who are in unusually close contact with their gut feelings -- "high intuitives." While you can't teach such skills the way you teach multiplication tables, everyone can hone their instincts to some degree. Here are a few guidelines: Practice, practice. This is the most important thing. "Gut instinct is basically a form of pattern recognition," says Howard Gardner, a Harvard professor and psychologist. The more you practice, the more patterns you intuitively recognize. List decisions you've made that turned out right -- and mistakes, too. Then reconstruct the thinking. Where did intuition come in? Was it right or wrong? Are there patterns? Highly intuitive people often let themselves be talked out of good ideas. "Generally you're better with either people or things," says Manhattan psychologist and executive coach Dee Soder. If you're intuitively gifted about people, write down your first impressions of new colleagues, customers, and so on -- you want to hold on to those gut reactions. Learn to listen. People come up with all sorts of reasons for ignoring what their gut is trying to tell them. Flavia Cymbalista has developed a decision-making approach adapted from a psychological technique known as "focusing." She calls it MarketFocusing, and she uses it to teach businesspeople to find the "felt sense" that tells them they know something they can't articulate. "You have to express your willingness to listen to what the felt sense has to say, without an agenda of your own," she says. Tell stories. Fictionalize a problem as a business school case or as happening to someone else. That can free up your imagination. Dave Snowden, director of IBM's (IBM) Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity in Wales, has been working with antiterrorism experts and finds that they think more creatively if he poses problems set in a different time -- the Civil War, for example. Another kind of storytelling is what cognitive psychologist Gary Klein calls a "pre-mortem": Imagine that your project has failed and gather the team to assess what went wrong. Breed gut thinkers. Dismantle the obstacles that prevent people from using their guts. High turnover rates, for example, are inimical to developing the deep expertise that hones intuition. Since gut feelings are inherently hard to express, don't let people jump on a dissenter who hesitantly says, "I'm not sure ... " Instead, say "Tell us more." Some leaders go around the table twice at meetings to give people a chance to put hunches into words. To sharpen your intuitive thinking, you have to get out of your own way; to foster it among those around you, you have to get out of their way too. The practical implications of all this are profound. People who make decisions for a living are coming to realize that in complex or chaotic situations -- a battlefield, a trading floor, or today's brutally competitive business environment -- intuition usually beats rational analysis. And as science looks closer, it is coming to see that intuition is not a gift but a skill. And, like any skill, it's something you can learn. To make sense of this, you first have to get over the fact that it contradicts everything you've been taught about making decisions. B-school encourages students to frame problems, formulate alternatives, collect data, and then evaluate the options. Almost every organization that trains decision-makers has followed the same approach. Paul Van Riper, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general, was taught that way, and he drilled this method into his students when he ran the Marines' leadership and combat development program in the '90s. But Van Riper noticed that in the swirl and confusion of war simulations -- let alone actual combat -- rational decisions always seemed to come up short. "We used the classical checklist system," he says. "But it never seemed to work. Then we'd criticize ourselves for not using the system well enough. But it still never seemed to work, because it's the wrong system." Frustrated, Van Riper sought out cognitive psychologist Gary Klein. At the time, Klein was studying firefighters, who operate under conditions quite like war. To his consternation, Klein learned that firefighters don't weigh alternatives: They simply grab the first idea that seems good enough, then the next, and the next after that. To them it doesn't even feel like "deciding." Inspired by Klein, Van Riper brought a group of Marines to the New York Mercantile Exchange in 1995, because the jostling, confusing pits reminded him of war rooms during combat. First the Marines tried their hand at trading on simulators, and to no one's surprise, the professionals on the floor wiped them out. A month or so later, the traders went to the Corps's base in Quantico, Va., where they played war games against the Marines on a mock battlefield. The traders trounced them again -- and this time everyone was surprised. When the Marines analyzed the humbling results, they concluded that the traders were simply better gut thinkers. Thoroughly practiced at quickly evaluating risks, they were far more willing to act decisively on the kind of imperfect and contradictory information that is all you ever get in war. The lesson wasn't lost on the Marines, who concluded that the old rational analysis model was useless in some situations. Today the Corps's official doctrine reads, "The intuitive approach is more appropriate for the vast majority of ... decisions made in the fluid, rapidly changing conditions of war when time and uncertainty are critical factors, and creativity is a desirable trait." Conditions, in other words, not unlike those in which many business decisions are made today. The notion that people always act rationally and in their own interest is a pillar of economic theory. So it's interesting that a group of economists, led by the University of Chicago's Richard Thaler, should contribute some of the most damning evidence of people's proclivity for irrational decisions. Building on work by Princeton psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, these so-called behavioral economists have shown not only that many of our economic decisions are irrational, but also that our waywardness is predictable. We get more satisfaction from avoiding a $100 loss than from making a $100 gain, for example, and we compulsively find patterns where none exist. (This stock has gone up for three days; therefore it will continue to go up.) Go ahead, point it out to us. It doesn't matter; we'll make the same mistakes over and over again. Thaler and others speculate that these logical lacunae are the product of a brain wired for survival on the savanna, not for hyperrational calculation. Machines do deductive and inductive calculations well. People excel at "abduction," which is less like reason than inspired guesswork. (Deduction: All taxis are yellow; this is a taxi; therefore it is yellow. Induction: These are all taxis; these are all yellow; therefore, all taxis are probably yellow. Abduction: All taxis are yellow; this vehicle is yellow; therefore this is probably a taxi.) Abduction leaps to conclusions by connecting a known pattern (taxis are yellow) to a specific situation (this yellow vehicle must be a taxi). Compared with computers, people are lousy number crunchers but superb pattern makers -- even without being aware of it. Indeed, much of what we call instinct, psychologists say, is simply pattern recognition taking place at a subconscious level. Some tantalizing evidence in this regard comes from experiments by Antonio Damasio, head of neurology at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. In one experiment, Damasio gave subjects four decks of cards. They were asked to flip the cards, picking from any deck. Two decks were rigged to produce an overall loss (in play money), and two to produce a gain. At intervals, the participants were asked what they thought was going on in the game. And they were hooked up to sensors to measure skin conductance responses, or SCRs (which are also measured by lie-detector machines). By the time they'd turned about 10 cards, subjects began showing SCRs when they reached for a losing deck -- that is, they showed a physical reaction. But not until they had turned, on average, 50 cards could they verbalize their "hunch" that two decks were riskier. It took 30 more cards before they could explain why their hunch was right. Three players were never able to put their hunches into words -- yet they, too, showed elevated SCRs and they, too, picked the right decks. Even if they couldn't explain it, their bodies knew what was going on. Damasio was already aware of the astounding fact that people who suffer damage to parts of their brains where emotions are processed have difficulty making decisions. When such patients participated in Damasio's card experiment, they never expressed hunches. Remarkably, even if they figured out the game intellectually, they continued to pick from losing decks. In other words, they knew their behavior was a mistake but they couldn't make the decision to change it. Emotions, Damasio theorizes, get decision-making started, presenting the conscious, logical mind with a short list of possibilities. Without at least a little intuition, then, the decision process never leaves the gate. None of us have the advantage of a handy SCR detector to know when we're getting a hunch. But gut knowledge has other ways of making its presence felt, and it's often physical. Howard Schultz shook when he had his caffe epiphany. George Soros, the international financier who made billions in currency speculation, feels opportunity in his back, according to his son Robert. "The reason he changes his position on the market or whatever is because his back starts killing him," Robert said in a book about his father. "It has nothing to do with reason. He literally goes into a spasm, and it's his early warning sign." What exactly is Soros's back reacting to? That question bedeviled Flavia Cymbalista, an economist who specializes in uncertainty in financial markets. Soros invests only when he has a hypothesis -- a story that explains a trend in the market. But as Soros himself has theorized, markets don't yield to analysis, because they are continuously changing -- and this is one reason Soros has learned to trust his back. "There are things you can know, but only experientially and bodily," Cymbalista says. What does this mean for making decisions in real life? Research suggests that neither nose-in-the-spreadsheet rationality nor pure gut inspiration is right all the time. The best approach lies somewhere between the extremes, the exact point depending on the situation. Naresh Khatri and H. Alvin Ng, of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and Massey University in Wellington, New Zealand, surveyed nearly 300 executives in the computer, banking, and utilities industries -- meant to represent three different degrees of business stability -- and then compared what executives said about their own decision-making styles. Intuition was clearly the favored strategy for computer-industry execs. Planful approaches were the norm in the relatively staid, rules-driven utilities industry. In a similar vein, Dave Snowden, director of IBM's new Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity in Wales, suggests basing your approach on the nature of the problem confronting you. Snowden breaks problems down into four types: The problem is covered by rules. This is the domain of legal structures, standard operating procedures, practices that are proven to work. Never draw to an inside straight. Never lend to a client whose monthly payments exceed 35 percent of gross income. Never end the meeting without asking for the sale. Here, decision-making lies squarely in the realm of reason: Find the proper rule and apply it. The situation is complicated. Here it is possible to work rationally toward a decision, but doing so requires refined judgment and expertise. Building an automobile, for example, is a complicated problem. You can diagram it; you can assemble and disassemble it; if you remove a piece, you know the consequences. This is the province of engineers, surgeons, intelligence analysts, lawyers, and other experts. Artificial intelligence copes well here: Deep Blue plays chess as if it were a complicated problem, looking at every possible sequence of moves. The situation is complex. This sort of problem can't be resolved by rational analysis. Too much is unknowable. Complex systems -- battlefields, markets, ecosystems, corporate cultures -- are impervious to a reductionist, take-it-apart-and-see-how-it-works approach because your very actions change the situation in unpredictable ways. "Complexity is coherent only in retrospect," Snowden says. With hindsight, for example, the malevolent lines leading to 9/11 are clear, but it would have taken pure luck to see them beforehand. The strategy is to look for patterns at every level, Snowden says. Or rather, the idea is to allow patterns to surface and trust your gut to recognize them. That's how masters play Go, a game that artificial intelligence can't seem to understand. They don't so much analyze a game as contemplate it. When a pattern or behavior emerges, they then reinforce it (if they like it) or disrupt it (if not). In the realm of complexity, decisions come from the informed gut. Karl Wiig, a consultant who runs the Knowledge Research Institute, and Sue Stafford, who heads the philosophy department at Simmons College, saw this in action while designing systems for insurance companies. "Insurance underwriting software is good only for simple cases," Stafford says. Plug in the data -- married white male, age 30, driving this and living here -- and get a quote. Hard cases -- the diabetic actuary who skydives and teaches Sunday school -- need human underwriters, and the best all do the same thing: Dump the file and spread out the contents. "They need to see it all at once," Stafford says. They don't calculate a decision; they arrive at one. The situation is chaotic. Here, too, instinct is better than analysis. The only thing you can do is act. "You impose order," Snowden says. "That's where charismatic leaders come in." After Enron imploded, a team of crisis executives from Kroll Zolfo Cooper parachuted in to save what's savable and dismantle the rest in an orderly way. One of them, Michael France, has the job of putting together a business plan for OpCo, a possibly viable energy business. When he landed, the entire operation was in chaos. "People were afraid," France recalls. "They were either misdirected or undirected. Decision-making was paralyzed. You don't have much time. You've got to be quick and decisive -- make little steps you know will succeed, so you can begin to tell a story that makes sense." This quick-twitch sort of decision-making is akin to the firefighter whose gut makes him turn left or the trader who instinctively sells when the news about the stock seems too good to be true. Behind many of the errors in decision-making lies a yearning for the "right" answer: If only we get enough data, if only we examine all the alternatives, we'll know what to do. "People tend to spend all their time looking for rules," Snowden says. "They're kidding themselves." Situations in which rules supply all the answers are becoming an endangered species, in business and everywhere else. Command-and-control management went out with tail fins. Risks are both greater and less predictable. As companies outsource, globalize, and form alliances, they become more interdependent -- simultaneously competitor and customer, drastically increasing the complexity of their relationships. More and more, all you can do is admit that you simply don't know and go with your gut. This may well feel uncomfortable. No one likes uncertainty, and it's going to be hard to explain to your boss a hunch you can't really articulate, even to yourself. To make things easier, you can teach yourself to tune in more attentively to intuition and to raise your gut IQ. (See "Getting in Touch With Your Gut.") On the other hand, making decisions this way may come more easily than you think. Chances are that the classic linear model you thought you were following -- data comes in, you analyze, draw inferences, make a decision -- was partly an illusion anyway. "The data doesn't just 'come in,'" Klein points out. "You have to figure out where you're going to look -- and that is an intuitive process." In other words, you already are more of an intuitive decision-maker than you may have thought. So relax and listen. Your gut has something to say to you, and it might be important. Thomas A. Stewart is the editorial director of Business 2.com. From velvethum at hotmail.com Sat Oct 14 20:11:00 2006 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Sat, 14 Oct 2006 16:11:00 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution? References: <8d71341e0610122137o2a060ea7ic41153f32c946caf@mail.gmail.com><0J72004PHZJ09G90@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <4530062F.3080503@pobox.com><007901c6ef3d$738298e0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677><7641ddc60610140739i5c7ec889q5cab74dd11082cba@mail.gmail.com> <009401c6efaa$7d7e0f10$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: > Rafal writes >> ### Lee, we [happen to] agree in our respective definitions of self (i.e. >> "Rafal" >> and "Lee") but I don't agree with you that only our brand of definition is in >> some >> rigorous way objectively correct. Lee Corbin: > However, for what constitutes a *person* in our daily usage, we do have something > pretty close to "objectively correct". If someone claims to be Napoleon, he is > simply wrong, and if ten days from now I claim not to be Lee Corbin, then either > I > am objectively wrong or I have undergone extensive brain damage. Anything that is not an integral part of Y is not Y. So yes, there exists an objectively correct (no quotes) way to determine whether person A is/isn't person B. Lee Corbin: > We are discussing to what extent a duplicate is you. Opinions do differ. > But in my opinion, it is simply erroneous to contend that you are not > the same person today as you were yesterday just because someone > made a duplicate of you while you slept and killed the original. That's > simply wrong. Well, the reason why a duplicate isn't the original is because the duplicate doesn't extend the original's ability to access reality after original is dead. To put it in the context of your story, "Pit and duplicate," Yevgeny in the pit will always stay in the pit. He will never see the city again because his ability to process reality is stuck in the chunk of matter that is, in turn, stuck in the pit, and will not be extended beyond the pit by those Yevgenys who reached the city. In reality, the paradox of "the same" Yevgeny inside and outside of the pit does not exist because it is logically impossible for two separate and unconnected chunks of matter to implement a single entity. Yevgeny inside the pit does not survive by virtue of other people continuing to exist outside of the pit. Lee Corbin: > I'm fond of how I described it a few days ago: > > In the end, it matters whether one embraces most closely a higher > level concept of who you are (your values, your beliefs, your > memories) or the lower level aspects of who you are (your current > sensations, your current moods, and your current thoughts). That's a good way of looking at it. S. From brian at posthuman.com Sat Oct 14 21:43:58 2006 From: brian at posthuman.com (Brian Atkins) Date: Sat, 14 Oct 2006 16:43:58 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Relativity drive: the end of wings and wheels? In-Reply-To: <4501AC82.2090700@pobox.com> References: <51ce64f10609080148lee84927wc272dcaf430460c@mail.gmail.com> <4501AC82.2090700@pobox.com> Message-ID: <45315A1E.3010603@posthuman.com> There's a few letters and a reply in a more recent NS: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19225720.700-emdrive-on-trial.html Emdrive on trial * 07 October 2006 * NewScientist.com news service * Paul Friedlander The article on "flying by light" describes a machine that uses microwaves to generate thrust. As I read it, I, like the thousands of other physicists who will have read it, immediately realised that this was impossible as described (9 September, p 30). Physicists are trained to use certain fundamental principles to analyse a problem and this claim clearly flouted one of them. To understand how, consider this. A "Shawyer drive" is installed in a spacecraft floating in deep space far from any other object. Let us say that it got there using nuclear power, since it cannot use sunlight. Switch on the Shawyer drive and the craft begins to accelerate. The craft changes speed and in so doing it changes its momentum without any other external change. Except it doesn't, because this is impossible. Momentum, according to one of our basic principles, is conserved and cannot be created or destroyed. The craft is breaking this rule. In a conventional rocket, thrust is achieved without breaking the rule because the combined momentum of the craft and the exhaust gas from the rocket cancel each other out as they move in exactly opposite directions. The principle of conservation of momentum is every bit as true in the world of relativity and quantum mechanics as it was when set down by Newton. The Shawyer drive is as impossible as perpetual motion. From Greg Egan Relativistic conservation of momentum has been understood for a century, and dictates that if nothing emerges from Shawyer's device then its centre of mass will not accelerate. This statement holds true in all reference frames. It is likely that Shawyer has used an approximation somewhere in his calculations that would have been reasonable if he hadn't then multiplied the result by 50,000. The reason physicists value principles such as conservation of momentum is that they act as a reality check against errors of this kind. Tuart Hill, Western Australia From Dick Atkinson Your cover story describes Roger Shawyer's plan to power a space vehicle by the pressure exerted by microwaves in a vessel shaped like a truncated cone. Because one end is smaller it is suggested that there will be a smaller force acting on it, so the net forces will accelerate the device in the direction of its larger end. Surely there is a facile error in this idea: every photon striking the big end has to be reflected there. Photons which impact on the sloping sides exert forces too. In effect, the narrowing walls of the vessel are part of the little end, and a little vector analysis should show that their contribution neatly balances the two ends. I think this is as unreal as Jonathan Swift's account of the Big-endians and the Little-endians in Gulliver's Travels, and any journey that Shawyer's drive facilitates is rather less likely than Gulliver's voyage to the flying island of Laputa. Having said that, I hope I'm wrong. South Shields, Tyne and Wear, UK From Paul Warren I have seen some comments that question the academic integrity of your reports on Shawyer and his emdrive concept. I feel New Scientist has an important role to fulfil in exploring maverick or contentious science, and thus I am glad you published the article. But I would like to request that you present both sides of this kind of argument, and with more academic rigour. Can we hear more on the emdrive and its sceptics? Scarborough, North Yorkshire, UK Roger Shawyer replies: The momentum exchange is between the electromagnetic wave and the engine, which is attached to the spacecraft. As the engine accelerates, momentum is lost by the electromagnetic wave and gained by the spacecraft, thus satisfying the conservation of momentum. In this process, energy is lost within the resonator, thus satisfying the conservation of energy. The emdrive concept is clearly difficult to comprehend without a rigorous study of the theory paper, which is available via emdrive.com or the New Scientist website (http://tinyurl.com/npxv8). This paper, which has been subjected to a long and detailed review process by industry and government experts, derives two equations: the static thrust equation and the dynamic thrust equation. The law of the conservation of momentum is the basis of the static thrust equation, the law of the conservation of energy is the basis of the dynamic thrust equation. Provided these two fundamental laws of physics are satisfied, there is no reason why the forces inside the resonator should sum to zero. The equations used to calculate the guide wavelengths in the static thrust equation are very non-linear. This is exploited in the design of the resonator to maximise the ratio of end plate forces, while minimising the axial component of the side wall force. This results in a net force that produces motion in accordance with Newton's laws. We are now in the process of negotiating a trial flight programme. From issue 2572 of New Scientist magazine, 07 October 2006, page 24 -- Brian Atkins Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence http://www.singinst.org/ From asa at nada.kth.se Sat Oct 14 22:06:43 2006 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 00:06:43 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Philosophical phylogeny In-Reply-To: <1488.163.1.72.81.1160680913.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> References: <20061011011838.26732.qmail@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> <1488.163.1.72.81.1160680913.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <1214.163.1.72.81.1160863603.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> I have put up the new versions of the Love and Wikipeidia genealogies, as well as a more complex version of the academic phylogeny at: http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2006/10/genealogy_the_next_generation.html Conclusions: there seems to be some consensus on who has influenced who, and most philosophers (and mathematicians, neuroscientists etc.) belong to the giant component. -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From sjatkins at mac.com Sat Oct 14 22:35:53 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Sat, 14 Oct 2006 15:35:53 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <00b001c6efad$dba54560$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> <8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com> <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <8d71341e0610012326y66fde0f3h3795e07362235e64@mail.gmail.com> <059801c6e90d$1753c390$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <8d71341e0610060912n29ce3919obe40cec30f1b43f5@mail.gmail.com> <00b001c6efad$dba54560$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On Oct 14, 2006, at 9:27 AM, Lee Corbin wrote: > At the risk of replying to the wrong email, I'm responding to > Russell who wrote > >> As it happens, you have tagged my sympathies entirely incorrectly; >> if you look at what I actually wrote, you'll note that I >> specifically stated >> the likes of al-Qaida are our enemies and have to be fought. What I >> am >> opposed to is autoimmune disease: allowing our supposed protectors to >> turn inwards and target us instead of our enemies. > > I agree. In very many ways the government has become an enemy of > its citizens, but this hasn't started just in the last decade. It > remains to > assess how much "we" are being targeted by government when those > governments attempt to target Al Queda. Personally, I don't believe that Al Qaeda is their target. I think massive expansion of government power and control and a near blank check for any military adventures they deem desirable is the primary target of their efforts. At the least this has been the primary result. Oh and the most lucrative and unquestioned federal pork barrel in US history. - samantha From brentn at freeshell.org Sat Oct 14 22:41:46 2006 From: brentn at freeshell.org (Brent Neal) Date: Sat, 14 Oct 2006 18:41:46 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> <8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com> <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <8d71341e0610012326y66fde0f3h3795e07362235e64@mail.gmail.com> <059801c6e90d$1753c390$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <8d71341e0610060912n29ce3919obe40cec30f1b43f5@mail.gmail.com> <00b001c6efad$dba54560$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On Oct 14, 2006, at 18:35, Samantha Atkins wrote: > Oh and the most lucrative and unquestioned federal pork > barrel in US history. > > - samantha Heck yes. The company I used to work for tried to apply for some DHS grants. It quickly became apparent that without the right sort of connections, the door was quite closed. So much for the "free market." :P B -- Brent Neal Geek of all Trades http://brentn.freeshell.org "Specialization is for insects" -- Robert A. Heinlein From extropy at unreasonable.com Sat Oct 14 23:19:11 2006 From: extropy at unreasonable.com (David Lubkin) Date: Sat, 14 Oct 2006 19:19:11 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Clamping down email server Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20061014185557.06905680@unreasonable.com> I've been sending and receiving my email through my hosted FreeBSD server for years, fairly smoothly. Of late I've been getting thousands of messages a day purportedly from other mail servers, rejecting email attributed to my domain, viz., that uses a random address like jkkqrlaz at unreasonable.com. Meanwhile, there are signs that some email I've originated is not getting to its destination, suggesting that it's being blocked along the way. I've checked a couple of blacklist sites, and not found my domain or its IP address listed, and confirmed that sendmail is using POP Auth. Could someone point me to a straight-forward procedure for clamping down my email server, seeing if it's on any blacklists, and restoring its good name? I plan to switch soon to a new web host, where I figured I'd rely on postfix, but I need email fully functional right away. -- David Lubkin. From gts_2000 at yahoo.com Sat Oct 14 23:58:31 2006 From: gts_2000 at yahoo.com (gts) Date: Sat, 14 Oct 2006 19:58:31 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution? In-Reply-To: <009401c6efaa$7d7e0f10$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <8d71341e0610122137o2a060ea7ic41153f32c946caf@mail.gmail.com> <0J72004PHZJ09G90@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <4530062F.3080503@pobox.com> <007901c6ef3d$738298e0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7641ddc60610140739i5c7ec889q5cab74dd11082cba@mail.gmail.com> <009401c6efaa$7d7e0f10$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: Seems to me that supposed duplicates share nearly the same biological nature, even more than is the case with identical twins, but that they cannot share the same nurture. Supposed duplicates must be separated in space, at the very least, necessitating different subjective experiences and thus different nurtures. If one is a product not only of nature but also of nurture (as I believe) then it follows that one's supposed duplicate is not actually oneself. -gts From russell.wallace at gmail.com Sun Oct 15 00:35:01 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 01:35:01 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <00b001c6efad$dba54560$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> <8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com> <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <8d71341e0610012326y66fde0f3h3795e07362235e64@mail.gmail.com> <059801c6e90d$1753c390$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <8d71341e0610060912n29ce3919obe40cec30f1b43f5@mail.gmail.com> <00b001c6efad$dba54560$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <8d71341e0610141735w75b44e59ibabaeaf8b25f6965@mail.gmail.com> On 10/14/06, Lee Corbin wrote: > > > Perhaps more fundamentally, I'm arguing precisely against making > decisions > > by affect value. > > That's not true if you mean it in general. Well okay, for strict accuracy the above should be read as "...against an excessive tendency in many contexts to make decisions by..." (interesting article btw, thanks). ...and I pretty much agree with the rest of what you wrote. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Sun Oct 15 03:03:24 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Sat, 14 Oct 2006 23:03:24 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Clamping down email server In-Reply-To: <6.2.3.4.2.20061014185557.06905680@unreasonable.com> References: <6.2.3.4.2.20061014185557.06905680@unreasonable.com> Message-ID: David, I've noticed something of the same nature on the email coming into the aeiveos.com domain. I think it is due to the fact that some mail systems (qmail?) are willing to attempt to send back "undelivered" messages. The spamers then falsify the mail into your system so it looks like a rejected send that has to be returned. Of course if the system/user that it is being delivered to rejects it then it bounces back to you (and presumably your system may get blacklisted as a spam relay). I think this problem may have diminished for me when I switched to Postfix (which was a quick deinstall of qmail and install of postfix under Gentoo Linux). As I suspect many (most?) large ISPs maintain their own internal blacklists getting ones name "cleared" may be difficult to impossible (which is why some people find blacklisting problematic). I never went into the mechanics of what was wrong with qmail. I thought it was setup to refuse to act as a relay but there may have been a bug that allowed it to do so when the message was being returned under the guise of having originated from your system. I do believe that there may have existed a number of 3rd party patches which were not incorporated into the version I was running -- so it might have been fixed but I didn't know what the fixes were. I have read someplace (/., digg, ???) that SPAMers may now have test suites to identify the holes in various mail agents so they can target their SPAM to yours [1] and so if one doesn't have staff people to stay on top of this full time its relatively easy to get caught in the cross fire. I would expect that among the ExI List readers there are enough people with systems that we could setup a "whitelisted" secure email relay cloud which could benefit everyone involved. Robert 1. Gives a whole new meaning to rotating your shield frequencies to defeat the enemy phasers -- but ultimately they will adapt. On 10/14/06, David Lubkin wrote: > I've been sending and receiving my email through my hosted FreeBSD > server for years, fairly smoothly. Of late I've been getting > thousands of messages a day purportedly from other mail servers, > rejecting email attributed to my domain, viz., that uses a random > address like jkkqrlaz at unreasonable.com. > > Meanwhile, there are signs that some email I've originated is not > getting to its destination, suggesting that it's being blocked along the > way. > > I've checked a couple of blacklist sites, and not found my domain or > its IP address listed, and confirmed that sendmail is using POP Auth. > > Could someone point me to a straight-forward procedure for clamping > down my email server, seeing if it's on any blacklists, and restoring > its good name? > > I plan to switch soon to a new web host, where I figured I'd rely on > postfix, but I need email fully functional right away. > > > -- David Lubkin. > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From brian at posthuman.com Sun Oct 15 03:23:14 2006 From: brian at posthuman.com (Brian Atkins) Date: Sat, 14 Oct 2006 22:23:14 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Clamping down email server In-Reply-To: References: <6.2.3.4.2.20061014185557.06905680@unreasonable.com> Message-ID: <4531A9A2.2000706@posthuman.com> Running your own personal outbound mail server in today's environment is simply not worth the endless neverending trouble you will have. Just send the outgoing mail through your ISP's mail server instead of attempting direct delivery. They have paid folks to do the neverending work of keeping clear of blacklists and all the other issues, and at this point it is a full time job. -- Brian Atkins Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence http://www.singinst.org/ From pharos at gmail.com Sun Oct 15 08:11:36 2006 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 09:11:36 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Clamping down email server In-Reply-To: <6.2.3.4.2.20061014185557.06905680@unreasonable.com> References: <6.2.3.4.2.20061014185557.06905680@unreasonable.com> Message-ID: On 10/15/06, David Lubkin wrote: > I've been sending and receiving my email through my hosted FreeBSD > server for years, fairly smoothly. Of late I've been getting > thousands of messages a day purportedly from other mail servers, > rejecting email attributed to my domain, viz., that uses a random > address like jkkqrlaz at unreasonable.com. > This is called NDR (Non Delivery Report) Spam. Or sometimes Reverse NDR Spam. Quote: By default, Microsoft(r) Exchange Server accepts all messages received via SMTP protocol. In case the server is unable to find a recipient within the system the message is returned to the sender (non-delivery report, NDR). This approach, however, may cause a potential security threat: since the sender's address is not checked, a sender with malicious intentions may set any address as the reply-to address. NDR-attacks allow spammers to bypass most of the server side and client side spam check filters: * since Exchange Server returns undelivered messages as an attachment, spam filters that monitor the message body and headers for specified keywords operate less than effectively, often allowing such messages to pass through undetected; * many users delete unsolicited mail manually without reading it (this takes less than a second); however, when they see a message with 'Undelivered Mail' in the subject line they may very well open and read the attached message, not only potentially wasting their time ? but what if it contains a virus, or more specifically a worm which would then send messages to all the contacts in their address book?; * because the source of such mail is a so-called "honest" server (one that is not found in SPEWS or ORDB databases), sever filters, including the latest filters introduced in Microsoft Exchange 2003 Server will pass the message through. End quote ----------------- What you need is a 'whitelist' of valid addresses for your domain, so that you can reject these NDR messages with made-up return addresses. In rare cases this may cause a false detection when somebody mistypes your email address. Or just train your spam filter to know that NDRs are spam. That is what I've done with my POP3 email. Again, this may also give very occasional false detections that you have to watch out for. BillK From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Oct 15 14:19:49 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 07:19:49 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> <8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com> <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <8d71341e0610012326y66fde0f3h3795e07362235e64@mail.gmail.com> <059801c6e90d$1753c390$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <8d71341e0610060912n29ce3919obe40cec30f1b43f5@mail.gmail.com> <00b001c6efad$dba54560$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <012d01c6f065$54a2db00$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Samantha writes > On Oct 14, 2006, at 9:27 AM, Lee Corbin wrote: > >> In very many ways the government has become >> an enemy of its citizens, but this hasn't started just >> in the last decade. It remains to assess how much >> "we" are being targeted by government when those >> governments attempt to target Al Queda. > > Personally, I don't believe that Al Qaeda is their target. So you see (as you explain below) that any inconvenience to Al Qaeda that occurs overseas is just a side-effect of a government grab for more power? Would you try to make that argument apply to America in World War II, the Civil War, Korea, and Viet Nam? Or is something different now? > I think massive expansion of government power and control > and a near blank check for any military adventures they deem > desirable is the primary target of their efforts. I think that the Bush and Blair administrations would like nothing better than to have buried Al Queda, especially by 2008, so that they could turn to the electorate and say "See?". One thing that is more dangerous now than in any point in Western history is the huge size of the bureaucracies, and their self-sustaining agendas. Far more civil rights were abrogated during the Civil War and World War II, and in effect in World War I, than now, but it was easy to pull back once the menace was contained. There are two very sad reasons why we'll never return to the halcyon days of the 1990s when the U.S. really was a superpower (or at least everyone thought so), and there seemed to be few threats from disgruntled individuals and groups. One is simply technically small groups and individuals can threaten organized society like never before, and the other is that the unbelievably huge centralized bureaucracies that have been created to deal with them have self-sustenance as their primary goal. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Oct 15 14:23:34 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 07:23:34 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution? References: <8d71341e0610122137o2a060ea7ic41153f32c946caf@mail.gmail.com> <0J72004PHZJ09G90@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <4530062F.3080503@pobox.com> <007901c6ef3d$738298e0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7641ddc60610140739i5c7ec889q5cab74dd11082cba@mail.gmail.com> <009401c6efaa$7d7e0f10$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <013301c6f065$c0d3ffc0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> gts writes (hi Gordon!) > Seems to me that supposed duplicates share nearly the same biological > nature, even more than is the case with identical twins, but that they > cannot share the same nurture. That depends on how recently the duplicate was made. I think that for suitable reward you'd sacrifice the last few moment's memories. > Supposed duplicates must be separated in space, at the very least, > necessitating different subjective experiences and thus different nurtures. "Nurture" as in the traditional nurture/nature debate is taken to mean a long term build-up. I don't identify with very brief experiences, and I'm the same person no matter where you teleport me and how many times per milli-second you do it. Lee From eugen at leitl.org Sun Oct 15 15:11:40 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 17:11:40 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Clamping down email server In-Reply-To: <6.2.3.4.2.20061014185557.06905680@unreasonable.com> References: <6.2.3.4.2.20061014185557.06905680@unreasonable.com> Message-ID: <20061015151140.GK6974@leitl.org> On Sat, Oct 14, 2006 at 07:19:11PM -0400, David Lubkin wrote: > I've been sending and receiving my email through my hosted FreeBSD > server for years, fairly smoothly. Of late I've been getting > thousands of messages a day purportedly from other mail servers, > rejecting email attributed to my domain, viz., that uses a random > address like jkkqrlaz at unreasonable.com. Most spam uses forged From: addresses. > Meanwhile, there are signs that some email I've originated is not > getting to its destination, suggesting that it's being blocked along the way. Not at all unsual. > I've checked a couple of blacklist sites, and not found my domain or > its IP address listed, and confirmed that sendmail is using POP Auth. I've tried http://www.robtex.com/rbls/207.159.131.159.html and several others on http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=RBL+check&btnG=Google+Search which come up green. > Could someone point me to a straight-forward procedure for clamping > down my email server, seeing if it's on any blacklists, and restoring You can always use http://www.abuse.net/relay.html or similiar online relaying sites to test whether you're having a misconfiguration. You do seem to have a lot of open ports, though: helium:~# nmap 207.159.131.159 Starting nmap 3.81 ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2006-10-15 17:09 CEST Interesting ports on unreasonable.com (207.159.131.159): (The 1639 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: closed) PORT STATE SERVICE 21/tcp open ftp 22/tcp open ssh 23/tcp open telnet 25/tcp open smtp 30/tcp open unknown 53/tcp open domain 80/tcp open http 110/tcp open pop3 111/tcp open rpcbind 135/tcp filtered msrpc 139/tcp open netbios-ssn 143/tcp open imap 443/tcp open https 587/tcp open submission 648/tcp open unknown 993/tcp open imaps 995/tcp open pop3s 1022/tcp open unknown 1023/tcp open netvenuechat 3306/tcp open mysql 6666/tcp filtered irc-serv 6667/tcp filtered irc 6668/tcp filtered irc 13782/tcp open VeritasNetbackup > its good name? As far as I can tell you're not in any RBL, so there's no way to restore what is not tarnished to start with. You typically can't get an RBL to unblock you or any target site to use non-braindead mail filtering anyway, so you could as well send a fax, or pick up the phone, if you want to make sure your missive came through. Yes, it is really that bad. > I plan to switch soon to a new web host, where I figured I'd rely on > postfix, but I need email fully functional right away. Picking postfix is a good choice. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From eugen at leitl.org Sun Oct 15 15:23:30 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 17:23:30 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Clamping down email server In-Reply-To: <4531A9A2.2000706@posthuman.com> References: <6.2.3.4.2.20061014185557.06905680@unreasonable.com> <4531A9A2.2000706@posthuman.com> Message-ID: <20061015152330.GM6974@leitl.org> On Sat, Oct 14, 2006 at 10:23:14PM -0500, Brian Atkins wrote: > Running your own personal outbound mail server in today's environment is simply > not worth the endless neverending trouble you will have. I disagree. I have zero trouble with mine, and I consistently made the experience that you just can't rely on other people. > Just send the outgoing mail through your ISP's mail server instead of attempting > direct delivery. They have paid folks to do the neverending work of keeping > clear of blacklists and all the other issues, and at this point it is a full > time job. If you share your IP with random users, it is *guaranteed* to be in a RBL or many at some point. The paid folks can do zilch about it. If you want proper hygiene, use sterile IPs, and don't contaminate them yourself (such as running Tor in your address space). -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From jonkc at att.net Sun Oct 15 15:51:52 2006 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 11:51:52 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] What is the smallest genome possible? References: <6.2.3.4.2.20061014185557.06905680@unreasonable.com> Message-ID: <009b01c6f071$e0e4f5b0$d3084e0c@MyComputer> A bacteria with the smallest ever genome has been discovered, this cell has only 159,662 base-pairs of DNA. That's only 80K of information. Hell there have been some posts to this list bigger than that; and this is a living thing. It might be worthwhile to study it to find the bare minimum needed for life, perhaps they could try removing one of its 182 genes to see if they could get something even smaller. For more see: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/10/061012184647.htm John K Clark From extropy at unreasonable.com Sun Oct 15 16:09:10 2006 From: extropy at unreasonable.com (David Lubkin) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 12:09:10 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Clamping down email server In-Reply-To: <20061015151140.GK6974@leitl.org> References: <6.2.3.4.2.20061014185557.06905680@unreasonable.com> <20061015151140.GK6974@leitl.org> Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20061015112836.072bfb68@unreasonable.com> Eugen wrote: [a hands-on, on-point reply] Thanks. One of my first thoughts actually was to write to you off-list, but (a) under the circumstances, I wasn't sure it would get to you, (b) I figured other people might have pertinent observations, and (c) the subject is one that many of us have to grapple with. And, as Brian alluded to, this is a topic where, even among technorati, you have to run as fast as you can to stay in the same place. -- David. From gts_2000 at yahoo.com Sun Oct 15 16:28:07 2006 From: gts_2000 at yahoo.com (gts) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 12:28:07 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution? In-Reply-To: <013301c6f065$c0d3ffc0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <8d71341e0610122137o2a060ea7ic41153f32c946caf@mail.gmail.com> <0J72004PHZJ09G90@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <4530062F.3080503@pobox.com> <007901c6ef3d$738298e0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7641ddc60610140739i5c7ec889q5cab74dd11082cba@mail.gmail.com> <009401c6efaa$7d7e0f10$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <013301c6f065$c0d3ffc0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: Hiya Lee, On Sun, 15 Oct 2006 10:23:34 -0400, Lee Corbin wrote: >> Seems to me that supposed duplicates share nearly the same biological >> nature, even more than is the case with identical twins, but that they >> cannot share the same nurture. > > That depends on how recently the duplicate was made. Of course that is true. The supposed duplicates become more unlike each other as a function of time and experience. And so logically they start as different people even in the first moment following the split, at their first moment of unshared, disparate experience. > "Nurture" as in the traditional nurture/nature debate is taken to mean a > long term build-up. I think it needn't be taken that way here. I think we are to some extent a product of our experiences, no matter how brief those experiences may be. It follows also that one is not the same person from one day to the next, or even from one moment to the next. Certainly this is true biologically. Why should it not also be true psychologically? -gts From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Sun Oct 15 18:27:55 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 14:27:55 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] What is the smallest genome possible? In-Reply-To: <009b01c6f071$e0e4f5b0$d3084e0c@MyComputer> References: <6.2.3.4.2.20061014185557.06905680@unreasonable.com> <009b01c6f071$e0e4f5b0$d3084e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: On 10/15/06, John K Clark wrote: > > It might be worthwhile to study it to find the bare minimum needed > for life, perhaps they could try removing one of its 182 genes to see if > they could get something even smaller. > Careful, careful, careful. As the article points out, it may be a bacteria in the process of becoming an organelle! You could view a mitochondria as being the smallest bacteria if you allow for bacteria to import proteins essential for self-replication. The previous minimal genome size for bacteria was thought to be in the 350-450 gene range so a 2-3x reduction is not simply trimming around the edges. The question is whether or not *all* the genes required for self-replication are in those 182 genes? I would tend to doubt it. If you are importing RNAs or proteins to accomplish complete replication then you are violating the "rules". I suspect this could be extended if you are importing anything other than simple molecules to produce a copy of yourself. (E.g. does the bacteria do the synthesis of its cell membrane and/or wall or is relying on the host to do the heavy lifting?) This is going to cause rather loud discussions as to *what* precisely is a bacteria? [And we thought the "what is a planet?" discussions were bad.] As at least one virus has recently been found with a multi-thousand base genome so I think the virus and bacteria definitions are starting to get very fuzzy. Where is Humpty Dumpty when you need him? Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From thespike at satx.rr.com Sun Oct 15 19:09:51 2006 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 14:09:51 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] What is the smallest genome possible? In-Reply-To: References: <6.2.3.4.2.20061014185557.06905680@unreasonable.com> <009b01c6f071$e0e4f5b0$d3084e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20061015140415.021b2ee0@satx.rr.com> >*what* precisely is a bacteria? I know it's tiresome of me to mention this, but "a bacteria" is a grammatical error, that's what it is. The singular word everyone in this thread is looking for is "bacterium". (And before anyone starts talking about plural "virii", that's "viri" or "viruses".) Damien Broderick [your friendly neighborhood lexical cop] From sjatkins at mac.com Sun Oct 15 20:48:46 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 13:48:46 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <012d01c6f065$54a2db00$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> <8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com> <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <8d71341e0610012326y66fde0f3h3795e07362235e64@mail.gmail.com> <059801c6e90d$1753c390$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <8d71341e0610060912n29ce3919obe40cec30f1b43f5@mail.gmail.com> <00b001c6efad$dba54560$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <012d01c6f065$54a2db00$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <1160945327.5671.9.camel@localhost> On Sun, 2006-10-15 at 07:19 -0700, Lee Corbin wrote: > Samantha writes > > > On Oct 14, 2006, at 9:27 AM, Lee Corbin wrote: > > > >> In very many ways the government has become > >> an enemy of its citizens, but this hasn't started just > >> in the last decade. It remains to assess how much > >> "we" are being targeted by government when those > >> governments attempt to target Al Queda. > > > > Personally, I don't believe that Al Qaeda is their target. > > So you see (as you explain below) that any inconvenience to > Al Qaeda that occurs overseas is just a side-effect of a > government grab for more power? Would you try to make > that argument apply to America in World War II, the Civil > War, Korea, and Viet Nam? Or is something different now? I don't believe Al Qaeda is or ever was a significant enough problem to justify what has been and is being done in this idiotic war on a form of asymmetric warfare. Bush has repeadely even lowered the priority of finding bin Laden. > > > I think massive expansion of government power and control > > and a near blank check for any military adventures they deem > > desirable is the primary target of their efforts. > > I think that the Bush and Blair administrations would like nothing > better than to have buried Al Queda, especially by 2008, so > that they could turn to the electorate and say "See?". Do you think Al Qaeda are the end and be-all of terrorism? Do you think it is remotely possible to ever find and "bury" all cells of any such organization? Bush and most of the administration claim this war is never ending. The people should have been up in arms and soon as this was claimed. But no, most of us bring our freedom and our money gladly to Washington to protect us from the B-A-A-D and E-V-I-L endless menace. > > One thing that is more dangerous now than in any point in > Western history is the huge size of the bureaucracies, and > their self-sustaining agendas. Far more civil rights were > abrogated during the Civil War and World War II, and > in effect in World War I, than now, but it was easy to pull > back once the menace was contained. > Yep. Which is why a "war" defined as endless is hideously dangerous. > There are two very sad reasons why we'll never return to > the halcyon days of the 1990s when the U.S. really was > a superpower (or at least everyone thought so), and there > seemed to be few threats from disgruntled individuals and > groups. One is simply technically small groups and > individuals can threaten organized society like never > before, and the other is that the unbelievably huge > centralized bureaucracies that have been created to > deal with them have self-sustenance as their primary > goal. > Yes. I consider the second orders of magnitude more dangerous than the first. YMMV. - samantha From jonkc at att.net Sun Oct 15 20:48:30 2006 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 16:48:30 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] What is the smallest genome possible? References: <6.2.3.4.2.20061014185557.06905680@unreasonable.com><009b01c6f071$e0e4f5b0$d3084e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <002501c6f09b$790f49c0$53094e0c@MyComputer> Robert Bradbury Wrote: > As at least one virus has recently been found with a multi-thousand base > genome so I think the virus and bacteria definitions are starting to get > very fuzzy. I disagree, the distinction between a bacterium (thank you Damien) and a virus (if virii or viri is a real word it damn well shouldn't be) isn't the size of its genome, it's the fact that a bacterium has a metabolism while a virus does not. However I agree with you that it might sometimes become a little difficult deciding if something is a organelle or a bacterium. It gets even worse, a mitochondria cannot live unless it is imbedded deep inside another creature, but then neither can a tapeworm. When a organism evolves into a parasite or symbiote it always becomes simpler. John K Clark From riel at surriel.com Sun Oct 15 21:16:43 2006 From: riel at surriel.com (Rik van Riel) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 17:16:43 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Pour-on nanotechnology stops bleeding in seconds Message-ID: <4532A53B.1070705@surriel.com> Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US, have created a liquid that stops bleeding in any tissue in a matter of seconds. It is a discovery that they claim has the potential to revolutionise surgery and emergency medicine and could even make it easier to reattach severed limbs. Rutledge Ellis-Behnke and colleagues worked from the nanoscale, using individual amino acids to create a self-assembling peptide. It looks exactly like water but when applied directly onto injured tissue it halts bleeding. This is the first time nanotechnology has been used to control bleeding, claims Rutledge. ... http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2006/October/10080601.asp -- Who do you trust? The people with all the right answers? Or the people with the right questions? From pharos at gmail.com Sun Oct 15 21:28:19 2006 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 22:28:19 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] What is the smallest genome possible? In-Reply-To: <002501c6f09b$790f49c0$53094e0c@MyComputer> References: <6.2.3.4.2.20061014185557.06905680@unreasonable.com> <009b01c6f071$e0e4f5b0$d3084e0c@MyComputer> <002501c6f09b$790f49c0$53094e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: On 10/15/06, John K Clark wrote: > I disagree, the distinction between a bacterium (thank you Damien) and a > virus (if virii or viri is a real word it damn well shouldn't be) isn't the > size of its genome, it's the fact that a bacterium has a metabolism while a > virus does not. However I agree with you that it might sometimes become a > little difficult deciding if something is a organelle or a bacterium. It > gets even worse, a mitochondria cannot live unless it is imbedded deep > inside another creature, but then neither can a tapeworm. When a organism > evolves into a parasite or symbiote it always becomes simpler. > Wikipedia has an interesting article about the plural of virus. Quote: In the English language, the standard plural of virus is viruses. This is the most frequently occurring form of the plural, and refers to both a biological virus and a computer virus. The less frequent variations viri and virii are virtually unknown in edited prose, and no major dictionary recognizes them as alternative forms. Their occurrence can be variously attributed to hypercorrection formed by analogy to Latin plurals such as radii; idiosyncratic use as jargon among a group, such as computer hackers; and deliberate word play, such as on BBSs (see, e.g.: leet). To complicate matters further, viri is already used in Latin as the plural of vir, meaning "man" (thus making viri mean "men") End quote ---------- Read on for more tasty linguistical nuggets. BillK From rhanson at gmu.edu Sun Oct 15 23:16:32 2006 From: rhanson at gmu.edu (Robin Hanson) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 19:16:32 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Doomsday argument In-Reply-To: <007a01c6ef3f$900a4c90$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com> <0J7300MG5007PJ40@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <007a01c6ef3f$900a4c90$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <0J7700CZEBHAEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> At 11:19 PM 10/13/2006, Lee Corbin wrote: > > If there are many aliens out there, then the total number of > > creatures that we could have been in the universe doesn't change much > > from scenarios where our civilization dies fast or lasts long. So if > > you are a random creature among all these creatures, > >I think that this is probably exactly the point at which Russell demurs. >That's what I've never been able to choke down myself. And I know >that Eliezer has publically denigrated such a calculus of souls, rightly >saying that it's bad to think about a sample space (made up, say, of >all sentient entities) from which you were drawn at random--- >in other words, that a priori, it was equally likely that you could have >been born in the four centuries before Christ as that you were born >in the U.S. in the 1960's. No way! >You could not have been born anywhere except on Earth and in >the 20th century at that. You are the result of a baby with certain >genetic traits being raised in a 20th century type environment. It is >not possible that you could have been born with twelve tentacles >living in a methane atmosphere and holding absolute religious >convictions concerning the Great Squid that preclude all scientific >or rational thinking. It simple wouldn't be you. Therefore as >Eliezer says, the sample space is bad; and Bostrom and others >seem to have been thinking that its made of soul-like points in the >space of all possible outcomes. Counterfactuals are one of our most powerful intellectual tools. If we had to swear off using them our thinking would be immensely impoverished. They infuse science and ordinary thinking in equal measures. Sometimes the language we use to describe counterfactuals makes it ambiguous which ones we refer to, but the idea that we can imagine situations other than the one we find ourselves and ask ourselves what we should believe in such situations is a powerful way to clarify what we should believe in our real situation. "What if you didn't know when you were born or what civilization you live in" is an example of a useful thought-clarifying counterfactual. Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323 From rhanson at gmu.edu Sun Oct 15 23:46:42 2006 From: rhanson at gmu.edu (Robin Hanson) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 19:46:42 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution? In-Reply-To: <7641ddc60610140654k65ec201au82cd2206bf9fad5f@mail.gmail.co m> References: <8d71341e0610122137o2a060ea7ic41153f32c946caf@mail.gmail.com> <0J72004PHZJ09G90@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <7641ddc60610140654k65ec201au82cd2206bf9fad5f@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <0J7700CZFBHAEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> At 09:54 AM 10/14/2006, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > > >if you choose to define your reference class by causal logic, then > > >you get the causal logic conclusion. If you choose to define your > > >reference class by measure accounting, then you get the measure > > >accounting conclusion. ... So decide what you care > > >about, and aim for that. > > > > beliefs are supposed to be your best estimate of > > the way the world is. When you ask "what is the chance that ..." > > you are asking about probabilities and beliefs, so the answer simply > > cannot depend on some value choice you make. > >### But value choices may change your definitions of terms: You can >formulate a number of similar but distinct definitions of "self", all >largely consistent with the quotidian usage, yet leading to widely >divergent numerical estimates in imagined situations far removed from >our daily experience. Yes, agreed. What questions we may choose to ask about the world may certainly depend on our values. But for any one question well-posed in terms of what someone will see, or how things will be arranged, the probabilities should not depend on values. If we ask about creatures who remember being in this situation many times, we should be able to ask about the typical frequencies they should remember having seen. Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323 From rhanson at gmu.edu Sun Oct 15 23:48:39 2006 From: rhanson at gmu.edu (Robin Hanson) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 19:48:39 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] You're Fired Message-ID: <0J7700CZHBHCEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> You're Fired, Forbes, October 30, 2006. In the above OpEd I introduce a wide audience to my proposal to put market in charge of whether to fire the CEO. Not only would this add value to companies, it would change the way we think about who does and should "run" our major organizations. Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323 From rhanson at gmu.edu Sun Oct 15 23:24:05 2006 From: rhanson at gmu.edu (Robin Hanson) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 19:24:05 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution? In-Reply-To: <4530062F.3080503@pobox.com> References: <8d71341e0610122137o2a060ea7ic41153f32c946caf@mail.gmail.com> <0J72004PHZJ09G90@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <4530062F.3080503@pobox.com> Message-ID: <0J7700CZGBHBEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> At 05:33 PM 10/13/2006, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote: > > After many repetitions you could compare the frequencies you > > see in your history to the probabilities you had assigned. Or you > > could make bets based on your probabilities and see whether such bets > > win or lose on average. These two related methods make clear that > > probabilities are not arbitrary value choices - they can be right or wrong. > >The bizarre thing about these situations, as they work in our thought >experiments, is that, on most assumptions you care to make about where >the subjective probability mass goes (or as I sometimes say, where the >realness-fluid flows, bearing in mind that we are almost certainly >talking about some kind of phlogiston that isn't the actual solution) - >anyway, regardless of which assumption you make, after N repetitions of >the experiment, nearly all of your subjective probability mass is in a >set of observers who, by applying induction, would end up with the >assumption you started with - that is, under your assumption, all the >probability mass would end up in observers who, given their experienced >history, would strongly suspect your assumption - which is to say, after >N repetitions of the experiment, then "you", wherever you are, would be >almost certain of the answer. >But an outside observer would have no idea where most of the >"probability mass" had gone, so they can't learn anything by performing >the experiment from outside - you would have to be inside it. I'm not yet convinced that this claim is true, that there are no outside observations that can prefer one account to another. But I haven't thought about this enough yet to be very confident about any such claim either way. Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323 From rhanson at gmu.edu Sun Oct 15 23:46:31 2006 From: rhanson at gmu.edu (Robin Hanson) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 19:46:31 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution? In-Reply-To: <007901c6ef3d$738298e0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <8d71341e0610122137o2a060ea7ic41153f32c946caf@mail.gmail.com> <0J72004PHZJ09G90@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <4530062F.3080503@pobox.com> <007901c6ef3d$738298e0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <0J7700FROCI9SQE0@caduceus1.gmu.edu> At 11:01 PM 10/13/2006, Lee Corbin wrote: > > Confusion exists in the mind, not in reality. All this mess has to be > > generated by a bad question - certainly we have to be doing *something* > > wrong. > >What is wrong in duplication (or forking) experiments is to suppose that >there is only a probability that the bad outcome will occur. We *know* >that both outcomes occur. Therefore probability is an atrocious way to >approach the problem. Probability can be used, as I say, only for >planning purposes in that one might have to do something awkward >in the present circumstance while a lot of copies of one are being made. You seem to be rejecting the concept of indexical uncertainty, which seems to me to be valid and central to these situations. Even when you know all of the physical details of a universe, you can still be uncertain about which creature you are in such a universe. An agent who has forked but has not yet found out which forked agent he is can sensibly have uncertainty about his identity. Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323 From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Mon Oct 16 00:50:44 2006 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 17:50:44 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] You're Fired In-Reply-To: <0J7700CZHBHCEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> Message-ID: <20061016005044.38517.qmail@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> I like the idea. I think it will make CEO selection for companies more meritocratic which would go a long way to justify how much more they earn compared to an average employee of the same company. --- Robin Hanson wrote: > You're Fired, > Forbes, October 30, 2006. > > In the above OpEd I introduce a wide audience to my > proposal to put > market in charge of whether to fire the CEO. Not > only would this > add value to companies, it would change the way we > think about who > does and should "run" our major organizations. > > > > Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu > Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason > University > MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444 > 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323 > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "More persons, on the whole, are humbugged by believing in nothing, than by believing too much." - P. T. Barnum __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From rhanson at gmu.edu Mon Oct 16 01:43:25 2006 From: rhanson at gmu.edu (Robin Hanson) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 21:43:25 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] You're Fired In-Reply-To: <20061016005044.38517.qmail@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> References: <0J7700CZHBHCEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <20061016005044.38517.qmail@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <0J7700H21GSE5010@caduceus1.gmu.edu> At 08:50 PM 10/15/2006, Stuart LaForge wrote: >I like the idea. I think it will make CEO selection >for companies more meritocratic which would go a long >way to justify how much more they earn compared to an >average employee of the same company. Similar mechanisms might be used to advise on the wisdom of offering particular CEO candidates particular compensation packages. Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323 From lcorbin at rawbw.com Mon Oct 16 01:45:34 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 18:45:34 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> <8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com> <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <8d71341e0610012326y66fde0f3h3795e07362235e64@mail.gmail.com> <059801c6e90d$1753c390$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <8d71341e0610060912n29ce3919obe40cec30f1b43f5@mail.gmail.com> <00b001c6efad$dba54560$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <012d01c6f065$54a2db00$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1160945327.5671.9.camel@localhost> Message-ID: <015d01c6f0c4$ff139ed0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Samantha writes >> So you see (as you explain below) that any inconvenience to >> Al Qaeda that occurs overseas is just a side-effect of a >> government grab for more power? Would you try to make >> that argument apply to America in World War II, the Civil >> War, Korea, and Viet Nam? Or is something different now? > > I don't believe Al Qaeda is or ever was a significant enough problem to > justify what has been and is being done in this idiotic war on a form of > asymmetric warfare. Bush has repeadely even lowered the priority of > finding bin Laden. Why was the bombing of Pearl Harbor any different? Fewer lives were lost than on 9-11, and wouldn't the mature thing to do have been to just sit down with the Japanese and ask them what their problem was? (They were upset about the oil sanctions.) We could just have just negotiated it out with them, do you think? > Do you think Al Qaeda are the end and be-all of terrorism? Do you think > it is remotely possible to ever find and "bury" all cells of any such > organization? No, on both counts. > Bush and most of the administration claim this war is > never ending. The people should have been up in arms and soon as this > was claimed. But no, most of us bring our freedom and our money gladly > to Washington to protect us from the B-A-A-D and E-V-I-L endless menace. Am I to infer that you don't think Al Qaeda attacks on the West.it will be endless? You suppose that they'll just fade away over time? >> One thing that is more dangerous now than in any point in >> Western history is the huge size of the bureaucracies, and >> their self-sustaining agendas. Far more civil rights were >> abrogated during the Civil War and World War II, and >> in effect in World War I, than now, but it was easy to pull >> back once the menace was contained. > > Yep. Which is why a "war" defined as endless is hideously dangerous. You are perfectly correct. The world is not in a good state peace-wise :-) But look on the bright side: in terms of per capita deaths, this one looks to be one of the gentlest in history. The only long term question is whether the war will gradually fade away, or escalate to total conflict once Hispanic North America and Moslem Europe lock horns. Lee From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Mon Oct 16 01:27:45 2006 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 18:27:45 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] When biology and english clash (was smallest genome) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20061016012745.7294.qmail@web60512.mail.yahoo.com> > Quote: > In the English language, the standard plural of > virus is viruses. This > is the most frequently occurring form of the plural, > and refers to > both a biological virus and a computer virus. Biological classification is much to blame for the confusion when it comes to the plurals of organisms. In biology, the singular can refer to a single individual organism i.e. the red fox got into our chicken coop. Unfortunately the singular can also refer to an entire species which is rarely comprised of a single individual. i.e. The red fox is in danger of going extinct due to the popularity of fox hunting. Whilst the plural in a sloppy way, is used to describe multiple organisms of the same species i.e. the foxes have a den in the woods. Or multiple species i.e. the foxes are in the order Carnivora or the foxes are comprised of three related species. When you get into microbiology it gets even worse because all the old taxonomical rules start to break down. The concept of species is rather ill defined for bacteria and non-existent for viruses. Since very seldomly is a microbiologist actually dealing with a single bacterium (i.e. Robert diluted down his suspension culture a million fold until but a single bacterium was present in his microscope field.) I and most microbiologists would not object to the phrase: E. coli is a bacteria that lives in your gut as opposed to Fred is Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "More persons, on the whole, are humbugged by believing in nothing, than by believing too much." - P. T. Barnum __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From lcorbin at rawbw.com Mon Oct 16 01:56:24 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 18:56:24 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution? References: <8d71341e0610122137o2a060ea7ic41153f32c946caf@mail.gmail.com><0J72004PHZJ09G90@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <4530062F.3080503@pobox.com><007901c6ef3d$738298e0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700FROCI9SQE0@caduceus1.gmu.edu> Message-ID: <016401c6f0c6$af6c9ec0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Robin writes >>What is wrong in duplication (or forking) experiments is to suppose that >>there is only a probability that the bad outcome will occur. We *know* >>that both outcomes occur. Therefore probability is an atrocious way to >>approach the problem. Probability can be used, as I say, only for >>planning purposes in that one might have to do something awkward >>in the present circumstance while a lot of copies of one are being made. > > You seem to be rejecting the concept of indexical uncertainty, which seems > to me to be valid and central to these situations. Even when you know > all of the physical details of a universe, you can still be uncertain > about which creature you are in such a universe. Yes, especially if you are addressing a case in which there are real differences: In some experiments, subjects remain identical over spatial distances. But in either case, one may wonder if he is A, the duplicate that was to be created near Alpha Centauri, or B, the duplicate that was to be created near Betelgeuse. However! That is not crucial to your identity: your identity is independent of spatial location. (Let me be clear: Robin Hanson lives equally well both near Alpha Centauri and Betelgeuse.) > An agent who has forked but has not yet found out which forked agent > he is can sensibly have uncertainty about his identity. He *can* be uncertain about his location. About what else can he be uncertain? And are you defending a statement such as "with probability .6 I will be at A and with probability .4 I'll be at B"? I have said that I will defend such a statement only for *planning* purposes---you need to be wearing a raincoat if you know it's raining at one of the places. But the truth is that there is a 100% probability that you will be at A. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Mon Oct 16 02:08:14 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 19:08:14 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Doomsday argument References: <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com><0J7300MG5007PJ40@caduceus2.gmu.edu><007a01c6ef3f$900a4c90$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700CZEBHAEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> Message-ID: <016701c6f0c7$fab96510$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Robin writes >>You could not have been born anywhere except on Earth and in >>the 20th century at that. You are the result of a baby with certain >>genetic traits being raised in a 20th century type environment. >>[If you had been raised under significantly different circumstances, >>then you wouldn't be you.] > Counterfactuals are one of our most powerful intellectual tools. Agreed. > the idea that we can imagine situations other than the one we find > ourselves and ask ourselves what we should believe in such situations > is a powerful way to clarify what we should believe in our real situation. That is so! But it is valid only so long as your identity remains constant (or nearly so) under the counterfactual assumptions. "What would it be like for me if I were a bat" is, as you know, a bad question. Likewise, we can't "find ourselves" as you write, in the 14th century (unless someone had some mighty fine simulations or hidden societies going on back then). > "What if you didn't know when you were born or what civilization you live > in" is an example of a useful thought-clarifying counterfactual. I know that I *must* have been born in a 20th century type civilization or simulation, or I wouldn't be me. It would be someone else. Even so, were a Lee Corbin infant raised as a latter-day Wahhabist in Saudi Arabia in the 1960s, the differences are just too great: it simply wouldn't be me. Therefore there can be no sense to taking the fundamental sample space to be "all sentient creatures" or even "all creatures with human DNA". Lee From rhanson at gmu.edu Mon Oct 16 02:44:30 2006 From: rhanson at gmu.edu (Robin Hanson) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 22:44:30 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Doomsday argument In-Reply-To: <016701c6f0c7$fab96510$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com> <0J7300MG5007PJ40@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <007a01c6ef3f$900a4c90$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700CZEBHAEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <016701c6f0c7$fab96510$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <0J7700CPPJM7WB80@caduceus2.gmu.edu> At 10:08 PM 10/15/2006, Lee Corbin wrote: > > the idea that we can imagine situations other than the one we find > > ourselves and ask ourselves what we should believe in such situations > > is a powerful way to clarify what we should believe in our real situation. > >That is so! But it is valid only so long as your identity remains constant >(or nearly so) under the counterfactual assumptions. "What would it be >like for me if I were a bat" is, as you know, a bad question. Likewise, >we can't "find ourselves" as you write, in the 14th century (unless someone >had some mighty fine simulations or hidden societies going on back then). I don't agree that it matters what your identity is or whether it holds constant. The issue is what beliefs are appropriate given the *info* available in a situation. That could include info, or lack of info, about any aspect of your identity, as well as info about anything else. So it can make sense to ask what you should believe if you had the info a bat has, or what you should believe if you had the info that people had in the 14th century. Of course the further you go from your current experience the harder it may be to evaluate what beliefs should go with what info. But that doesn't mean the question doesn't make sense - just that the question may be hard. Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323 From rhanson at gmu.edu Mon Oct 16 02:49:38 2006 From: rhanson at gmu.edu (Robin Hanson) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 22:49:38 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution? In-Reply-To: <016401c6f0c6$af6c9ec0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <8d71341e0610122137o2a060ea7ic41153f32c946caf@mail.gmail.com> <0J72004PHZJ09G90@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <4530062F.3080503@pobox.com> <007901c6ef3d$738298e0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700FROCI9SQE0@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <016401c6f0c6$af6c9ec0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <0J7700GQRJURYY40@caduceus1.gmu.edu> At 09:56 PM 10/15/2006, Lee Corbin wrote: > > You seem to be rejecting the concept of indexical uncertainty, which seems > > to me to be valid and central to these situations. Even when you know > > all of the physical details of a universe, you can still be uncertain > > about which creature you are in such a universe. > >Yes, especially if you are addressing a case in which there are real >differences: >In some experiments, subjects remain identical over spatial distances. But in >either case, one may wonder if he is A, the duplicate that was to be created >near Alpha Centauri, or B, the duplicate that was to be created near >Betelgeuse. However! That is not crucial to your identity: your identity >is independent of spatial location. It seems to me that all aspects of my identity, not just my spatial location, can be reasonable topics of uncertainty. I can be uncertain about my space, my time, my name, my personality, my memory, my goals, at so on. >And are you defending a statement such as "with probability .6 I will be >at A and with probability .4 I'll be at B"? I have said that I will defend >such a statement only for *planning* purposes---you need to be wearing >a raincoat if you know it's raining at one of the places. But the truth is >that there is a 100% probability that you will be at A. I can certainly say now that I am at A or B with some probabilities. If I have one or several descendants, I can anticipate now that they might then also have such uncertainty. Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323 From george at betterhumans.com Mon Oct 16 02:27:20 2006 From: george at betterhumans.com (George Dvorsky) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 22:27:20 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Doomsday argument In-Reply-To: <016701c6f0c7$fab96510$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com><0J7300MG5007PJ40@caduceus2.gmu.edu><007a01c6ef3f$900a4c90$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700CZEBHAEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <016701c6f0c7$fab96510$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <4532EE08.2000802@betterhumans.com> Self-sampling most definitely gives strength to the Doomsday Argument. The fact that I find myself as an individual in pre-Singularity existence is a very troubling observation, particularly given the assumption that there should be far more post-Singularity individuals than in a pre-Singularity civ. It also indicates that the most probable observation of a civ is pre-Singularity and not post, a possible indicator that there are no post-Singularity civs. Cheers, George From lcorbin at rawbw.com Mon Oct 16 03:10:35 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 20:10:35 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Doomsday argument References: <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com><0J7300MG5007PJ40@caduceus2.gmu.edu><007a01c6ef3f$900a4c90$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677><0J7700CZEBHAEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu><016701c6f0c7$fab96510$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700CPPJM7WB80@caduceus2.gmu.edu> Message-ID: <017701c6f0d0$a85b5720$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Robin writes >>"What would it be like for me if I were a bat" is, as you know, a bad question. >>Likewise, we can't "find ourselves" as you write, in the 14th century (unless >>someone had... simulations or hidden societies going on back then). > > I don't agree that it matters what your identity is or whether it > holds constant. > The issue is what beliefs are appropriate given the *info* available in a > situation. That could include info, or lack of info, about any aspect of your > identity [!], as well as info about anything else. So it can make sense to ask > what you should believe if you had the info a bat has, or what you should > believe if you had the info that people had in the 14th century. Yes, I could conceivably have the info that a bat has at a certain time and place. But I could not *be* a bat. That is, "I" could not have different info---contrary to what you write above---concerning the critical factors of my identity, the things that make me who I am. The Doomsday Argument asks about chances of *being* an individual living over certain periods, and the point here is that almost all historical periods are inadmissable because you can't be anyone else. Lee From rhanson at gmu.edu Mon Oct 16 03:22:05 2006 From: rhanson at gmu.edu (Robin Hanson) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 23:22:05 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Doomsday argument In-Reply-To: <017701c6f0d0$a85b5720$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com> <0J7300MG5007PJ40@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <007a01c6ef3f$900a4c90$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700CZEBHAEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <016701c6f0c7$fab96510$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700CPPJM7WB80@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <017701c6f0d0$a85b5720$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <0J7700G8HLCUYY60@caduceus1.gmu.edu> At 11:10 PM 10/15/2006, Lee Corbin wrote: > >>"What would it be like for me if I were a bat" is, as you know, a > bad question. > >>Likewise, we can't "find ourselves" as you write, in the 14th > century (unless > >>someone had... simulations or hidden societies going on back then). > > > > I don't agree that it matters what your identity is or whether it > holds constant. > > The issue is what beliefs are appropriate given the *info* available in a > > situation. That could include info, or lack of info, about any > aspect of your > > identity [!], as well as info about anything else. So it can > make sense to ask > > what you should believe if you had the info a bat has, or what you should > > believe if you had the info that people had in the 14th century. > >Yes, I could conceivably have the info that a bat has at a certain time >and place. But I could not *be* a bat. That is, "I" could not have >different info---contrary to what you write above---concerning the >critical factors of my identity, the things that make me who I am. The fact that you cannot be other than who you are does not at all imply that you cannot be uncertain about who you are. You can even be uncertain about critical factors of your identity. If is even possible to imagine that you are uncertain about whether you are a human or a bat. >The Doomsday Argument asks about chances of *being* an individual >living over certain periods, and the point here is that almost all historical >periods are inadmissable because you can't be anyone else. It seems to me that one can imagine being uncertain about what historical period one lives in. Given such uncertainty, we can ask what reasonable beliefs are about that. Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323 From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Mon Oct 16 03:08:20 2006 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 20:08:20 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] When biology and english clash In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20061015140415.021b2ee0@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <20061016030820.26022.qmail@web60524.mail.yahoo.com> --- Damien Broderick wrote: > > >*what* precisely is a bacteria? > > I know it's tiresome of me to mention this, but "a > bacteria" is a > grammatical error, that's what it is. The singular > word everyone in > this thread is looking for is "bacterium". If the English qualify as a people- debatable I know ;) - then E. coli qualify as a bacteria. Especially since a bacterium usually refers to an individual as opposed to a population, a group, or a type. Incidently an individual virus is called a virion. A virus generally refers to a type of virion. And multiple types of virions/virus are referred to as viruses. Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "More persons, on the whole, are humbugged by believing in nothing, than by believing too much." - P. T. Barnum __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From lcorbin at rawbw.com Mon Oct 16 03:42:13 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 20:42:13 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Doomsday argument References: <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com><0J7300MG5007PJ40@caduceus2.gmu.edu><007a01c6ef3f$900a4c90$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677><0J7700CZEBHAEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu><016701c6f0c7$fab96510$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677><0J7700CPPJM7WB80@caduceus2.gmu.edu><017701c6f0d0$a85b5720$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700G8HLCUYY60@caduceus1.gmu.edu> Message-ID: <018201c6f0d5$13a72820$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Robin writes >>The Doomsday Argument asks about chances of *being* an individual >>living over certain periods, and the point here is that almost all historical >>periods are inadmissable because you can't be anyone else. > > It seems to me that one can imagine being uncertain about what historical > period one lives in. Given such uncertainty, we can ask what reasonable > beliefs are about that. Okay, suppose that you do know about different historical periods (let's say Roman Civilization, French Enlightenment, 20th century America, and 22nd century Africa), insofar as you know that they existed or exist. Nonetheless *you*, Robin Hanson, are more certain about 20th century life and that you were raised in it than almost anything else. Were those influences absent, then you would be someone else. But what sense does such a counterfactual make (you *could be* Napoleon)? That's like saying that Soul #29230041608 could attach to Robin Hanson or it could attach to Napoleon Bonaparte. As a good Bayesian, you should use all the information you have, but you *must* use the information that makes you who you are. Everything else *you* know must be predicated up that first. Lee From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Mon Oct 16 03:32:45 2006 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 20:32:45 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] What is the smallest genome possible? In-Reply-To: <002501c6f09b$790f49c0$53094e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <20061016033245.26481.qmail@web60515.mail.yahoo.com> --- John K Clark wrote: > Robert Bradbury Wrote: > > > As at least one virus has recently been found with > a multi-thousand base > > genome so I think the virus and bacteria > definitions are starting to get > > very fuzzy. > > I disagree, the distinction between a bacterium > (thank you Damien) and a > virus (if virii or viri is a real word it damn well > shouldn't be) isn't the > size of its genome, it's the fact that a bacterium > has a metabolism while a > virus does not. For the sake of thread discipline, I have moved the grammatical discussuion to a separate thread. However this topic is an interesting one. I agree that a metabolism AND a genome distinguish bacteria from viruses that have only a genome. However, Robert's point is still valid. There are things called mycoplasmas that dwell in a twilight world between viruses and bacteria. They have circular genomes and some housekeeping genes, yet are obligate parasites incapable of living outside of a host cell. They also share a plasma membrane with bacteria but lack a cell wall. And they have tiny genomes compared to bacteria. So the question remains: Are they viruses that evolved plasma membranes, parasitic bacteria that got lazy and ditched most of their genes, or simply a thing unto themeselves? On the other hand theer are viruses like herpes viruses (including CMV, EBV, and others)that have genomes in excess of 150kb (kilobases not kilobytes). Amazingly the genomes of some herpes viruses include counterfeit copies of human MHC genes (the id mechanism of self for the immune system) that actually fool the host defenses into "thinking" a cell is not infected. > However I agree with you that it > might sometimes become a > little difficult deciding if something is a > organelle or a bacterium. > gets even worse, a mitochondria cannot live unless > it is imbedded deep > inside another creature, but then neither can a > tapeworm. When a organism > evolves into a parasite or symbiote it always > becomes simpler. It has a whole becomes simpler, but the genes it keeps should remain as highly derived as the free living counterpart. That's my story at any rate and I am sticking with it. ;) Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "More persons, on the whole, are humbugged by believing in nothing, than by believing too much." - P. T. Barnum __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From fauxever at sprynet.com Mon Oct 16 04:08:41 2006 From: fauxever at sprynet.com (Olga Bourlin) Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 21:08:41 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Halloween Hangman Game Message-ID: <002001c6f0d8$c4bbc500$6600a8c0@brainiac> Be warned: this can be a terrible time sink. http://dedge.com/flash/hangman/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jonkc at att.net Mon Oct 16 05:41:36 2006 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 01:41:36 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution? References: <8d71341e0610122137o2a060ea7ic41153f32c946caf@mail.gmail.com><0J72004PHZJ09G90@caduceus1.gmu.edu><4530062F.3080503@pobox.com><007901c6ef3d$738298e0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677><7641ddc60610140739i5c7ec889q5cab74dd11082cba@mail.gmail.com><009401c6efaa$7d7e0f10$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <001c01c6f0e5$c3ea0a30$ac084e0c@MyComputer> Heartland, High Priest of the Unique Atom and Sacred Original Cult Wrote: > So yes, there exists an objectively correct (no quotes) way to determine > whether person A is/isn't person B. Yes, assuming God is the one doing the observing, but then God is a bit of a bore. Astronomically more important than objectivity is subjectivity, if you think feel and have person B memories then you are person B. And if God disagrees then God can stick it where the sun don't shine. > the reason why a duplicate isn't the original is because the duplicate > doesn't extend the original's ability to access reality after original is > dead. Translation: The copy isn't the original because he isn't the original and he isn't the original because he's not the original. That is to say, the copy doesn't have those same sacred atoms that Heartland can distinguish from all other atoms in the observable universe but that the scientific method can not. John K Clark From jonkc at att.net Mon Oct 16 06:15:54 2006 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 02:15:54 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution?. References: <8d71341e0610122137o2a060ea7ic41153f32c946caf@mail.gmail.com><0J72004PHZJ09G90@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <4530062F.3080503@pobox.com><007901c6ef3d$738298e0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700FROCI9SQE0@caduceus1.gmu.edu> Message-ID: <003a01c6f0ea$9562c710$ac084e0c@MyComputer> "Robin Hanson" > You seem to be rejecting the concept of indexical uncertainty What sort of index could you possibly provide to convince me that I am not me? As I've said before, objectivity be damned! If subjectively I'm John K Clark then I am. And even if I'm wrong and it's all an illusion it still doesn't matter, not when you're dealing with an illusion that incredibly gigantically astronomically good. > An agent who has forked but has not yet found out which forked agent he is > can sensibly have ncertainty about his identity. I can't see how. The agent might have uncertainty about what Everett style universe he was now living in, but not that he is he. The uncertainty is external not internal. To me the idea that someone can think like person B, feel like person B, believe he is person B, and have all of person B's memories, but still not be person B is, well.., I don't believe gibberish is too strong a word. John K Clark From eugen at leitl.org Mon Oct 16 07:01:58 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 09:01:58 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Doomsday argument In-Reply-To: <4532EE08.2000802@betterhumans.com> References: <0J7700CZEBHAEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <016701c6f0c7$fab96510$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <4532EE08.2000802@betterhumans.com> Message-ID: <20061016070158.GQ6974@leitl.org> On Sun, Oct 15, 2006 at 10:27:20PM -0400, George Dvorsky wrote: > Self-sampling most definitely gives strength to the Doomsday Argument. I find it interesting that so many subscribe to the SSA religiously. You don't have any degrees of freedom at all in this experiment of self-observation. > The fact that I find myself as an individual in pre-Singularity Wherever you go, there you are. You're not an omniscient external observer, randomly picking items from the same reference class. You're only observing an infinitely self-biased sample of one: yourself. > existence is a very troubling observation, particularly given the I only find it troubling, that people are taking number games religiously. > assumption that there should be far more post-Singularity individuals > than in a pre-Singularity civ. It also indicates that the most probable > observation of a civ is pre-Singularity and not post, a possible > indicator that there are no post-Singularity civs. Only if you build on invalid premises. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From velvethum at hotmail.com Mon Oct 16 07:05:43 2006 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 03:05:43 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution? References: <8d71341e0610122137o2a060ea7ic41153f32c946caf@mail.gmail.com><0J72004PHZJ09G90@caduceus1.gmu.edu><4530062F.3080503@pobox.com><007901c6ef3d$738298e0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677><7641ddc60610140739i5c7ec889q5cab74dd11082cba@mail.gmail.com><009401c6efaa$7d7e0f10$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <001c01c6f0e5$c3ea0a30$ac084e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: John K Clark: > Astronomically more important than objectivity is subjectivity, if you > think feel and have person B memories then you are person B. And if God > disagrees then God can stick it where the sun don't shine. Subjectivity is more important than objectivity? So, according to you, the truth is what *you* want or feel is the truth? If so, then you are nothing more than a faith-based scientist and you should stop talking to me. Heartland: >> the reason why a duplicate isn't the original is because the duplicate >> doesn't extend the original's ability to access reality after original is >> dead. John K Clark: > Translation: The copy isn't the original because he isn't the original and > he isn't the original because he's not the original. That is to say, the > copy doesn't have those same sacred atoms that Heartland can distinguish > from all other atoms in the observable universe but that the scientific > method can not. I guess you can't stop yourself from inventing these moronic interpretations, can you? It's hard for me to believe that you actually believe in the majority of stuff you write. I'm sorry that I can't reward you with more attention for this silliness. S. From pharos at gmail.com Mon Oct 16 10:49:31 2006 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 11:49:31 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] You're Fired In-Reply-To: <0J7700CZHBHCEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> References: <0J7700CZHBHCEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> Message-ID: On 10/16/06, Robin Hanson wrote: > > You're Fired, Forbes, October 30, 2006. > > In the above OpEd I introduce a wide audience to my proposal to put > market in charge of whether to fire the CEO. Not only would this > add value to companies, it would change the way we think about who > does and should "run" our major organizations. > I don't really see why random market movements should be used as the basis for directorial employment. There are two main criticisms. 1) Stock markets are random. 2) Company directors are mostly PR or insignificant. The market swings through booms and slumps and some sectors have mini booms and slumps. If markets were efficient then successful investors contrary to the herd (like Buffet) could not exist. (1). Some directors will be lucky to be in the right place at the right time and some won't. There are only a very few directors whose decisions have much effect on company performance. Usually in new, fast-moving sectors where rapid change is paramount. The vast majority of company directors are of the type "I've worked 10 years to get my snout into the trough and I'm going to make the most of it." (Because everyone else does it as well). Then they concentrate on PR, keeping their lucrative employment, increasing their stock options, accumulating huge pension funds, and ensuring huge payoffs for terminating their employment. Company staff voting is a much better system for controlling the excesses of the board. If the company staff are also the shareholders, you get the best of all possible worlds. ;) BillK (1) From rhanson at gmu.edu Mon Oct 16 11:47:11 2006 From: rhanson at gmu.edu (Robin Hanson) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 07:47:11 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] You're Fired In-Reply-To: References: <0J7700CZHBHCEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> Message-ID: <0J7800JSB8QOAT70@caduceus1.gmu.edu> At 06:49 AM 10/16/2006, BillK wrote: > > http://hanson.gmu.edu/YoureFired.htm > > You're Fired, Forbes, October 30, 2006. > > In the above OpEd I introduce a wide audience to my proposal to put > > market in charge of whether to fire the CEO. > >I don't really see why random market movements should be used as the >basis for directorial employment. > >There are two main criticisms. >1) Stock markets are random. ... >The market swings through booms and slumps and some sectors have mini >booms and slumps. If markets were efficient then successful investors >contrary to the herd (like Buffet) could not exist. (1). Claiming that stock markets do not contain all possible information, and so are not perfectly "efficient," is very different from claiming that they are completely random and contain no info whatsoever. My proposal only needs markets to contain a bit more info than the other processes one might use to fire CEOs. >2) Company directors are mostly PR or insignificant. ... >Some directors will be lucky to be in the right place at the right >time and some won't. There are only a very few directors whose >decisions have much effect on company performance. Usually in new, >fast-moving sectors where rapid change is paramount. If the CEO makes no difference, and markets recognized that fact, then my proposal will not advise firing the CEO. The markets would only have an impact when they estimated that they would make a difference. >The vast majority of company directors are of the type "I've worked 10 >years to get my snout into the trough and I'm going to make the most >of it." (Because everyone else does it as well). Then they >concentrate on PR, keeping their lucrative employment, increasing >their stock options, accumulating huge pension funds, and ensuring >huge payoffs for terminating their employment. Similar methods could be used to advise on CEO compensation. If markets agree with you that CEOs are paid too much, they would advise cutting back. >Company staff voting is a much better system for controlling the >excesses of the board. If the company staff are also the shareholders, >you get the best of all possible worlds. ;) As you know, that situation is very rare. Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323 From rhanson at gmu.edu Mon Oct 16 11:58:17 2006 From: rhanson at gmu.edu (Robin Hanson) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 07:58:17 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Indexical Uncertainty In-Reply-To: <018201c6f0d5$13a72820$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com> <0J7300MG5007PJ40@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <007a01c6ef3f$900a4c90$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700CZEBHAEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <016701c6f0c7$fab96510$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700CPPJM7WB80@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <017701c6f0d0$a85b5720$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700G8HLCUYY60@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <018201c6f0d5$13a72820$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <0J7800FDW996IW10@caduceus2.gmu.edu> At 11:42 PM 10/15/2006, Lee Corbin wrote: > > It seems to me that one can imagine being uncertain about what historical > > period one lives in. Given such uncertainty, we can ask what reasonable > > beliefs are about that. > >But what sense does such a counterfactual make (you *could be* Napoleon)? >That's like saying that Soul #29230041608 could attach to Robin Hanson or >it could attach to Napoleon Bonaparte. As a good Bayesian, you should use >all the information you have, but you *must* use the information >that makes you >who you are. Everything else *you* know must be predicated up that first. At 02:15 AM 10/16/2006, John K Clark wrote: > > You seem to be rejecting the concept of indexical uncertainty > >What sort of index could you possibly provide to convince me that I am not >me? ... The agent might have uncertainty about what Everett style >universe he was now living in, but not that he is he. At 03:01 AM 10/16/2006, Eugen* Leitl wrote: > > The fact that I find myself as an individual in pre-Singularity > >Wherever you go, there you are. You're not an omniscient >external observer, randomly picking items from the same >reference class. You're only observing an infinitely self-biased >sample of one: yourself. Let's start with simple examples. I might wake up and for a moment not be able to remember whether it is Monday, when I can sleep in, or Tuesday, when I need to get up early. This is not uncertainty about the world, it is uncertainty about who I am, whether I am Monday-Robin or Tuesday-Robin. I might also have amnesia, permanent or temporary. For example, I might have been having a dream about my life as Lee Corbin, and so I might wake up and for a moment not remember if I was really Robin Hanson or Lee Corbin. When I ask "Am I Robin?" the "I" in this sentence cannot be by definition equal to Robin, as then the claim would be true by definition. If I am able to be uncertain about this, it must be that "I" refers to something other than "Robin," so that it can be only a contingent fact about the world that "I" am "Robin." If Lee could also have had a dream that confused him about whether he was Lee or Robin, then when he asks "Am I Robin?" the "I" in his question must refer to something different than the "I" when I ask the question. So if we are to be able to represent the uncertainty in both of these questions, I can't see how to escape having things like "Soul #29230041608" in our language. Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323 From rhanson at gmu.edu Mon Oct 16 12:02:19 2006 From: rhanson at gmu.edu (Robin Hanson) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 08:02:19 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution?. In-Reply-To: <003a01c6f0ea$9562c710$ac084e0c@MyComputer> References: <8d71341e0610122137o2a060ea7ic41153f32c946caf@mail.gmail.com> <0J72004PHZJ09G90@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <4530062F.3080503@pobox.com> <007901c6ef3d$738298e0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700FROCI9SQE0@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <003a01c6f0ea$9562c710$ac084e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <0J7800JAX9FWASA0@caduceus1.gmu.edu> On 10/13/2006, Russell Wallace wrote: >suppose you're copied into 2 copies, A and B, then B is copied into >999, should you subjectively expect to have a 1/2 probability of >finding "yourself" as A, as intuition and causal logic would >suggest, or 1/1000, as measure accounting would suggest? On reflection, I say 1/1000. If this situation is repeated many times, that is the frequency that will be recorded in the vast majority of agent history statistics. Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323 From jay.dugger at gmail.com Mon Oct 16 12:41:30 2006 From: jay.dugger at gmail.com (Jay Dugger) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 07:41:30 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Philosophical phylogeny In-Reply-To: <1488.163.1.72.81.1160680913.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> References: <20061011011838.26732.qmail@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> <1488.163.1.72.81.1160680913.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <5366105b0610160541g5fd71758j4bc50d1c4b911c08@mail.gmail.com> I eagerly await seeing more memetic phylogenic trees, Anders. Even more interesting: your methods and tools for generating these maps. If you've posted this already, where? I've not studied graph theory, so forgive an ignorant question. Does there exist a way to measure messiness? Finally, for your transhumanist phylogeny do you plan to map an overlap between science fiction authors and non-fiction works? I think in particular of three examples. Bernal's influence on Stapledon; Danridge Cole's & G.K. O'Neill's influence on Zebrowski, Sterling, et.al.; and Scott Westerfeld's political visualization tools on your own similar work. -- Jay Dugger http://jaydugger.suprglu.com Sometimes the delete key serves best. From asa at nada.kth.se Mon Oct 16 13:17:30 2006 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 15:17:30 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Philosophical phylogeny In-Reply-To: <5366105b0610160541g5fd71758j4bc50d1c4b911c08@mail.gmail.com> References: <20061011011838.26732.qmail@web60513.mail.yahoo.com> <1488.163.1.72.81.1160680913.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> <5366105b0610160541g5fd71758j4bc50d1c4b911c08@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4820.147.67.241.226.1161004650.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Jay Dugger wrote: > I eagerly await seeing more memetic phylogenic trees, Anders. Even > more interesting: your methods and tools for generating these maps. If > you've posted this already, where? My current setup consists of simple files with rows consisting of "name1" "name2" "name3" "name4" ... This read by a matlab script that puts the names into a set, and then prints a file in the GML language with nodes and edges. The map layout is then done with the wonderful program yEd, free for downloading and fully functional. I only wish the clustering algorithm was documented. Making the initial file and fiddling with the layout coloring and style is what takes most time. > I've not studied graph theory, so forgive an ignorant question. Does > there exist a way to measure messiness? Hmm, not that I know of. But one could compare to a random graph. If you calculate the diameter and local clustering (the average number of triangles each node is in), in a regular localized graph the clustering is high and the diameter is high. In a small world graph diameter is small but there is much clustering. In a random (messy) graph the clustering is small and the diameter is small. Graphs with low clustering and high diameter are probably tree-like (not messy?). > Finally, for your transhumanist phylogeny do you plan to map an > overlap between science fiction authors and non-fiction works? I think > in particular of three examples. Bernal's influence on Stapledon; > Danridge Cole's & G.K. O'Neill's influence on Zebrowski, Sterling, > et.al.; and Scott Westerfeld's political visualization tools on your > own similar work. Yes, I don't think it makes sense to leave them out. And thanks for the tips! -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From jef at jefallbright.net Mon Oct 16 14:33:54 2006 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 07:33:54 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Slawomir, it appears this would have been a good opportunity to paraphrase your understanding of what the other person is trying to say, rather than responding with the shallow implication that he's being stupid. John is making a hugely important point that many people don't grasp, that *all meaning* is subjective. Some people misinterpret this to mean *all knowledge* is subjective, and either (1) go to the postmodernist extreme of absolute relativism, or (2) take righteous umbrage in defense of (increasingly) objective scientific practice. Either reaction would be missing the point. John also points out that you repeatedly offer circular definitions; such behavior being the crux of both cognitive dissonance and endlessly unproductive argument. In a discussion such as this, one would hope to clearly highlight the differences between two points of view, to be left for resolution in the (indefinite) future as each person's knowledge base converges on an increasingly accurate model of reality. - Jef > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org > [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Heartland > Sent: Monday, October 16, 2006 12:06 AM > To: ExI chat list > Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution? > > John K Clark: > > Astronomically more important than objectivity is > subjectivity, if you > > think feel and have person B memories then you are person B. And if > > God disagrees then God can stick it where the sun don't shine. > > Subjectivity is more important than objectivity? So, > according to you, the truth is what *you* want or feel is the > truth? If so, then you are nothing more than a faith-based > scientist and you should stop talking to me. > > Heartland: > >> the reason why a duplicate isn't the original is because the > >> duplicate doesn't extend the original's ability to access reality > >> after original is dead. > > John K Clark: > > Translation: The copy isn't the original because he isn't > the original > > and he isn't the original because he's not the original. That is to > > say, the copy doesn't have those same sacred atoms that > Heartland can > > distinguish from all other atoms in the observable universe > but that > > the scientific method can not. > > I guess you can't stop yourself from inventing these moronic > interpretations, can you? It's hard for me to believe that > you actually believe in the majority of stuff you write. I'm > sorry that I can't reward you with more attention for this silliness. > > S. > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From jonkc at att.net Mon Oct 16 14:51:46 2006 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 10:51:46 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution? References: <8d71341e0610122137o2a060ea7ic41153f32c946caf@mail.gmail.com><0J72004PHZJ09G90@caduceus1.gmu.edu><4530062F.3080503@pobox.com><007901c6ef3d$738298e0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677><7641ddc60610140739i5c7ec889q5cab74dd11082cba@mail.gmail.com><009401c6efaa$7d7e0f10$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677><001c01c6f0e5$c3ea0a30$ac084e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <002c01c6f132$a018da80$d90a4e0c@MyComputer> Heartland, High Priest of the Unique Atom and Sacred Original Cult Wrote: > Subjectivity is more important than objectivity? ABSOLUTELY! The end of subjectivity is the very definition of death. > So, according to you, the truth is > what *you* want or feel is the truth? If you're talking about my identity then you are completely correct, if I think I'm me then I'm me. And I don't want to brag or anything but I am the world's greatest expert on John K Clark; and I think I'm him. > If so, then you are nothing more than a faith-based scientist One thing and one thing only takes priority over the scientific method, but it certainly isn't faith, its direct experience. If I stick my hand into a fire I don't need science or even logic to know the sensation is unpleasant, in a similar way someone telling me I'm not conscious I just think I am is downright comical. > you should stop talking to me I'm commenting on your childish ideas, it you don't wish to read what I say just block my posts, it's really not hard, I'll bet even you could figure out how to do it. By the way, the running total for your last post was 3 question marks and 3 periods, come on you can do better than 50%. John K Clark From jef at jefallbright.net Mon Oct 16 15:12:46 2006 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 08:12:46 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Indexical Uncertainty In-Reply-To: <0J7800FDW996IW10@caduceus2.gmu.edu> Message-ID: Robin Hanson wrote: > When I ask "Am I Robin?" the "I" in this sentence cannot be > by definition equal to Robin, as then the claim would be true > by definition. If I am able to be uncertain about this, it > must be that "I" refers to something other than "Robin," > so that it can be only a contingent fact about the world that > "I" am "Robin." > > If Lee could also have had a dream that confused him about > whether he was Lee or Robin, then when he asks "Am I Robin?" > the "I" in his question must refer to something different > than the "I" when I ask the > question. So if we are > to be able to represent the uncertainty in both of these > questions, I can't see how to escape having things like "Soul > #29230041608" in our language. For these same reasons, I say that the Self is an illusion, albeit a necessary one for any agent. So I agree that we must assign such labels, but I hope that we can also become clearly aware that as with all labels, even those which refer to our "own self", the map is not the territory. When more of society has arrived at this higher-level, pragmatic understanding of self as the referent of agency, then it will become obvious that the same rules apply to collective agencies as to individuals, and problems such as Tragedy of the Commons will no longer appear paradoxical. - Jef From george at betterhumans.com Mon Oct 16 14:26:41 2006 From: george at betterhumans.com (George Dvorsky) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 10:26:41 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Doomsday argument In-Reply-To: <20061016070158.GQ6974@leitl.org> References: <0J7700CZEBHAEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <016701c6f0c7$fab96510$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <4532EE08.2000802@betterhumans.com> <20061016070158.GQ6974@leitl.org> Message-ID: <453396A1.7020500@betterhumans.com> Eugen, You and I have gone back and forth many times on the topic of the SSA, and we clearly have differing perspectives on the matter. One thing I want to make clear, however, is that the SSA does not indicate the *truth*, merely what you should probabilistically *assume* given insufficient data. I will admit that it is at best a philosophical mind exercise, but it's one that, imo, offers some profound insight as where we find ourselves within certain reference classes. Cheers, George Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Sun, Oct 15, 2006 at 10:27:20PM -0400, George Dvorsky wrote: > >> Self-sampling most definitely gives strength to the Doomsday Argument. > > I find it interesting that so many subscribe to the SSA religiously. > You don't have any degrees of freedom at all in this experiment > of self-observation. > >> The fact that I find myself as an individual in pre-Singularity > > Wherever you go, there you are. You're not an omniscient > external observer, randomly picking items from the same > reference class. You're only observing an infinitely self-biased > sample of one: yourself. > >> existence is a very troubling observation, particularly given the > > I only find it troubling, that people are taking number games > religiously. > >> assumption that there should be far more post-Singularity individuals >> than in a pre-Singularity civ. It also indicates that the most probable >> observation of a civ is pre-Singularity and not post, a possible >> indicator that there are no post-Singularity civs. > > Only if you build on invalid premises. > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From eugen at leitl.org Mon Oct 16 16:32:47 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 18:32:47 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Doomsday argument In-Reply-To: <453396A1.7020500@betterhumans.com> References: <0J7700CZEBHAEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <016701c6f0c7$fab96510$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <4532EE08.2000802@betterhumans.com> <20061016070158.GQ6974@leitl.org> <453396A1.7020500@betterhumans.com> Message-ID: <20061016163247.GC6974@leitl.org> On Mon, Oct 16, 2006 at 10:26:41AM -0400, George Dvorsky wrote: > You and I have gone back and forth many times on the topic of the SSA, > and we clearly have differing perspectives on the matter. One thing I George, if it's science, it has to be straightforward. There have to be zero space for interpretation. There must be a rigorous argument as to why SSA must be valid for first-person single-instance observers, or not. I don't see such reasons, but then I'm not an expert. Those here who are experts please set me straight. > want to make clear, however, is that the SSA does not indicate the > *truth*, merely what you should probabilistically *assume* given But the whole point of self-observation is that you can't argue probabilistically, because it's an infinitely biased sample of one. I must be missing something, because it is completely obvious to me. > insufficient data. I will admit that it is at best a philosophical mind > exercise, but it's one that, imo, offers some profound insight as where > we find ourselves within certain reference classes. I agree that probability applies to external observers, assuming sufficient number of samples. But we're not external observers. Our ability to observe is causally linked to our existance. I can infer no probability from a self-measurement, other than me (a member of a particular class) exists. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Mon Oct 16 18:38:20 2006 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 11:38:20 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] You're Fired In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20061016183820.84626.qmail@web60516.mail.yahoo.com> --- BillK wrote: > Some directors will be lucky to be in the right > place at the right > time and some won't. There are only a very few > directors whose > decisions have much effect on company performance. > Usually in new, > fast-moving sectors where rapid change is paramount. If you are right and that is the case, then there is no justification whatsoever to huge CEO salaries. Cap their salaries at ten times the salary of the average employee and use the savings to pay the shareholders dividends. > The vast majority of company directors are of the > type "I've worked 10 > years to get my snout into the trough and I'm going > to make the most > of it." (Because everyone else does it as well). > Then they > concentrate on PR, keeping their lucrative > employment, increasing > their stock options, accumulating huge pension > funds, and ensuring > huge payoffs for terminating their employment. If their decisions make NO DIFFERENCE in the performance of the company, they are no more worthy than the middle manager who devotes thirty years of his life to a company only to get a meager pension and gold watch. > > Company staff voting is a much better system for > controlling the > excesses of the board. If the company staff are also > the shareholders, > you get the best of all possible worlds. ;) This might work although I worry that such will still suffer the problem of becoming a popularity contest. At least a market model would be presumambly more objective if less nimble. Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "More persons, on the whole, are humbugged by believing in nothing, than by believing too much." - P. T. Barnum __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From andrew at ceruleansystems.com Mon Oct 16 19:38:39 2006 From: andrew at ceruleansystems.com (J. Andrew Rogers) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 12:38:39 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] You're Fired In-Reply-To: <20061016183820.84626.qmail@web60516.mail.yahoo.com> References: <20061016183820.84626.qmail@web60516.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <9C4A81DF-C7FF-4492-97D1-E06B9020A293@ceruleansystems.com> On Oct 16, 2006, at 11:38 AM, The Avantguardian wrote: > --- BillK wrote: >> Some directors will be lucky to be in the right >> place at the right >> time and some won't. There are only a very few >> directors whose >> decisions have much effect on company performance. >> Usually in new, >> fast-moving sectors where rapid change is paramount. > > If you are right and that is the case, then there is > no justification whatsoever to huge CEO salaries. Cap > their salaries at ten times the salary of the average > employee and use the savings to pay the shareholders > dividends. This type of populist thinking is naive and wrong. If this was really true, the shareholders already have the power to do it. The kind of CEO that gets paid $10 million is also the kind of CEO that immediately adds $1 billion in value to a company, making it one of the best investments a shareholder can make. Only a fool would think this is a bad deal for the shareholder. If paying the mail boy a ton of money had the same ROI, the shareholders would be all over that too. As a point of fact, most CEOs do not make all that much money and they have to put up with hours, risks, and other crap no ordinary employee has to. Not surprisingly, in a free market a good CEO is usually worth to shareholders what they are paid whether you recognize it or not, anecdotes notwithstanding. A somewhat relevant tangent is that until the Bush tax cuts, the tax code made this kind of indirect investment in high-value CEOs one of the best ways of returning value to shareholders. Now that old- fashioned dividends are (for the moment) a moderately good (but not great) vehicle for returning value to shareholders, it will mitigate some of the creative ways in which shareholders try to maximize their profit. Much of what people dislike about how money is shuffled around and allocated at companies is a direct result of stupid taxation policies and regulations and the investor market responding to said stupid taxation policies and regulations. The government created this environment for the most part, not the companies. J. Andrew Rogers From hibbert at mydruthers.com Mon Oct 16 21:42:41 2006 From: hibbert at mydruthers.com (Chris Hibbert) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 14:42:41 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Indexical Uncertainty In-Reply-To: <0J7800FDW996IW10@caduceus2.gmu.edu> References: <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com> <0J7300MG5007PJ40@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <007a01c6ef3f$900a4c90$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700CZEBHAEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <016701c6f0c7$fab96510$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700CPPJM7WB80@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <017701c6f0d0$a85b5720$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700G8HLCUYY60@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <018201c6f0d5$13a72820$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7800FDW996IW10@caduceus2.gmu.edu> Message-ID: <4533FCD1.2090006@mydruthers.com> > When I ask "Am I Robin?" the "I" in this sentence cannot be by > definition equal to Robin, as then the claim would be true by > definition. If I am able to be uncertain about this, it must be that > "I" refers to something other than "Robin," so that it can be only a > contingent fact about the world that "I" am "Robin." > > If Lee could also have had a dream that confused him about whether he > was Lee or Robin, then when he asks "Am I Robin?" the "I" in his > question must refer to something different than the "I" when I ask > the question. So if we are to be able to represent the uncertainty > in both of these questions, I can't see how to escape having things > like "Soul #29230041608" in our language. This seems like a confusing way to think about it, but maybe I'm misunderstanding the referents. As a third party, describing the two situations, I would have said that the question was about which BODY was Robin Hanson, not which SOUL was. In the first paragraph I quoted above, the third party would tie the word "I" to a particular body which was recently observed to have woken up in Fairfax County, and to note that the body was wondering whether or not it was a particular person currently employed at GMU. From our external point of view, we already know that the answer is yes, but we're not sure how long it will take for the body and brain to figure that out. In the second paragraph, we have a hypothetical question about a different body, presumably situated in Santa Clara County. In the hypothetical, the Santa Clara body has recently woken up and is wondering something similar. Once again, the question is about the identity of a particular body. Was your use of "Soul #2923..." metaphorical? Or is the question deeper than it looks to me? Have you already assumed that consciousnesses might be transplanted or something? Chris -- Currently reading: Marc Bekoff, The Cognitive Animal; Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum; Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature Chris Hibbert hibbert at mydruthers.com Blog: http://pancrit.org From rhanson at gmu.edu Mon Oct 16 22:35:52 2006 From: rhanson at gmu.edu (Robin Hanson) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 18:35:52 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Indexical Uncertainty In-Reply-To: <4533FCD1.2090006@mydruthers.com> References: <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com> <0J7300MG5007PJ40@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <007a01c6ef3f$900a4c90$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700CZEBHAEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <016701c6f0c7$fab96510$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700CPPJM7WB80@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <017701c6f0d0$a85b5720$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700G8HLCUYY60@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <018201c6f0d5$13a72820$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7800FDW996IW10@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <4533FCD1.2090006@mydruthers.com> Message-ID: <0J7900HQZ2V2V580@caduceus2.gmu.edu> At 05:42 PM 10/16/2006, Chris Hibbert wrote: > > If Lee could also have had a dream that confused him about whether he > > was Lee or Robin, then when he asks "Am I Robin?" the "I" in his > > question must refer to something different than the "I" when I ask > > the question. So if we are to be able to represent the uncertainty > > in both of these questions, I can't see how to escape having things > > like "Soul #29230041608" in our language. > >This seems like a confusing way to think about it, but maybe I'm >misunderstanding the referents. As a third party, describing the two >situations, I would have said that the question was about which BODY was >Robin Hanson, not which SOUL was. ... >Was your use of "Soul #2923..." metaphorical? Or is the question deeper >than it looks to me? Have you already assumed that consciousnesses >might be transplanted or something? I was just following Lee's notation. A better name might be "Index#2923". But it is more about minds than bodies. You know you are a mind, but you might not know which body that corresponds to. Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323 From russell.wallace at gmail.com Mon Oct 16 23:55:05 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 00:55:05 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Indexical Uncertainty In-Reply-To: <0J7900HQZ2V2V580@caduceus2.gmu.edu> References: <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com> <0J7700CZEBHAEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <016701c6f0c7$fab96510$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700CPPJM7WB80@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <017701c6f0d0$a85b5720$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700G8HLCUYY60@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <018201c6f0d5$13a72820$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7800FDW996IW10@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <4533FCD1.2090006@mydruthers.com> <0J7900HQZ2V2V580@caduceus2.gmu.edu> Message-ID: <8d71341e0610161655m444b921bg9218946cd0eb71da@mail.gmail.com> On 10/16/06, Robin Hanson wrote: > > I was just following Lee's notation. A better name might be > "Index#2923". > But it is more about minds than bodies. You know you are a mind, but you > might not know which body that corresponds to. > To see why it doesn't make sense to say "I might not be me", consider that fundamentally there is nothing ontologically privileged about one's past and future selves as opposed to other people. Do you think it makes sense to ask "why am I currently my current self as opposed to my 10 year old self or my 70 year old self?" -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From velvethum at hotmail.com Tue Oct 17 00:54:02 2006 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 20:54:02 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution? References: Message-ID: Jef: > Slawomir, it appears this would have been a good opportunity to > paraphrase your understanding of what the other person is trying to say, > rather than responding with the shallow implication that he's being > stupid. Ok. Since you insist, I will paraphrase what he's saying. He claims that beliefs are equivalent to knowledge so if he "thinks" he is John Clark, then it must be the case that he is John Clark. So, according to this view, if I brainwashed him into believing he was an ant, that belief and nothing else determines the truth value of the statement, "John Clark is a ant." That's simply nonsense. Jef: > John is making a hugely important point that many people don't grasp, > that *all meaning* is subjective. It's also a red herring in this debate that doesn't pertain to the things I'm talking about. Jef: > John also points out that you repeatedly offer circular definitions; > such behavior being the crux of both cognitive dissonance and endlessly > unproductive argument. Jef, you can't continue to accuse me of these things without giving specific examples. Jef: > In a discussion such as this, one would hope to clearly highlight the > differences between two points of view, to be left for resolution in the > (indefinite) future as each person's knowledge base converges on an > increasingly accurate model of reality. As you may recall, not long ago, I've spent a whole month highlighting those differences on this list. At some point one has to accept that some people have the capacity to understand those differences and some don't. It's okay if not everyone understands. Really. In summary, I'm talking exclusively about physical survival, not some hopelessly confused and abstract notion of personal identity. I don't care who I am as long as I am. (BTW, the "I's" here mean something very different from what you and John Clark think). I don't care about my "pattern." I only care about the process that wrote this sentence and its potential to experience something instead of nothing in the future. At the end of the day you have to ask yourself 2 questions: "What does it really mean to survive?" and, "Why does survival matter?" Without converging on the same answers to these questions first, there's absolutely no point in continuing this discussion. S. From rhanson at gmu.edu Tue Oct 17 02:38:03 2006 From: rhanson at gmu.edu (Robin Hanson) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 22:38:03 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Indexical Uncertainty In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0610161655m444b921bg9218946cd0eb71da@mail.gmail.co m> References: <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com> <0J7700CZEBHAEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <016701c6f0c7$fab96510$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700CPPJM7WB80@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <017701c6f0d0$a85b5720$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700G8HLCUYY60@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <018201c6f0d5$13a72820$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7800FDW996IW10@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <4533FCD1.2090006@mydruthers.com> <0J7900HQZ2V2V580@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <8d71341e0610161655m444b921bg9218946cd0eb71da@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <0J7900MEPDZFB1F0@caduceus1.gmu.edu> At 07:55 PM 10/16/2006, Russell Wallace wrote: >I was just following Lee's notation. A better name might be "Index#2923". >But it is more about minds than bodies. You know you are a mind, but you >might not know which body that corresponds to. > >To see why it doesn't make sense to say "I might not be me", >consider that fundamentally there is nothing ontologically >privileged about one's past and future selves as opposed to other >people. Do you think it makes sense to ask "why am I currently my >current self as opposed to my 10 year old self or my 70 year old self?" I think I agree to your claim about lack of privilege. Whether it makes sense to ask "why" depends on more details, but it can make sense to ask which of these creatures you are, if you are uncertain. And it could make sense to ask which of them will remember being you, or which ones you remember being. Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323 From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Tue Oct 17 02:41:23 2006 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 19:41:23 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Fictional Singularity Movie In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20061017024123.60596.qmail@web37401.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Hey y'all, I'm wondering when the first "blockbuster" Singularity movie will emerge out of Hollywood. I have no doubt that it will happen eventually. If a film isn't already underway, this might be a good opportunity for someone in the pro-Singularity camp to make a positive contribution to Singularity awareness. The masses want to be entertained if they are to be expected to learn anything. I think Ray Kurzweil would be a good candidate for writing the screenplay (if he was interested) for several reasons: expertise, name recognition, balanced analyses, and a double major including creative writing. And I think the Wachowski brothers would make good Directors for it. (They are famous for "The Matrix" of course). To guard against the possibility that a film would only add to the "fiction" interpretation of the Singularity meme, the film could begin with an brief written explanation to the effect that: although the film itself is fictional, the Singularity is a "real" projected event that is anticipated by many experts in various fields. (Or something like that). A good, thought provoking film, might get a lot of people talking who otherwise might not learn of the Singularity for quite some time. Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich --------------------------------- All-new Yahoo! Mail - Fire up a more powerful email and get things done faster. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lcorbin at rawbw.com Tue Oct 17 03:24:24 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 20:24:24 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Indexical Uncertainty References: <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com><0J7300MG5007PJ40@caduceus2.gmu.edu><007a01c6ef3f$900a4c90$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677><0J7700CZEBHAEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu><016701c6f0c7$fab96510$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677><0J7700CPPJM7WB80@caduceus2.gmu.edu><017701c6f0d0$a85b5720$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677><0J7700G8HLCUYY60@caduceus1.gmu.edu><018201c6f0d5$13a72820$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7800FDW996IW10@caduceus2.gmu.edu> Message-ID: <020101c6f19b$e0151220$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Robin writes > Let's start with simple examples. I might wake up and for a moment not be > able to remember whether it is Monday, when I can sleep in, or Tuesday, > when I need to get up early. This is not uncertainty about the world, it is > uncertainty about who I am, whether I am Monday-Robin or Tuesday-Robin. I claim and I thought you also held that "Monday Robin" and "Tuesday Robin" are the same person (differing only infinitesimally). Surely you agree that you are the same person from day to day (differing so little as to be of no consequence)? Or is this an evil meta-joke on your part, and you're fiendishly trying to convince me that you aren't Robin? > I might also have amnesia, permanent or temporary. For example, I might > have been having a dream about my life as Lee Corbin, and so I might wake > up and for a moment not remember if I was really Robin Hanson or Lee Corbin. But indeed, if you have enough amnesia, then absolutely you are *not* the same person. Even in popular culture, one says that to lose one's memories is to lose one's identity. The only thing that the two people still have in common is the same body---so I guess I agree with Chris's statement. > If Lee could also have had a dream that confused him about whether he was > Lee or Robin, then when he asks "Am I Robin?" the "I" in his question must > refer to something different than the "I" when I ask the question. But Lee and Robin never have such dreams, unless they're out of their minds. I've never heard of people in dreams thinking that they were someone else. Does this truly happen? Yes---I know that in some dreams I do things that are very unlike myself, and in some I don't seem to be conscious of certain things in my past. Therefore you are right to this extent: we could say that the now fully-awake Lee is burdened with someone else's memories. It's just a mistake, I think, to suppose in this case that those are really *my* memories. Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Tue Oct 17 03:35:06 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 20:35:06 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution? References: Message-ID: <020801c6f19d$8fa36f10$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Slawomir (Heartland) is in my opinion right to reject valuing subjectivity over objectivity. In the case John advances, yes, if someone thinks he's Napoleon, and has all Napoleon's memories and dispositions, then he is Napoleon. But this is really because *objectively* he has those memories and objectively has those dispositions. It's not at all because he thinks he's Napoleon; that is a side issue, possibly denoting insanity or other mental dysfunction. What are we talking about? We are *talking* about that guy over there who thinks he's Napoleon. It has to be decided on objective grounds whether it is true that he has those memories and dispositions. Subjectivity has nothing to do with it. Subjectively, many people were deluded that they were Napoleon. We are entitled to call it delusion because they didn't really have Napoleon's memories and dispositions. We must rely on what we can determine to be objectively true. Lee From spike66 at comcast.net Tue Oct 17 04:29:31 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 21:29:31 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] high tech birds In-Reply-To: <45315A1E.3010603@posthuman.com> Message-ID: <200610170445.k9H4jbGv002739@andromeda.ziaspace.com> The quality of posts has been excellent lately, thanks everyone. A few months ago I read on ExI about ravens placing nuts on roadways so that cars would crack them, which would be a special example of tool use in beasts; special because we know when cars and pavement became common, so we can observe how this technology spreads. Touring in northern California and southern Oregon this past weekend, I observed this behavior twice. Just as I was heading for an on-ramp to interstate 5 in Yreka, a raven swooped down, placed a hickory nut on the road ahead and flew off. I recognized the intent, so I drifted over and cracked the nut. I watched in my mirror as the bird came back and devoured the pieces. About an hour later, on highway 96 west of Seiad Valley, I saw that 8 to 10 ravens had placed a number of nuts on the roadway and were standing along side the road waiting for cars to provide lunch. The questions raised by these observations are many. Are we seeing the behavior arise independently in different populations? Are they teaching each other the tricks? In the second observation, I would guess they learned from watching one bird. The two observations were essentially different behaviors, where the first bird worked alone and the second as a group. The first bird worked near an overpass where there was a lot of traffic; the second group out in the country where the rolling nutcrackers would be sparse. I came up with an idea. There should be a website where those of us who watch beasts can report our observations. I would be interested to learn if there are geographical regions where ravens have not learned to place nuts on the roadways, or if some years in the future they figure out how that is done, and how the behavior spreads, and does the behavior ever disappear after having been observed in an area. We might be able to map the spread of technology in birds. Since ravens are indigenous to all over North America, Europe and Asia, it would make an interesting test case. Until I get that set up, how many of those here have seen ravens place nuts on a road? Where? When? This past weekend is the first time I saw that myself, and I watch birds early and often. spike From thespike at satx.rr.com Tue Oct 17 04:59:10 2006 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 23:59:10 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] high tech birds In-Reply-To: <200610170445.k9H4jbGv002739@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <45315A1E.3010603@posthuman.com> <200610170445.k9H4jbGv002739@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20061016235836.021abd60@satx.rr.com> At 09:29 PM 10/16/2006 -0700, spike wrote: >The questions raised by these observations are many. Are we seeing the >behavior arise independently in different populations? Are they teaching >each other the tricks? It's inherited, passed down through their nuts. From russell.wallace at gmail.com Tue Oct 17 05:03:13 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 06:03:13 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] high tech birds In-Reply-To: <200610170445.k9H4jbGv002739@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <45315A1E.3010603@posthuman.com> <200610170445.k9H4jbGv002739@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0610162203w3c345263k8bcb2ebc121497c1@mail.gmail.com> Ravens are interesting birds, though I've only ever seen one face to face once and it was merely glancing around the airport car park at the time. But another invention of theirs I've read about is landing on top of street lights and covering the photocell with their wings; the light comes on, generating enough heat to keep the bird warm on a winter's day. Probably again one bird discovered it by accident and remembered the trick, and others saw and copied. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jonkc at att.net Tue Oct 17 05:33:48 2006 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 01:33:48 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution? References: Message-ID: <001e01c6f1ad$d7087610$c70a4e0c@MyComputer> Heartland, High Priest of the Unique Atom and Sacred Original Cult Wrote: > if I brainwashed him [me] into believing he was an ant, that belief and > nothing else determines the truth value of the statement, "John Clark is a > ant." That is true, but of course you'd have to be very good at brainwashing. If I felt and though like an ant and had an ant's memories and you erased all my memories of being a human being then there would be one more ant in the world and John Clark would be dead. Objectively that particular ant would look somewhat different from most other ants, but that is a trivial point because it would be other people's problem not the ant's. Subjectively he would see himself as a very handsome ant and a credit to his species. > I only care about the process that wrote this sentence That is an entirely reasonable sentiment, but to a process one atom of hydrogen is as good as another atom of hydrogen, a process can be duplicated. > At the end of the day you have to ask yourself 2 questions: "What does it > really mean to survive?" To you survival means having the same atoms and some pompous-speak bafflegab about space time coordinates. To me survival means that the difference between yesterday and today and between today and tomorrow to be roughly the same. If I feel that way tomorrow then I've lived another day. The crazy thing is you claim it is possible to be dead and not know you are dead, in fact according to you it is very easy to end up in that unfortunate state if you have not carefully performed the proper rituals concerning the High Holy Original atoms. And that my friend is beyond idiotic. > Why does survival matter? That is strictly a matter of personal preference and there is no point disputing matters of taste. > there's absolutely no point in continuing this > discussion. So you've said many times, so why do you keep continuing it? John K Clark From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Tue Oct 17 05:46:45 2006 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 22:46:45 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] You're Fired In-Reply-To: <9C4A81DF-C7FF-4492-97D1-E06B9020A293@ceruleansystems.com> Message-ID: <20061017054645.18654.qmail@web60522.mail.yahoo.com> --- BillK wrote: > >> Some directors will be lucky to be in the right > >> place at the right > >> time and some won't. There are only a very few > >> directors whose > >> decisions have much effect on company > performance. > >> Usually in new, > >> fast-moving sectors where rapid change is > paramount. > On Oct 16, 2006, at 11:38 AM, The Avantguardian > wrote: > > > > If you are right and that is the case, then there > is > > no justification whatsoever to huge CEO salaries. > Cap > > their salaries at ten times the salary of the > average > > employee and use the savings to pay the > shareholders > > dividends. --- "J. Andrew Rogers" wrote: > This type of populist thinking is naive and wrong. > If this was > really true, the shareholders already have the power > to do it. The shareholders or the majority share holders? > The kind of CEO that gets paid $10 million is also > the kind of CEO > that immediately adds $1 billion in value to a > company, making it one > of the best investments a shareholder can make. Value or price? > Only a fool would > think this is a bad deal for the shareholder. If > paying the mail boy > a ton of money had the same ROI, the shareholders > would be all over > that too. What do you consider ROI? Net profit or more market capitalization from hopeful investors who want to buy into Job's next big project? > As a point of fact, most CEOs do not make > all that much > money and they have to put up with hours, risks, and > other crap no > ordinary employee has to. Those are the CEOs that are actually earning their salaries. If those particular CEOs make more than 10 times the average employee of their company and didn't actually FOUND the company, I will be happy to reconsider my salary cap. (I consider CEOs that actually started the company has a whole different breed ... owners in fact) > Not surprisingly, in a > free market a good > CEO is usually worth to shareholders what they are > paid whether you > recognize it or not, anecdotes notwithstanding. In the ideal mathematical nirvana known as the free market, I agree. In the real world, "caveat emptor" prevails. > A somewhat relevant tangent is that until the Bush > tax cuts, the tax > code made this kind of indirect investment in > high-value CEOs one of > the best ways of returning value to shareholders. The shareholders or the majority shareholders? > Now that old- > fashioned dividends are (for the moment) a > moderately good (but not > great) vehicle for returning value to shareholders, > it will mitigate > some of the creative ways in which shareholders try > to maximize their > profit. Yeah I know. If I could somehow earn my keep by collecting stock divedends instead of working. It would be like not having to pay taxes. How cool is that? > Much of what people dislike about how money > is shuffled > around and allocated at companies is a direct result > of stupid > taxation policies and regulations and the investor > market responding > to said stupid taxation policies and regulations. > The government > created this environment for the most part, not the > companies. But Andrew, isn't the government simply composed of the mouthpieces of those industries and non-profits with most successful spin-doctoring in a given election cycle? Who are you going to vote for come November? Big tobacco or the Sierra Club? The National Rifleman's Association or the entertainment industry? The "Don't Nuke the Whales Foundation" or "U-boat Veterans for Deficit Spending?" Corporations (in a broad sense) are the government. And which ever ones gain the high ground and are able to lob grenades onto their opponents every four to eight years don't seem to have much to offer the average voter. Yet amazingly, any two of even the least-informed voters seems to have the most deap-seated political convictions. Convictions that demand loyalty to idealogies that have long ago ceased to have any of but the most token of meanings to the political parties that supposedly espouse them. Thus we live in an age where republicans try to drown the government in a bathtub by creating gigantic new bureaucracies in the name of combatting the "phantom menace". And the democrats support legislation endorsing the creation of what amounts to concentration camps for the undesirables without very clearly defining who those are. All supposedly in the name of "business as usual". Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "More persons, on the whole, are humbugged by believing in nothing, than by believing too much." - P. T. Barnum __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From pharos at gmail.com Tue Oct 17 09:31:26 2006 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 10:31:26 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] You're Fired In-Reply-To: <0J7800JSB8QOAT70@caduceus1.gmu.edu> References: <0J7700CZHBHCEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <0J7800JSB8QOAT70@caduceus1.gmu.edu> Message-ID: On 10/16/06, Robin Hanson wrote: > Claiming that stock markets do not contain all possible information, and so are > not perfectly "efficient," is very different from claiming that they > are completely > random and contain no info whatsoever. My proposal only needs markets to > contain a bit more info than the other processes one might use to fire CEOs. > Obviously markets do not contain all possible information. Equally obviously markets contain *some* information. But markets also contain much wrong information, 'noise', rumor, fashion, 'follow the herd' and other nonsense. The accumulation of all that correct and incorrect data makes stock movements unpredictable. i.e. random. > > If the CEO makes no difference, and markets recognized that fact, then my > proposal will not advise firing the CEO. The markets would only have an impact > when they estimated that they would make a difference. > Markets don't recognize anything. They are random. Though they remain within the general business cycle. i.e. they all tend to rise in the boom cycle and they all tend to fall in the bear cycle, with fluctuations around the trend line. > > Similar methods could be used to advise on CEO compensation. If markets > agree with you that CEOs are paid too much, they would advise cutting back. > *Everyone* (except CEOs) think CEOs are over-rewarded. When all companies share prices rise in a boom market, the papers are full of CEOs explaining how their brilliant management has led their company to success. When boom turns to slump, the same CEOs complain that market conditions were against them, difficult trading conditions, nobody could have done any better, etc. But they still keep all their benefits, come boom or recession. Robin, you don't seem to appreciate how random stock movements are, within the general boom - slump business cycles. Every year random stock picking competitions are done which do just as well or better than the financial professionals. (Leading to much huffing and puffing and excusing by aforesaid professionals). Market movements are unpredictable, meaningless and random. It's not a problem. That's just the way life is. BillK From rhanson at gmu.edu Tue Oct 17 10:20:01 2006 From: rhanson at gmu.edu (Robin Hanson) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 06:20:01 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Indexical Uncertainty In-Reply-To: <020101c6f19b$e0151220$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com> <0J7300MG5007PJ40@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <007a01c6ef3f$900a4c90$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700CZEBHAEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <016701c6f0c7$fab96510$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700CPPJM7WB80@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <017701c6f0d0$a85b5720$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700G8HLCUYY60@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <018201c6f0d5$13a72820$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7800FDW996IW10@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <020101c6f19b$e0151220$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <0J7900LAKZDC3XA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> At 11:24 PM 10/16/2006, Lee Corbin wrote: > > Let's start with simple examples. I might wake up and for a moment not be > > able to remember whether it is Monday, when I can sleep in, or Tuesday, > > when I need to get up early. This is not uncertainty about the > world, it is > > uncertainty about who I am, whether I am Monday-Robin or Tuesday-Robin. > >I claim and I thought you also held that "Monday Robin" and "Tuesday Robin" >are the same person (differing only infinitesimally). Surely you >agree that you >are the same person from day to day (differing so little as to be of no >consequence)? I am not very different from day to day it is true, but I am a little different, and that little difference is enough to use this as an example of indexical uncertainty. >But indeed, if you have enough amnesia, then absolutely you are *not* the >same person. Even in popular culture, one says that to lose one's memories >is to lose one's identity. ... But Lee and Robin never have such dreams, >unless they're out of their minds. We are the sort of creatures who usually are not very uncertain about who we are. Nevertheless, we are not completely certain either, and so we often have at least small degrees of indexical uncertainty. So once you accept the basic concept, then the question is when and where it is reasonable to apply the concept. Even if large degrees of indexical uncertainty are unusual, if they are coherent concepts, then we can think about them as possibilities, and use those examples to help us understand other things. Surely we have talked about many things on this list that are not in our immediate experience, but are plausible projections of our immediate experience into larger changes. Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323 From rhanson at gmu.edu Tue Oct 17 10:26:50 2006 From: rhanson at gmu.edu (Robin Hanson) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 06:26:50 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] You're Fired In-Reply-To: References: <0J7700CZHBHCEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <0J7800JSB8QOAT70@caduceus1.gmu.edu> Message-ID: <0J7900L4DZOQ3XB0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> At 05:31 AM 10/17/2006, Bill K wrote: >On 10/16/06, Robin Hanson wrote: > > Claiming that stock markets do not contain all possible > information, and so > > are not perfectly "efficient," is very different from claiming > that they are > > completely random and contain no info whatsoever. My proposal only > > needs markets to contain a bit more info than the other processes one > > might use to fire CEOs. > >Obviously markets do not contain all possible information. Equally >obviously markets contain *some* information. But markets also contain >much wrong information, 'noise', rumor, fashion, 'follow the herd' and >other nonsense. The accumulation of all that correct and incorrect >data makes stock movements unpredictable. i.e. random. ... >Robin, you don't seem to appreciate how random stock movements are, >within the general boom - slump business cycles. Every year random >stock picking competitions are done which do just as well or better >than the financial professionals. (Leading to much huffing and puffing >and excusing by aforesaid professionals). >Market movements are unpredictable, meaningless and random. >It's not a problem. That's just the way life is. Again, the question is how much information the prices contain, relative to the other methods one could use to fire CEOs. You have not addressed that issue. If the prices are more informed, then they will make better choices and should be preferred. Of course we could do even better if the prices were even more informed. That is where you could help. Since you can see that the current prices are all wrong and you can tell in which direction they are wrong, you can make lots of money by buying low and selling high. And you will help make the prices more accurate in the process. Win win for all, surely. Do come back and thank us when you are rich. Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323 From mbb386 at main.nc.us Tue Oct 17 11:35:03 2006 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 07:35:03 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Indexical Uncertainty In-Reply-To: <0J7900LAKZDC3XA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> References: <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com> <0J7300MG5007PJ40@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <007a01c6ef3f$900a4c90$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700CZEBHAEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <016701c6f0c7$fab96510$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700CPPJM7WB80@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <017701c6f0d0$a85b5720$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700G8HLCUYY60@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <018201c6f0d5$13a72820$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7800FDW996IW10@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <020101c6f19b$e0151220$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7900LAKZDC3XA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> Message-ID: <34316.72.236.102.119.1161084903.squirrel@main.nc.us> At what point does the Alzheimer's sufferer become "not" the person they were? At what point do you think "well, my dad is dead - his body is still here, but he's not"? I have friends who've been down this road, and when the parent finally does actually *die* (to have a funeral, the *real* thing) they say it's like losing them a second time. ------------ If my mind were to be transplanted into another body, as in one of the Heinlein books - do I become someone else or am I still "me" but in another home - as Heinlein indicated in the book? -------------- The word "soul" and "spirit" have many religious connotations for me, but I do not have another word that seems to describe that part of me beyond my body. What word do we use here? It's a given that our bodies are, by now, 100% no longer our original cells, isn't it? TIA for any clarification - I'm just feeling a bit confused! Regards, MB From lcorbin at rawbw.com Tue Oct 17 11:53:49 2006 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 04:53:49 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Indexical Uncertainty References: <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com><0J7300MG5007PJ40@caduceus2.gmu.edu><007a01c6ef3f$900a4c90$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677><0J7700CZEBHAEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu><016701c6f0c7$fab96510$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677><0J7700CPPJM7WB80@caduceus2.gmu.edu><017701c6f0d0$a85b5720$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677><0J7700G8HLCUYY60@caduceus1.gmu.edu><018201c6f0d5$13a72820$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677><0J7800FDW996IW10@caduceus2.gmu.edu><020101c6f19b$e0151220$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7900LAKZDC3XA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> Message-ID: <026101c6f1e3$390f44d0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Robin writes >>But indeed, if you have enough amnesia, then absolutely you are *not* the >>same person. Even in popular culture, one says that to lose one's memories >>is to lose one's identity. ... But Lee and Robin never have such dreams, >>unless they're out of their minds. > > We are the sort of creatures who usually are not very uncertain about who we > are. Nevertheless, we are not completely certain either, and so we often have > at least small degrees of indexical uncertainty. But I protest that the word "we" or "I" is slippery here. Yes, we may say that a given human organism may be unsure about who he is. But if it's sufficiently unsure---i.e. has enough aberrant behavioral tendencies and different memories, then it's no longer the person that was formerly associated with that body. Lee > Surely we have talked about many things on this list that are not in > our immediate experience, but are plausible projections of our [sic] > immediate experience into larger changes. From emlynoregan at gmail.com Tue Oct 17 12:42:49 2006 From: emlynoregan at gmail.com (Emlyn) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 22:12:49 +0930 Subject: [extropy-chat] "Cool computer program" Message-ID: <710b78fc0610170542k38e52c9bs57bbfa77a876dd2c@mail.gmail.com> I just don't know what to say about this. I'm sure someone will... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7eGypGOlOc Emlyn From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Tue Oct 17 14:22:50 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 10:22:50 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Botnets: shades of future present Message-ID: eWeek.com has an interesting article about how the war may be lost vis-a-vis "botnets" [1]. There is an associated /. discussion [2]. The numbers appear to be rather staggering -- 57,000 active bots per day, 4.7 million computers hijacked. Bad enough that the networks are controlled by evil people. I shudder to think of what happens when they become controlled by evil AIs. Robert 1. http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2029720,00.asp 2. http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/17/002251 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jonkc at att.net Tue Oct 17 15:30:49 2006 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 11:30:49 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution? References: <8d71341e0610122137o2a060ea7ic41153f32c946caf@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <002c01c6f201$3e37c810$030a4e0c@MyComputer> Russell Wallace Wrote: > suppose you're copied into 2 copies, A and B, then B is copied into 999, > should you subjectively expect to have a 1/2 probability of finding > "yourself" as A, as intuition and causal logic would suggest, or 1/1000, > as measure accounting would suggest?) After the copying if you asked A he would say there was a 100% probability that his identity had been successfully transferred to him, and he would be correct. If you asked B he would say there was a 100% probability that his identity had been successfully transferred to him, and he would be correct. If you asked one of B's 999 copies he would say there was a 100% probability his identity had been successfully transferred to copy number 721 and he would be correct too. You can't ask C, the person before any copying was done, his opinion on which one was him because he was yesterday, he doesn't exist today. None of this is a logical paradox, it's just an odd situation. It's unusual because up to now human copying machines are rather few and far between. But that need not always be true. I have a hunch the Singularity will produce far stranger things than that, so you'd better get used to it. John K Clark From pharos at gmail.com Tue Oct 17 15:36:19 2006 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 16:36:19 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Indexical Uncertainty In-Reply-To: <34316.72.236.102.119.1161084903.squirrel@main.nc.us> References: <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com> <016701c6f0c7$fab96510$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700CPPJM7WB80@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <017701c6f0d0$a85b5720$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700G8HLCUYY60@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <018201c6f0d5$13a72820$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7800FDW996IW10@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <020101c6f19b$e0151220$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7900LAKZDC3XA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <34316.72.236.102.119.1161084903.squirrel@main.nc.us> Message-ID: On 10/17/06, MB wrote: > > If my mind were to be transplanted into another body, as in one of the Heinlein > books - do I become someone else or am I still "me" but in another home - as > Heinlein indicated in the book? > > -------------- > > The word "soul" and "spirit" have many religious connotations for me, but I do not > have another word that seems to describe that part of me beyond my body. What word > do we use here? It's a given that our bodies are, by now, 100% no longer our > original cells, isn't it? > Ah, this could be a job for my lexical tools. Let's try. The dictionary says that 'soul' has a wide range of meanings, depending on context, some more spiritual, some pretty mundane. Let's concentrate on the spiritual / religious meanings for you. First, a bit of background. In our Western religious tradition "soul" and "spirit" are often confused. Sometimes meanings are very similar, sometimes very different, leading to confusing discussions. The reason for this is that "soul" and "spirit" are used in English translations of the Old Testament and the New Testament. But the New Testament was written in Greek, thousands of years after the Old Testament was written in Ancient Hebrew. I think it is a mistake to take our idea of a 'soul' which comes from the Greek philosophers around the time of the New Testament and force them back thousands of years into the Hebrew Old Testament. Genesis wasn't written by Greek philosophers. The Ancient Hebrews didn't have the Greek philosophical conception of "soul". The Ancient Hebrew words relate to breath or wind. In Genesis, man is a living soul, but so are animals. (same Hebrew phrase). Basically, in the Old Testament if you had 'soul' (breath) you were alive, if you didn't, you were dead. Now, bearing that in mind, let's look up some dictionaries. soul - the immaterial part of a person; the actuating cause of an individual life 1. The animating and vital principle in humans, credited with the faculties of thought, action, and emotion and often conceived as an immaterial entity. 2. The spiritual nature of humans, regarded as immortal, separable from the body at death, and susceptible to happiness or misery in a future state. 3. The disembodied spirit of a dead human. History: Old English sawol "spiritual and emotional part of a person, animate existence"; related to Old Frisian sele, Old Saxon seola, Old High German seula, of uncertain origin. Sometimes said to mean originally "coming from or belonging to the sea," because that was supposed to be the stopping place of the soul before birth or after death. psyche 1. The spirit or soul. 2. Psychiatry. The mind functioning as the center of thought, emotion, and behavior and consciously or unconsciously adjusting or mediating the body's responses to the social and physical environment. History: 17thC: from Latin, from Greek psykhe "the soul, mind, spirit, breath, life, the invisible animating principle or entity which occupies and directs the physical body" (personified as Psykhe, the lover of Eros); related to Greek psykhein "to breathe". The word had extensive sense development in Platonic philosophy and Jewish-influenced theological writing of St. Paul. In English, psychological sense is from 1910. spirit - 1. a. The vital principle or animating force within living beings. b. Incorporeal consciousness. 2. The soul, considered as departing from the body of a person at death. 5. The part of a human associated with the mind, will, and feelings: the vital principle or animating force within living things History: 13thC: from Old French esperit, from Latin spiritus "soul, courage, vigor, breath"; related to spirare "to breathe". Original usage in English mainly from passages in Vulgate, where the Latin word translates Greek pneuma and Hebrew ruah. mind - 1. the reasoning faculty, which thinks, judges, understands, and directs, in humans capable of great complexity because of the development of the human brain. 2. the human faculty to which are ascribed thought, feeling, etc.; often regarded as an immaterial part of a person distinct from the body; intellectual power. History: Old English gemynd "memory, thinking, intention"; related to Old High German gimunt "memory". ghost - the visible disembodied soul of a dead person History: Old English gast "soul, spirit, life, breath"; related to Old Frisian jest, Old High German geist "spirit, ghost". The surviving Old English senses are in Christian writing, where it is used to render Latin spiritus, a sense preserved in Holy Ghost. Modern sense of "disembodied spirit of a dead person" is attested from c.1385 and returns the word toward its ancient sense. Hope this gives you something to think about. :) BillK From russell.wallace at gmail.com Tue Oct 17 15:37:10 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 16:37:10 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution? In-Reply-To: <002c01c6f201$3e37c810$030a4e0c@MyComputer> References: <8d71341e0610122137o2a060ea7ic41153f32c946caf@mail.gmail.com> <002c01c6f201$3e37c810$030a4e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <8d71341e0610170837o6f34d5c0wdc2eee78562bdc42@mail.gmail.com> On 10/17/06, John K Clark wrote: > > After the copying if you asked A he would say there was a 100% probability > that his identity had been successfully transferred to him, and he would > be > correct. If you asked B he would say there was a 100% probability that his > identity had been successfully transferred to him, and he would be > correct. > If you asked one of B's 999 copies he would say there was a 100% > probability > his identity had been successfully transferred to copy number 721 and he > would be correct too. You can't ask C, the person before any copying was > done, his opinion on which one was him because he was yesterday, he > doesn't > exist today. Right, you seem to be agreeing with the solution I came up with. None of this is a logical paradox, it's just an odd situation. It's unusual > because up to now human copying machines are rather few and far between. > But > that need not always be true. I have a hunch the Singularity will produce > far stranger things than that, so you'd better get used to it. > *nods* I don't know what the world of 3000 AD will look like, but I suspect our ideas will look as quaintly naive to our descendants then as spacemen rescuing Martian princesses from bug-eyed monsters look to us now. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Tue Oct 17 17:13:39 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 19:13:39 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] Probability of identity - solution? In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0610170837o6f34d5c0wdc2eee78562bdc42@mail.gmail.com> References: <8d71341e0610122137o2a060ea7ic41153f32c946caf@mail.gmail.com> <002c01c6f201$3e37c810$030a4e0c@MyComputer> <8d71341e0610170837o6f34d5c0wdc2eee78562bdc42@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20061017171339.GN6974@leitl.org> On Tue, Oct 17, 2006 at 04:37:10PM +0100, Russell Wallace wrote: > *nods* I don't know what the world of 3000 AD will look like, but I > suspect our ideas will look as quaintly naive to our descendants then > as spacemen rescuing Martian princesses from bug-eyed monsters look to > us now. Right. It's either that, or back to really basic silica technology (flint). The way there leading through a truly narrow population bottleneck. I came across http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-fg-empty8oct08,0,1515774,full.story recently, which set me thinking about how a very similiar malady is developing around the place where I sit. The U.S. star has been sinking for quite a few years already, and I'm really anxious for someone to pick up the guttering torch. So far, there are no conclusive candidates. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From pj at pj-manney.com Tue Oct 17 17:24:12 2006 From: pj at pj-manney.com (pjmanney) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 13:24:12 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] high tech birds Message-ID: <2737946.949701161105852872.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pj at pj-manney.com Tue Oct 17 17:27:09 2006 From: pj at pj-manney.com (pjmanney) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 13:27:09 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] high tech birds Message-ID: <21854155.950131161106029834.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pj at pj-manney.com Tue Oct 17 17:23:48 2006 From: pj at pj-manney.com (pjmanney) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 13:23:48 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] high tech birds Message-ID: <24357266.949651161105828204.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jay.dugger at gmail.com Tue Oct 17 19:03:21 2006 From: jay.dugger at gmail.com (Jay Dugger) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 14:03:21 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] "Cool computer program" In-Reply-To: <710b78fc0610170542k38e52c9bs57bbfa77a876dd2c@mail.gmail.com> References: <710b78fc0610170542k38e52c9bs57bbfa77a876dd2c@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <5366105b0610171203r31018337nd063b5151982fe79@mail.gmail.com> Tuesday, 17 October 2006 I think that program has the name "Physics Illustrator," and runs only on Tablet PCs. You can download it for free. (No link handy, just Google.) I'd like to know more about the whiteboard-style interface he uses in the video. Enjoy spring time, Emlyn! -- Jay Dugger http://jaydugger.suprglu.com Sometimes the delete key serves best. From hibbert at mydruthers.com Tue Oct 17 18:37:26 2006 From: hibbert at mydruthers.com (Chris Hibbert) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 11:37:26 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Indexical Uncertainty In-Reply-To: <0J7900LAKZDC3XA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> References: <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com> <0J7300MG5007PJ40@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <007a01c6ef3f$900a4c90$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700CZEBHAEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <016701c6f0c7$fab96510$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700CPPJM7WB80@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <017701c6f0d0$a85b5720$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700G8HLCUYY60@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <018201c6f0d5$13a72820$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7800FDW996IW10@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <020101c6f19b$e0151220$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7900LAKZDC3XA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> Message-ID: <453522E6.1080902@mydruthers.com> >> But indeed, if you have enough amnesia, then absolutely you are >> *not* the same person. Even in popular culture, one says that to >> lose one's memories is to lose one's identity. ... But Lee and >> Robin never have such dreams, unless they're out of their minds. > > We are the sort of creatures who usually are not very uncertain about > who we are. Nevertheless, we are not completely certain either, and > so we often have at least small degrees of indexical uncertainty. > So once you accept the basic concept, then the question is when and > where it is reasonable to apply the concept. A somewhat plausible example of uncertainty of identity: a standard nightmare supposedly has people waking up thinking that the final exam is today and they haven't studied. That's a Monday-me vs. Tuesday-me distinction that can matter intensely. (Or so I've heard.) Anyway, back to the uncertainty. Unless someone is verging on amnesia, the only kind of waking confusion that makes sense is momentary confusion about what history-of-behavior you have. Given modern technologies, we wouldn't distinguish mind from body in associating them with behavioral histories. (They always travel together in our experience.) So it would surprise me if a friend reported, after a dream about living someone else's life, that he woke up secure in his identity, but unsure about which body he should expect to be in. He'd have to have been confused about both mind (habits, experience, tastes) and body for the story to make any sense. Chris -- Currently reading: Marc Bekoff, The Cognitive Animal; Vernor Vinge: Rainbow's End; Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum; Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature Chris Hibbert hibbert at mydruthers.com http://mydruthers.com Prediction Market Software: http://zocalo.sourceforge.net From rhanson at gmu.edu Tue Oct 17 19:28:54 2006 From: rhanson at gmu.edu (Robin Hanson) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 15:28:54 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Indexical Uncertainty In-Reply-To: <453522E6.1080902@mydruthers.com> References: <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com> <0J7300MG5007PJ40@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <007a01c6ef3f$900a4c90$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700CZEBHAEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <016701c6f0c7$fab96510$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700CPPJM7WB80@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <017701c6f0d0$a85b5720$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700G8HLCUYY60@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <018201c6f0d5$13a72820$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7800FDW996IW10@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <020101c6f19b$e0151220$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7900LAKZDC3XA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <453522E6.1080902@mydruthers.com> Message-ID: <0J7A000J9OS6BU10@caduceus2.gmu.edu> At 02:37 PM 10/17/2006, Chris Hibbert wrote: > > We are the sort of creatures who usually are not very uncertain about > > who we are. Nevertheless, we are not completely certain either, and > > so we often have at least small degrees of indexical uncertainty. > > So once you accept the basic concept, then the question is when and > > where it is reasonable to apply the concept. > >A somewhat plausible example of uncertainty of identity: a standard >nightmare supposedly has people waking up thinking that the final exam >is today and they haven't studied. That's a Monday-me vs. Tuesday-me >distinction that can matter intensely. (Or so I've heard.) >Anyway, back to the uncertainty. Unless someone is verging on amnesia, >the only kind of waking confusion that makes sense is momentary >confusion about what history-of-behavior you have. ... The main reason to be interested in and think about indexical uncertainty is not because people in our world often have large degrees of such uncertainty. The reason to be interested is that it opens up a new family of counterfactuals to reason about. Postulating and applying rationality constraints that relate the reasonable beliefs under different counterfactuals is a powerful way to constrain the beliefs we should find reasonable. I find the kind of possibilities considered in Doomsday arguments reasonable, even if I might take issue with assumptions made about reasonable priors, etc. Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323 From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Tue Oct 17 19:42:25 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 15:42:25 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] "Cool computer program" In-Reply-To: <5366105b0610171203r31018337nd063b5151982fe79@mail.gmail.com> References: <710b78fc0610170542k38e52c9bs57bbfa77a876dd2c@mail.gmail.com> <5366105b0610171203r31018337nd063b5151982fe79@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 10/17/06, Jay Dugger wrote: > > > I think that program has the name "Physics Illustrator," and runs only > on Tablet PCs. You can download it for free. (No link handy, just > Google.) I'd like to know more about the whiteboard-style interface he > uses in the video. > I agree -- *what* is the whiteboard (or software that links a touch-sensitive projected screen) to window regions? The physics was interesting but the large scale interactive medium more so. Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From austriaaugust at yahoo.com Tue Oct 17 19:45:13 2006 From: austriaaugust at yahoo.com (A B) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 12:45:13 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Space colony behind the moon? In-Reply-To: <21854155.950131161106029834.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: <20061017194513.64622.qmail@web37412.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Could someone here tell me whether or not it would be physically possible to place a space station in "Lunar-Synchronous" orbit, such that the station would permanently "hover" over the "invisible" face of the moon (ie. so that the moon itself would at all times be located between Earth and the space station)? I personally wouldn't know where to begin in trying to calculate whether such an orbit is possible. The reason I ask is that it seems to me that a "stationary" orbit over the "invisible" side of the moon would be an ideal starting place to locate a self-sustaining space colony (as insurance against an existential disaster), such as the "Ark 1" as proposed by the Lifeboat Foundation. This location would seem to offer several security advantages over a lower, earth-orbit station. The advantages would be provided by the body of the moon itself. For example, the moon would serve as a crude shield to protect the station from simple projectile based weapons such as mass-drivers and coil guns (which may eventually achieve enough power to launch projectiles/payloads into space). I suspect a simple projectile based weapon of the future would be considerably easier for a terrorist to build, hide, and use successfully than a traditional rocket based propulsion system. The moon might also serve to shield and "trap" within it's gravity well, a payload of malicious nanoreplicators that might be fired toward the space station. Of course, actively-guided weapons would still pose a problem, but we have to start somewhere. Maybe moving out to behind Mars or Venus would make for a good next step. ;-) Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich --------------------------------- All-new Yahoo! Mail - Fire up a more powerful email and get things done faster. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jonkc at att.net Tue Oct 17 20:17:12 2006 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 16:17:12 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Indexical Uncertainty. References: <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com><0J7300MG5007PJ40@caduceus2.gmu.edu><007a01c6ef3f$900a4c90$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677><0J7700CZEBHAEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu><016701c6f0c7$fab96510$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677><0J7700CPPJM7WB80@caduceus2.gmu.edu><017701c6f0d0$a85b5720$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677><0J7700G8HLCUYY60@caduceus1.gmu.edu><018201c6f0d5$13a72820$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677><0J7800FDW996IW10@caduceus2.gmu.edu><020101c6f19b$e0151220$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677><0J7900LAKZDC3XA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <34316.72.236.102.119.1161084903.squirrel@main.nc.us> Message-ID: <01e801c6f229$473563a0$e3084e0c@MyComputer> "MB" > The word "soul" and "spirit" have many religious connotations for me, but > I do not have another word that seems to describe that part of me beyond > my body. The word you're looking for is "information". Information is as close as you can get to the traditional concept of the soul and still remain within the scientific method. Consider the similarities: The soul is non material and so is information. It's difficult to pin down a unique physical location for the soul, and the same is true for information. The soul is the essential, must have, part of consciousness, exactly the same situation is true for information. The soul is immortal and so, potentially, is information. I don't want to push this too far because there are also important differences between the soul and information. A soul is unique but information can be duplicated. The soul is and will always remain unfathomable, but information is understandable, in fact, information is the ONLY thing that is understandable. Information unambiguously exists, I don't think anyone would deny that, but in the unlikely event that the soul exists it will never be proven scientifically. > At what point does the Alzheimer's sufferer become "not" the person they > were? Point? Glass does not have a melting POINT, as it gets hotter it just gets softer and softer. Questions of this sort are not decided at a POINT, they are decided by a grey blob. John K Clark From pharos at gmail.com Tue Oct 17 20:30:21 2006 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 21:30:21 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] "Cool computer program" In-Reply-To: References: <710b78fc0610170542k38e52c9bs57bbfa77a876dd2c@mail.gmail.com> <5366105b0610171203r31018337nd063b5151982fe79@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 10/17/06, Robert Bradbury wrote: > > On 10/17/06, Jay Dugger wrote: > > > > I think that program has the name "Physics Illustrator," and runs only > > on Tablet PCs. You can download it for free. (No link handy, just > > Google.) I'd like to know more about the whiteboard-style interface he > > uses in the video. > > > > I agree -- *what* is the whiteboard (or software that links a > touch-sensitive projected screen) to window regions? > > The physics was interesting but the large scale interactive medium more so. > The whiteboard is called a smartboard. They're in about every college and school in the country. (Maybe a slight exaggeration). The example photos show children using them. BillK From asa at nada.kth.se Tue Oct 17 20:36:53 2006 From: asa at nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 22:36:53 +0200 (MEST) Subject: [extropy-chat] Space colony behind the moon? In-Reply-To: <20061017194513.64622.qmail@web37412.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <20061017194513.64622.qmail@web37412.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1780.163.1.72.81.1161117413.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> A B wrote: > Could someone here tell me whether or not it would be physically possible > to place a space station in "Lunar-Synchronous" orbit, such that the > station would permanently "hover" over the "invisible" face of the moon > (ie. so that the moon itself would at all times be located between Earth > and the space station)? You are thinking of the second Lagrange point. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point for a map. It is unstable, so you would need to do a bit of station-keeping to remain there, but it is a very small amount needed. > The moon might also serve to shield and "trap" within it's gravity well, > a payload of malicious nanoreplicators that might be fired toward the > space station. But this assumes they are just fired stupidly, not by somebody who understands orbital mechanics. It is not harder to hit L2 than L1! The real place to put the space ark is an unknown orbit. Space is big, and if it is too much of an hassle to find you it is likely nobody will. -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From thespike at satx.rr.com Tue Oct 17 20:56:54 2006 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 15:56:54 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Space colony behind the moon? In-Reply-To: <20061017194513.64622.qmail@web37412.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <21854155.950131161106029834.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> <20061017194513.64622.qmail@web37412.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20061017155631.02264910@satx.rr.com> >Could someone here tell me whether or not it would be physically >possible to place a space station in "Lunar-Synchronous" orbit, such >that the station would permanently "hover" over the "invisible" face >of the moon Yes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point#L2 From mbb386 at main.nc.us Tue Oct 17 21:58:31 2006 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 17:58:31 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Indexical Uncertainty. In-Reply-To: <01e801c6f229$473563a0$e3084e0c@MyComputer> References: <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com><0J7300MG5007PJ40@caduceus2.gmu.edu><007a01c6ef3f$900a4c90$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677><0J7700CZEBHAEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu><016701c6f0c7$fab96510$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677><0J7700CPPJM7WB80@caduceus2.gmu.edu><017701c6f0d0$a85b5720$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677><0J7700G8HLCUYY60@caduceus1.gmu.edu><018201c6f0d5$13a72820$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677><0J7800FDW996IW10@caduceus2.gmu.edu><020101c6f19b$e0151220$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677><0J7900LAKZDC3XA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <34316.72.236.102.119.1161084903.squirrel@main.nc.us> <01e801c6f229$473563a0$e3084e0c@MyComputer> Message-ID: <34698.72.236.103.145.1161122311.squirrel@main.nc.us> > "MB" > >> The word "soul" and "spirit" have many religious connotations for me, but >> I do not have another word that seems to describe that part of me beyond >> my body. > > The word you're looking for is "information". Information is as close as you > can get to the traditional concept of the soul and still remain within the > scientific method. Thank you. :) Regards, MB From pharos at gmail.com Tue Oct 17 22:32:24 2006 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 23:32:24 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] You're Fired In-Reply-To: <0J7900L4DZOQ3XB0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> References: <0J7700CZHBHCEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <0J7800JSB8QOAT70@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <0J7900L4DZOQ3XB0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> Message-ID: On 10/17/06, Robin Hanson wrote: > > Again, the question is how much information the prices contain, relative to the > other methods one could use to fire CEOs. You have not addressed that issue. > If the prices are more informed, then they will make better choices and should > be preferred. > > Of course we could do even better if the prices were even more informed. I thought I had addressed that issue. "Market movements are unpredictable, meaningless and random". Unpredictable, random price movements cannot be used to validate a CEO's performance, except in a few outstanding examples, e.g. where they turn round a failing company. But profits are probably a better measure in that case, rather than share price level. In a rising market, every CEO will claim they are obviously doing a great job. In a falling market, every CEO has good excuses available. After all, in a falling market you can't sack every CEO, can you? > That is where you could help. Since you can see that the current > prices are all wrong and you can tell in which direction they are wrong, you can make > lots of money by buying low and selling high. And you will help make the prices more > accurate in the process. Win win for all, surely. Do come back and thank us > when you are rich. > Heh! :) The old 'If you're so clever, why aren't you rich?' question. :) What part of "Market movements are unpredictable, meaningless and random" don't you understand? I can't predict stock prices. Nobody can. That's the point. You won't get any get-rich-quick tips from me (or Warren Buffet, for that matter). My advice is to invest in index tracking funds near the bottom of a recession cycle and sell near the top of a rising market. Usually a 4 or 5 year cycle. Don't worry about about timing the exact top or bottom. Just cash in near the top and wait till the recession cycle takes prices down far enough to buy back in to the index fund again. You won't become a dotcom millionaire, but you won't lose everything either. You'll do quite nicely for very little cost or trouble. BillK From rhanson at gmu.edu Tue Oct 17 22:55:51 2006 From: rhanson at gmu.edu (Robin Hanson) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 18:55:51 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] You're Fired In-Reply-To: References: <0J7700CZHBHCEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <0J7800JSB8QOAT70@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <0J7900L4DZOQ3XB0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> Message-ID: <0J7A0008NYD3C170@caduceus2.gmu.edu> At 06:32 PM 10/17/2006, BillK wrote: > > Again, the question is how much information the prices contain, > relative to the > > other methods one could use to fire CEOs. You have not addressed > > that issue. If the prices are more informed, then they will make better > > choices and should be preferred. > >I thought I had addressed that issue. >"Market movements are unpredictable, meaningless and random". >Unpredictable, random price movements cannot be used to validate a >CEO's performance, except in a few outstanding examples, e.g. where >they turn round a failing company. But profits are probably a better >measure in that case, rather than share price level. First, it seems you did not actually read my proposal, as I did not suggest using share price levels. Second, while before you granted that stock prices contained some info, now you seem to claim they have no info, that stock prices are completely unrelated to profit, and that price changes have no relation to changes in expected profit. > > Since you can see that the current prices are all wrong > > and you can tell in which direction they are wrong, you > > can make lots of money by buying low and selling high. > >What part of "Market movements are unpredictable, meaningless and >random" don't you understand? I can't predict stock prices. Nobody >can. That's the point. If there is no relation between stock price and profit, then you must think that if you take your web business public you have just as good a chance of getting Google level prices as Google did, without having to go through all the work that Google did of actually being useful to customers. Buy low (any cheap web business), sell high (Google prices). Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323 From velvethum at hotmail.com Tue Oct 17 23:29:52 2006 From: velvethum at hotmail.com (Heartland) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 19:29:52 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fictional Singularity Movie References: <20061017024123.60596.qmail@web37401.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Hi Jeffrey, A B wrote: >> Hey y'all, >> >> I'm wondering when the first "blockbuster" Singularity movie will >> emerge out of Hollywood. I have no doubt that it will happen >> eventually. If a film isn't already underway, this might be a good >> opportunity for someone in the pro-Singularity camp to make a >> positive contribution to Singularity awareness. The masses want to >> be entertained if they are to be expected to learn anything. There's no doubt in my mind that a well done movie would do far more to increase awareness of Singularity among general population than all the Singularity-related websites out there put together. >> I think >> Ray Kurzweil would be a good candidate for writing the screenplay >> (if he was interested) for several reasons: expertise, name >> recognition, balanced analyses, and a double major including >> creative writing. It would have to be someone who is, first and foremost, skilled in the art of storytelling while also being an expert on the Singularity. Perhaps a better and faster approach to this would be to do a screenplay adaptation of the best and currently available novel about the Singularity. >> And I think the Wachowski brothers would make good >> Directors for it. (They are famous for "The Matrix" of course). I'm in total agreement with you there. I would argue that "The Matrix" is a "Singularity movie." After all, in the movie machines achieved above human-level intelligence and took over the world. The "S" word is not used explicitly (although the phrase "singular consciousness" makes an appearance) but the concept of transhuman intelligence is dealt with implicitly. Even though I suspect that the "W" brothers are talented enough to not only direct such a movie, but also to write it, I think they are currently more interested in adapting comic books than trying to write about "heavy" topics like Singularity. >> To >> guard against the possibility that a film would only add to the >> "fiction" interpretation of the Singularity meme, the film could >> begin with an brief written explanation to the effect that: although >> the film itself is fictional, the Singularity is a "real" projected >> event that is anticipated by many experts in various fields. (Or >> something like that). If the movie was done well, a sense of real potential for Singularity happening within our lifetimes should be obvious from the movie itself. As always, it's better to show than tell. S. From gts_2000 at yahoo.com Tue Oct 17 23:03:31 2006 From: gts_2000 at yahoo.com (gts) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 19:03:31 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] You're Fired In-Reply-To: References: <0J7700CZHBHCEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <0J7800JSB8QOAT70@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <0J7900L4DZOQ3XB0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> Message-ID: On Tue, 17 Oct 2006 18:32:24 -0400, BillK wrote: > What part of "Market movements are unpredictable, meaningless and > random" don't you understand? I can't predict stock prices. Nobody > can. That's the point. The random walk hypothesis is not so well supported as you seem to think. How for example do you explain the fact that market indices have risen on the order of 8% or 10% each year on average for roughly the past 100 years? The random walk hypothesis predicts a 0% percent average return. US financial markets may be and probably are non-random but extremely or perfectly efficient. -gts From nanogirl at halcyon.com Tue Oct 17 23:29:00 2006 From: nanogirl at halcyon.com (Gina Miller) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 16:29:00 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] "Cool computer program" References: <710b78fc0610170542k38e52c9bs57bbfa77a876dd2c@mail.gmail.com> <5366105b0610171203r31018337nd063b5151982fe79@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <007f01c6f244$0ea7be50$0200a8c0@Nano> I have Physics Illustrator on my Tablet PC. Here is the link - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=56347faf-a639-4f3b-9b87-1487fd4b5a53&displaylang=en (and as Jay said if you have a desktop or a normal laptop with Windows it won't work, only if you have the tablet pc operating system). While the program is fun to play with, and perhaps demonstrate something at a presentation, the problem I experienced with the program is that there is no output! You can not save it to an .avi or an .mov to show later or upload to a website. If you have a way to record your screen (and those are out there) you could record it, and if you are anything but perfect in your drawing (or in your just stopping to think) you might have to modify your footage (cut boring or incorrect frames out) and resave it, more work. In fact I talked about this problem on my animation blog - and came to the conclusion that self recording is the only way to output PI. To answer Robert, I can tell you how Physics Illustrator works, you draw directly on your computer screen and you could then show it via projector. But in the case of this YouTube video, in the beginning we hear the man (Professor Randall Davis) say "let me show you an example of the Assist Sketch Understanding System" which looks like it comes out of MIT, and so appears not to be of the Microsoft variety. These are two different programs. In his program Davis is actually drawing on the screen. This may be similar technology to some of the other onscreen interactive progress that has been going on like the Khronos Projector (also wrote about this on my blog here: http://nanogirlblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/khronos-projector.html) There are other examples too, I think some have shown at Siggraph and Wired. Do a Google search for "interactive screen". You can also read more about the MIT program by searching for "Assist Sketch Understanding System". Regards, 'animator for hire' Gina "Nanogirl" Miller Nanotechnology Industries http://www.nanoindustries.com Personal: http://www.nanogirl.com/index2.html Animation Blog: http://maxanimation.blogspot.com/ Craft blog: http://nanogirlblog.blogspot.com/ Foresight Participating Member http://www.foresight.org Nanotechnology Advisor Extropy Institute http://www.extropy.org Email: nanogirl at halcyon.com "Nanotechnology: Solutions for the future." ----- Original Message ----- From: Jay Dugger To: ExI chat list Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2006 12:03 PM Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] "Cool computer program" Tuesday, 17 October 2006 I think that program has the name "Physics Illustrator," and runs only on Tablet PCs. You can download it for free. (No link handy, just Google.) I'd like to know more about the whiteboard-style interface he uses in the video. Enjoy spring time, Emlyn! -- Jay Dugger http://jaydugger.suprglu.com Sometimes the delete key serves best. _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From emlynoregan at gmail.com Tue Oct 17 23:40:55 2006 From: emlynoregan at gmail.com (Emlyn) Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 09:10:55 +0930 Subject: [extropy-chat] "Cool computer program" In-Reply-To: References: <710b78fc0610170542k38e52c9bs57bbfa77a876dd2c@mail.gmail.com> <5366105b0610171203r31018337nd063b5151982fe79@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <710b78fc0610171640u58cccee0p78d1825a36eca996@mail.gmail.com> I love this list, people are too cool to be amazed by anything. Also might have to do with people knowing waaay too much to be surprised very often. Apologies for the stupid subject, btw, that was the subject line for the vid on youtube, and there was no context to where it came from. I really want one of those whiteboards! Emlyn On 18/10/06, BillK wrote: > On 10/17/06, Robert Bradbury wrote: > > > > On 10/17/06, Jay Dugger wrote: > > > > > > I think that program has the name "Physics Illustrator," and runs only > > > on Tablet PCs. You can download it for free. (No link handy, just > > > Google.) I'd like to know more about the whiteboard-style interface he > > > uses in the video. > > > > > > > I agree -- *what* is the whiteboard (or software that links a > > touch-sensitive projected screen) to window regions? > > > > The physics was interesting but the large scale interactive medium more so. > > > > The whiteboard is called a smartboard. They're in about every college > and school in the country. (Maybe a slight exaggeration). > > > > The example photos show children using them. > > BillK > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From nanogirl at halcyon.com Tue Oct 17 23:32:04 2006 From: nanogirl at halcyon.com (Gina Miller) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 16:32:04 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] "Cool computer program" Message-ID: <004401c6f244$c44f5830$0200a8c0@Nano> PS - here are a bunch of YouTube results for interactive screens: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=interactive+screen 'animator for hire' Gina "Nanogirl" Miller Nanotechnology Industries http://www.nanoindustries.com Personal: http://www.nanogirl.com/index2.html Animation Blog: http://maxanimation.blogspot.com/ Craft blog: http://nanogirlblog.blogspot.com/ Foresight Participating Member http://www.foresight.org Nanotechnology Advisor Extropy Institute http://www.extropy.org Email: nanogirl at halcyon.com "Nanotechnology: Solutions for the future." ----- Original Message ----- From: Gina Miller To: ExI chat list Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2006 4:29 PM Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] "Cool computer program" I have Physics Illustrator on my Tablet PC. Here is the link - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=56347faf-a639-4f3b-9b87-1487fd4b5a53&displaylang=en (and as Jay said if you have a desktop or a normal laptop with Windows it won't work, only if you have the tablet pc operating system). While the program is fun to play with, and perhaps demonstrate something at a presentation, the problem I experienced with the program is that there is no output! You can not save it to an .avi or an .mov to show later or upload to a website. If you have a way to record your screen (and those are out there) you could record it, and if you are anything but perfect in your drawing (or in your just stopping to think) you might have to modify your footage (cut boring or incorrect frames out) and resave it, more work. In fact I talked about this problem on my animation blog - and came to the conclusion that self recording is the only way to output PI. To answer Robert, I can tell you how Physics Illustrator works, you draw directly on your computer screen and you could then show it via projector. But in the case of this YouTube video, in the beginning we hear the man (Professor Randall Davis) say "let me show you an example of the Assist Sketch Understanding System" which looks like it comes out of MIT, and so appears not to be of the Microsoft variety. These are two different programs. In his program Davis is actually drawing on the screen. This may be similar technology to some of the other onscreen interactive progress that has been going on like the Khronos Projector (also wrote about this on my blog here: http://nanogirlblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/khronos-projector.html) There are other examples too, I think some have shown at Siggraph and Wired. Do a Google search for "interactive screen". You can also read more about the MIT program by searching for "Assist Sketch Understanding System". Regards, 'animator for hire' Gina "Nanogirl" Miller Nanotechnology Industries http://www.nanoindustries.com Personal: http://www.nanogirl.com/index2.html Animation Blog: http://maxanimation.blogspot.com/ Craft blog: http://nanogirlblog.blogspot.com/ Foresight Participating Member http://www.foresight.org Nanotechnology Advisor Extropy Institute http://www.extropy.org Email: nanogirl at halcyon.com "Nanotechnology: Solutions for the future." ----- Original Message ----- From: Jay Dugger To: ExI chat list Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2006 12:03 PM Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] "Cool computer program" Tuesday, 17 October 2006 I think that program has the name "Physics Illustrator," and runs only on Tablet PCs. You can download it for free. (No link handy, just Google.) I'd like to know more about the whiteboard-style interface he uses in the video. Enjoy spring time, Emlyn! -- Jay Dugger http://jaydugger.suprglu.com Sometimes the delete key serves best. _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From thespike at satx.rr.com Wed Oct 18 00:01:42 2006 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 19:01:42 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fictional Singularity Movie In-Reply-To: References: <20061017024123.60596.qmail@web37401.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20061017184138.0218f100@satx.rr.com> At 07:29 PM 10/17/2006 -0400, S wrote: > >> I think > >> Ray Kurzweil would be a good candidate for writing the screenplay Or wait--maybe Arnie Schwarzenegger? >It would have to be someone who is, first and foremost, skilled in the art of >storytelling while also being an expert on the Singularity. Perhaps >a better and >faster approach to this would be to do a screenplay adaptation of >the best and >currently available novel about the Singularity. Novels are rarely useful as the basis for a movie; they are too long and complicated. A novella is what you need, or an informed original screenplay. Wil McCarthy is currently writing some scripts for the SciFi Channel, and would be a fine candidate. His BLOOM is a remarkable nanocalypse novel, and some of his more recent novels have remarkable visualization of near-Singularity technology and cultural adaptations (THE COLLAPSIUM, from 2000, and its sequels). John Barnes' MOTHER OF STORMS (1994) was an impressive self-bootstrapping Singularity novel. Poul Anderson's GENESIS (2000). Obviously Charlie Stross's linked stories in ACCELERANDO (2005) and GLASSHOUSE (2006) might serve. Or even, you know, SINGULARITY SKY (2003), although that's not quite right despite the title. Since hardly anyone here seems to have heard of my own Singularity fiction, I'll simply mention THE JUDAS MANDALA (1982) TRANSCENSION (2002) perhaps the most accessible for a mass audience: THE HUNGER OF TIME (with Rory Barnes, 2003) GODPLAYERS/K-MACHINES (2005/6). Damien Broderick From sentience at pobox.com Wed Oct 18 00:32:37 2006 From: sentience at pobox.com (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 17:32:37 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] You're Fired In-Reply-To: References: <0J7700CZHBHCEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <0J7800JSB8QOAT70@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <0J7900L4DZOQ3XB0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> Message-ID: <45357625.8000600@pobox.com> BillK wrote: > > I thought I had addressed that issue. > "Market movements are unpredictable, meaningless and random". > Unpredictable, random price movements cannot be used to validate a > CEO's performance, except in a few outstanding examples, e.g. where > they turn round a failing company. But profits are probably a better > measure in that case, rather than share price level. > > In a rising market, every CEO will claim they are obviously doing a great job. > In a falling market, every CEO has good excuses available. > After all, in a falling market you can't sack every CEO, can you? Bill, read Robin's actual paper. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence From nvitamore at austin.rr.com Wed Oct 18 00:03:20 2006 From: nvitamore at austin.rr.com (nvitamore at austin.rr.com) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 20:03:20 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Cool computer program Message-ID: <380-22006103180320843@M2W030.mail2web.com> From: Gina Miller I like "touch me" art. Natasha -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web - Check your email from the web at http://mail2web.com/ . From CHealey at unicom-inc.com Tue Oct 17 23:59:59 2006 From: CHealey at unicom-inc.com (Christopher Healey) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 19:59:59 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] How to use Physics Illustrator on a non-tablet PC Message-ID: <5725663BF245FA4EBDC03E405C85429673F91D@w2k3exch.UNICOM-INC.CORP> For the more enterprising of you: http://blog.hypercubed.com/archives/2006/02/05/how-to-use-physics-illist rator-on-non-tablet-pc/ Haven't tested this yet myself... -Chris From spike66 at comcast.net Wed Oct 18 02:44:49 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 19:44:49 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] "Cool computer program" In-Reply-To: <710b78fc0610170542k38e52c9bs57bbfa77a876dd2c@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200610180258.k9I2wVTW008879@andromeda.ziaspace.com> That is wicked cool Emlyn. On that same YouTube page that superconducting magnet video is way cool too. I hafta be careful to avoid the YouTube black hole for time: it is too easy to have an hour or two slip away fooling with it. spike > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat- > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Emlyn > Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2006 5:43 AM > To: ExI chat list > Subject: [extropy-chat] "Cool computer program" > > I just don't know what to say about this. I'm sure someone will... > > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7eGypGOlOc > > Emlyn > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From emlynoregan at gmail.com Wed Oct 18 03:30:09 2006 From: emlynoregan at gmail.com (Emlyn) Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 13:00:09 +0930 Subject: [extropy-chat] "Cool computer program" In-Reply-To: <200610180258.k9I2wVTW008879@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <710b78fc0610170542k38e52c9bs57bbfa77a876dd2c@mail.gmail.com> <200610180258.k9I2wVTW008879@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <710b78fc0610172030nb28b069ue3ed95fb8274091d@mail.gmail.com> On 18/10/06, spike wrote: > That is wicked cool Emlyn. On that same YouTube page that superconducting > magnet video is way cool too. Yes, that's awesome! > I hafta be careful to avoid the YouTube black > hole for time: it is too easy to have an hour or two slip away fooling with > it. > > spike I was looking at that stuff around 9pm last night, and suddenly it was after 1 in the morning... My wife commented that it's a technology (can I call it that?) which is still at the "Here's me, here's a picture of my dog" stage (like a circa '95 personal home page). I think it'll progress though. It's like TV only even more scarily addictive... Emlyn > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat- > > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Emlyn > > Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2006 5:43 AM > > To: ExI chat list > > Subject: [extropy-chat] "Cool computer program" > > > > I just don't know what to say about this. I'm sure someone will... > > > > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7eGypGOlOc > > > > Emlyn > > _______________________________________________ > > extropy-chat mailing list > > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From CHealey at unicom-inc.com Wed Oct 18 00:13:06 2006 From: CHealey at unicom-inc.com (Christopher Healey) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 20:13:06 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] FW: How to use Physics Illustrator on a non-tablet PC (was "Cool computer program") Message-ID: <5725663BF245FA4EBDC03E405C85429673F91F@w2k3exch.UNICOM-INC.CORP> There's also a link I just noticed in the blog comments for filefactory.com, containing the completed conversion, but I'd recommend you either perform the conversion yourself from trusted sources, or at a minimum scan it very well for trojans. -Chris > -----Original Message----- > From: Christopher Healey > Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2006 8:00 PM > To: 'ExI chat list' > Subject: How to use Physics Illustrator on a non-tablet PC > > > For the more enterprising of you: > > http://blog.hypercubed.com/archives/2006/02/05/how-to-use-phys > ics-illistrator-on-non-tablet-pc/ > > Haven't tested this yet myself... > > -Chris > From spike66 at comcast.net Wed Oct 18 04:23:44 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 21:23:44 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] high tech birds In-Reply-To: <21854155.950131161106029834.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> Message-ID: <200610180425.k9I4Pt0D024291@andromeda.ziaspace.com> bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of pjmanney ... There are even stories of injured hikers being stalked by groups of Keas like they were just a big sheep...? Glad it wasn't me! PJ ... Keas and most other beasts likely know better than to mess with a primate with two opposable thumbs. Only by imagining not having those do we realize what competent weapons they are. spike From russell.wallace at gmail.com Wed Oct 18 04:36:19 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 05:36:19 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] high tech birds In-Reply-To: <200610180425.k9I4Pt0D024291@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <21854155.950131161106029834.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> <200610180425.k9I4Pt0D024291@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0610172136m402b7529ne896801f998c53c6@mail.gmail.com> On 10/18/06, spike wrote: > > Keas and most other beasts likely know better than to mess with a primate > with two opposable thumbs. Only by imagining not having those do we > realize > what competent weapons they are. > At a guess the keas were just hoping the human would expire of his own accord so they could have first dibs on the carrion. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at comcast.net Wed Oct 18 04:18:12 2006 From: spike66 at comcast.net (spike) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 21:18:12 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] communist legacy In-Reply-To: <20061017171339.GN6974@leitl.org> Message-ID: <200610180437.k9I4bYLj022558@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl ... > I came across http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-fg-empty8oct08,0,1515774,full.st ory ... Eugen* Leitl Thanks Gene. Looks to me like the classic communist legacy. It reminds me why the world fought against it like rabid wildcats. Thank evolution the good guys won WW3. spike From hkhenson at rogers.com Wed Oct 18 04:14:57 2006 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (Keith Henson) Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 00:14:57 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] spirits (was Indexical Uncertainty) In-Reply-To: References: <34316.72.236.102.119.1161084903.squirrel@main.nc.us> <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com> <016701c6f0c7$fab96510$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700CPPJM7WB80@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <017701c6f0d0$a85b5720$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700G8HLCUYY60@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <018201c6f0d5$13a72820$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7800FDW996IW10@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <020101c6f19b$e0151220$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7900LAKZDC3XA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <34316.72.236.102.119.1161084903.squirrel@main.nc.us> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20061018000733.03d9f6e8@pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com> For at least ten years I have said that humans as well as dogs, cats and running operating systems have spirit. If you can interact with it, it has spirit. Keith Henson From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Wed Oct 18 06:20:54 2006 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 23:20:54 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] high tech birds In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0610172136m402b7529ne896801f998c53c6@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20061018062054.59439.qmail@web60517.mail.yahoo.com> --- Russell Wallace wrote: > At a guess the keas were just hoping the human would > expire of his own > accord so they could have first dibs on the carrion. Once while taking my trash out into the back alley, I had a large very stale dinner roll narrowly miss my noggin and hit the pavement at my feet with an impressive crack. I immediatelly looked around and up at all the 2nd story apartment windows, feeling certain some rascal child or vindictive neighbor had hurled it at me. But to my surprise, nobody was in the alley and all the windows were shut. Then I happened to look straight up and sitting on a telephone wire some 60 feet above my head was a raven with his head cocked to the side looking down at me with one eye. From the way it was looking at me I am quite certain that it had been hoping to trade a stale biscuit for some warm unconcious not-quite-carrion. I was rather impressed by this feat of bird intelligence but also just a little disturbed. Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "More persons, on the whole, are humbugged by believing in nothing, than by believing too much." - P. T. Barnum __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From russell.wallace at gmail.com Wed Oct 18 08:26:45 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 09:26:45 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Indexical Uncertainty In-Reply-To: <0J7A000J9OS6BU10@caduceus2.gmu.edu> References: <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com> <0J7700CPPJM7WB80@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <017701c6f0d0$a85b5720$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700G8HLCUYY60@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <018201c6f0d5$13a72820$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7800FDW996IW10@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <020101c6f19b$e0151220$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7900LAKZDC3XA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <453522E6.1080902@mydruthers.com> <0J7A000J9OS6BU10@caduceus2.gmu.edu> Message-ID: <8d71341e0610180126p6d175bdau1c001ac607974736@mail.gmail.com> On 10/17/06, Robin Hanson wrote: > > The main reason to be interested in and think about indexical uncertainty > is not because people in our world often have large degrees of such > uncertainty. The reason to be interested is that it opens up a new > family > of counterfactuals to reason about. Postulating and applying rationality > constraints that relate the reasonable beliefs under different > counterfactuals > is a powerful way to constrain the beliefs we should find reasonable. But the one does not imply the other. That we can postulate a mind of sufficiently low (dreaming) or distorted (insane) consciousness as to genuinely not know whether it's Russell or Napoleon doesn't mean I (the entity currently thinking these thoughts) could have been Napoleon, any more than the number 3 could have been the number 7. If you doubt this, consider the extreme case: a rock doesn't know whether it's me or a rock. That doesn't mean I could have been a rock. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Wed Oct 18 08:55:49 2006 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 10:55:49 +0200 Subject: [extropy-chat] communist legacy In-Reply-To: <200610180437.k9I4bYLj022558@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <20061017171339.GN6974@leitl.org> <200610180437.k9I4bYLj022558@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <20061018085548.GP6974@leitl.org> On Tue, Oct 17, 2006 at 09:18:12PM -0700, spike wrote: > Thanks Gene. Looks to me like the classic communist legacy. It reminds me While communist fallout was an exacerbating factor, you'll notice that all of the developed countries are well below replacement rate (but the U.S., but only due to red state excess and immigration), and demographics alone is about to finish off the economy. What's worse, is that the society is stratifying (the middle class is going fast, about everywhere), that education is very much failing, and that we've about have ceased innovating. By itself, this is not fatal, if someone else is about to pick up the torch. > why the world fought against it like rabid wildcats. Thank evolution the > good guys won WW3. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From rhanson at gmu.edu Wed Oct 18 14:05:20 2006 From: rhanson at gmu.edu (Robin Hanson) Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 10:05:20 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Indexical Uncertainty In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0610180126p6d175bdau1c001ac607974736@mail.gmail.co m> References: <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com> <0J7700CPPJM7WB80@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <017701c6f0d0$a85b5720$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700G8HLCUYY60@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <018201c6f0d5$13a72820$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7800FDW996IW10@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <020101c6f19b$e0151220$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7900LAKZDC3XA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <453522E6.1080902@mydruthers.com> <0J7A000J9OS6BU10@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <8d71341e0610180126p6d175bdau1c001ac607974736@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <0J7C0048P4GWWU80@caduceus2.gmu.edu> At 04:26 AM 10/18/2006, Russell Wallace wrote: >The main reason to be interested in and think about indexical uncertainty >is not because people in our world often have large degrees of such >uncertainty. The reason to be interested is that it opens up a new family >of counterfactuals to reason about. Postulating and applying rationality >constraints that relate the reasonable beliefs under different counterfactuals >is a powerful way to constrain the beliefs we should find reasonable. > >But the one does not imply the other. Which claim is "one" and which is "other"? >That we can postulate a mind of sufficiently low (dreaming) or >distorted (insane) consciousness as to genuinely not know whether >it's Russell or Napoleon doesn't mean I (the entity currently >thinking these thoughts) could have been Napoleon, any more than the >number 3 could have been the number 7. If you doubt this, consider >the extreme case: a rock doesn't know whether it's me or a rock. >That doesn't mean I could have been a rock. A possible world specifies answers to all relevant questions. That is, it should be straightforward to figure out, if that world were the true one, what the answer to any specific relevant question is. So the problem with postulating "3=7" in a world is that ordinary math has clearly been thrown out in that world. Thus to make sense of this world we need to also specify some other way to answer relevant math questions. This is awkward, but for some purposes can be useful. Counterfactuals are untrue claims useful to an analysis. So clearly the mere fact that a counterfactual claim is not true is not a sufficient basis to reject it from consideration in an analysis. I see three obvious reasons to reject a counterfactual: 1) it is ambiguous which possible worlds are intended to be included or excluded by this claim, 2) the relevant possible worlds are themselves not clear, not giving us a straightforward way to answer relevant questions, or 3) the claim is not relevant to some purpose, so that ignoring it won't change the results. We also have one strong reason for considering a counterfactual. This is when we are analyzing the reasonable beliefs of an agent who is not entirely sure that the counterfactual is in fact false. It is hard to get such analyses right without including the possible worlds that the agents themselves are considering. I don't see that any of these reasons for rejection apply to the counterfactual claim that I (or you) are Napoleon. And I can imagine situations containing agents who are not sure they are false. So I don't yet see a basis for rejecting such counterfactuals. Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323 From jonkc at att.net Wed Oct 18 14:44:58 2006 From: jonkc at att.net (John K Clark) Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 10:44:58 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fictional Singularity Movie References: <20061017024123.60596.qmail@web37401.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20061017184138.0218f100@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <00a401c6f2c4$048ed860$270a4e0c@MyComputer> Let me see if I can guess what a Hollywood made Singularity movie would be like. The handsome hero and his beautiful assistant Dr. Kitty Loveinterest are determined to stop the Singularity; they accomplish this in the third act by breaking into the mad scientist's underground laboratory deep in the heart of an active volcano and winning a fistfight with villain Eliezer Yudkowsky and his gang of evil henchmen, who for some reason insist on attacking the hero one at a time rather than all at once. The world is saved, the Singularity will never happen, and they all lived happily ever after. The End.. or is it? Yudkowsky's diabolical laughter could be faintly heard over the closing credits. John K Clark From discwuzit at yahoo.com Wed Oct 18 14:25:16 2006 From: discwuzit at yahoo.com (John B) Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 07:25:16 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] Space colony behind the moon? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20061018142516.94516.qmail@web54507.mail.yahoo.com> Anders - How hard is it to see a 300 Kelvin object against a 2 Kelvin background? And that's assuming only shirtsleeve conditions - no motors or other 'hotspots'... -John Message: 2 Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 22:36:53 +0200 (MEST) From: "Anders Sandberg" Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Space colony behind the moon? To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: <1780.163.1.72.81.1161117413.squirrel at webmail.csc.kth.se> Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1 -snip- But this assumes they are just fired stupidly, not by somebody who understands orbital mechanics. It is not harder to hit L2 than L1! The real place to put the space ark is an unknown orbit. Space is big, and if it is too much of an hassle to find you it is likely nobody will. -- Anders Sandberg, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From hemm at openlink.com.br Wed Oct 18 15:56:51 2006 From: hemm at openlink.com.br (Henrique Moraes Machado (oplnk)) Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 12:56:51 -0300 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fictional Singularity Movie References: <20061017024123.60596.qmail@web37401.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <03da01c6f2ce$082b7b90$fe00a8c0@cpd01> Well, Hollywood has a bad record on depicting AIs. Usually humans are it's enemy or food or whatever makes it very likely to kill everything. It's like any singularity event would necessarily be distopic. There's perhaps one movie (which I can remember) where AI is at least interesting. and it's *not* 2001. If you remember the very first Star Trek movie, You'll remember that V'Ger thing. It looks very much like a product of a civilisation that has come through a singularity. And in the end of the movie, someone is actually uploaded into the AI. ----- Original Message ----- From: A B To: ExI chat list Sent: Monday, October 16, 2006 11:41 PM Subject: [extropy-chat] Fictional Singularity Movie Hey y'all, I'm wondering when the first "blockbuster" Singularity movie will emerge out of Hollywood. I have no doubt that it will happen eventually. If a film isn't already underway, this might be a good opportunity for someone in the pro-Singularity camp to make a positive contribution to Singularity awareness. The masses want to be entertained if they are to be expected to learn anything. I think Ray Kurzweil would be a good candidate for writing the screenplay (if he was interested) for several reasons: expertise, name recognition, balanced analyses, and a double major including creative writing. And I think the Wachowski brothers would make good Directors for it. (They are famous for "The Matrix" of course). To guard against the possibility that a film would only add to the "fiction" interpretation of the Singularity meme, the film could begin with an brief written explanation to the effect that: although the film itself is fictional, the Singularity is a "real" projected event that is anticipated by many experts in various fields. (Or something like that). A good, thought provoking film, might get a lot of people talking who otherwise might not learn of the Singularity for quite some time. Best Wishes, Jeffrey Herrlich ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ All-new Yahoo! Mail - Fire up a more powerful email and get things done faster. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hemm at openlink.com.br Wed Oct 18 16:31:35 2006 From: hemm at openlink.com.br (Henrique Moraes Machado (oplnk)) Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 13:31:35 -0300 Subject: [extropy-chat] Space colony behind the moon? References: <21854155.950131161106029834.JavaMail.servlet@perfora><20061017194513.64622.qmail@web37412.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20061017155631.02264910@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <040101c6f2d2$e207be10$fe00a8c0@cpd01> Why not bury it a couple of kilometers below the surface of the moon? The moon itself is a good space station. It already has some gravity to begin with. and if safety is a concern, bury the base deep below the surface. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Damien Broderick" To: "ExI chat list" Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2006 5:56 PM Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Space colony behind the moon? > >>Could someone here tell me whether or not it would be physically >>possible to place a space station in "Lunar-Synchronous" orbit, such >>that the station would permanently "hover" over the "invisible" face >>of the moon > > Yes. > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point#L2 > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From mbb386 at main.nc.us Wed Oct 18 17:18:31 2006 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 13:18:31 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [extropy-chat] high tech birds In-Reply-To: <20061018062054.59439.qmail@web60517.mail.yahoo.com> References: <8d71341e0610172136m402b7529ne896801f998c53c6@mail.gmail.com> <20061018062054.59439.qmail@web60517.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <32960.72.236.102.90.1161191911.squirrel@main.nc.us> > Then I happened to look straight up and sitting on a > telephone wire some 60 feet above my head was a raven > with his head cocked to the side looking down at me > with one eye. From the way it was looking at me I am > quite certain that it had been hoping to trade a stale > biscuit for some warm unconcious not-quite-carrion. > > I was rather impressed by this feat of bird > intelligence but also just a little disturbed. > Indeed. Note this old painting: http://www.pafa.org/paintingsPreview.jsp?id=1030 No doubt the eyes would be the first target, and then the meal could be finished at leisure... :( Regards, MB From thespike at satx.rr.com Wed Oct 18 17:17:30 2006 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 12:17:30 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] new free online fiction from COSMOS Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20061018121539.022fb850@cosmosmagazine.com> The first of the new free online COSMOS short stories is now up. These will be online offerings not published in the magazine--although the regular print stories will continue to appear online several months after paper publication. ================= http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/fiction or more specifically http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/763 "Apollo's breath" Original fiction exclusive to Cosmos Online by Shaun A. Saunders ===================== Enjoy! Damien Broderick From brian at posthuman.com Wed Oct 18 17:14:29 2006 From: brian at posthuman.com (Brian Atkins) Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 12:14:29 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Fictional Singularity Movie In-Reply-To: <03da01c6f2ce$082b7b90$fe00a8c0@cpd01> References: <20061017024123.60596.qmail@web37401.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <03da01c6f2ce$082b7b90$fe00a8c0@cpd01> Message-ID: <453660F5.1020208@posthuman.com> A good solid documentary movie would be nice, with some flashy graphics. Who knows, maybe such a thing is already underway? *wink* ;-) -- Brian Atkins Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence http://www.singinst.org/ From sjatkins at mac.com Wed Oct 18 18:58:28 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 11:58:28 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Tyranny in place In-Reply-To: <015d01c6f0c4$ff139ed0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <200609302126.k8ULQbBM005673@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <451F134E.8030706@goldenfuture.net> <45203945.1030206@goldenfuture.net> <8d71341e0610012204p203bbfb2gabd206c5fae84994@mail.gmail.com> <051501c6e5e8$2c5243c0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <8d71341e0610012326y66fde0f3h3795e07362235e64@mail.gmail.com> <059801c6e90d$1753c390$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <8d71341e0610060912n29ce3919obe40cec30f1b43f5@mail.gmail.com> <00b001c6efad$dba54560$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <012d01c6f065$54a2db00$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1160945327.5671.9.camel@localhost> <015d01c6f0c4$ff139ed0$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <3CAE0AEF-541D-4950-B007-A2D914D6F829@mac.com> On Oct 15, 2006, at 6:45 PM, Lee Corbin wrote: > Samantha writes > >>> So you see (as you explain below) that any inconvenience to >>> Al Qaeda that occurs overseas is just a side-effect of a >>> government grab for more power? Would you try to make >>> that argument apply to America in World War II, the Civil >>> War, Korea, and Viet Nam? Or is something different now? >> >> I don't believe Al Qaeda is or ever was a significant enough >> problem to >> justify what has been and is being done in this idiotic war on a >> form of >> asymmetric warfare. Bush has repeadely even lowered the priority of >> finding bin Laden. > > Why was the bombing of Pearl Harbor any different? Actual country with clear war like intentions. Clear definition of victory. Formal declaration of war. How was it all that similar? How is the question relevant? > >> Do you think Al Qaeda are the end and be-all of terrorism? Do you >> think >> it is remotely possible to ever find and "bury" all cells of any such >> organization? > > No, on both counts. > >> Bush and most of the administration claim this war is >> never ending. The people should have been up in arms and soon as >> this >> was claimed. But no, most of us bring our freedom and our money >> gladly >> to Washington to protect us from the B-A-A-D and E-V-I-L endless >> menace. > > Am I to infer that you don't think Al Qaeda attacks on the West.it > will > be endless? You suppose that they'll just fade away over time? Bush declared this is a never-ending war, not I. I don't believe it is or should be a "war" at all. I think we will have a lot less terrorist attacks if we refrain from some of our more asinine foreign entanglements and get out of Iraq. Whether people want to hear it or not the US has been asking for major blowback in the Middle East for decades now. We will not and cannot eliminate terrorism by turning the world into a complete police state. Personally I would not want to inhabit that kind of world even if such measures actually could remotely be workable with deep enough total surveillance. > >>> One thing that is more dangerous now than in any point in >>> Western history is the huge size of the bureaucracies, and >>> their self-sustaining agendas. Far more civil rights were >>> abrogated during the Civil War and World War II, and >>> in effect in World War I, than now, but it was easy to pull >>> back once the menace was contained. >> >> Yep. Which is why a "war" defined as endless is hideously dangerous. > > You are perfectly correct. The world is not in a good state peace- > wise :-) > > But look on the bright side: in terms of per capita deaths, this one > looks to be one of the gentlest in history. In terms of damage to fundamental rights and freedoms and the growth of unchecked power it is very dangerous. I don't see much bright side to the near total perversion of US concerns by the terrorism trump card. > The only long term question > is whether the war will gradually fade away, or escalate to total > conflict once Hispanic North America and Moslem Europe lock > horns. Now that image cheered me up. :-) - samantha From sjatkins at mac.com Wed Oct 18 19:07:58 2006 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 12:07:58 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Indexical Uncertainty In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0610161655m444b921bg9218946cd0eb71da@mail.gmail.com> References: <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com> <0J7700CZEBHAEKA0@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <016701c6f0c7$fab96510$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700CPPJM7WB80@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <017701c6f0d0$a85b5720$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700G8HLCUYY60@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <018201c6f0d5$13a72820$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7800FDW996IW10@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <4533FCD1.2090006@mydruthers.com> <0J7900HQZ2V2V580@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <8d71341e0610161655m444b921bg9218946cd0eb71da@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <278713BE-6EA3-4451-A533-37D92E0BA174@mac.com> On Oct 16, 2006, at 4:55 PM, Russell Wallace wrote: > On 10/16/06, Robin Hanson wrote: > I was just following Lee's notation. A better name might be > "Index#2923". > But it is more about minds than bodies. You know you are a mind, > but you > might not know which body that corresponds to. > > To see why it doesn't make sense to say "I might not be me", > consider that fundamentally there is nothing ontologically > privileged about one's past and future selves as opposed to other > people. Do you think it makes sense to ask "why am I currently my > current self as opposed to my 10 year old self or my 70 year old > self?" Yep. If it was high priority to contemplate such things I would retreat to a cave in the Himalayas. - s -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Wed Oct 18 19:12:05 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 15:12:05 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Space colony behind the moon? In-Reply-To: <20061018142516.94516.qmail@web54507.mail.yahoo.com> References: <20061018142516.94516.qmail@web54507.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 10/18/06, John B wrote: > How hard is it to see a 300 Kelvin object against a 2 > Kelvin background? And that's assuming only > shirtsleeve conditions - no motors or other > 'hotspots'... It would be more like a 20-40K background within the solar system and its not hard at all. The detectors in any IR telescope could manage it. Our mid-to-far IR technology isn't great (it isn't at the level of a 10 megapixel visible light camera for example) but that is because the market for such sensors isn't as large not because we can't really figure out how to do it. The real question isn't what temperature is it at as much as it is how much power is it radiating on an areal basis? If its only radiating 0.00001W/m^2 [1] its going to be hard to detect no matter *what* wavelengths the photons have. Robert 1. Thats an arbitrary number. The better way to look at it is whether its radiator size and our detector size are sufficiently matched that we can count photons at specific frequencies at levels significantly greater than the equipment or background noise. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Wed Oct 18 19:39:24 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 15:39:24 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Space colony behind the moon? In-Reply-To: <20061017194513.64622.qmail@web37412.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <21854155.950131161106029834.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> <20061017194513.64622.qmail@web37412.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 10/17/06, A B wrote: > > The reason I ask is that it seems to me that a "stationary" orbit over the > "invisible" side of the moon would be an ideal starting place to locate a > self-sustaining space colony (as insurance against an existential > disaster), such as the "Ark 1" as proposed by the Lifeboat Foundation. This > location would seem to offer several security advantages over a lower, > earth-orbit station. > You and/or the Lifeboat foundation should probably rethink this. I've devoted a *lot* of thought over the years to external hazard function minimization -- I'm not sure putting anything in space is the way to go. I strongly suspect that there are places on Earth that could be far safer at a significantly lower cost because you don't have the wasted cost of hauling material out of the Earth's gravity well. Henrique's suggestion for a lunar subsurface colony isn't bad -- but I think a better argument could be made for an ocean subsurface colony. Something like an oceanic subfloor colony [1] someplace off the NW coast of the islands of Hawaii (away from the direction the subsurface hot spot is traveling, away from the Pacific subduction zones, not near any "typical" city targets for atomic bombs, etc.). There is probably still enough latent heat in the crust in such a location that you could tap geothermal energy (otherwise you probably need a breeder reactor and relatively large pile of uranium). Something like that and you would be relatively immune to anything which happens on the surface and probably be able to survive for millions to even tens or hundreds of millions of years. The problem is that most of us were brought up in the era when the colonizing of space would be the solution for all of our problems so we don't think along the lines of colonizing the oceans. Whether your fears are cosmic rays, mass drivers, nuclear weapons, nanobots, etc. most of them become much less pressing problems if you have sufficient amounts of mass between you and them. Robert 1. Oceanic subsurface (sea floor) colonies are largely immune from most natural or man-made hazards that would impact the Earth's surface. A sub-sea-floor colony would be immune from nuclear tipped torpedos as well. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From russell.wallace at gmail.com Wed Oct 18 22:55:47 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 23:55:47 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Indexical Uncertainty In-Reply-To: <278713BE-6EA3-4451-A533-37D92E0BA174@mac.com> References: <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com> <0J7700CPPJM7WB80@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <017701c6f0d0$a85b5720$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700G8HLCUYY60@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <018201c6f0d5$13a72820$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7800FDW996IW10@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <4533FCD1.2090006@mydruthers.com> <0J7900HQZ2V2V580@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <8d71341e0610161655m444b921bg9218946cd0eb71da@mail.gmail.com> <278713BE-6EA3-4451-A533-37D92E0BA174@mac.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0610181555r55676b05w49fed9633b0d8bae@mail.gmail.com> On 10/18/06, Samantha Atkins wrote: > > Yep. If it was high priority to contemplate such things I would retreat to a cave in the Himalayas. > Eh, some people play football when they're taking a break from work, I contemplate philosophy :) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Wed Oct 18 23:07:12 2006 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 19:07:12 -0400 Subject: [extropy-chat] Indexical Uncertainty In-Reply-To: <278713BE-6EA3-4451-A533-37D92E0BA174@mac.com> References: <8d71341e0610122012wbaf4f61x44a5f0f68c79c7b7@mail.gmail.com> <0J7700CPPJM7WB80@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <017701c6f0d0$a85b5720$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7700G8HLCUYY60@caduceus1.gmu.edu> <018201c6f0d5$13a72820$6701a8c0@homeef7b612677> <0J7800FDW996IW10@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <4533FCD1.2090006@mydruthers.com> <0J7900HQZ2V2V580@caduceus2.gmu.edu> <8d71341e0610161655m444b921bg9218946cd0eb71da@mail.gmail.com> <278713BE-6EA3-4451-A533-37D92E0BA174@mac.com> Message-ID: <62c14240610181607r5aae495q9d13087ec2ce3a18@mail.gmail.com> On 10/18/06, Samantha Atkins wrote: > > > > Yep. If it was high priority to contemplate such things I would retreat to a cave in the Himalayas. > So would that be to get away from contemplating such things, or to enable contemplation? (in either event, bring a jacket - I hear it's cold there) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From russell.wallace at gmail.com Wed Oct 18 23:31:18 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 00:31:18 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Space colony behind the moon? In-Reply-To: References: <21854155.950131161106029834.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> <20061017194513.64622.qmail@web37412.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <8d71341e0610181631j3ec91a58k7d571ad1c1220193@mail.gmail.com> On 10/18/06, Robert Bradbury wrote: > You and/or the Lifeboat foundation should probably rethink this. I've > devoted a *lot* of thought over the years to external hazard function > minimization -- I'm not sure putting anything in space is the way to go. > The point being missed is that what we need isolation from isn't matter, it's ideas. Giant rail guns, killer robots, swarms of flesh-eating nanites - they're like Satan and Cthulhu, reifications of our fears, because it's in our nature to put a visually imaginable face on things. They don't _literally_ exist; they need to be taken on the correct level, as metaphors. The reason Earth isn't big enough is that it's not _psychologically perceived_ as big enough, not now that we can span it in hours in person and in milliseconds by proxy. Materially it could support everyone in comfort and safety - considerably more than its current population if its resources were used more efficiently - but that's not how our psychology works. We need the _perception_ of an open frontier, so that our efforts will start being turned outwards rather than inwards against each other: http://spot.colorado.edu/~marscase/cfm/articles/frontier.html I don't agree with the specifics of Zubrin's plans, but he's right about one thing: opening the space frontier is the only way to go. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From brian at posthuman.com Thu Oct 19 03:49:42 2006 From: brian at posthuman.com (Brian Atkins) Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 22:49:42 -0500 Subject: [extropy-chat] Transhuman warning signs In-Reply-To: <1546.163.1.72.81.1160419899.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> References: <1546.163.1.72.81.1160419899.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: <4536F5D6.1000003@posthuman.com> The internet mods-up things quickly nowadays: http://digg.com/design/Funny_Warning_Signs_from_the_Future -- Brian Atkins Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence http://www.singinst.org/ From neuronexmachina at gmail.com Thu Oct 19 04:21:57 2006 From: neuronexmachina at gmail.com (Neil H.) Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 21:21:57 -0700 Subject: [extropy-chat] Transhuman warning signs In-Reply-To: <1211.86.143.28.237.1160469316.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> References: <200610100317.k9A3H3oe006947@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <1211.86.143.28.237.1160469316.squirrel@webmail.csc.kth.se> Message-ID: On 10/10/06, Anders Sandberg wrote: > > > Brandon Reinhart wrote: > > Does this mean when I join up with a group-mind, I'm going to have to > wear > > one of your warning signs like a star of david? Feh! > > Exactly my thought when I made the sign. Could the warning sign threaten > individual liberty? I might have to wear one of those cognitive hazard > signs myself. On a related note, some of these signs would make rather spiffy t-shirts. -- Neil -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Thu Oct 19 04:32:04 2006 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 04:32:04 +0000 Subject: [extropy-chat] Space colony behind the moon? In-Reply-To: <8d71341e0610181631j3ec91a58k7d571ad1c1220193@mail.gmail.com> References: <21854155.950131161106029834.JavaMail.servlet@perfora> <20061017194513.64622.qmail@web37412.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <8d71341e0610181631j3ec91a58k7d571ad1c1220193@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On 10/18/06, Russell Wallace wrote: > > The point being missed is that what we need isolation from isn't matter, > it's ideas. So are you saying we should return back to the cave man days when ideas were in much shorter supply? The reason Earth isn't big enough is that it's not _psychologically > perceived_ as big enough, not now that we can span it in hours in person and > in milliseconds by proxy. > But adjusting the psychological perceptions of people with a few milligrams of assorted substances is *so* much easier & cheaper than hauling bodies out of gravity wells... Materially it could support everyone in comfort and safety - considerably > more than its current population if its resources were used more efficiently > - but that's not how our psychology works. We need the _perception_ of an > open frontier, so that our efforts will start being turned outwards rather > than inwards against each other: > But shouldn't we stop reinforcing perceptions that people have that the frontier is someplace "out there". It is instead within our minds regarding what is and is not really possible -- call it the "pre-nano-reality wall". That is the open frontier that we need to overcome because that undermines the perception of resource shortages which in turn plays off of the predisposition (presumably genetic) to roam, accumulate resources and make copies of ourselves. As an aside -- in "The Case for Mars" Zubrin comes very close to making a case for nanotechnology (when he argues using Martian material and robots to produce Martian solar power satellites). But he fails to grasp that once you have the technology to start dismantling Mars and launching it into space you can keep going and finish the process completely. Whenever I come across the proponents of Mars colonization (blogs, etc.) I don't hesitate to point out that by the time they are able to get "there" it will likely no longer be "there". Robert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From russell.wallace at gmail.com Thu Oct 19 05:16:41 2006 From: russell.wallace at gmail.com (Russell Wallace) Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 06:16:41 +0100 Subject: [extropy-chat] Space colony behind