From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Dec 1 01:29:27 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2011 18:29:27 -0700 Subject: [ExI] forwarding tara maya's post: capitalism, etc In-Reply-To: <029401cca017$fd583490$f8089db0$@att.net> References: <029401cca017$fd583490$f8089db0$@att.net> Message-ID: 2011/11/10 spike : > From:?Tara Maya [mailto:tara at taramayastales.com] > Sent:?Thursday, November 10, 2011 1:48 PM > To:?ExI chat list > Subject:?Re: [ExI] Capitalism, anti capitalism, emotional arousal > > Almost none of my emails get through, so I apologize if I am cramming too > many ideas in at once. These are my thoughts inspired by the ongoing > discussion. Thanks for making the effort Tara, and though I am replying late, I really want you to know that I appreciated your post very much. > 1. Happiness vs. Suffering > There is no utopia possible, because of human nature. Actually, it's worse > than that. Change human nature, and is utopia possible? No. Even if we all > upload or evolve, we are not going to have a utopia. Happiness (and > suffering) exist to let encourage (or warn) you to pursue actions ?that will > (hopefully) prolong your survival or your relatives' survival, and that is > true of all living beings, not just humans. So the goal of eliminating all > suffering is a ludicrous one. Not only it isn't possible, it isn't > desirable. Life pays one coin, heads happiness, tails suffering. If you > eliminate all suffering, you eliminate all happiness; you end life. Suffering can be staved off by pushing problems to the future, or through time limited exponential growth. It is the problem of the red queen (Alice in Wonderland) though... you have to go faster and faster to remain in the same place. America seems to be getting off the exponential growth train, and I think it is going to get more painful before it gets less... In the long term, however, I entirely believe you are correct. Eventually you run out of asteroids to mine... and even Jupiter's mass will be sucked dry... and then where will we go? Unless we have FTL travel through some magickal process that I cannot comprehend, we are doomed to run out of exponential growth at some point, and suffering and competition will resume in earnest. > 2. Pragmatism vs. Dogmatism > Despite my belief that one cannot eliminate ALL suffering, I do believe > certain systems/regimes/relationships, etc. are worse than they need to be. > The way we can tell things can be better is that we (1) try something new > and find it to be better, or (2) see someone else try something new and find > it to be better. (Though we must be careful: the cash is always greener on > the other side of the economy.) If what you are doing doesn't work, try something different. Anything different. The thing is, that what we're doing is working mostly... to the extent that it is capitalism, it is working pretty good. Now I haven't said this before, so some of you may consider this an intellectual victory... :-) Some corporations and corporate officers and representatives are collectively or individually so selfish that they act in immoral ways. This is just plain wrong. Unfettered capitalism must not be a license for greedy and immoral people and corporations to take advantage of the rest of us. Abusing the environment for selfish gain at the expense of everyone else is one of the most important classes of immoral acts engaged in by corporations. So capitalism to be successful MUST have moral people and moral corporations. Since you can't legislate morality, you're screwed. Religion doesn't seem to be able to add to the morals of our society either, and in some cases actually erodes moral behavior. Without moral behavior, capitalism is bad. So, what is to be done? There are no easy answers. Perhaps though we will somehow be able to get AGI to behave in a more moral fashion than people. It might be possible.. and it all goes back to the whole friendly AI thing that we've already beaten to death. Pray to Odin for friendly AI... :-) > The smartest thing Zero State has said so far is that they will try out and > test their ideas before advocating them. I don't think that's particularly practical, but whatever... > Some deeper reading of history > would also be instructive. One thing I like about the Occupy movement is > that they are trying to be the change they advocate. We, as well as they, > can all see consensus decision making become tyranny of the few over the > many, rape and abuse of property proliferate, taxation taken without > representation, and other problems plague the Occupy camps. This would not > have surprised anyone who had studied the long history of similar movements, > but if the Occupy folks have better solutions to these problems than they > have yet demonstrated, this would be the time to dazzle the world. Unfortunately, I don't think the occupy people have very many good ideas, and if they do, they certainly aren't held by the majority of the group. They are intellectually fragmented, and so are destined to either fizzle, or end in violence. Either way, they become a political tool for the tools in Washington on both sides. This isn't going to help the people on the bottom any more than any other similar group mob action... (Reference 1918 Russia) > 3. Evolution vs. Revolution > Revolutions are never undertaken by the bottom of society against the top. > They are always undertaken by the next-to-the-top of society against the > top. They usually only result in a new top. Historically, revolutions don't > have a good track record in actually improving the lot of the common joe and > jane. Evolution and innovation, slow and steady change that is much less > dramatic and not nearly so romantic, has a much better record of improving > the lives of everyone. What do we want? Incremental improvement!!! When do we want it? Gradually!!!! (Apologies to Spike, but this now belongs to me too, meme successfully reproduced!) > Personally, I don't really understand the complaint that nothing at all is > working in our present society, so we ought to throw ALL of it out, and > start over from scratch. Starting over from scratch is a really bad idea. Totally agree. Reinstituting a hunter gatherer society would be a disaster at this point. So would resurrecting the USSR. > You couldn't do it even if you wanted to, but if you wanted to, you'd have > ...what? A cave, a stick and a rock? Seriously? The past ten thousand > generations of humans have toiled to give us, their descendants, the benefit > of their wisdom and hard work, and they have managed to pass this on to us > in a way that most animals cannot. Most animals do indeed start from scratch > every new generation, and far from changing their lives for the better, this > perpetual "revolution" only leads them to replicate the exact lifestyle of > their predecessors. It is precisely because we do NOT have to start from > scratch, because we are not condemned to perpetual revolution, that we can > stand on the shoulders of our parents and grandparents and see farther over > the horizon. To kick out the support under us would only make us fall, > perhaps to an even lower level than what we hope to replace. The rope is already around all our necks. We must not kick chairs out from under each other! > 4. Capitalism vs. Anti-captialism > I was raised a socialist, so the "anything but capitalism" mindset is like > mother's milk to me. But I have weaned. Congratulations!!! This is at least as great a victory as my overcoming my religious upbringing!!! > I learned to love capitalism the > hard way, by hating it first, and trying my best to destroy it. I learned > through trying to put anything-but-capitalism into effect, by trying it out > on a small scale, or seeing others try. In each case, anti-capitalism > returned my love with nothing but a slap to the face, whereas capitalism > returned rewards despite my loathing for it. For instance, while I was > active trying to put consensus decision-making into practice, I had two > friends who were both involved in anti-poverty programs. One roused the > Third-World workers of a certain factory in a certain Third-World state to > go on strike against the international corporation that ran the factory. The > corporation moved the factory to Vietnam and they all lost their jobs. Of > course, you could blame capitalism for that (Vietnam, as we all know, fought > a long war for the right to become a capitalist paradise), which we all did, > promptly and loudly. But meanwhile, the other friend was working with the > Grameen bank to give out micro-loans. The poor people prospered and started > their own businesses. The first activist, who had gotten the factory closed, > decided to try Grameen loans with her community (those who would still speak > to her). She was a little worried, though, and asked the second activist, > "But... loans to start new businesses... isn't that capitalism?" (She, like > all of us, belonged to the anything-but-capitalism school.) The second > activist reassured her, "Oh, no, not at all. Well. A little. But it really > works!" I love micro-loans!! One of my favorite companies is working with these guys and it's really exciting to watch. > A lightbulb went off in my head. Not a big one. More like Christmas-light > size bulb. It took many more strings of little colored lights from all > different sources to convince me that capitalism, like democracy, is a lousy > system of economy, but better than all the rest. If you have a system that > works better, I'm all for it, but I'd like proof, not promises. Amen sister!! > 5. Future vs. Present > For a hundred years or more we've heard promises that the human race is > about to outgrow capitalism, but I suspect it is the other way around. In a few ways (wikipedia, Linux, other open source) we are. The book Free is full of ways that we can overcome capitalism locally... but globally, I just don't think there is another way to make the world go around. You can't get rid of money, that's not the solution. You could make a pretty good start of things by simplifying the tax code... but Mr. Cain has given us a good case study in what happens to you when you attack that system. (Whether he did what he is being accused of or not.) > I suspect that there is so much opposition to capitalism because the human > race has yet to grow INTO it. This is an interesting thought, and I would really like to hear more on this point, if you can manage a reply... > In every nation that is touched by capitalism > and democracy, and the industrial revolution and demographic revolution that > accompanies that dangerous duo, certain individuals (and often certain > ethnic groups) prosper first, because they are better able to grasp the > opportunities. Naturally, this creates a backlash of anger, indeed, burning > hatred, against them. They are denounced as thieves and villains, even if > their activities actually raise the standard of living of all those around > them. In Nigeria, they have a saying, "The child who brings back the most > wood will be accused of collecting it from a taboo forest." The person who > earns less than you is pitied; the person who earns more than you is > resented. Yes, success is always resented.. but for a time in America it was also admired and sought for. I fear that time is passing with the OWS type movements. I was shocked a few months back to see a young person wearing a T-shirt that actually said, "Eat the Rich"... wow, that's misguided! > It would be wonderful indeed if we could live in a world where we had > neither to pity nor resent our neighbors, but what system would this be? The > great achievement of capitalism is to coordinate reciprocal altruism on a > scale of billions. OK... I can't let this pass without comment... In the immortal words of Inigo Montoia... I do not think that word means what you think it means... >From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism "Altruism is a concern for the welfare of others. It is a traditional virtue in many cultures, and a core aspect of various religious traditions, though the concept of 'others' toward whom concern should be directed can vary among cultures and religions. Altruism is the opposite of selfishness. Altruism can be distinguished from feelings of loyalty and duty. Altruism is a motivation to provide something of value to a party who must be anyone but the self, while duty focuses on a moral obligation towards a specific individual (for example, a god, a king), or collective (for example, a government). Some individuals may feel both altruism and duty, while others may not. Pure altruism consists of giving something of value[citation needed] (a reward or benefit) with no expectation of any compensation or benefits, either direct, or indirect (for instance from recognition of the giving). The term altruism may also refer to an ethical doctrine that claims that individuals are morally obliged to benefit others. Used in this sense, it is the opposite of egoism." Capitalism is the exact opposite of reciprocal altruism. It is reciprocal self interest. That it benefits everyone is a side effect. More people have been helped by self interest than by charity, for example. Reading some of the writings of Ayn Rand, while strident in the extreme, will beat at least this true point into your head. > What system can replace this? Most attempts to replace > capitalism have appealed to the sentiments of mutual care that we all know > (I hope) from the family, where members love each other unconditionally, and > sacrifice even their very lives for one another without hesitation. We may > feel this way also for our dear friends, and possibly, members of our > cultural/religious community, who share ideas so closely with us that they > are like family. But it is very hard to scale up. Even our soldiers, who > give their lives for their nation, expect to be paid for the honor. The fact > is that we are not ants, or coral reefs, with millions of members so closely > genetically related that Darwin's law helps us help each other. Just so. > In the West, we citizens are not only of different families, but of > different tribes, different races, different religions, different > world-views. And so attempts to found an economy on the altruism specific to > the family (evolved through kin selection) always ends in one of two ways: > back at capitalism, or down the road to authoritarianism. If you will not > pay your neighbor for his labor, he will not give it to you unless you > enslave him. So the USSR and Nazi Germany became slave camps; while the > Oneida commune and Israeli kibbutzim became corporations. Perhaps you do get it, and your use of the word altruism was a mis-statement. > How does any of this relate to transhumanism? I fear it is quite at the > heart of the future. If transhumans become an entirely separate species, or > collection of species, attempts to appeal to family models of economics (kin > based altruism) will be even more doomed to fail. The fall-back position of > organizing through mass enslavement will be an ongoing temptation. The only > humane alternative is capitalism. Money is blind to your race, your > religion, your politics or your gender, or even whether you are human at > all. (Isn't that what everyone hates about it?) But this is exactly why it > is what can guarantee that transhumans and AIs and humans and whatever will > be, can still live in peace, as neighbors, in democratic societies of the > future, each earning his/her/its own living in his/her/its own way without > hurting anyone else by his/her/its industry. But I predict there will be > blood shed in the name of "brotherly" love before that is allowed to > happen. I am very fearful of racism or specie-ism infiltrating into the minds of AGI. It's one of the most pernicious ideas. While I usually have quite a bit of disdain for PETA, I find myself now a days reevaluating my position, for as we treat animals today, we may well be expected to be treated tomorrow. Granting some rights to animals now, may preserve human rights in the future, when we are no longer the dominant life form on earth... it's food for thought anyway. Pass the steak and all you can eat shrimp! -Kelly From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Dec 1 01:41:38 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2011 18:41:38 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Humming Bird robot on cover of TIME Message-ID: I saw the TIME issue at a doctor's office yesterday... http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2011/11/24.aspx I think the thing that I find most encouraging about this is that TIME thinks people are interested enough in technology that this will actually sell magazines. That's hope and change for ya!!!! -Kelly From spike66 at att.net Thu Dec 1 05:15:34 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2011 21:15:34 -0800 Subject: [ExI] commentary by one of ours Message-ID: <012401ccafe8$411f3720$c35da560$@att.net> Interesting commentary by Charlie Stross: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/11/cutting-their-own-throat s.html spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Thu Dec 1 07:26:23 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2011 08:26:23 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Life began with a planetary mega-organism? In-Reply-To: References: <1322489892.82955.YahooMailNeo@web160606.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <1322490952.38080.YahooMailNeo@web160617.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20111201072623.GC31847@leitl.org> On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 04:47:39PM -0700, Kelly Anderson wrote: > How much do we know about the chemical origins of life? Their book is We know a damn lot, but we don't have a smoking gun (fossilized prebiotic chemistry) yet. The current vogue points the blame at hydrothermal sulfides (black smokers). > quite out of date (circa 1985) so I'm assuming that a lot of the stuff > they are talking about is entirely out of date, in addition to being > misleading. I really don't understand why they have to resort to You can't argue science with believers. It's an exercise in futility. > quoting people out of context so very much... sigh. If the truth is on > your side, why would you have to be so tricky about it?? -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Thu Dec 1 12:43:31 2011 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2011 05:43:31 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Humming Bird robot on cover of TIME In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I believe it was TIME, (or perhaps NEWSWEEK), who recently did a cover story about the Singularity/immortality and the year 2045. I was amazed at that one! lol And even READER'S DIGEST did a transhumanist flavored story about future tech, a number of years ago. John : ) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Thu Dec 1 14:00:24 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2011 15:00:24 +0100 Subject: [ExI] commentary by one of ours In-Reply-To: <012401ccafe8$411f3720$c35da560$@att.net> References: <012401ccafe8$411f3720$c35da560$@att.net> Message-ID: <20111201140024.GG31847@leitl.org> On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 09:15:34PM -0800, spike wrote: > Interesting commentary by Charlie Stross: > > http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/11/cutting-their-own-throat > s.html Everyone but the publishers knows DRM is stillborn. It only inconveniences the paying customers. DRM is trivially removed (e.g. via Calibre) and if all things fail putting an e-Ink device on an OCR scanner will get rid of DRM and any potential watermarks in the bargain. The only way which is going to work is by offering DRM-free products cheap enough that pirates don't bother. From dan_ust at yahoo.com Thu Dec 1 15:48:17 2011 From: dan_ust at yahoo.com (Dan) Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2011 07:48:17 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] Humming Bird robot on cover of TIME In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1322754497.90377.YahooMailNeo@web160605.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> On Wednesday, November 30, 2011 8:41 PM Kelly Anderson wrote: > I saw the TIME issue at a doctor's office yesterday... > > http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2011/11/24.aspx > > I think the thing that I find most encouraging about this is that TIME > thinks people are interested enough in technology that this will > actually sell magazines. That's hope and change for ya!!!! Yes, it's great to have something new to be paranoid about. :/ Regards, Dan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From aware at awareresearch.com Thu Dec 1 15:52:03 2011 From: aware at awareresearch.com (Aware) Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2011 07:52:03 -0800 Subject: [ExI] commentary by one of ours In-Reply-To: <20111201140024.GG31847@leitl.org> References: <012401ccafe8$411f3720$c35da560$@att.net> <20111201140024.GG31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 6:00 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 09:15:34PM -0800, spike wrote: > > Interesting commentary by Charlie Stross: > > > > http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/11/cutting-their-own-throat > > s.html > > Everyone but the publishers knows DRM is stillborn. > > It only inconveniences the paying customers. DRM is trivially > removed (e.g. via Calibre) and if all things fail putting > an e-Ink device on an OCR scanner will get rid of DRM and any > potential watermarks in the bargain. > > The only way which is going to work is by offering DRM-free > products cheap enough that pirates don't bother. I think it's interesting that both sides of the DRM debate focus on paying (or not) for product, with no thought of instead paying for production. - Jef From bbenzai at yahoo.com Thu Dec 1 16:46:47 2011 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2011 08:46:47 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] forwarding tara maya's post: capitalism, etc In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1322758007.11799.YahooMailClassic@web114417.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Kelly Anderson wrote: > ... as we treat animals today, we may well be expected to > be treated tomorrow. Granting some rights to animals now, may preserve > human rights in the future, when we are no longer the dominant life > form on earth... I've always found this a rather ridiculous idea. It's equivalent to expecting that our treatment of cats would be based on their treatment of mice. Ben Zaiboc From js_exi at gnolls.org Thu Dec 1 19:58:33 2011 From: js_exi at gnolls.org (J. Stanton) Date: Thu, 01 Dec 2011 11:58:33 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Yes, I have experience re: retrocausal writing In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4ED7DC69.3010604@gnolls.org> > The Avantguardian wrote: > > any instances where a piece of writing be it a novel, academic > paper, or what have you simply seemed to write itself? When this > occurs did you ever get the sense that the finished work was using > you as a means to bring it into being? Yes. It was a strange and wonderful experience -- intense to the point of being physically and mentally draining. As I said once: "The Gnoll Credo is Gryka's book: I just wrote it down. She is absolutely real, and I'm the only one who knows her story. I had to tell it as best I could, so that others could know at least a small part of the joy, pain, and wonder I felt -- and the knowledge I gained -- from knowing her." http://www.thegnollcredo.com I believe I've succeeded. Reader reactions: "It has shocked me and moved me and infected my dreams," "Like an epiphany from a deep meditative experience," "Compare it to the great works of anthropologists Jane Goodall and Jared Diamond to see its true importance," and "The book was awesome. I cringed, I laughed, I even shed some tears." http://www.thegnollcredo.com/reviews/ JS http://www.gnolls.org From pharos at gmail.com Thu Dec 1 20:07:17 2011 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2011 20:07:17 +0000 Subject: [ExI] forwarding tara maya's post: capitalism, etc In-Reply-To: <1322758007.11799.YahooMailClassic@web114417.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <1322758007.11799.YahooMailClassic@web114417.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 4:46 PM, Ben Zaiboc wrote: > I've always found this a rather ridiculous idea. >?It's equivalent to expecting that our treatment of cats would be based on their treatment of mice. > > And it also presupposes that the new dominant species doesn't regard humans as a tasty snack. BillK From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Thu Dec 1 23:42:14 2011 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2011 16:42:14 -0700 Subject: [ExI] 10 mega construction projects that could save the environment and the economy Message-ID: I am very curious to know what list members think of these ideas... http://io9.com/5863422/10-mega+construction-projects-that-could-save-the-environment--and-the-economy?tag=daily-10 John From atymes at gmail.com Fri Dec 2 00:26:17 2011 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2011 16:26:17 -0800 Subject: [ExI] 10 mega construction projects that could save the environment and the economy In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: The ones that require people to live in them, are often not designed with adequate consideration that people will want to travel to and interact with the world outside. Look at any large city: is it a gated community? No, and it became large (and thrives) precisely because it is not. Massive amounts of people and products move in and out of the city at every hour. Sure, there are many who rarely leave the city - even quite a few who stay entirely within it for years at a time. The majority, though, travel to suburbs or beyond some of the time - and then there is the transient population, only there at certain hours of the day (such as workers in the many offices, who live in suburbs beyond the city). And then there are the raw and manufactured goods: imports to sustain the city and exports of what it produces. Not that redesign to solve this is impossible. Take that pyramid city in Tokyo Bay - or, possibly, one could consider it at certain points in the San Francisco Bay (though environmentalists would have a fit about habitat destruction, unless one could do this within land not currently suitable for wildlife). Start by tying it into car traffic, and designing the first parts as a housing community, with the seaward-facing side a cargo port. Add in commerce and light industry, but first and foremost, make it a residential area for the housing-tight existing community, with the expectation that, at least at first, most of the residents will be commuting outside - and even after the city is going, there will still be massive commute. But the projects won't work if they are designed to exist in isolation. No megaproject humanity has done thus far has worked well sealed into its own thing, instead of interacting with the world that already existed. On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 3:42 PM, John Grigg wrote: > I am very curious to know what list members think of these ideas... > > > http://io9.com/5863422/10-mega+construction-projects-that-could-save-the-environment--and-the-economy?tag=daily-10 > > > John > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From moulton at moulton.com Fri Dec 2 04:03:06 2011 From: moulton at moulton.com (F. C. Moulton) Date: Thu, 01 Dec 2011 20:03:06 -0800 Subject: [ExI] 10 mega construction projects that could save the environment and the economy In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4ED84DFA.9030303@moulton.com> On 12/01/2011 03:42 PM, John Grigg wrote: > I am very curious to know what list members think of these ideas... > > http://io9.com/5863422/10-mega+construction-projects-that-could-save-the-environment--and-the-economy?tag=daily-10 > I did not bother looking most of the list in detail because most of them do not look like projects but more like imaginative proposals. There is nothing wrong with imaginative proposals however they should not be called projects. A project has Gantt charts, budgets, diagrams and plans and people and organizations lined up to make it happen. I did look at the Masdar City entry. This looks like it actually has some substance even though it is behind schedule. The summary links to a 2008 NPR article which talks about how it is supposed to have low environmental impact which is great. The problem seems to be that the things have slowed down a bit however according to other online references Masdar City is still under construction. So from what I can see it is the one most deserving of being called a project. Masdar City does have a website http://www.masdar.ae/En/Menu/index.aspx?MenuID=48&CatID=27&mnu=Cat and has a Graduate School http://www.masdar.ac.ae/ The overall corporate site is: http://www.masdar.ae The ownership is Mubadala Development Company, an Abu Dhabi government investment company.And they have a FAQ http://www.masdar.ae/en/Menu/index.aspx?MenuID=94&mnu=Pri It will be interesting to see how successful it is. At least they are taking environmental issues very seriously. Fred From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Fri Dec 2 06:40:32 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2011 23:40:32 -0700 Subject: [ExI] forwarding tara maya's post: capitalism, etc In-Reply-To: <1322758007.11799.YahooMailClassic@web114417.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <1322758007.11799.YahooMailClassic@web114417.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 9:46 AM, Ben Zaiboc wrote: > Kelly Anderson wrote: > >> ... as we treat animals today, we may well be expected to >> be treated tomorrow. Granting some rights to animals now, may preserve >> human rights in the future, when we are no longer the dominant life >> form on earth... > > > I've always found this a rather ridiculous idea. It's equivalent to expecting that our treatment of cats would be based on their treatment of mice. I hope I'm wrong about this, but I don't find your analogy to be, well, analogous. We apparently weren't very nice to Neanderthals... It seems there can be only one dominant primate in a given area at a given time. The secret may be to make sure that whatever comes next isn't a primate. ;-) >From an evolutionary standpoint, mice and cats and humans don't occupy the same ecological niche... but us and whatever comes next most likely will occupy the same ecological niche, or at least there is a reasonable probability that we will. -Kelly From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Fri Dec 2 06:43:32 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2011 23:43:32 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Life began with a planetary mega-organism? In-Reply-To: <20111201072623.GC31847@leitl.org> References: <1322489892.82955.YahooMailNeo@web160606.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <1322490952.38080.YahooMailNeo@web160617.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <20111201072623.GC31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 12:26 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 04:47:39PM -0700, Kelly Anderson wrote: > >> How much do we know about the chemical origins of life? Their book is > > We know a damn lot, but we don't have a smoking gun (fossilized > prebiotic chemistry) yet. The current vogue points the blame > at hydrothermal sulfides (black smokers). So where do I go to get the best current thinking on the subject. >> quite out of date (circa 1985) so I'm assuming that a lot of the stuff >> they are talking about is entirely out of date, in addition to being >> misleading. I really don't understand why they have to resort to > > You can't argue science with believers. It's an exercise in > futility. My intent is not really to convince them. I know that's a waste of time. My intent is to educate myself in the area... make sure I'm on steady earth. And to learn a bit more about a new mythology. -Kelly From eugen at leitl.org Fri Dec 2 07:33:00 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 2 Dec 2011 08:33:00 +0100 Subject: [ExI] commentary by one of ours In-Reply-To: References: <012401ccafe8$411f3720$c35da560$@att.net> <20111201140024.GG31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20111202073259.GX31847@leitl.org> On Thu, Dec 01, 2011 at 07:52:03AM -0800, Aware wrote: > I think it's interesting that both sides of the DRM debate focus on > paying (or not) for product, with no thought of instead paying for > production. Can you expand your remark somewhat more? Are you talking about financing each step of the publishing process instead of just the end result? From eugen at leitl.org Fri Dec 2 10:35:52 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 2 Dec 2011 11:35:52 +0100 Subject: [ExI] forwarding tara maya's post: capitalism, etc In-Reply-To: References: <1322758007.11799.YahooMailClassic@web114417.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20111202103552.GD31847@leitl.org> On Thu, Dec 01, 2011 at 11:40:32PM -0700, Kelly Anderson wrote: > From an evolutionary standpoint, mice and cats and humans don't occupy > the same ecological niche... but us and whatever comes next most > likely will occupy the same ecological niche, or at least there is a The niche is the surface of this planet. You will observe that the 6th Great Extinction in this nice new-fangled Anthropocene epoch cuts across many niches -- and I pity the fools occupying them. Consider simple things like orbiting structures. Even with a low albedo a lot of them will permanently abolish the night. What about self-replicating photosynthetic panels? Rapid CO2 depletion, or oxygen reduction? What about your solar constant going down by quite a few 10%? How about microwave flux enough to melt the chocolate in your hand? Or, what about if you're just crunchy and good with ketchup? Prime rib CHNOPS source, my hearties. > reasonable probability that we will. They will use atoms and Joules. Of course they will. From eugen at leitl.org Fri Dec 2 10:40:57 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 2 Dec 2011 11:40:57 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Life began with a planetary mega-organism? In-Reply-To: References: <1322489892.82955.YahooMailNeo@web160606.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <1322490952.38080.YahooMailNeo@web160617.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <20111201072623.GC31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20111202104057.GE31847@leitl.org> On Thu, Dec 01, 2011 at 11:43:32PM -0700, Kelly Anderson wrote: > So where do I go to get the best current thinking on the subject. The usual staples like Nature and Science Magazine are pretty scarce on OoL articles, so I would ask Google (Scholar?) for origin of life and journal or somesuch combination of search terms, and drill down to the major peer reviewed journals of the field. Most of them won't be open access and subscriptions will be pricey, so the easiest way to find them would be your local university library (or some pirate resources out there, shiver me timbers). > >> quite out of date (circa 1985) so I'm assuming that a lot of the stuff > >> they are talking about is entirely out of date, in addition to being > >> misleading. I really don't understand why they have to resort to > > > > You can't argue science with believers. It's an exercise in > > futility. > > My intent is not really to convince them. I know that's a waste of > time. My intent is to educate myself in the area... make sure I'm on > steady earth. And to learn a bit more about a new mythology. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From anders at aleph.se Fri Dec 2 11:49:25 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 02 Dec 2011 11:49:25 +0000 Subject: [ExI] 10 mega construction projects that could save the environment and the economy In-Reply-To: <4ED84DFA.9030303@moulton.com> References: <4ED84DFA.9030303@moulton.com> Message-ID: <4ED8BB45.9010501@aleph.se> I love megaproject. I have dreamed of them ever since I was a kid. But most are stillborn because they require huge investments. Looking at the megaprojects that have been achieved, like interstate highways, the Internet, and the Netherlands, most of them were done piecemal. A highway here, a new connection there, a few more dikes - not a gigantic investment, and rewards come in after a short while. Then you or somebody else can build another part. Transatlantic cables were perhaps the exception: big investment, big reward, single structure. But the first one or two attempts also failed. You want to be able to afford to fail your megaproject. And of course, sketching a megaproject ignores all those messy human details. Sometimes that is accurate, but often ignoring them leads to embarassing problems. Going through the list: Renewable energy: this one handles the above criteria most of the time - there are plenty of different approaches, you can do things piecemal, you can fail, and they have to take humans into account. Which of course makes everything slower and messier than we would like. Masdar: Can be built in pieces, the UAE can afford a failure, but who would want to go and live there? Many ideal city projects have been total flops because they didn't figure out how to get people to live in them - both to go there and to behave consistent with the ideas. Usually such plans are assuming people are the little architect's clip art people rather than beings with their own goals, taking shortcuts and changing their environment to suit them. Desert aquanet: Big investment, risk for truly embarassing failure. Soverignty isn't the problem (Libya, say, could build their own aquanet), but an obvious problem is getting rid of the salt that would accumulate in the lakes. Could easily become environmental disaster zones. Still, maybe we want to have a few high-albedo salt flats to cool the planet? Amfora: Big investment, cannot afford failure, likely problems with humans. Amsterdam is a city that works; doing big digs in the centre is costly and interferes a lot. Space isn't an obvious problem given good communications to the outlying areas. Geothermal plants: not that expensive compared to most stuff on the list, failures are manageable, people are little involved. Good idea with the lithium, might be worth exploring for other minerals. However, only works in certain limited areas. Megacity pyramids: again, big and brittle business idea that if built will likely flounder on how people actually decide to live their lives. In my rpg module on transhuman cities I suggested that the target demographic for arcologies would be the elderly. I suspect the young and mobile might not be interested in a regimented and enclosed city. Seasteading arcologies: seasteading has the usual problem of attracting people, and arcologies has problems mentioned above. A near-shore arcology might have less problem getting people because there might actually be work and something to do outside, but it is essentially an architect's way of saying we should reclaim some land from the sea. Build snazzy skyscrapers there instead! Coral Venice: I believe this when I see Rachel get her protocells to do something on demand rather than ooze suggestively. I love them, but not as engineering tools. I can totally see biotech solutions for improving cities or even growing materials (in my rpg module I had a rhizome system bioengineered by the Dutch that helps keep Venice afloat). Space elevator: This is what we ought to start working on the minute we have figured out fullerene cabling. But it is one of those high threshold projects with pretty annoying failure modes. Lunar ring: Let's do this once we have the space elevator in place. And a treaty that ensures that nobody uses the moon as a phased array maser. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Fri Dec 2 13:52:33 2011 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Fri, 2 Dec 2011 05:52:33 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] Life began with a planetary mega-organism? In-Reply-To: <20111202104057.GE31847@leitl.org> References: <1322489892.82955.YahooMailNeo@web160606.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <1322490952.38080.YahooMailNeo@web160617.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <20111201072623.GC31847@leitl.org> <20111202104057.GE31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: <1322833953.93918.YahooMailNeo@web65611.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> ----- Original Message ----- > From: Eugen Leitl > To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > Cc: > Sent: Friday, December 2, 2011 2:40 AM > Subject: Re: [ExI] Life began with a planetary mega-organism? > > On Thu, Dec 01, 2011 at 11:43:32PM -0700, Kelly Anderson wrote: > >> So where do I go to get the best current thinking on the subject. > > The usual staples like Nature and Science Magazine are pretty > scarce on OoL articles, so I would ask Google (Scholar?) for > origin of life and journal or somesuch combination of search > terms, and drill down to the major peer reviewed journals of the field. > Most of them won't be open access and subscriptions will be > pricey, so the easiest way to find them would be your local > university library (or some pirate resources out there, shiver > me timbers). FWIW, I have figured out that for any really involved research project it is often cheaper to enroll in some easy class at?a nearby?university and get free library access then pay for all the articles involved in your research. I mean?$200 for an art appreciation class?for one semester can easily net you over a thousand dollars of journal articles. Stuart LaForge ? ?Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." -Clay Shirky From dan_ust at yahoo.com Fri Dec 2 15:49:08 2011 From: dan_ust at yahoo.com (Dan) Date: Fri, 2 Dec 2011 07:49:08 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] forwarding tara maya's post: capitalism, etc In-Reply-To: References: <1322758007.11799.YahooMailClassic@web114417.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1322840948.85891.YahooMailNeo@web160601.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> On Friday, December 2, 2011 1:40 AM Kelly Anderson wrote: > We apparently weren't very nice to Neanderthals... We? I don't remember doing anything to Neanderthals! Do you mean Modern Humans around the same time as Neanderthals? > It seems there can be only one dominant primate in a given area > at a given time. The secret may be to make sure that whatever > comes next isn't a primate. > ;-) The jury's still out on that one. Neanderthals and Modern Humans seem to have fit in different niches -- the former in dense forests, the latter in open grasslands. So, the view that one group pushed out the other seems a stretch. In fact, it seems more likely that Neanderthals went extinct not because they met up with Modern Humans, but because of habitat loss due to the worsening conditions during the glacial period. The kind of forests Neanderthals lived in simply got smaller and smaller, and the Neanderthals themselves became increasingly isolated from each other. (There also appears to have been some interbreeding with humans, but the main story seems to a decline in viable populations due to loss of habitat and not direct competition with another primate species.) In fact, one might say, Modern Humans got lucky. Their ancestors were pushed out of forests -- because they simply couldn't cut it there -- but then grasslands spread and this provided a large niche with little competition from other primates. Had things gone slightly different -- say, a warming period with robust reforestation -- Modern Humans might never have arisen. At least, this seems one narrative* that fits many of the facts about early humans. Of course, as more evidence comes in, especially on interbreeding and other human species, the "best fit" story will likely change. All the more reason, though, to be cautious of drawing conclusions like Humans "weren't very nice to Neanderthals." Regards, Dan * Cf. _The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived_ by Clive Finlayson. Finlayson actually argues that it might have been Neaderthals that kept Modern Humans from entering Europe and the Middle East. In other words, it wasn't until Neanderthals were in decline, due to climate change and habitat loss, that Modern Humans could move into formerly Neanderthal dominated areas. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bbenzai at yahoo.com Sat Dec 3 11:07:50 2011 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Sat, 3 Dec 2011 03:07:50 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] commentary by one of ours In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1322910470.57066.YahooMailClassic@web114419.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Eugen Leitl asked: >On Thu, Dec 01, 2011 at 07:52:03AM -0800, Aware wrote: > >> I think it's interesting that both sides of the DRM debate focus on >> paying (or not) for product, with no thought of instead paying for >> production. > >Can you expand your remark somewhat more? Are you talking >about financing each step of the publishing process instead >of just the end result? How much did it cost you to publish that email? We've entered an era when publishing costs can be negligible, but people still want/need to be paid for /creating/ things. The traditonal publishers haven't really caught on to this yet, and may well be in the position of dinosaurs 65 myr ago heading for the pretty orange glow on the horizon, thinking it might keep them warm. Some of them are carrying firetongs to control it. Ben Zaiboc From darren.greer3 at gmail.com Sat Dec 3 13:48:37 2011 From: darren.greer3 at gmail.com (Darren Greer) Date: Sat, 3 Dec 2011 09:48:37 -0400 Subject: [ExI] commentary by one of ours In-Reply-To: <1322910470.57066.YahooMailClassic@web114419.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <1322910470.57066.YahooMailClassic@web114419.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 3, 2011 at 7:07 AM, Ben Zaiboc wrote: > > > We've entered an era when publishing costs can be negligible, but people > still want/need to be paid for /creating/ things. > The traditional publishers haven't really caught on to this yet . . . Neither have authors. The majority of authors thrive on advances from established publishers that our books usually don't earn out. If e-publishing continues to become cheaper and easier, and the established dead-tree publishing industry dissolute, then we may be forced to skip the middle man and send our books out into the market on a supply and demand basis. Advances will be a thing of the past, and our payment will depend entirely on how popular our books are and how much money we earn above our production costs. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sat Dec 3 15:29:40 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 3 Dec 2011 07:29:40 -0800 Subject: [ExI] commentary by one of ours In-Reply-To: References: <1322910470.57066.YahooMailClassic@web114419.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <001e01ccb1d0$60635be0$212a13a0$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Darren Greer Subject: Re: [ExI] commentary by one of ours On Sat, Dec 3, 2011 at 7:07 AM, Ben Zaiboc wrote: >>We've entered an era when publishing costs can be negligible, but people still want/need to be paid for /creating/ things. >>The traditional publishers haven't really caught on to this yet . . . >Neither have authors. The majority of authors thrive on advances from established publishers that our books usually don't earn out. . our payment will depend entirely on how popular our books are and how much money we earn above our production costs. I have noted the musician counterparts who are direct marketing their products through YouTube. I accidentally stumbled across the marvelous new talent Kina Grannis that way. It isn't clear to me how a new author could get material into the mainstream that way. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sat Dec 3 16:54:06 2011 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 3 Dec 2011 09:54:06 -0700 Subject: [ExI] 10 mega construction projects that could save the environment and the economy Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 3, 2011 at 5:00 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: snip > > Space elevator: This is what we ought to start working on the minute we > have figured out fullerene cabling. But it is one of those high > threshold projects with pretty annoying failure modes. At least we know that single walled nanotubes won't do it. At at tension short of what is needed, they become unstable with 6 member rings becoming 5 and 7 member rings and the nanotube parts like a stocking with a run in it. Sorry. Space elevators are still useful in setting the minimum energy standard to GEO. A 60 ton per hour transport rate need about a GW to power a loop cable. Using climbers powered with a laser, the input would be at least 10 times that high what with conversions and the need to lift dead weight (PV cells and motors). Using the same lasers and reaction engines using hydrogen will probably lift the same mass without the failure modes. > Lunar ring: Let's do this once we have the space elevator in place. And > a treaty that ensures that nobody uses the moon as a phased array maser. Lunar ring is a variation on space based solar power, usually based in GEO. I see it as a factor of ten more expensive per kW, but have never actually done the numbers and have never seen anywhere where they have been done. Keith From darren.greer3 at gmail.com Sat Dec 3 17:38:20 2011 From: darren.greer3 at gmail.com (Darren Greer) Date: Sat, 3 Dec 2011 13:38:20 -0400 Subject: [ExI] commentary by one of ours In-Reply-To: <001e01ccb1d0$60635be0$212a13a0$@att.net> References: <1322910470.57066.YahooMailClassic@web114419.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <001e01ccb1d0$60635be0$212a13a0$@att.net> Message-ID: 2011/12/3 spike wrote: > > ** ** > > ** ** > > I have noted the musician counterparts who are direct marketing their > products through YouTube. I accidentally stumbled across the marvelous new > talent Kina Grannis that way. It isn?t clear to me how a new author could > get material into the mainstream that way.**** > > > Actually, authors and publishers are starting to use Youtube to promote, with something called book trailers. At the risk of being accused of self promotion, here is one my publisher did of my second novel. It was their first animated trailer. I'm not sure it actually sold any books, but I thought it was neat. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GwGQVHPjrc ** ** > > **** > > ** ** > > **** > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -- Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood. Friedrich Nietzsche -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Sat Dec 3 18:49:58 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sat, 3 Dec 2011 19:49:58 +0100 Subject: [ExI] commentary by one of ours In-Reply-To: <1322910470.57066.YahooMailClassic@web114419.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <1322910470.57066.YahooMailClassic@web114419.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20111203184958.GJ31847@leitl.org> On Sat, Dec 03, 2011 at 03:07:50AM -0800, Ben Zaiboc wrote: > Eugen Leitl asked: > > >On Thu, Dec 01, 2011 at 07:52:03AM -0800, Aware wrote: > > > >> I think it's interesting that both sides of the DRM debate focus on > >> paying (or not) for product, with no thought of instead paying for > >> production. > > > >Can you expand your remark somewhat more? Are you talking > >about financing each step of the publishing process instead > >of just the end result? > > > How much did it cost you to publish that email? Quite a bit more than it cost you to read it. Not counting the Internet infrastructure in-between and the (mostly nonrenewable, though the part I control is) power to run it. But an email is not a book, of course. You did not pay me anything for the privilege of reading this message, and I had not take a few months to years out of my life and pay editors and the advertisement machine to spread it. > We've entered an era when publishing costs can be > negligible, but people still want/need to be paid for /creating/ things. The only way I'm seeing it to work is to reduce the transaction friction and reduce the price so that pirates don't need to bother. Suing your customers and letting the lobby write your legislation has empirically not turned out well on the long run. > The traditonal publishers haven't really caught on to this > yet, and may well be in the position of dinosaurs 65 myr > ago heading for the pretty orange glow on the horizon, > thinking it might keep them warm. Some of them are carrying firetongs to control it. Beware of stampeding dinos. They might be doomend, but they can do some damage still. From spike66 at att.net Sat Dec 3 19:57:23 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 3 Dec 2011 11:57:23 -0800 Subject: [ExI] commentary by one of ours In-Reply-To: References: <1322910470.57066.YahooMailClassic@web114419.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <001e01ccb1d0$60635be0$212a13a0$@att.net> Message-ID: <006901ccb1f5$c6c365e0$544a31a0$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Darren Greer Actually, authors and publishers are starting to use Youtube to promote, with something called book trailers. At the risk of being accused of self promotion, here is one my publisher did of my second novel. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GwGQVHPjrc Coooool! Darren, there is no risk of self-promotion, for that is allowed here, welcome in fact. If anyone here is published on dead trees, I do hope you take advantage of this small forum to let us know it is out there and available. Damien Broderick, Keith Henson, Charlie Stross and others are published authors who are regulars here. The work need not be transhumanist to be promoted here. It might be interesting to see a work of non-transhumanist nature written by someone who feels at home hanging out on ExI. I have seriously considered doing something like that myself: it would be a fictionalized memoir of experiences I had in college, using actual events but with composite characters. We know so many people that any attempt to tell an actual memoir would get hopelessly complicated without the use of composite characters. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sat Dec 3 20:15:59 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 3 Dec 2011 12:15:59 -0800 Subject: [ExI] commentary by one of ours In-Reply-To: References: <1322910470.57066.YahooMailClassic@web114419.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <001e01ccb1d0$60635be0$212a13a0$@att.net> Message-ID: <007401ccb1f8$5fd2d480$1f787d80$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Darren Greer . Actually, authors and publishers are starting to use Youtube to promote, with something called book trailers. At the risk of being accused of self promotion, here is one my publisher did of my second novel. It was their first animated trailer. I'm not sure it actually sold any books, but I thought it was neat. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GwGQVHPjrc Hey Darren, your YouTube ad worked: it created in me a desire to read your book. Regardless if I follow through and read it or not, the ad did what ads do: it informed and compelled me. I see it is big on the LGBT lists. I don't really know if I would relate. Were I an American Indian, my name would be Straight Arrow. But there is a good chance I will get and read Still Life with June. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Sat Dec 3 20:35:43 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sat, 3 Dec 2011 21:35:43 +0100 Subject: [ExI] commentary by one of ours In-Reply-To: References: <1322910470.57066.YahooMailClassic@web114419.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20111203203543.GN31847@leitl.org> On Sat, Dec 03, 2011 at 09:48:37AM -0400, Darren Greer wrote: > Neither have authors. The majority of authors thrive on advances from > established publishers that our books usually don't earn out. If Extremely popular authors (say, Stephen King) can just publish directly online, and word of mouth is absolutely sufficient. > e-publishing continues to become cheaper and easier, and the established > dead-tree publishing industry dissolute, then we may be forced to skip the > middle man and send our books out into the market on a supply and demand > basis. Advances will be a thing of the past, and our payment will depend > entirely on how popular our books are and how much money we earn above our > production costs. I don't see why you can't contract freelancing editors (or advertisers), and run a standard blog with a shopping cart. Charge 1-5 USD/eBook for mass titles, keep >90% of that, that should do it. For speciality you can use embedded watermarking, make users aware of that, and charge a bit more. Scientific publishing which is paid for by taxes should be open access. Textbooks, especially elementary ones, especially so. I'm with Springer, we've got books which are >2 kEUR apiece. I just don't see that as a viable business model. Online versions, subscription-based are more like it. From anders at aleph.se Sun Dec 4 01:03:05 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 04 Dec 2011 01:03:05 +0000 Subject: [ExI] 10 mega construction projects that could save the environment and the economy In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4EDAC6C9.30906@aleph.se> Keith Henson wrote: > Lunar ring is a variation on space based solar power, usually based in > GEO. I see it as a factor of ten more expensive per kW, but have > never actually done the numbers and have never seen anywhere where > they have been done. > Think they are in Criswell's original paper. In this paper "Lunar Solar Power System: Industrial Research, Development, and Demonstration" http://www.agci.org/dB/PDFs/03S2_DCriswell_LSP.pdf he estimates it as 1.4, 0.2 and 0.06 dollar per kWe depending on expansion. Found some related stuff: http://www.aip.org/tip/INPHFA/vol-8/iss-5/p28.pdf http://www.aip.org/tip/INPHFA/vol-8/iss-2/p12.pdf -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Faculty of Philosophy Oxford University From darren.greer3 at gmail.com Sun Dec 4 02:18:57 2011 From: darren.greer3 at gmail.com (Darren Greer) Date: Sat, 3 Dec 2011 22:18:57 -0400 Subject: [ExI] commentary by one of ours In-Reply-To: <20111203203543.GN31847@leitl.org> References: <1322910470.57066.YahooMailClassic@web114419.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <20111203203543.GN31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 3, 2011 at 4:35 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > > Extremely popular authors (say, Stephen King) can just publish > directly online, and word of mouth is absolutely sufficient. > Catherine Cookson, J.K Rawling, and--closer to our hearts here perhaps--Sam Harris have recently done exactly this. I am signed up to Harris's blog and I get almost weekly e-mails imploring me to buy his ebook LYING, (I haven't yet, but will I think.) King did the online thing with his novel The Plant, though I never heard how he made out. > > > I don't see why you can't contract freelancing editors (or advertisers), > and run a standard blog with a shopping cart. Charge 1-5 USD/eBook for > mass titles, keep >90% of that, that should do it. > The big problem is promotion, Unless you are very established, most reviewers won't look at a self published book---e or otherwise. Traditional publishers have big budgets for promotion, and have rapport with all the traditional review venues. Despite self-publishing being on the increase, and a dip in traditional publishing output, there is still a very mighty stigma associated with a self-published book. I think a good freelance promoter might be just as important as a good freelance editor. You could even pay them in a royalty-type system, so much of a percentage per each copy sold. This would seem fair, given their sole job would be to come up with strategies to get the book out there and off the virtual shelves. Of course, they'd probably demand an advance. :) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From darren.greer3 at gmail.com Sun Dec 4 02:34:33 2011 From: darren.greer3 at gmail.com (Darren Greer) Date: Sat, 3 Dec 2011 22:34:33 -0400 Subject: [ExI] commentary by one of ours In-Reply-To: <007401ccb1f8$5fd2d480$1f787d80$@att.net> References: <1322910470.57066.YahooMailClassic@web114419.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <001e01ccb1d0$60635be0$212a13a0$@att.net> <007401ccb1f8$5fd2d480$1f787d80$@att.net> Message-ID: 2011/12/3 spike > ** ** > > > ** > > Hey Darren, your YouTube ad worked: it created in me a desire to read your > book. Regardless if I follow through and read it or not, the ad did what > ads do: it informed and compelled me. > Very cool. The publisher created it because it was up for one of those public voter-type deals here in Canada, and they thought it would boost its chances. I notice it hasn't been viewed very much, but it is good to know it peaked someone's interest. > **** > > ** ** > > I see it is big on the LGBT lists. > Yes, but it's not at all a 'gay' book. The narrator is gay and mentions it incidentally I think about twice. It's important to the plot in some respects, but it doesn't at all define it. I have a new book coming out this spring, and there is not a gay character in it. I got tired of being called a "gay" author. Thanks for the interest, Spike. Much appreciated. Darren > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Sun Dec 4 10:37:52 2011 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sun, 4 Dec 2011 10:37:52 +0000 Subject: [ExI] commentary by one of ours In-Reply-To: References: <1322910470.57066.YahooMailClassic@web114419.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <001e01ccb1d0$60635be0$212a13a0$@att.net> <007401ccb1f8$5fd2d480$1f787d80$@att.net> Message-ID: 2011/12/4 Darren Greer wrote: > Yes, but it's not at all a 'gay' book. The narrator is gay and mentions > it?incidentally?I think about twice. ?It's important to the plot in some > respects, but it doesn't at all define it. I have a new book coming out this > spring, and there is not a gay character in it. I got tired of being called > a "gay" author. > > I doubt if it is as easy as changing the plot to avoid gay characters. Textual analysis shows differences in style and word usage between male and female writers (and not just in the sex scenes!). Of course it is a bell curve type thing, not an either / or choice. BillK From darren.greer3 at gmail.com Sun Dec 4 15:55:05 2011 From: darren.greer3 at gmail.com (Darren Greer) Date: Sun, 4 Dec 2011 11:55:05 -0400 Subject: [ExI] commentary by one of ours In-Reply-To: References: <1322910470.57066.YahooMailClassic@web114419.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <001e01ccb1d0$60635be0$212a13a0$@att.net> <007401ccb1f8$5fd2d480$1f787d80$@att.net> Message-ID: I On Sun, Dec 4, 2011 at 6:37 AM, BillK wrote: > > > I doubt if it is as easy as changing the plot to avoid gay characters. > Textual analysis shows differences in style and word usage between > male and female writers (and not just in the sex scenes!). > > Perhaps. But gay men and women have been writing books for years without being pigeonholed as gay writers and other than genre writing I'm not certain that there is a particular style associated with gay authorship. The idea that a writer is gay or not only emerged with the advent of a gay subset of literature, which began in the eighties during the AIDS crisis. The Canadian author Timothy Findlay avoided gay characters for precisely this reason. Of course it is a bell curve type thing, not an either / or choice. > I suppose it depends on what you're writing about. If you're writing about gay culture, then it's going to be called a gay book. Unfortunately if you add even one gay character it might also, which could drive off readers who, like Spike, find it on LGBT lists think they may not be able to relate. I once saw John Irving's A Prayer For Owen Meany on a gay list because the friendship between two straight men in the book had "platonic, but homosexual" overtones. I understand that at the time gay men were starved for literature of our own, and we co-opted everything that could give us an emotional thrill, a sense that we might be somewhat normal. I'm not even interested in exploring the world of gay culture, or coming out, and if I do, it will be on my own terms. For about a year I've been toying with the idea of a coming out novel of a boy in what appears to be in a late nineteenth century village in Nova Scotia, Canada. The woods surrounding this isolated little place are populated with strange beasts that prevent the inhabitants from leaving and anyone getting in and seem to be interfering and monitoring with the everyday life of the commune. The villagers refer to them as Sea-beasts. Eventually, of course, it will be revealed that these animals are made of programmable matter, and the village is not a village but a zoo or anthropological expereiment in a post-singularity world. I tell this not because I wish to give away the plot of a book that I haven't written yet, but to illustrate how sexuality can enhance a plot, how it can act as a filter on what is otherwise a common idea and give it a new twist. We use what is available to us, and if I do end up writing this book, I would be curious to see if ended up on any LGBT lists. P.S. Another reason I want to write a book like this is I want to see what a post-singularity world looks like by exploring what it doesn't look like, via the village. The boy and his sexuality would act as a catalysis for the r-emergence of these two worlds. I welcome feedback on this idea, as I'll probably have to come to the group a lot anyway while writing it. I'm still a newbie. > -- Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood. Friedrich Nietzsche -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sun Dec 4 15:43:09 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Sun, 4 Dec 2011 16:43:09 +0100 Subject: [ExI] 10 mega construction projects that could save the environment and the economy In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 3 December 2011 17:54, Keith Henson wrote: > At least we know that single walled nanotubes won't do it. At at > tension short of what is needed, they become unstable with 6 member > rings becoming 5 and 7 member rings and the nanotube parts like a > stocking with a run in it. Sorry. > Many of us think of space elevators as simply an engineering project, but I wonder whether this may simply be impossible to achieve in too-deep gravity wells. This reminds me of a SF short story starring a very advanced race living on a Jovian planet, with a gravity high enough to prevent chemical rockets to reach outer space, and nuclear propulsion not being an option owing to the scarcity of heavy, fissile elements in the planet outer crust... Perhaps we are already lucky that in our case chemical and nuclear rockets might well in principle "bootstrap" us out of a terrestrian insulation... -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From darren.greer3 at gmail.com Sun Dec 4 17:17:10 2011 From: darren.greer3 at gmail.com (Darren Greer) Date: Sun, 4 Dec 2011 13:17:10 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Wiki entry of Critical Theory of Posthumanism Message-ID: I was reading the Wikipedia entry on the critical theory branch of posthumanism for discussion with a friend and I came across this: "The posthuman is a being that relies on context rather than relativity, on situated objectivity rather than universal objectivity, and on the creation of meaning through 'play' between constructions of informational pattern and reductions to the randomness of on-off switches, which are the foundation of digital binary systems" (Wikipedia entry on posthumanism) I think I may have some idea what they mean when they say 'creation of meaning through play between constructions of informational pattern' and some vague idea of what contextual objectivity might mean, but the rest leaves me somewhat bewildered. This is why I never took philosophy in college. I can find no other place on the web or Wikipedia itself that clarifies what in the hell this might means Anybody got any idea? It could be the reason this passage was flagged as needing citation. Darren -- Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood. Friedrich Nietzsche -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bbenzai at yahoo.com Sun Dec 4 17:51:53 2011 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Sun, 4 Dec 2011 09:51:53 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] commentary by one of ours In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1323021113.26830.YahooMailClassic@web114404.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Darren Greer sic'ed: >Very cool. The publisher created it because it was up for one of those >public voter-type deals here in Canada, and they thought it would boost its >chances. I notice it hasn't been viewed very much, but it is good to know >it peaked someone's interest. Aaggh, hate to be a grammar nazi, but there is a very real and vast (and tooth-grinding) difference between "to peak" and "to pique"! Ben Zaiboc From darren.greer3 at gmail.com Sun Dec 4 18:10:16 2011 From: darren.greer3 at gmail.com (Darren Greer) Date: Sun, 4 Dec 2011 14:10:16 -0400 Subject: [ExI] commentary by one of ours In-Reply-To: <1323021113.26830.YahooMailClassic@web114404.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <1323021113.26830.YahooMailClassic@web114404.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 4, 2011 at 1:51 PM, Ben Zaiboc wrote: > Darren Greer sic'ed: > > >Very cool. The publisher created it because it was up for one of those > >public voter-type deals here in Canada, and they thought it would boost > its > >chances. I notice it hasn't been viewed very much, but it is good to know > >it peaked someone's interest. > > > Aaggh, hate to be a grammar nazi, but there is a very real and vast (and > tooth-grinding) difference between "to peak" and "to pique"! > np. Grammer nazi away. I make orthological errors of that sort constantly. D. > > Ben Zaiboc > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -- Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood. Friedrich Nietzsche -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sun Dec 4 18:00:14 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Sun, 4 Dec 2011 19:00:14 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Wiki entry of Critical Theory of Posthumanism In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: 2011/12/4 Darren Greer > I was reading the Wikipedia entry on the critical theory branch of > posthumanism for discussion with a friend and I came across this: > > > "The posthuman is a being that relies on context rather than relativity, > on situated objectivity rather > than universal objectivity, and on the creation of meaning through 'play' > between constructions of informational pattern and > reductions to the randomness of on-off switches, > which are the foundation of digital > binary systems" > (Wikipedia entry on posthumanism) > > I think I may have some idea what they mean when they say 'creation of > meaning through play between constructions of informational pattern' and > some vague idea of what contextual objectivity might mean, but the rest > leaves me somewhat bewildered. This is why I never took philosophy in > college. I can find no other place on the web or Wikipedia itself that > clarifies what in the hell this might means Anybody got any idea? It could > be the reason this passage was flagged as needing citation. > If this is serious, and no Sokal's friend has edited the entry for his own amusement, I personal deplore the usual indulgence in oracular word games. But, with a little effort, I think this "narrative" can be "deconstrued" as follows: in a posthumanist perspective, the context of a given statement is fundamental to assess its "objective" meaning (and "truth"), and this meaning is ultimately determined by the "play" between the construction of new paradigms (say, in our case, the "posthuman change") and the identification of the arbitrary, that is free, yes/no parameters that define it (as for Chomsky languages are defined by how they operate the switches of our "universal grammar"). In other words again: humanism is based on the idea that a universal human nature exists that prevents practically or at least ethically any attempt to tinker with meanings, which would be given by God or some secularised avatar thereof, and could be derived mechanistically without any "random", digital choice of their parameters. All this is very abstract, but, hey, it is still less boring than John Stuart Mill... :-) -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jonkc at bellsouth.net Sun Dec 4 18:33:01 2011 From: jonkc at bellsouth.net (john clark) Date: Sun, 4 Dec 2011 10:33:01 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] Wiki entry of Critical Theory of Posthumanism. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1323023581.91505.YahooMailClassic@web82907.mail.mud.yahoo.com> On Sun, 12/4/11, Darren Greer wrote: ?"I came across this:" "The posthuman is a being that relies on context rather than?relativity, on situated?objectivity?rather than universal objectivity, and on the creation of meaning through 'play' between?constructions of informational pattern?and reductions to the randomness of?on-off switches, which are the foundation of?digital?binary?systems" (Wikipedia entry on posthumanism) "I think I may have some idea what they mean" Then you're a better man than I am. This was obviously written by a professional philosopher and I love philosophy, but very little philosophy comes from philosophers, it comes from scientists and mathematicians. Nearly everything philosophers say can be put into one of four categories. 1) False 2) True but obvious, a truism disguised in opaque language. 3) True and deep but discovered first and explained better by someone who didn't write "philosopher" in the box labeled "occupation" on his tax form. 4) So bad its not even wrong.? "This is why I never took philosophy in college." If you had taken philosophy in college it would not have helped you understand what if anything the above turd poem means, but you would have learned how to write similar bafflegab of your own. ?John K Clark ? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From darren.greer3 at gmail.com Sun Dec 4 18:49:12 2011 From: darren.greer3 at gmail.com (Darren Greer) Date: Sun, 4 Dec 2011 14:49:12 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Wiki entry of Critical Theory of Posthumanism. In-Reply-To: <1323023581.91505.YahooMailClassic@web82907.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <1323023581.91505.YahooMailClassic@web82907.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: > > John wrote: > > > If you had taken philosophy in college it would not have helped you > understand what if anything the above turd poem means, but you would have > learned how to write similar bafflegab of your own. > > Ha! Turd poem. I very much like that. > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Sun Dec 4 18:21:57 2011 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Sun, 4 Dec 2011 13:21:57 -0500 Subject: [ExI] commentary by one of ours In-Reply-To: <1323021113.26830.YahooMailClassic@web114404.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <1323021113.26830.YahooMailClassic@web114404.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 4, 2011 at 12:51 PM, Ben Zaiboc wrote: > Darren Greer sic'ed: > >>Very cool. The publisher created it because it was up for one of those >>public voter-type deals here in Canada, and they thought it would boost its >>chances. I notice it hasn't been viewed very much, but it is good to know >>it peaked someone's interest. > > Aaggh, hate to be a grammar nazi, but there is a very real and vast (and tooth-grinding) difference between "to peak" and "to pique"! I consider it valuable feedback/education on that difference. Considering Darren has professed to be a writer and also considering the sometimes deplorable state of proof-reading services he may employ, it's better to know about that particular homophone while writing than to hope someone catches it later. (since it would not be trapped by a spellchecker) In many cases we hear words (like "piqued") and learn their meaning through context. My college roommate pronounced the letter "b" in the word doubt [doob't]. I had no idea what he was saying until he spelled the word; being a voracious reader he had only ever seen the word in print and imagined how it should be pronounced from how it is spelled. I expect this will become more common since so much communication is now in print. (or rather 'type' since relatively few words make it all the way to dead-tree hosting these days) From darren.greer3 at gmail.com Sun Dec 4 18:56:18 2011 From: darren.greer3 at gmail.com (Darren Greer) Date: Sun, 4 Dec 2011 14:56:18 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Wiki entry of Critical Theory of Posthumanism In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: 2011/12/4 Stefano Vaj wrote" > > > In other words again: humanism is based on the idea that a universal human > nature exists that prevents practically or at least ethically any attempt > to tinker with meanings, which would be given by God or some secularised > avatar thereof, and could be derived mechanistically without any "random", > digital choice of their parameters. > > All this is very abstract, but, hey, it is still less boring than John > Stuart Mill... :-) > I had a professor once that described the traditional "chain of being" from God, Archangel, Angel, King, Duke, Knight, etc, etc, and how each one of them came under attack and was abolished from ideology/theology and relegated to the dusty attic of mythology as the enlightenment took hold. Now it seems, and I guess is only natural, that the constructed idea of 'human' is being so disposed of. Technology, and rightly so, is responsible and transhumanism is an excellent example of that redefinition (and one I obviously advocate). It has made us question what it means to actually be human in the first place. But in researching this topic on the philosophies of posthumanism, there is one interesting question that keeps arising, where do liberal human philosophies fit in this posthuman world? Some branches of philosophical posthumansim advocate a complete denial not only of collective human identity but individual identity as well. Throw the baby out with the bathwater, in other words. It is interesting to sit in as many of these camps as possible and watch the battles take place. It is a very fun time to be alive. darren -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From darren.greer3 at gmail.com Sun Dec 4 19:03:53 2011 From: darren.greer3 at gmail.com (Darren Greer) Date: Sun, 4 Dec 2011 15:03:53 -0400 Subject: [ExI] commentary by one of ours In-Reply-To: References: <1323021113.26830.YahooMailClassic@web114404.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 4, 2011 at 2:21 PM, Mike Dougherty wrote: I consider it valuable feedback/education on that difference. > Considering Darren has professed to be a writer and also considering > the sometimes deplorable state of proof-reading services he may > employ, it's better to know about that particular homophone while > writing than to hope someone catches it later. (since it would not be > trapped by a spellchecker) For a minute in fact I was horribly embarrassed and my face got hot, especially as the topic under discussion was that of being a writer, of which, as you say, I profess to be. Then I got thinking about it, and realized I don't think I'd ever written the cliche "piqued my interest" before and I actually had never considered the difference. I make tons of errors of this sort in manuscripts which copy-editors have to catch and sometimes they don't. So I decided to be grateful for the heads-up, rather than embarrassed about it. If you find something that you like doing, and that you are good at it, I find that you've got keep a student mentality about it all your life or you ossify. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rtomek at ceti.pl Sun Dec 4 21:09:30 2011 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Sun, 4 Dec 2011 22:09:30 +0100 (CET) Subject: [ExI] WSU researchers use a 3-D printer to make bone-like material Message-ID: Howdy, I'm not sure if this has been mentioned on the list. (Article follows from here): [ http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-11/wsu-wru112911.php ] Public release date: 29-Nov-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ] Contact: Susmita Bose sbose at wsu.edu 509-335-7461 Washington State University WSU researchers use a 3-D printer to make bone-like material Clears way for custom-made replacement tissue IMAGE: Using a 3D printer, Washington State University Mechanical and Materials Engineering Professor Susmita Bose created a bone???like material that can be used for orthopedic and dental work. Shelly Hanks photo courtesy... Click here for more information. PULLMAN, Wash. -- It looks like bone. It feels like bone. For the most part, it acts like bone. And it came off an inkjet printer. Washington State University researchers have used a 3D printer to create a bone-like material and structure that can be used in orthopedic procedures, dental work, and to deliver medicine for treating osteoporosis. Paired with actual bone, it acts as a scaffold for new bone to grow on and ultimately dissolves with no apparent ill effects. The authors report on successful in vitro tests in the journal Dental Materials and say they're already seeing promising results with in vivo tests on rats and rabbits. It's possible that doctors will be able to custom order replacement bone tissue in a few years, says Susmita Bose, co-author and a professor in WSU's School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering. "If a doctor has a CT scan of a defect, we can convert it to a CAD file and make the scaffold according to the defect," IMAGE: Washington State University researchers used a 3???D printer to make a variety of bone???like materials, including pieces of hip bone. Click here for more information. Bose says. IMAGE: Washington State University researchers used a 3???D printer to make a variety of bone???like materials, including pieces of hip bone. Click here for more information. The material grows out of a four-year interdisciplinary effort involving chemistry, materials science, biology and manufacturing. A main finding of the paper is that the addition of silicon and zinc more than doubled the strength of the main material, calcium phosphate. Theresearchers also spent a year optimizing a commercially available ProMetal 3D printer designed to make metal objects. The printer works by having an inkjet spray a plastic binder over a bed of powder in layers of 20 microns, about half the width of a human hair. Following a computer's directions, it creates a channeled cylinder the size of a pencil eraser. After just a week in a medium with immature human bone cells, the scaffold was supporting a network of new bone cells. ### The research was funded with a $1.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. Video of Bose discussing her work can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvkfMu76drE. [ | E-mail | Share ] AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system. (Article ends here). Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sun Dec 4 23:22:15 2011 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sun, 4 Dec 2011 16:22:15 -0700 Subject: [ExI] 10 mega construction projects that could save the environment and the economy Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 4, 2011 at 5:00 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Keith Henson wrote: >> Lunar ring is a variation on space based solar power, usually based in >> GEO. ?I see it as a factor of ten more expensive per kW, but have >> never actually done the numbers and have never seen anywhere where >> they have been done. >> > Think they are in Criswell's original paper. In this paper > "Lunar Solar Power System: Industrial Research, Development, and > Demonstration" > http://www.agci.org/dB/PDFs/03S2_DCriswell_LSP.pdf > he estimates it as 1.4, 0.2 and 0.06 dollar per kWe depending on expansion. There are several problems with this paper, including the sparse array curse, and the need for a lot of reflectors (or high loss rectennas/transmitters in space so the power comes down in the places where it is needed. Then there are the complications of making very large amounts of materials on the lunar surface, particularly aluminum power conductors to get the power around from the far side during new moons. But the killer is their cost (in dollars per kWh), which I suspect is way too low, but accepting their numbers, 6 cents is just not low enough to displace fossil fuels. To do that takes 2 cents per kWh or less. That said, I can see where such a proposal would work, in a world of nanotech. But if we have nanotech, it's not obvious to me that we need much energy at all. Keith > Found some related stuff: > http://www.aip.org/tip/INPHFA/vol-8/iss-5/p28.pdf > http://www.aip.org/tip/INPHFA/vol-8/iss-2/p12.pdf > > -- > Anders Sandberg, From emlynoregan at gmail.com Sun Dec 4 23:32:10 2011 From: emlynoregan at gmail.com (Emlyn) Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2011 10:02:10 +1030 Subject: [ExI] commentary by one of ours In-Reply-To: References: <1323021113.26830.YahooMailClassic@web114404.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: I do share a love of books with the rest of you, but only because I grew up in the knowledge dark ages like the rest of you. The format only makes sense in terms of wads of paper. Certainly if it's non-fiction, in an abundant networked environment, you want something entirely different. Wikis seem like the best model to me, but anything hyperlinky, commentable, fixable by the readers, mutable, is good. For narrative fiction, they make some more sense, but still I'd prefer my information searchable and indexed, containing links, commenting, etc. Forkable. Mutable. Books are knowledge prisons from out of the long ages of ignorance. 2011/12/5 Darren Greer : > > > On Sun, Dec 4, 2011 at 2:21 PM, Mike Dougherty wrote: > > >> I consider it valuable feedback/education on that difference. >> Considering Darren has professed to be a writer and also considering >> the sometimes deplorable state of proof-reading services he may >> employ, it's better to know about that particular homophone while >> writing than to hope someone catches it later. ?(since it would not be >> trapped by a spellchecker) > > > > For a minute in fact I was horribly?embarrassed and my face got hot, > especially as the topic under discussion was that of being a writer, of > which, as you say, I profess to be. Then I got thinking about it, and > realized I don't think I'd ever written the cliche "piqued my interest" > before and I actually had never?considered?the difference. I make tons of > errors of this sort in manuscripts which copy-editors have to catch and > sometimes they don't. So I decided to be grateful for the heads-up, rather > than?embarrassed?about it. If you find?something?that you like doing, and > that you are good at it, I find that you've got keep a student mentality > about it all your life or you ossify. > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -- Emlyn http://my.syyn.cc - Synchonise Google+, Facebook, WordPress and Google Buzz posts, comments and all. http://point7.wordpress.com - My blog Find me on Facebook and Buzz From spike66 at att.net Mon Dec 5 02:29:14 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 4 Dec 2011 18:29:14 -0800 Subject: [ExI] commentary by one of ours In-Reply-To: References: <1322910470.57066.YahooMailClassic@web114419.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <001e01ccb1d0$60635be0$212a13a0$@att.net> <007401ccb1f8$5fd2d480$1f787d80$@att.net> Message-ID: <009201ccb2f5$aead8200$0c088600$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of BillK ... >...Textual analysis shows differences in style and word usage between male and female writers (and not just in the sex scenes!)...BillK There was a book I read a long time ago called Davita's Harp, by Chaim Potok. It was the third of a trilogy which included The Chosen and The Promise, a prequel to the other two. Interesting thing about it is that he did it in first person as a female. All his other first person narrators were male characters. Somehow he made it work. spike From eugen at leitl.org Mon Dec 5 07:22:47 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2011 08:22:47 +0100 Subject: [ExI] commentary by one of ours In-Reply-To: References: <1323021113.26830.YahooMailClassic@web114404.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20111205072247.GY31847@leitl.org> On Mon, Dec 05, 2011 at 10:02:10AM +1030, Emlyn wrote: > I do share a love of books with the rest of you, but only because I > grew up in the knowledge dark ages like the rest of you. The format > only makes sense in terms of wads of paper. > > Certainly if it's non-fiction, in an abundant networked environment, > you want something entirely different. Wikis seem like the best model > to me, but anything hyperlinky, commentable, fixable by the readers, > mutable, is good. > > For narrative fiction, they make some more sense, but still I'd prefer > my information searchable and indexed, containing links, commenting, > etc. Forkable. Mutable. Careful what you wish for, you might just get it. And a deluge of incompatible formats from hell, all in flux and not versioned. Beware of Babel. > Books are knowledge prisons from out of the long ages of ignorance. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From anders at aleph.se Mon Dec 5 11:52:38 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 05 Dec 2011 11:52:38 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Wiki entry of Critical Theory of Posthumanism In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4EDCB086.4010304@aleph.se> Darren Greer wrote: > But in researching this topic on the philosophies of posthumanism, > there is one interesting question that keeps arising, where do liberal > human philosophies fit in this posthuman world? Some branches of > philosophical posthumansim advocate a complete denial not only of > collective human identity but individual identity as well. Throw the > baby out with the bathwater, in other words. Maybe. I think Derek Parfit has done a good job of sketching a non-person centric approach to ethics that is pretty compatible with some form of liberal human philosophy (and for transhumanists, his Reasons and Persons is of course a fun read - plenty of uploading and teleportation in the persons part, plus it set Nick and others on the path to fight xrisks). But I do think there is a major challenge to update our enlightenment views to work in a postmodern and indeed posthuman world. If free will, rights, rationality, individuality and species membership are less sharp than assumed by past thinkers, how do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Faculty of Philosophy Oxford University From bbenzai at yahoo.com Mon Dec 5 14:00:09 2011 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2011 06:00:09 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] commentary by one of ours In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1323093609.55310.YahooMailClassic@web114419.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Darren Greer wrote: > If you find something that you like doing, and > that you are good at it, I find that you've got keep a student mentality > about it all your life or you ossify. Very well said, sir! I think a 'student mentality' is pretty much essential nowadays (also, fun!). It will become moreso as we live longer, too. Ben Zaiboc From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Mon Dec 5 15:44:41 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2011 16:44:41 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Wiki entry of Critical Theory of Posthumanism In-Reply-To: <4EDCB086.4010304@aleph.se> References: <4EDCB086.4010304@aleph.se> Message-ID: On 5 December 2011 12:52, Anders Sandberg wrote: > But I do think there is a major challenge to update our enlightenment > views to work in a postmodern and indeed posthuman world. If free will, > rights, rationality, individuality and species membership are less sharp > than assumed by past thinkers, how do we construct workable institutions > and ethical behaviors? > This is the question, as Hamlet was fond of saying... :-) IMHO, such task is neither trivial nor impossible, but certainly should not dismissed out of hand. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From darren.greer3 at gmail.com Mon Dec 5 17:38:29 2011 From: darren.greer3 at gmail.com (Darren Greer) Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2011 13:38:29 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Wiki entry of Critical Theory of Posthumanism In-Reply-To: References: <4EDCB086.4010304@aleph.se> Message-ID: > On 5 December 2011 12:52, Anders Sandberg wrote: > >> But I do think there is a major challenge to update our enlightenment >> views to work in a postmodern and indeed posthuman world. If free will, >> rights, rationality, individuality and species membership are less sharp >> than assumed by past thinkers, how do we construct workable institutions >> and ethical behaviors? > > About a year ago I was wandering around my house looking for something I had misplaced. Suddenly the thought occurred to me that I could just Google to find out where it was. I marveled at what had just happened, and realized that the Internet had fused itself with my consciousnesses. It was an extension of it, and its contents were now in fact my own memory, amplified and expanded to a profound degree. It was at that moment that I realized I was entirely ready and willing to move it into my brain, even though the technology wasn't available yet, so I could search the database for that misplaced ashtray. One of the tenets that most posthumanists can agree on is that our ever-changing and adapting collective consciousness is now, and probably has been since the second world war or longer, a construct amalgam of technology, informational systems, rationality, and evolutionary imperative rather than the purely human consciousness as a by-product of free will and separation of mind and body/thought and environment toted (and promoted) by the enlightenment. The sooner we as a society (or collection of them) accept this, the faster we can begin to have conversations about ethics and workable institutions. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From nebathenemi at yahoo.co.uk Mon Dec 5 21:28:17 2011 From: nebathenemi at yahoo.co.uk (Tom Nowell) Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2011 21:28:17 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [ExI] commentary by one of ours In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1323120497.78085.YahooMailNeo@web27006.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> Mike Dougherty wrote:"In many cases we hear words (like "piqued") and learn their meaningthrough context.? My college roommate pronounced the letter "b" in the word doubt [doob't].? I had no idea what he was saying until he spelled the word; being a voracious reader he had only ever seen the word in print and imagined how it should be pronounced from how it is spelled.? I expect this will become more common since so much communication is now in print. (or rather 'type' since relatively few words make it all the way to dead-tree hosting these days)" Interesting thing I learnt from a neurologist back in my student days: The difference between written English and spoken English allows neurologists to roughly gauge how good someone's vocabulary was and gain a rough idea of their educational level even after someone had suffered brain damage: show someone a flashcard with a word on it, and ask them to read it out loud. You can work up from words that are spelt like they sound (if someone gets these wrong, they probably had literacy issues before their current problems) and move up through more and more complex ones to tell if someone had a huge vocabulary. We tested this on our student group, and it was pretty interesting. And funnily enough, the word "doubt" tripped up the German exchange student who guessed "doobt". Tom -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From darren.greer3 at gmail.com Tue Dec 6 02:04:11 2011 From: darren.greer3 at gmail.com (Darren Greer) Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2011 22:04:11 -0400 Subject: [ExI] commentary by one of ours In-Reply-To: <1323120497.78085.YahooMailNeo@web27006.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> References: <1323120497.78085.YahooMailNeo@web27006.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> Message-ID: 2011/12/5 Tom Nowell wrote: > > > Interesting thing I learnt from a neurologist back in my student days: The > difference between written English and spoken English allows neurologists > to roughly gauge how good someone's vocabulary was . . . > That is interesting. I've spent most of my life reading and writing and little of it talking. I had a conversation a few years ago with someone similar and we were both complaining about how lousy our spoken vocabulary was compared to our written. I had been reading words all my life and making assumptions about their pronunciation, and had been caught out a few times. Most notably by pronouncing gazebo in two syllables, which drew gales of laughter from a room full of college students. After so much of this kind of thing, you tend to get gun shy about using words in conversation that you're not used to pronouncing. Of course, that can work for you as well as against you. E.B. White worried over his vocabulary constantly, and developed a clean, terse, near-iconic writing style as a result. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mbb386 at main.nc.us Tue Dec 6 02:31:22 2011 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2011 21:31:22 -0500 Subject: [ExI] commentary by one of ours In-Reply-To: References: <1323120497.78085.YahooMailNeo@web27006.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <6327162648e49eecc86e68b899accb40.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> > I had been reading words all my life and > making assumptions about their pronunciation, and had been caught out a few > times. Most notably by pronouncing gazebo in two syllables, which drew > gales of laughter from a room full of college students. After so much of > this kind of thing, you tend to get gun shy about using words in > conversation that you're not used to pronouncing. I hear you! My trip-up word was fatigue. ;) Others I've hit the wall with were hellebore and clematis and campanula. Gardening and plant catalogs don't often have pronunciation guides. Sigh. Regards, MB From spike66 at att.net Tue Dec 6 03:07:13 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2011 19:07:13 -0800 Subject: [ExI] commentary by one of ours In-Reply-To: <6327162648e49eecc86e68b899accb40.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> References: <1323120497.78085.YahooMailNeo@web27006.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> <6327162648e49eecc86e68b899accb40.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> Message-ID: <01c601ccb3c4$27b691e0$7723b5a0$@att.net> > I had been reading words all my life and making assumptions about > their pronunciation, and had been caught out a few times. Most notably > by pronouncing gazebo in two syllables, which drew gales of laughter > from a room full of college students... I do stuff like that intentionally, in order to draw gales of laughter. It helps to include some kind of clue that you did it intentionally. This one caught my attention because it is one of the words I intentionally mispronounce for comic effect. It isn't such a common word, so an example is to emphasize it as gaaaaaazzzebo. Another fun thing to do is find an archaic or obscure word to use for comic effect around people who take themselves entirely too seriously. For instance in the office, one can bring in donuts and utter a comment such as "There are treats over by the samovar." Now of course people just get on google and find out it means tea pot, so it doesn't work as well as it once did. But I recall several people loathe to admit they had no clue what is a samovar. > After so much of this kind of > thing, you tend to get gun shy about using words in conversation that > you're not used to pronouncing. Darren Like any other skill, the spoken word requires practice practice practice. Recommend stretching exercises: try to speak in such a way that if someone made a word for word transcript of your speech, it would make perfect sense in written form. Try to read a transcript of most conversations, oy vey. Sentence fragments, jumpy subject, nothing that holds together well as a paragraph. So work on it! Work hard! Get rid of all fillers such as the plethora of likes and you knows. Or if you use fillers, have so many of them that you never use the same ones twice. So erudite will you sound, and cause the proles to scramble for google to learn the definition of erudite and prole. spike From msd001 at gmail.com Tue Dec 6 05:07:32 2011 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2011 00:07:32 -0500 Subject: [ExI] commentary by one of ours In-Reply-To: <01c601ccb3c4$27b691e0$7723b5a0$@att.net> References: <1323120497.78085.YahooMailNeo@web27006.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> <6327162648e49eecc86e68b899accb40.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <01c601ccb3c4$27b691e0$7723b5a0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 10:07 PM, spike wrote: > Recommend stretching exercises: try to speak in such a way that if someone > made a word for word transcript of your speech, it would make perfect sense > in written form. ?Try to read a transcript of most conversations, oy vey. > Sentence fragments, jumpy subject, nothing that holds together well as a > paragraph. ?So work on it! ?Work hard! ?Get rid of all fillers such as the > plethora of likes and you knows. ?Or if you use fillers, have so many of > them that you never use the same ones twice. ?So erudite will you sound, and > cause the proles to scramble for google to learn the definition of erudite > and prole. I think I would write more tersely than I speak: the whole paragraph is visible in one chunk, while a stream of words tends to require some resonance around an idea in order for it to be conveyed. At least that's how it seems when I find myself saying the same thing 3-4 times until the listener gives some non-verbal indication they "got it." I know this is a cultural thing too though, so mileage my vary (or [kilo]meterage for those using SI) What about so-called talking with your hands? It seems some hand-waving helps the visual thinkers follow a 'line of thought' through an idea 'space' if references are literally pointed to or gestured-at while speaking. I was recently called-out on this; I assured her that while I could speak without gesticulating it would probably take some of the life from my soliloquy [ok, rant]. From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Tue Dec 6 05:03:04 2011 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2011 22:03:04 -0700 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? Message-ID: Anders Sandberg wrote (from the "Wiki entry of Critical Theory of Posthumani?sm" thread): But I do think there is a major challenge to update our enlightenment views to work in a postmodern and indeed posthuman world. If free will, rights, rationality, individuality and species membership are less sharp than assumed by past thinkers, how do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? >>> Anders, I wish someone of your caliber would devote their career to the creation of workable institutions and ethical behaviors. I am horrified at the degree of Wall Street & corporate shady behavior (which often gets rewarded, rather than punished), along with the financial seduction of political leaders. And of course this is not just an American problem. I see the notion of a "social contract" rapidly falling apart. I dearly hope the massive greed/lack of effective oversight/siphoning of funds/destruction of economic strength can be successfully dealt with, but with the best and brightest generally working for corporations and not as gov't regulators, and politicians being in the pockets of the corporations, I have doubts that we will see real change. What can be done? Ironically, I now see the hopefully coming Singularity (even if it is a soft take-off) as a means to finally successfully deal with the massive corruption we see. I suppose I envision A.G.I. being vastly more effective regulators than humans. But perhaps machines will not be granted the authority to become directly involved in these issues. The here and now solution to my mind is ending the massive public apathy to the economic nightmares we have experienced, and holding leaders accountable. I would have thought, considering how so many in the middle class have suffered, that there would have been many more people marching on behalf of Occupy Wall Street, or doing other things to get involved and create change. I think the corporate and political elite at least for now, assume correctly that most people will act like sheep and not agitate for serious change, and so the structural/institutional change has not been made to seriously try to prevent further economic disasters. John -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Tue Dec 6 06:01:49 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2011 22:01:49 -0800 Subject: [ExI] commentary by one of ours In-Reply-To: References: <1323120497.78085.YahooMailNeo@web27006.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> <6327162648e49eecc86e68b899accb40.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <01c601ccb3c4$27b691e0$7723b5a0$@att.net> Message-ID: <01e701ccb3dc$8be94780$a3bbd680$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Mike Dougherty Subject: Re: [ExI] commentary by one of ours On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 10:07 PM, spike wrote: >> ... Sentence fragments, jumpy subject, nothing that holds together well as >> a paragraph. ?So work on it! ?Work hard! ?Get rid of all fillers such >> as the plethora of likes and you knows... >...I think I would write more tersely than I speak...What about so-called talking with your hands? ... It helped me to have a role model, someone I wanted to sound like. I grew up in the south, so I had that in my voice, sounded a bit like Jimmy Carter, who was a dismal failure, but about that time like a lightning bolt from the clear sky, Carl Sagan. I saw Cosmos and knew immediately that there was intelligent life on this planet. I was new at college so I had the opportunity to reinvent myself completely, with a new voice. It took work, but eventually I sounded and even felt like a different and better person, more the true me. My old friends from before didn't like it, still don't. Even my own family think I am putting on a mask of some sort, because I don't sound like them anymore. So be it, I am not going back. I found other role models since then, Asimov, Feynman, Steven Jay Gould, AC Clarke, more recently Richard Dawkins, Sagan never let me down with all the cool stuff he wrote and said, Max More was an influence, plenty of others, but a common characteristic of all those is that they are all effective users of the spoken word. They practiced. spike From spike66 at att.net Tue Dec 6 06:06:38 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2011 22:06:38 -0800 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <01ee01ccb3dd$3e148be0$ba3da3a0$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of John Grigg > >? I would have thought, considering how so many in the middle class have suffered, that there would have been many more people marching on behalf of Occupy Wall Street?John Plenty of us realized the Occupy people were occupying the wrong place. Wall Street didn?t do it, Washington DC did. The fed set the policy on a course of disaster, Wall Street just did what businesses do. John why weren?t the mobs descending on the people who actually did the crime? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Tue Dec 6 06:39:40 2011 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2011 23:39:40 -0700 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: <01ee01ccb3dd$3e148be0$ba3da3a0$@att.net> References: <01ee01ccb3dd$3e148be0$ba3da3a0$@att.net> Message-ID: Spike wrote: Plenty of us realized the Occupy people were occupying the wrong place. Wall Street didn?t do it, Washington DC did. The fed set the policy on a course of disaster, Wall Street just did what businesses do. John why weren?t the mobs descending on the people who actually did the crime? >>> I think many Americans think of our politicians as merely pawns/prostitutes at this point, and that Corporate America are the ones really calling the shots. But I agree that ultimately the elected/public employees are here to serve the electorate, as they govern on our behalf, and if heavily pressured to be accountable to the general public, they would be. And so yes, it may have been a wiser policy to protest against political centers of power. John -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Tue Dec 6 10:53:11 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 06 Dec 2011 10:53:11 +0000 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4EDDF417.50009@aleph.se> John Grigg wrote: > Anders Sandberg wrote (from the "Wiki entry of Critical Theory of > Posthumani?sm" thread): > But I do think there is a major challenge to update our enlightenment > views to work in a postmodern and indeed posthuman world. If free > will, rights, rationality, individuality and species membership are > less sharp than assumed by past thinkers, how do we construct workable > institutions and ethical behaviors? > >>> > > > Anders, I wish someone of your caliber would devote their career to > the creation of workable institutions and ethical behaviors. Thanks for the vote of confidence, but this is definitely a many geniuses problem. Consider the thought and debate that went into inventing our enlightenment concept of morality. Also, it is one of those wexed problems where we cannot expect group problem solving to be effective, yet it is so interdisciplinary that there are likely no experts who could singlehandedly deal with it. So we have to make do with a global intellectual debate and hope our brains are sharp enough. > I am horrified at the degree of Wall Street & corporate shady > behavior (which often gets rewarded, rather than punished), along with > the financial seduction of political leaders. And of course this is > not just an American problem. I see the notion of a "social > contract" rapidly falling apart. A key problem right now is that our societies have bungled the principal agent problem badly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem The incentives have been set up in the wrong way for traders, banks, politicians, governments and perhaps everybody else. This in turn might be due to ideological blinders of various kinds - the assumption that a properly democratic appointed official will act rationally and zealously in the public interest (despite plenty of evidence about cognitive bias and public choice economics), the asusmption that markets will self-organize well (despite having massive government controls, behavioral economics and social-signalling driven organisations), the assumption that decisionmakers even know what they are doing (at least in domains like technology, security and finance there is likely a case of policy theatre where decisionmakers simply cannot keep up and hence make irrelevant decisions) and that the voters contribute useful information (ignoring that they are also incentive driven, rationally ignorant, and often do not appoint praise and blame anywhere close to the right targets). Note that the above is not the normal indignant moral condemnation for somebody behaving badly - the problem is that the cybernetics of the system is malfunctioning, not that humans are human. It is easy to blame bankers or politicians, but they are not that important. A scary possibility is that more complex societies might be even less able to deal with these problems than ours. Some technologies may fix some problems, but they can also add even more to the speed and complexity that destabilizes things. It could be that Didier Sornette is right about the singularity as an infinite sequence of ever faster stock market crashes and rallies converging to a single point... But I do think there are practical things we can do to improve transparency, accountability and freedom of experimentation. That might at least help us figure things out a bit better. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Faculty of Philosophy Oxford University From darren.greer3 at gmail.com Tue Dec 6 13:13:15 2011 From: darren.greer3 at gmail.com (Darren Greer) Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2011 09:13:15 -0400 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: <4EDDF417.50009@aleph.se> References: <4EDDF417.50009@aleph.se> Message-ID: > > Anders wrote: > It could be that Didier Sornette is right about the singularity as an > infinite sequence of ever faster stock market crashes and rallies > converging to a single point... > I find it interesting that Marx and Engels predicated all of this in the section on capitalism in The Communist Manifesto. The descriptions of it as a revolutionary force creating periodic crisis within the system and needing to create new markets or exploit old ones to right itself. And that line about the executive of the state becoming servants to the bourgeois class as a whole. .As for your comment about the cybernetics of the system breaking down, Anders, that is what I was trying to get at in my last e-mail about informational systems and technology making up part of the human psyche in ways it has never done before, though it was rather muddily expressed compared to you. Your comments clarified it a bit for me. People as a rule are still invested in the enlightenment view that we can solve these problems by sheer human will and reason and ingenuity alone, that the liberal march of human progress and technology will do it for us. Yet if the problem is, as you say, cybernetic and the beast is becoming unsteady due to poor feedback, badly defined goals and an unintelligible babble of conversation, even a simple collective will to change it might not be enough. We'll still keep feeding into the old teleological models expecting them to work. I have a feeling this is because we haven't fully acknowledged as a society that these systems are even there, that they have grafted themselves onto our way of perceiving and dealing with the world. So we sit here and wait for a hero or two to rescue us like we are damsels in distress in some medieval tale published by enlightenment age presses in 1895. In a way we are all a bit like Don Quixotes, with our politicians and business leaders Sancho Panzas. Everyone is deluded, but some are slightly more practical than others. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From giulio at gmail.com Tue Dec 6 16:39:58 2011 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2011 17:39:58 +0100 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: 2011/12/6 John Grigg <<>> Many smart people are corrupted. Smart AGIs may well be even more corrupted than today's human regulators. It is difficult to imagine how one can be even more corrupted than today's regulators, but remembers that AGIs may be superintelligent. From darren.greer3 at gmail.com Tue Dec 6 17:54:41 2011 From: darren.greer3 at gmail.com (Darren Greer) Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2011 13:54:41 -0400 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: References: <4EDDF417.50009@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 9:13 AM, Darren Greer wrote: > > > > > in some medieval tale published by enlightenment age presses in 1895. > 1795. My bad. d. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dan_ust at yahoo.com Tue Dec 6 19:47:56 2011 From: dan_ust at yahoo.com (Dan) Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2011 11:47:56 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] New Horizons Becomes Closest Spacecraft to Approach Pluto Message-ID: <1323200876.2920.YahooMailNeo@web160603.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/New_Horizons_Becomes_Closest_Spacecraft_to_Approach_Pluto_999.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Tue Dec 6 21:38:28 2011 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2011 21:38:28 +0000 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 4:39 PM, Giulio Prisco wrote: > Many smart people are corrupted. Smart AGIs may well be even more > corrupted than today's human regulators. It is difficult to imagine > how one can be even more corrupted than today's regulators, but > remembers that AGIs may be superintelligent. > > I have never noticed any link between 'smarts' and morality. In fact, the smart wheeler-dealers are often noticeably lacking in morality. If you design an AGI using cognitive functions only, you have designed a highly intelligent psychopath. BillK From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Wed Dec 7 08:31:39 2011 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Wed, 7 Dec 2011 00:31:39 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] New Horizons Becomes Closest Spacecraft to Approach Pluto In-Reply-To: <1323200876.2920.YahooMailNeo@web160603.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> References: <1323200876.2920.YahooMailNeo@web160603.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1323246699.68881.YahooMailNeo@web65616.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> ________________________________ >From: Dan >To: ExI chat list >Sent: Tuesday, December 6, 2011 11:47 AM >Subject: [ExI] New Horizons Becomes Closest Spacecraft to Approach Pluto > > >http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/New_Horizons_Becomes_Closest_Spacecraft_to_Approach_Pluto_999.html ? Amazing. Pluto?won't even have completed?one third?of its?orbit aroud?the sun, since?we first discovered it in 1930, before it encounters our spacecraft. From the perspective a of a human lifetime,?75 years might seem like a long time. But from Pluto's point of view,?that's pretty darn fast. ? Stuart LaForge ?Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." -Clay Shirky From anders at aleph.se Wed Dec 7 10:12:53 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Wed, 07 Dec 2011 10:12:53 +0000 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: References: <4EDDF417.50009@aleph.se> Message-ID: <4EDF3C25.2040106@aleph.se> Darren Greer wrote: > > Anders wrote: > > > > > It could be that Didier Sornette is right about the singularity as > an infinite sequence of ever faster stock market crashes and > rallies converging to a single point... > > > I find it interesting that Marx and Engels predicated all of this in > the section on capitalism in The Communist Manifesto. > The descriptions of it as a revolutionary force creating periodic > crisis within the system and needing to create new markets or exploit > old ones to right itself. And that line about the executive of the > state becoming servants to the bourgeois class as a whole. That is not what Sornette talks about. His model suggests that *any* economic system (presumably even perfect communism) has this crisis singularity. Whether you believe the model is another matter (IMHO it is based on *weird* assumptions and completely ignores the details of the system, but at least it makes testable predictions - he has started a "stock market crash observatory" that actually logs predictions and checks whether they come true). Capitalism has proven amazingly resilient because it has incentives to reinvent itself. A bit like the Internet, a system whose imminent collapse has been predicted regularly since 1980. Institutions that create disincentives to self-innovation, they are the ones that cause trouble (case in point, of cours, the socialist states). > I have a feeling this is because we haven't fully acknowledged as a > society that these systems are even there, that they have grafted > themselves onto our way of perceiving and dealing with the world. So > we sit here and wait for a hero or two to rescue us like we are > damsels in distress in some medieval tale published > by enlightenment age presses in 1895. In a way we are all a bit like > Don Quixotes, with our politicians and business leaders Sancho Panzas. > Everyone is deluded, but some are slightly more practical than others. Exactly! And people prefer politics (just like novels) that is about people, not abstract systems. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From bbenzai at yahoo.com Wed Dec 7 14:38:32 2011 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Wed, 7 Dec 2011 06:38:32 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] Ethical behaviours In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1323268712.49637.YahooMailClassic@web114407.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> BillK wrote: > If you design an AGI using cognitive functions only ... I'm pretty sure that's an oxymoron. Although, it depends on what you mean by 'cognitive functions'. I don't like the term "AGI" myself, but I understand it to indicate an AI with a broad problem-solving capability, similar in type to (but probably greater in scope than) human abilities. This implies a lot more than just calculating ability, but includes emotions, imagination, theory of mind, and so-on. In other words, an artificial person, capable of acting as a moral agent. There may be human examples of smart, unscrupulous people, but I suspect that a sufficiently advanced AI would have superior morals as well as superior intellect. The fact that there are morally confused intelligent humans isn't really that relevant. The difference between the dullest and the smartest humans is tiny compared to the sort of intelligence we are expecting machines to reach, so I don't think it makes sense to hold up clever bankers as evidence that intelligence and morality are completely separate. Ben Zaiboc From darren.greer3 at gmail.com Wed Dec 7 16:03:17 2011 From: darren.greer3 at gmail.com (Darren Greer) Date: Wed, 7 Dec 2011 12:03:17 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Ethical behaviours In-Reply-To: <1323268712.49637.YahooMailClassic@web114407.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <1323268712.49637.YahooMailClassic@web114407.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 10:38 AM, Ben Zaiboc wrote: > > > The fact that there are morally confused intelligent humans isn't really > that relevant. > Especially if you consider that moral stance may be derived from a combination of human life experience and biological evolutionary mandate. Presumably an intelligent machine would not be so encumbered. And I think it pays dividends to remember that there may be different kinds of intelligence. Howard Gardener came up with eight, and one of them was actually moral intelligence. But how do you measure such a thing? Perhaps a hundred years ago you could have, as we had an certain objective morality that was a bit like a check list. But moral acumen now requires an immense amount of sophistication. What seems, on the surface, to be moral behavior might actually be immoral in the long run. Not to prove Godwin right, but the Nazi's were a very moral bunch. Shortly after he seized power, Hitler issued an edict that lobsters were to be killed before being thrown into the pot, as he thought it was inhumane to boil them alive. Darren -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Dec 8 05:18:24 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Wed, 7 Dec 2011 22:18:24 -0700 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: 2011/12/5 John Grigg : > creation of workable institutions and ethical behaviors.? I am horrified at > the degree of Wall Street & corporate shady behavior (which often gets > rewarded, rather than punished), along with the financial seduction of > political leaders.? And of course this is not just an American problem.? I > see the notion of a?"social contract"? rapidly falling apart. The only thing that can save us is if individuals and corporations function completely in the full light of day. Back room dealing has got to stop. The only way that I can see this happening today is if there is just a complete loss of privacy, or at least the retroactive threat of a complete loss of privacy. Consider how things would be different if every person working for a corporation had to wear a video and audio recorder 24/7, and in the event of some kind of corporate breakdown, that recording could be reviewed (automatically without human involvement) for relevant information, which could then be brought up before the relevant authorities. It would be akin to the old fashioned idea that 'God is always watching you', which served to keep people ethical in the olden days. This kind of loss of privacy is the sort of thing we're going to get if people can't pull their heads out of their collective asses voluntarily. I don't advocate for such a complete loss of privacy. I just don't see a long term alternative if people continue to become immoral at the current rate. There was a lady that called into a talk show today that was an insider on the housing collapse. She is slated to testify in three upcoming trials relating to the subject. The malfeasance of Freddy Mack and Fannie Mae, and the people that got into the mortgage business during the period around 2002 in cooperation with these institutions was truly shocking. > I dearly hope the massive greed/lack of effective oversight/siphoning > of?funds/destruction of economic strength can be successfully dealt with, > but with the best and brightest generally working for corporations and not > as gov't regulators, and?politicians being in the pockets of the > corporations, I have doubts that we will see real?change.? What can be done? More government clearly isn't the answer. In fact, it is often the government that causes the problems in the first place. > Ironically, I now see the hopefully coming Singularity (even if it is a soft > take-off) as a means to? finally successfully deal with?the massive > corruption we see.? I suppose I?envision A.G.I. being vastly more effective > regulators than humans.? But perhaps machines will not be granted the > authority to become directly involved in these issues. Any statement of this kind has to be viewed as a temporary situation. Anything you can imagine that machines could do, someday, inevitably, they will do. So some temporary thing like "they'll never let computers drive cars" is just that, temporary. > The here and now solution to my mind is ending the massive public apathy to > the economic nightmares we have experienced, and holding leaders > accountable.? I would have thought, considering how so many in the middle > class have suffered, that there would have been many more people marching on > behalf of Occupy Wall Street, or doing other things to get involved and > create change.? I think the corporate and political elite at least for now, > assume correctly that most people will act like sheep and not agitate for > serious change, and so the structural/institutional change has not been made > to seriously try to prevent further economic disasters. Apathy? Really? Both the tea party and the wall street warblers testify to the lack of apathy in America today. I can't remember this much of a lack of apathy since I was just a couple of years old in 1969. When men walked on the moon, any change seemed possible. Perhaps that's why they cancelled the space program? The problems most mainstream Americans see are not solved, in their minds, by OWS. So while many can relate to the problems they are pointing out, few agree with their proposed solutions. When someone comes out with real solutions to those sorts of problems, the people will get behind it. There just isn't any apathy left. People are pissed off, and they aren't going to take it any more. But Washington is seen more to blame than Wall Street. Interestingly, it appears that Obama has received more money from Wall Street donors than all the republicans... how do you like them apples OWS? -Kelly From anders at aleph.se Thu Dec 8 06:29:58 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 08 Dec 2011 07:29:58 +0100 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4EE05966.9020804@aleph.se> Kelly Anderson wrote: > Consider how things would be > different if every person working for a corporation had to wear a > video and audio recorder 24/7, and in the event of some kind of > corporate breakdown, that recording could be reviewed (automatically > without human involvement) for relevant information, which could then > be brought up before the relevant authorities. This works against deliberate wrongdoing, but a lot of the recent problems have been due to overconfidence and cognitive bias. People did things that was eventually shown to be ultra-stupid without any deliberate plan. As much as I am a fan of transparency, I don't see it fixing this. In fact, the above system might allow scapegoating people more effectively without helping them making the right decisions. (Still, I want to see it implemented in government - any time somebody proposes an extension of government surveillance powers, suggest this as part of the package. After all, we must make sure any misuse will be harshly dealt with eventually.) > More government clearly isn't the answer. In fact, it is often the > government that causes the problems in the first place. > I just read Tyler Cowen's "The Great Stagnation" (a quick read, recommended). He made the argument that we have gotten more government because we can afford it, due to economic growth in turn driven by technological innovation. We are unlikely to see much bigger government simply because we cannot afford it right now. He also points out that people are likely applying the wrong recipes to solve the crisis, and this makes the more/less government issue irrelevant. (His suggestions for what we ought to do likely appeals to people like us, since they lean heavily on the importance of more innovation, better globalized spread of clever solutions and higher status for scientists and innovators) -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Thu Dec 8 14:59:07 2011 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Thu, 8 Dec 2011 07:59:07 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Origin of ethics and morals Message-ID: Related to recent discussions, ethics and morals come out of successful evolutionary strategies (where else could they come from?). That means they were mostly formed when humans were hunter-gatherers, living in small tribes or bands. They are also conditional, since external conditions determined how one tribe interacted with another. Then recently some of our ancestors were heavily selected for economic success. (See Gregory Clark's work.) Unfortunately this is mostly descriptive rather than proscriptive. Still, understanding the evolutionary forces that shaped what we consider to ethical and moral might help analyze proposals to change things. Keith From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Thu Dec 8 18:01:33 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Thu, 8 Dec 2011 19:01:33 +0100 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: References: <4EDDF417.50009@aleph.se> Message-ID: 2011/12/6 Darren Greer : > I find it interesting that Marx and Engels predicated all of this in the > section on capitalism in The Communist Manifesto. In a way, yes. In another, the developments currently in place are entirely different from what they expected, because the real class struggle that industrial capitalists (and old-style ?lites such as politicians, military, etc.) are eventually losing is that against speculators and banker, that is orgs and individuals dealing with the money *of others* and/or creating it ex nihilo, an activity having little to do with basic, Marxian primary capital accumulation. Moreover, Marx and Engels remain squarely in the field of Enlightenment values. Even though it may still be difficult to say what comes after, one wonders whether the cycle of the latter may not eventually coming to an end... In the interview published at http://www.biopolitix.com I try to offer some tentative hypotheses of how posthuman-ist developments could be conjugated with, and made possible by, a post-humanist worldview. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Thu Dec 8 17:49:50 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Thu, 8 Dec 2011 18:49:50 +0100 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: <01ee01ccb3dd$3e148be0$ba3da3a0$@att.net> References: <01ee01ccb3dd$3e148be0$ba3da3a0$@att.net> Message-ID: 2011/12/6 spike : > Plenty of us realized the Occupy people were occupying the wrong place. > Wall Street didn?t do it, Washington DC did.? The fed set the policy on a > course of disaster, Wall Street just did what businesses do.? John why > weren?t the mobs descending on the people who actually did the crime? I have some objections to the generalisation of the term "crime" (I prefer to reserve it to the breach of the criminal law actually in force in the territory and in the time when the alleged crime is perpetrated, so that best-practice and "ethical" rules cannot really be considered). But Spike's approach is refreshingly *political* rather than moralistic. A banker, same as a hangman, may be a very nice and considerate individual in his private life - or perhaps not, since he would have otherwise opted for another job :-) - but when working they have to comply with what their actual, concrete job descriptions dictate. Blaming them for responding to systemic expectations and Darwinian pressures as best as they can seems therefore naive and futile. A company is a *for-profit* organisation, and either a given undesirable behaviour is made unprofitable or those objecting to it are simply going to be replaced. Perhaps by a computer having no such qualms... :-) -- Stefano Vaj From sparge at gmail.com Thu Dec 8 21:07:48 2011 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Thu, 8 Dec 2011 16:07:48 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Yes, I have experience re: retrocausal writing In-Reply-To: <4ED7DC69.3010604@gnolls.org> References: <4ED7DC69.3010604@gnolls.org> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 2:58 PM, J. Stanton wrote: >> The Avantguardian wrote: >> >> any instances where a piece of writing be it a novel, academic >> paper, or what have you simply seemed to write itself? When this >> occurs did you ever get the sense that the finished work was using >> you as a means to bring it into being? > > > Yes. ?It was a strange and wonderful experience -- intense to the point of > being physically and mentally draining. ?As I said once: > > "The Gnoll Credo is Gryka's book: I just wrote it down. > > She is absolutely real, and I'm the only one who knows her story. ?I had to > tell it as best I could, so that others could know at least a small part of > the joy, pain, and wonder I felt -- and the knowledge I gained -- from > knowing her." > > http://www.thegnollcredo.com > > I believe I've succeeded. ?Reader reactions: "It has shocked me and moved me > and infected my dreams," "Like an epiphany from a deep meditative > experience," "Compare it to the great works of anthropologists Jane Goodall > and Jared Diamond to see its true importance," and "The book was awesome. I > cringed, I laughed, I even shed some tears." > > http://www.thegnollcredo.com/reviews/ FWIW, I highly recommend it. It's really changed the way I think about some things. Important things. -Dave From spike66 at att.net Thu Dec 8 23:15:15 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 8 Dec 2011 15:15:15 -0800 Subject: [ExI] FW: Larry King wants to be cryopreserved In-Reply-To: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> If you hadn't heard, Larry King is a cryonics fan. Posted for Alan Brooks: From: Alan Brooks [mailto:alaneugenebrooks52 at yahoo.com] Subject: Larry King wants to be cryopreserved http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20551359,00.html [could you post this, Spike? I wont subscribe anymore] -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Dec 8 23:48:36 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 8 Dec 2011 16:48:36 -0700 Subject: [ExI] FW: Larry King wants to be cryopreserved In-Reply-To: <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> Message-ID: 2011/12/8 spike : > > > If you hadn?t heard, Larry King is a cryonics fan.? Posted for Alan Brooks: > > > Subject: Larry King wants to be cryopreserved > > http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20551359,00.html Well, that clinches the deal for me... I won't spend decades frozen in the same room with Larry King... LOL!!! And the prospect of being thawed out to a world that still has Larry King in it... well, that just doesn't seem quite as nice a world as I hoped the future would be... LOL... I have nightmares of being on the Larry King show... Well, Kelly, what was it like to be frozen in a room with me for 185 years? AAAaaargh!!! -Kelly From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Thu Dec 8 23:29:54 2011 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Thu, 8 Dec 2011 16:29:54 -0700 Subject: [ExI] FW: Larry King wants to be cryopreserved In-Reply-To: <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> Message-ID: > > ** ** > > If you hadn?t heard, Larry King is a cryonics fan. Posted for Alan Brooks: > **** > > ** ** > > ** ** > > *From:* Alan Brooks [mailto:alaneugenebrooks52 at yahoo.com] > *Subject:* Larry King wants to be cryopreserved**** > > ** ** > > *http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20551359,00.html* > **** > > > I hope he gets to share a dewar with Ted Williams. John : ) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Thu Dec 8 23:49:27 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 8 Dec 2011 15:49:27 -0800 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: References: <01ee01ccb3dd$3e148be0$ba3da3a0$@att.net> Message-ID: <01b101ccb604$05c17270$11445750$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Stefano Vaj 2011/12/6 spike : >> Plenty of us realized the Occupy people were occupying the wrong place. > Wall Street didn?t do it, Washington DC did.? The fed set the policy > on a course of disaster, Wall Street just did what businesses do.? > John why weren?t the mobs descending on the people who actually did the crime? >I have some objections to the generalisation of the term "crime" (I prefer to reserve it to the breach of the criminal law actually in force in the territory and in the time when the alleged crime is perpetrated, so that best-practice and "ethical" rules cannot really be considered)...Stefano Vaj Hmmm, OK. But what we had were Washington policies that compelled banks to give out a bunch of risky loans, then spread the risk into pools with good loans. Eventually the amount of toxic waste stirred into the stew caused the entire pot to be poisoned, so... the banks were bailed out by the government, being too big to fail. Other healthy institutions were compelled to buy the bad loans, but healthy institutions wanted more certainty than the risky institutes would allow, so plenty of people who had never missed a payment were foreclosed and lost their homes and all their equity. So the government took peoples' taxes and bailed out banks which then did not bail out those who took out the risky loans, even those who had never missed a single goddam payment. Does that sound right to you? Doesn't to me. The bank isn't at fault: they were compelled to give out the bad loans, another healthy bank was compelled to buy the bad loans and they want to get them safer to comply with the standards that kept them healthy in the first place. It was the fault of those who set up the rules to compel banks to give out risky loans. The Occupy people have a perfectly legitimate complaint, if they can shake off the drug addled fog and realize what it is. They are occupying the wrong place. spike From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Thu Dec 8 23:50:43 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2011 00:50:43 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Origin of ethics and morals In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 8 December 2011 15:59, Keith Henson wrote: > Related to recent discussions, ethics and morals come out of > successful evolutionary strategies (where else could they come from?). > Mmhhh. This is more applicable to human *ethology* than to human *ethics*. How could one otherwise explain the extreme diversity of ethical systems throughout ages and cultures? Accordingly, I suspect that we are dealing here with memes rather than with genes. In fact, a sufficiently powerful meme (say, chastity) may thrive or at least survive even though it is obviously detrimental to one's chance to leave behind and abundant and successful offspring. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From max at maxmore.com Fri Dec 9 00:14:48 2011 From: max at maxmore.com (Max More) Date: Thu, 8 Dec 2011 17:14:48 -0700 Subject: [ExI] FW: Larry King wants to be cryopreserved In-Reply-To: References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> Message-ID: How has Larry King offended you so badly that you would rather die than have a chance to live again with him in the world? --Max On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 4:48 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > 2011/12/8 spike : > > > > > > If you hadn?t heard, Larry King is a cryonics fan. Posted for Alan > Brooks: > > > > > > Subject: Larry King wants to be cryopreserved > > > > http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20551359,00.html > > Well, that clinches the deal for me... I won't spend decades frozen in > the same room with Larry King... LOL!!! And the prospect of being > thawed out to a world that still has Larry King in it... well, that > just doesn't seem quite as nice a world as I hoped the future would > be... LOL... I have nightmares of being on the Larry King show... > Well, Kelly, what was it like to be frozen in a room with me for 185 > years? AAAaaargh!!! > > -Kelly > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -- Max More, PhD Strategic Philosopher Co-editor, *The Transhumanist Reader* CEO, Alcor Life Extension Foundation 7895 E. Acoma Dr # 110 Scottsdale, AZ 85260 480/905-1906 ext 113 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Fri Dec 9 02:13:56 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 8 Dec 2011 19:13:56 -0700 Subject: [ExI] FW: Larry King wants to be cryopreserved In-Reply-To: References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> Message-ID: 2011/12/8 Max More : > How has Larry King offended you so badly that you would rather die than have > a chance to live again with him in the world? It's called humor Max... ;-) The world is a big place. :-) -Kelly From darren.greer3 at gmail.com Fri Dec 9 03:36:05 2011 From: darren.greer3 at gmail.com (Darren Greer) Date: Thu, 8 Dec 2011 23:36:05 -0400 Subject: [ExI] FW: Larry King wants to be cryopreserved In-Reply-To: References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> Message-ID: > 2011/12/8 Max More : > > How has Larry King offended you so badly that you would rather die than > have > > a chance to live again with him in the world? I remember being surprised that Micheal Jackson wasn't preserved; I was fairly sure I'd heard that he'd signed up. I read later that he missed the deadline because of the need for autopsy. How is that kind of issue dealt with in contracting for cryogenic services, or is it? Darren -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From seculartranshumanist at gmail.com Fri Dec 9 03:29:16 2011 From: seculartranshumanist at gmail.com (Joseph Bloch) Date: Thu, 8 Dec 2011 22:29:16 -0500 Subject: [ExI] FW: Larry King wants to be cryopreserved In-Reply-To: References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 9:13 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > 2011/12/8 Max More : >> How has Larry King offended you so badly that you would rather die than have >> a chance to live again with him in the world? > > It's called humor Max... ;-) The world is a big place. :-) > > -Kelly Bazinga. Joe From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Fri Dec 9 04:56:08 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 8 Dec 2011 21:56:08 -0700 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: <01b101ccb604$05c17270$11445750$@att.net> References: <01ee01ccb3dd$3e148be0$ba3da3a0$@att.net> <01b101ccb604$05c17270$11445750$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 4:49 PM, spike wrote: > compelled to buy the bad loans, but healthy institutions wanted more > certainty than the risky institutes would allow, so plenty of people who had > never missed a payment were foreclosed and lost their homes and all their > equity. Help me understand this... this isn't an urban legend or something? People who never missed a payment got foreclosed on? That just seems like a breach of contract, how does that happen? If banks are pulling that kind of crap, I might have to go join OWS... LOL! Seriously, if there are documented cases of this, I would really like to know about it. That's just messed up. -Kelly From spike66 at att.net Fri Dec 9 05:54:53 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 8 Dec 2011 21:54:53 -0800 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: References: <01ee01ccb3dd$3e148be0$ba3da3a0$@att.net> <01b101ccb604$05c17270$11445750$@att.net> Message-ID: <000901ccb637$134dbce0$39e936a0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson Subject: Re: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 4:49 PM, spike wrote: >> compelled to buy the bad loans, but healthy institutions wanted more > certainty than the risky institutes would allow, so plenty of people > who had never missed a payment were foreclosed and lost their homes > and all their equity. >Help me understand this... this isn't an urban legend or something? People who never missed a payment got foreclosed on? That just seems like a breach of contract, how does that happen? ...LOL! Seriously, if there are documented cases of this, I would really like to know about it. That's just messed up. -Kelly The reason it wasn't breach of contract is that banks gave out loans to people who exaggerated their income, in areas known to be risky, where property values declined. During the meltdown, existing risky loans were sold by failing banks to more cautious and healthy banks. The loans did not conform to the risk standards of the new bank. Apparently there were at least some of these loans called in, for which the admittedly risky borrowers had not missed a payment. I don't have the documentation. This turns into a wildly complicated question, for we saw legislation against red lining. That is the practice where banks were reluctant to loan for houses inside an arbitrary boundary. Consequently the prices of the real estate inside there was lower than a comparable property outside the red line, since a general refusal of banks to loan money on that property means a restricted market: those who don't need a loan. Further consequences: a lot of those properties are rentals. Lower priced properties attract the kinds of neighbors that lower priced property attracts. Crime is high inside the red line, lots or parolees end up there, and so forth. Legislatures outlaw the practice of redlining, banks make loans on the property, value goes down, bank sells the loan to a different bank which already has its conforming share of special loans and wants no more, so it forecloses on the redline property. We saw plenty of wackiness during the peak of the pre-meltdown subprime lending debacle. Down the street from us was a house for sale into which four adults moved into in 2008. They owned exactly nothing: the house was a see-through the entire time they lived there. You could look in their curtain-less front window and see all the way through the house. There was no furniture, no pictures on the walls, to tables, desks, dishes, appliances, nothing. There were four junky old cars, but nothing in the garage, no tools, no usual garage clutter, no mower, no washer or dryer, nothing at all except the four cars and the four people. They lived there for over a year, never did acquire anything. What does that seem like is going on there? Any speculation? Hint: all four residents were minority, two men and two women, all between about 40 and 55 yrs, not at all obvious if they were two traditional couples, or if so who went with whom. Four bedroom house, peak value about 900k. What was that about? But that is a subject for another time, for I have grown weary. spike From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Fri Dec 9 06:52:48 2011 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Thu, 8 Dec 2011 23:52:48 -0700 Subject: [ExI] FW: Larry King wants to be cryopreserved In-Reply-To: References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> Message-ID: Max More wrote: How has Larry King offended you so badly that you would rather die than have a chance to live again with him in the world? >>> It could be that he saw the "Ugly Americans" episode where a virus turns people into copies of Larry King! A future bio-weapon might do just such a horrible thing... "And we'll be right back with Ted Williams, who was my roommate for over 100 years!" John ; ) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Dec 9 10:11:00 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2011 11:11:00 +0100 Subject: [ExI] FW: Larry King wants to be cryopreserved In-Reply-To: References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> Message-ID: <20111209101100.GS31847@leitl.org> On Thu, Dec 08, 2011 at 11:36:05PM -0400, Darren Greer wrote: > I remember being surprised that Micheal Jackson wasn't preserved; I was > fairly sure I'd heard that he'd signed up. I read later that he missed the > deadline because of the need for autopsy. How is that kind of issue dealt > with in contracting for cryogenic services, or is it? Cryonics. Cryogenics is something different. P.S. Via an anonymous contributor: http://cryoeuro.eu:8080/display/cryobiology/Home From darren.greer3 at gmail.com Fri Dec 9 13:10:29 2011 From: darren.greer3 at gmail.com (Darren Greer) Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2011 09:10:29 -0400 Subject: [ExI] FW: Larry King wants to be cryopreserved In-Reply-To: <20111209101100.GS31847@leitl.org> References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> <20111209101100.GS31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 6:11 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > > Cryonics. Cryogenics is something different. > Noted. Thanks. I had never made the distinction but it is a rather important one. > > P.S. Via an anonymous contributor: > http://cryoeuro.eu:8080/display/cryobiology/Home Thanks again. Lots of information there. I read over the Alcor site for the first time last night. I enjoyed their rather informative, sensitive approach. I was surprised that even possible religious objections were broached. I'll see if I can find the answers I'm looking for in the wiki. Darren -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Dec 9 13:17:43 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2011 14:17:43 +0100 Subject: [ExI] FW: Larry King wants to be cryopreserved In-Reply-To: References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> <20111209101100.GS31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20111209131743.GZ31847@leitl.org> On Fri, Dec 09, 2011 at 09:10:29AM -0400, Darren Greer wrote: > Thanks again. Lots of information there. I read over the Alcor site for the > first time last night. I enjoyed their rather informative, sensitive > approach. I was surprised that even possible religious objections were > broached. I'll see if I can find the answers I'm looking for in the wiki. Another great resource is the Chronosphere blog by Mike Darwin Start here http://chronopause.com/index.php/page/10/ and don't stop until the front page. You'll probably need a day for the entire thing. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From darren.greer3 at gmail.com Fri Dec 9 13:52:58 2011 From: darren.greer3 at gmail.com (Darren Greer) Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2011 09:52:58 -0400 Subject: [ExI] FW: Larry King wants to be cryopreserved In-Reply-To: <20111209131743.GZ31847@leitl.org> References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> <20111209101100.GS31847@leitl.org> <20111209131743.GZ31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: Eugen wrote: > Another great resource is the Chronosphere blog by Mike Darwin > Start here http://chronopause.com/index.php/page/10/ > and don't stop until the front page. You'll probably need a day > for the entire thing. > Thanks Eugen. I appreciate not being roasted for the error, but being given an opportunity to educate myself instead. That's the reason I hang out here. Darren -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Fri Dec 9 14:25:26 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2011 06:25:26 -0800 Subject: [ExI] FW: Larry King wants to be cryopreserved In-Reply-To: References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> <20111209101100.GS31847@leitl.org> <20111209131743.GZ31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Darren Greer . >.Thanks Eugen. I appreciate not being roasted for the error, but being given an opportunity to educate myself instead. That's the reason I hang out here. Darren Jeez who forgot to roast Darren? {8^D Darren, is your book available as a PDF download to the computer? I am a primitive savage who still has no kindle or whatever the kids have these days. I will likely get one if you have a recommendation. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Dec 9 14:48:01 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2011 15:48:01 +0100 Subject: [ExI] FW: Larry King wants to be cryopreserved In-Reply-To: <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> References: <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> <20111209101100.GS31847@leitl.org> <20111209131743.GZ31847@leitl.org> <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> Message-ID: <20111209144801.GE31847@leitl.org> On Fri, Dec 09, 2011 at 06:25:26AM -0800, spike wrote: > Darren, is your book available as a PDF download to the computer? I am a > primitive savage who still has no kindle or whatever the kids have these > days. I will likely get one if you have a recommendation. You can get a Nook tablet. Or the Kindle Fire, if you like Amazon's teat. Both can possibly rooted/reflashed with alternative firmware (in case you're into that kind of thing), in later case go with the B&N device. I have a Nook color with CM7, and a) the display is too small b) the CPU is too weak for scanned PDFs (djvu less so). Regular PDFs work quite well. I think you need a 10" with paperlike ppi and some four ARM cores (or really good video acceleration tie-in, which so far only Apple does) to completely kill paper stone cold dead. From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Fri Dec 9 14:58:26 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2011 15:58:26 +0100 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: <01b101ccb604$05c17270$11445750$@att.net> References: <01ee01ccb3dd$3e148be0$ba3da3a0$@att.net> <01b101ccb604$05c17270$11445750$@att.net> Message-ID: On 9 December 2011 00:49, spike wrote: > >... On Behalf Of Stefano Vaj > >I have some objections to the generalisation of the term "crime" (I prefer > to reserve it to the breach of the criminal law actually in force in the > territory and in the time when the alleged crime is perpetrated, so that > best-practice and "ethical" rules cannot really be considered)...Stefano > Vaj > > Hmmm, OK. But what we had were Washington policies that compelled banks to > give out a bunch of risky loans > Yes. This is why I explicitely concur with your views about that as stated in the part of my message you did not quote. :-) -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Fri Dec 9 14:56:57 2011 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2011 07:56:57 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Origin of ethics and morals Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 5:00 AM, Stefano Vaj wrote: > On 8 December 2011 15:59, Keith Henson wrote: > >> Related to recent discussions, ethics and morals come out of >> successful evolutionary strategies (where else could they come from?). >> > > Mmhhh. This is more applicable to human *ethology* than to human *ethics*. > > How could one otherwise explain the extreme diversity of ethical systems > throughout ages and cultures? Perhaps you can convince me differently, but I see more in common than divergent across cultures. Parents, for example, universally take care of children. > Accordingly, I suspect that we are dealing here with memes rather than with > genes. In fact, a sufficiently powerful meme (say, chastity) may thrive or > at least survive even though it is obviously detrimental to one's chance to > leave behind and abundant and successful offspring. Talk to the Shakers about it. Keith From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Fri Dec 9 15:45:14 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2011 16:45:14 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Origin of ethics and morals In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 9 December 2011 15:56, Keith Henson wrote: > Perhaps you can convince me differently, but I see more in common than > divergent across cultures. Parents, for example, universally take > care of children. > It may be a matter of definitions, but I suspect that the common part can be fairly described as part of our ethology. Is breathing an ethical or unethical behaviour? Actual ethical systems come into play when they dictate diverging behaviours to their respective followers. As pointed out, eg, by Posner in The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory, "Do the Right Thing", or even "Thou Shalt Not Kill" does not really say much about the solution or real-world moral dilemmas, which have invariably to do with different views of what can or cannot be killed, how, when, why, by whom, what "killing" does actually mean and what exhonerating or mitigating circumstances may be applicable or not. Now, I find it interesting that human experiences and theories offer a range of answers to such questions that is much wider of what most of us are able even to imagine, and covering almost everything which be barely compatible with individual and group survival (and perhaps beyond...). So, no, I am not persuaded that ethical values expounded, say, in Beowulf, in Francis of Assisi's teachings and in Bentham's works are one and the same. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From darren.greer3 at gmail.com Fri Dec 9 16:24:09 2011 From: darren.greer3 at gmail.com (Darren Greer) Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2011 12:24:09 -0400 Subject: [ExI] FW: Larry King wants to be cryopreserved In-Reply-To: <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> <20111209101100.GS31847@leitl.org> <20111209131743.GZ31847@leitl.org> <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> Message-ID: 2011/12/9 spike wrote: Darren, is your book available as a PDF download to the computer? I am a > primitive savage who still has no kindle or whatever the kids have these > days. I will likely get one if you have a recommendation. > Spike: The kindle edition is available on Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/Still-Life-with-June-ebook/dp/B0053DLIF0. No pdf that I am aware of, for sale or for pirate. My advice is to order a second-hand copy from Amazon for peanuts. If you look at the U.S. edition (St. Martin's Press -- it has an upside down dude on the cover) there is one there for fifty cents, though if I can find the seller, he's a dead man. :) > **** > > ** > Darren -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From moulton at moulton.com Fri Dec 9 18:19:03 2011 From: moulton at moulton.com (F. C. Moulton) Date: Fri, 09 Dec 2011 10:19:03 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Ebooks Formats and ebook readers In-Reply-To: References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> <20111209101100.GS31847@leitl.org> <20111209131743.GZ31847@leitl.org> <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> Message-ID: <4EE25117.8060800@moulton.com> I am changing the Subject line it has drifted away from Re: [ExI] FW: Larry King wants to be cryopreserved On 12/09/2011 08:24 AM, Darren Greer wrote: > 2011/12/9 spike wrote: > Darren, is your book available as a PDF download to the computer? I am a >> primitive savage who still has no kindle or whatever the kids have these >> days. I will likely get one if you have a recommendation. > > Spike: The kindle edition is available on Amazon. > http://www.amazon.com/Still-Life-with-June-ebook/dp/B0053DLIF0. No pdf that > I am aware of, for sale or for pirate. My advice is to order a second-hand > copy from Amazon for peanuts. If you look at the U.S. edition (St. Martin's > Press -- it has an upside down dude on the cover) there is one there for > fifty cents, though if I can find the seller, he's a dead man. :) > A couple of things to remember about Ebook formats and Ebook readers 1. Some are tied to various degrees to particular vendors 2. Some can only read a limited number of formats 3. Many ebooks have DRM which in my opinion is a very bad thing 4. There are ways to get rid of DRM (google for the answer) 5. There are programs such as calibre which formats such as pdf to epub Points 1 and 2 are why I did not buy a Kindle (there are also other reasons). Point 3 describes the problem and point 4 gives the path to the answer. >From the statistics I have seen I buy more that average ebooks and I buy them without DRM if practical however if they only way to get them is with DRM then immediately after getting them I strip the DRM out so that I have a clean no DRM version. Point 5 is a reminder that if you have something in one format and you want it in another then calibre does a fairly good job of converting formats. I even used it once when I had a MOBI ebook which did not display properly so I used calibre to convert it to EPub and it was much better. In general if you are getting either a dedicated ebook reader or a tablet make sure it as a minimum can handle common ebook formats such as Mobi, EPub, RTF and regular simple text. I hope this is helpful. Fred From max at maxmore.com Fri Dec 9 19:28:23 2011 From: max at maxmore.com (Max More) Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2011 12:28:23 -0700 Subject: [ExI] FW: Larry King wants to be cryopreserved In-Reply-To: References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> Message-ID: It didn't come across that way to me (the perils of text), but I'm glad to hear it! --Max On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 7:13 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > 2011/12/8 Max More : > > How has Larry King offended you so badly that you would rather die than > have > > a chance to live again with him in the world? > > It's called humor Max... ;-) The world is a big place. :-) > > -Kelly > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -- Max More, PhD Strategic Philosopher Co-editor, *The Transhumanist Reader* CEO, Alcor Life Extension Foundation 7895 E. Acoma Dr # 110 Scottsdale, AZ 85260 480/905-1906 ext 113 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Fri Dec 9 20:02:20 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2011 13:02:20 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Wiki entry of Critical Theory of Posthumanism In-Reply-To: References: <4EDCB086.4010304@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Dec 5, 2011 10:39 AM, "Darren Greer" wrote: > About a year ago I was wandering around my house looking for something I had misplaced. Audibly the thought occurred to me that I could just Google to find out where it was. I marveled at what had just happened, and realized that the Internet had dudes itself with my consciousnesses. It was an extension of it, and its contents were now in fact my own memory, amplified and expanded to a profound degree. It was at that moment that I realized I was entirely ready and willing to move it into my brain, even though the technology wasn't available yet, so I could search the database for that misplaced ashtray. > my reply to this email is an experiment in using the voice recognition software that comes on my new cellphone. the fact that a cell phone can recognize the human voice this accurately is an indication of just how far technology has come over the past few years. I am amazed by the capabilities of this new phone, and I feel a little bit like Spike does sometimes in having missed the revolution. now to my main point... about 15 years ago, I was working on a Sun workstation that had a monitor with a loose stand. from time to time the monitor would slip and rotate downwards. One day when it did this, I impulsively reached for the mouse, and tried to fix the physical problem of the monitor location by moving the mouse up. It didn't take me long to figure out that what I was doing was not going to work. that was my first mental slip between the physical world and the virtual world... and I found it very interesting from a mental point of view. your belief that google could find items in your house seems like a similar slip between physical and virtual worlds. I think this kind of slip is going to become more and more and more common in the future and as we spend more time in virtual worlds reality will become harder to differentiate. Kurzweil will have to wait for speech recognition to be the most ubiquitous input modality for a few more years, but the capabilities available today are really rather astonishing even if they don't work flawlessly. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rtomek at ceti.pl Fri Dec 9 20:05:40 2011 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2011 21:05:40 +0100 (CET) Subject: [ExI] Ebooks Formats and ebook readers In-Reply-To: <4EE25117.8060800@moulton.com> References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> <20111209101100.GS31847@leitl.org> <20111209131743.GZ31847@leitl.org> <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> <4EE25117.8060800@moulton.com> Message-ID: On Fri, 9 Dec 2011, F. C. Moulton wrote: > A couple of things to remember about Ebook formats and Ebook readers > 1. Some are tied to various degrees to particular vendors > 2. Some can only read a limited number of formats > 3. Many ebooks have DRM which in my opinion is a very bad thing > 4. There are ways to get rid of DRM (google for the answer) > 5. There are programs such as calibre which formats such as pdf to epub > > Points 1 and 2 are why I did not buy a Kindle (there are also other > reasons). Yes. And a prospect of my legally bought device being examined by some third party, without asking me for permission, is, at least for me, totally unappealing. It is assumed that only a producer will be able to do this, but I think soon there will be stories of mobsters and psycos playing their tricks in this shadow area, too. If buying a kindle makes me a potential criminal, like a recidivist who needs to be watched over by his curator, then I would rather not buy it and stay in my clean, uncriminalised state. Of course, majority will vote with their money. It's going to be fashionable, this e-book thing. Very green and cool, etc. I perceive it as strange behaviour, but certainly not the first time when people screw themselves to get some more popularity in their circles (anybody here remembers cigarettes?). Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From moulton at moulton.com Fri Dec 9 20:49:33 2011 From: moulton at moulton.com (F. C. Moulton) Date: Fri, 09 Dec 2011 12:49:33 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Ebooks Formats and ebook readers In-Reply-To: References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> <20111209101100.GS31847@leitl.org> <20111209131743.GZ31847@leitl.org> <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> <4EE25117.8060800@moulton.com> Message-ID: <4EE2745D.9000401@moulton.com> On 12/09/2011 12:05 PM, Tomasz Rola wrote: > > Yes. And a prospect of my legally bought device being examined by some > third party, without asking me for permission, is, at least for me, > totally unappealing. > I should have added that the ereader I currently use is an Aluratek which is about two years old and is not tied to any vendor but it does not have any WiFi connectivity. It does have a 2 GB card that I can load with whatever I want; I am in complete control. Of course being almost two years old it is a couple of generations behind. As I said I do not recommend the Kindle. The Nook Tablet and the new Kobo units both look promising but I have not investigated them in detail. http://www.kobobooks.com/kobovox http://www.barnesandnoble.com/p/nook-tablet-barnes-noble/1104687969 One important feature of both of these is that they can take an SD micro card so it is possible to carry huge amounts of text, video and audio and have it even if there is no WiFi. It looks like much of the dedicated ereader only market is being replaced by tablets and smartphones with the higher end ereaders becoming Android tablets and thus disrupting the tablet market. And ebooks are becoming increasingly popular. One reason is ease of transport and ease of reading. A typical ereader or tablet is so much easier to handle than a large hardback. And if my eyes get tired then it is one click of my thumb and the text is enlarged. Fred From rtomek at ceti.pl Fri Dec 9 23:53:19 2011 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 00:53:19 +0100 (CET) Subject: [ExI] Ebooks Formats and ebook readers In-Reply-To: <4EE2745D.9000401@moulton.com> References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> <20111209101100.GS31847@leitl.org> <20111209131743.GZ31847@leitl.org> <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> <4EE25117.8060800@moulton.com> <4EE2745D.9000401@moulton.com> Message-ID: On Fri, 9 Dec 2011, F. C. Moulton wrote: > On 12/09/2011 12:05 PM, Tomasz Rola wrote: > > > > Yes. And a prospect of my legally bought device being examined by some > > third party, without asking me for permission, is, at least for me, > > totally unappealing. > > > > I should have added that the ereader I currently use is an Aluratek > which is about two years old and is not tied to any vendor but it does > not have any WiFi connectivity. It does have a 2 GB card that I can > load with whatever I want; I am in complete control. Of course being > almost two years old it is a couple of generations behind. Sounds really nice. Being behind sounds nicer than lemmings would've expected. This includes being behind the wheel :-). > As I said I do not recommend the Kindle. The Nook Tablet and the new > Kobo units both look promising but I have not investigated them in detail. Well, in some cases choosing a reader can be very hard. My ideal ebook reader is PDA fitted with e-ink display. PDA (personal digital assistant) was the latest hit before cellular took over and sent PDAs into oblivion. I bought Compaq Ipaq some 10 years ago, installed Linux on it and used as ebook reader until CF card went bunk. I am yet to revive the thing (unfortunately, Familiar Linux seems to be gone for good, probably dead with sources, too, so the only other option is, I guess, Angstrom - but I digress). A lot of html files had been read in full sun, since I had been ordaining fresh air to myself every day and I could not take a PC outside with me. Ipaqs had remarkable displays, that looked great in sunshine and could be backlited when indoors. IMHO, their displays were amongst the closest to e-ink that could be done with LCD - those were transflective LCDs, if I am correct. As far as I can tell after watching some youtube films, contemporary devices are close to useless outdoors, at least for heavy reading. Of course I didn't watch everything. And of course, I didn't bother checking neither Kindle nor Ipad. Nook looks interesting, but I am not going to buy it right now. Before I do, I will have to examine the "sunshine problem". Unless Eugene takes his for sun bathing :-). Also, I would really like to have Linux on it. By Linux I mean a terminal emulator and ability to control the device from it, without a need to use pointy-clicky interface. I had such thing 10 years ago, no reason to go graphical now, especially if we expect things to improve over time. The only improvement I want is bigger terminals (like, true vt100 emulation that fits on the display). Size of emulated terminal was my only complaint about Ipaqs - some 30x20 characters (30x10 with keyboard enabled) instead of 80x24. Still, it was a killer for me - running scripts, vi etc out of the pocket. Tweaking the system while birds were singing over my head. You got the idea. Unfortunately, even having Linux on board does not guarantee me a total control. Especially if Linux is ran on one cpu while some other software, possibly virus-infected, runs on modem or wifi hardware, and remains out of my reach all the time. Android is _maybe_ good, but I need to see what is going on with "remote control" in Android devices. Nokia made few interesting tablets, but I am not sure if they are going to consider Linux in the future or maybe go to Windows (and beyond). So far, not so good. I don't have to hurry, so I don't read on the subject too extensively. If things go in the right direction I expect one day there will be cheap enough laptops with e-ink displays (or hybrid lcd/e-ink). Laptops are - at the moment - preferred from my point of view. It is easy to find and install normal Linux distribution on a laptop (i.e. PC by another name). It is also possible to repair them, if such need arises. Not trivial but some folks manage. One alternative possibility is to buy some e-ink/touchscreen capable reader and reflash it with whatever I want. Again, some folks manage to do it but this is still kind of unknown territory for me. Also, producers don't like it too much. Seems like I am yet to see an ultimate pda/reader that could seduce me better than this 10 years old thing I mentioned above. > And ebooks are becoming increasingly popular. One reason is ease of > transport and ease of reading. A typical ereader or tablet is so much > easier to handle than a large hardback. And if my eyes get tired then > it is one click of my thumb and the text is enlarged. Sure. And I really like the fact there is so much great stuff on Wikisource, Project Gutenberg and Archive. And few other places. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From rtomek at ceti.pl Sat Dec 10 00:02:33 2011 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 01:02:33 +0100 (CET) Subject: [ExI] Ebooks Formats and ebook readers In-Reply-To: References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> <20111209101100.GS31847@leitl.org> <20111209131743.GZ31847@leitl.org> <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> <4EE25117.8060800@moulton.com> <4EE2745D.9000401@moulton.com> Message-ID: On Sat, 10 Dec 2011, Tomasz Rola wrote: > Nook looks interesting, but I am not going to buy it right now. Before I > do, I will have to examine the "sunshine problem". Unless Eugene takes his > for sun bathing :-). Ops, pardon me, Eugen, please. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From spike66 at att.net Sat Dec 10 00:41:37 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2011 16:41:37 -0800 Subject: [ExI] FW: why some don't want to become involved In-Reply-To: <1323440653.93510.YahooMailNeo@web46101.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <019e01ccb5ff$24428950$6cc79bf0$@att.net> <1323440653.93510.YahooMailNeo@web46101.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <00ce01ccb6d4$7a174890$6e45d9b0$@att.net> Forwarded from Alan Brooks. From: Alan Brooks [mailto:alaneugenebrooks52 at yahoo.com] Sent: Friday, December 09, 2011 6:24 AM To: spike Subject: why some don't want to become involved [Spike, since this is the Newtonmas season, could you post this? it will be the last one until next Dec.] Not all those interested yet who are reluctant to become involved in h+, extropianism, technoprogressivism, etc., are lazy and or cowardly. A good deal of it is that the larger world has a shoot-first-ask-questions-later mentality of "God created us this way, if you try to change it you are" the tool of that which is evil. They play for KEEPS. If they were not so trigger-happy, it would be bearable, but the only way to get along with them is to ignore them, hoping they will cease-fire eventually, or to be guileful. Neither is a good choice. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sat Dec 10 00:49:41 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2011 16:49:41 -0800 Subject: [ExI] FW: Larry King wants to be cryopreserved In-Reply-To: References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> <20111209101100.GS31847@leitl.org> <20111209131743.GZ31847@leitl.org> <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> Message-ID: <00dd01ccb6d5$9a92e830$cfb8b890$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Darren Greer Sent: Friday, December 09, 2011 8:24 AM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] FW: Larry King wants to be cryopreserved 2011/12/9 spike wrote: Darren, is your book available as a PDF download to the computer? I am a primitive savage who still has no kindle or whatever the kids have these days. I will likely get one if you have a recommendation. Spike: The kindle edition is available on Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/Still-Life-with-June-ebook/dp/B0053DLIF0. No pdf that I am aware of, for sale or for pirate. My advice is to order a second-hand copy from Amazon for peanuts. If you look at the U.S. edition (St. Martin's Press -- it has an upside down dude on the cover) there is one there for fifty cents, though if I can find the seller, he's a dead man. :) Darren OK thanks. I hadn't thought of that, surprisingly, since I recently bought the AI textbook for a few bucks on Amazon. I think I am going to break down and get a kindle or an ebook reader of some sort. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sat Dec 10 01:55:19 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2011 17:55:19 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Ebooks Formats and ebook readers In-Reply-To: <4EE2745D.9000401@moulton.com> References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> <20111209101100.GS31847@leitl.org> <20111209131743.GZ31847@leitl.org> <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> <4EE25117.8060800@moulton.com> <4EE2745D.9000401@moulton.com> Message-ID: <00fa01ccb6de$c603bb30$520b3190$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of F. C. Moulton ... > >...I should have added that the ereader I currently use is an Aluratek...As I said I do not recommend the Kindle. The Nook Tablet and the new Kobo units both look promising...It looks like much of the dedicated ereader only market is being replaced by tablets and smartphones with the higher end ereaders becoming Android tablets and thus disrupting the tablet market...Fred Fred, I know you well enough to know you research stuff carefully and are informed. Since I am not all that interested in the details of this, I will just Koresh off of you, and get a Nook or Kobo. spike From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sat Dec 10 04:13:37 2011 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2011 21:13:37 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Origin of ethics and morals Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 7:08 PM, Stefano Vaj wrote: > On 9 December 2011 15:56, Keith Henson wrote: > >> Perhaps you can convince me differently, but I see more in common than >> divergent across cultures. ?Parents, for example, universally take >> care of children. > > It may be a matter of definitions, but I suspect that the common part can > be fairly described as part of our ethology. > > Is breathing an ethical or unethical behaviour? > > Actual ethical systems come into play when they dictate diverging > behaviours to their respective followers. I don't think much human behavior in the moral or ethical class involves consulting a "system." I think most of it is closer to reflex, i.e., the output of evolved psychological mechanisms. > As pointed out, eg, by Posner in The Problematics of Moral and Legal > Theory, > "Do the Right Thing", or even "Thou Shalt Not Kill" does not really say > much about the solution or real-world moral dilemmas, which have invariably > to do with different views of what can or cannot be killed, how, when, why, > by whom, what "killing" does actually mean and what exhonerating or > mitigating circumstances may be applicable or not. The meaning of the biblical version meant don't kill members of your tribe. The point I would make is that ethics and morals can be largely if not entirely predicted on the basis of genetic considerations. > Now, I find it interesting that human experiences and theories offer a > range of answers to such questions that is much wider of what most of us > are able even to imagine, and covering almost everything which be barely > compatible with individual and group survival (and perhaps beyond...). > > So, no, I am not persuaded that ethical values expounded, say, in Beowulf, > in Francis of Assisi's teachings and in Bentham's works are one and the > same. Our psychological mechanisms have been shaped by millions of year of genetic selection in hunter gatherer bands or small tribes. And it was selection for appropriate responses depending on the conditions. I have shown in a simple model that going to war with neighbors in a time of plenty has dire consequences for genes that induce such behavior. Likewise, *not* going to war when the environmental conditions called for it had equally dire consequences. The way we treat close relatives, remote relatives and strangers makes complete sense if you analyze it from the viewpoint of genes. If you can come up with exceptions, I would be most interested. Keith From ddraig at gmail.com Sat Dec 10 04:21:24 2011 From: ddraig at gmail.com (ddraig) Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 15:21:24 +1100 Subject: [ExI] FW: Larry King wants to be cryopreserved In-Reply-To: <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> <20111209101100.GS31847@leitl.org> <20111209131743.GZ31847@leitl.org> <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> Message-ID: 2011/12/10 spike : > > Darren, is your book available as a PDF download to the computer?? I am a > primitive savage who still has no kindle or whatever the kids have these > days.? I will likely get one if you have a recommendation. This is true, he has the most AMAZING steam-powered computer, with a treadmill and a rather dubious-looking whip as emergency backup for when he falls off the grid. Dwayne -- ? ddraig at pobox.com irc.bluesphereweb.com #dna ? ? ? ?? ...r.e.t.u.r.n....t.o....t.h.e....s.o.u.r.c.e... ? ? ? ? http://tinyurl.com/he-is-right-you-know-jpg our aim is wakefulness,? our enemy is dreamless sleep From spike66 at att.net Sat Dec 10 05:59:44 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2011 21:59:44 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Origin of ethics and morals In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <011301ccb700$ea975110$bfc5f330$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Keith Henson ... >...The meaning of the biblical version meant don't kill members of your tribe. The point I would make is that ethics and morals can be largely if not entirely predicted on the basis of genetic considerations...Keith Ja. If you check it in the original language, the term translated as kill has a different flavor. It more accurately would be translated as "thou shalt not murder" and even then it really does not apply to those outside one's tribe. Consider that the society that developed that rule quite cheerfully went about specifically slaying entire neighboring tribes, down to the last man, woman and child. The commandment was against murdering one's own tribesmen. I didn't become an atheist easily, but I did so very thoroughly. spike From spike66 at att.net Sat Dec 10 06:01:53 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2011 22:01:53 -0800 Subject: [ExI] FW: Larry King wants to be cryopreserved In-Reply-To: References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> <20111209101100.GS31847@leitl.org> <20111209131743.GZ31847@leitl.org> <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> Message-ID: <011401ccb701$37f20540$a7d60fc0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of ddraig Subject: Re: [ExI] FW: Larry King wants to be cryopreserved 2011/12/10 spike : > > >? I am a primitive savage who still has no kindle or whatever the kids have these days.? I will likely get one if you have a recommendation. >...This is true, he has the most AMAZING steam-powered computer, with a treadmill and a rather dubious-looking whip as emergency backup for when he falls off the grid...Dwayne Steam? Luxury! We used to dreeeeam of steam powered computing. spike From pharos at gmail.com Sat Dec 10 07:58:47 2011 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 07:58:47 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Origin of ethics and morals In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 4:13 AM, Keith Henson wrote: > Our psychological mechanisms have been shaped by millions of year of > genetic selection in hunter gatherer bands or small tribes. ?And it > was selection for appropriate responses depending on the conditions. > I have shown in a simple model that going to war with neighbors in a > time of plenty has dire consequences for genes that induce such > behavior. ?Likewise, *not* going to war when the environmental > conditions called for it had equally dire consequences. > > The way we treat close relatives, remote relatives and strangers makes > complete sense if you analyze it from the viewpoint of genes. > > If you can come up with exceptions, I would be most interested. > On the other hand you also claim that a few generations of gene selection can transform a nation (re Clark), so I don't see why you insist that gene driven ethics can't be changed. BillK From eugen at leitl.org Sat Dec 10 11:10:08 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 12:10:08 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Ebooks Formats and ebook readers In-Reply-To: References: <20111209131743.GZ31847@leitl.org> <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> <4EE25117.8060800@moulton.com> <4EE2745D.9000401@moulton.com> Message-ID: <20111210111008.GR31847@leitl.org> On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 01:02:33AM +0100, Tomasz Rola wrote: > On Sat, 10 Dec 2011, Tomasz Rola wrote: > > > Nook looks interesting, but I am not going to buy it right now. Before I > > do, I will have to examine the "sunshine problem". Unless Eugene takes his > > for sun bathing :-). > > Ops, pardon me, Eugen, please. I typically don't read things in the bright sunlight for some reason (not that I'm a vampire, or anything). If I did I'd buy an eInk device along with a regular tablet. As eInk displays don't do color, and eInk devices can't handle scanned djvu and pdf. Plus, it's nice to be able to read in total darkness (hmm, maybe vampirism can't be ruled out, after all). -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From spike66 at att.net Sat Dec 10 14:53:53 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 06:53:53 -0800 Subject: [ExI] clouds over the eclipse Message-ID: <013001ccb74b$890bbda0$9b2338e0$@att.net> Anyone get to see the lunar eclipse? It was too foggy on the horizon to see it here. {8-[ spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Sat Dec 10 15:17:33 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 16:17:33 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Ebooks Formats and ebook readers In-Reply-To: <20111210111008.GR31847@leitl.org> References: <20111209131743.GZ31847@leitl.org> <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> <4EE25117.8060800@moulton.com> <4EE2745D.9000401@moulton.com> <20111210111008.GR31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: <4EE3780D.8050809@aleph.se> I am considering getting a reader so I don?t have to drag so much cellulose with me everywhere I travel, but I have one constraint: I must be able to read PDFs with equations and diagrams (and ideally djvu too). Since this list community knows things, what are your recommendations? Get a general purpose pad with PDF reader, or is there some eink solution that actually works? -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From alito at organicrobot.com Sat Dec 10 16:08:55 2011 From: alito at organicrobot.com (Alejandro Dubrovsky) Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2011 03:08:55 +1100 Subject: [ExI] Ebooks Formats and ebook readers In-Reply-To: <4EE3780D.8050809@aleph.se> References: <20111209131743.GZ31847@leitl.org> <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> <4EE25117.8060800@moulton.com> <4EE2745D.9000401@moulton.com> <20111210111008.GR31847@leitl.org> <4EE3780D.8050809@aleph.se> Message-ID: <4EE38417.3010406@organicrobot.com> On 12/11/11 02:17, Anders Sandberg wrote: > I am considering getting a reader so I don?t have to drag so much > cellulose with me everywhere I travel, but I have one constraint: I must > be able to read PDFs with equations and diagrams (and ideally djvu too). > Since this list community knows things, what are your recommendations? > Get a general purpose pad with PDF reader, or is there some eink > solution that actually works? > I'm not aware of any e-reader solution that "actually works". But: Sony's e-readers can handle some PDFs. What you can do when they can't handle them is convert them to .epub or whatever with calibre which is quite good. As a last resort, for things that calibre can't handle, you can convert them to .epubs (or .mobi I'd assume too) made up completely of images, making 'pdftohtml' from evince/poppler do all the heavy lifting. Both .epub and .mobi are basically packaged up HTML, so putting each page as a HTML page consisting of one image is almost foolproof, even though not useful for searching and relatively slow. I have written a hack stealing from calibre that converts to an .epub made of images custom made for converting an old scanned journal that came in two columns format to the Sony PRS 300 (which I have sadly lost). It should be only partially disgusting to customise it to other inputs and outputs: http://organicrobot.com/ale/converttoimageepub-0.3.tar.gz In my experience, reading from the e-reader is a much better experience than reading from the tablet, I think mainly due to weight and glare. From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sat Dec 10 17:30:14 2011 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 10:30:14 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Origin of ethics and morals Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 5:00 AM, BillK wrote: > > On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 4:13 AM, Keith Henson wrote: snip >> >> The way we treat close relatives, remote relatives and strangers makes >> complete sense if you analyze it from the viewpoint of genes. >> >> If you can come up with exceptions, I would be most interested. >> > On the other hand you also claim that a few generations of gene > selection can transform a nation (re Clark), so I don't see why you > insist that gene driven ethics can't be changed. It was 20 generations of intense selection. We have the tame foxes as examples of what you can do with intense selection for that long. I see no reason why intense selection for ethical behavior over 20 generations would not change humans to the same degree as the foxes. Keith From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sat Dec 10 17:44:13 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 18:44:13 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Ebooks Formats and ebook readers In-Reply-To: References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> <20111209101100.GS31847@leitl.org> <20111209131743.GZ31847@leitl.org> <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> <4EE25117.8060800@moulton.com> <4EE2745D.9000401@moulton.com> Message-ID: On 10 December 2011 00:53, Tomasz Rola wrote: > Well, in some cases choosing a reader can be very hard. > Since as a transhumanist I would like to have my cake and eat it too, I really cannot accept to be forced to choose between e-ink and iPad-like displays. It is for instance paradoxical that Amazon offers now the Kindle Fire after all the ads with the lad squinting his eyes by the swimming pool on his iPad while being humiliated by the near-lying beauty enjoying her Kindle novel while getting a tan... -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sat Dec 10 18:12:54 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 19:12:54 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Origin of ethics and morals In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 10 December 2011 05:13, Keith Henson wrote: > Our psychological mechanisms have been shaped by millions of year of > genetic selection in hunter gatherer bands or small tribes. And it > was selection for appropriate responses depending on the conditions. > I have shown in a simple model that going to war with neighbors in a > time of plenty has dire consequences for genes that induce such > behavior. Likewise, *not* going to war when the environmental > conditions called for it had equally dire consequences. > The way we treat close relatives, remote relatives and strangers makes > complete sense if you analyze it from the viewpoint of genes. > Absolutely. But it is not clear to me why you refuse to categorise all that simply as our ethology and psychology. The real domain of ethics IMHO is the moral dilemma (to do what one is genetically inclined or forced to do in the first place may generate pleasure, to infringe one's own rules may generate guilt, but certainly neither thing involves ethical decisions). A moral dilemma implies that there is a real, actual uncertainty on what is the "right thing to do". An ethical "system" is in turn simply a set of answers and/or of theories on how to solve such problems, which in turn reflects different values and priorities, not to mention "anthropologies" in the philosophical sense. A work which in my view remains seminal in this respect is Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals. Even if one does really share Nietzsche's specific conclusions on the merits of what he is discussing, this short work would still remain in my opinion exemplary anyway as to the method. And all the contemporary "memetics" reading of how ideas arise, circulate and go extinct in human societies nicely completes it. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rtomek at ceti.pl Sat Dec 10 18:20:16 2011 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 19:20:16 +0100 (CET) Subject: [ExI] Ebooks Formats and ebook readers In-Reply-To: References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> <20111209101100.GS31847@leitl.org> <20111209131743.GZ31847@leitl.org> <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> <4EE25117.8060800@moulton.com> <4EE2745D.9000401@moulton.com> Message-ID: On Sat, 10 Dec 2011, Stefano Vaj wrote: > On 10 December 2011 00:53, Tomasz Rola wrote: > > > Well, in some cases choosing a reader can be very hard. > > > > Since as a transhumanist I would like to have my cake and eat it too, I > really cannot accept to be forced to choose between e-ink and iPad-like > displays. One of my fav future techs is IMOD = [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interferometric_modulator_display ] In theory, this has ability to become e-paper doing as many colors as one wishes, just like current better (graphics/design grade) LCDs and more. With all expected advantages of e-paper (low energy, print-like and so on). It is, however, few years before we will see anything like this in shops. Or maybe we can see it next year, but not really affordable for book reader. But as a transhumanist, you should aim to make your own cakes and eating them, or having them, whatever you want. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From rtomek at ceti.pl Sat Dec 10 18:59:29 2011 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 19:59:29 +0100 (CET) Subject: [ExI] Ebooks Formats and ebook readers In-Reply-To: <4EE3780D.8050809@aleph.se> References: <20111209131743.GZ31847@leitl.org> <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> <4EE25117.8060800@moulton.com> <4EE2745D.9000401@moulton.com> <20111210111008.GR31847@leitl.org> <4EE3780D.8050809@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Sat, 10 Dec 2011, Anders Sandberg wrote: > I am considering getting a reader so I don?t have to drag so much cellulose > with me everywhere I travel, but I have one constraint: I must be able to read > PDFs with equations and diagrams (and ideally djvu too). Since this list > community knows things, what are your recommendations? Get a general purpose > pad with PDF reader, or is there some eink solution that actually works? Perhaps I am in no position to give any advice on this, but I guess you don't really need color so much. Most pdf/djvu's I have read either had color pictures or equations. In rare cases when both were included, pictures were mostly ok in b/w/grey too. In theory, the more grey levels, the better picture looks. I think current max is 16 levels of grey. OTOH, if you plan to read mostly indoors, you may consider color display, too. My rule of thumb is this - it the display is backlit and you cannot turn the light off, it is rather poor choice for outside use. As I wrote previously, transflective LCDs I had been using could work with or without light and it was possible to completely turn the light off in preferences. This is not the case with IPS LCDs in modern high end readers, I'm afraid. So they produce live colours as long as you stay in your room. OTOH2, since color devices shine their own light, this means you are going to look into the light, possibly for many hours on a daily basis. I'm not sure how eyes like this kind of play, longterm. I think you should go to the shop with SD card loaded with some papers that you'd like to read (even better, those you already read and remember their looks). Insist that the guy lets you try a reader(s) before you buy. Myself, I would start with bigger units i.e. 10 inches display. If I am right, those are capable of showing normal A4 page with very little scaling, so you would - in theory - have it almost like a printed copy. I would also try to get a device with touchscreen, so that I could make notes on it. When trying them, turn around to see how they look in better light and in a shadow. Since some of them have micro-SD slot, you could also consider buying yourself a microSD card (they usually come with special adapter, so they are in fact usable in micro/mini/standard slots, but don't assume blindly that you get proper adapters with your buy). About djvu support in readers, I don't know. However, those aimed at serious users claim to support pdfs. It is possible to convert from pdf to dvju, from djvu->ps->pdf, too. At least on Linux, I don't remember problems, even thou I mostly went pdf->djvu rather than the other direction. You should probably have on your test SD both djvu's and their converted copies (maybe change their names a bit, just in case). In case of djvu->pdf conversion, it is possible you end up with bitmapped document, which can be significantly slower on slow cpu. I don't know, if such conversion makes bitmaps and how often - no time to look at this right now. Other than above, the best advisor should be your eyes. DISCLAIMER: I am theorist, never used ebook reader produced after 2002. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From rtomek at ceti.pl Sat Dec 10 19:08:33 2011 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 20:08:33 +0100 (CET) Subject: [ExI] Ebooks Formats and ebook readers In-Reply-To: <20111210111008.GR31847@leitl.org> References: <20111209131743.GZ31847@leitl.org> <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> <4EE25117.8060800@moulton.com> <4EE2745D.9000401@moulton.com> <20111210111008.GR31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Sat, 10 Dec 2011, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 01:02:33AM +0100, Tomasz Rola wrote: > > > > Ops, pardon me, Eugen, please. > > I typically don't read things in the bright sunlight for some > reason (not that I'm a vampire, or anything). If I did I'd > buy an eInk device along with a regular tablet. As eInk displays > don't do color, and eInk devices can't handle scanned djvu and > pdf. Plus, it's nice to be able to read in total darkness (hmm, > maybe vampirism can't be ruled out, after all). Uhm. So, again, pardon me even more. And may I never stand between you and a mirror... Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From eugen at leitl.org Sat Dec 10 19:13:17 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 20:13:17 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Ebooks Formats and ebook readers In-Reply-To: <4EE3780D.8050809@aleph.se> References: <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> <4EE25117.8060800@moulton.com> <4EE2745D.9000401@moulton.com> <20111210111008.GR31847@leitl.org> <4EE3780D.8050809@aleph.se> Message-ID: <20111210191317.GZ31847@leitl.org> On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 04:17:33PM +0100, Anders Sandberg wrote: > I am considering getting a reader so I don?t have to drag so much > cellulose with me everywhere I travel, but I have one constraint: I must > be able to read PDFs with equations and diagrams (and ideally djvu too). Do you have particular aversions against either Android or Apple? A rooted/alternative firmware Android tablet works for me. I would make sure to get a 10" and one with enough ppi, unfortunately there's nothing better than a Nook color/tablet or Kindle Fire out there. Next-generation tablets (due early 2012) will be much better, though. Something Tegra 3 or A6 based should have ample performance, too. > Since this list community knows things, what are your recommendations? > Get a general purpose pad with PDF reader, or is there some eink > solution that actually works? I'm not aware of any eInk solution that can do you want, including scans and colors. From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sat Dec 10 19:21:00 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 20:21:00 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Ebooks Formats and ebook readers In-Reply-To: References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> <20111209101100.GS31847@leitl.org> <20111209131743.GZ31847@leitl.org> <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> <4EE25117.8060800@moulton.com> <4EE2745D.9000401@moulton.com> Message-ID: On 10 December 2011 19:20, Tomasz Rola wrote: > In theory, this has ability to become e-paper doing as many colors as one > wishes, just like current better (graphics/design grade) LCDs and more. > With all expected advantages of e-paper (low energy, print-like and so > on). > So, let me summarise my wishlist: - full-colour, "static" (as opposed to constanly refreshed) display; - backlighting only inasmuch as it may be required by environmental lighting; - "retina" resolution; - high enough responsiveness to watch films or play arcade videogames. I am not asking for much... :-) Does anybody see any conceptual contradiction? -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From giulio at gmail.com Sat Dec 10 18:59:57 2011 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 19:59:57 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Turing Church online workshop 2, tomorrow (Sunday 11), 9am-4pm PST Message-ID: Turing Church online workshop 2 http://www.kurzweilai.net/turing-church-online-workshop-2 The convergence of religion with highly imaginative future science and technologies will be explored in the Turing Church online workshop 2 on Sunday, December 11 in teleXLR8, a 3D interactive video conferencing space. The Turing Church is a working group on science and religion. Speakers, morning session, 9am PST to noon PST: Giulio Prisco James Hughes Martine Rothblatt Frank Tipler Ben Goertzel Remi Sussan Speakers, afternoon session, 1pm PST to 4pm PST Lincoln Cannon Brent Allsop Dan Massey Andrew Warner Mike Perry Fred and Linda Chamberlain (pre-recorded talk) From eugen at leitl.org Sat Dec 10 19:41:52 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 20:41:52 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Ebooks Formats and ebook readers In-Reply-To: References: <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> <4EE25117.8060800@moulton.com> <4EE2745D.9000401@moulton.com> Message-ID: <20111210194152.GD31847@leitl.org> On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 08:21:00PM +0100, Stefano Vaj wrote: > So, let me summarise my wishlist: > - full-colour, "static" (as opposed to constanly refreshed) display; > - backlighting only inasmuch as it may be required by environmental > lighting; > - "retina" resolution; > - high enough responsiveness to watch films or play arcade videogames. > > I am not asking for much... :-) > > Does anybody see any conceptual contradiction? Yes. This is 2011. You're asking for a full-color high-resolution mirasol (inteferometric modulator display). These are probably 5-10 years away from the consumer, if the technology can be made to work at all. From rtomek at ceti.pl Sat Dec 10 19:49:52 2011 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 20:49:52 +0100 (CET) Subject: [ExI] Ebooks Formats and ebook readers In-Reply-To: References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <20111209101100.GS31847@leitl.org> <20111209131743.GZ31847@leitl.org> <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> <4EE25117.8060800@moulton.com> <4EE2745D.9000401@moulton.com> Message-ID: On Sat, 10 Dec 2011, Stefano Vaj wrote: > On 10 December 2011 19:20, Tomasz Rola wrote: > > > In theory, this has ability to become e-paper doing as many colors as one > > wishes, just like current better (graphics/design grade) LCDs and more. > > With all expected advantages of e-paper (low energy, print-like and so > > on). > > > > So, let me summarise my wishlist: > - full-colour, "static" (as opposed to constanly refreshed) display; > - backlighting only inasmuch as it may be required by environmental > lighting; > - "retina" resolution; > - high enough responsiveness to watch films or play arcade videogames. > > I am not asking for much... :-) Not really. Unless you insist that the device is going to be used for personal improvement rather than socio-networking, shop browsing, photo sharing and games. :-) > Does anybody see any conceptual contradiction? If you agreed to trade backlight for frontlight, this one is more compatible with current e-paper concepts I've read about. Myself, I can easily provide my own frontlight and have one less element that can fail and is hard to replace (you can expect they will no longer make those very specific back/frontlit diodes in times when consumers would like to replace them - OTOH it may still be possible to have their analogs). BTW, I think current e-papers are not really good for fast changing pictures. I don't remember anything specific, let's call it suspicion. There must be a reason why we hear about readers but not laptops/netbooks. So I think games and films would contribute to faster wearing of electromechanical pixels. Compared to LCD, this is still very new tech. And it took quite few years to make LCD that can do anim without ghosting. Other than this, you only need to be patient, so that the market has a chance to catch up with your (and mine) wishes. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sat Dec 10 22:11:29 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 23:11:29 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Ebooks Formats and ebook readers In-Reply-To: <20111210194152.GD31847@leitl.org> References: <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> <4EE25117.8060800@moulton.com> <4EE2745D.9000401@moulton.com> <20111210194152.GD31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: On 10 December 2011 20:41, Eugen Leitl wrote: > Yes. This is 2011. You're asking for a full-color high-resolution > mirasol (inteferometric modulator display). These are probably 5-10 years > away from the consumer, if the technology can be made to work at all. > Why, my life expectancy should hopefully be longer than that even if no life-extension breakthroughs take place in the meantime... :-) -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sat Dec 10 22:15:59 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 23:15:59 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Ebooks Formats and ebook readers In-Reply-To: References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <20111209101100.GS31847@leitl.org> <20111209131743.GZ31847@leitl.org> <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> <4EE25117.8060800@moulton.com> <4EE2745D.9000401@moulton.com> Message-ID: On 10 December 2011 20:49, Tomasz Rola wrote: > If you agreed to trade backlight for frontlight, this one is more > compatible with current e-paper concepts I've read about. > I remember using laptops in old times which had no backlighting, same as, say, pocket calculators. But even in colour, I wonder how video would look on them. I mean, Real Life things are either backlit or light-emitting after all... -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Sun Dec 11 01:15:25 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2011 01:15:25 +0000 Subject: [ExI] clouds over the eclipse In-Reply-To: <013001ccb74b$890bbda0$9b2338e0$@att.net> References: <013001ccb74b$890bbda0$9b2338e0$@att.net> Message-ID: <4EE4042D.4080109@aleph.se> spike wrote: > > Anyone get to see the lunar eclipse? It was too foggy on the horizon > to see it here. {8-[ spike > A cold and clear day in the Czech republic. I saw it from the bus stop where I was waiting for the airport bus. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/arenamontanus/6489717673/in/photostream -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Faculty of Philosophy Oxford University From darren.greer3 at gmail.com Sun Dec 11 01:55:24 2011 From: darren.greer3 at gmail.com (Darren Greer) Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 21:55:24 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Origin of ethics and morals In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: 2011/12/10 Stefano Vaj > > > A work which in my view remains seminal in this respect is Nietzsche's On > the Genealogy of Morals > . A book I found helpful on this question was The Evolution of Morality by Richard Joyce. I haven't read On the Genealogy of Morals, though I shall. I did read Beyond Good and Evil and remember being struck by Nietzsche's assertion that it is nothing more than a moral prejudice that truth is worth more than semblance. > -- > Stefano Vaj > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -- Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood. Friedrich Nietzsche -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sun Dec 11 02:39:57 2011 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 19:39:57 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Moral and ethical rats. Message-ID: Peggy Mason, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago and lead author of the new study, says that the research shows that our empathy and impulse to help others are common across other mammals. "Helping is our evolutionary inheritance," Mason told LiveScience. "Our study suggests that we don't have to cognitively decide to help an individual in distress; rather, we just have to let our animal selves express themselves." Keith From rtomek at ceti.pl Sun Dec 11 04:27:15 2011 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2011 05:27:15 +0100 (CET) Subject: [ExI] Ebooks Formats and ebook readers In-Reply-To: References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <20111209101100.GS31847@leitl.org> <20111209131743.GZ31847@leitl.org> <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> <4EE25117.8060800@moulton.com> <4EE2745D.9000401@moulton.com> Message-ID: On Sat, 10 Dec 2011, Stefano Vaj wrote: > On 10 December 2011 20:49, Tomasz Rola wrote: > > > If you agreed to trade backlight for frontlight, this one is more > > compatible with current e-paper concepts I've read about. > > > > I remember using laptops in old times which had no backlighting, same as, > say, pocket calculators. > > But even in colour, I wonder how video would look on them. Nope. Judging by my own experience, I have great reminiscences of my times with Amiga. However, after spending next few years with PC and 24-bit graphics, I wasn't so glad running Amiga emulator - it was nice, but definitely time did its job on this computer. I may repeat this as leisure activity, but there isn't too many things that I could do with Ami while moving myself forward. Most of those things I could also do on Linux. One cannot bath twice in the same river. > I mean, Real > Life things are either backlit or light-emitting after all... Oh my :-). If I read you well, this suggests that we don't exist. Ok, maybe _I_ do exist. Therefore I must shine. Or be shined through... Wow. What shines through me? Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From jrd1415 at gmail.com Sun Dec 11 05:31:47 2011 From: jrd1415 at gmail.com (Jeff Davis) Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 22:31:47 -0700 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: <01b101ccb604$05c17270$11445750$@att.net> References: <01ee01ccb3dd$3e148be0$ba3da3a0$@att.net> <01b101ccb604$05c17270$11445750$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 4:49 PM, spike wrote: ...... ... ?Other healthy institutions were > compelled to buy the bad loans,.. . ...> The bank isn't at fault: they were compelled to give out the bad loans, > another healthy bank was compelled to buy the bad loans... >?It was the fault of those who set up the rules to compel banks to give out risky loans. ************************************ I've heard this "they were forced/compelled to give out the bad loans" thing quite a few times. I think it's right wing echo chamber HooHah,... yet... I could be wrong as I have only tidbits of information. Some years ago some law was passed by the feds prohibiting the practice of "redlining". This was where banks wouldn't give home mortgage loans in minority neighborhoods. I'm very suspicious that this is the origin of the notion that "the banks" were "forced" to give out the bad loans, when what was really "forced" on the bank was the prohibition of racial discrimination in banking services. So my theory has it that "they were forced" is a classic case of right-wing truth torturing with its time-honored "blame the liberals(and the niggers and spics, too)" formula. I think the issuance of "bad" mortgages came from entrepreneurial Randians (thieves) in the mortgage business, responding to Wall Steet's insatiable demand for "more" -- as in "more mortgage paper and we won't be asking any questions." With all the various govt regulators, insurance companies, rating agencies, accounting firms, and all their legal departments... all signing on and partying down. All govt at all levels and on both sides of the partisan divide in on party as well, what with the housing bubble being the wild exuberant ride that it was on the way up. I don't know how to resolve this, since anything posing as "analysis" is so thoroughly politicized. No, I blame the bankers and the whole "financial services" sector. I'd nationalize the whole shebang: retail banks, commercial banks, investment banks, and ALL stock and bond markets. Put them under govt control. Outlaw any private commerce in that area. Close the casinos. If anyone has something, some kind of documentary "smoking gun" which supports the "the banks were forced" thesis, I'd like to see it. Best, Jeff Davis "It is as morally bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it." -Edmund Way Teale, "Circle of the Seasons" From darren.greer3 at gmail.com Sun Dec 11 12:52:38 2011 From: darren.greer3 at gmail.com (Darren Greer) Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2011 08:52:38 -0400 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: References: <01ee01ccb3dd$3e148be0$ba3da3a0$@att.net> <01b101ccb604$05c17270$11445750$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 11, 2011 at 1:31 AM, Jeff Davis wrote: > > > I think the issuance of "bad" mortgages came from entrepreneurial > Randians (thieves) in the mortgage business, responding to Wall > Steet's insatiable demand for "more" The only analysis of the whole situation from the financial and government end of things I've read, besides the occasional print media piece, is Andrew Ross Sorkin's book Too Big To Fail. He helped me understand how the sub-prime-mortgage backed securities-default swap scheme almost brought the whole system down. The book is available as an audio file. E-mail me directly if you want a copy. It's worth a read, or a listen. Darren -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sun Dec 11 14:16:15 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2011 15:16:15 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Origin of ethics and morals In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: 2011/12/11 Darren Greer > I did read Beyond Good and Evil and remember being struck by > Nietzsche's assertion that it is nothing more than a moral prejudice that > truth is worth more than semblance. > I certainly do not remember this statement, but it would still leave wide open the possibility of prefering the truth out of a personal taste ("Geschmack")... :-) -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sun Dec 11 14:28:41 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2011 15:28:41 +0100 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: References: <01ee01ccb3dd$3e148be0$ba3da3a0$@att.net> <01b101ccb604$05c17270$11445750$@att.net> Message-ID: On 11 December 2011 06:31, Jeff Davis wrote: > I think the issuance of "bad" mortgages came from entrepreneurial > Randians (thieves) in the mortgage business, responding to Wall > Steet's insatiable demand for "more" -- as in "more mortgage paper and > we won't be asking any questions." > Mmhhh. I do not know about "Randians" (see and Marx and Marxists, Christ and catholics, etc.). But as to Ayn Rand herself, the hero of the Fountainhead is exactly an individual who suffers from marginalisation, poverty and lack of success, but for the happy end, exactly because he refuses to comply to what is expected from him. Moreover, how would those issuing bad mortgage be "thieves"? If anything, I would consider their activity as "usury". Now, usury may considered as an ethically dubious business, but what about a society that allows and "regulate", so to say, it? The series "Money as Debt" seems to be persuasive enough as to the fact that what is really flawed is our economic/monetary system, not supposedly deviant individuals. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sun Dec 11 15:37:47 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2011 07:37:47 -0800 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: References: <01ee01ccb3dd$3e148be0$ba3da3a0$@att.net> <01b101ccb604$05c17270$11445750$@att.net> Message-ID: <00fe01ccb81a$d5707800$80516800$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Jeff Davis ... >...Some years ago some law was passed by the feds prohibiting the practice of "redlining". This was where banks wouldn't give home mortgage loans in minority neighborhoods. I'm very suspicious that this is the origin of the notion that "the banks" were "forced" to give out the bad loans, when what was really "forced" on the bank was the prohibition of racial discrimination in banking services. So my theory has it that "they were forced" is a classic case of right-wing truth torturing with its time-honored "blame the liberals(and the niggers and spics, too)" formula... Jeff Jeff, this is a perfect example of what I was referring to in the earlier post. The banks redlining wasn't about racism. It was about risk control. They would loan to minorities in safe areas, they would refuse loans to non-minorities in redlined areas. The banks didn't care what race the borrow was, they cared about the risk the borrower would get killed and the bank wouldn't be able to get their money back. The politicians made redlining into a big racism scam, when it was never that. It was about risk. Banks had no problem with minority neighborhoods, but they avoided risky neighborhoods. Two different things. Perfect example in this area: East Palo Alto, a classic example of a redlined area. It was adjacent to crazy rich Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Stanford, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, but East Palo Alto was a damn dangerous neighborhood. They had almost no cops, couldn't afford them because they had almost no tax generating industry in there. I knew this because I did business with a scrap metal shop in EPA. So it was very dangerous in there. Crime statistics prove that. Of course banks didn't want to loan money for homes down in there. Can you blame them? They were accused of racism, because EPA had a lot of minorities, but businessmen are not automatically racist. They want to control risk, and it was easy to see EPA was risky. Businesses couldn't get a toehold in there because the theft rate caused them to be unprofitable. What finally happened about 15 yrs ago IKEA went in there. Since furniture stores generally are immune from theft, it made it. That generated tax revenue, which allowed them to hire cops, which made it safer, which encouraged other businesses and banks to loan on homes. Those who remember East Palo Alto from the late 80 to early 90s should go look at it now: you wouldn't recognize the place. It has a Nordstrom, a Home Depot, Office Depot, a Best Buy, even a grocery store. Hell they have a Starbucks there now. It looks like a perfectly safe silicon valley town now. 15 years ago you took your life in your hands even going into the metal warehouse. In 1992 EPA had 42 murders, which comes out to 173 murders per 100k proles. The banks' redlining EPA wasn't about race, it was about risk. EPA has all these big rap stars that live there, Sean T, Scoot Dogg, perhaps Ice Dog, Canine Icicle, Frosted Dog Shit, plenty of others with some variation of "ice" and "dog" in their name, but that should tell you something in itself. As I understand it, the term "ice" in rap means murder. Dog means something other than Bowser the family pet as well, but the point is that the local entertainers were urging their audiences to murder each other. Imagine the banks reluctance to loan their money where such entertainers reside. That whole reluctance was turned into a red hot racism accusation. Banks came up with an idea: create exotic derivatives to spread that risk, then go ahead and make the loans in the dangerous hoods. Some banks went another route to combat the charge or racism: they loaned to minorities in safe neighborhoods. The banks already knew the proles couldn't or wouldn't pay (that's what credit ratings are for), such as the see-through house down the street from me which had four people living there for over a year who had exactly no possessions and never did so much as put up curtains, which is why you could see through their house. Then when those exotic derivatives eventually went bust, the bank was holding property which was still worth something. The people moved out without even a moving van: they all four got into their four cars and drove away, haven't seen them since. The banking industry's redlining wasn't about racism, it was about risk control. They were accused of racism. But to falsely accuse of racism is racisim. spike From darren.greer3 at gmail.com Sun Dec 11 18:06:15 2011 From: darren.greer3 at gmail.com (Darren Greer) Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2011 14:06:15 -0400 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: <00fe01ccb81a$d5707800$80516800$@att.net> References: <01ee01ccb3dd$3e148be0$ba3da3a0$@att.net> <01b101ccb604$05c17270$11445750$@att.net> <00fe01ccb81a$d5707800$80516800$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 11, 2011 at 11:37 AM, spike wrote: Then when those exotic derivatives > > eventually went bust, the bank was holding property which was still worth > something. > Or so they thought. What they hadn't counted on was the entire subprime market going bust, and a dramatic fall in housing prices because of it. They were still thinking in terms of the prime mortgage model, when foreclosure meant you could recoup. Instead they were left with billions in toxic assets, insurance companies who were going down the drain because of default swap payoffs, and mortgage-backed securities worth nothing and eroding the value of the institutions who issued them. It's easy to play the blame game -- government, borrowers, regulators, financiers. But in the end we have an almost perfect example on every side of the triumph of greed over common sense. Somewhere along the line the system broke down. The crazy thing is, we know where and we have done zilch to address it. That's what Occupy was about, in my opinion. Use the old 1930's style external feedback mechanisms to steer the beast, since the internal mechanisms no longer seem to be working. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From darren.greer3 at gmail.com Sun Dec 11 18:58:42 2011 From: darren.greer3 at gmail.com (Darren Greer) Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2011 14:58:42 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Origin of ethics and morals In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: 2011/12/11 Stefano Vaj > > > I certainly do not remember this statement . . . http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/nietzsche/1886/beyond-good-evil/ch02.htm Paragraph 34. > but it would still leave wide open the possibility of prefering the truth > out of a personal taste ("Geschmack")... :-) Yes, but this statement would preclude classifying someone as objectively "moral" for doing so, which I think is rather his point. In other words, knock yourself out but understand that it IS just a preference. Like the colour of your shoes. Darren -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sun Dec 11 22:19:01 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2011 15:19:01 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) Message-ID: I agree that the evolution of morality is partially genetic and partially memetic... The bigger part would have to be memetic though, just because memes reproduce faster than genes in human populations. I'm improvising on this post, so don't take anything I'm saying here too seriously, it's just to start a conversation. And if anything here sounds racist, or anti-anyone, please I ask your forgiveness up front. One thing that I haven't heard anyone think about out loud is the effect of a thousand+ years of Catholicism on our genes (we all know more or less what it did to our memes)... The Catholic faith was pretty efficient at a few things that might have had a genetic impact... 1) Heretics, Muslims and Jews were occasionally slaughtered, though probably not in great enough numbers to have a huge genetic effect. 2) Religious orders (monks, priests and nuns) tended to attract those who were interested in an intellectual life. Obviously, their reproduction was sharply curtailed being in these religious orders. Would that imply that Catholicism decreased intellectualism in those areas where it was practiced for many centuries? 3) Catholic beliefs about food (fish Friday, wine, dirty water) might have had some impact, as did their support of kings and the political orders under kings. 4) Catholicism and feudalism meant very limited travel for most people. This could have led to prejudice, insofar as that is genetic, but probably more importantly, it created islands where specific genes that would otherwise have been bred out of a larger population became more prevalent. This may be more especially the case for recessives. 5) Might there have been a breeding advantage to those who truly believed leading to more true believers? Might there have been other breeding advantages related to Catholic beliefs? 6) Did feudal beliefs about bathing increase the capacity of the overall immune system of those who survived? Same with the black death... 7) Could there have been effects on rates of promiscuity in the gene pool from Catholic punishments of adultery and fornication, as well as the negative effects of being a bastard? 8) Insofar as ethics are genetic, there may be other impacts of our brush with the papacy. It's an interesting topic, at least to me. These are just starting points for discussion. I actually think that number 2 is probably one of the more plausible scenarios... but I don't know how you would go about testing such a hypothesis without the standard accusations of racism coming up immediately. -Kelly From atymes at gmail.com Sun Dec 11 22:09:11 2011 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2011 14:09:11 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Stanford AI class wrapup Message-ID: So, now that we're into the final week of the AI class, how are those who took it faring? I miscounted during the midterm, so I'm not going to get 100%, but at my current rate, I expect I'll get over 95%. It's mostly been review for me, though I was surprised to see how simple some things are that are, according to the professors, "state of the art" in AI. I wonder if it's possible to automate the process of discovering new methods to solve the problems in AI - starting with automating the formulation of existing problems. From jrd1415 at gmail.com Sun Dec 11 22:43:40 2011 From: jrd1415 at gmail.com (Jeff Davis) Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2011 15:43:40 -0700 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: References: <01ee01ccb3dd$3e148be0$ba3da3a0$@att.net> <01b101ccb604$05c17270$11445750$@att.net> Message-ID: I freely admit that my "Randians (thieves)" was an entirely indulgent and gratuitous slam. I don't retract it, but of course it is a distraction which, well,... distracts... from temperate discourse. My bad. Jeff 2011/12/11 Stefano Vaj : > On 11 December 2011 06:31, Jeff Davis wrote: >> >> I think the issuance of "bad" mortgages came from entrepreneurial >> Randians (thieves) in the mortgage business, responding to Wall >> Steet's insatiable demand for "more" -- as in "more mortgage paper and >> we won't be asking any questions." > > > Mmhhh. I do not know about "Randians" (see and Marx and Marxists, Christ and > catholics, etc.). But as to Ayn Rand herself, the hero of the Fountainhead > is exactly an individual who suffers from marginalisation, poverty and lack > of success, but for the happy end, exactly because he refuses to comply to > what is expected from him. > > Moreover, how would those issuing bad mortgage be "thieves"? > > If anything, I would consider their activity as "usury". Now, usury may > considered as an ethically dubious business, but what about a society that > allows and "regulate", so to say, it? > > The series "Money as Debt" seems to be persuasive enough as to the fact that > what is really flawed is our economic/monetary system, not supposedly > deviant individuals. > > -- > Stefano Vaj > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From jrd1415 at gmail.com Sun Dec 11 22:59:32 2011 From: jrd1415 at gmail.com (Jeff Davis) Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2011 15:59:32 -0700 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: References: <01ee01ccb3dd$3e148be0$ba3da3a0$@att.net> <01b101ccb604$05c17270$11445750$@att.net> Message-ID: 2011/12/11 Stefano Vaj : > Moreover, how would those issuing bad mortgage be "thieves"? When people engage knowingly in illegal and unethical behavior intended to enrich them while knowingly causing others financial loss, that in my view is theft. I am not impressed by legal trickery that allows someone to evade responsibility for what any three-year old would know is wrong. George Bush when challenged on his and Cheney's use of torture famously said, "We followed the law." Translation: "My bought and paid for lawyer said it was okay." Not. Bush/Cheney are torturers. Wall Street et al are thieves. Jeff Davis From spike66 at att.net Sun Dec 11 23:22:38 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2011 15:22:38 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Stanford AI class wrapup In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <015a01ccb85b$c68c4d00$53a4e700$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes Subject: [ExI] Stanford AI class wrapup >...So, now that we're into the final week of the AI class, how are those who took it faring? Adrian I listened to several of the lectures and did the quizzes, but I found that reading the textbook was actually more useful than the online stuff. I eventually stopped following the lectures. It will be interesting to me to see how many others did the same. spike From jrd1415 at gmail.com Sun Dec 11 23:38:00 2011 From: jrd1415 at gmail.com (Jeff Davis) Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2011 16:38:00 -0700 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: <00fe01ccb81a$d5707800$80516800$@att.net> References: <01ee01ccb3dd$3e148be0$ba3da3a0$@att.net> <01b101ccb604$05c17270$11445750$@att.net> <00fe01ccb81a$d5707800$80516800$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 11, 2011 at 8:37 AM, spike wrote: > Jeff, this is a perfect example of what I was referring to in the earlier > post. ?The banks redlining wasn't about racism. ?It was about risk control. Not buying it, Spike. Risk control based on racism is offensive and not to be tolerated. There exist standards -- there used to anyway -- regarding qualifying for a loan. Standards that are independent of where you live. When the banking industry red-lined a district, they broad-brushed everyone living there and denied them access to services on a racial basis. Case by case would have been fair, the broad-brush is discriminatory. Their risk-avoidance motive is understandable, but the standard mortgage qualification criteria would have take care of that. The intent may not have originated from racial bias, but the result was racist and was at least partially enabled by an apologist's easy indifference to racially discriminatory practices. > They would loan to minorities in safe areas, they would refuse loans to > non-minorities in redlined areas. ?The banks didn't care what race the > borrow was, they cared about the risk the borrower would get killed and the > bank wouldn't be able to get their money back. ?The politicians made > redlining into a big racism scam, when it was never that. ?It was about > risk. ?Banks had no problem with minority neighborhoods, but they avoided > risky neighborhoods. ?Two different things. > > Perfect example in this area: East Palo Alto, a classic example of a > redlined area. ?It was adjacent to crazy rich Palo Alto, Menlo Park, > Stanford, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, but East Palo Alto was a damn dangerous > neighborhood. ?They had almost no cops, couldn't afford them because they > had almost no tax generating industry in there. ?I knew this because I did > business with a scrap metal shop in EPA. ?So it was very dangerous in there. > Crime statistics prove that. ?Of course banks didn't want to loan money for > homes down in there. ?Can you blame them? ?They were accused of racism, > because EPA had a lot of minorities, but businessmen are not automatically > racist. ?They want to control risk, and it was easy to see EPA was risky. > Businesses couldn't get a toehold in there because the theft rate caused > them to be unprofitable. > > What finally happened about 15 yrs ago IKEA went in there. ?Since furniture > stores generally are immune from theft, it made it. ?That generated tax > revenue, which allowed them to hire cops, which made it safer, which > encouraged other businesses and banks to loan on homes. ?Those who remember > East Palo Alto from the late 80 to early 90s should go look at it now: you > wouldn't recognize the place. ?It has a Nordstrom, a Home Depot, Office > Depot, a Best Buy, even a grocery store. ?Hell they have a Starbucks there > now. ?It looks like a perfectly safe silicon valley town now. ?15 years ago > you took your life in your hands even going into the metal warehouse. ?In > 1992 EPA had 42 murders, which comes out to 173 murders per 100k proles. > > The banks' redlining EPA wasn't about race, it was about risk. ?EPA has all > these big rap stars that live there, Sean T, Scoot Dogg, perhaps Ice Dog, > Canine Icicle, Frosted Dog Shit, plenty of others with some variation of > "ice" and "dog" in their name, but that should tell you something in itself. > As I understand it, the term "ice" in rap means murder. ?Dog means something > other than Bowser the family pet as well, but the point is that the local > entertainers were urging their audiences to murder each other. ?Imagine the > banks reluctance to loan their money where such entertainers reside. > > That whole reluctance was turned into a red hot racism accusation. ?Banks > came up with an idea: create exotic derivatives to spread that risk, then go > ahead and make the loans in the dangerous hoods. ?Some banks went another > route to combat the charge or racism: they loaned to minorities in safe > neighborhoods. ?The banks already knew the proles couldn't or wouldn't pay > (that's what credit ratings are for), such as the see-through house down the > street from me which had four people living there for over a year who had > exactly no possessions and never did so much as put up curtains, which is > why you could see through their house. ?Then when those exotic derivatives > eventually went bust, the bank was holding property which was still worth > something. ?The people moved out without even a moving van: they all four > got into their four cars and drove away, haven't seen them since. > > The banking industry's redlining wasn't about racism, it was about risk > control. ?They were accused of racism. ?But to falsely accuse of racism is > racisim. > > spike Spike, you know I love you like a brother, but this feels all too much like white boy apologism. None of which persuasively addresses the "they were forced" question. Full disclosure: I'm a racist. No apologies. I have zero use for the American black ghetto culture. Sure, they came from slaves and have had a rough time. They have all manner of thoroughly valid explanations about how they got where they are. But that's no excuse. Time for them to get over it, and get on with making something of themselves. Everyone's got their problems. Best, Jeff From atymes at gmail.com Sun Dec 11 23:39:06 2011 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2011 15:39:06 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Stanford AI class wrapup In-Reply-To: <015a01ccb85b$c68c4d00$53a4e700$@att.net> References: <015a01ccb85b$c68c4d00$53a4e700$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 11, 2011 at 3:22 PM, spike wrote: > I listened to several of the lectures and did the quizzes, but I found that > reading the textbook was actually more useful than the online stuff. ?I > eventually stopped following the lectures. ?It will be interesting to me to > see how many others did the same. Are you doing the homeworks & midterm, and will you do the final exam? From spike66 at att.net Mon Dec 12 00:30:01 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2011 16:30:01 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Stanford AI class wrapup In-Reply-To: References: <015a01ccb85b$c68c4d00$53a4e700$@att.net> Message-ID: <016301ccb865$2fe3fce0$8fabf6a0$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes Sent: Sunday, December 11, 2011 3:39 PM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] Stanford AI class wrapup On Sun, Dec 11, 2011 at 3:22 PM, spike wrote: > I listened to several of the lectures and did the quizzes, but I found > that reading the textbook was actually more useful than the online > stuff. ?I eventually stopped following the lectures. ?It will be > interesting to me to see how many others did the same. >...Are you doing the homeworks & midterm, and will you do the final exam? Lapsed, found some cool stuff in the textbook, got distracted. Good discussions on Reddit. Might go back and listen to the rest of the lectures, haven't decided if I will do the exams. Probably depends on how my job goes in the next few weeks. Expecting a lotta action soon. {8-] spike From spike66 at att.net Mon Dec 12 00:57:21 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2011 16:57:21 -0800 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: References: <01ee01ccb3dd$3e148be0$ba3da3a0$@att.net> <01b101ccb604$05c17270$11445750$@att.net> <00fe01ccb81a$d5707800$80516800$@att.net> Message-ID: <016401ccb869$0175b570$04612050$@att.net> >...On Behalf Of Jeff Davis Subject: Re: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? On Sun, Dec 11, 2011 at 8:37 AM, spike wrote: >> Jeff, this is a perfect example of what I was referring to in the >> earlier post. ?The banks redlining wasn't about racism. ?It was about risk control. >...Not buying it, Spike. Risk control based on racism is offensive and not to be tolerated... Jeff this assumes guilt instead of making any attempt to prove guilt. If it worked this way, we would not need courts or legal experts. Guilt would always be assumed, and counter evidence would be useless. I agree risk control based on racism is offensive. My point is that risk control was (and is) done on the basis of the location of the property. From the location, they can get local crime statistics, estimate risks of the borrower being slain or the property burning down, the risk of the property being seized as a meth lab, for instance. None of that has anything to do with race in any way, for there is no known correlation between race and any of these factors. >... When the banking industry red-lined a district, they broad-brushed everyone living there and denied them access to services... Agree. >... on a racial basis... Disagree. Evidence? The redlining was based on location of the property. This seems legitimate to me. East Palo Alto was an unincorporated area with very little law enforcement, and that which they had was deeply corrupt. It was a very dangerous area, absolutely regardless of one's race. Investment in that area was risky, regardless of the race of the borrower. I wouldn't do it. >...Full disclosure: I'm a racist. No apologies. I have zero use for the American black ghetto culture. Sure, they came from slaves... How do we know that? Do we continue to assume for all time that African Americans are descended from slaves? What if they didn't? And what if non-African people did descend from slaves? Remember we had race-based slavery as late as 1945, in Germany. There may even be some former slaves living today. I personally knew two of them back in the 1980s. They had numbers tattooed on their arms. >...and have had a rough time... How do we know that? Do we assume all African Americans have had a rough time? For how long? >... They have all manner of thoroughly valid explanations about how they got where they are. But that's no excuse. Time for them to get over it, and get on with making something of themselves. Everyone's got their problems. Best, Jeff Actually Jeff we are talking past each other. The focus of the discussion is on whether or not it is legitimate for banks to loan or not loan based on the location of the property. To me that is perfectly valid. It isn't valid to loan or not loan based on race. It is not legitimate for one who was denied a loan to assume it was based on race, when far more likely it was based on zip code. If I were a banker, that's sure as hell what I would be looking for: the location of the property and any possible flaws that would make it hard to sell if it lands in my lap. spike From eugen at leitl.org Mon Dec 12 14:11:10 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2011 15:11:10 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Ebooks Formats and ebook readers In-Reply-To: References: <4EE25117.8060800@moulton.com> <4EE2745D.9000401@moulton.com> <20111210194152.GD31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20111212141110.GJ31847@leitl.org> On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 11:11:29PM +0100, Stefano Vaj wrote: > On 10 December 2011 20:41, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > > Yes. This is 2011. You're asking for a full-color high-resolution > > mirasol (inteferometric modulator display). These are probably 5-10 years > > away from the consumer, if the technology can be made to work at all. > > > > Why, my life expectancy should hopefully be longer than that even if no > life-extension breakthroughs take place in the meantime... :-) First mirasol-display readers seem to be closer to the marketplace than I thought: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/E-Reader-mit-Mirasol-Display-1393714.html The colors and contrast look too good to be true: http://www.heise.de/imgs/18/7/4/6/0/7/8/Kyobo-E-Reader_Mirasol-4434d3bc6c2ca47a.jpeg The other Google images hits for mirasol aren't nearly as dramatic. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Mon Dec 12 14:14:29 2011 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2011 07:14:29 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The challenge of autism Message-ID: I have heard that supposedly 1 in a 100 American children are now born autistic. I wonder what the cause is, and I suspect it may be that families with autistic offspring tend to be well-educated and to attain that, held off having children until later in their childbearing years. And so their reproductive organs have years more worth of exposure to the many chemical & electro-magnetic pollutants found in our environment. Or might autism actually be evolution at work? Could it be that this is a new branching off of humanity? There is at least the stereotype of the relatively high functioning "aspie," who despite limitations regarding human interactions, excels in areas such as math and information technology. http://www.care2.com/causes/is-there-an-autism-epidemic-not-exactly-but.html John From tara at taramayastales.com Mon Dec 12 17:12:09 2011 From: tara at taramayastales.com (Tara Maya) Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2011 09:12:09 -0800 Subject: [ExI] ethics and ethology Message-ID: <6474AF4D-E82E-4E7D-96D1-83C02DA52493@taramayastales.com> On Dec 10, 2011, at 10:12 AM, Stefano Vaj wrote: > > > Absolutely. But it is not clear to me why you refuse to categorise all that simply as our ethology and psychology. > > The real domain of ethics IMHO is the moral dilemma (to do what one is genetically inclined or forced to do in the first place may generate pleasure, to infringe one's own rules may generate guilt, but certainly neither thing involves ethical decisions). > > A moral dilemma implies that there is a real, actual uncertainty on what is the "right thing to do". > > An ethical "system" is in turn simply a set of answers and/or of theories on how to solve such problems, which in turn reflects different values and priorities, not to mention "anthropologies" in the philosophical sense. > > A work which in my view remains seminal in this respect is Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals. Even if one does really share Nietzsche's specific conclusions on the merits of what he is discussing, this short work would still remain in my opinion exemplary anyway as to the method. And all the contemporary "memetics" reading of how ideas arise, circulate and go extinct in human societies nicely completes it. Ethics is grounded in ethology, but distinct from it, and this is what gives ethics its aspects of cultural specificity and individual responsibility. As highly complex and highly adaptable beings, human evolution has responded to multiple pressures. For instance, we have an instinct to survive, and we consider the resulting needs basic: eat, fight or cower if attacked, try to breath if shoved underwater, etc. Then we have instincts shaped by millennia of sexual competition. Probably most of our greed and envy and striving to out-do others through the display of material things such as fashion (especially for women) and wealth/power (especially for men), comes from this. Then we have the competition to raise vulnerable children with skill sets that take decades to acquire. (Even if the "simplest" of human societies, one study estimated it took 12 years for girls and 14 years for boys to achieve mastery of their adult roles). Here we find all our instincts to protect and teach our children, and our kin's children. In addition to these, which we share to some extent with other animals, we have other evolutionary pressures, such as the ability to spread memes (how many humans have been killed because they failed to adapt to the right orthodoxy in time?), and the ability to engage in reciprocal altruism (trade and capitalism follows from this instinct, even if it is sexual competition that drives conspicuous consumption). And so on. All of these pressures add up to our ethology, but do not describe a single system of ethics, because ethics is what we call the ability to raise one instinct over another. Individuals and cultures balance these pressures in different ways, sometimes by habit, sometimes with a great deal of excrusiating internal struggle. In the Chinese epic of The Three Kingdoms, there's a famous scene where a man is guarding a pass. An enemy is fleeing and asks to be allowed through the pass. Normally, the guard's loyalty to his king and people would make his obligation obvious; kill the enemy. But it turns out that this enemy once saved his life. Now the enemy asks, "Is it ethical to kill a man who saved your life?" The guard lets him through. The enemy carried a message critical to the war, and the guard's kingdom falls. The question debated in the text is, did the guard do the right thing? Which was more important, to be true to one's pledged word to help someone who helped you (reciprocal altruism) or loyalty to one's own people (kin selection)? Now, here is why I just shake my head when I hear the idea that super-intelligent machines or super-intelligent aliens or super-intelligent people would not have problems because they would be "more" ethical than we are. Very likely they would; but this would only make ethical dilemmas MORE DIFFICULT. The greater the intelligence involved, the more loyalties such an intelligence would have to balance, and the greater the oportunity for ethical conflicts. What I do hope to see is less faulty-ethical systems. What I mean is that people want a certain thing, such as less alcoholics. So they create an ethical or legal system aimed at that, such as forbidding alcohol. But because they have inaccurately gauged their own behavior in response to rewards and punishments, the very opposite of their goal is brought about, along with other undesirable consequences, such as mafia involvement. There are a whole category of sins that humans respond to in this way, and do not seem to learn from experience that merely outlawing certain kinds of things (usually "negative" behaviors which are nonetheless strongly selected for by evolution), does not eliminate the behavior, and in fact, may even exacerbate it. Tara Maya Conmergence (a speculative fiction anthology) Burst (an sf short story) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Mon Dec 12 17:22:14 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2011 18:22:14 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Origin of ethics and morals In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: 2011/12/11 Darren Greer > 2011/12/11 Stefano Vaj > > http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/nietzsche/1886/beyond-good-evil/ch02.htm > > Paragraph 34. > Thank you. > > >> but it would still leave wide open the possibility of prefering the truth >> out of a personal taste ("Geschmack")... :-) > > > Yes, but this statement would preclude classifying someone as objectively > "moral" for doing so, which I think is rather his point. In other words, > knock yourself out but understand that it IS just a preference. Like the > colour of your shoes. > Absolutely. In fact, Nietzsche may or may not be pro-science, but certainly is not a moral "objectivist". In fact, the preference for the truth probably corresponds to one's nature more than to some cosmic necessity. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Mon Dec 12 17:24:04 2011 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2011 09:24:04 -0800 Subject: [ExI] The challenge of autism In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 6:14 AM, John Grigg wrote: > Or might autism actually be evolution at work? ?Could it be that this > is a new branching off of humanity? ?There is at least the stereotype > of the relatively high functioning "aspie," who despite limitations > regarding human interactions, excels in areas such as math and > information technology. Biological evolution doesn't work that fast. Info tech has barely been around for about a single human generation - way too small to be observing this kind of effect. Also, if it really was superior, it won't be a "branching off". Rather than 1 in 100, a majority of kids - more than 50 in 100 - would be this way. From rtomek at ceti.pl Mon Dec 12 17:42:39 2011 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2011 18:42:39 +0100 (CET) Subject: [ExI] Ebooks Formats and ebook readers In-Reply-To: <20111212141110.GJ31847@leitl.org> References: <4EE25117.8060800@moulton.com> <4EE2745D.9000401@moulton.com> <20111210194152.GD31847@leitl.org> <20111212141110.GJ31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Mon, 12 Dec 2011, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 11:11:29PM +0100, Stefano Vaj wrote: > > On 10 December 2011 20:41, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > > > > Yes. This is 2011. You're asking for a full-color high-resolution > > > mirasol (inteferometric modulator display). These are probably 5-10 years > > > away from the consumer, if the technology can be made to work at all. > > > > > > > Why, my life expectancy should hopefully be longer than that even if no > > life-extension breakthroughs take place in the meantime... :-) > > First mirasol-display readers seem to be closer to the marketplace > than I thought: > > http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/E-Reader-mit-Mirasol-Display-1393714.html > > The colors and contrast look too good to be true: > http://www.heise.de/imgs/18/7/4/6/0/7/8/Kyobo-E-Reader_Mirasol-4434d3bc6c2ca47a.jpeg > > The other Google images hits for mirasol aren't nearly as > dramatic. Interesting. I tried to see this thing in action, there are few films on y-tube, like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y21xHGrecMk&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=ag4HGceyVik http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=-rYg9-VJ2Ys >From those and other films, I can say that both colors and contrast seem rather acceptable to me, but not very much. I would like to wait and see next gen of this technology, or their competition. Maybe for now it would be more interesting to have e-paper with 256 grey levels rather than one with 1024 or even 4096 colors. I'm not sure how many colors have the displays shown but I wouldn't bet on 5 digits... On my IPS LCD monitor I can see that Kyobo colors are very similar to my old 4096-color Ipaq 3630, including picture being somewhat pinkish sometimes. I could easily swallow this, but I can even easier wait - a unit with 16-bit colors (65000+) would look much nicer. Besides, I didn't like the glassy reflections. This is exactly the thing that I don't need to take with me for a walk. I guess they will sell antiglare filters. Compare for example, this Kyobo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rYg9-VJ2Ys&feature=related with this nice Mirasol presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMxJDi5z-C4 The second one looks (to me) much more like 16-bit colors and is very sexy. OTOH, it is also quite possible, that both devices have same colors, but only the second have been filmed with decent camera. However, the glassy reflexes are present only in first, as far as I can see. As of Mirasol being close to market - I couldn't see price sticker anywhere. I think we will see it when it happens. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Mon Dec 12 18:03:17 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2011 19:03:17 +0100 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: References: <01ee01ccb3dd$3e148be0$ba3da3a0$@att.net> <01b101ccb604$05c17270$11445750$@att.net> Message-ID: On 11 December 2011 23:59, Jeff Davis wrote: > 2011/12/11 Stefano Vaj : > > Moreover, how would those issuing bad mortgage be "thieves"? > > When people engage knowingly in illegal and unethical behavior > intended to enrich them while knowingly causing others financial loss, > that in my view is theft. > Sorry, professional deformation, but I think that usury or blackmail or criminal fraud or embezzlement or corruption fall as well as theft in the category of "illegal and unethical behavior intended to enrich them while knowingly causing others financial loss" even though they are considered as distinct crimes by all existing legal systems. In fact, they may command a harsher sentence than mere theft. And rightly so, IMHO. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jrd1415 at gmail.com Mon Dec 12 18:31:41 2011 From: jrd1415 at gmail.com (Jeff Davis) Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2011 11:31:41 -0700 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: <016401ccb869$0175b570$04612050$@att.net> References: <01ee01ccb3dd$3e148be0$ba3da3a0$@att.net> <01b101ccb604$05c17270$11445750$@att.net> <00fe01ccb81a$d5707800$80516800$@att.net> <016401ccb869$0175b570$04612050$@att.net> Message-ID: I'm top posting this because it's an apology for stuff I wrote yesterday that I regret having written. When I reread it later I realized that I had come to the discussion with a pissy attitude from something earlier and unrelated, and then adopted bullying mode, not listening and not interested in listening. My bad. So, as it's the holiday season and I wish everyone well. Best, Jeff Davis "And I think to myself, what a wonderful world!" Louie Armstrong On Sun, Dec 11, 2011 at 5:57 PM, spike wrote: > >>...On Behalf Of Jeff Davis > Subject: Re: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical > behaviors? > > On Sun, Dec 11, 2011 at 8:37 AM, spike wrote: > >>> Jeff, this is a perfect example of what I was referring to in the >>> earlier post. ?The banks redlining wasn't about racism. ?It was about > risk control. > >>...Not buying it, Spike. ?Risk control based on racism is offensive and not > to be tolerated... > > Jeff this assumes guilt instead of making any attempt to prove guilt. ?If it > worked this way, we would not need courts or legal experts. ?Guilt would > always be assumed, and counter evidence would be useless. ?I agree risk > control based on racism is offensive. ?My point is that risk control was > (and is) done on the basis of the location of the property. ?From the > location, they can get local crime statistics, estimate risks of the > borrower being slain or the property burning down, the risk of the property > being seized as a meth lab, for instance. ?None of that has anything to do > with race in any way, for there is no known correlation between race and any > of these factors. > >>... ?When the banking industry red-lined a district, they broad-brushed > everyone living there and denied them access to services... > > Agree. > >>... on a racial basis... > > Disagree. ?Evidence? ?The redlining was based on location of the property. > This seems legitimate to me. ?East Palo Alto was an unincorporated area with > very little law enforcement, and that which they had was deeply corrupt. ?It > was a very dangerous area, absolutely regardless of one's race. ?Investment > in that area was risky, regardless of the race of the borrower. ?I wouldn't > do it. > >>...Full disclosure: ?I'm a racist. ?No apologies. ?I have zero use for the > American black ghetto culture. ?Sure, they came from slaves... > > How do we know that? ?Do we continue to assume for all time that African > Americans are descended from slaves? ?What if they didn't? ?And what if > non-African people did descend from slaves? ?Remember we had race-based > slavery as late as 1945, in Germany. ?There may even be some former slaves > living today. ?I personally knew two of them back in the 1980s. ?They had > numbers tattooed on their arms. > >>...and have had a rough time... > > How do we know that? ?Do we assume all African Americans have had a rough > time? ?For how long? > > ?>... They have all manner of thoroughly valid explanations about how they > got where they are. ?But that's no excuse. > ?Time for them to get over it, and get on with making something of > themselves. ?Everyone's got their problems. ?Best, Jeff > > Actually Jeff we are talking past each other. ?The focus of the discussion > is on whether or not it is legitimate for banks to loan or not loan based on > the location of the property. ?To me that is perfectly valid. ?It isn't > valid to loan or not loan based on race. ?It is not legitimate for one who > was denied a loan to assume it was based on race, when far more likely it > was based on zip code. ?If I were a banker, that's sure as hell what I would > be looking for: the location of the property and any possible flaws that > would make it hard to sell if it lands in my lap. > > spike > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From jrd1415 at gmail.com Mon Dec 12 18:39:55 2011 From: jrd1415 at gmail.com (Jeff Davis) Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2011 11:39:55 -0700 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: References: <01ee01ccb3dd$3e148be0$ba3da3a0$@att.net> <01b101ccb604$05c17270$11445750$@att.net> Message-ID: Yes. See apology. Hope the holiday season finds you and yours well and safe. Best, Jeff Davis "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." Bertrand Russell 2011/12/12 Stefano Vaj : > On 11 December 2011 23:59, Jeff Davis wrote: >> >> 2011/12/11 Stefano Vaj : >> > Moreover, how would those issuing bad mortgage be "thieves"? >> >> When people engage knowingly in illegal and unethical behavior >> intended to enrich them while knowingly causing others financial loss, >> that in my view is theft. > > > Sorry, professional deformation, but I think that usury or blackmail or > criminal fraud or embezzlement or corruption fall as well as theft in the > category of "illegal and unethical behavior intended to enrich them while > knowingly causing others financial loss" even though they are considered as > distinct crimes by all existing legal systems. > > In fact, they may command a harsher sentence than mere theft. And rightly > so, IMHO. > > -- > Stefano Vaj > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Mon Dec 12 18:49:22 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2011 19:49:22 +0100 Subject: [ExI] ethics and ethology In-Reply-To: <6474AF4D-E82E-4E7D-96D1-83C02DA52493@taramayastales.com> References: <6474AF4D-E82E-4E7D-96D1-83C02DA52493@taramayastales.com> Message-ID: 2011/12/12 Tara Maya > Ethics is grounded in ethology, but distinct from it, and this is what > gives ethics its aspects of cultural specificity and individual > responsibility... > Yes, this pretty much in the line on my own view on the subject. Only, more eloquently said. :-) -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Mon Dec 12 18:56:58 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2011 11:56:58 -0700 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: References: <01ee01ccb3dd$3e148be0$ba3da3a0$@att.net> <01b101ccb604$05c17270$11445750$@att.net> Message-ID: 2011/12/11 Stefano Vaj : > Moreover, how would those issuing bad mortgage be "thieves"? Stefano, If I knowingly make a highly risky loan with the knowledge that I can immediately resell it to Fanny, Freddy or some "no questions asked" wall street investment banker, pocket my fees, and let the next investor down the line be a "fall guy" for my bad decision, then how is that not being a thief? I'm at least a con man, selling paper to the next investor for much more than I believe it to be worth. I don't even see this as controversial. Where's the confusion? -Kelly From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Mon Dec 12 19:33:22 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2011 20:33:22 +0100 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: References: <01ee01ccb3dd$3e148be0$ba3da3a0$@att.net> <01b101ccb604$05c17270$11445750$@att.net> Message-ID: On 12 December 2011 19:56, Kelly Anderson wrote: > 2011/12/11 Stefano Vaj : > > Moreover, how would those issuing bad mortgage be "thieves"? > > If I knowingly make a highly risky loan with the knowledge that I can > immediately resell it to Fanny, Freddy or some "no questions asked" > wall street investment banker, pocket my fees, and let the next > investor down the line be a "fall guy" for my bad decision, then how > is that not being a thief? I'm at least a con man, selling paper to > the next investor for much more than I believe it to be worth. I don't > even see this as controversial. Where's the confusion? > This is perhaps a boring technicality, but please understand that I am not condoning this behaviour in the least. I am only saying that the crime you might end up indicted for is criminal fraud to the detriment of your purchaser (even though I am inclined to believe that the borrower is a more likely victim than a banker who purchase the loan knowing full well that it is junk, except for the probability to resell it quickly to somebody else in the same line of business making a nice profit). In other words: there are worse crimes than theft, and I suspect that Ponzi schemes and usury both qualify. If anything because they are much more dangerous and detrimental both to the public and to their direct victims. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Mon Dec 12 20:24:50 2011 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2011 13:24:50 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Origin of ethics and morals In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Keith Henson wrote: Then recently some of our ancestors were heavily selected for economic success. (See Gregory Clark's work.) >>> I've heard a number of times that the modern-day Scandinavians are definitely not the same people as their Viking ancestors, from roughly one millennia ago. The Swede of today (Anders being a prime example) is known for their civility and friendliness, and not so much for "burning down your town, killing you, and taking your valuables." We all must hope Anders never enters an isolation tank and regresses "Altered States" style into being like his war-like ancestors... But it would make for a very interesting transhumanist conference! ; ) John -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rtomek at ceti.pl Mon Dec 12 20:25:35 2011 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2011 21:25:35 +0100 (CET) Subject: [ExI] Ebooks Formats and ebook readers In-Reply-To: <4EE3780D.8050809@aleph.se> References: <20111209131743.GZ31847@leitl.org> <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> <4EE25117.8060800@moulton.com> <4EE2745D.9000401@moulton.com> <20111210111008.GR31847@leitl.org> <4EE3780D.8050809@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Sat, 10 Dec 2011, Anders Sandberg wrote: > I am considering getting a reader so I don?t have to drag so much cellulose > with me everywhere I travel, but I have one constraint: I must be able to read > PDFs with equations and diagrams (and ideally djvu too). Since this list > community knows things, what are your recommendations? Get a general purpose > pad with PDF reader, or is there some eink solution that actually works? By pure chance I've stumbled upon "The Ebook Reader" channel on youtube. Lots of video reviews, hands on etc material. Good quality, including HD. One can easily see why some people here like Nook Color, it is really nice piece of hardware (and software, too). http://www.youtube.com/user/TheeBookReader May help you to meet your ultimate device. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Mon Dec 12 21:01:57 2011 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2011 14:01:57 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Moral and ethical rats. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Keith Henson posting: > "Helping is our evolutionary inheritance," Mason told LiveScience. > "Our study suggests that we don't have to cognitively decide to help > an individual in distress; rather, we just have to let our animal > selves express themselves." I find it interesting that people will often use the expression, "they acted like animals," to indicate acts of great brutality. This post has caused me to recall Carl Sagan discussing how a baboon troop leader would charge a group of large dogs to protect a young one, or a female chimp would patiently disarm a male who had hands full of rocks, intended to be used as projectiles. I wonder what we would be like if we were descended from reptiles? lol John -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Mon Dec 12 22:27:26 2011 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2011 15:27:26 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I hope Keith Henson weighs in on this discussion. My responses are below... Kelly Anderson wrote: > 1) Heretics, Muslims and Jews were occasionally slaughtered, though > probably not in great enough numbers to have a huge genetic effect. > I think that the ban on Christians charging interest for loans, may have caused change in the Jewish gene pool, in terms of the selection for the type of intelligence that excels at finance. But then the Jews had a strong merchant class dating back to the Babylonians and the Romans. I think if any people have been molded for success by powerful selective pressures from within and without, it is the Jews. I find it painfully ironic that Hitler and the Nazi's considered themselves a "master race," and persecuted the Jews, when the Jews are a prime example of several millennia of intense cultural eugenics at work, with the end result being a people who have achieved so much for humanity. When it came to heretics, most people just did not have the moral courage to open their mouth when they knew death would be the end result. But the wars of the reformation (for both religious and economic reasons) helped heretics fight back and yet have a chance of surviving and thriving. > 2) Religious orders (monks, priests and nuns) tended to attract those > who were interested in an intellectual life. Obviously, their > reproduction was sharply curtailed being in these religious orders. > Would that imply that Catholicism decreased intellectualism in those > areas where it was practiced for many centuries? > This is a fascinating question! Yep, the Catholics should have been more like Mormons or Jews, and had their smarter folks have lots of kids! lol I've read that Spain was Catholic down to the core of their being, and their modern lack of great scientific productivity might be influenced from this matter. But then again, the Irish have excelled in areas such as literature and the I.T. field. > 3) Catholic beliefs about food (fish Friday, wine, dirty water) might > have had some impact, as did their support of kings and the political > orders under kings. > Dirty water? Wine was known as a safe option for drinking (as compared to water) many centuries before Jesus was even born. 4) Catholicism and feudalism meant very limited travel for most people. This could have led to prejudice, insofar as that is genetic, but probably more importantly, it created islands where specific genes that would otherwise have been bred out of a larger population became more prevalent. This may be more especially the case for recessives. Times have sure changed... But poverty stricken rural areas in the third world may still be somewhat like your description... > 5) Might there have been a breeding advantage to those who truly > believed leading to more true believers? Might there have been other > breeding advantages related to Catholic beliefs? They did not use birth control and so they had many more offspring, who then also had offspring! lol And modern psychology has recognized the bulwark against stress and adversity that religious faith can create in a person's life. > 6) Did feudal beliefs about bathing increase the capacity of the > overall immune system of those who survived? Same with the black > death... > Did medieval beliefs about cats being evil and needing to be exterminated, increase the odds of the Black Death killing lots of people? lol > 7) Could there have been effects on rates of promiscuity in the gene > pool from Catholic punishments of adultery and fornication, as well as > the negative effects of being a bastard? > I believe people tended to be pretty human and have socially unapproved sex back then at fairly high levels, but they simply had alot more guilt and anxiety attached to it, and the risks were far greater. The person who had to deal with the negative effects of being a bastard more than anyone else, was the poor person who actually bore that label! Well, the mother would often bear a great deal of social disapproval for having an illegitimate child. But I think among the peasants the stigma was not so gigantic, while the higher you went up the social ladder, the more scandalous it would be for you. Landowning males wanted to be certain of the paternity of their children. > 8) Insofar as ethics are genetic, there may be other impacts of our > brush with the papacy. > > The papacy is a real mixed bag when it comes to ethics. There were some good popes and then some really not so good ones... Anyway, I hope you get an insightful collection of replies. John -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From darren.greer3 at gmail.com Tue Dec 13 00:50:48 2011 From: darren.greer3 at gmail.com (Darren Greer) Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2011 20:50:48 -0400 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Kelly Anderson wrote: > > >> 2) Religious orders (monks, priests and nuns) tended to attract those >> who were interested in an intellectual life. Obviously, their >> reproduction was sharply curtailed being in these religious orders. >> Would that imply that Catholicism decreased intellectualism in those >> areas where it was practiced for many centuries? >> > And then 2011/12/12 John Grigg wrote: > > > This is a fascinating question! > Hate to do a me too, but I also thought this was a particularly fine point. Meant to say so earlier, but was busy with other things. Makes perfect sense to me, although I would add that the church would not likely give a hoot if this was pointed out to them. Eminently practical, it has been suggested that when they expanded celibacy laws in the 12th century to include all clergy, it was to keep the offspring of priests from getting their grubby little fingers on their money and property. I can't confirm this. I read it in a novel. But I wouldn't put it past 'em. Sly buggers. P.S. I found a reference for a similar statement on Wikipedia, if anyone cares, in their entry on celibacy. Vitello, Paul (22 March 2009). "On Eve of Retirement, Cardinal Breathes Life Into Debate on Priestly Celibacy" . *The New York Times*. Retrieved 1 April 2010. P.P.S Turns out even the Vatican admits this is a (if not the) reason. I decided to look for another reference for this post and found this on their site. Look under "Priestly celibacy from an economic point of view. " If all other speculations about motivation fails, turn to money. http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cclergy/documents/rc_con_cclergy_doc_01011993_prob_en.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Tue Dec 13 01:42:13 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2011 17:42:13 -0800 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: References: <01ee01ccb3dd$3e148be0$ba3da3a0$@att.net> <01b101ccb604$05c17270$11445750$@att.net> <00fe01ccb81a$d5707800$80516800$@att.net> <016401ccb869$0175b570$04612050$@att.net> Message-ID: <00e301ccb938$7045ee00$50d1ca00$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Jeff Davis Subject: Re: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? ... So, as it's the holiday season and I wish everyone well. Best, Jeff Davis Best to you too Jeff. We know this is a difficult topic, and simple answers don't cover a complex question. spike From gsantostasi at gmail.com Tue Dec 13 01:32:22 2011 From: gsantostasi at gmail.com (Giovanni Santostasi) Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2011 19:32:22 -0600 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Kelly, One of the most catholic place in the world is Italy. But would you consider such a place anti-intellectual? It was the birthplace of Renaissance, Leonardo, Galileo.... Giovanni On Sun, Dec 11, 2011 at 4:19 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > I agree that the evolution of morality is partially genetic and > partially memetic... The bigger part would have to be memetic though, > just because memes reproduce faster than genes in human populations. > I'm improvising on this post, so don't take anything I'm saying here > too seriously, it's just to start a conversation. And if anything here > sounds racist, or anti-anyone, please I ask your forgiveness up front. > > One thing that I haven't heard anyone think about out loud is the > effect of a thousand+ years of Catholicism on our genes (we all know > more or less what it did to our memes)... The Catholic faith was > pretty efficient at a few things that might have had a genetic > impact... > > 1) Heretics, Muslims and Jews were occasionally slaughtered, though > probably not in great enough numbers to have a huge genetic effect. > > 2) Religious orders (monks, priests and nuns) tended to attract those > who were interested in an intellectual life. Obviously, their > reproduction was sharply curtailed being in these religious orders. > Would that imply that Catholicism decreased intellectualism in those > areas where it was practiced for many centuries? > > 3) Catholic beliefs about food (fish Friday, wine, dirty water) might > have had some impact, as did their support of kings and the political > orders under kings. > > 4) Catholicism and feudalism meant very limited travel for most > people. This could have led to prejudice, insofar as that is genetic, > but probably more importantly, it created islands where specific genes > that would otherwise have been bred out of a larger population became > more prevalent. This may be more especially the case for recessives. > > 5) Might there have been a breeding advantage to those who truly > believed leading to more true believers? Might there have been other > breeding advantages related to Catholic beliefs? > > 6) Did feudal beliefs about bathing increase the capacity of the > overall immune system of those who survived? Same with the black > death... > > 7) Could there have been effects on rates of promiscuity in the gene > pool from Catholic punishments of adultery and fornication, as well as > the negative effects of being a bastard? > > 8) Insofar as ethics are genetic, there may be other impacts of our > brush with the papacy. > > It's an interesting topic, at least to me. These are just starting > points for discussion. I actually think that number 2 is probably one > of the more plausible scenarios... but I don't know how you would go > about testing such a hypothesis without the standard accusations of > racism coming up immediately. > > -Kelly > _______________________________________________ > 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 kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Dec 13 06:11:49 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2011 23:11:49 -0700 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: References: <01ee01ccb3dd$3e148be0$ba3da3a0$@att.net> <01b101ccb604$05c17270$11445750$@att.net> Message-ID: 2011/12/11 Darren Greer : > > > On Sun, Dec 11, 2011 at 1:31 AM, Jeff Davis wrote: >> >> >> I think the issuance of "bad" mortgages came from entrepreneurial >> Randians (thieves) in the mortgage business, responding to Wall >> Steet's insatiable demand for "more" > > > > The only analysis of the whole situation from the?financial?and government > end of things I've read,?besides?the?occasional?print media?piece, is Andrew > Ross Sorkin's book Too Big To Fail. He helped me understand how the > sub-prime-mortgage backed securities-default swap scheme almost brought the > whole system down. The book is ?available as an audio file. E-mail me > directly if you want a copy. It's worth a read, or a listen. There is also an HBO special by this name. will watch it... -Kelly From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Tue Dec 13 08:45:25 2011 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 01:45:25 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Giovanni Santostasi wrote: >One of the most catholic place in the world is Italy. >But would you consider such a place anti-intellectual? It was the birthplace of Renaissance, >Leonardo, Galileo.... It has been a place of great intellectual creativity, yes... But I have always thought of Italy as being a people with a love/hate relationship with their Church. And so Italians are not necessarily the most truly observant of Catholics. John -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From darren.greer3 at gmail.com Tue Dec 13 10:24:54 2011 From: darren.greer3 at gmail.com (Darren Greer) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 06:24:54 -0400 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: References: <01ee01ccb3dd$3e148be0$ba3da3a0$@att.net> <01b101ccb604$05c17270$11445750$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 2:11 AM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > > There is also an HBO special by this name. will watch it... > > > The special is based on the book. It's pretty good also, but of course with much less detail about the financial dirt than the book. If I was to have a complaint, it would be that Sorkin, and the film-makers, let Hank Paulson off too easily. It always struck me as suspect that he, as former head of Goldman, would let Lehman Brothers fail, who was Goldman`s biggest competitor. Sorkin explains that his motivation was to send a message that the government would not be bailing out Wall Street, but then was forced to anyway when AIG threatened to go under. Although Sorkin does not say this, the bailouts were in fact a good idea. Most of the T.A.R.P. money has been repaid. It kept the system from collapsing. And the whole mess cost less than 1% of the GDP, which is far less, percentage-wise, than the savings and loans fiasco under Reagan. > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -- Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood. Friedrich Nietzsche -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Tue Dec 13 11:24:56 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 12:24:56 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4EE73608.4030506@aleph.se> Hmm, what was the selection pressure from priestly celibacy? One source I glanced at suggested a density of 0.25% clergy, or one in 40. Assume that you need above intelligence to join the clergy: this means that the fitness of the smarter people will be 1-(1/40) (assuming they could keep it in their cassocks, which was not always true). Now, intelligence is due to a lot of small gene components with overall heritability h^2=0.5 or so. In selection experiments h^2=(R-M)/(S-M), where R is the response in the population trait, S is the value it had in the selected parent population and M is the population mean. As parents for the next generation we have a population with mean intelligence S = 0.5*(100-12) + 0.5*(100+12)*(1-1/40) = 98.6 (the first term is the under iq 100 people, the second the slightly decreased 100+ population, and 12 is the expectation of a half normal distribution). So we should expect an IQ in the next generation of (98.6-100)*0.5 + 100 = 99.3. Not much. OK, lets make a recursion out of this. Let M(t) be the population mean smarts at time t, and assume it is always the upper half that has a chance of becoming clergy and that variances stay the same. S(t) = 0.5*(M(t)-12) + 0.5*(M(t)+12)(1-1/40) = [(1-1/80)M(t) -3/20]. M(t+1) = M(t) + h^2 (S(t)-M(t)) = (1 + h^2 (1-1/80) -h^2)M(t) -h^2 3/20 = 0.99375 M(t) - 0.075. Not the nicest formula, and I might have slipped somewhere. But running this from M=100 at the First Lateran Council (1123) to the present (36 generations) produces an overall reduction of population IQ to 77.37. The present IQ of Italy is 102, so I suspect this overestimates the continence of priests, the selection effect, heritability and entry requirements to clergy. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From giulio at gmail.com Tue Dec 13 15:42:48 2011 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 16:42:48 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Turing Church Online Workshop 2 videos Message-ID: I wish to thank all speakers for their great talks at the Turing Church Online Workshop 2. I also wish to thank Khannea Suntzu, David Wallace Croft and Frederic Emam-Zade for recording the videos below, and the (about 30) participants. Pictures and videos here: Turing Church Online Workshop 2 videos http://telexlr8.wordpress.com/2011/12/13/turing-church-online-workshop-2-videos/ On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 7:59 PM, Giulio Prisco wrote: > Turing Church online workshop 2 > http://www.kurzweilai.net/turing-church-online-workshop-2 > > The convergence of religion with highly imaginative future science and > technologies will be explored in the Turing Church online workshop 2 > on Sunday, December 11 in teleXLR8, a 3D interactive video > conferencing space. > > The Turing Church is a working group on science and religion. > > Speakers, morning session, 9am PST to noon PST: > > ? ?Giulio Prisco > ? ?James Hughes > ? ?Martine Rothblatt > ? ?Frank Tipler > ? ?Ben Goertzel > ? ?Remi Sussan > > Speakers, afternoon session, 1pm PST to 4pm PST > > ? ?Lincoln Cannon > ? ?Brent Allsop > ? ?Dan Massey > ? ?Andrew Warner > ? ?Mike Perry > ? ?Fred and Linda Chamberlain (pre-recorded talk) From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Tue Dec 13 17:11:42 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 18:11:42 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Origin of ethics and morals In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: 2011/12/12 John Grigg > I've heard a number of times that the modern-day Scandinavians are > definitely not the same people as their Viking ancestors, from roughly one > millennia ago. The Swede of today (Anders being a prime example) is known > for their civility and friendliness, and not so much for "burning down your > town, killing you, and taking your valuables." This, I believe, remains nevertheless essentially a legacy of anti-Viking propaganda. :-) There is more to the Viking and Normans civilisation than that, and their enemies were not world-famous for their especially humane treatment of war prisoners or pillaged villages either. :-) -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rtomek at ceti.pl Tue Dec 13 17:21:21 2011 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 18:21:21 +0100 (CET) Subject: [ExI] Morality function, self-correcting moral systems? Message-ID: Howdy, As a general rule, I tend to stay away from anything that smells of swampy philosophical dispute without resolve, thus I did not read recent threads about morality and the likes. I hope I will be excused for this, simply said, my time is limited. However, I wonder if there was any attempt to devise a "morality function", by which I understand something like this (an example): M(..?..) = [U, H] In this example, function M takes some arguments (description of human based structure/organisation) and returns two real numbers U (utility) and H (humanity). Ants seek to maximize U, but I assume their organisation has H=0, as they throw their wounded/old/ill fellow ants out of their colonies and to the landfill, where they slowly die. Human-based society organised around such rules I would have judged as immoral. This is just an example from top of my head. M is probably a function that has to return a multidimensional point. It is of course possible to make it into one number, say, by means of Y function such that Y: R^n -> R . But this means there are (using my above example) sets of parameters where H <= 0 but thanks to big U we can still be called as moral as other structures that have better H with not so good U. In such cases it would be impossible to discern between different societies (because they would have equal Y), even though gut reaction would still tell us we prefer some of them more and abhor others on the moral basis. So, it seems M's value has to be a point in multidimensional space. I am looking for suggestions about M and its arguments (I have already come to conclusion that one of args can be some kind of graph). It would be a very nice thing to have. Once we are able to measure M, we can talk about constructing structures that have it better. It is thinkable that there is a way to make a correction mechanism to better M and preserve it (but there needs to be a way out of local maxima - here computers may be of some help in finding better structures and proposing them). Also, I have a hypothesis that all human based organisations (societies) I know of are immoral. IMHO the main reason for this stems from information hiding, which prevents a "so called" citizen from becoming a conscious citizen (i.e. one that has full known information about the world and can take proper actions - uh-huh, I have gaps in my theory, like what is proper - of course analysing full info in real time is impossible but having access to it is, I think, doable). I understand it may be tempting to discuss morality in context of economy alone, when one is faced with failing income figures. But really, I am afraid no economy is going to save immoral society. I don't have much problem with this (i.e. I unemotionally do not care, just observe), but of course I wouldn't mind being away if all this is going to crack. However, any other proposition I have seen (communism, faith-based, laisses-faire-and-fuck-the-weak etc) is doomed by design because of information hiding. This hints towards conclusion, that it is impossible to build moral structure out of humans. The way I see it, as one structure inevitably fails, another one grows on its ruins. The growth is taken to be good omen by the gullibles, but just as it starts to grow, it also starts to rot. It would therefore be nice being able to perform some analysis of this phenomenon, using mathematics rather than human language - because the latter is full of inconsistencies and it makes it hardly usable for analytical approach. So, a simple answer would be ok for me. - "yes" and some pointers to (preferrably downloadable) data for me to munch over, so I can better understand what M function is or in case nobody constructed it (I guess this is quite probable), what it could be - "no" alone will do the job, too - "stay where you are, dispatching extermination unit 8" - this would not be nice, but still interesting like hell - a dilligent student/observer that I am, there is something good in learning until the very end Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From jrd1415 at gmail.com Tue Dec 13 18:35:05 2011 From: jrd1415 at gmail.com (Jeff Davis) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 11:35:05 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Rapid improvement -- TEN MINUTES!!! -- of chronic stroke deficits Message-ID: Friends, Here's a Newtonmas present I think you'll appreciate. Forwarded from the New Cryonet: --- On Mon, 12/12/11, Doug Skrecky wrote: Wow! Snip> "Onset of clinical response was evident within 10 minutes of perispinal injection in all patients" CNS Drugs. 2011 Feb 1;25(2):145-55. doi: 10.2165/11588400-000000000-00000. Rapid improvement of chronic stroke deficits after perispinal etanercept: three consecutive cases. Tobinick E. Source Institute for Neurological Research, a private medical group, inc., Los Angeles, California, USA. etmd at ucla.edu Abstract BACKGROUND: Thrombolytic therapy reduces stroke size and disability by reperfusion and salvage of ischaemic penumbra. Emerging evidence suggests that retrieved penumbra may be the site of ongoing inflammatory pathology that includes extensive microglial activation. Microglial activation may be associated with excessive levels of tumour necrosis factor (TNF) and resultant neurotoxicity. Etanercept, a potent biologic TNF antagonist, reduces microglial activation in experimental models and has been therapeutically effective in models of brain and neuronal injury. Perispinal administration of etanercept, previously reported to be beneficial for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease, may facilitate delivery of etanercept into the brain. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this report is to document the initial clinical response to perispinal etanercept in the first chronic stroke cohort so treated. METHODS: Three consecutive patients with stable and persistent chronic neurological deficits due to strokes that had failed to resolve despite previous treatment and rehabilitation were evaluated at an outpatient clinic. They were treated off-label with perispinal etanercept as part of the clinic's practice of medicine. RESULTS: All three patients had chronic hemiparesis, in addition to other stroke deficits. Their stroke distributions were right middle cerebral artery (MCA), brainstem (medulla) and left MCA. The two patients with MCA strokes had both received acute thrombolytic therapy. Each of the three patients was treated with an initial dose of perispinal etanercept 13, 35 and 36 months following their acute stroke, respectively. Significant clinical improvement following perispinal etanercept administration was observed in all patients. Onset of clinical response was evident within 10 minutes of perispinal injection in all patients. Improvements in hemiparesis, gait, hand function, hemi-sensory deficits, spatial perception, speech, cognition and behaviour were noted among the patients treated. Each patient received a second perispinal etanercept dose at 22-26 days after the first dose that was followed by additional clinical improvement. CONCLUSIONS: Open-label administration of perispinal etanercept resulted in rapid neurological improvement in three consecutive patients with chronic neurological dysfunction due to strokes occurring 13-36 months earlier. These results suggest that stroke may result in chronic TNF-mediated pathophysiology that may be amenable to therapeutic intervention long after the acute event. Randomized clinical trials of perispinal etanercept for selected patients with chronic neurological dysfunction following stroke are indicated. PMID: 21254790 ********************************************** Best, Jeff Davis "Everything's hard till you know how to do it." Ray Charles From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Tue Dec 13 18:37:49 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 19:37:49 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Moral and ethical rats. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: 2011/12/12 John Grigg > I find it interesting that people will often use the expression, > "they acted like animals," to indicate acts of great brutality. > Does anybody remember Konrad Lorenz? Animals are aggressive, animals are social and empathic. Humans are animals. Humans are aggressive, humans are social and empathic. One problems however exists with humans. Animal aggressivity is normally ritualised and limited (btw, especially in heavily-armed predators, much less with erbivores happily killing one another) by hardwired ethological restraints. On the other hand, while we also have those ethological restraints, so that an average human has no less reluctance to kill a fellow human with her teeth and nails (unless she has a good reason to do that) than the next chimp, our ethological firmware does not say a thing about pressing a button unleashing nuclear war... -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Tue Dec 13 19:37:12 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 20:37:12 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Rapid improvement -- TEN MINUTES!!! -- of chronic stroke deficits In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20111213193712.GM31847@leitl.org> On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 11:35:05AM -0700, Jeff Davis wrote: > Friends, > > Here's a Newtonmas present I think you'll appreciate. > > Forwarded from the New Cryonet: Weird, I did not receive that message. > --- On Mon, 12/12/11, Doug Skrecky wrote: > > Wow! -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From atymes at gmail.com Tue Dec 13 20:00:39 2011 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 12:00:39 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Stanford AI class wrapup In-Reply-To: <016301ccb865$2fe3fce0$8fabf6a0$@att.net> References: <015a01ccb85b$c68c4d00$53a4e700$@att.net> <016301ccb865$2fe3fce0$8fabf6a0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 11, 2011 at 4:30 PM, spike wrote: > Lapsed, found some cool stuff in the textbook, got distracted. ?Good > discussions on Reddit. ?Might go back and listen to the rest of the > lectures, haven't decided if I will do the exams. ?Probably depends on how > my job goes in the next few weeks. ?Expecting a lotta action soon. ?{8-] > spike Seems to be the majority response. Of the 160K initial applicants, there are apparently only 30K - including basic and advanced - still following to the end, and 23K passed the midterm. BTW, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtmdiPUGGe8&feature=mfu_channel&list=UL is a good Q&A on thoughts about online education, informed in part by the class (though focused more on Khan Academy). From jrd1415 at gmail.com Tue Dec 13 20:32:58 2011 From: jrd1415 at gmail.com (Jeff Davis) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:32:58 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Rapid improvement -- TEN MINUTES!!! -- of chronic stroke deficits In-Reply-To: <20111213193712.GM31847@leitl.org> References: <20111213193712.GM31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 12:37 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 11:35:05AM -0700, Jeff Davis wrote: >> Friends, >> >> Here's a Newtonmas present I think you'll appreciate. >> >> Forwarded from the New Cryonet: > > Weird, I did not receive that message. Whoops! Thanks for the heads-up, Gene. Correction: It was NOT from the New Cryonet but rather from cryobc, a Yahoo! group for cryonicists in British Columbia, Canada. Best, Jeff Davis "Everythings hard etc." RC > >> --- On Mon, 12/12/11, Doug Skrecky wrote: >> >> ? ? Wow! > -- > Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org > ______________________________________________________________ > ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org > 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A ?7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From spike66 at att.net Tue Dec 13 20:25:33 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 12:25:33 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Origin of ethics and morals In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <008d01ccb9d5$5e272ca0$1a7585e0$@att.net> >. Behalf Of Stefano Vaj Subject: Re: [ExI] Origin of ethics and morals 2011/12/12 John Grigg >.The Swede of today (Anders being a prime example) is known for their civility and friendliness, and not so much for "burning down your town, killing you, and taking your valuables." So it would seem, but beware never to come between gentle Anders and sushi. A most dangerous place is this. That kind and civil soul will race through your burning town, roughly hurl you out of his way, trample over your valuables and devour the hapless beasts to the very brink of extinction. It is truly a wonderful sight to behold. Once the sushi is gone, he is back to his gentle and scholarly self. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Dec 13 20:59:48 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:59:48 -0700 Subject: [ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors? In-Reply-To: References: <01ee01ccb3dd$3e148be0$ba3da3a0$@att.net> <01b101ccb604$05c17270$11445750$@att.net> <00fe01ccb81a$d5707800$80516800$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 11, 2011 at 4:38 PM, Jeff Davis wrote: > Not buying it, Spike. ?Risk control based on racism is offensive and > not to be tolerated. ?There exist standards -- there used to anyway -- > regarding qualifying for a loan. ?Standards that are independent of > where you live. ?When the banking industry red-lined a district, they > broad-brushed everyone living there and denied them access to services > on a racial basis. While it is certainly the case that neighborhoods have racial profiles, the idea that you would not give a loan out for a house in a particular area makes some sense. For example, I might not want to loan people money if their homes were built in an area prone to land slides, or earthquake liquefaction, or hurricane damage or flooding. Likewise, I might not want to put out loans in areas where there previously have been riots, fire storms (either man made or natural), or that are likely to be bulldozed en masse (such as parts of Detroit recently)... While there is a correlation to race, redlining areas because of specific risks does not seem to be overly racist to me. > Case by case would have been fair, the broad-brush > is discriminatory. So all you who live in a flood plane are being discriminated against? Really? > Their risk-avoidance motive is understandable, but > the standard mortgage qualification criteria would have take care of > that. ?The intent may not have originated from racial bias, but the > result was racist and was at least partially enabled by an apologist's > easy indifference to racially discriminatory practices. People and institutions that are racist always look for some way to discriminate that doesn't seem to be racially oriented. But more people just want to make more money. >> That generated tax >> revenue, which allowed them to hire cops, which made it safer, which >> encouraged other businesses and banks to loan on homes. ?Those who remember >> East Palo Alto from the late 80 to early 90s should go look at it now That would be fun. I worked in East Palo Alto for a brief period in 1984... > Spike, you know I love you like a brother, but this feels all too much > like white boy apologism. > > None of which persuasively addresses the "they were forced" question. > > Full disclosure: ?I'm a racist. ?No apologies. ?I have zero use for > the American black ghetto culture. ?Sure, they came from slaves and > have had a rough time. ?They have all manner of thoroughly valid > explanations about how they got where they are. ?But that's no excuse. > ?Time for them to get over it, and get on with making something of > themselves. ?Everyone's got their problems. I'm not a racist, though I have over the years had 6 black, 8 Hispanic, 1 half Asian, 4 Caucasian and one full African children in my care, though thankfully not all at once (LOL). So I have something of an interest in race and racism. (Currently, I have 2 black and 2 Hispanic children home full time as a single dad.) >From my point of view, having read a few books on the subject from all sides of the political spectrum, it's complicated. But one of the things that stands out to me was LBJ's Great Society program of the late 60s. At the beginning of this program, something around 5% of inner city black families that qualified for welfare payments of some kind actually received those payments. The program went into the inner city and advertised the availability of these programs. The program was a huge success, in that by the end of the program 95% of the families that were entitled to the entitlements actually got them. Now for the law of unintended consequences... This led directly to the disintegration of the black family structure in these neighborhoods. It led to a particular kind of "pimp" that would knock up single black women with multiple children, who would then collect welfare checks, that the "pimp" would then force her to share with him. I call him a pimp rather than a father, because he didn't help raise his children, just took their money. Granted, that is an extreme case, and probably didn't happen all that often.... However, the number of inner city children with intact nuclear family units plummeted rapidly after everyone who was entitled got their entitlements. This has led to the high rates of incarceration of blacks, and any number of other bad outcomes. I lay a considerable portion of the blame at the feet of LBJ. Libertarian economist Thomas Sowell argues that the Great Society programs only contributed to the destruction of African American families, saying "the black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life."* I agree with Mr. Sowell. Great article, by the way... at http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/index.php?news=3864 -Kelly * Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society From anders at aleph.se Tue Dec 13 21:43:37 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 22:43:37 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Morality function, self-correcting moral systems? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4EE7C709.5050606@aleph.se> Tomasz Rola wrote: > However, I wonder if there was any attempt to devise a "morality > function" Yes. However, most professional ethicists would not think it is a workable approach if you asked them. I recently found this paper: "An artificial neural network approach for creating an ethical artificial agent" by Honarvar et al. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5423190&tag=1 Basically they take examples with features are like "the voluntariness of an agent", "the duration of non-human patients? pleasure", "the number of displeasured human patients", etc. encoded as levels, train a neural network to correctly classify them as ethical or not based on labeled examples, and then apply it to new cases. Basically the method finds a decision boundary in the space of features. Since an ANN is a general function approximator this is a bit like your M, although just producing a thumbs up or down answer. There might be interesting things to learn here if you have plenty of examples or real world data (i.e. what kinds of decision boundaries do real world morality have?), but there are many weaknesses. First, you need to assume the examples are correctly judged (what is the correct judgement about somebody stealing medicine for their sick wife?), second that all the relevant features are encoded (this is a biggie - their model misses enormous chunks of ethical possibilities because it doesn't include them). And then there is the not-so-small matter that many ethicists think that getting to a correct answer on the morality of actions is not the whole of morality (Kantians think that understanding and intending the good is the important part, while virtue ethicists think the big thing is to repeatedly act in a good way). > Also, I have a hypothesis that all human based organisations (societies) I > know of are immoral. I think this is a pretty safe assumption that few ethicists would deny. OK, the social contractarians might actually think it is impossible, but they are crazy ;-) > This hints towards conclusion, that it is impossible > to build moral structure out of humans. There are many ethicists who would say that if your morality is impossible to follow, then it cannot be the true morality. It is the converse of "ought implies can". However, there might be moralities that are possible to do but so demanding that practically nobody can do them (this is a common accusation against Peter Singers utilitarianism, to which he usually cheerfully responds to by asking why anybody thinks the correct moral system has to be easy to do). My own take on it is that in a sense we are reinforcement learning machines, trying to find an optimal policy function (mapping each action possible in a situation onto a probability of doing it). Becoming better at morality means we develop a better policy function. The problem is figuring out what "better" means here (my friend the egoistic hedonist ethicist Ola has a simple answer - what gives *him* pleasure - but he is fairly rare). But it is clear that learning and optimizing ought to be regarded as important parts of moral behavior. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Tue Dec 13 21:53:15 2011 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 14:53:15 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The generosity scale & relationships Message-ID: I thought this might prove useful for those in intimate relationships... But I do think up to a point this is something that people who grew up attending a church would know. I remember routinely hearing talks about how married couples should lovingly go the extra mile for each other on a very frequent basis. And if they did so, a happy and solid relationship would be the end result. I knew quite a few couples that had been together for many years (seemingly truly happy) and this was one of their cardinal rules. I sometimes wonder about how transhuman and posthuman relationships will be, and if their superior intelligence will help or hinder them in their quest for love. John Quiz: Do You Have a Generous Relationship? http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/08/quiz-do-you-have-a-generous-relationship/ By TARA PARKER-POPE How does your relationship rate on the generosity scale? Here are four questions researchers from the [4]University of Virginia's National Marriage Project used to measure generosity, high levels of which are predictive of a stronger relationship. Click on the box in front of your answer and then check your score. And to find out more about how generosity affects your relationship, read the New York Times Magazine column, [5]"The Generous Marriage." References 4. http://www.virginia.edu/marriageproject/ 5. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=67323 --- The Generous Marriage http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/08/is-generosity-better-than-sex/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Tue Dec 13 21:24:50 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 22:24:50 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Stanford AI class wrapup In-Reply-To: References: <015a01ccb85b$c68c4d00$53a4e700$@att.net> <016301ccb865$2fe3fce0$8fabf6a0$@att.net> Message-ID: <4EE7C2A2.1080707@aleph.se> Adrian Tymes wrote: > Seems to be the majority response. Of the 160K initial applicants, there > are apparently only 30K - including basic and advanced - still following to > the end, and 23K passed the midterm. > So, a few tens of thousand more people who understand AI better. I wonder whether that decreases or increases existential risk? (Unofficial FHI position on it: we have no clue :-) ) -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Tue Dec 13 21:16:43 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 22:16:43 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Origin of ethics and morals In-Reply-To: <008d01ccb9d5$5e272ca0$1a7585e0$@att.net> References: <008d01ccb9d5$5e272ca0$1a7585e0$@att.net> Message-ID: <4EE7C0BB.9080605@aleph.se> spike wrote: > > *>? Behalf Of *Stefano Vaj > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] Origin of ethics and morals > > 2011/12/12 John Grigg > > > >?The Swede of today (Anders being a prime example) is known for their > civility and friendliness, and not so much for "burning down your > town, killing you, and taking your valuables." > > > So it would seem, but beware never to come between gentle Anders and > sushi. A most dangerous place is this. That kind and civil soul will > race through your burning town, roughly hurl you out of his way, > trample over your valuables and devour the hapless beasts to the very > brink of extinction. It is truly a wonderful sight to behold. > > Once the sushi is gone, he is back to his gentle and scholarly self. > LOL! I am reading this post while I am eating... guess what? You are all safe now. The wildness of Swedes is an interesting thing. While Stefano is right that most stories about Viking depredations came from their (surviving) enemies, it is clear they were not that peaceful. You could call them opportunistic traders, willing to use force if it looked profitable enough. Just a few kilometers away lies the ruins of king ?thelred the Unready's castle. He got his name (from old English 'unraed', 'bad counsel') because he tried to pay off the viking raiders. It worked... for a while. Then they came back for more. And more. And then king Sweyn Forkbeard ended up king of Britain. A few centuries later my ancestors were at it again, conquering big parts of northern Europe all the way down to Prague during the 30-years war. Then the empire got overextended and imploded in 1721, followed by peace and prosperity (more or less). I don't think this is great evidence for any particular national character or any sensible thesis about the genetic basis of aggression. Rather, it suggests that the same genetic stock can produce rather different behaviors under different culture, management and motivation. Which is probably good news. There are presumably genes that affect politics and national character - I recently read a paper showing that the MAOA gene was involved in voting behavior. It is also known to (in some individuals) be involved in aggressivity. There are other genes for oxytocine, dopamine and serotonine receptors that do seem to correlate with some political behavior, group cohesion and risk-taking, so it is not too implausible to think that a population with a certain allele distribution might on average be different in their behavior. However, it all gets modulated by culture: who are the acceptable targets of aggression, how may it be expressed, what institutions exist and how do they mesh with different types of people, and so on. Very complex and fun, but it probably makes national character so holistic that it is hard to make any useful predictions (and then individuals go and react to it in an individual way, producing even trickier outcomes). -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Dec 13 22:34:18 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 15:34:18 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: 2011/12/12 Giovanni Santostasi : > Kelly, > One of the most catholic place in the world is Italy. > But would you consider such a place anti-intellectual? It was the birthplace > of?Renaissance, > Leonardo, Galileo.... The economic forces of the church (i.e. money flowed more towards the Vatican than away from it) probably had as much to do with that than anything else. A lot of intellectuals from all around Europe flocked to Italy during that period, which led to a very rich environment for the non clerical intellectuals to flourish as well. It is certainly more complex than a simple genetic component. And you would have to admit that Leonardo would have been an outlier in any population, including today's. He is the only known person believed to be a genius in all seven types of intelligence... a truly brilliant person... whom I respect even more than Einstein. Aside from that, Poland, Portugal and parts of South America (though for a shorter time) are probably as much if not more Catholic than Italy for the purposes of this conversation. It would have to do with the rate of entering into religious orders... I don't have good numbers for that. -Kelly From anders at aleph.se Tue Dec 13 22:45:51 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 23:45:51 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4EE7D59F.3040707@aleph.se> I do recommend Charles Murray's "Human Accomplishment" for looking at the distribution of excellence. The main finding seems to be that genius cluster in time and space: partially because certain conditions might enable it, but also because bright people seek out each other or stimulate each other. I think the only strongly ethnic result is that jews are very overrepresented among the highest achievers. The renaissance was probably a confluence of several factors: the economic rebound from the black death and malaise of the 14th century, the existence of suitably splintered states, the influx of Greek learning via fleeing Byzantine scholars, as well as the spread of humanistic memes that allowed breaks from tradition. But once enabled, what actually caused the flowering and clustering of genius is harder to tell. It was one of the rare explosions of creativity, one that we are still in many ways processing. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Dec 13 22:23:13 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 15:23:13 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: 2011/12/12 John Grigg : > I hope Keith Henson weighs in on this discussion.? My responses are below... > > > Kelly Anderson wrote: >> >> 1) Heretics, Muslims and Jews were occasionally slaughtered, though >> probably not in great enough numbers to have a huge genetic effect. > > I think that the ban on Christians charging interest for loans, may have > caused change in the Jewish gene pool, in terms of the selection for > the?type of intelligence?that excels at?finance.? But then the Jews had a > strong merchant class dating back to the Babylonians and the Romans.? I > think if any people have been molded for success?by powerful selective > pressures?from within and without, it is the Jews.? I find it painfully > ironic that Hitler and the Nazi's considered themselves a "master race," and > persecuted the Jews, when the Jews?are a prime example of?several?millennia > of intense?cultural eugenics at work, with the end result being?a people who > have achieved so much for humanity. This is a really great point. > When it came to heretics, most people just did not have the moral courage to > open their mouth when they knew death would be the end result.? But the wars > of the reformation (for both religious and economic reasons) helped heretics > fight back and yet have a chance of surviving and thriving. Agreed. >> 2) Religious orders (monks, priests and nuns) tended to attract those >> who were interested in an intellectual life. Obviously, their >> reproduction was sharply curtailed being in these religious orders. >> Would that imply that Catholicism decreased intellectualism in those >> areas where it was practiced for many centuries? > > This is a fascinating question! Thank you... I thought it was at least interesting. > Yep, the Catholics should have been more > like Mormons or Jews, and had their smarter folks have lots of kids! lol > I've?read that Spain?was Catholic down?to the core of their being, and their > modern?lack of great?scientific?productivity might be influenced from this > matter.? But then again, the Irish have excelled in areas such?as literature > and?the I.T. field. And again, how much of this is memetic vs. genetic... it's an open question. >> 3) Catholic beliefs about food (fish Friday, wine, dirty water) might >> have had some impact, as did their support of kings and the political >> orders under kings. > > Dirty water?? Wine was known as a safe option for drinking (as compared to > water)?many centuries before Jesus was even born. I guess I was thinking more about the aversion to bathing than drinking issues... sorry I didn't write what I was thinking. > 4) Catholicism and feudalism meant very limited travel for most > people. This could have led to prejudice, insofar as that is genetic, > but probably more importantly, it created islands where specific genes > that would otherwise have been bred out of a larger population became > more prevalent. This may be more especially the case for recessives. > > Times have sure changed...? But poverty stricken rural areas in the third > world may still be somewhat like your description... Yes. Even so, the increased incidence of certain genes locally may have residual effects... not sure exactly what they would be though. >> 5) Might there have been a breeding advantage to those who truly >> believed leading to more true believers? Might there have been other >> breeding advantages related to Catholic beliefs? > > They did not use birth control and so they had many more offspring, who then > also had offspring! lol? And modern psychology has recognized the bulwark > against stress and adversity?that religious faith can create in a person's > life. How much effective birth control was even available 500 years ago?? I know there were primitive condoms back in Roman times. Were the Catholics as highly opposed to birth control back then? I don't know. >> 6) Did feudal beliefs about bathing increase the capacity of the >> overall immune system of those who survived? Same with the black >> death... > > Did?medieval beliefs about cats being evil and needing to be exterminated, > increase the odds of the Black Death killing lots of people? lol Probably... Glad we can laugh about the black death after all these years... ring around the rosies pocket full of posies ashes, ashes we all fall down. >> 7) Could there have been effects on rates of promiscuity in the gene >> pool from Catholic punishments of adultery and fornication, as well as >> the negative effects of being a bastard? > > I?believe people tended to be pretty human and have socially?unapproved sex > back then at fairly high levels, but they simply had alot more guilt and > anxiety attached to it, and the risks were far greater.? The person who had > to deal with the negative effects of being a bastard more than anyone else, > was the poor person who actually bore that label! And that poor bastard would carry the genes of his mother and father... and thus potentially to the detriment of their gene pool success... though they did reproduce successfully... it cuts both ways, I suppose. > Well, the mother would > often bear a great deal of social disapproval for having an illegitimate > child.? But I think among the peasants the stigma was not so gigantic, while > the higher you went up the social ladder, the more scandalous it would be > for you.? Landowning males wanted to be certain of the paternity of their > children. You are likely correct. And any genetic effect, to be pervasive, would have to be an effect that affected the serf level of society, since that's where most of the genes were pooled. >> 8) Insofar as ethics are genetic, there may be other impacts of our >> brush with the papacy. > > The papacy is a real mixed bag when it comes to ethics.? There were some > good popes and then some really not so good ones... Yup. Just like everybody else. > Anyway, I hope you get an insightful collection of replies. Me too. Thanks for playing this dangerous game with me... :-) -Kelly From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Tue Dec 13 23:00:58 2011 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 16:00:58 -0700 Subject: [ExI] is a FTL drive a dream without any physics to back it up? Message-ID: A person dared to declare to me that "a faster than light drive is a dream without any physics to back it up." I realize it is purely within the realm of theory and conjecture, but I did not think it fit into the making castles in the sky category. This same person made the statement that "we could build a generation ship tomorrow." I suppose I am an optimist who firmly believes that our transhuman and posthuman descendents will surely find a way over the next few centuries to surpass the agonizing limitations of slower than light space travel. I just wanted input from the list. John -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Tue Dec 13 23:25:43 2011 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 23:25:43 +0000 Subject: [ExI] is a FTL drive a dream without any physics to back it up? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: 2011/12/13 John Grigg wrote: > A person dared to?declare to me?that "a?faster than light?drive is a dream > without any physics to back it up."? I realize it is purely within the realm > of theory and conjecture, but I did not think it fit into the making?castles > in the sky category.? This same person made the statement that "we could > build a generation ship tomorrow." > > I suppose I am an optimist who firmly?believes that our transhuman and > posthuman descendents will surely find a way over the next few centuries to > surpass the agonizing?limitations of slower than light space travel.? I > just?wanted input from the list. > > Dr Kaku duscusses FTL here: The Physics of Interstellar Travel Conclusion: Therefore, one cannot rule out interstellar travel if an advanced civilization can attain enough energy to destabilize space and time. -------------- Now, that's what I call a really big IF........... BillK From msd001 at gmail.com Tue Dec 13 23:50:58 2011 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 18:50:58 -0500 Subject: [ExI] is a FTL drive a dream without any physics to back it up? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 6:25 PM, BillK wrote: > Conclusion: > Therefore, one cannot rule out interstellar travel if an advanced > civilization can attain enough energy to destabilize space and time. > -------------- > > Now, that's what I call a really big IF........... One might also not rule out that an advanced civilization created a universe in which FTL travel is not possible because they needed to build a garden wall around those universes where magic happens every day. ex: We generally don't build firebrick from substances that melt easily. How "advanced" of a civilization are we talking about anyway? From seculartranshumanist at gmail.com Wed Dec 14 01:19:43 2011 From: seculartranshumanist at gmail.com (Joseph Bloch) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 20:19:43 -0500 Subject: [ExI] is a FTL drive a dream without any physics to back it up? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: 2011/12/13 John Grigg : > A person dared to?declare to me?that "a?faster than light?drive is a dream > without any physics to back it up."? I realize it is purely within the realm > of theory and conjecture, but I did not think it fit into the making?castles > in the sky category.? This same person made the statement that "we could > build a generation ship tomorrow." I would agree about the generation ship comment ("tomorrow" being an obvious rhetorical flourish). It's certainly possible that such a thing could probably be done in a reasonable amount of time, say 10-20 years (less if there were some imminent global catastrophe), if there were a global consensus to do so and a realistic destination. Not a practical thing, but definitely within the realm of possibility. Joe From natasha at natasha.cc Wed Dec 14 05:03:21 2011 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 23:03:21 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Origin of ethics and morals In-Reply-To: <4EE7C0BB.9080605@aleph.se> References: <008d01ccb9d5$5e272ca0$1a7585e0$@att.net> <4EE7C0BB.9080605@aleph.se> Message-ID: <98091DFF0C87462694CAA63AFB9ECACF@DFC68LF1> I love you guys. You are simply delightful :-) Natasha Natasha Vita-More PhD Researcher, Univ. of Plymouth, UK Chair, Humanity+ Co-Editor, The Transhumanist Reader -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg Sent: Tuesday, December 13, 2011 3:17 PM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] Origin of ethics and morals spike wrote: > > *> Behalf Of *Stefano Vaj > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] Origin of ethics and morals > > 2011/12/12 John Grigg > > > > The Swede of today (Anders being a prime example) is known for their > civility and friendliness, and not so much for "burning down your > town, killing you, and taking your valuables." > > > So it would seem, but beware never to come between gentle Anders and > sushi. A most dangerous place is this. That kind and civil soul will > race through your burning town, roughly hurl you out of his way, > trample over your valuables and devour the hapless beasts to the very > brink of extinction. It is truly a wonderful sight to behold. > > Once the sushi is gone, he is back to his gentle and scholarly self. > LOL! I am reading this post while I am eating... guess what? You are all safe now. The wildness of Swedes is an interesting thing. While Stefano is right that most stories about Viking depredations came from their (surviving) enemies, it is clear they were not that peaceful. You could call them opportunistic traders, willing to use force if it looked profitable enough. Just a few kilometers away lies the ruins of king ?thelred the Unready's castle. He got his name (from old English 'unraed', 'bad counsel') because he tried to pay off the viking raiders. It worked... for a while. Then they came back for more. And more. And then king Sweyn Forkbeard ended up king of Britain. A few centuries later my ancestors were at it again, conquering big parts of northern Europe all the way down to Prague during the 30-years war. Then the empire got overextended and imploded in 1721, followed by peace and prosperity (more or less). I don't think this is great evidence for any particular national character or any sensible thesis about the genetic basis of aggression. Rather, it suggests that the same genetic stock can produce rather different behaviors under different culture, management and motivation. Which is probably good news. There are presumably genes that affect politics and national character - I recently read a paper showing that the MAOA gene was involved in voting behavior. It is also known to (in some individuals) be involved in aggressivity. There are other genes for oxytocine, dopamine and serotonine receptors that do seem to correlate with some political behavior, group cohesion and risk-taking, so it is not too implausible to think that a population with a certain allele distribution might on average be different in their behavior. However, it all gets modulated by culture: who are the acceptable targets of aggression, how may it be expressed, what institutions exist and how do they mesh with different types of people, and so on. Very complex and fun, but it probably makes national character so holistic that it is hard to make any useful predictions (and then individuals go and react to it in an individual way, producing even trickier outcomes). -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute 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 pjmanney at gmail.com Wed Dec 14 05:41:37 2011 From: pjmanney at gmail.com (PJ Manney) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 21:41:37 -0800 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: 2011/12/12 John Grigg : > I think that the ban on Christians charging interest for loans, may have > caused change in the Jewish gene pool, in terms of the selection for > the?type of intelligence?that excels at?finance.? But then the Jews had a > strong merchant class dating back to the Babylonians and the Romans.? I > think if any people have been molded for success?by powerful selective > pressures?from within and without, it is the Jews.? I find it painfully > ironic that Hitler and the Nazi's considered themselves a "master race," and > persecuted the Jews, when the Jews?are a prime example of?several?millennia > of intense?cultural eugenics at work, with the end result being?a people who > have achieved so much for humanity. As a resident Ashkenazi (which simply means "German" in Medieval Hebrew), please allow me to weigh in. Jews will tell you the following might have exerted pressures on their culture and gene pool for increased intelligence: 1) Your above mentioned ban on usury. 2) Your above mentioned experiences in trade. Jews traveled all over Europe and Asia as soon as trade routes were established. They settled in Europe in the early middle ages. It's how the Ashkenazim (a branch of Judaism) as a genetic pool even exist. A few traveling traders/bankers married gentile/pagan women. Supposedly, it's how many Ashkenazim got red/blonde hair, green/blue eyes, etc. Someone should study haplogroups to see if it's true and not just parallel mutation. 3) Beyond that early intermarriage, we're really inbred! 4) The smartest men in the community had the highest and most prestigious job: Rabbi. The first cut was dynastic (the Cohen/Kohein/Kohanim and Levi families), but they chose the best scholars from those families to become rabbis. Scholars were a prestigious job, too. They married sought-after women in their communities and were under biblical orders to be fruitful and multiply... ;-) Otherwise, wealth, jobs and social class were dynastic. The top women (and intelligence was valued in women, too -- see #5) married the wealthiest men and had the most children who survived. 5) I don't know if you've spent much time with Jewish women, but they were raised to be more than competent -- they had to be dominant. While the men in the old days were studying and arguing their Torah, the women secretly ran the businesses, raised the families and kept the home fires burning, while the men took the credit for a profitable business, smart kids and well-run homes. Girls needed intellectual skills to pull this trick off, so they were taught mathematics, languages, etc. And if you had no sons to push into scholarship, you raised your daughters secretly with advanced schooling. My great-grandmother was the youngest of six daughters to a merchant-banker in Warsaw. Like her sisters, she spoke 6 languages fluently, was taught mathematics, economics, science and philosophy. When her father tried to marry her off to a local aristocrat, she ran away to the New World, married a poor, but adorable and loving tailor and used her knowledge to create a real estate business and raise very smart kids. And this was not unusual! So intelligence was valued in women, not just men. 6) Judaism as a culture reveres learning and analysis in general. Even regarding their religious writings, there is not a written word in the culture that has not been argued, debated, analyzed, reinterpreted, etc. continually for the last 2000 years. 7) Being a persecuted underdog for 2 millennia does wonders for survival skills, which are linked to intelligence. I firmly believe: increased pattern recognition > intelligence > paranoia > survival. Woody Allen was right: it's not whether you're paranoid. It's whether you're paranoid enough. 8) As the perpetual outsider, Jews have had to assimilate local traditions while preserving their own cultural heritage. It's this cultural mishmash and the related practice of synthesizing large amounts of divergent information that often brings fresh intellectual and creative insights. I really think this is a significant reason why 0.2% of the world is Jewish, but 20% of the Nobel winners are Jewish. 9) The IQ increase is predominantly found in Ashkenazim, which is between 50% and 80% of the world's Jews, depending on the source. There's still enormous debate whether there is or isn't a genetic component to all of the above and the arguments both pro and con are sadly rife with political correctness, bigotry, bias, etc. Pity... PJ From gsantostasi at gmail.com Wed Dec 14 06:25:58 2011 From: gsantostasi at gmail.com (Giovanni Santostasi) Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2011 00:25:58 -0600 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I read sometime ago an article that explained that the severe restrictions on what Jews could do in terms of jobs put a very strong evolutionary pressure on this population. They could not own land, they could not do traditional academic jobs, they of course could not join the christian clergy (unless they converted). The only jobs left were jobs that were considered demeaning like certain kind of trade, banking, lawyering required intellectual skills for survival and success. I find this explanation very convincing. Giovanni On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 11:41 PM, PJ Manney wrote: > 2011/12/12 John Grigg : > > I think that the ban on Christians charging interest for loans, may have > > caused change in the Jewish gene pool, in terms of the selection for > > the type of intelligence that excels at finance. But then the Jews had a > > strong merchant class dating back to the Babylonians and the Romans. I > > think if any people have been molded for success by powerful selective > > pressures from within and without, it is the Jews. I find it painfully > > ironic that Hitler and the Nazi's considered themselves a "master race," > and > > persecuted the Jews, when the Jews are a prime example > of several millennia > > of intense cultural eugenics at work, with the end result being a people > who > > have achieved so much for humanity. > > As a resident Ashkenazi (which simply means "German" in Medieval > Hebrew), please allow me to weigh in. Jews will tell you the > following might have exerted pressures on their culture and gene pool > for increased intelligence: > > 1) Your above mentioned ban on usury. > > 2) Your above mentioned experiences in trade. Jews traveled all over > Europe and Asia as soon as trade routes were established. They > settled in Europe in the early middle ages. It's how the Ashkenazim > (a branch of Judaism) as a genetic pool even exist. A few traveling > traders/bankers married gentile/pagan women. Supposedly, it's how > many Ashkenazim got red/blonde hair, green/blue eyes, etc. Someone > should study haplogroups to see if it's true and not just parallel > mutation. > > 3) Beyond that early intermarriage, we're really inbred! > > 4) The smartest men in the community had the highest and most > prestigious job: Rabbi. The first cut was dynastic (the > Cohen/Kohein/Kohanim and Levi families), but they chose the best > scholars from those families to become rabbis. Scholars were a > prestigious job, too. They married sought-after women in their > communities and were under biblical orders to be fruitful and > multiply... ;-) Otherwise, wealth, jobs and social class were > dynastic. The top women (and intelligence was valued in women, too -- > see #5) married the wealthiest men and had the most children who > survived. > > 5) I don't know if you've spent much time with Jewish women, but they > were raised to be more than competent -- they had to be dominant. > While the men in the old days were studying and arguing their Torah, > the women secretly ran the businesses, raised the families and kept > the home fires burning, while the men took the credit for a profitable > business, smart kids and well-run homes. Girls needed intellectual > skills to pull this trick off, so they were taught mathematics, > languages, etc. And if you had no sons to push into scholarship, you > raised your daughters secretly with advanced schooling. My > great-grandmother was the youngest of six daughters to a > merchant-banker in Warsaw. Like her sisters, she spoke 6 languages > fluently, was taught mathematics, economics, science and philosophy. > When her father tried to marry her off to a local aristocrat, she ran > away to the New World, married a poor, but adorable and loving tailor > and used her knowledge to create a real estate business and raise very > smart kids. And this was not unusual! So intelligence was valued in > women, not just men. > > 6) Judaism as a culture reveres learning and analysis in general. > Even regarding their religious writings, there is not a written word > in the culture that has not been argued, debated, analyzed, > reinterpreted, etc. continually for the last 2000 years. > > 7) Being a persecuted underdog for 2 millennia does wonders for > survival skills, which are linked to intelligence. I firmly believe: > increased pattern recognition > intelligence > paranoia > survival. > Woody Allen was right: it's not whether you're paranoid. It's whether > you're paranoid enough. > > 8) As the perpetual outsider, Jews have had to assimilate local > traditions while preserving their own cultural heritage. It's this > cultural mishmash and the related practice of synthesizing large > amounts of divergent information that often brings fresh intellectual > and creative insights. I really think this is a significant reason > why 0.2% of the world is Jewish, but 20% of the Nobel winners are > Jewish. > > 9) The IQ increase is predominantly found in Ashkenazim, which is > between 50% and 80% of the world's Jews, depending on the source. > > There's still enormous debate whether there is or isn't a genetic > component to all of the above and the arguments both pro and con are > sadly rife with political correctness, bigotry, bias, etc. Pity... > > PJ > > _______________________________________________ > 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 spike66 at att.net Wed Dec 14 06:16:00 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 22:16:00 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Origin of ethics and morals In-Reply-To: <98091DFF0C87462694CAA63AFB9ECACF@DFC68LF1> References: <008d01ccb9d5$5e272ca0$1a7585e0$@att.net> <4EE7C0BB.9080605@aleph.se> <98091DFF0C87462694CAA63AFB9ECACF@DFC68LF1> Message-ID: <006e01ccba27$dac97b30$905c7190$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Natasha Vita-More Subject: Re: [ExI] Origin of ethics and morals >...I love you guys. You are simply delightful :-) Natasha... Natasha, you are too kind. I find it delightful that a discussion on the origin of ethics and morals went to the civility of Swedes, to sushi, to Viking depredations to the effect on genes of civilization. Such a delightfully chaotic meme pool is this. spike From gsantostasi at gmail.com Wed Dec 14 06:30:04 2011 From: gsantostasi at gmail.com (Giovanni Santostasi) Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2011 00:30:04 -0600 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Here is a source mentioning the article I talked about on the intelligence of Jewish people in Europe. Researchers Say Intelligence and Diseases May Be Linked in Ashkenazic Genes http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/03/science/03gene.html Giovanni On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 12:25 AM, Giovanni Santostasi wrote: > I read sometime ago an article that explained that the severe restrictions > on what Jews could do in terms of jobs put a very strong evolutionary > pressure on this population. > They could not own land, they could not do traditional academic jobs, they > of course could not join the christian clergy (unless they converted). The > only jobs left were jobs that were considered demeaning like certain kind > of trade, banking, lawyering required intellectual skills for survival and > success. > I find this explanation very convincing. > Giovanni > > > On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 11:41 PM, PJ Manney wrote: > >> 2011/12/12 John Grigg : >> > I think that the ban on Christians charging interest for loans, may have >> > caused change in the Jewish gene pool, in terms of the selection for >> > the type of intelligence that excels at finance. But then the Jews had >> a >> > strong merchant class dating back to the Babylonians and the Romans. I >> > think if any people have been molded for success by powerful selective >> > pressures from within and without, it is the Jews. I find it painfully >> > ironic that Hitler and the Nazi's considered themselves a "master >> race," and >> > persecuted the Jews, when the Jews are a prime example >> of several millennia >> > of intense cultural eugenics at work, with the end result being a >> people who >> > have achieved so much for humanity. >> >> As a resident Ashkenazi (which simply means "German" in Medieval >> Hebrew), please allow me to weigh in. Jews will tell you the >> following might have exerted pressures on their culture and gene pool >> for increased intelligence: >> >> 1) Your above mentioned ban on usury. >> >> 2) Your above mentioned experiences in trade. Jews traveled all over >> Europe and Asia as soon as trade routes were established. They >> settled in Europe in the early middle ages. It's how the Ashkenazim >> (a branch of Judaism) as a genetic pool even exist. A few traveling >> traders/bankers married gentile/pagan women. Supposedly, it's how >> many Ashkenazim got red/blonde hair, green/blue eyes, etc. Someone >> should study haplogroups to see if it's true and not just parallel >> mutation. >> >> 3) Beyond that early intermarriage, we're really inbred! >> >> 4) The smartest men in the community had the highest and most >> prestigious job: Rabbi. The first cut was dynastic (the >> Cohen/Kohein/Kohanim and Levi families), but they chose the best >> scholars from those families to become rabbis. Scholars were a >> prestigious job, too. They married sought-after women in their >> communities and were under biblical orders to be fruitful and >> multiply... ;-) Otherwise, wealth, jobs and social class were >> dynastic. The top women (and intelligence was valued in women, too -- >> see #5) married the wealthiest men and had the most children who >> survived. >> >> 5) I don't know if you've spent much time with Jewish women, but they >> were raised to be more than competent -- they had to be dominant. >> While the men in the old days were studying and arguing their Torah, >> the women secretly ran the businesses, raised the families and kept >> the home fires burning, while the men took the credit for a profitable >> business, smart kids and well-run homes. Girls needed intellectual >> skills to pull this trick off, so they were taught mathematics, >> languages, etc. And if you had no sons to push into scholarship, you >> raised your daughters secretly with advanced schooling. My >> great-grandmother was the youngest of six daughters to a >> merchant-banker in Warsaw. Like her sisters, she spoke 6 languages >> fluently, was taught mathematics, economics, science and philosophy. >> When her father tried to marry her off to a local aristocrat, she ran >> away to the New World, married a poor, but adorable and loving tailor >> and used her knowledge to create a real estate business and raise very >> smart kids. And this was not unusual! So intelligence was valued in >> women, not just men. >> >> 6) Judaism as a culture reveres learning and analysis in general. >> Even regarding their religious writings, there is not a written word >> in the culture that has not been argued, debated, analyzed, >> reinterpreted, etc. continually for the last 2000 years. >> >> 7) Being a persecuted underdog for 2 millennia does wonders for >> survival skills, which are linked to intelligence. I firmly believe: >> increased pattern recognition > intelligence > paranoia > survival. >> Woody Allen was right: it's not whether you're paranoid. It's whether >> you're paranoid enough. >> >> 8) As the perpetual outsider, Jews have had to assimilate local >> traditions while preserving their own cultural heritage. It's this >> cultural mishmash and the related practice of synthesizing large >> amounts of divergent information that often brings fresh intellectual >> and creative insights. I really think this is a significant reason >> why 0.2% of the world is Jewish, but 20% of the Nobel winners are >> Jewish. >> >> 9) The IQ increase is predominantly found in Ashkenazim, which is >> between 50% and 80% of the world's Jews, depending on the source. >> >> There's still enormous debate whether there is or isn't a genetic >> component to all of the above and the arguments both pro and con are >> sadly rife with political correctness, bigotry, bias, etc. Pity... >> >> PJ >> >> _______________________________________________ >> 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 pjmanney at gmail.com Wed Dec 14 06:39:15 2011 From: pjmanney at gmail.com (PJ Manney) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 22:39:15 -0800 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 9:41 PM, PJ Manney wrote: > As a resident Ashkenazi (which simply means "German" in Medieval > Hebrew), please allow me to weigh in. ?Jews will tell you the > following might have exerted pressures on their culture and gene pool > for increased intelligence: > 8) As the perpetual outsider, Jews have had to assimilate local > traditions while preserving their own cultural heritage. ?It's this > cultural mishmash and the related practice of synthesizing large > amounts of divergent information that often brings fresh intellectual > and creative insights. ?I really think this is a significant reason > why 0.2% of the world is Jewish, but 20% of the Nobel winners are > Jewish. I just had another thought and please allow me to follow my thought train here before I pass out for the night: Earlier in the year, Joshua Fox wrote a piece in H+ Magazine comparing transhumanism to Judaism. http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/08/18/beyond-otaku-transhumanism-and-judaism/ I had this to say in response: I believe it is crucial in any comparison of transhumanism and Judiasm to discuss the concept of Tikkun Olum (Repairing or Perfecting the World). Jews and H+ers have many things in common. Maybe it?s why so many are both. Both are used to a challenging, cerebral life. Both see the world differently and appreciate things no one understands but them. Both self-identify as outsiders in a hostile, dominant culture and console themselves that their separateness allows greater moral, ethical or intellectual clarity. It is the pursuit of Tikkun Olam that unites them both. Many Jews believe by performing Mitzvots ? good deeds ? they set an example others can follow and this perfects the world, so the powerless can positively influence others. Many H+ers dedicate their lives to their research or writings and hope someone will use it to change the world for the better. But some think Tikkun Olam means they are responsible for the world, even if they are not a welcome part of it. Since they know best, they must fix it, however possible, regardless of opinions or cost. Jews and H+ers have cultures that meditate upon this choice, however this mentality is not reserved for Jews or H+ers. All Abrahamic religions think this. It gives them moral authority. The American Empire called it ?Manifest Destiny? or ?my way or the highway.? ;-) Ultimately, the question to every society is this: Which way is best? Positive change (whatever that means) only through moral behavior or by any means necessary? ++++++++++++++++ New thought: So if Tikkun Olam/Repairing the World is a cultural imperative for Jews, perhaps it is the motivation (conscious or not) in their search for ways to make the world better, which supports scholarship and activism. And so many win Nobels while doing it... :-) Also, research in altruism, empathy and compassion indicates that species and societies that emphasize those traits are more likely to survive through cooperation. So if we're improving the world both through and to promote cooperation, Tikkun Olam is perpetuated. Goodnight, PJ From eugen at leitl.org Wed Dec 14 07:33:50 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2011 08:33:50 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Stanford AI class wrapup In-Reply-To: <4EE7C2A2.1080707@aleph.se> References: <015a01ccb85b$c68c4d00$53a4e700$@att.net> <016301ccb865$2fe3fce0$8fabf6a0$@att.net> <4EE7C2A2.1080707@aleph.se> Message-ID: <20111214073350.GR31847@leitl.org> On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 10:24:50PM +0100, Anders Sandberg wrote: > So, a few tens of thousand more people who understand AI better. I Ah, but they didn't teach AI in that course. > wonder whether that decreases or increases existential risk? > > (Unofficial FHI position on it: we have no clue :-) ) -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From eugen at leitl.org Wed Dec 14 07:44:11 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2011 08:44:11 +0100 Subject: [ExI] is a FTL drive a dream without any physics to back it up? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20111214074411.GU31847@leitl.org> On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 06:50:58PM -0500, Mike Dougherty wrote: > One might also not rule out that an advanced civilization created a One might not rule out anything. So one has to rule out almost everything, in order to get something done. > universe in which FTL travel is not possible because they needed to > build a garden wall around those universes where magic happens every > day. ex: We generally don't build firebrick from substances that melt > easily. > > How "advanced" of a civilization are we talking about anyway? From atymes at gmail.com Wed Dec 14 07:44:42 2011 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 23:44:42 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Stanford AI class wrapup In-Reply-To: <20111214073350.GR31847@leitl.org> References: <015a01ccb85b$c68c4d00$53a4e700$@att.net> <016301ccb865$2fe3fce0$8fabf6a0$@att.net> <4EE7C2A2.1080707@aleph.se> <20111214073350.GR31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 11:33 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 10:24:50PM +0100, Anders Sandberg wrote: > >> So, a few tens of thousand more people who understand AI better. I > > Ah, but they didn't teach AI in that course. So far as they can tell, no AI signed up to be students. Though, it's possible that some AI just followed the YouTube videos anonymously. They did, however, teach what students were there, techniques to create AI. From eugen at leitl.org Wed Dec 14 09:30:16 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2011 10:30:16 +0100 Subject: [ExI] is a FTL drive a dream without any physics to back it up? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20111214093015.GV31847@leitl.org> On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 08:19:43PM -0500, Joseph Bloch wrote: > I would agree about the generation ship comment ("tomorrow" being an > obvious rhetorical flourish). It's certainly possible that such a > thing could probably be done in a reasonable amount of time, say 10-20 > years (less if there were some imminent global catastrophe), if there > were a global consensus to do so and a realistic destination. Not a > practical thing, but definitely within the realm of possibility. Space will never belong to monkeys. Convert to solid state, and enjoy your relativistic ride at whatever duty cycle you want. From dan_ust at yahoo.com Wed Dec 14 17:28:59 2011 From: dan_ust at yahoo.com (Dan) Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2011 09:28:59 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] Private stratolauncher to orbit Message-ID: <1323883739.21691.YahooMailNeo@web160603.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> http://www.space-travel.com/reports/Its_A_Bird_Its_A_Plane_No_Its_Stratolaunch_999.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Wed Dec 14 18:33:12 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2011 19:33:12 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Morality function, self-correcting moral systems? In-Reply-To: <4EE7C709.5050606@aleph.se> References: <4EE7C709.5050606@aleph.se> Message-ID: On 13 December 2011 22:43, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Also, I have a hypothesis that all human based organisations (societies) I > know of are immoral. > > I think this is a pretty safe assumption that few ethicists would deny. > I probably do not qualify as an "ethicist", but you are IMHO way too optimistic about that... :-) Societies are almost invariably highly moral (and moralistic), they have very complicate and evolving sets of social rules, and they invariably do their best to rewards and enforce compliance, as well as to repress and marginalise individual and collective deviancy. As to the latter, either it is the feat of people who basically share the same values, and simply infringe them but would not dream for a moment of putting them seriously into discussion; or is the feat of people adhering to a competing moral system, and in such event they usually partake in a group where internal morality, even though of a kind competing with the dominant version, is even more central to their lives than it may be the case for their other fellow citizens. True "immoralism" is pretty rare occurrence, and I can hardly see how it could apply to a society as such... -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rtomek at ceti.pl Wed Dec 14 19:53:44 2011 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2011 20:53:44 +0100 (CET) Subject: [ExI] Morality function, self-correcting moral systems? In-Reply-To: <4EE7C709.5050606@aleph.se> References: <4EE7C709.5050606@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Tue, 13 Dec 2011, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Tomasz Rola wrote: > > However, I wonder if there was any attempt to devise a "morality > > function" > Yes. However, most professional ethicists would not think it is a > workable approach if you asked them. The problem: we discuss morality, ethics, try to improve ways humans deal with each other. Without knowing what is to be optimized, trying to optimize it is, to say mildly, optimistic... > I recently found this paper: "An artificial neural network approach for > creating an ethical artificial agent" by Honarvar et al. > http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5423190&tag=1 Using neural net for this is interesting. Unfortunately, I think NNs can behave slightly differently every time they are raised and trained from the scratch. There might be also some small but meaningful problems when porting trained NN from one computer to another (different float representations, different computation' precisions an so on). I am more into finding formula that is not affected by such effects. (oh please, please, hopefully I used these words in a right way and won't cause the whole thread slip into the linguistic mumbo-jumbo-boxing). > > Also, I have a hypothesis that all human based organisations (societies) I > > know of are immoral. > > I think this is a pretty safe assumption that few ethicists would deny. > OK, the social contractarians might actually think it is impossible, but > they are crazy ;-) Yes. However I don't aim at agreeing with guys who say more or less what I do, but to agree with a proof :-). From what you wrote, they don't provide the proof because they cannot. They formulated some thesis but it doesn't seem like they have prooved them - if this was the case, "contractarians" would have to agree, even if it was against their ideas. My understanding of the word, "proof" is not just something that one might or might not consider true at one's whimsical will. Not accepting the proof - of course, if one really wants to be hurt by consequences. One can also stick one's finger into fire, not accepting that fire will sooner or later fry the finger. > > This hints towards conclusion, that it is impossible > > to build moral structure out of humans. > > There are many ethicists who would say that if your morality is > impossible to follow, then it cannot be the true morality. It is the > converse of "ought implies can". However, there might be moralities that > are possible to do but so demanding that practically nobody can do them > (this is a common accusation against Peter Singers utilitarianism, to > which he usually cheerfully responds to by asking why anybody thinks the > correct moral system has to be easy to do). Interesting. Here I can see where a language of ethicists and language of mathematics part ways :-). If M-function gives an n-dimensional point as a result, there are many different outcomes, none of them any more "true" than another. Those are just numbers, giving evaluation of M arguments in a form that is easier to analyse with mathematical tools. > My own take on it is that in a sense we are reinforcement learning > machines, trying to find an optimal policy function (mapping each action > possible in a situation onto a probability of doing it). Becoming better > at morality means we develop a better policy function. The problem is > figuring out what "better" means here (my friend the egoistic hedonist > ethicist Ola has a simple answer - what gives *him* pleasure - but he is > fairly rare). But it is clear that learning and optimizing ought to be > regarded as important parts of moral behavior. You are right, probably. In Ola's case, does he mean short term maximization or long term one? Thanks for the pointers. It will take me some time to grok. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From rtomek at ceti.pl Wed Dec 14 20:53:45 2011 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2011 21:53:45 +0100 (CET) Subject: [ExI] Morality function, self-correcting moral systems? In-Reply-To: References: <4EE7C709.5050606@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Wed, 14 Dec 2011, Stefano Vaj wrote: > True "immoralism" is pretty rare occurrence, and I can hardly see how it > could apply to a society as such... I didn't mean anything in humanistic/religious/ethical (HRE) sense. I am thinking if it is possible to define some "morality function", or M-function, that would take some args (like, structure description - a structure can be a society, too) and give some numbers in return. It seems, indeed, that (HRE)-immoral structures (immoral in HRE sense) don't survive for too long. I don't want to speculate about reasons, I didn't grok it yet. Perhaps it would be possible to analyse this if one could have M-function defined. This would give some hints about (M)-immorality (immorality in mathematical sense). (M)-immorality has not much in common with (HRE)-immorality. What we consider to be moral, can be considered something else 500 years from now, just like slavery is looked upon nowadays. Homosexualism was (HRE)-immoral once, seems to be (HRE)-neutral in some circles, can be (HRE)-moral one day. Truth telling is (HRE)-immoral always+everywhere, I would say, at least as long as humans are involved. Personally I don't have to care what will be (HRE)-moral in the future. I am interested in (M)-morality, because it is something new to me (I've stepped on it with my wandering mind, that's it). Maybe I can draw some fine picture about the concept, or maybe not. For now, I just try to make my mind about what I have stepped on, actually. So, for now, (HRE)-morality is something relative, and society always is (HRE)-moral for at least some of its members. It doesn't prevent it from being (M)-immoral, however. What exactly does it mean, to be (M)-im/moral, I am unable say at the moment :-). But it is more about engineering society than about public opinion about politicians or wars or sexual (mis)behaviours or eating your dead/alive family members. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From anders at aleph.se Wed Dec 14 23:08:29 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2011 23:08:29 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Morality function, self-correcting moral systems? In-Reply-To: References: <4EE7C709.5050606@aleph.se> Message-ID: <4EE92C6D.3060509@aleph.se> Stefano Vaj wrote: > On 13 December 2011 22:43, Anders Sandberg > wrote: > > Also, I have a hypothesis that all human based organisations > (societies) I know of are immoral. > > I think this is a pretty safe assumption that few ethicists would > deny. > > > I probably do not qualify as an "ethicist", but you are IMHO way too > optimistic about that... :-) > > Societies are almost invariably highly moral (and moralistic), they > have very complicate and evolving sets of social rules, and they > invariably do their best to rewards and enforce compliance, as well as > to repress and marginalise individual and collective deviancy. I was using the term immoral in the sense "against the correct morality (if any)". Any moral realist will typically think that society and individuals tend to fall short of correct moral behavior, no matter what their theory is. Meta-ethical relativists might think that the truth or falsity of moral judgements is not objective, but that doesn't imply that they automatically become nihilists, and again whatever their theory is it is unlikely they think society follows it well. Ethical subjectivists might say that morality is all about attitudes, but we know societies and individuals do not behave consistent with their own attitudes. There is certainly a lot of moralizing and attempts at moral behavior going on, but it is a rare ethicist who thinks most of it is correctly done. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Faculty of Philosophy Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Wed Dec 14 23:23:15 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2011 23:23:15 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Morality function, self-correcting moral systems? In-Reply-To: References: <4EE7C709.5050606@aleph.se> Message-ID: <4EE92FE3.8080107@aleph.se> Tomasz Rola wrote: > The problem: we discuss morality, ethics, try to improve ways humans deal > with each other. Without knowing what is to be optimized, trying to > optimize it is, to say mildly, optimistic... > Yup. Hence axiology. But sadly, we do not have much consensus on what value is. And even given a value theory it is often hard to find moral systems that achieve the value (in theory or practice). > Using neural net for this is interesting. Unfortunately, I think NNs can > behave slightly differently every time they are raised and trained from > the scratch. There might be also some small but meaningful problems when > porting trained NN from one computer to another (different float > representations, different computation' precisions an so on). I am more into > finding formula that is not affected by such effects. > > (oh please, please, hopefully I used these words in a right way and won't > cause the whole thread slip into the linguistic mumbo-jumbo-boxing). > No problem. But that NNs give slightly different responses depending on training should not be a problem if the training set is good enough or the problem is well posed - if you get radical differences, then you are using the wrong approach. Similarly for floats: any system that is too noise sensitive is likely a bad moral system. If you ever find a formula it must be implemented using fallible neurons or noisy electronics. > Interesting. Here I can see where a language of ethicists and language of > mathematics part ways :-). > There are some ethicists who go all the way to formal logic, but they are rare. It is rather hard to bridge the gap to reality - as the Wiki entry on formal ethics mentions, unusually for ethics people don't even quibble about the axioms, which is a strong sign that it might not have much actual content. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_ethics > In Ola's case, does he mean short term > maximization or long term one? > I don't remember. I think he is for the long term one, insofar that he wants to maximize the integral of his pleasure. > Thanks for the pointers. It will take me some time to grok. > Yup. Ethics is fun, but besides the facepalm-inducing parts (how can anybody believe *that*?!) there are some really hard problems. People who say otherwise have not groked it. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Faculty of Philosophy Oxford University From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Wed Dec 14 23:59:14 2011 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2011 15:59:14 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] Ashkenazi Longevity was Re: The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) References: Message-ID: <1323907154.19824.YahooMailNeo@web65608.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> ----- Original Message ----- > From: PJ Manney > To: ExI chat list > Cc: > Sent: Tuesday, December 13, 2011 9:41 PM > Subject: Re: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) > > 2011/12/12 John Grigg : >> I think that the ban on Christians charging interest for loans, may have >> caused change in the Jewish gene pool, in terms of the selection for >> the?type of intelligence?that excels at?finance.? But then the Jews had a >> strong merchant class dating back to the Babylonians and the Romans.? I >> think if any people have been molded for success?by powerful selective >> pressures?from within and without, it is the Jews.? I find it painfully >> ironic that Hitler and the Nazi's considered themselves a "master > race," and >> persecuted the Jews, when the Jews?are a prime example of?several?millennia >> of intense?cultural eugenics at work, with the end result being?a people > who >> have achieved so much for humanity. > > As a resident Ashkenazi (which simply means "German" in Medieval > Hebrew), please allow me to weigh in.? Jews will tell you the > following might have exerted pressures on their culture and gene pool > for increased intelligence: > > 1) Your above mentioned ban on usury. > > 2) Your above mentioned experiences in trade.? Jews traveled all over > Europe and Asia as soon as trade routes were established.? They > settled in Europe in the early middle ages.? It's how the Ashkenazim > (a branch of Judaism) as a genetic pool even exist.? A few traveling > traders/bankers married gentile/pagan women.? Supposedly, it's how > many Ashkenazim got red/blonde hair, green/blue eyes, etc.? Someone > should study haplogroups to see if it's true and not just parallel > mutation. > > 3) Beyond that early intermarriage, we're really inbred! > > 4) The smartest men in the community had the highest and most > prestigious job: Rabbi.? The first cut was dynastic (the > Cohen/Kohein/Kohanim and Levi families), but they chose the best > scholars from those families to become rabbis.? Scholars were a > prestigious job, too.? They married sought-after women in their > communities and were under biblical orders to be fruitful and > multiply...? ;-)? Otherwise, wealth, jobs and social class were > dynastic.? The top women (and intelligence was valued in women, too -- > see #5) married the wealthiest men and had the most children who > survived. > > 5) I don't know if you've spent much time with Jewish women, but they > were raised to be more than competent -- they had to be dominant. > While the men in the old days were studying and arguing their Torah, > the women secretly ran the businesses, raised the families and kept > the home fires burning, while the men took the credit for a profitable > business, smart kids and well-run homes.? Girls needed intellectual > skills to pull this trick off, so they were taught mathematics, > languages, etc.? And if you had no sons to push into scholarship, you > raised your daughters secretly with advanced schooling.? My > great-grandmother was the youngest of six daughters to a > merchant-banker in Warsaw.? Like her sisters, she spoke 6 languages > fluently, was taught mathematics, economics, science and philosophy. > When her father tried to marry her off to a local aristocrat, she ran > away to the New World, married a poor, but adorable and loving tailor > and used her knowledge to create a real estate business and raise very > smart kids.? And this was not unusual!? So intelligence was valued in > women, not just men. > > 6) Judaism as a culture reveres learning and analysis in general. > Even regarding their religious writings, there is not a written word > in the culture that has not been argued, debated, analyzed, > reinterpreted, etc. continually for the last 2000 years. > > 7) Being a persecuted underdog for 2 millennia does wonders for > survival skills, which are linked to intelligence.? I firmly believe: > increased pattern recognition > intelligence > paranoia > survival. > Woody Allen was right: it's not whether you're paranoid.? It's > whether > you're paranoid enough. > > 8) As the perpetual outsider, Jews have had to assimilate local > traditions while preserving their own cultural heritage.? It's this > cultural mishmash and the related practice of synthesizing large > amounts of divergent information that often brings fresh intellectual > and creative insights.? I really think this is a significant reason > why 0.2% of the world is Jewish, but 20% of the Nobel winners are > Jewish. > > 9) The IQ increase is predominantly found in Ashkenazim, which is > between 50% and 80% of the world's Jews, depending on the source. > > There's still enormous debate whether there is or isn't a genetic > component to all of the above and the arguments both pro and con are > sadly rife with political correctness, bigotry, bias, etc.? Pity... I didn't know you were Ashkenazi. Lucky you. One thing that *is* an Ashkenazi genetic trait is long life expectancies. The Ashkenazi weigh in with one of the highest rates of survival into the centenarian age category. I once met a researcher who claims that one of the reasons for this is that the lipid-micelles i.e. HDL and LDL cholelesterol particles?in the blood of Ashkenazi patients are of?larger diameter on average than in the overall population,?and therefore more resistant to oxidation by free-radicals.?He has found a genetic linkage to the I405V?allele variant of the?cholesteryl ester transfer protein (CETP) gene. Here is a link to what I think is his work: ? http://www.cenegenicsfoundation.org/library/library_files/Unique_lipoprotein_phenotype_and_genotype_associated_with_exceptional_longevity.pdf ? ? Almost makes up for Tay-Sachs disease in the gene pool no? But more relevant to your previous discussion is the question can you think of any historical selective pressures for this trait to have evolved??For example do Ashkenazi women?typically wait longer before having their first child relative to other ethnic groups??? ? Stuart LaForge ?Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." -Clay Shirky From pjmanney at gmail.com Thu Dec 15 05:30:19 2011 From: pjmanney at gmail.com (PJ Manney) Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2011 21:30:19 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Ashkenazi Longevity was Re: The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: <1323907154.19824.YahooMailNeo@web65608.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> References: <1323907154.19824.YahooMailNeo@web65608.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 3:59 PM, The Avantguardian wrote: > I didn't know you were Ashkenazi. Lucky you. One thing that *is* an Ashkenazi genetic trait is long life expectancies. The Ashkenazi weigh in with one of the highest rates of survival into the centenarian age category. I once met a researcher who claims that one of the reasons for this is that the lipid-micelles i.e. HDL and LDL cholelesterol particles?in the blood of Ashkenazi patients are of?larger diameter on average than in the overall population,?and therefore more resistant to oxidation by free-radicals.?He has found a genetic linkage to the I405V?allele variant of the?cholesteryl ester transfer protein (CETP) gene. Here is a link to what I think is his work: > > http://www.cenegenicsfoundation.org/library/library_files/Unique_lipoprotein_phenotype_and_genotype_associated_with_exceptional_longevity.pdf Sadly, not all Ashkenazim have two copies of the variant necessary. According to 23 and Me, I only carry one copy, which they imply does not confer the same extreme longevity, but perhaps moderate increases. I'll just have to take extra good care of myself... ;-) > Almost makes up for Tay-Sachs disease in the gene pool no? But more relevant to your previous discussion is the question can you think of any historical selective pressures for this trait to have evolved??For example do Ashkenazi women?typically wait longer before having their first child relative to other ethnic groups? I'm happy I'm not a Tay-Sachs carrier. To be fair, historically the odds are low: 1 in 30 are carriers. Millions have been screened through genetic testing since the 1970s. All women of specific religious/cultural/national descents are strongly urged by their Ob-Gyns in the State of California to have a Tay-Sachs test. In Orthodox communities, everyone is checked in high school and some potential marriages have been canceled based on the partners' carrier status! While I could check 'yes' to all the ethnic and national high-risk groups (except French-Canadian, who carry a different mutation), I do not carry the gene. So my children will not have it either and won't have to be worried. Because of the all the screening in the Jewish community, Tay-Sachs has been virtually eradicated -- there hasn't been a new case since 2003. The only Tay-Sachs cases that still pop up come from the French Canadian and Cajun communities. However, the pressure on our gene pool to produce diseases like Tay-Sachs and other lipid storage mutations seems to be from a founder effect: random genetic drift from a larger population exacerbated by inbreeding in a smaller population. When you're always marrying your local cousins, mutations are bound to happen. But even with the inbreeding, it's amazing how few diseases have really come about in that population. We just think Ashkenazim have more diseases, because they're the most studied founder group in medical history and we're looking for them. PJ From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Dec 15 07:57:53 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2011 00:57:53 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: <4EE73608.4030506@aleph.se> References: <4EE73608.4030506@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 4:24 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Hmm, what was the selection pressure from priestly celibacy? One source I > glanced at suggested a density of 0.25% clergy, or one in 40. Assume that > you need above intelligence to join the clergy: this means that the fitness > of the smarter people will be 1-(1/40) (assuming they could keep it in their > cassocks, which was not always true). Ya, made that point... :-) Let's just neglect it for the moment... > Now, intelligence is due to a lot of small gene components with overall > heritability h^2=0.5 or so. In selection experiments h^2=(R-M)/(S-M), where > R is the response in the population trait, S is the value it had in the > selected parent population and M is the population mean. As parents for the > next generation we have a population with mean intelligence S = 0.5*(100-12) > + 0.5*(100+12)*(1-1/40) = 98.6 (the first term is the under iq 100 people, > the second the slightly decreased 100+ population, and 12 is the expectation > of a half normal distribution). So we should expect an IQ in the next > generation of (98.6-100)*0.5 + 100 = 99.3. Not much. Trying to follow along here... where does the 12 come from? Is that the presumed difference in IQ between the priestly class and the normal class? > OK, lets make a recursion out of this. Let M(t) be the population mean > smarts at time t, and assume it is always the upper half that has a chance > of becoming clergy and that variances stay the same. S(t) = 0.5*(M(t)-12) + > 0.5*(M(t)+12)(1-1/40) = [(1-1/80)M(t) -3/20]. > > M(t+1) = M(t) + h^2 (S(t)-M(t)) = (1 + h^2 (1-1/80) -h^2)M(t) -h^2 3/20 = > 0.99375 M(t) - 0.075. > > Not the nicest formula, and I might have slipped somewhere. But running this > from M=100 at ?the First Lateran Council (1123) to the present (36 > generations) produces an overall reduction of population IQ to 77.37. The > present IQ of Italy is 102, so I suspect this overestimates the continence > of priests, the selection effect, heritability and entry requirements to > clergy. Great stab at the math!!! Reality is clearly a little different than this... there must be a lot of other things going on... at least in Italy. -Kelly From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Dec 15 10:13:04 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2011 03:13:04 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 10:41 PM, PJ Manney wrote: > 2011/12/12 John Grigg : > As a resident Ashkenazi (which simply means "German" in Medieval > Hebrew), please allow me to weigh in. ?Jews will tell you the > following might have exerted pressures on their culture and gene pool > for increased intelligence: > There's still enormous debate whether there is or isn't a genetic > component to all of the above and the arguments both pro and con are > sadly rife with political correctness, bigotry, bias, etc. ?Pity... Thanks for sharing this PJ. It was very interesting to hear what you had to say. I have to wonder if some of the things that were happening that made the Jews more intelligent were also happening to the Catholics, but that the process might have been retarded in the Catholic populations by the celibate nature of the intellectual... Just a thought... Stated another way, all of Europe was getting smarter, but the Jews faster than the Catholics... MAYBE... I have no problem with people of another group being ON AVERAGE smarter or less smart than the AVERAGE of my group (whatever group I want to associate myself with today) because I'm quite secure in the fact that I'm above average in my own group... :-) Unless of course that group is a mailing list such as this one, where I rank in about the 5th percentile... I have often wondered if the Mormon experience is in some ways similar to the experience of the Jews... and if some of the things that have made the Jews successful also contribute to the enormous success that Mormons often achieve. From American Idol to Washington, Mormons are becoming a force to be reckoned with. I also think of all the religions out there, that Mormons are among the best prepared to embrace the future as we Extropians see it. Religions that are not centrally powerful will splinter like a hand grenade in the face of the brave new world. Those that don't require huge sacrifices of their memberships will likewise suffer, IMHO. The Mormons have a particular advantage in that they are used to the prophet changing the rules as necessary to meet the world's new challenges without much question. The future of religion is as interesting to me as the future of everything else. I am particularly looking forward to how religions will address issues of NBEs becoming the dominant intelligence on earth, and whether the blessings of the gospel of this or that church will be extended to them... What happens to robots after they are turned off??? :-) It's going to be a fun ride, and I'm personally glad to be watching it from a comfortable distance. -Kelly From eugen at leitl.org Thu Dec 15 10:22:01 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2011 11:22:01 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20111215102201.GU31847@leitl.org> On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 03:13:04AM -0700, Kelly Anderson wrote: > Just a thought... Stated another way, all of Europe was getting > smarter, but the Jews faster than the Catholics... MAYBE... If we were indeed getting smarter, that has stopped for quite a while now. Flynn is dead in many parts of the world. From anders at aleph.se Thu Dec 15 11:08:58 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2011 12:08:58 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: <4EE73608.4030506@aleph.se> Message-ID: <4EE9D54A.9020906@aleph.se> Kelly Anderson wrote: >> Now, intelligence is due to a lot of small gene components with overall >> heritability h^2=0.5 or so. In selection experiments h^2=(R-M)/(S-M), where >> R is the response in the population trait, S is the value it had in the >> selected parent population and M is the population mean. As parents for the >> next generation we have a population with mean intelligence S = 0.5*(100-12) >> + 0.5*(100+12)*(1-1/40) = 98.6 (the first term is the under iq 100 people, >> the second the slightly decreased 100+ population, and 12 is the expectation >> of a half normal distribution). So we should expect an IQ in the next >> generation of (98.6-100)*0.5 + 100 = 99.3. Not much. >> > > Trying to follow along here... where does the 12 come from? Is that > the presumed difference in IQ between the priestly class and the > normal class? > No. I split the normal distribution into two symmetric halves, and calculated their contributions separately (since the below average halve would not have any priests, while the above average halve would have 1/40 less people), then adding them together again. The average value of the positive half of a normal distribution is sigma*sqrt(2/pi) (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-normal_distribution ) so in this case it was 12. If I had time I would likely have done a gene model instead, since I honestly don't think this analysis works that great except close to IQ 100. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From pharos at gmail.com Thu Dec 15 11:10:44 2011 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2011 11:10:44 +0000 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: <20111215102201.GU31847@leitl.org> References: <20111215102201.GU31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 10:22 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > If we were indeed getting smarter, that has stopped for quite a while now. > Flynn is dead in many parts of the world. > > Yea, where Facebook and texting is now wildly popular among the new generation. BillK From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Thu Dec 15 12:08:02 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2011 13:08:02 +0100 Subject: [ExI] is a FTL drive a dream without any physics to back it up? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 14 December 2011 02:19, Joseph Bloch wrote: > I would agree about the generation ship comment ("tomorrow" being an > obvious rhetorical flourish). It's certainly possible that such a > thing could probably be done in a reasonable amount of time, say 10-20 > years (less if there were some imminent global catastrophe), if there > were a global consensus to do so and a realistic destination. > Let us say that we could start building it (or building what is necessary to build it) tomorrow. The real requirement would be a massive reallocation of our current civilisational priorities. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Thu Dec 15 12:19:37 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2011 13:19:37 +0100 Subject: [ExI] is a FTL drive a dream without any physics to back it up? In-Reply-To: <20111214093015.GV31847@leitl.org> References: <20111214093015.GV31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: On 14 December 2011 10:30, Eugen Leitl wrote: > Space will never belong to monkeys. Convert to solid state, and enjoy > your relativistic ride at whatever duty cycle you want. > I have always been perplexed by the solution hinted here. We have known for a while now that more or less everything (starting from the level of complexity of Wolfram's automata) computes things, and that the real difference between the original IBM PC, a Chinese Room, a human brain and a godlike computronium Jupiter brain is essentially one of performance at a given task. So, the most plausible reason to convert to solid state (besides immortality, etc.) or to develop AIs is to compute faster - which in turn means to live and think at a faster pace. What would be the point if we were to deliberately slow down our subjective time? If we object to those opposed to life-extension research that there is no real reason why one should get more bored in a 1000 years lifespan than one does in a 80 years one, the same would apply to hyperfast "intelligence" emulation. So, for interstellar travelling, a FTL one day's journey - lasting, say, 10,000 subjective years anyway to a superfast AI - would be neither less nor more boring for it than a relativistic 50 years' one. If boredom was the problem we would indeed be better off by sending a few frozen monkeys... -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Thu Dec 15 12:58:41 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2011 13:58:41 +0100 Subject: [ExI] is a FTL drive a dream without any physics to back it up? In-Reply-To: References: <20111214093015.GV31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20111215125841.GW31847@leitl.org> On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 01:19:37PM +0100, Stefano Vaj wrote: > What would be the point if we were to deliberately slow down our subjective > time? If we object to those opposed to life-extension research that there When you travel, you want to travel as light as possible. You might want to save juice when cruising, and you certainly can't take much company, particularly gods which count in km^3 and more. There isn't much space on a ~kg payload. > is no real reason why one should get more bored in a 1000 years lifespan > than one does in a 80 years one, the same would apply to hyperfast > "intelligence" emulation. I think pioneers would travel as seeds, not as full organisms. You'd probably have a baseline metabolism which does error correction in transit, and radiation background will cause much bit rot. > So, for interstellar travelling, a FTL one day's journey - lasting, say, > 10,000 subjective years anyway to a superfast AI - would be neither less > nor more boring for it than a relativistic 50 years' one. > > If boredom was the problem we would indeed be better off by sending a few > frozen monkeys... If you can devitrify monkeys, you no longer have to send monkeys. From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Thu Dec 15 17:16:55 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2011 18:16:55 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Morality function, self-correcting moral systems? In-Reply-To: <4EE92C6D.3060509@aleph.se> References: <4EE7C709.5050606@aleph.se> <4EE92C6D.3060509@aleph.se> Message-ID: On 15 December 2011 00:08, Anders Sandberg wrote: > I was using the term immoral in the sense "against the correct morality > (if any)". Any moral realist will typically think that society and > individuals tend to fall short of correct moral behavior, no matter what > their theory is. Meta-ethical relativists might think that the truth or > falsity of moral judgements is not objective, but that doesn't imply that > they automatically become nihilists, and again whatever their theory is it > is unlikely they think society follows it well. > Let me see. I think we are in agreement that all societies try to impose conformity and compliance with their own values on their members (the question whether they may be or not the "correct" ones has sense only for moral realists, and the answer can change depending on the moral realist concerned, but the statement remains true anyway). Thus, morals are an unavoidable cultural product of all human societies in existence or having existed sofar, and no society is "amoral" in that sense. On the other hand, it can be discussed whether varying degrees of success exists amongst different societies in the repression of deviancy. This can in fact be considered as a distinct subject from the effectiveness of law enforcement, which does not necessarily tells us much on the degree of interiorisation of corresponding dominant social norms and of the effectiveness of social enforcement mechanisms (guilt, shame, peer rejection, self-censorship, education, imitation, etc.) But I contend that all that has little to do with the possible dissatisfaction of the average ethicist with the fact that his society does not espouse the "true" (or "her own preferred", if she is a relativist) values to a sufficient degree. For example, in medieval Europe catholic values had a pretty absolute dominance, and catholics still mourn the loss of that kind of egemony even if the medieval society was pretty poor at enforcing them in everyday life, and probably contemporary behaviours are more compliant with their more or less secularised versions than they have ever been. The "ethical" issue for a catholic is instead whether they are challenged as such, something that very few sinners ever meant to do at that time. Those who may happen to do the right thing for perhaps the bad reasons, or involuntarily, or even thinking that in fact they are breaking some ethical rule by doing that and feeling guilty about it, are hardly considered as examples of "morality", AFAIK. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Thu Dec 15 17:27:51 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2011 18:27:51 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: 2011/12/13 John Grigg > It has been a place of great intellectual creativity, yes... But I have > always thought of Italy as being a people with a love/hate > relationship with their Church. And so Italians are not necessarily the > most truly observant of Catholics. > What about the idea that Italian were made intellectually stronger *because* of the especially pervasive christian repression of their cultural life, on the tune of what has been discussed about Jews ("What does not kill you makes you stronger"). :-) But it is also true that the Reform took place exactly because Luther was scandalised that the Pope himself was not taking his role seriously enough, and was spending in arts, wars, lovers, architecture, gastronomy and scholarship like the next Renaissance prince. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Thu Dec 15 17:50:13 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2011 18:50:13 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Ashkenazi Longevity was Re: The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: <1323907154.19824.YahooMailNeo@web65608.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> References: <1323907154.19824.YahooMailNeo@web65608.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 15 December 2011 00:59, The Avantguardian wrote: > ----- Original Message ----- > > From: PJ Manney > > To: ExI chat list > > As a resident Ashkenazi (which simply means "German" in Medieval > > Hebrew), please allow me to weigh in. Jews will tell you the > > following might have exerted pressures on their culture and gene pool > > for increased intelligence: > The rest of your message corresponds pretty much to what I know and think on the subject and develops it in interesting directions. I would also recommend here *Abraham's Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People * by Jon Entineand the subject is also marginally touched in *Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors * by Nicholas Wade . > > 2) Your above mentioned experiences in trade. Jews traveled all over > > Europe and Asia as soon as trade routes were established. They > > settled in Europe in the early middle ages. It's how the Ashkenazim > > (a branch of Judaism) as a genetic pool even exist. A few traveling > > traders/bankers married gentile/pagan women. Supposedly, it's how > > many Ashkenazim got red/blonde hair, green/blue eyes, etc. Of course, a genetic pool exists inasmuch as there are reproductive differentials, as opposed to panmixia. What makes the Jewish case interesting is that while I maintain that all societies and cultures can be seen (also) as eugenic experiments on a very large scale, the Jews' (relative) historical endogamy has very little to do with geographic segregation and even more than usually with a sense of collective identity. Moreover, I suspect that the social mechanisms involved in the occasional interbreeding with Gentiles in average actually brought in "good" genes (say, a rich merchant marrying a beautiful/smart/healthy Gentile girl), rather than diluting whatever might have been the group traits in the process of being selected by the factors you mention. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tara at taramayastales.com Thu Dec 15 18:14:22 2011 From: tara at taramayastales.com (Tara Maya) Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2011 10:14:22 -0800 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4DB4EBF3-1588-49EC-813D-3599F96C3075@taramayastales.com> 2011/12/13 John Grigg It has been a place of great intellectual creativity, yes... But I have always thought of Italy as being a people with a love/hate relationship with their Church. And so Italians are not necessarily the most truly observant of Catholics. I've been working on a research paper about the sociobiological impact of celibacy, actually. There are several rival explanations: 1. The number of actual celibates was so small as to have no real impact. (To my surprise, when I brought the topic up with David Buss at a conference, this was his stance.) 2. Celibacy could represent the triumphal parasitism of a meme (religion) which succeeded in co-opting the most intelligent members of a community to the biological detriment of the community but to the benefit of the religion, which therefore continued to spread. 3. Celibacy was actually biologically beneficial at a certain point in time, and then became less so (at which point, it also became less common). I believe either (2) or (3) is probably correct. The list has already discussed the evidence for (2) [including comparison with rabbis in geographically close community], so I'll share the evidence for (3). During a certain period of human history, celibacy became very popular, apparently independently in several very different civilizations. Before the Catholics, there were other groups that had monks, and there were also Buddhist monks, Jain monks, and other kinds of less structured celibate and hermit traditions around the world. There are certain things these monk/hermit traditions had in common, but I'll focus on the Catholic monks during the Dark Ages, since I've done more research on them. Their ranks were usually made up of younger sons of the nobility or very smart sons from the middle or even lower classes. In a period when class divisions were very strong, there were basically only two kinds of class mobility: the military or the church. The path of warlord during the dark ages no doubt fostered a certain kind of cunning, but not literacy or numeracy or the use of cutlery. It basically favored brawn over brain. There is no question that warlords fathered lots of kids, and so did the landholders who inherited titles and wealth, even if they weren't as strong or cunning. Those two groups of guys did well. Now imagine some scrawny, yet brainy peasant who is smart enough to read, but not brawny enough to bash heads. So he won't be able to rise above his station through war. And you have another kid, perhaps not scrawny, but the third or forth born son of nobility, who is therefore not likely to inherit any land or gold. What these two boys have in common is that neither was likely to get married. Possibly not even laid. They really had nothing to lose, evolutionarily speaking, by joining together as celibate monks and investing a lot of time in learning to read and write and giving sermons to the warlords and nobles about what bastards they were, and the best way to get in good with God would be to give us, er, I mean the church, some of that gold you plundered. The church was extremely rich and powerful in the dark ages, before merchants or even princes could really compete with them. What is interesting is that if you study the families of famous clergy, especially the higher up, is that you realize whole families became very, very rich by having successive generations of second or third sons rise to power in the Church hierarchy. New noble families rose up based on the power base created by clergymen. The clergy may have used their wealth and power to be hypocrites and foster illegitimate children. That definitely happened, and even Popes had offspring. But possibly even without that, it might have made evolutionary sense for families to invest younger sons in the Church because of kin selection (also known as nepotism). It your success means that you have more surviving nephews, nieces and cousins, it might be worth it to have no children. Now, what I suspect is that between the High Middle Ages and the Reformation, this path no longer paid off as well, and that's why smart younger sons began to go into trade rather than take vows, and why hypocritical behavior may have increased even in those who were forced into the clergy. Growing dissastisfaction with a situation which was no longer a net gain to families may have contributed to the Reformation. Tara Maya The Unfinished Song: Initiate The Unfinished Song: Taboo The Unfinished Song: Sacrifice -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Thu Dec 15 22:49:02 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2011 23:49:02 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Intelligence genes (Was: The Catholic Impact) In-Reply-To: <4DB4EBF3-1588-49EC-813D-3599F96C3075@taramayastales.com> References: <4DB4EBF3-1588-49EC-813D-3599F96C3075@taramayastales.com> Message-ID: <4EEA795E.2040003@aleph.se> Looks like we know less about the genetics of intelligence than we thought: "Most Reported Genetic Associations with General Intelligence Are Probably False Positives" http://www.arts.cornell.edu/econ/dbenjamin/IQ-SNPs-PsychSci-20111205-accepted.pdf Short version: intelligence is as heritable as we think, but the effects of the genes reported to affect it significantly have not been replicated in a fairly big new study. Oops. Back to the drawing board. Blog comments: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/12/most-reported-genetic-associations-with-general-intelligence-are-probably-false-positives/#more-14778 http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.com/2011/12/heres-paper-soon-to-appear-in.html -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From bbenzai at yahoo.com Thu Dec 15 22:37:29 2011 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:37:29 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] Morality function, self-correcting moral systems? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1323988649.25504.YahooMailClassic@web114413.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Tomasz Rola wrote: > On Tue, 13 Dec 2011, Anders Sandberg wrote: >> Tomasz Rola wrote: >> > However, I wonder if there was any attempt to devise a "morality >> > function" >> Yes. However, most professional ethicists would not think it is a >> workable approach if you asked them. > >The problem: we discuss morality, ethics, try to improve ways humans deal >with each other. Without knowing what is to be optimized, trying to >optimize it is, to say mildly, optimistic... Well, according to Sam Harris, 'well-being' is the obvious thing that should be optimised. This sounds perfectly reasonable, to me. Defining what exactly 'well-being' means, on the other hand, is the difficult thing. Obviously one person's well-being is not necessarily the same as another's. So personal preference must be a part of it, as well as 'universal' factors. It seems clear that as long as some groups of people can claim with a straight face that morality consists of following the rules laid down in an ancient book, claimed to be the inerrant word of a supernatural being, that there cannot really be any agreement on what morality is (even if only because there are many such books, each with different rules). It may be easy to rationally demolish such rule-based moral systems, but that cuts no ice in the real world. Try convincing a catholic that Original Sin is actually an evil concept. Probably the only practical approach is to decide for yourself what you think a good moral system is, and do your best to stick to it. Imposing your morals on someone else is probably immoral. Unless you are the follower of an ancient book... Ben Zaiboc From anders at aleph.se Thu Dec 15 23:05:11 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 00:05:11 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Computational equivalence (Was: FTL drive) In-Reply-To: References: <20111214093015.GV31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: <4EEA7D27.6030506@aleph.se> Stefano Vaj wrote: > We have known for a while now that more or less everything (starting > from the level of complexity of Wolfram's automata) computes things, > and that the real difference between the original IBM PC, a Chinese > Room, a human brain and a godlike computronium Jupiter brain is > essentially one of performance at a given task. However, that performance matters a lot. My chair is in a sense implementing my mind (and yours), but not well enough that any of us would sacrifice our lives happily knowing we will survive in the chair. The lack of performance in the real world is so complete that we do not care at all about the mental states implemented in random objects. There are also major differences in the abilities between computational systems; I am not convinced at all by Wolfram's reasoning - he is essentially just arguing that everything is equivalent to Turing-machines, and since any of them can compute any other (with a bit of overhead) they are the same. The snags are that 1) the overhead can be *enormous* - constant factors in theoretical computer science are often amazingly large numbers, the kind that cannot even be expressed with exponent notation. 2) That a Turing machine can compute program X and Y doesn't mean X and Y are equivalent in power [*], and one might be tremendously slower on the machine despite being faster on some other machine. So implementing ones mental processes on the right substrate matters: do it on the wrong substrate and you cannot interact efficiently with the real world, or even think within the history of the universe. Solid state societies seem to have advantages here (variable speed, compactness, resiliency, resource use) in many domains that matter if one wants to go to space. [*] A nice new paper by Shane Legg about an approximate universal intelligence measure, http://www.vetta.org/2011/11/aiq/ shows that even for the small cases we can compute readily, there are a clear ranking of intelligences between algorithms (anecdotally, Shane can outperform AIXItl on this task so far...) It is also the first *serious* application of the Brainfuck language I ever seen. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Fri Dec 16 10:21:26 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 11:21:26 +0100 Subject: [ExI] is a FTL drive a dream without any physics to back it up? In-Reply-To: <20111215125841.GW31847@leitl.org> References: <20111214093015.GV31847@leitl.org> <20111215125841.GW31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: On 15 December 2011 13:58, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 01:19:37PM +0100, Stefano Vaj wrote: > > > What would be the point if we were to deliberately slow down our > subjective > > time? If we object to those opposed to life-extension research that there > > When you travel, you want to travel as light as possible. > You might want to save juice when cruising, and you certainly > can't take much company, particularly gods which count > in km^3 and more. There isn't much space on a ~kg payload. > OK. So it would not be a matter of subjective time, but a matter of energy consumption (which would not apply to, say, a Bussard propulsor or any other renovating source thereof). In such event, I think the best would be to switch off whatever you send altogether, be it biological or digital or a mix thereof, unless and until you find the next source of energy. I think pioneers would travel as seeds, not as full organisms. > Yes, I always wondered about that. How much do we push the idea, however? The "lightest" way to seed AIs at destination might be to send a few probiotes likely to inseminate an evolutionary cycle, leading to organisms able to transfer themselves on synthetic support. But this is not much more emotionally satisfying than send the Voyager with a few records of our civilisation towards the big Nothing... -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Fri Dec 16 10:42:13 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 11:42:13 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Intelligence genes (Was: The Catholic Impact) In-Reply-To: <4EEA795E.2040003@aleph.se> References: <4DB4EBF3-1588-49EC-813D-3599F96C3075@taramayastales.com> <4EEA795E.2040003@aleph.se> Message-ID: On 15 December 2011 23:49, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Looks like we know less about the genetics of intelligence than we thought: > > "Most Reported Genetic Associations with General Intelligence Are Probably > False Positives" > http://www.arts.cornell.edu/**econ/dbenjamin/IQ-SNPs-** > PsychSci-20111205-accepted.pdf > > Short version: intelligence is as heritable as we think, but the effects > of the genes reported to affect it significantly have not been replicated > in a fairly big new study. Oops. Back to the drawing board. > If by "general intelligence" we mean "performance in resolving IQ test", I think that too many phenotypic traits are involved for it to be plausible that the results be determined by just one or a very few genes, as it appears to be the case for the "absolute ear" in music. As you say, however, this does not change much as to the role of one's genetic profile in achieving the results concerned. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Dec 16 10:57:34 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 11:57:34 +0100 Subject: [ExI] is a FTL drive a dream without any physics to back it up? In-Reply-To: References: <20111214093015.GV31847@leitl.org> <20111215125841.GW31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20111216105734.GR31847@leitl.org> On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 11:21:26AM +0100, Stefano Vaj wrote: > OK. So it would not be a matter of subjective time, but a matter of energy > consumption (which would not apply to, say, a Bussard propulsor or any No, it's about mass. Relativistic travel is energetically expensive, so you want to limit the payload size. > other renovating source thereof). If we want to ramp up to >0.9 c within months you'll need a light craft with a huge sail and a noticeable fraction of Sun's total output for propulsion. Nothing else really works with known physics. Even so braking is iffy, as I don't see how sacrificial sails would work over few lightyears. > In such event, I think the best would be to switch off whatever you send > altogether, be it biological or digital or a mix thereof, unless and until > you find the next source of energy. The beam tracking the sail provides more than enough energy. It's the mass that we don't have. Even with machine-phase a few grams of computronium isn't that much. > I think pioneers would travel as seeds, not as full organisms. > > > > Yes, I always wondered about that. How much do we push the idea, however? > The "lightest" way to seed AIs at destination might be to send a few > probiotes likely to inseminate an evolutionary cycle, leading to organisms In theory you only need a few cubic microns. In practice you'll need a ~kg craft deccelerated to sufficiently low delta v so that it can find and latch upon suitable space debris to feed on. The rest is an exponential growth process. > able to transfer themselves on synthetic support. But this is not much more > emotionally satisfying than send the Voyager with a few records of our > civilisation towards the big Nothing... You're not going to send the seeds. Something that has a need will send the seeds. You will contribute to that something with the needs will come into being. It will be definitely not human, so no human motivations apply. (Apart from making babies, that is). From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Fri Dec 16 11:13:40 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 12:13:40 +0100 Subject: [ExI] is a FTL drive a dream without any physics to back it up? In-Reply-To: <20111216105734.GR31847@leitl.org> References: <20111214093015.GV31847@leitl.org> <20111215125841.GW31847@leitl.org> <20111216105734.GR31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: On 16 December 2011 11:57, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 11:21:26AM +0100, Stefano Vaj wrote: > > > OK. So it would not be a matter of subjective time, but a matter of > energy > > consumption (which would not apply to, say, a Bussard propulsor or any > > No, it's about mass. Relativistic travel is energetically > expensive, so you want to limit the payload size. > That's clear. And energy being mass, you may want to bring along as little of it as possible... You're not going to send the seeds. Something that has a need will > send the seeds. You will contribute to that something with the needs > will come into being. > > It will be definitely not human, so no human motivations apply. > (Apart from making babies, that is). > Certainly I will and do contribute :-), but we were discussing here of what we could in principle do ourselves... -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Dec 16 11:30:43 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 12:30:43 +0100 Subject: [ExI] is a FTL drive a dream without any physics to back it up? In-Reply-To: References: <20111214093015.GV31847@leitl.org> <20111215125841.GW31847@leitl.org> <20111216105734.GR31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20111216113043.GW31847@leitl.org> On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 12:13:40PM +0100, Stefano Vaj wrote: > That's clear. And energy being mass, you may want to bring along as little > of it as possible... A gray sail probe will need circumstellar cloud of hardware to create the beam (whether by individual lasers targeting, or the cloud collectively acting as a phased array microwave radiator). So if your sail e.g. does double duty as a rectenna, you're awash in power during the entire journey. > Certainly I will and do contribute :-), but we were discussing here of what > we could in principle do ourselves... Obviously AI research is substrate constrained, and machine-phase or at least molecular circuitry fabrication would be synergistic, since more powerful hardware feeds back into development of more powerful hardware. So you can push (real) AI research and/or molecular electronics manufacturing research. Both are difficult and very expensive. Meanwhile, to get there we need to convert from fossil resource and energy base to fully renewable energy and resource base similarly as we did about a century ago, when we moved from biofuels to fossils, only on an order of magnitude larger scale. So in order to get out into space we must prevent collapse. This should be our first and foremost priority as a species. From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Fri Dec 16 11:34:33 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 12:34:33 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Morality function, self-correcting moral systems? In-Reply-To: <1323988649.25504.YahooMailClassic@web114413.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <1323988649.25504.YahooMailClassic@web114413.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 15 December 2011 23:37, Ben Zaiboc wrote: > Well, according to Sam Harris, 'well-being' is the obvious thing that > should be optimised. This sounds perfectly reasonable, to me. Defining > what exactly 'well-being' means, on the other hand, is the difficult thing. > Obviously one person's well-being is not necessarily the same as > another's. So personal preference must be a part of it, as well as > 'universal' factors. > > It seems clear that as long as some groups of people can claim with a > straight face that morality consists of following the rules laid down in an > ancient book, claimed to be the inerrant word of a supernatural being, that > there cannot really be any agreement on what morality is (even if only > because there are many such books, each with different rules). It may be > easy to rationally demolish such rule-based moral systems, but that cuts no > ice in the real world. Try convincing a catholic that Original Sin is > actually an evil concept. > > Probably the only practical approach is to decide for yourself what you > think a good moral system is, and do your best to stick to it. Imposing > your morals on someone else is probably immoral. Unless you are the > follower of an ancient book... > I think that a general process is in place in our society where the ex auctoritate argument progressively cuts less and less cloth. This is by the way not typical of modernity, but simply the reflection of an age of change where things held as "evident" in the past are not any more, and new ones are not yet (when somebody started claiming that a few scriptures were "holier" than others, they did have to face the same incredulity we exhibit today). Where does it leave us, however? I suspect that when a really general consensus can be reached on the universal validity of an ethical predicate, the same is invariably of a purely formal nature ("Do the Right Thing", "Evil is To Be Fought", etc. something which tells us strictly nothing as to the what the right and the evil would be). Perhaps the only thing which might put all those concerned with morality in the same camp is the idea that it would be nice if people were more consistent with their principles, whatever they might be (I for one put a big weight on consistency as to my respect of people I do not agree with, or lack thereof). But even there, some might prefer that principles dictating behaviours deemed "immoral" by themselves be infringed rather than observed by their adopters... -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Fri Dec 16 11:43:52 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 12:43:52 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Computational equivalence (Was: FTL drive) In-Reply-To: <4EEA7D27.6030506@aleph.se> References: <20111214093015.GV31847@leitl.org> <4EEA7D27.6030506@aleph.se> Message-ID: On 16 December 2011 00:05, Anders Sandberg wrote: > There are also major differences in the abilities between computational > systems; I am not convinced at all by Wolfram's reasoning - he is > essentially just arguing that everything is equivalent to Turing-machines, > and since any of them can compute any other (with a bit of overhead) they > are the same. The snags are that 1) the overhead can be *enormous* - > constant factors in theoretical computer science are often amazingly large > numbers, the kind that cannot even be expressed with exponent notation. 2) > That a Turing machine can compute program X and Y doesn't mean X and Y are > equivalent in power [*], and one might be tremendously slower on the > machine despite being faster on some other machine. > > So implementing ones mental processes on the right substrate matters: do > it on the wrong substrate and you cannot interact efficiently with the real > world, or even think within the history of the universe. Solid state > societies seem to have advantages here (variable speed, compactness, > resiliency, resource use) in many domains that matter if one wants to go to > space. > As long as we admit that it is a quantitative, rather than a qualitative, difference, I am OK with that. Heck, quantities do matter in almost every aspect of life. And differences which makes some quantities practically uncountable or vanishingly small even more. I deal with that with an article on AI in English of which Anders should have a preview copy and that I expect soon to land on the Web somewhere. OTOH, my issue here was about the concept, which is discussed I believe in some Egan's book or other, of an AI which would be supremely "intelligent", and yet deliberately slowed down (possibly by itself) to avoid "boredom" or to make some future developments to arrive faster in subjective time. This idea is akin IMHO of walking in a pit and then raise on your toetip... -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Dec 16 13:27:52 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 14:27:52 +0100 Subject: [ExI] the right stuff Message-ID: <20111216132752.GZ31847@leitl.org> If monkeys are to travel, they should strive to be like http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4001832/2ft-tall-Jyoti-Amge-is-the-worlds-smallest-woman.html From ilia.stambler at gmail.com Thu Dec 15 05:44:40 2011 From: ilia.stambler at gmail.com (Ilia Stambler) Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2011 07:44:40 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Ashkenazi Longevity was Re: The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: <1323907154.19824.YahooMailNeo@web65608.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> Message-ID: > "3) Beyond that early intermarriage, we're really inbred!" I am wondering whether the inbreeding generally had anything to do with this increasing longevity. Here is for example what has been reported about seed beetles (thought there have been conflicting data on other species of insects and animals, i.e. unlike in this case, showing that inbreeding generally decreases longevity): ?Inbreeding can unexpectedly extend male lifespan. Insect experiments described in the open access journal *BMC Evolutionary Biology * have shown that, in seed beetles, inbreeding causes males to live longer, while shortening female lifespan.? http://www.biomedcentral.com/presscenter/pressreleases/20090204 I am an Ashkenazi Israeli myself, so I hope I won?t be suspected in any politically incorrectness, or any other malice. Just trying to figure it out... Ilia On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 7:30 AM, PJ Manney wrote: > On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 3:59 PM, The Avantguardian > wrote: > > I didn't know you were Ashkenazi. Lucky you. One thing that *is* an > Ashkenazi genetic trait is long life expectancies. The Ashkenazi weigh in > with one of the highest rates of survival into the centenarian age > category. I once met a researcher who claims that one of the reasons for > this is that the lipid-micelles i.e. HDL and LDL cholelesterol particles in > the blood of Ashkenazi patients are of larger diameter on average than in > the overall population, and therefore more resistant to oxidation by > free-radicals. He has found a genetic linkage to the I405V allele variant > of the cholesteryl ester transfer protein (CETP) gene. Here is a link to > what I think is his work: > > > > > http://www.cenegenicsfoundation.org/library/library_files/Unique_lipoprotein_phenotype_and_genotype_associated_with_exceptional_longevity.pdf > > Sadly, not all Ashkenazim have two copies of the variant necessary. > According to 23 and Me, I only carry one copy, which they imply does > not confer the same extreme longevity, but perhaps moderate increases. > I'll just have to take extra good care of myself... ;-) > > > Almost makes up for Tay-Sachs disease in the gene pool no? But more > relevant to your previous discussion is the question can you think of any > historical selective pressures for this trait to have evolved? For example > do Ashkenazi women typically wait longer before having their first child > relative to other ethnic groups? > > I'm happy I'm not a Tay-Sachs carrier. To be fair, historically the > odds are low: 1 in 30 are carriers. Millions have been screened > through genetic testing since the 1970s. All women of specific > religious/cultural/national descents are strongly urged by their > Ob-Gyns in the State of California to have a Tay-Sachs test. In > Orthodox communities, everyone is checked in high school and some > potential marriages have been canceled based on the partners' carrier > status! While I could check 'yes' to all the ethnic and national > high-risk groups (except French-Canadian, who carry a different > mutation), I do not carry the gene. So my children will not have it > either and won't have to be worried. Because of the all the screening > in the Jewish community, Tay-Sachs has been virtually eradicated -- > there hasn't been a new case since 2003. The only Tay-Sachs cases > that still pop up come from the French Canadian and Cajun communities. > > However, the pressure on our gene pool to produce diseases like > Tay-Sachs and other lipid storage mutations seems to be from a founder > effect: random genetic drift from a larger population exacerbated by > inbreeding in a smaller population. When you're always marrying your > local cousins, mutations are bound to happen. But even with the > inbreeding, it's amazing how few diseases have really come about in > that population. We just think Ashkenazim have more diseases, because > they're the most studied founder group in medical history and we're > looking for them. > > PJ > > _______________________________________________ > 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 spike66 at att.net Fri Dec 16 13:42:21 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 05:42:21 -0800 Subject: [ExI] the right stuff In-Reply-To: <20111216132752.GZ31847@leitl.org> References: <20111216132752.GZ31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: <011301ccbbf8$89e0b3f0$9da21bd0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl Subject: [ExI] the right stuff >...If monkeys are to travel, they should strive to be like http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4001832/2ft-tall-Jyoti-Amge-is-the -worlds-smallest-woman.html The mass of a pressure vessel scales as the cube of the linear dimension. Repeat it like a mantra. spike From dan_ust at yahoo.com Fri Dec 16 14:51:15 2011 From: dan_ust at yahoo.com (Dan) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 06:51:15 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] Hitch belongs to the ages In-Reply-To: <1324047035.78677.YahooMailNeo@web160606.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> References: <1324047035.78677.YahooMailNeo@web160606.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1324047075.15553.YahooMailNeo@web160606.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2075027/Christopher-Hitchens-moral-power-polemical-fury.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Fri Dec 16 16:04:37 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 17:04:37 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Hitch belongs to the ages In-Reply-To: <1324047075.15553.YahooMailNeo@web160606.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> References: <1324047035.78677.YahooMailNeo@web160606.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <1324047075.15553.YahooMailNeo@web160606.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: 2011/12/16 Dan > > http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2075027/Christopher-Hitchens-moral-power-polemical-fury.html > The Bright I have always liked the least... -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dan_ust at yahoo.com Fri Dec 16 16:54:20 2011 From: dan_ust at yahoo.com (Dan) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 08:54:20 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] Hitch belongs to the ages In-Reply-To: References: <1324047035.78677.YahooMailNeo@web160606.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <1324047075.15553.YahooMailNeo@web160606.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1324054460.22778.YahooMailNeo@web160606.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> On Friday, December 16, 2011 11:04 AMStefano Vaj wrote: > 2011/12/16 Dan >> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2075027/Christopher-Hitchens-moral-power-polemical-fury.html > > The Bright I have always liked the least... Why's that? And which others one are you comparing him to? By the way, Reason magazine has an obit out on him along with links to an old interview that might be of interest: http://reason.com/archives/2011/12/16/christopher-hitchens-rip/singlepage Regards, Dan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Fri Dec 16 17:13:18 2011 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 09:13:18 -0800 Subject: [ExI] the right stuff In-Reply-To: <011301ccbbf8$89e0b3f0$9da21bd0$@att.net> References: <20111216132752.GZ31847@leitl.org> <011301ccbbf8$89e0b3f0$9da21bd0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 5:42 AM, spike wrote: >>... On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl > Subject: [ExI] the right stuff > >>...If monkeys are to travel, they should strive to be like > http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4001832/2ft-tall-Jyoti-Amge-is-the > -worlds-smallest-woman.html > > The mass of a pressure vessel scales as the cube of the linear dimension. > Repeat it like a mantra. The problem of getting people into space has far more to do with the efficiency of thrust than the mass of the payload. Repeat it like a mantra. Any effort toward making people smaller, will have a far higher effort to reward ratio spent instead in improving telepresence and robotics. Repeat it like a mantra. From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Fri Dec 16 17:19:41 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 18:19:41 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Hitch belongs to the ages In-Reply-To: <1324054460.22778.YahooMailNeo@web160606.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> References: <1324047035.78677.YahooMailNeo@web160606.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <1324047075.15553.YahooMailNeo@web160606.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <1324054460.22778.YahooMailNeo@web160606.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: 2011/12/16 Dan > **On Friday, December 16, 2011 11:04 AM Stefano Vaj > wrote: > ****> 2011/12/16 Dan > >> > http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2075027/Christopher-Hitchens-moral-power-polemical-fury.html > > > > > The Bright I have always liked the least... > > Why's that? And which others one are you comparing him to? > Dennett, Dawkins, Stenger... I have never met him, but always found Hitchens in his writings, well, as he is described in the obituary: very strident and opinionated and moralistic. This is especially disturbing to me when one is supposed to be on my side, as it was the case with regard to monotheistic obscurantism (see *God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything *). -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Fri Dec 16 20:07:13 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 12:07:13 -0800 Subject: [ExI] the right stuff In-Reply-To: References: <20111216132752.GZ31847@leitl.org> <011301ccbbf8$89e0b3f0$9da21bd0$@att.net> Message-ID: <01bb01ccbc2e$4dc9a580$e95cf080$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes Sent: Friday, December 16, 2011 9:13 AM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] the right stuff On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 5:42 AM, spike wrote: >>... On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl > Subject: [ExI] the right stuff > >>...If monkeys are to travel, they should strive to be like > http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4001832/2ft-tall-Jyoti-Amge-is-the -worlds-smallest-woman.html > >> The mass of a pressure vessel scales as the cube of the linear dimension. > Repeat it like a mantra. >...The problem of getting people into space has far more to do with the efficiency of thrust than the mass of the payload... For any reasonably large payload, the cost is always going to be roughly proportional to the mass. If the payload is very small, the cost per unit mass goes crazy high as we found out, unless you can use a getaway special. But for missions requiring humans, less human is better. If we had one third scale humans, it saves mass like crazy. Not a factor of 27, but saves a lot of payload. >Any effort toward making people smaller, will have a far higher effort to reward ratio spent instead in improving telepresence and robotics. ... We don't make people smaller, we choose smaller people. Actually they already do that in a sense. The reasoning behind using fighter pilots for the first space missions is that they tend to be small guys: they need to pull a lot of Gs and fit into a fighter cockpit. But I can think of only one logical space mission left for humans: they would go into Mars synchronous orbit and guide semi-autonomous robots on the surface. For that task, we need one very small person, possibly two. Two has some big advantages, but it waaaay more than doubles the weight of the payload. spike From atymes at gmail.com Fri Dec 16 20:24:04 2011 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 12:24:04 -0800 Subject: [ExI] the right stuff In-Reply-To: <01bb01ccbc2e$4dc9a580$e95cf080$@att.net> References: <20111216132752.GZ31847@leitl.org> <011301ccbbf8$89e0b3f0$9da21bd0$@att.net> <01bb01ccbc2e$4dc9a580$e95cf080$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 12:07 PM, spike wrote: > For any reasonably large payload, the cost is always going to be roughly > proportional to the mass. ?If the payload is very small, the cost per unit > mass goes crazy high as we found out, unless you can use a getaway special. Right. So, improve engine technology (ion thrusters, anyone?) until "several humans and associated life support" counts as "very small" relative to the performance you're getting. > But I can think of only one logical space mission left for humans: they > would go into Mars synchronous orbit and guide semi-autonomous robots on the > surface. I can think of more than that, though I will agree that robots can do more than they are currently used for. From anders at aleph.se Sat Dec 17 13:47:43 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2011 14:47:43 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Morality function, self-correcting moral systems? In-Reply-To: <1323988649.25504.YahooMailClassic@web114413.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <1323988649.25504.YahooMailClassic@web114413.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <4EEC9D7F.1040406@aleph.se> Ben Zaiboc wrote: > Well, according to Sam Harris, 'well-being' is the obvious thing that should be optimised. This sounds perfectly reasonable, to me. Sure. But it is a reasonable philosophical claim, rather than a scientific one (as he is claiming). See http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2010/10/sam-harris-the-naturalistic-fallacy-and-the-slipperiness-of-well-being/ http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2011/11/sam-harris-is-wrong-about-science-and-morality/ for some griping from my office-mates about his claim. Note that several of us agree that well-being (whatever it is) is worth optimising, either because it is good itself or because it helps us achieve the good. But it is tricky to make a proper justification for it, let alone define it well. > Probably the only practical approach is to decide for yourself what you think a good moral system is, and do your best to stick to it. Imposing your morals on someone else is probably immoral. Unless you are the follower of an ancient book... > In the end you have to decide for yourself what you think and do. But you should check out whether you can find high quality ideas about it, or find good methodologies for improving your own abilities to achieve it. Some of you might be interested in Richard Sherry's "WHO?S TO SAY WHAT?S RIGHT OR WRONG? PEOPLE WHO HAVE PH.D.S IN PHILOSOPHY, THAT?S WHO" http://mises.org/journals/jls/21_3/21_3_1.pdf -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From lubkin at unreasonable.com Sat Dec 17 13:44:00 2011 From: lubkin at unreasonable.com (David Lubkin) Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2011 08:44:00 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Hitch belongs to the ages In-Reply-To: References: <1324047035.78677.YahooMailNeo@web160606.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <1324047075.15553.YahooMailNeo@web160606.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <1324054460.22778.YahooMailNeo@web160606.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <201112171425.pBHEPxaW005131@andromeda.ziaspace.com> I found him a pleasure to read and to listen to, whether I agreed with him on the subject in question or not. The nearest, perhaps, we'll get to encountering Orwell, minus the sf. I love that the Vatican asked him to serve as the unofficial Devil's Advocate for Mother Teresa. And although he forcefully presented his viewpoint, it didn't interfere with his befriending a wide range of people who violently disagreed with him, which speaks well of him. Too many people -- including some in our community -- will shun someone solely for holding ideas they disagree with. (When I hold my parties, I have to juggle who to invite, because W won't attend if X does and likewise for Y and Z.) This is my favorite picture in the slide show at Vanity Fair: He was featured for one of BookTV's three-hour in-depth interviews. If you didn't catch it: -- David. From pjmanney at gmail.com Sat Dec 17 16:17:14 2011 From: pjmanney at gmail.com (PJ Manney) Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2011 08:17:14 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Ashkenazi Longevity was Re: The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: <1323907154.19824.YahooMailNeo@web65608.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> Message-ID: 2011/12/14 Ilia Stambler : > ?> "3) Beyond that early intermarriage, we're really inbred!" > I am wondering whether the inbreeding generally had anything to do with this > increasing longevity. Yes, it's likely it's another example of the founder effect. > Here is for example what has been reported about seed beetles (thought there > have been conflicting data on other species of insects and animals, i.e. > unlike in this case, showing that inbreeding generally decreases longevity): > ?Inbreeding can unexpectedly extend male lifespan. Insect experiments > described in the open access journal?BMC Evolutionary Biology?have shown > that, in seed beetles, inbreeding causes males to live longer, while > shortening female lifespan.? > http://www.biomedcentral.com/presscenter/pressreleases/20090204 > I am an Ashkenazi Israeli myself, so I hope I won?t be suspected in any > politically incorrectness, or any other malice. Just trying to figure it > out... Try not to worry about asking questions that might be construed as politically incorrect or malicious, if it comes from a good and curious place. I dislike and fear the censorship of research because the answers might be politically or culturally inconvenient. We're lucky, because Ashkenazi have more information about their genetics than any other group in the world, being an easy, highly cooperative and unusual population to study, leading to general research on genomics. But even after 40+ years of questions and attempted answers, we still know so little. PJ From pjmanney at gmail.com Sat Dec 17 16:05:14 2011 From: pjmanney at gmail.com (PJ Manney) Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2011 08:05:14 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Ashkenazi Longevity was Re: The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: <1323907154.19824.YahooMailNeo@web65608.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> Message-ID: 2011/12/15 Stefano Vaj : > The rest of your message? corresponds pretty much to what I know and think > on the subject and develops it in interesting directions. I would also > recommend here > Abraham's Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People by Jon > Entine and the subject is also marginally touched in Before the Dawn: > Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors by Nicholas Wade. Thanks for these. I'm just starting some serious research into the subject. > What makes the Jewish case interesting is that while I maintain that all > societies and cultures can be seen (also) as eugenic experiments on a very > large scale, the Jews' (relative) historical endogamy has very little to do > with geographic segregation and even more than usually with a sense of > collective identity. Moreover, I suspect that the social mechanisms involved > in the occasional interbreeding with Gentiles in average actually brought in > "good" genes (say, a rich merchant marrying a beautiful/smart/healthy > Gentile girl), rather than diluting whatever might have been the group > traits in the process of being selected by the factors you mention. Absolutely! I joke that I married my non-Jewish husband to add hybrid vigor to my bloodline. (Well that, and he's adorable!) He's half Norwegian, half German and has a very different 23 and Me profile and haplogroup than me. And so far, my children are proving I'm right! :-) PJ From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sat Dec 17 17:17:08 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2011 18:17:08 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Morality function, self-correcting moral systems? In-Reply-To: <4EEC9D7F.1040406@aleph.se> References: <1323988649.25504.YahooMailClassic@web114413.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <4EEC9D7F.1040406@aleph.se> Message-ID: On 17 December 2011 14:47, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Sure. But it is a reasonable philosophical claim, rather than a scientific > one (as he is claiming). See > http://blog.practicalethics.**ox.ac.uk/2010/10/sam-harris-** > the-naturalistic-fallacy-and-**the-slipperiness-of-well-**being/ > http://blog.practicalethics.**ox.ac.uk/2011/11/sam-harris-** > is-wrong-about-science-and-**morality/ > for some griping from my office-mates about his claim. Note that several > of us agree that well-being (whatever it is) is worth optimising, either > because it is good itself or because it helps us achieve the good. But it > is tricky to make a proper justification for it, let alone define it well. > Yes. A sentence there resumes my view on the matter: > The proceedings seem however typical enough of pop "ethical debate", something to which nobody can really escape today. You do not take an openly formal or tautological ethical predicate ("A moral person is one who does the right thing"), but rather a semi-formal one ("well-being"), where the content is vague enough that most of your audience is comfortable in defining it in the terms of its very diverse moral intuitions (say, "the well-being of the world require the extermination of the heretics", so, yes, as a fundamentalist Mr. X is still happy with that), so that the naturalistic fallacy is not perceived, or the target is willing to accept the predicate as an axiom anyway. Then you introduce more or less subreptiously a content-rich definition of the term employed, and try to cry contradiction on those who refuse to draw the conclusions that you claim derive from their acceptance of the "first principle" discussed. Does it mean that ethical (aesthetical, political) discussions are pointless? Certainly not. Firstly, because unless the other party is 100% consistent in opting for a radically incompatible value system, there is usually at least *some* territory you have in commeon where you can show that what she says lead to consequences, or derives from premises, that are unacceptable for *her* - or at least for the public hearing the discussion. :-) Secondly, because even when this is not not the case, an ethich (aesthetical, political) discussion still makes sense in clarifying ever more what the differences between two views really are, and helps each party to think what it already things "to the end", "to the bottom", "up to its ultimate consequences", and to increase personal and reciprocal awareness of all that. Which makes, if anything, for a higher awareness in one's fundamental choices. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pjmanney at gmail.com Sat Dec 17 17:18:35 2011 From: pjmanney at gmail.com (PJ Manney) Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2011 09:18:35 -0800 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> Message-ID: On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 9:26 AM, Randall Webmail wrote: > Something that has always puzzled me: > Other than the Rothschilds and the other banking families, European Jewry was for the most part impoverished, at least in central and eastern Europe. ? ?They came to the US, like as not with a couple nickels at most in their pockets,and in thirty years they're comparatively well-off. > > Why is that? ? Are they still subject to that much persecution in central and eastern Europe? ?(Yes, in the Soviet Bloc, I suppose they were - but Austria?) I really hope I'm not rising to bait... I'm not sure where you got the idea that except for a handful of bankers, all the Jews were impoverished in Europe. In their home countries, I'd say the socio-economic ratios were at least similar to the the dominant culture. What they couldn't do was own large agricultural lands, so you didn't have landed gentry. That didn't mean they couldn't own estates, especially by the 19th C. They just couldn't have a feudal-style relationship to the land. So most Jews were urban. They owned businesses, worked in finance and trade/commerce, because that's what they were allowed to do. And it kept them close to their religious communities. However, the Jews WERE periodically dispossessed. It was not against the law to refuse to pay debts to Jews or their banks. In fact, most of the monarchies of Europe used that as a governmental bail out plan for centuries! Pogroms in countries like Russia meant communities that had been functional one minute were razed to the ground the next. So those who once had small subsistence farms or businesses had nothing. That's powerful motivation to high-tail it to another country with whatever you could stuff in your pockets before the Cossacks came riding through... They might have left with nothing (it was hard to emigrate with stuff), but they brought with them education, skills and a desire to succeed in abundance. You're right, life is still difficult for them in former Soviet countries, which is why there is still emigration. Post WWII, no one wanted the survivors back in their home countries, so that caused the huge postwar emigration to North and South America, Australasia and Israel. But I'm not aware of significant problems in present day Europe. PJ From ilia.stambler at gmail.com Sat Dec 17 21:03:07 2011 From: ilia.stambler at gmail.com (Ilia Stambler) Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2011 23:03:07 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Ashkenazi Longevity was Re: The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: <1323907154.19824.YahooMailNeo@web65608.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> Message-ID: * * > ?Try not to worry about asking questions that might be construed aspolitically incorrect or malicious, if it comes from a good and curious place.? Yes, Inbreeding as such (keeping the genome stable) does seem to play a role in longevity. This has even been suggested for humans by Guiseppe Passarino http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?order=wbapi_data_value_2009+wbapi_data_value+wbapi_data_value-last&sort=desc Still the data on the effects of inbreeding are vastly inconsistent, even for such presumably well studied animals as cats and dogs. Also very curiously, as of 2009, the five countries with the highest life expectancy were 1) San Marino (83 years), 2) Japan (83), 3) Hong Kong (83), 4) Switzerland (82), 5) Israel (82) ? all are communities with apparently relatively high genetic homogeneity/inbreeding. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?order=wbapi_data_value_2009+wbapi_data_value+wbapi_data_value-last&sort=desc The reason I was worrying about the ?political correctness? is that this kind of data would be normally cited by rabid nationalists (which I hope I am not). And I have actually seen them cite similar evidence (interestingly, regarding most nations they use the terms ?low genetic diversity? and ?keeping to the roots? while regarding the Jews it?s usually ?inbreeding? and ?enclosure.?) Still, as you say, perhaps that should not be a cause to disregard a phenomenon so interesting and potentially significant for life-extension. Ilia On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 6:05 PM, PJ Manney wrote: > 2011/12/15 Stefano Vaj : > > The rest of your message corresponds pretty much to what I know and > think > > on the subject and develops it in interesting directions. I would also > > recommend here > > Abraham's Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People by > Jon > > Entine and the subject is also marginally touched in Before the Dawn: > > Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors by Nicholas Wade. > > Thanks for these. I'm just starting some serious research into the > subject. > > > What makes the Jewish case interesting is that while I maintain that all > > societies and cultures can be seen (also) as eugenic experiments on a > very > > large scale, the Jews' (relative) historical endogamy has very little to > do > > with geographic segregation and even more than usually with a sense of > > collective identity. Moreover, I suspect that the social mechanisms > involved > > in the occasional interbreeding with Gentiles in average actually > brought in > > "good" genes (say, a rich merchant marrying a beautiful/smart/healthy > > Gentile girl), rather than diluting whatever might have been the group > > traits in the process of being selected by the factors you mention. > > Absolutely! I joke that I married my non-Jewish husband to add hybrid > vigor to my bloodline. (Well that, and he's adorable!) He's half > Norwegian, half German and has a very different 23 and Me profile and > haplogroup than me. And so far, my children are proving I'm right! > :-) > > PJ > > _______________________________________________ > 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 ilia.stambler at gmail.com Sat Dec 17 21:05:58 2011 From: ilia.stambler at gmail.com (Ilia Stambler) Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2011 23:05:58 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Ashkenazi Longevity was Re: The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: <1323907154.19824.YahooMailNeo@web65608.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Pardon. Here is the correct link to Passarino's research http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19726404.200-inbred-humans-live-to-a-ripe-old-age.html On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 11:03 PM, Ilia Stambler wrote: > * * > > > ?Try not to worry about asking questions that might be construed aspolitically incorrect or malicious, if it comes from a good and curious > place.? > > > > Yes, Inbreeding as such (keeping the genome stable) does seem to play a > role in longevity. > > > > This has even been suggested for humans by Guiseppe Passarino > > > > > http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?order=wbapi_data_value_2009+wbapi_data_value+wbapi_data_value-last&sort=desc > > > > Still the data on the effects of inbreeding are vastly inconsistent, even > for such presumably well studied animals as cats and dogs. > > > > Also very curiously, as of 2009, the five countries with the highest life > expectancy were 1) San Marino (83 years), 2) Japan (83), 3) Hong Kong (83), > 4) Switzerland (82), 5) Israel (82) ? all are communities with apparently > relatively high genetic homogeneity/inbreeding. > > > > > http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?order=wbapi_data_value_2009+wbapi_data_value+wbapi_data_value-last&sort=desc > > > > The reason I was worrying about the ?political correctness? is that this > kind of data would be normally cited by rabid nationalists (which I hope I > am not). And I have actually seen them cite similar evidence > (interestingly, regarding most nations they use the terms ?low genetic > diversity? and ?keeping to the roots? while regarding the Jews it?s usually > ?inbreeding? and ?enclosure.?) > > > > Still, as you say, perhaps that should not be a cause to disregard a > phenomenon so interesting and potentially significant for life-extension. > > > > Ilia > > On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 6:05 PM, PJ Manney wrote: > >> 2011/12/15 Stefano Vaj : >> > The rest of your message corresponds pretty much to what I know and >> think >> > on the subject and develops it in interesting directions. I would also >> > recommend here >> > Abraham's Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People by >> Jon >> > Entine and the subject is also marginally touched in Before the Dawn: >> > Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors by Nicholas Wade. >> >> Thanks for these. I'm just starting some serious research into the >> subject. >> >> > What makes the Jewish case interesting is that while I maintain that all >> > societies and cultures can be seen (also) as eugenic experiments on a >> very >> > large scale, the Jews' (relative) historical endogamy has very little >> to do >> > with geographic segregation and even more than usually with a sense of >> > collective identity. Moreover, I suspect that the social mechanisms >> involved >> > in the occasional interbreeding with Gentiles in average actually >> brought in >> > "good" genes (say, a rich merchant marrying a beautiful/smart/healthy >> > Gentile girl), rather than diluting whatever might have been the group >> > traits in the process of being selected by the factors you mention. >> >> Absolutely! I joke that I married my non-Jewish husband to add hybrid >> vigor to my bloodline. (Well that, and he's adorable!) He's half >> Norwegian, half German and has a very different 23 and Me profile and >> haplogroup than me. And so far, my children are proving I'm right! >> :-) >> >> PJ >> >> _______________________________________________ >> 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 stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sat Dec 17 21:42:08 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2011 22:42:08 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Ashkenazi Longevity was Re: The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: <1323907154.19824.YahooMailNeo@web65608.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 17 December 2011 17:05, PJ Manney wrote: > Absolutely! I joke that I married my non-Jewish husband to add hybrid > vigor to my bloodline. (Well that, and he's adorable!) He's half > Norwegian, half German and has a very different 23 and Me profile and > haplogroup than me. And so far, my children are proving I'm right! > :-) > If you are interested in such subjects from a transhumanist POV, you will like (the soon-to-be-published English translation of) my book on biopolitics, genetic diversity and biotechnologies. Even though it created some strident protests about how politically incorrect it is to be curious about past and future human genetics in the first place... -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sun Dec 18 01:18:26 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2011 18:18:26 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Ashkenazi Longevity was Re: The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: <1323907154.19824.YahooMailNeo@web65608.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 10:30 PM, PJ Manney wrote: > Sadly, not all Ashkenazim have two copies of the variant necessary. > According to 23 and Me, I only carry one copy, which they imply does > not confer the same extreme longevity, but perhaps moderate increases. > ?I'll just have to take extra good care of myself... ?;-) I ran into 23 and me the other day, but their web site really sucks in terms of telling you what they do. How many things can they tell you about yourself? What sorts of things are they? Have many of you used their services? Has it seemed worthwhile to you? > Because of the all the screening > in the Jewish community, Tay-Sachs has been virtually eradicated -- > there hasn't been a new case since 2003. That is an astonishing success story. Why hasn't this been told where I could read it, I wonder. Perhaps I'm not reading widely enough... LOL -Kelly From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sun Dec 18 01:10:52 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2011 18:10:52 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Hitch belongs to the ages In-Reply-To: <201112171425.pBHEPxaW005131@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <1324047035.78677.YahooMailNeo@web160606.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <1324047075.15553.YahooMailNeo@web160606.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <1324054460.22778.YahooMailNeo@web160606.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <201112171425.pBHEPxaW005131@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 6:44 AM, David Lubkin wrote: > I found him a pleasure to read and to listen to, whether I agreed with him > on the subject in question or not. The nearest, perhaps, we'll get to > encountering Orwell, minus the sf. I feel just this way as well. > I love that the Vatican asked him to serve as the unofficial Devil's > Advocate for Mother Teresa. When I heard that he was down on Mother Teresa, I was shocked... then I heard his reasoning, and I was persuaded. A man with the ability to reason that logically and persuasively does not come along every day. I listened to his entire autobiography, and he seemed to be where the action was for a long time. What a loss. I don't suppose he was slated for brain preservation? > And although he forcefully presented his viewpoint, it didn't interfere > with his befriending a wide range of people who violently disagreed > with him, which speaks well of him. Too many people ?-- including some > in our community -- will shun someone solely for holding ideas they > disagree with. (When I hold my parties, I have to juggle who to invite, > because W won't attend if X does and likewise for Y and Z.) Yes, he seemed very friendly with Blair in their debate, which was enchanting. > This is my favorite picture in the slide show at Vanity Fair: > > Interesting fellow. I listened to him read Hitch-22 on an audio book, which made the book very personal. I really feel like I have a good feeling for him, and I will miss him quite a lot. Sad day. -Kelly From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sun Dec 18 01:46:06 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2011 18:46:06 -0700 Subject: [ExI] is a FTL drive a dream without any physics to back it up? In-Reply-To: References: <20111214093015.GV31847@leitl.org> <20111215125841.GW31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: 2011/12/16 Stefano Vaj : > On 15 December 2011 13:58, Eugen Leitl wrote: >> I think pioneers would travel as seeds, not as full organisms. > > > Yes, I always wondered about that. How much do we push the idea, however? > The "lightest" way to seed AIs at destination might be to send a few > probiotes likely to inseminate an evolutionary cycle, leading to organisms > able to transfer themselves on synthetic support. But this is not much more > emotionally satisfying than send the Voyager with a few records of our > civilisation towards the big Nothing... If you send seeds that know their origin, and are designed to want to send back information, then it is indeed more satisfying than Voyager, which is definitely a one way communication with minimal chance of ever even being found, except by the future "us", in which case it will just get put back into the Smithsonian air and space museum... LOL. One of the problems I see with the idea that we were "seeded" by extraterrestrials is that we aren't quite programmed with the information to communicate back with whoever put us here... Seems a little too primitive to just send out protein sequences... So I think I'll stick with the theory that we evolved naturally in place...until better evidence for the other comes in. -Kelly From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sun Dec 18 01:54:27 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2011 18:54:27 -0700 Subject: [ExI] is a FTL drive a dream without any physics to back it up? In-Reply-To: <20111216113043.GW31847@leitl.org> References: <20111214093015.GV31847@leitl.org> <20111215125841.GW31847@leitl.org> <20111216105734.GR31847@leitl.org> <20111216113043.GW31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 4:30 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > So in order to get out into space we must prevent collapse. > This should be our first and foremost priority as a species. I don't think this is the only choice Eugen. We can collapse in such a way that most of our civilization's scientific knowledge survives, and is pushed forward by the (hopefully) wiser survivors of said collapse. Those wise survivors can get into space and assure the continuity of our civilization even after a collapse, and they might be in a better place to do so politically than we are today. I hope this is the case, as collapse seems rather difficult to avoid on the current track. Perhaps this could be a side effect of having watched both 'Contagion' and 'Too Big to Fail' within the last week... LOL... I'm usually a little more optimistic. -Kelly From lubkin at unreasonable.com Sun Dec 18 02:32:55 2011 From: lubkin at unreasonable.com (David Lubkin) Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2011 21:32:55 -0500 Subject: [ExI] FW: Larry King wants to be cryopreserved In-Reply-To: <011401ccb701$37f20540$a7d60fc0$@att.net> References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> <20111209101100.GS31847@leitl.org> <20111209131743.GZ31847@leitl.org> <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> <011401ccb701$37f20540$a7d60fc0$@att.net> Message-ID: <201112180233.pBI2X2qY001148@andromeda.ziaspace.com> The article in People left out much of the juice. I have my remote control set to cycle between the news channels, and I often have news on while I work. When I hit CNN, the topic in question was just beginning, so I stayed with it. It's not just that he wants cryonics. He does not believe in an afterlife. He wants to live forever. He was asked but if you are revived in hundreds of years, all your friends will be dead. His reply? I'll make new friends. ISTM King is the most prominent person to publicly declare their serious desire to be frozen. Is there anyone else faintly near his name recognition? (Ted Williams's arrangements weren't public until after his suspension.) -- David. From darren.greer3 at gmail.com Sun Dec 18 02:35:22 2011 From: darren.greer3 at gmail.com (Darren Greer) Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2011 22:35:22 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Hitch belongs to the ages In-Reply-To: References: <1324047035.78677.YahooMailNeo@web160606.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <1324047075.15553.YahooMailNeo@web160606.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <1324054460.22778.YahooMailNeo@web160606.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <201112171425.pBHEPxaW005131@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: > On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 6:44 AM, David Lubkin > wrote: > > I found him a pleasure to read and to listen to, whether I agreed with > him > > on the subject in question or not. The nearest, perhaps, we'll get to > > encountering Orwell, minus the sf. > Sam Harris said once of him that he was the only man he knew who spoke as well as he wrote. High praise, considering how beautifully he did the latter. What I admire most about him though was his absolute insistence on considering each issue presented him on its own merits. He refused to be co-opted by the left or right, and was not afraid of pissing off either if need be, as long as it meant he was free to reason and debate on his own terms. No matter what you think of him or his opinions, he was his own man, which is why he eventually fell afoul of everyone who ever held him up as a poster boy for a cause. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sun Dec 18 03:07:58 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2011 19:07:58 -0800 Subject: [ExI] mate selection vs sotf Message-ID: <017101ccbd32$3fb91390$bf2b3ab0$@att.net> Darwin's Origin of Species details two mechanisms involved in speciation: survival of the fittest and mate selection. My neighbor's visit this evening caused me to wonder if in the case of humans, the two mechanisms can both be at work simultaneously and in concert. This neighbor is an Inuit, a short round person, clearly built for survival in very cold climates. The traditional explanation is that tall thin people in northern Asia and far northern America could not survive the brutal cold, so the surviving genes were those which shaped the bodies of the peoples in those climates. But could not mate selection have worked there too? Is it conceivable that people living in the far north could look at individuals and realize that the short round build would just work better? Could not that realization have made the short round individuals more desirable mates? If so, would not they reproduce with a slightly higher differential? If so, is that an example of mate selection and SOTF working together? And if so, would not that explain how the body build of the northern Asians could have diverged so far from the African build in just a few thousand generations? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From steinberg.will at gmail.com Sun Dec 18 04:46:41 2011 From: steinberg.will at gmail.com (Will Steinberg) Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2011 23:46:41 -0500 Subject: [ExI] mate selection vs sotf In-Reply-To: <017101ccbd32$3fb91390$bf2b3ab0$@att.net> References: <017101ccbd32$3fb91390$bf2b3ab0$@att.net> Message-ID: it's like reverse memetic selection...the meme for liking chubby bodies engages with the genes/epigenetics for chubby bodies and since the genes are beneficial they pull the meme along for the ride. so yes I would agree with you there spike, but of course the meme is really just a second-level replicator based on our consciousness module/mesh's awareness of the concept of survival. ;) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From max at maxmore.com Sun Dec 18 06:04:58 2011 From: max at maxmore.com (Max More) Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2011 23:04:58 -0700 Subject: [ExI] FW: Larry King wants to be cryopreserved In-Reply-To: <201112180233.pBI2X2qY001148@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> <20111209101100.GS31847@leitl.org> <20111209131743.GZ31847@leitl.org> <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> <011401ccb701$37f20540$a7d60fc0$@att.net> <201112180233.pBI2X2qY001148@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: It is not confirmed yet, but looks very likely to go ahead: On January 11, I'm scheduled to appeared on the Dr. Oz Show alongside Larry King. There will probably be a couple of other people who are not yet confirmed. The producer tells me that Larry King has confirmed. (The show also wants to film at Alcor the week before the in-studio appearance.) I've never seen the show, but it clearly has a large audience, and Mr King is popular. Celebrities can be as much of a problem for cryonics as an opportunity, but this case seems fairly likely to be beneficial. --Max On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 7:32 PM, David Lubkin wrote: > The article in People left out much of the juice. I have my remote control > set to cycle between the news channels, and I often have news on while > I work. When I hit CNN, the topic in question was just beginning, so I > stayed with it. > > It's not just that he wants cryonics. > > He does not believe in an afterlife. > > He wants to live forever. > > He was asked but if you are revived in hundreds of years, all your > friends will be dead. His reply? I'll make new friends. > > ISTM King is the most prominent person to publicly declare their > serious desire to be frozen. Is there anyone else faintly near his > name recognition? (Ted Williams's arrangements weren't public > until after his suspension.) > > > -- David. > > > ______________________________**_________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/**mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-**chat > -- Max More, PhD Strategic Philosopher Co-editor, *The Transhumanist Reader* CEO, Alcor Life Extension Foundation 7895 E. Acoma Dr # 110 Scottsdale, AZ 85260 480/905-1906 ext 113 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From max at maxmore.com Sun Dec 18 06:41:01 2011 From: max at maxmore.com (Max More) Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2011 23:41:01 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Hitch belongs to the ages In-Reply-To: References: <1324047035.78677.YahooMailNeo@web160606.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <1324047075.15553.YahooMailNeo@web160606.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <1324054460.22778.YahooMailNeo@web160606.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <201112171425.pBHEPxaW005131@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: I don't see him having considered cryonics on its merits. Apparently someone mentioned the idea to him. He dismissed it somewhat snidely, citing no reasons whatsoever. I've never read his books, but his lack of intelligent engagement with something that just might have saved his life is very disappointing. --Max 2011/12/17 Darren Greer > > > >> On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 6:44 AM, David Lubkin >> wrote: >> > I found him a pleasure to read and to listen to, whether I agreed with >> him >> > on the subject in question or not. The nearest, perhaps, we'll get to >> > encountering Orwell, minus the sf. >> > > > Sam Harris said once of him that he was the only man he knew who spoke as > well as he wrote. High praise, considering how beautifully he did the > latter. What I admire most about him though was his absolute insistence on > considering each issue presented him on its own merits. He refused to be > co-opted by the left or right, and was not afraid of pissing off either if > need be, as long as it meant he was free to reason and debate on his own > terms. No matter what you think of him or his opinions, he was his own man, > which is why he eventually fell afoul of everyone who ever held him up as a > poster boy for a cause. > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -- Max More, PhD Strategic Philosopher Co-editor, *The Transhumanist Reader* CEO, Alcor Life Extension Foundation 7895 E. Acoma Dr # 110 Scottsdale, AZ 85260 480/905-1906 ext 113 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kgh1kgh2 at gmail.com Sun Dec 18 06:51:18 2011 From: kgh1kgh2 at gmail.com (Kevin G Haskell) Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2011 01:51:18 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Organization to 'Speed Up" Creation of AGI? Message-ID: There are few organizations in the H+/AGI 'aware' communities that are dedicated to the idea of slowing down the creation of the AGI species, and Singularity, for the purposes of being "cautious" so that mankind isn't destroyed, or in some other way harmed, by the new species that we create. Does anyone know of any presently existing private organizations that are dedicated to the idea of 'speeding' up the development of AGI and of achieving the Singularity as soon as possible? Thanks, Kevin George Haskell -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From giulio at gmail.com Sun Dec 18 08:28:46 2011 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2011 09:28:46 +0100 Subject: [ExI] FW: Larry King wants to be cryopreserved In-Reply-To: References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> <20111209101100.GS31847@leitl.org> <20111209131743.GZ31847@leitl.org> <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> <011401ccb701$37f20540$a7d60fc0$@att.net> <201112180233.pBI2X2qY001148@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: This. Is. Great. 2011/12/18 Max More : > It is not confirmed yet, but looks very likely to go ahead: On January 11, > I'm scheduled to appeared on the Dr. Oz Show alongside Larry King. There > will probably be a couple of other people who are not yet confirmed. The > producer tells me that Larry King has confirmed. (The show also wants to > film at Alcor the week before the in-studio appearance.) > > I've never seen the show, but it clearly has a large audience, and Mr King > is popular. Celebrities can be as much of a problem for cryonics as an > opportunity, but this case seems fairly likely to be beneficial. > > --Max > > > > > On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 7:32 PM, David Lubkin > wrote: >> >> The article in People left out much of the juice. I have my remote control >> set to cycle between the news channels, and I often have news on while >> I work. When I hit CNN, the topic in question was just beginning, so I >> stayed with it. >> >> It's not just that he wants cryonics. >> >> He does not believe in an afterlife. >> >> He wants to live forever. >> >> He was asked but if you are revived in hundreds of years, all your >> friends will be dead. His reply? I'll make new friends. >> >> ISTM King is the most prominent person to publicly declare their >> serious desire to be frozen. Is there anyone else faintly near his >> name recognition? (Ted Williams's arrangements weren't public >> until after his suspension.) >> >> >> -- David. >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > > > > -- > Max More, PhD > Strategic Philosopher > Co-editor, The Transhumanist Reader > CEO, Alcor Life Extension Foundation > 7895 E. Acoma Dr # 110 > Scottsdale, AZ 85260 > 480/905-1906 ext 113 > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From anders at aleph.se Sun Dec 18 08:42:49 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2011 09:42:49 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Organization to 'Speed Up" Creation of AGI? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4EEDA789.4010402@aleph.se> On 2011-12-18 07:51, Kevin G Haskell wrote: > There are few organizations in the H+/AGI 'aware' communities that are > dedicated to the idea of slowing down the creation of the AGI species, > and Singularity, for the purposes of being "cautious" so that mankind > isn't destroyed, or in some other way harmed, by the new species that we > create. I think that is a bit of misrepresentation. I can only speak for us at FHI, but we would be fine with faster AGI development if we thought safe AGI was very likely or we were confident that it would be developed before AGI went critical. An early singularity reduces existential risk from everything that could happen while waiting for it. It also benefits existing people if it is a positive one. > Does anyone know of any presently existing private organizations that > are dedicated to the idea of 'speeding' up the development of AGI and of > achieving the Singularity as soon as possible? Every single AGI company? OK, there aren't *that* many of them. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Sun Dec 18 08:54:07 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2011 09:54:07 +0100 Subject: [ExI] is a FTL drive a dream without any physics to back it up? In-Reply-To: References: <20111214093015.GV31847@leitl.org> <20111215125841.GW31847@leitl.org> <20111216105734.GR31847@leitl.org> <20111216113043.GW31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: <4EEDAA2F.9050700@aleph.se> On 2011-12-18 02:54, Kelly Anderson wrote: > On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 4:30 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: >> So in order to get out into space we must prevent collapse. >> This should be our first and foremost priority as a species. > > I don't think this is the only choice Eugen. We can collapse in such a > way that most of our civilization's scientific knowledge survives, and > is pushed forward by the (hopefully) wiser survivors of said collapse. The problem with collapses is that they are likely triggers of existential risk, and that low-tech states might be very persistent. We spent hundreds of thousands of years as hunter-gatherers, and for those many thousands of years we were agriculturalists technological progress was fairly spotty. During low-tech states the species is much more vulnerable to exogenous existential risks like climate, supervolcanos and disease. But it is the collapse itself that is really risky. During a collapse dangerous technology is still available and people and groups are simultaneously desperate. That means that we might see release of nuclear, biological or other weapons with existential threat potential. Combined with whatever is causing the collapse this might wipe out stored knowledge and give an extra push beyond the brink. > I hope this is the case, as collapse seems rather difficult to avoid > on the current track. Perhaps this could be a side effect of having > watched both 'Contagion' and 'Too Big to Fail' within the last week... > LOL... I'm usually a little more optimistic. That is just the availability heuristic talking. :-) The fundamental paradox is that the kind of technology that would help us reduce existential risk a lot - molecular manufacturing, AI, brain emulation - also poses existential risks. Powerful tools are risky. So depending on where you think the balance lies, you will want to make some of these happen before the other ones. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From painlord2k at libero.it Sun Dec 18 09:50:54 2011 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2011 10:50:54 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> Message-ID: <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> Il 17/12/2011 18:18, PJ Manney ha scritto: > You're right, life is still difficult for them in former Soviet > countries, which is why there is still emigration. Post WWII, no one > wanted the survivors back in their home countries, so that caused the > huge postwar emigration to North and South America, Australasia and > Israel. But I'm not aware of significant problems in present day > Europe. There are problems with the Muslims immigrants and the second generation Muslims born here. A large majority of them is not friendly with the Jews and many are simply hostile to them. The number of attacks against Jews is rising all around Europe and mainly where Muslims live. More than a few Jews are leaving for the US or Israel claiming this as the triggering reason. This happen more often in places like Norway, Sweden, Holland, but the UK, France and Germany are not immune. Mirco From lubkin at unreasonable.com Sun Dec 18 13:37:41 2011 From: lubkin at unreasonable.com (David Lubkin) Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2011 08:37:41 -0500 Subject: [ExI] FW: Larry King wants to be cryopreserved In-Reply-To: References: <1323365130.16198.YahooMailNeo@web46107.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <01a301ccb5ff$3f3b2370$bdb16a50$@att.net> <20111209101100.GS31847@leitl.org> <20111209131743.GZ31847@leitl.org> <004701ccb67e$659c7a30$30d56e90$@att.net> <011401ccb701$37f20540$a7d60fc0$@att.net> <201112180233.pBI2X2qY001148@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <201112181337.pBIDbqH8014046@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Max wrote: >It is not confirmed yet, but looks very likely to go ahead: On >January 11, I'm scheduled to appeared on the Dr. Oz Show alongside >Larry King. There will probably be a couple of other people who are >not yet confirmed. The producer tells me that Larry King has >confirmed. (The show also wants to film at Alcor the week before the >in-studio appearance.) This is excellent. >I've never seen the show, but it clearly has a large audience, and >Mr King is popular. Celebrities can be as much of a problem for >cryonics as an opportunity, but this case seems fairly likely to be beneficial. King is a mixed blessing. He's extremely well-known, but he has a reputation as a little odd, between his appearance, his many wives, and occasional bizarre statements when he'd interview someone on his show. All in all, reaching out to King, especially now that he has retired from a nightly show, seems a net positive. He cuts through mystique, misconception, and fear with the candor of an old Brooklyn Jew (which he is; as my dad was). It's exciting to consider the possibilities if he'd consent to participating in Alcor marketing (YouTube, radio, print, web, etc.). If the goal is to grow numbers, and thence financial and political stability for Alcor, outreach has to recognize that different people are swayed differently. I was always sold on the concept, but it took Drexler and Merkle to convince me with an existence proof for re-animation. For many others, the pitch has to be simple, emotional, and repeated before they'll have any interest in how. While we're on the subject: The process of signing up has historically been on the order of complexity and delay of buying a house. Some of this may be inherent and unavoidable, but it is a deterrent for any but true believers. I'm not sure what the process looks like nowadays, but perhaps a web-based wizard to step people through their alternatives and assist in completing the process? (Max, feel free to contact me off-list if you want to discuss anything beyond what is appropriate here.) -- David. From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sun Dec 18 13:43:40 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2011 14:43:40 +0100 Subject: [ExI] mate selection vs sotf In-Reply-To: <017101ccbd32$3fb91390$bf2b3ab0$@att.net> References: <017101ccbd32$3fb91390$bf2b3ab0$@att.net> Message-ID: 2011/12/18 spike > Darwin?s Origin of Species details two mechanisms involved in speciation: > survival of the fittest and mate selection. My neighbor?s visit this > evening caused me to wonder if in the case of humans, the two mechanisms > can both be at work simultaneously and in concert. > Yes, I think that in post-Dawkins Darwinism it is clear that natural selection and sexual selection are one and the same - the whisper of the genes is supposed to recommend the choice of a partner with the higher chances to give place to an abundant replication thereof. The superior fitness of the bearer in survival terms may be instrumental to, but it by no means required for, such end. Higher fertility or sexual vicious circles (say, the pens of the Argo bird's tail) may well compensate for it. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sun Dec 18 13:58:25 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2011 14:58:25 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Organization to 'Speed Up" Creation of AGI? In-Reply-To: <4EEDA789.4010402@aleph.se> References: <4EEDA789.4010402@aleph.se> Message-ID: On 18 December 2011 09:42, Anders Sandberg wrote: > I think that is a bit of misrepresentation. I can only speak for us at > FHI, but we would be fine with faster AGI development if we thought safe > AGI was very likely or we were confident that it would be developed before > AGI went critical. An early singularity reduces existential risk from > everything that could happen while waiting for it. It also benefits > existing people if it is a positive one. > Given that unless something very dramatic happens the entire humankind - defined as the set of all humans currently alive - is currently confronted with an obvious extinction risk, or rather certitude, in a matter of decades, out of aging if anything, it has always been unclear to me how FHI can reconcile what I think is fair to characterise as an utilitarian value system with a primary concern for the dominance or not of bio-based intelligences in the future. But of course the same question could be asked to the Singularity Institute. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sun Dec 18 14:18:32 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2011 15:18:32 +0100 Subject: [ExI] is a FTL drive a dream without any physics to back it up? In-Reply-To: References: <20111214093015.GV31847@leitl.org> <20111215125841.GW31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: On 18 December 2011 02:46, Kelly Anderson wrote: > If you send seeds that know their origin, and are designed to want to > send back information, then it is indeed more satisfying than Voyager, > which is definitely a one way communication with minimal chance of > ever even being found, except by the future "us", in which case it > will just get put back into the Smithsonian air and space museum... > LOL. > Yes. This would however exclude probiotes as well... One of the problems I see with the idea that we were "seeded" by > extraterrestrials is that we aren't quite programmed with the > information to communicate back with whoever put us here... Seems a > little too primitive to just send out protein sequences... So I think > I'll stick with the theory that we evolved naturally in place...until > better evidence for the other comes in. > I am not entirely certain of what "intentionality" and "motives" may mean out of a strictrly anthropmorphic reference framework (heck, more than subtle differences exist even from one culture and age to another), but besides the distinct possibility that cosmic panspermia, if it takes place at all, could be a "natural" process, extraterrestrials may not really care for feedbacks as much you and I do... -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From darren.greer3 at gmail.com Sun Dec 18 14:31:26 2011 From: darren.greer3 at gmail.com (Darren Greer) Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2011 10:31:26 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Hitchens and Cryonics (Was Hitch Belongs to the Ages) Message-ID: 2011/12/18 Max More > I don't see him having considered cryonics on its merits. Apparently > someone mentioned the idea to him. He dismissed it somewhat snidely, citing > no reasons whatsoever. > I didn't know that. I found on the 'net what he said about it. "somebody has written to me from a famous university to suggest that I have myself cryonically or cryogenically frozen against the day when the magic bullet, or whatever it is, has been devised. (When I failed to reply to this, I got a second missive, suggesting that I freeze at least my brain so that its cortex could be appreciated by posterity. Well, I mean to say, gosh, thanks awfully." I can find no other mention of why he might have so summarily dismissed the idea. Surely, given the ground he has covered with the other "horseman" -- Dennett, Harris and Dawkins -- the subject had to come up at least once. The concept of life extension is in part indubitably tied to beliefs about life and afterlife, which must have been very familiar ground for Hitchens. I'm surprised he wasn't all over it. darren -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sun Dec 18 14:43:59 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2011 15:43:59 +0100 Subject: [ExI] is a FTL drive a dream without any physics to back it up? In-Reply-To: <4EEDAA2F.9050700@aleph.se> References: <20111214093015.GV31847@leitl.org> <20111215125841.GW31847@leitl.org> <20111216105734.GR31847@leitl.org> <20111216113043.GW31847@leitl.org> <4EEDAA2F.9050700@aleph.se> Message-ID: On 18 December 2011 09:54, Anders Sandberg wrote: > The problem with collapses is that they are likely triggers of existential > risk, and that low-tech states might be very persistent. We spent hundreds > of thousands of years as hunter-gatherers, and for those many thousands of > years we were agriculturalists technological progress was fairly spotty. > During low-tech states the species is much more vulnerable to exogenous > existential risks like climate, supervolcanos and disease. > I agree. OTOH, I am not sure about the persistence of low-tech states. NeoLuddites themselves are "pessimistic" upon the fact that any state barely compatible with survival allows for a rapid bounce-back, if not in terms of wealth , at least in terms of access to information and know-how. Even those who, eg, adhere to a strictly cyclical vision of history recognise that memory of past cycles does not really get lost and influences subsequent cycles. The fundamental paradox is that the kind of technology that would help us > reduce existential risk a lot - molecular manufacturing, AI, brain > emulation - also poses existential risks. Powerful tools are risky. So > depending on where you think the balance lies, you will want to make some > of these happen before the other ones. > The question nevertheless remains - dangerous for what? -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From darren.greer3 at gmail.com Sun Dec 18 15:56:23 2011 From: darren.greer3 at gmail.com (Darren Greer) Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2011 11:56:23 -0400 Subject: [ExI] is a FTL drive a dream without any physics to back it up? In-Reply-To: References: <20111214093015.GV31847@leitl.org> <20111215125841.GW31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: 2011/12/18 Stefano Vaj > > > > but besides the distinct possibility that cosmic panspermia, if it takes > place at all, could be a "natural" process, extraterrestrials may not > really care for feedbacks as much you and I do... > Or have evolved to the point that it has become unnecessary. If you're knowledgeable enough about "natural" systems and how they behave, and have mastered stochastic analysis, you're set. You may have figured out that the conditions required for life in the universe are stringently alike, and have further decided that any attempt at exogenous communication with this seeded environment might introduce added uncertainty into the experiment. Imagine memos sent out about our probable phase of our evolution and its characteristics with so much faith in the science and math there was no need to check it against the reality and no way to do it because feedback mechanisms were not built in. Sounds ridiculously unscientific from our perspective, which relies so much on observation and feedback. You'd have to have the self-assurance of a God. Perhaps the methods of an advanced species would seem very unscientific to us. Who knows? But it is fun to speculate. Darren -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sun Dec 18 16:50:30 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2011 17:50:30 +0100 Subject: [ExI] is a FTL drive a dream without any physics to back it up? In-Reply-To: References: <20111214093015.GV31847@leitl.org> <20111215125841.GW31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: 2011/12/18 Darren Greer > Or have evolved to the point that it has become unnecessary. If you're > knowledgeable enough about "natural" systems and how they behave, and have > mastered stochastic analysis, you're set. > Mmhhh. I suppose that the space of evolutionary trajectories is so vast, that unless one considers an infinite, populated multiverse scenario, what has really happened as opposed to the range of what could have still maintains an interest. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From darren.greer3 at gmail.com Sun Dec 18 17:56:44 2011 From: darren.greer3 at gmail.com (Darren Greer) Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2011 13:56:44 -0400 Subject: [ExI] is a FTL drive a dream without any physics to back it up? In-Reply-To: References: <20111214093015.GV31847@leitl.org> <20111215125841.GW31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: 2011/12/18 Stefano Vaj > Mmhhh. I suppose that the space of evolutionary trajectories is so vast, > that unless one considers an infinite, populated multiverse scenario, what > has really happened as opposed to the range of what could have still > maintains an interest. > I'm not sure exactly what you are saying here. Could you expand a bit more? One other thought while I wait, and this has been voiced by many others including Sagan. The feedback mechanisms come through the process of evolution itself. When the seeded planet(s) develop radio technology, then the progenitors get interested, and know that phase one is complete. Any planet that didn't develop radio technology is considered a failure and written off. We tend to think of projects of any sort on such small scales. We haven't even mastered multi-generational work yet. Surely expanded capacity to think includes expanded capacity to conceive. If you had the capacity, such a feedback mechanism built into the system by evolution itself would be far preferable to anything you could artificially design . Darren -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sun Dec 18 19:54:56 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2011 20:54:56 +0100 Subject: [ExI] is a FTL drive a dream without any physics to back it up? In-Reply-To: References: <20111214093015.GV31847@leitl.org> <20111215125841.GW31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: 2011/12/18 Darren Greer > I'm not sure exactly what you are saying here. Could you expand a bit > more? > Let us say that I get a pretty good idea of the space of possible products of an evolutionary process. If this space is exceedingly vast, I can still be curious of what actually exists, at least in my light sphere, as opposed to what simply could exist. The feedback mechanisms come through the process of evolution itself. When > the seeded planet(s) develop radio technology, then the progenitors get > interested, and know that phase one is complete. Any planet that didn't > develop radio technology is considered a failure and written off. We tend > to think of projects of any sort on such small scales. > Wolfram posits that i) unless computational processes are "anthropomorphic" enough, we are bound not to recognise them as "intelligence" at all; ii) the better the compression of signals, the more indistinguishable the signal becomes from noise. The combination of this two facts would account for the Fermi paradox. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pjmanney at gmail.com Sun Dec 18 23:49:09 2011 From: pjmanney at gmail.com (PJ Manney) Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2011 15:49:09 -0800 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 18, 2011 at 1:50 AM, Mirco Romanato wrote: > There are problems with the Muslims immigrants and the second generation > Muslims born here. A large majority of them is not friendly with the > Jews and many are simply hostile to them. > The number of attacks against Jews is rising all around Europe and > mainly where Muslims live. > More than a few Jews are leaving for the US or Israel claiming this as > the triggering reason. > This happen more often in places like Norway, Sweden, Holland, but the > UK, France and Germany are not immune. There were some news stories here in the US about this, but I didn't know it was so pervasive to trigger immigration. I'm unhappy to hear this. PJ From pjmanney at gmail.com Mon Dec 19 00:26:14 2011 From: pjmanney at gmail.com (PJ Manney) Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2011 16:26:14 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Ashkenazi Longevity was Re: The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: <1323907154.19824.YahooMailNeo@web65608.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 5:18 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > I ran into 23 and me the other day, but their web site really sucks in > terms of telling you what they do. How many things can they tell you > about yourself? What sorts of things are they? > > Have many of you used their services? Has it seemed worthwhile to you? I have both the genealogy and health profiles that I purchased a couple of years ago during a World DNA Day offer of $99. I couldn't resist! They show lots of data, both disease and traits related. And your haplogroups. As a woman, I only have one they can show by DNA, which means I need to get my dad tested to get my paternal group. I plan to do that this summer. They can link your haplogroup and segments together to show genealogical connections with other users. I haven't used their services much yet, but I'm about to give them a pretty good workout, since I'm researching a new book, so I'll let you know. It's why I jumped onto this thread. I've been thinking a lot about it lately. Genealogy is worthless for an Ashkenazi. Most "relatives" comes out as my 2nd - 5th cousin (because of inbreeding)! As opposed to my husband, who has fewer matches in genealogy, mostly "Distant relatives" and they all have Scandinavian or Germanic names. Mostly, I discovered that I am definitely the biological offspring of my parents. And given what I know about them, I need to take good care of myself! I keep thinking "epigenetics vs. genetics... epigenetics vs. genetics..." So I went on my first Hike the Geek today to get some exercise! :-) It can give you potentially scary information, too, like genetic likelihoods of Alzheimer's, etc. Their new upgrade system pisses me off. I have to pay more to get more information. I also just discovered they do a statistical likelihood of offsprings' traits, so I took my husband and my profiles and linked them. Funny -- it's how it really turned out with two kids... :-) Anyone else have an opinion of 23 and Me for Kelly? Re: Tay-Sachs -- > That is an astonishing success story. Why hasn't this been told where > I could read it, I wonder. Perhaps I'm not reading widely enough... > LOL I don't think it made mainstream news: http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/tay-sachs-the-jewish-disease-almost-eradicated-1.147493 http://www.genomenewsnetwork.org/articles/08_01/Tay_Sachs_gene_tests.shtml PJ From alito at organicrobot.com Mon Dec 19 03:10:10 2011 From: alito at organicrobot.com (Alejandro Dubrovsky) Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2011 14:10:10 +1100 Subject: [ExI] 23 and me (was Ashkenazi Longevity was Re: The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals)) In-Reply-To: References: <1323907154.19824.YahooMailNeo@web65608.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <4EEEAB12.8080208@organicrobot.com> On 12/19/11 11:26, PJ Manney wrote: > On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 5:18 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote: >> I ran into 23 and me the other day, but their web site really sucks in >> terms of telling you what they do. How many things can they tell you >> about yourself? What sorts of things are they? >> >> Have many of you used their services? Has it seemed worthwhile to you? [snipped] > Anyone else have an opinion of 23 and Me for Kelly? The number of things the site tells you directly is not very large (couple of hundred?), and almost none of them, except for Parkinson's, Alzheimer's (and breast cancer if you are a woman) have a huge impact and are common (potential 2x odds of heart attack might count as huge too). The warfarin and clopidogrel sensitivity could also become useful in practice. The information they give you directly consists mostly of things you know ("you are likely to have blue eyes"), very rare carrier status ("Limb-girdle Muscular Dystrophy variant absent"), some drug response effects ("Typical response to Hepatitis C treatment") and about a hundred disease risk odds going by SNP frequency correlation studies, where either the odds multiplier is between 0.7x and 1.4x so you don't really care much, or the disease is rare enough or not-serious enough that you don't care much. Their most interesting feature for me is that they let you download the SNPs so you can go and find associations on SNPedia or on new papers yourself, so it becomes more of an entertainment assistant. If you like trawling through data for things like "1.2 times higher frequency of macular degeneration" then you'll enjoy it and think it worthwhile. If you are into it, it can consume all your time. You soon become flooded with information and become insensitive to any effect smaller than a 2 times higher frequency of something important. All that said, I have changed my behaviour because of the results (cut out coffee), not sure if rationally. It would probably also be worthwhile if you are into genealogy. For me, at the current $100 (I paid $500), it's quite a cheap puzzle game per hour. I'd estimate 1000+ hours for completion. From bbenzai at yahoo.com Mon Dec 19 08:41:19 2011 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2011 00:41:19 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] FW: Larry King wants to be cryopreserved In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1324284079.26024.YahooMailClassic@web114413.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Giulio Prisco observed: > This. Is. Great. > I don't really know who Larry King is, I understand he's a 'tv personality' in the U.S., so his choice will get a lot of publicity, but I thought the most significant thing (given that he is in the U.S.) wasn't the cryonics decision but the declaration: > >> He does not believe in an afterlife. Ben Zaiboc From anders at aleph.se Sun Dec 18 21:05:34 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2011 22:05:34 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Organization to 'Speed Up" Creation of AGI? In-Reply-To: References: <4EEDA789.4010402@aleph.se> Message-ID: <4EEE559E.4060807@aleph.se> On 2011-12-18 14:58, Stefano Vaj wrote: > On 18 December 2011 09:42, Anders Sandberg > wrote: > > I think that is a bit of misrepresentation. I can only speak for us > at FHI, but we would be fine with faster AGI development if we > thought safe AGI was very likely or we were confident that it would > be developed before AGI went critical. An early singularity reduces > existential risk from everything that could happen while waiting for > it. It also benefits existing people if it is a positive one. > > > Given that unless something very dramatic happens the entire humankind - > defined as the set of all humans currently alive - is currently > confronted with an obvious extinction risk, or rather certitude, in a > matter of decades, out of aging if anything, it has always been unclear > to me how FHI can reconcile what I think is fair to characterise as an > utilitarian value system with a primary concern for the dominance or not > of bio-based intelligences in the future. Yes, we usually tend towards the consequentialist side of the ethical spectrum. But most of us also think future generations and sentient systems have some or full value: discounting people in the future is the same thing as discounting them in space (given relativity) and pretty odd. So this means that the enormous value embodied in possible future generations - whether humans, posthumans or AIs - matters a lot, and avoiding risking it by our actions is an important moral consideration. The threats we must reduce are those that remove value: extinction or permanent curtailment of value. For example, badly motivated AGI might both wipe out humanity and be unable to ever achieve any value of its own. We are much less concerned if humanity invents successors that gradually take our place and then go on to enrich the universe with impossible-to-human mentalities. It is individually rational to try to reduce existential risk, especially if you are signed up for cryonics or think life extension is likely, since then you will have even more years to be at risk in. Right now the existential risk per year is likely below 1% per year, but by our estimates probably not far below it. Inventing a super-powerful technology like self-improving AGI, uploading or atomically precise manufacturing, bumps it up - at least for a short time. This means that if you are a transhumanist who thinks these technologies are likely in the not too far future you should existential risk to be a *personal* threat on the same magnitude as many common diseases. I think a brain emulation based singularity is safer than an AGI one, and hence I would prefer it to come first. Others in the office argue that while friendly AGI might be hard to achieve, once we have it we are much safer from the risks of uploading, and hence it is to be preferred over the scenario where we first get uploading and then AGI. Same thing with nanotechnology. But the rational choice depends a lot on what probability estimates you have... Gambling with the future of Earth-originating civilization is so fun, isn't it? (My own strategy is to talk to as many AI researchers as possible and get them thinking in constructive ways. Stopping research has never been an option, but it might get smarter.) -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From eugen at leitl.org Mon Dec 19 10:21:04 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2011 11:21:04 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Ashkenazi Longevity was Re: The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: <1323907154.19824.YahooMailNeo@web65608.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20111219102104.GY31847@leitl.org> On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 06:18:26PM -0700, Kelly Anderson wrote: > Have many of you used their services? Has it seemed worthwhile to you? I have subscribed for a year, but letting the subscription lapse. It was good value (I went for a special) but what's it telling you is very limited (unless you want to play with the raw data). I think I'll go for a full sequence sometime when it's affordable. > > Because of the all the screening > > in the Jewish community, Tay-Sachs has been virtually eradicated -- > > there hasn't been a new case since 2003. > > That is an astonishing success story. Why hasn't this been told where > I could read it, I wonder. Perhaps I'm not reading widely enough... > LOL > > -Kelly > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From eugen at leitl.org Mon Dec 19 10:24:49 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2011 11:24:49 +0100 Subject: [ExI] is a FTL drive a dream without any physics to back it up? In-Reply-To: References: <20111214093015.GV31847@leitl.org> <20111215125841.GW31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20111219102449.GZ31847@leitl.org> On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 06:46:06PM -0700, Kelly Anderson wrote: > If you send seeds that know their origin, and are designed to want to > send back information, then it is indeed more satisfying than Voyager, > which is definitely a one way communication with minimal chance of > ever even being found, except by the future "us", in which case it > will just get put back into the Smithsonian air and space museum... What is the reason animals and plants have offspring? They're definitely not doing it for their personal profit. Why did the astrochicken cross the interstellar void? To get to the other side. From eugen at leitl.org Mon Dec 19 10:45:36 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2011 11:45:36 +0100 Subject: [ExI] is a FTL drive a dream without any physics to back it up? In-Reply-To: References: <20111214093015.GV31847@leitl.org> <20111215125841.GW31847@leitl.org> <20111216105734.GR31847@leitl.org> <20111216113043.GW31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20111219104536.GB31847@leitl.org> On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 06:54:27PM -0700, Kelly Anderson wrote: > On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 4:30 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > So in order to get out into space we must prevent collapse. > > This should be our first and foremost priority as a species. > > I don't think this is the only choice Eugen. We can collapse in such a > way that most of our civilization's scientific knowledge survives, and I see a big problem with engineering collapse. It's a degenerate state and really easy to reach: all you have to do is to keep doing nothing. Collapse is default. The end-game of a food fight for the last scraps on the table is probably a total nuclear exchange, which reduces the carrying capacity to next to nothing. The survivors of a depopulated, contaminated world will have to claw their way back -- to add insult to injury in a depleted-resource environment. It is possible to build archives which would assist with the bootstrap but this is expensive, and this is not being done on a sufficient scale. If we collapse, further prognosis would be dim. This world has less than a gigayear of habitability left, and even that time would be interpunctuated with extinction events. > is pushed forward by the (hopefully) wiser survivors of said collapse. > > Those wise survivors can get into space and assure the continuity of In order to get to space you need the entire supply chain of a space faring civilisation. Rebuilding this is a devastated, depleted world is much, much harder than it's been for us, even if you know how. > our civilization even after a collapse, and they might be in a better > place to do so politically than we are today. If you go through a hunter-gatherer phase (assuming, your population size isn't below critical, especially considering the enhanced mutation background, and you'll be sitting duck to any supervolcanism/spontaneous climatic excursion/asteroid impact event) you'd be just screwed up as us cognition-wise. I think the only good chance we have is now, and we're wasting it good. > I hope this is the case, as collapse seems rather difficult to avoid > on the current track. Perhaps this could be a side effect of having > watched both 'Contagion' and 'Too Big to Fail' within the last week... > LOL... I'm usually a little more optimistic. You shouldn't be an optimist. These are dangerous to themselves and others. You should be a realist. http://www.mamieyoung.com/dailydawdle/I%20think%20this%20is%20piss.jpg From eugen at leitl.org Mon Dec 19 11:38:15 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2011 12:38:15 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Organization to 'Speed Up" Creation of AGI? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20111219113815.GD31847@leitl.org> On Sun, Dec 18, 2011 at 01:51:18AM -0500, Kevin G Haskell wrote: > Does anyone know of any presently existing private organizations that are > dedicated to the idea of 'speeding' up the development of AGI and of > achieving the Singularity as soon as possible? All the brain emulation projects clearly aim for this, whether they realize it, or not. Of course accelerating the Singularity just because you can is the most idiotic idea imaginable. All extinction events happen when the environment changes particularly rapidly. If you cease to be the prime mover and shaker you'll be a prime candidate for the fossil layer yourself. There are easier and more straightforward ways to commit suicide as a species. From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Mon Dec 19 12:29:33 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2011 13:29:33 +0100 Subject: [ExI] is a FTL drive a dream without any physics to back it up? In-Reply-To: <20111219102449.GZ31847@leitl.org> References: <20111214093015.GV31847@leitl.org> <20111215125841.GW31847@leitl.org> <20111219102449.GZ31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: On 19 December 2011 11:24, Eugen Leitl wrote: > Why did the astrochicken cross the interstellar void? > To get to the other side. > I really like that. All my cultural background would also make me wary of optimism (O. Spengler "optimism is cowardice"). But on a more positive angle, what about the fact that a more outward-oriented, daring and dynamic civilisational orientation would also be best placed to resist and avoid collapse? The crises we are possibly facing are an altogether different scale, but after all Europe inverted its decline around 1300 by embarking in exploration, change, paradigm shifts, political unrest, etc. most of which was not per se aimed at immediate returns. In this respect, vigorous and competing space programs, even of an "Everest nature" ("I want to climb it because it's there"), could in principle pay indirect dividends also with regard with the dire prospectives in discussion... -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Mon Dec 19 16:04:33 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2011 17:04:33 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Organization to 'Speed Up" Creation of AGI? In-Reply-To: <4EEE559E.4060807@aleph.se> References: <4EEDA789.4010402@aleph.se> <4EEE559E.4060807@aleph.se> Message-ID: On 18 December 2011 22:05, Anders Sandberg wrote: > But most of us also think future generations and sentient systems have > some or full value: discounting people in the future is the same thing as > discounting them in space (given relativity) and pretty odd. So this means > that the enormous value embodied in possible future generations - whether > humans, posthumans or AIs - matters a lot, and avoiding risking it by our > actions is an important moral consideration. > > The threats we must reduce are those that remove value: extinction or > permanent curtailment of value. For example, badly motivated AGI might both > wipe out humanity and be unable to ever achieve any value of its own. This corresponds roughly to my understanding of FHI stance, and, yes, for a utilitarian I suspect that discounting the "happiness", "well-being" or "pleasure-pain balance" contribution of future entities is somewhat odd (even though this does not go without its own paradoxes, such as making birth control immoral unless the case can be satisfactorily proved that additional births would create more suffering than the opposite, whatever it may be). I come from a very different perspective, so all this does not concern me too much personally, but a point however that I consider perplexing is this content-rich idea of "value", where a utilitarian could and should recognise as "successors", and be contented with them, only those to which "value" can be attached in human, when not squarely in humanist, terms (a position epitomised by Stross' characters quite "racist" language about the so-called Vile Offspring). Interestingly, this is at odd as well with the kind of animalism espoused by, eg, David Pearce, which axiologically could otherwise be not so far from Bostrom's ethical views. We are much less concerned if humanity invents successors that gradually > take our place and then go on to enrich the universe with > impossible-to-human mentalities. > I wonder however whether this can be generalised to the transhumanism camp in general, since some statements, including passing-by ones in mailing lists seem to suggest otherwise. It is individually rational to try to reduce existential risk, especially > if you are signed up for cryonics or think life extension is likely, since > then you will have even more years to be at risk in. Right now the > existential risk per year is likely below 1% per year, but by our estimates > probably not far below it. Inventing a super-powerful technology like > self-improving AGI, uploading or atomically precise manufacturing, bumps it > up - at least for a short time. This means that if you are a transhumanist > who thinks these technologies are likely in the not too far future you > should existential risk to be a *personal* threat on the same magnitude as > many common diseases. This is probably the crux of the issue. I am basically persuaded that our personal chances of survival in a seventy- or eighty-year time are vanishingly small, unless dramatic changes take place (any significant lifespan extension requires itself the development and adoption of dangerous technologies, and cryonics remains at best a stop-gag measure). I am a transhumanist in the sense that I would like to defy such destiny - even though in my case personal survival, or for that matter "the well-being balance in the cosmos", are not really the entire story. Accordingly, it seems that the real choice is between, say, sitting on the deck of the Titanic, with a 99,999 chances of getting drown in five hours, and dive aiming at a lifeboat, a process which has, say, a 50% chance of killing you in a handful of seconds. Now, I maintain that the kind of risk aversion that certainly dictates the first behaviour to those adhering to contemporary mainstream ideology in western countries, besides reflecting ethologically the literal and civilisational aging of those societies, are deeply influence by moral biases of a monotheistic origin according to which a drastic difference would exist between identically catastrophic events depending on whether they are the product of human decisions or of some alleged impersonal "providence" or "necessity", religious or secular that it may be. See the statistic about the huge differences of the sacrifices the average US citizen would be ready to make to fight Global Warming in connection with its anthropic or non-anthropic nature (something which, strictly speaking, is absolutely irrelevant as to its consequences) I think a brain emulation based singularity is safer than an AGI one, and > hence I would prefer it to come first. > My own bet, but you probably know it by now, is that we are not recognising an AGI anyway as such unless it *is* a functional, ethological emulation of brain, no matter at what high or low level. And that anyway a pure-silicon system is neither more nor less dangerous than a fyborg composed by a biological brain with en equivalent computing power at its fingertips. Biological/Darwinian features can certainly be emulated, but specialised "human peripherals" are so plenty and cheap that their full emulation is mainly an interesting scientific exercise - same as running graphic programs on a CPU. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From darren.greer3 at gmail.com Tue Dec 20 00:05:32 2011 From: darren.greer3 at gmail.com (Darren Greer) Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2011 20:05:32 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Organization to 'Speed Up" Creation of AGI? In-Reply-To: <20111219113815.GD31847@leitl.org> References: <20111219113815.GD31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 7:38 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: There are easier and more > > straightforward ways to commit suicide as a species. > Ah yes, but would any of them be as fun? Your comments, Eugen, put me in mind of a quote by George Steiner. "We cannot turn back. We cannot choose the dreams of unknowing. We shall, I expect, open the last door in the castle, even if it leads, perhaps *because * it leads, on to realities which are beyond the reach of human comprehension and control. And we shall do so with that desolate clairvoyance, so marvelously rendered in Bartok's music, because opening doors is the tragic merit of our identity." Cheery thought for the day. Darren > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Tue Dec 20 00:22:42 2011 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2011 17:22:42 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream . . . Message-ID: On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 5:00 AM, Stefano Vaj > 2011/12/18 Darren Greer > snip > > The feedback mechanisms come through the process of evolution itself. When >> the seeded planet(s) develop radio technology, then the progenitors get >> interested, and know that phase one is complete. ?Any planet that didn't >> develop radio technology is considered a failure and written off. We tend >> to think of projects of any sort on such small scales. >> > Wolfram posits that i) unless computational processes are "anthropomorphic" > enough, we are bound not to recognise them as "intelligence" at all; ii) > the better the compression of signals, the more indistinguishable the > signal becomes from noise. The combination of this two facts would account > for the Fermi paradox. Perhaps. But radio technology is not the only indicator of intelligent processes. There is a difference visible from space between wild country and farms. So far we have not seen anything out there that does not look "wild," everywhere we look there is enormous waste of energy and matter. There are (I think) a limited number of ways to account for this. 1) We are the first in our light cone. This seems really unlikely given the number of stars and probable planets, but someone has to be first, it could be us. The obvious way to get from star to star is to use light sails and TW lasers. Such a transport mechanism would be seen as obviously artificial far across the universe. We don't see it. 2) Something removes intelligences from large scale interaction with the universe. I have theorized this might be the attractiveness of virtual worlds or perhaps the speed of information propagation. A million to one speed up would limit interactive communication to a distance much smaller than the earth. 3) Perhaps the most bizarre reason for the Fermi problem is the world as we know it being a simulation. There are probably ways to test for being in a simulation, but testing ends the simulation (and the universe as we know it) so it might not be something you want to try. If you have other ideas, that are not minor variations on these, please mention them. Keith From kgh1kgh2 at gmail.com Tue Dec 20 04:32:48 2011 From: kgh1kgh2 at gmail.com (Kevin G Haskell) Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2011 23:32:48 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Organization to "Speed Up" Creation of AGI? Message-ID: On 12/18/12, 9:42, Anders Sanderberg wrote: On 2011-12-18 07:51, Kevin G Haskell wrote: > There are few organizations in the H+/AGI 'aware' communities that are > dedicated to the idea of slowing down the creation of the AGI species, > and Singularity, for the purposes of being "cautious" so that mankind > isn't destroyed, or in some other way harmed, by the new species that we > create. >>I think that is a bit of misrepresentation. I can only speak for us at >>FHI, but we would be fine with faster AGI development if we thought safe >>AGI was very likely or we were confident that it would be developed >>before AGI went critical. An early singularity reduces existential risk >>from everything that could happen while waiting for it. It also benefits >>existing people if it is a positive one. If by misrepresentation, Anders, you think that I was including FHI in my comments regarding the groups that I mentioned, I wasn't because I actually wasn't aware of your group. However, in light of your comments, I think I now safely include your group among the "go slow 'just in case' group," and also in light of your description of your group, I don't see how you wouldn't include it in the other (as yet unnamed groups) I had mentioned, or consider what I said as a misrepresentation. Individuals who are aware of what is being developed fall into four categories: Those who want to speed up the process, those who wish slow down the process to some degree, those who wish to stop the process, and those who wish to reverse the process. > Does anyone know of any presently existing private organizations that > are dedicated to the idea of 'speeding' up the development of AGI and of > achieving the Singularity as soon as possible? >>Every single AGI company? OK, there aren't *that* many of them. Regarding my question regarding "private organizations," I should have been more clear. What I meant by "private" wasn't meant as the equivalent of "exclusive or hidden," but a group or "official" organization that is openly advocating the "speeding of the development of AGI" that is not a company, and is not publicly funded. An advocacy group with a webpage, if you will. Kevin C.H.A.R.T.S (Capitalism, Health, Age-Reversal, Transhumanism, and Singularity.) -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kgh1kgh2 at gmail.com Tue Dec 20 04:43:37 2011 From: kgh1kgh2 at gmail.com (Kevin G Haskell) Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2011 23:43:37 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Organization to "Speed Up" the Creation of AGI? Message-ID: On Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2011 14:58:25 +0100, Stefano Vaj wrote: On 18 December 2011 09:42, Anders Sandberg wrote: (Anders Sandberg's comment)" > I think that is a bit of misrepresentation. I can only speak for us at > FHI, but we would be fine with faster AGI development if we thought safe > AGI was very likely or we were confident that it would be developed before > AGI went critical. An early singularity reduces existential risk from > everything that could happen while waiting for it. It also benefits > existing people if it is a positive one. > (Stefano Vaj's Reply) >>Given that unless something very dramatic happens the entire humankind - >>defined as the set of all humans currently alive - is currently confronted >>with an obvious extinction risk, or rather certitude, in a matter of >>decades, out of aging if anything, it has always been unclear to me how FHI >>can reconcile what I think is fair to characterise as an utilitarian value >>system with a primary concern for the dominance or not of bio-based >>intelligences in the future. >>But of course the same question could be asked to the Singularity Institute. I share your thoughts on that, Stefano. Well said. Kevin -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kgh1kgh2 at gmail.com Tue Dec 20 05:35:49 2011 From: kgh1kgh2 at gmail.com (Kevin G Haskell) Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:35:49 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Organizations to "Speed Up" the Creation of AGI? Message-ID: On Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2011 22:05:34 +0100, Anders Sandberg wrote: >(Anders Sanderberg reply to Kevin George Haskell): > I think that is a bit of misrepresentation. I can only speak for us > at FHI, but we would be fine with faster AGI development if we > thought safe AGI was very likely or we were confident that it would > be developed before AGI went critical. An early singularity reduces > existential risk from everything that could happen while waiting for > it. It also benefits existing people if it is a positive one. > Also >> (Reply from Stefano Vaj to Anders Sandberg) > > > Given that unless something very dramatic happens the entire humankind - > defined as the set of all humans currently alive - is currently > confronted with an obvious extinction risk, or rather certitude, in a > matter of decades, out of aging if anything, it has always been unclear > to me how FHI can reconcile what I think is fair to characterise as an > utilitarian value system with a primary concern for the dominance or not > of bio-based intelligences in the future. >>Yes, we usually tend towards the consequentialist side of the ethical >>spectrum. But most of us also think future generations and sentient >>systems have some or full value: discounting people in the future is the >>same thing as discounting them in space (given relativity) and pretty >>odd. So this means that the enormous value embodied in possible future >>generations - whether humans, posthumans or AIs - matters a lot, and >>avoiding risking it by our actions is an important moral consideration. >>The threats we must reduce are those that remove value: extinction or >>permanent curtailment of value. For example, badly motivated AGI might >>both wipe out humanity and be unable to ever achieve any value of its >>own. We are much less concerned if humanity invents successors that >>gradually take our place and then go on to enrich the universe with >>impossible-to-human mentalities. While the concern is valid, how would FHI and like-minded groups go about ensuring that once AGI is created, either in 10 years or 200, that this new species will be anything other than it/they want(s) to be, and do to whatever existing species, rather human or Transhuman, that will still have much lower levels of speed, awareness, and power, that it wants? >>It is individually rational to try to reduce existential risk, >>especially if you are signed up for cryonics or think life extension is >>likely, since then you will have even more years to be at risk in. Right >>now the existential risk per year is likely below 1% per year, but by >>our estimates probably not far below it. Inventing a super-powerful >>technology like self-improving AGI, uploading or atomically precise >>manufacturing, bumps it up - at least for a short time. This means that >>if you are a transhumanist who thinks these technologies are likely in >>the not too far future you should existential risk to be a *personal* >>threat on the same magnitude as many common diseases. I would be interested in how you can quantify the existential risks as being 1% per year? How can one quantify existential risks that are known, and as yet unknown, to mankind, within the next second, never mind the next year, and never mind with a given percentage? As someone who considers himself a Transhumanist, I come to exactly the opposite conclusion as the one you gave, in that I think by focusing on health technologies and uploading as fast as possible, we give humanity, and universal intelligence, a greater possibility of lasting longer as a species, being 'superior' before the creation of AGI,and perhaps merging with a new species that we create which will 'allow' us to perpetually evolve with it/them, or least protect us from most existential threats that are already plentiful. >>I think a brain emulation based singularity is safer than an AGI one, >>and hence I would prefer it to come first. Others in the office argue >>that while friendly AGI might be hard to achieve, once we have it we are >>much safer from the risks of uploading, and hence it is to be preferred >>over the scenario where we first get uploading and then AGI. Same thing >>with nanotechnology. But the rational choice depends a lot on what >>probability estimates you have... Once a brain is emulated, a process that companies like IBM have promised to complete in 10 years because of competitive concerns, not to mention all of the other companies and countries pouring massive amounts of money for the same reason, the probability that various companies and countries are also pouring ever larger sums of money into developing AGI, especially since many of the technologies overlap. If brain-emulation is achieved in 10 years or less, then AGI can't be far behind. Still, I can't really see how waiting for brain-emulation will somehow keep us safer as a species once AGI is actually developed. What factors are being used in the numbers game that you mentioned? Do we have any idea, even those most closely working on these projects, especially since many of these projects will be approached from different angles and with a great deal of secrecy, that a numbers game is even possible. The leap-frogging through unexpected breakthroughs are bound to happen and speed up as we approach the Singularity, won't they? What is the general thinking about why we need to wait for full-brain emulation before we can start uploading our brains (and hopefully bodies)? Even if we must wait, is the idea that if we can create artificial brains that are patterned on each of our individual brains, so that we can have a precise upload, that the AGIans will somehow have a different view about what they will choose to do with a fully Transhumanist species? >>Gambling with the future of Earth-originating civilization is so fun, >>isn't it? Pardon? >>(My own strategy is to talk to as many AI researchers as possible and >>get them thinking in constructive ways. Stopping research has never been >>an option, but it might get smarter.) >>-- >>Anders Sandberg >>Future of Humanity Institute >>Oxford University When you said 'constructive' and 'smarter,' don't you mean 'slower and more cautious?' I don't mean to put words in your mouth, but I don't see what else you could mean. May I ask if you've been polling these researchers, or have a general idea as to what the percentages of them working on AGI think regarding the four options I presented (expecting, of course, that since they are working on the creation of them, few are likely in support of either the stop, or reversing options, but rather the other two choices of go slower or speed up)? Thanks, Kevin George Haskell C.H.A.R.T.S (Capitalism, Health, Age-Reversal, Transhumanism, and Singularity) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kgh1kgh2 at gmail.com Tue Dec 20 05:51:42 2011 From: kgh1kgh2 at gmail.com (Kevin G Haskell) Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:51:42 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Organizations to "Speed Up" Creation of AGI? Message-ID: On Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2011 12:38:15 +0100, Eugen Leitl wrote: >( Kevin George Haskell) : > Does anyone know of any presently existing private organizations that are > dedicated to the idea of 'speeding' up the development of AGI and of > achieving the Singularity as soon as possible? >>All the brain emulation projects clearly aim for this, whether they >>realize it, or not. Agreed. >>Of course accelerating the Singularity just because you can is the >>most idiotic idea imaginable. All extinction events happen when >>the environment changes particularly rapidly. Is it the most idiotic? It is true what you wrote about extinction level events, so how wise it to wait for the countless other possible extinction level-events, either caused by nature, war, or man-made accidents like the release of a global-killing virus, non of which will provide anything for man, and will end the chance of human/AGI intelligence from evolving and spreading throughout the universe? >>If you cease to be the prime mover and shaker you'll be a prime >>candidate for the fossil layer yourself. There are easier and more >>straightforward ways to commit suicide as a species. Yes, but at some point, we are bound to go extinct, one way or the other...except...possibly, if we create AGI. So, again, you 'do' realize that we are going to go extinct if we 'don't' create AGI, right? Do you propose stopping the development of AGI, and if so, since we will eventually go extinct as a species, wouldn't that actually be the way we would be committing suicide as a species? Kevin George Haskell, C.H.A.R.T.S (Capitalism, Health, Age-Reversal, Transhumanism, and Singularity.) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Tue Dec 20 07:30:02 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2011 08:30:02 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream . . . In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20111220073002.GD31847@leitl.org> On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 05:22:42PM -0700, Keith Henson wrote: > 2) Something removes intelligences from large scale interaction with > the universe. I have theorized this might be the attractiveness of > virtual worlds or perhaps the speed of information propagation. A There is nothing particularly virtual about hardware. It's large, bulky, and takes entire stars to power in sufficient quantities. The speed of information propagation is a red herring, because you're happy enough to interact mostly-locally. People got out of Africa on foot just fine, one band of primates by another. Would you say that seven billion people are pretty observable? This planet sure thinks so. > million to one speed up would limit interactive communication to a > distance much smaller than the earth. It takes too long to talk to somewhere more than a light seconds away? Don't do it, then! Just talk to people closer to you, and so will they, and so on. Why do you insist to talk at all, for that matter? Seeds are pretty inert. They never get bored, and sprout just fine on the other end of the journey. > 3) Perhaps the most bizarre reason for the Fermi problem is the world > as we know it being a simulation. There are probably ways to test for Yes, but this is religion. We don't do religion here. > being in a simulation, but testing ends the simulation (and the > universe as we know it) so it might not be something you want to try. So the pesky rodents gets terminated when they get too uppity, and realize they've been living in cage #9? Occam sez: I will cut you. From pharos at gmail.com Tue Dec 20 10:07:48 2011 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2011 10:07:48 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream . . . In-Reply-To: <20111220073002.GD31847@leitl.org> References: <20111220073002.GD31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 7:30 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > There is nothing particularly virtual about hardware. It's large, > bulky, and takes entire stars to power in sufficient quantities. > Even with nanotech? > The speed of information propagation is a red herring, because > you're happy enough to interact mostly-locally. People got out > of Africa on foot just fine, one band of primates by another. > We're not talking about primates. Million times speedup intelligences with nanotech don't have the same drives as primates. > > It takes too long to talk to somewhere more than a light seconds > away? Don't do it, then! Just talk to people closer to you, and > so will they, and so on. > 'Talking' is probably the wrong word to use about these intelligences. That sort of hive-mind may well not even have individuals as we understand it. > Why do you insist to talk at all, for that matter? Seeds are > pretty inert. They never get bored, and sprout just fine on > the other end of the journey. > If seeds are the preferred colonisation method, then that implies that we must be the first in the galaxy. Even at sub-light speeds the galaxy is old enough to have been colonised many times over. BillK From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Tue Dec 20 10:28:53 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2011 11:28:53 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Organization to 'Speed Up" Creation of AGI? In-Reply-To: References: <20111219113815.GD31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: 2011/12/20 Darren Greer > Ah yes, but would any of them be as fun? Your comments, Eugen, put me in > mind of a quote by George Steiner. > > "We cannot turn back. We cannot choose the dreams of unknowing. We shall, > I expect, open the last door in the castle, even if it leads, perhaps * > because* it leads, on to realities which are beyond the reach of human > comprehension and control. And we shall do so with that desolate > clairvoyance, so marvelously rendered in Bartok's music, because opening > doors is the tragic merit of our identity." > > Wonderful quote. Where does it come from? -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Tue Dec 20 11:06:22 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:06:22 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream . . . In-Reply-To: References: <20111220073002.GD31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20111220110622.GL31847@leitl.org> On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 10:07:48AM +0000, BillK wrote: > Even with nanotech? Atoms and moles are additive. Replication rate of information patterns will always outstrip the rate of substrate doublings. Not many doublings to blot out the Sun. Then, as egress rate from the volume is very limited relatively to production rate you're effectively simmering at steady state. > > > The speed of information propagation is a red herring, because > > you're happy enough to interact mostly-locally. People got out > > of Africa on foot just fine, one band of primates by another. > > > > We're not talking about primates. Million times speedup intelligences > with nanotech don't have the same drives as primates. All life has the same drive. No known exceptions. > > > > > It takes too long to talk to somewhere more than a light seconds > > away? Don't do it, then! Just talk to people closer to you, and > > so will they, and so on. > > > > 'Talking' is probably the wrong word to use about these intelligences. When I say talking, I mean relativistic signalling. > That sort of hive-mind may well not even have individuals as we > understand it. >From the information theory view, all the systems are the same. > > > Why do you insist to talk at all, for that matter? Seeds are > > pretty inert. They never get bored, and sprout just fine on > > the other end of the journey. > > > > If seeds are the preferred colonisation method, then that implies that > we must be the first in the galaxy. Even at sub-light speeds the > galaxy is old enough to have been colonised many times over. Exactly. We're not in anyone's smart light cone. The most probable way to observe an expanding wave is to be the nucleus. We'll either do that, or self-terminate. There's really not anything in between these two outcomes. From darren.greer3 at gmail.com Tue Dec 20 11:36:56 2011 From: darren.greer3 at gmail.com (Darren Greer) Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2011 07:36:56 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Organization to 'Speed Up" Creation of AGI? In-Reply-To: References: <20111219113815.GD31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: 2011/12/20 Stefano Vaj > > >> Wonderful quote. Where does it come from? In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards The Redefinition of Culture, By George Steiner > > > -- > Stefano Vaj > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -- Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood. Friedrich Nietzsche -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Tue Dec 20 11:46:40 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:46:40 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream . . . In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 20 December 2011 01:22, Keith Henson wrote: > Perhaps. But radio technology is not the only indicator of > intelligent processes. > Yes, even though Wolfram's argument can be extended to any kind of signalling. > 1) We are the first in our light cone. This seems really unlikely > given the number of stars and probable planets, but someone has to be > first, it could be us. The obvious way to get from star to star is to > use light sails and TW lasers. Such a transport mechanism would be > seen as obviously artificial far across the universe. We don't see > it. > > 2) Something removes intelligences from large scale interaction with > the universe. I have theorized this might be the attractiveness of > virtual worlds or perhaps the speed of information propagation. A > million to one speed up would limit interactive communication to a > distance much smaller than the earth. > > 3) Perhaps the most bizarre reason for the Fermi problem is the world > as we know it being a simulation. There are probably ways to test for > being in a simulation, but testing ends the simulation (and the > universe as we know it) so it might not be something you want to try. > > If you have other ideas, that are not minor variations on these, > please mention them. > I do not really know how to resolve Fermi's paradox. The idea that we are the only, or the first, of something disturbs me aesthetically, as the all-too-easy recourse to the anthropic principle in cosmology and physics. What I tentatively find more persuasive is the idea that we might be too parochial in our view of extraterrestrial "life" or "intelligence". That is, we would recognise it only inasmuch as it is a slightly alterated version of ourselves; same as the AGIs being defined as a Turing-passing emulation. Now, if the space of all possible computations and/or darwinian processes is vast enough, we would be the "only ones" simply in the sense that it would be unlikely that two instantiations bump against each other that be similar enough for our purpose, unless they are deliberately programmed to this effect. Moreover, I am not sure of how visible even civilisations and species pretty identical to ours could or would be making themselves on a cosmic scale. Let us say, eg, that somebody is making use of light sails and TW lasers the other side of Andromeda. Would it be an obvious, in-your-face, red drape for contemporary terrestrial astronomers? As to more massive footprints, I am a member of the Order of Cosmic Engineers, and I like Kardashev's speculations about Type III civilisations like the next guy, but the truth is that even a ton of mass is, well, heavy, and I would not take for granted that most clades quickly end up sculpting for fun the shape of neighbouring galaxies in the shape of their females... :-) -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Tue Dec 20 11:49:14 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:49:14 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Organization to 'Speed Up" Creation of AGI? In-Reply-To: References: <20111219113815.GD31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: 2011/12/20 Darren Greer > In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards The Redefinition of Culture, > By George Steiner > Thank you! -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cetico.iconoclasta at gmail.com Tue Dec 20 12:05:00 2011 From: cetico.iconoclasta at gmail.com (Henrique Moraes Machado) Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2011 10:05:00 -0200 Subject: [ExI] RES: Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream . . . In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <00ae01ccbf0f$9d08b530$d71a1f90$@gmail.com> As to more massive footprints, I am a member of the Order of Cosmic Engineers, and I like Kardashev's speculations about Type III civilisations like the next guy, but the truth is that even a ton of mass is, well, heavy, and I would not take for granted that most clades quickly end up sculpting for fun the shape of neighbouring galaxies in the shape of their females... :-) What if their females are spiral? From eugen at leitl.org Tue Dec 20 13:05:22 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2011 14:05:22 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream . . . In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20111220130522.GQ31847@leitl.org> On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 12:46:40PM +0100, Stefano Vaj wrote: > On 20 December 2011 01:22, Keith Henson wrote: > > > Perhaps. But radio technology is not the only indicator of > > intelligent processes. > > > > Yes, even though Wolfram's argument can be extended to any kind of > signalling. I presume Wolfram's argument is closely related to http://old.nabble.com/Everything-List-f18221.html which have always struck me as a particularly sterile mode of inquiry. I have big problems which approaches attempting to describe the physical universe in terms of a particular view upon an infinity of... information stuff existing in some sort of metaverse. This isn't provable as it explains everything and nothing, and doesn't reduce the problem complexity but actually increases it. It isn't turtles all the way down, no. It's basically the same thing as the simulation argument, only without a (bearded, elderly, white-clad male) entity doing a particular simulation for a particular purpose, and it's definitely not science. > I do not really know how to resolve Fermi's paradox. I fail to see where there is a paradoxon. Life is rare and difficult to observe, why is this something surprising? > The idea that we are the only, or the first, of something disturbs me > aesthetically, as the all-too-easy recourse to the anthropic principle in > cosmology and physics. The universe doesn't care about what we consider aesthetical. In absence of independent data points about life not causally related to the local system we can't put any probability on it that isn't pefectly biased. This is why probabilistic arguments are not applicable, and observer-moments are bunk. > What I tentatively find more persuasive is the idea that we might be too > parochial in our view of extraterrestrial "life" or "intelligence". That > is, we would recognise it only inasmuch as it is a slightly alterated > version of ourselves; same as the AGIs being defined as a Turing-passing No, it has to be subject to the laws of thermondynamics and evolution. Anything which has a metabolism and self-replicates is easy enough to observe. > emulation. Now, if the space of all possible computations and/or darwinian > processes is vast enough, we would be the "only ones" simply in the sense > that it would be unlikely that two instantiations bump against each other > that be similar enough for our purpose, unless they are deliberately > programmed to this effect. > > Moreover, I am not sure of how visible even civilisations and species > pretty identical to ours could or would be making themselves on a cosmic > scale. Let us say, eg, that somebody is making use of light sails and TW > lasers the other side of Andromeda. Would it be an obvious, in-your-face, > red drape for contemporary terrestrial astronomers? Anything which can do interstellar travel would make you never have happened. How can you observe something which prevented your very existance? And if you expand at >0.9 c, which time will you have to observe the stars blinking out across the galaxy before your own system goes splat? Evolution seems to take billions of years to create observers starting from congealed star drek, that either go extinct or give raise to expanding waves themselves, which will prevent any new observers from ever emerging when they've passed. Given above, you shouldn't be wondering why you're not seeing them, in fact what you're seeing is exactly what you expect you should be seeing -- nothing. > As to more massive footprints, I am a member of the Order of Cosmic > Engineers, and I like Kardashev's speculations about Type III civilisations > like the next guy, but the truth is that even a ton of mass is, well, > heavy, and I would not take for granted that most clades quickly end up > sculpting for fun the shape of neighbouring galaxies in the shape of their > females... :-) Their females look like ~AU-sized FIR sources with some few MT/s total luminosity. Trust me on this. From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Tue Dec 20 18:34:26 2011 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2011 11:34:26 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream . . . Message-ID: On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 5:00 AM, Stefano Vaj wrote: snip > I do not really know how to resolve Fermi's paradox. snip > Moreover, I am not sure of how visible even civilisations and species > pretty identical to ours could or would be making themselves on a cosmic > scale. Let us say, eg, that somebody is making use of light sails and TW > lasers the other side of Andromeda. Would it be an obvious, in-your-face, > red drape for contemporary terrestrial astronomers? Yes. No doubt about it. > As to more massive footprints, I am a member of the Order of Cosmic > Engineers, and I like Kardashev's speculations about Type III civilisations Drexler, when he first understood the power of nanotechnology, went looking for expanding spots where the stars were being dimmed behind an expanding wave front of technical capable civilization. He found none. Even days I think we are the first, odd days I think technically capable civilizations commonly arise but something removes the lot of them from becoming apparent. There really isn't any way to resolve the issue except to live through us dimming the galaxy. Keith From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Tue Dec 20 18:01:09 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2011 19:01:09 +0100 Subject: [ExI] RES: Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream . . . In-Reply-To: <00ae01ccbf0f$9d08b530$d71a1f90$@gmail.com> References: <00ae01ccbf0f$9d08b530$d71a1f90$@gmail.com> Message-ID: On 20 December 2011 13:05, Henrique Moraes Machado < cetico.iconoclasta at gmail.com> wrote: > What if their females are spiral? > I shall not dignify that with trivial puns about black holes at their centers... :-) -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Tue Dec 20 19:26:08 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2011 20:26:08 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream . . . In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 20 December 2011 19:34, Keith Henson wrote: > Even days I think we are the first, odd days I think technically > capable civilizations commonly arise but something removes the lot of > them from becoming apparent. > No, my point is somewhat the opposite. Could we ourselves really make us blatantly visible to a civilisation the other side of Andromeda even if we considered it a top civilisational priority? I have dimmers everywhere at home, but dimming a galaxy would be a technological feat on quite different scale... -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Tue Dec 20 21:43:32 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2011 22:43:32 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream . . . In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20111220214332.GA31847@leitl.org> On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 08:26:08PM +0100, Stefano Vaj wrote: > Could we ourselves really make us blatantly visible to a civilisation the > other side of Andromeda even if we considered it a top civilisational > priority? Best bang for the buck would be lasers. You can easily outshine the Sun in narrow enough spectral bands. > I have dimmers everywhere at home, but dimming a galaxy would be a > technological feat on quite different scale... Dimming a galaxy would not be any more difficult than dimming a single star. And it's pretty easy to dim a single star, provided you have enough orbiting material in the system. You do it with an ISRU with self-rep closure over unity. The shorter the self-rep times the sooner you blanket it out. With approaches like http://apl.aip.org/resource/1/applab/v95/i22/p223503_s1?isAuthorized=no you need really little mass. Roughly about the mass of the Moon, or about the entire asteroid belt, roughly. It wouldn't take long to disassemble by a self-rep system, as the mass is predispersed and is sitting in shallow gravity wells. From msd001 at gmail.com Tue Dec 20 21:34:43 2011 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2011 16:34:43 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream . . . In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: 2011/12/20 Stefano Vaj : > > I have dimmers everywhere at home, but dimming a galaxy would be a > technological feat on quite different scale... > In a similarly mundane analogy: Could military-grade communications specialists from 1950 even detect (much less understand) today's spectrum-hopping (et al) technology used in something as backwards as a cordless phone? Would HD Radio make sense under examination using the tools of the day? Would even stereo FM be obvious to any but a few nerds in the world? (who may have been on other projects at the time) Do we have the right technology to interpret the signals around us? What if we can't find anything because we're just not clever enough (yet) to see what is everywhere? I know, pointless speculation... can't do anything if it's true... let's talk about some other pointless nuance of this paradox. (right) From anders at aleph.se Tue Dec 20 22:29:50 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2011 23:29:50 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream . . . In-Reply-To: <20111220214332.GA31847@leitl.org> References: <20111220214332.GA31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: <4EF10C5E.206@aleph.se> On 2011-12-20 22:43, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 08:26:08PM +0100, Stefano Vaj wrote: > >> Could we ourselves really make us blatantly visible to a civilisation the >> other side of Andromeda even if we considered it a top civilisational >> priority? > > Best bang for the buck would be lasers. You can easily outshine > the Sun in narrow enough spectral bands. And you can arrange the bands in weird changing patterns that might signal a non-natural origin (there are a few natural maser and laser sources). But it is not glaringly obvious. Now, if we can outshine the sun using planet-sized power through a laser, we might be able to outshine the galaxy by using a Dyson sphere to power a laser. > Dimming a galaxy would not be any more difficult than dimming a > single star. And it's pretty easy to dim a single star, provided > you have enough orbiting material in the system. You do it with > an ISRU with self-rep closure over unity. The shorter the self-rep > times the sooner you blanket it out. Yup. However, something we have been thinking about recently is whether we would actually see a dimming front. The classic technosphere scenario has lots of colonization probes making short jumps, leading to a front. But you can send probes much further ahead than a few lightyears: while it is likely a bit harder, it doesn't seem that difficulty scales proportional to distance. That means you can have a very high branching factor at early stages, using early resources to send probes to every other galaxy (or at least very far away), and then do local filling in once the probes have germinated. This might produce a much less clear front, and maybe even a universal dimming. It also interacts with Robin's cosmic commons scenario. The key factors are probe survival as a function of travelled distance (my BOTE calculations of interstellar dust suggested that the mean free path is pretty long) the cost of launching and slowing probes from high speeds, and whether you want to do really long range colonization on the off chance that some other civ might get there first. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Tue Dec 20 23:48:21 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:48:21 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Organizations to "Speed Up" the Creation of AGI? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4EF11EC5.50809@aleph.se> Longish post. Summary: soft takeoffs have a good chance of being nice for us, hard ones might require some hard choices. I give reasons for why I think we might be in the range 0.1-1% risk of global disaster per year. I urge a great deal of caution and intellectual humility. On 2011-12-20 06:35, Kevin G Haskell wrote: > While the concern is valid, how would FHI and like-minded groups go > about ensuring that once AGI is created, either in 10 years or 200, that > this new species will be anything other than it/they want(s) to be, and > do to whatever existing species, rather human or Transhuman, that will > still have much lower levels of speed, awareness, and power, that it wants? (That sentence structure is worthy Immanuel Kant :-) ) There is a tricky theoretical ethical question surrounding just what kind of ethical agents they would be, and how we could recognize it. But from a practical ethics perspective, I can see a bunch of possibilities: If there is no hard takeoff, we should expect a distribution of "power" that is fairly broad: there will be entities of different levels of capability, and groups of entities can constrain each others activities. This is how we currently handle our societies, with laws, police, markets, and customs to constrain individuals and groups to behave themselves. Our solutions might not be perfect, but it doesn't stretch credulity too much to imagine that there are equivalents that could work here too. (Property rights might or might not help here, by the way. I don't know the current status of the analysis, but Nick did a sketch of how an AGI transition with property rights might lead to a state where the *AGIs* end up impoverished even if afforded full moral rights. More research is needed!) A problem might be if certain entities (like AGI or upload clades) have an easy way of coordinating and gaining economies of scale in their power. If this is possible (good research question!!!), then it must either be prevented using concerted constraints from everybody else or a singleton, or the coordinated group better be seeded with a few entities with humanitarian values. Same thing if we get a weakly multilateral singularity with just a few entities on par. In the case of hard takeoffs we get one entity that can more or less do what it wants. This is likely very bad for the rights or survival for anything else unless the entity happens to be exceedingly nice. We are not optimistic about this being a natural state, so policies to increase the likelihood are good to aim for. To compound the problem, there might be incentives to have a race towards takeoff that disregards safety. One approach might be to get more coordination among the pre-takeoff powers, so that they 1) do not skimp on friendliness, 2) have less incentives to rush. The result would then be somewhat similar to the oligopoly case above. Nick has argued that it might be beneficial to aim for a singleton, a top coordinating agency whose will *will* be done (whether a sufficiently competent world government or Colossus the Computer) - this might be what is necessary to avoid certain kinds of existential risks. But of course, singletons are scary xrisk threats on their own... As I often argue, any way of shedding light on whether hard or soft takeoffs are likely (or possible in the first place) would be *very important*. Not just as cool research, but to drive other research and policy. > I would be interested in how you can quantify the existential risks as > being 1% per year? How can one quantify existential risks that are > known, and as yet unknown, to mankind, within the next second, never > mind the next year, and never mind with a given percentage? For a fun case where the probability of a large set of existential risks that includes totally unknown cosmic disasters can be bounded, see http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0512204 My own guesstimate is based on looking at nuclear war risks. At least in the Cuba crisis case some estimates put the chance of an exchange to "one in three". Over the span of the 66 years we have had nuclear weapons there have been several close calls - not just the Cuba Crisis, but things like Able Archer, the Norwegian rocket incident, the NORAD false alarms 79/80 etc. A proper analysis needs to take variable levels of tension into account, as well as a possible anthropic bias (me being here emailing about it precludes a big nuclear war in the recent past) - I have a working paper on this I ought to work on. But "one in three" for one incident per 66 years gives a risk per year of 0.5%. (Using Laplace's rule of succession gives a risk of 0.15% per year, by the way) We might quibble about how existential the risk of a nuclear war might be, since after all it might just kill a few hundred million people and wreck the global infrastructure, but I give enough credence to the recent climate models of nuclear winter to think it has a chance of killing off the vast majority of humans. I am working on heavy tail distributions of wars, democides, pandemics and stuff like that; one can extrapolate the known distributions to get estimates of tail risks. Loosely speaking it all seems to add to something below 1% per year. Note that I come from a Bayesian perspective: probabilities are statements about ignorance, they are not things that exist independently in nature. > As someone who considers himself a Transhumanist, I come to exactly the > opposite conclusion as the one you gave, in that I think by focusing on > health technologies and uploading as fast as possible, we give humanity, > and universal intelligence, a greater possibility of lasting longer as a > species, being 'superior' before the creation of AGI,and perhaps merging > with a new species that we create which will 'allow' us to perpetually > evolve with it/them, or least protect us from most existential threats > that are already plentiful. I personally do think uploading is the way to go, and should be accelerated. It is just that the arguments in favor of it reducing the risks are not that much stronger than the arguments it increases the risks. We spent a month analyzing this question, and it was deeply annoying to realize how uncertain the rational position seems to be. > Once a brain is emulated, a process that companies like IBM have > promised to complete in 10 years because of competitive concerns, not to > mention all of the other companies and countries pouring massive amounts > of money for the same reason, the probability that various companies and > countries are also pouring ever larger sums of money into developing > AGI, especially since many of the technologies overlap. If > brain-emulation is achieved in 10 years or less, then AGI can't be far > behind. Ah, you believe in marketing. I have a bridge to sell you cheaply... :-) As a computational neuroscientist following the field, I would bet rather strongly against any promise of brain emulation beyond the insect level over the next decade. (My own median estimate ends up annoyingly close to Kurzweil's estimate for the 2040s... ) Do you have a source on how much money countries are pouring into AGI? (not just narrow AI) > Still, I can't really see how waiting for brain-emulation will somehow > keep us safer as a species once AGI is actually developed. What factors > are being used in the numbers game that you mentioned? Here is a simple game: what probability do you assign to us surviving the transition to an AGI world? Call it P1. Once in this world, where we have (by assumption) non-malign very smart AGI, what is the probability we will survive the invention of brain emulation? Call it P2. Now consider a world where brain emulation comes first. What is the chance of surviving that transition? Call it P3. OK, we survived the upload transition. Now we invent AGI. What is the chance of surviving it in this world? Call it P4. Which is largest, P1*P2 or P3*P4? The first is the chance of a happy ending for the AGI first world, the second is the chance of a happy ending for the uploading first world. Now, over at FHI most of us tended to assume the existence of nice superintelligence would make P2 pretty big - it would help us avoid making a mess of the upload transition. But uploads doesn't seem to help much with fixing P4, since they are not superintelligent per se (there is just a lot more brain power in that world). > What is the general thinking about why we need to wait for full-brain > emulation before we can start uploading our brains (and hopefully > bodies)? Even if we must wait, is the idea that if we can create > artificial brains that are patterned on each of our individual brains, > so that we can have a precise upload, that the AGIans will somehow have > a different view about what they will choose to do with a fully > Transhumanist species? I don't think you would be satisfied with a chatbot based on your online writing or even spoken speech patterns, right? You shouldn't try to upload your brain before we have full-brain emulation since the methods are likely going to be 1) destructive, 2) have to throw away information during processing due to storage constraints until at least mid-century, 3) we will not have evidence it works before it actually works. Of course, some of us might have no choice because we are frozen in liquid nitrogen... > >>(My own strategy is to talk to as many AI researchers as possible and > >>get them thinking in constructive ways. Stopping research has never been > >>an option, but it might get smarter.) > > When you said 'constructive' and 'smarter,' don't you mean 'slower and > more cautious?' I don't mean to put words in your mouth, but I don't > see what else you could mean. I tell them about their great forebears like Simon, Minsky and McCarthy, and how they honestly believed they would achieve human level and beyond AI within their own active research careers. Then I point out that none of them - or anybody else for that matter - seemed to have had *any* safety concerns about the project. Despite (or perhaps because of) fictional safety concerns *predating* the field. I point out that if they take their own ideas seriously they should also be concerned about getting the consequences right. They cannot simultaneously claim they are pursuing AGI and that 1) it will change the world radically and 2) it will automatically be safe, unless they have some fairly strong theory of AI safety and idea why it will be implemented. And in that case, they better tell others about it. Another thing I suggest is that they chat with philosophers more. OK, that might seriously slow down anybody :-) But it is surprising how many scientists do elementary methodological, ethical or epistemological mistakes about their own research - discussing what you do with a friendly philosopher can be quite constructive (and might bring the philosopher a bit more in tune with real research). > May I ask if you've been polling these researchers, or have a general > idea as to what the percentages of them working on AGI think regarding > the four options I presented (expecting, of course, that since they are > working on the creation of them, few are likely in support of either the > stop, or reversing options, but rather the other two choices of go > slower or speed up)? I have not done any polling like that, but we did do a survey at an AI conference we arranged a year ago: http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/news/2011/?a=21516 Fairly optimistic about AGI soonish (2060), concerned with the consequences (unlikely to be just business as usual), all over the place in regards to methodology, and cautious about whether Watson would win (the survey was done before the win). -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Wed Dec 21 02:48:55 2011 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2011 19:48:55 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 18, 2011 at 4:49 PM, PJ Manney wrote: > On Sun, Dec 18, 2011 at 1:50 AM, Mirco Romanato wrote: >> There are problems with the Muslims immigrants and the second generation >> Muslims born here. A large majority of them is not friendly with the >> Jews and many are simply hostile to them. >> The number of attacks against Jews is rising all around Europe and >> mainly where Muslims live. >> More than a few Jews are leaving for the US or Israel claiming this as >> the triggering reason. >> This happen more often in places like Norway, Sweden, Holland, but the >> UK, France and Germany are not immune. > > There were some news stories here in the US about this, but I didn't > know it was so pervasive to trigger immigration. ?I'm unhappy to hear > this. We could have a whole separate discussion about how the massive immigration to Europe of fundamentalist Muslims may be potentially a very destabilizing thing. These are people who *do not* want to merge into the Western melting pot. They instead want the West to adapt to them... John From eugen at leitl.org Wed Dec 21 07:31:39 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 08:31:39 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream . . . In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20111221073139.GD31847@leitl.org> On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 04:34:43PM -0500, Mike Dougherty wrote: > Could military-grade communications specialists from 1950 even detect > (much less understand) today's spectrum-hopping (et al) technology > used in something as backwards as a cordless phone? Would HD Radio > make sense under examination using the tools of the day? Would even > stereo FM be obvious to any but a few nerds in the world? (who may > have been on other projects at the time) > > Do we have the right technology to interpret the signals around us? You're describing the classical problem of SETI: the observability window is narrow. The brightest monochromatic sources we used was military radar so we're detectable to within some 300 lightyears http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2010/07/13/2952471.htm Our total observability window was only about a century. > What if we can't find anything because we're just not clever enough > (yet) to see what is everywhere? The problem is not being clever, the problem is the issue of power. If you look at single stellar FIR sources, the range is much enhanced http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Fermilab_search.htm But given expansiveness they'd be impossible to miss even at GLyr distances. (Of course if you can observe them, they would have passed here already, and you would never have happened, so they're not observable). > I know, pointless speculation... can't do anything if it's true... > let's talk about some other pointless nuance of this paradox. (right) There is no paradox. Anthropic principle and relativistic expansion as well as long time to observer creation and brief observer existance makes the odds of observing one half of the sky going dark very low. From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Wed Dec 21 07:33:22 2011 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:33:22 -0700 Subject: [ExI] A crowd-sourced, Ajax-powered, and simple to modify speculative timeline of the future of technology Message-ID: This is so cool! http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/12/06/science/20111206-technology-timeline.html John : ) From eugen at leitl.org Wed Dec 21 08:00:17 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 09:00:17 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream . . . In-Reply-To: <4EF10C5E.206@aleph.se> References: <20111220214332.GA31847@leitl.org> <4EF10C5E.206@aleph.se> Message-ID: <20111221080017.GO31847@leitl.org> On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 11:29:50PM +0100, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Yup. However, something we have been thinking about recently is whether > we would actually see a dimming front. The classic technosphere scenario You would see a dimming front. If you could observe it, which you couldn't. You're either not there yet, or you never happened when the wave passed through and made emergence of new life impossible. > has lots of colonization probes making short jumps, leading to a front. It doesn't matter, as the real limit is the speed of light. > But you can send probes much further ahead than a few lightyears: while > it is likely a bit harder, it doesn't seem that difficulty scales > proportional to distance. That means you can have a very high branching Cruise is cruise, and background repairs take next to no energy. If you don't hit debris in transit and can deccelerate on arrival, the universe's your oyster. > factor at early stages, using early resources to send probes to every > other galaxy (or at least very far away), and then do local filling in > once the probes have germinated. This might produce a much less clear In order to be able to launch stuff you need to be able to dim the star. Due to the exponential kinetics the dimming is very sudden. Total duration is very short, probably under a century. > front, and maybe even a universal dimming. It also interacts with > Robin's cosmic commons scenario. I don't see how cosmic commons is possible. The assumptions make no sense. > The key factors are probe survival as a function of travelled distance > (my BOTE calculations of interstellar dust suggested that the mean free > path is pretty long) the cost of launching and slowing probes from high Especially in integalactic space. The biggest issue is mass required for slowdown, and resources required to prepare fuel (antimatter-catalyzed fusion e.g.). > speeds, and whether you want to do really long range colonization on the > off chance that some other civ might get there first. Dandelions do not care where their seeds fall. You can probably push 10^3 probes simultaneously, if not more. The costs for each seed are negligible. From anders at aleph.se Wed Dec 21 08:48:38 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 09:48:38 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> Message-ID: <4EF19D66.4070907@aleph.se> On 2011-12-21 03:48, John Grigg wrote: > We could have a whole separate discussion about how the massive > immigration to Europe of fundamentalist Muslims may be potentially a > very destabilizing thing. I am curious as an European where these massive hordes are. They mainly seem to be visible from across the Atlantic. [ Basically most European Muslims (~6% of the total population) are moderate, but suffers guilt by association because a few are fundamentalist. Typical outgroup bias ("we are very different individually, but *they* are all the same" - this is of course why Europeans think Americans are religious fundamentalists). Surveys show that European Muslims are almost as worried about fundamentalism as non-Muslims http://www.pewglobal.org/2006/07/06/muslims-in-europe-economic-worries-top-concerns-about-religious-and-cultural-identity/ http://www.pewglobal.org/2011/07/21/muslim-western-tensions-persist/ but that the real problem might be outsidership and limited economic opportunities causing resentment. Not to mention the blame game of who is responsible for bad things and what ought to be changed. I am far more worried by big organized mainstream groups like political parties and churches pushing religious and conservative agendas. ] -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Wed Dec 21 08:57:36 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 09:57:36 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream . . . In-Reply-To: <20111221080017.GO31847@leitl.org> References: <20111220214332.GA31847@leitl.org> <4EF10C5E.206@aleph.se> <20111221080017.GO31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: <4EF19F80.9060203@aleph.se> On 2011-12-21 09:00, Eugen Leitl wrote: >> front, and maybe even a universal dimming. It also interacts with >> Robin's cosmic commons scenario. > > I don't see how cosmic commons is possible. The assumptions make no > sense. Which assumptions in the scenario make no sense? > You can probably push > 10^3 probes simultaneously, if not more. The costs for each seed are > negligible. Yup, that fits with our calculations. For nanoprobes with about a ton of reaction mass to slow down you can deliver payloads to all galaxies in the reachable universe within a tiny fraction of lightspeed over a launch period less than a century. Some interesting questions about the visibility of probes slowing down. Continous antimatter rockets would show a very unusual signature of blueshifted annihilation plus blackbody radiation, but Drexler suggested something more akin to backwards pointing railguns that might be far harder to see. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Wed Dec 21 09:06:04 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 10:06:04 +0100 Subject: [ExI] A crowd-sourced, Ajax-powered, and simple to modify speculative timeline of the future of technology In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4EF1A17C.1080504@aleph.se> On 2011-12-21 08:33, John Grigg wrote: > This is so cool! > > http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/12/06/science/20111206-technology-timeline.html Agreed. I am mostly curious about whether it would be possible to see the probability distributions people assign to these possibilities. Not that we are any good at predicting the future. But it is amusing to see things like "cash is outlawed" for 2029, when there is indeed a current debate in Sweden about removing it from stores. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From eugen at leitl.org Wed Dec 21 09:44:39 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 10:44:39 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream . . . In-Reply-To: <4EF19F80.9060203@aleph.se> References: <20111220214332.GA31847@leitl.org> <4EF10C5E.206@aleph.se> <20111221080017.GO31847@leitl.org> <4EF19F80.9060203@aleph.se> Message-ID: <20111221094439.GQ31847@leitl.org> On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 09:57:36AM +0100, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2011-12-21 09:00, Eugen Leitl wrote: >>> front, and maybe even a universal dimming. It also interacts with >>> Robin's cosmic commons scenario. >> >> I don't see how cosmic commons is possible. The assumptions make no >> sense. > > Which assumptions in the scenario make no sense? Basically almost every assumption is ad hoc. It's something an economist would write, who is accustomed to deal with a narrow scope of interactions among members of a single local species. You think the http://hanson.gmu.edu/filluniv.pdf paper is good, yes? > Some interesting questions about the visibility of probes slowing down. > Continous antimatter rockets would show a very unusual signature of > blueshifted annihilation plus blackbody radiation, but Drexler suggested > something more akin to backwards pointing railguns that might be far > harder to see. Do you disagree that the anthropic principle prevents observation of relativistically expanding preexpansive observer-extinguishing fronts very effectively? From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Wed Dec 21 09:50:31 2011 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 02:50:31 -0700 Subject: [ExI] A crowd-sourced, Ajax-powered, and simple to modify speculative timeline of the future of technology In-Reply-To: <4EF1A17C.1080504@aleph.se> References: <4EF1A17C.1080504@aleph.se> Message-ID: Anders wrote: > Agreed. I am mostly curious about whether it would be possible to see the > probability distributions people assign to these possibilities. > > Not that we are any good at predicting the future. But it is amusing to see > things like "cash is outlawed" for 2029, when there is indeed a current > debate in Sweden about removing it from stores. I found many of the predictions wayyyyyyy off in terms of being far too soon or far too late. I felt like it was an exercise in intellectual horse shoes! lol But still, the project is great food for thought, and I hope Anders, that you will contribute to it. I feel I should write that the Singularity will happen in 2045, to protect the honor of the transhumanist saint, Ray Kurzweil! : ) John From anders at aleph.se Wed Dec 21 11:30:43 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 12:30:43 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream . . . In-Reply-To: <20111221094439.GQ31847@leitl.org> References: <20111220214332.GA31847@leitl.org> <4EF10C5E.206@aleph.se> <20111221080017.GO31847@leitl.org> <4EF19F80.9060203@aleph.se> <20111221094439.GQ31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: <4EF1C363.6070402@aleph.se> On 2011-12-21 10:44, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 09:57:36AM +0100, Anders Sandberg wrote: >> Which assumptions in the scenario make no sense? > > Basically almost every assumption is ad hoc. It's something an > economist would write, who is accustomed to deal with a narrow scope of > interactions among members of a single local species. > > You think the http://hanson.gmu.edu/filluniv.pdf paper is good, yes? It is a start. So you don't think the assumption that the propensity for colonizing is partially "inherited" from the parent civilization would be true? >> Some interesting questions about the visibility of probes slowing down. >> Continous antimatter rockets would show a very unusual signature of >> blueshifted annihilation plus blackbody radiation, but Drexler suggested >> something more akin to backwards pointing railguns that might be far >> harder to see. > > Do you disagree that the anthropic principle prevents observation > of relativistically expanding preexpansive observer-extinguishing > fronts very effectively? Not really. It prevents us from being inside the front, and might (depending on our views on SIA/SSA) bias our probabilities towards universes where there are a lot of observers (i.e. no fronts) or where we are first. It is a bit like my anthropic shadow paper: the fact that we cannot have giant meteor impacts in our recent past doesn't make them less likely or invisible in the present. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From eugen at leitl.org Wed Dec 21 12:08:42 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 13:08:42 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream . . . In-Reply-To: <4EF1C363.6070402@aleph.se> References: <20111220214332.GA31847@leitl.org> <4EF10C5E.206@aleph.se> <20111221080017.GO31847@leitl.org> <4EF19F80.9060203@aleph.se> <20111221094439.GQ31847@leitl.org> <4EF1C363.6070402@aleph.se> Message-ID: <20111221120838.GT31847@leitl.org> On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 12:30:43PM +0100, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2011-12-21 10:44, Eugen Leitl wrote: >> On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 09:57:36AM +0100, Anders Sandberg wrote: >>> Which assumptions in the scenario make no sense? >> >> Basically almost every assumption is ad hoc. It's something an >> economist would write, who is accustomed to deal with a narrow scope of >> interactions among members of a single local species. >> >> You think the http://hanson.gmu.edu/filluniv.pdf paper is good, yes? > > It is a start. So you don't think the assumption that the propensity for > colonizing is partially "inherited" from the parent civilization would > be true? I wouldn't call them civilizations, but ecosystems. But of course, the pioneer front self-selects for expansibility over comparatively short distances and times, in the classical darwinian way. We already see it in action: it has been a while since we've even left LEO, we never went into translunar space while our probes are currently entering insterstellar space. As soon as ISRU starts approaching closure of unity it will vastly favor abiological self-replication even within our solar system. Anything capable of crossing interstellar voids will see much higher fitness pressures. A few hops there are going to make some pretty lean and mean critters. >> Do you disagree that the anthropic principle prevents observation >> of relativistically expanding preexpansive observer-extinguishing >> fronts very effectively? > > Not really. It prevents us from being inside the front, and might Not unless you're the nucleus. The species succession will tend to create radiating waves, at least for a while. When you have reached steady state then any wave propagation will be necessarily local and short-lived, as diversity will be very high and what allows invasion in one compartment is perfectly benign in another. Pioneers see strongly convergent due to their niche selection, so they're pretty much indistinguishable regardless of point of origin, while the steady state is sufficiently diverse to make the whole notion of "alienness" moot. Aliens'R'us. Or will be. > (depending on our views on SIA/SSA) bias our probabilities towards > universes where there are a lot of observers (i.e. no fronts) or where > we are first. It is a bit like my anthropic shadow paper: the fact that > we cannot have giant meteor impacts in our recent past doesn't make them > less likely or invisible in the present. The probability that we'd observe a front while we would recognize it for what it is is probably just 2-3 centuries in our case. Unless we collapse, we'll start expanding in about a century. I think the expansion will be close to relativistic (at least 0.1 c) right from the first hop. Everything else would be too slow, and overtaken while still in transit. The first threshold is at the interstellar distance. If you have a fusion metabolism, then slow outwards diffusion across Oort would work, with the last hop to the next star's Oort being quite small. If not, you fire up the big guns and go right for the jugular (inner system of the next star with sufficient flux). Arguably deep space like Oort is a different niche, rather like the deep sea. Less metals, more fissibles, need to make own power and maybe use QC in cold circuits for information processing. The inner systems are awash in metals and abundant energy. From spike66 at att.net Wed Dec 21 14:32:52 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 06:32:52 -0800 Subject: [ExI] mit's answer to the stanford ai class Message-ID: <040d01ccbfed$6c75b6f0$456124d0$@att.net> I was interested in Stanford's AI online class as much for the innovative learning model as for the class content. Of course MIT would have some kind of response: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/mitx-education-initiative-1219.html The Stanford experiment was a critical breakthrough in education. Once enough people try out an online course, they will develop that kind of learning as a skill set in itself. That breaks the entire classical model of education as an exercise in getting to a class at a specific time, listening to one guy talk to a group of people, taking notes, studying for a test on a specific day, etc. It eliminates the very difficult and uncomfortable move into a dormitory on a crowded and dangerous campus away from one's home. All that can be made far more flexible and cheaper, it can be dissociated with the minor league football franchises that the mainstream American colleges have become, it reduces education costs dramatically and creates a domino-effect of changes that will take years to see. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From painlord2k at libero.it Wed Dec 21 15:37:49 2011 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 16:37:49 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: <4EF19D66.4070907@aleph.se> References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> <4EF19D66.4070907@aleph.se> Message-ID: <4EF1FD4D.1090600@libero.it> Il 21/12/2011 09:48, Anders Sandberg ha scritto: > On 2011-12-21 03:48, John Grigg wrote: >> We could have a whole separate discussion about how the massive >> immigration to Europe of fundamentalist Muslims may be potentially >> a very destabilizing thing. > I am curious as an European where these massive hordes are. They > mainly seem to be visible from across the Atlantic. Maybe people to accustomed to look at the Moon have problem looking for things near their feet. And it is easier to not see if these people (and others) are encouraged to segregate themselves. This is an article from 2010; just last year. http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/Moralkontroll-i-Oslos-innvandrergater-5314438.html http://goo.gl/JUY57 * -Many people with minority backgrounds feel pressured by the majority * population to develop their own community. It is built invisible * walls between people, who create their own communities with their own * rules. They prefer to interact with each other and have little * contact with others, he says. http://goo.gl/rNtlP * There, women raped outside of Oslo at night, which robbed men of far * greater scope. Only the last ten years, more than 4,000 people have * been robbed in the city center and Greenland police station area, * most young men. * - They said that everyone has a right to feel safe, but that they are * unable to prevent robberies. "We have lost the city," they said. So * they asked if I could guess how many patrol cars they had out in the * streets this evening, says N?stvik. > [ Basically most European Muslims (~6% of the total population) are > moderate, but suffers guilt by association because a few are > fundamentalist. "Moderate" is a tricky concept. What is the definition of "moderate". Was Swedish people "moderate" when they forceful sterilized "unfit" people (often for silly reasons) until the 1970s? And I remember they started to do so before the Nazi Germans. Also, "most" is a tricky concept. Is most what? 90%? 80%? 50%+1? or what? * The latest WikiLeaks revelation: 1 in 3 British Muslim students back * killing for Islam and 40% want Sharia law Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1340599/WikiLeaks-1-3-British-Muslim-students-killing-Islam-40-want-Sharia-law.html#ixzz1hBHoLrrx * A survey of 600 Muslim students at 30 universities throughout Britain * found that 32 per cent of Muslim respondents believed killing in the * name of religion is justified. Very moderate indeed. More young Muslims back sharia, says poll http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/jan/29/thinktanks.religion In the survey of 1,003 Muslims, ..., nearly 60% said they would prefer to live under British law, while 37% of 16 to 24-year-olds said they would prefer sharia law, against 17% of those over 55. Eighty-six per cent said their religion was the most important thing in their lives. > Typical outgroup bias ("we are very different individually, but > *they* are all the same" - this is of course why Europeans think > Americans are religious fundamentalists). > Surveys show that European Muslims are almost as worried about > fundamentalism as non-Muslims > http://www.pewglobal.org/2006/07/06/muslims-in-europe-economic-worries-top-concerns-about-religious-and-cultural-identity/ There > are lies, damned lies and statistics. > http://www.pewglobal.org/2011/07/21/muslim-western-tensions-persist/ *Muslim and Western publics continue to see relations between them as *generally bad, with both sides holding negative stereotypes of the *other. Many in the West see Muslims as fanatical and violent, while *few say Muslims are tolerant or respectful of women. Meanwhile, *Muslims in the Middle East and Asia generally see Westerners as *selfish, immoral and greedy ? as well as violent and fanatical. I feel there is a bit of a contradiction from the first to the second link. The first "Muslims worry more about economy than religion - like westerns" is contradicted by the second "However, the latest Pew Global Attitudes survey finds somewhat of a thaw in the U.S. and Europe compared with five years ago." As Islamic extremists declare Britain's first Sharia law zone, the worrying social and moral implications Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2020382/You-entering-Sharia-law-Britain-As-Islamic-extremists-declare-Sharia-law-zone-London-suburb-worrying-social-moral-implications.html#ixzz1hBMTp0MM > but that the real problem might be outsidership and limited economic > opportunities causing resentment. Not to mention the blame game of > who is responsible for bad things and what ought to be changed. At the end, it is always about money. Really? Just give them a good job and they will become like us. Or just give them money and they will forget you are a > I am far more worried by big organized mainstream groups like > political parties and churches pushing religious and conservative > agendas. Like the Labour in UK? > Labour threw open the doors to mass migration in a deliberate policy > to change the social make-up of the UK, secret papers suggest. > > A draft report from the Cabinet Office shows that ministers wanted to > ?maximise the contribution? of migrants to their ?social > objectives?. "Social Objectives" like being re-elected even if the natives stop voting for them? They imported their own voters. Like they did in Holland (until, very recently, the imported voters started to challenge their masters and tried to elect their representatives and not some socialist kuffar). > The number of foreigners allowed in the UK increased by as much as 50 > per cent in the wake of the report, written in 2000. Melting pot: > Labour's diversity drive is exposed in secret papers > > Melting pot: Labour's diversity drive is exposed in secret papers > > Labour has always justified immigration on economic grounds and > denied it was using it to foster multiculturalism. > > But suspicions of a secret agenda rose when Andrew Neather, a former > government adviser and speech writer for Tony Blair, Jack Straw and > David Blunkett, said the aim of Labour?s immigration strategy was to > ?rub the Right?s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of > date?. > > Read more: > http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1249797/Labour-threw-open-doors-mass-migration-secret-plot-make-multicultural-UK.html#ixzz1hBPaYNoM Ander, how is going the Arab Spring? Do you think the Moderate Muslim Brotherhood will respect the Universal Human Rights charter that not a single Muslim Nation have signed, preferring the Universal Islamic Human Right charter (aka Shaaria rule supreme). Mirco From spike66 at att.net Wed Dec 21 15:38:01 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 07:38:01 -0800 Subject: [ExI] mit's answer to the stanford ai class In-Reply-To: <040d01ccbfed$6c75b6f0$456124d0$@att.net> References: <040d01ccbfed$6c75b6f0$456124d0$@att.net> Message-ID: <001101ccbff6$8642da50$92c88ef0$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of spike Subject: [ExI] mit's answer to the stanford ai class >. MIT would have some kind of response: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/mitx-education-initiative-1219.html >.The Stanford experiment was a critical breakthrough in education. breaks the entire classical model of education.a specific day.eliminates. move into a dormitory.far more flexible and cheaper.minor league football franchises.reduces education costs dramatically...spike Oy, I have not yet begun to plumb the depths of this innovation. It allows one to use a university like a library, by going to a specific area of interest while allowing the student to go right to their level of current expertise. It throws open the door for anyone with a specific skill to be a nano-professor. Hey I like that, nano-professor. That isn't a professor of nanotechnology, but rather a person who knows one hell of a lot about one very specific topic, but does not pretend to have the full skill set or degrees to be a real professor. For instance in my own case, I may be the world's foremost expert in fixing one specific problem on one obscure motorcycle, the Suzuki Cavalcade. That bike had a driveline design flaw which in extreme cases can cause a rear wheel lockup, with truly bad consequences. I discovered it in 1999, and learned how to fix it. It's an all day job, involving removal of the secondary gear box. I could make an online lecture on how to do that on the remaining thousand or so of these bikes still in service in the world. So I could be a nano-professor of Cavalcade secondary gear box hypoid seal repairology. Nano-professors would not need to master a wide range of topics, but they would need to master the hell out of their one or two. Most of us here have something in our lives that is the one area where we know more than anyone, even if it is a bit of family history, or even a memoir. We will still need classical professors, for some things change very slowly if they ever change at all. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dan_ust at yahoo.com Wed Dec 21 15:41:16 2011 From: dan_ust at yahoo.com (Dan) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 07:41:16 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream . . . In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1324482076.81060.YahooMailNeo@web160605.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> On Monday, December 19, 2011 7:22 PM Keith Henson wrote: > 3)? Perhaps the most bizarre reason for the Fermi problem is the > world as we know it being a simulation.? There are probably > ways to test for being in a simulation, but testing ends the > simulation (and the universe as we know it) so it might not be > something you want to try. Jeff Olson asked, on this, why wouldn't there be simulated aliens as well? I think raising the simulation scenario here doesn't resolve the issue. You might just as well say there are no aliens in evidence because God wills it to be so. Regards, Dan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Wed Dec 21 15:43:30 2011 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 08:43:30 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Uploading cautions, "Speed Up" . . Message-ID: On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 5:00 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Here is a simple game: what probability do you assign to us surviving > the transition to an AGI world? Call it P1. Once in this world, where we > have (by assumption) non-malign very smart AGI, what is the probability > we will survive the invention of brain emulation? Call it P2. > > Now consider a world where brain emulation comes first. What is the > chance of surviving that transition? Call it P3. OK, we survived the > upload transition. Now we invent AGI. What is the chance of surviving it > in this world? Call it P4. > > Which is largest, P1*P2 or P3*P4? The first is the chance of a happy > ending for the AGI first world, the second is the chance of a happy > ending for the uploading first world. > > Now, over at FHI most of us tended to assume the existence of nice > superintelligence would make P2 pretty big - it would help us avoid > making a mess of the upload transition. But uploads doesn't seem to help > much with fixing P4, since they are not superintelligent per se (there > is just a lot more brain power in that world). I have argued that uploads could be an unmitigated disaster. I am assuming there is some reason to upload such as advanced ability to control real world machines. But the problem is that humans have psychological mechanisms (I assume evolved in as hardware) to detect looming privation and take steps as a group to reduce the privation, i.e., kill neighbors. Blind emulation would incorporate these mechanisms, and a better view of the future might turn them on hard. A tribe of highly enhanced uploads dedicated to thinning out the population is an unnerving thought. snip > You shouldn't try to upload your brain before we have full-brain > emulation since the methods are likely going to be 1) destructive, I have argued that, for marketing reasons alone, destructive uploads are going to be a hard sell. Especially since the technology to make uploading fully reversible with no memory loss (or even loss of consciousness) is no harder. (See "The clinic seed.) > 2) > have to throw away information during processing due to storage > constraints until at least mid-century, I don't see why. The information in your brain fits in your skull. > 3) we will not have evidence it > works before it actually works. Of course, some of us might have no > choice because we are frozen in liquid nitrogen... The technology to do any of this is so similar that we should be able to revive the cryonics patients and let them decide if they want to upload. Ian Banks had a good deal of this in "Surface Detail." Keith From atymes at gmail.com Wed Dec 21 16:51:31 2011 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 08:51:31 -0800 Subject: [ExI] mit's answer to the stanford ai class In-Reply-To: <040d01ccbfed$6c75b6f0$456124d0$@att.net> References: <040d01ccbfed$6c75b6f0$456124d0$@att.net> Message-ID: It does do all these things - but there are two remaining pieces of value that currently require a physical place for people to come to: 1) Proving that a certain person has a given general skill category. For example, in programming jobs, a Bachelor's in CS or a related field is almost a union card. Whether or not this should be the case, that is the reality today. With all-online learning, how do you prove that a given person really did take a certain course of education - and how do you gain mainstream acceptance of that proof? The latter is the harder part of this challenge. Currently, "the student showed up here to take the classes, or at least the critical exams" is the most commonly accepted solution. (Notice the physical-presence-required offer in this class from a certain German university.) 2) Research. Sure, a lot of research can be done virtually - but a lot can not. You can simulate a microfusion plant that in theory only costs $1,000 to build and makes cheaper output than coal - but funders of research will want an actual demonstration plant, well aware that simulations of such breakthroughs most often just mean the simulation is subtly flawed. The actual demonstration plant has to be built somewhere, and it will probably need equipment not available to most DIY enthusiasts. 2011/12/21 spike : > I was interested in Stanford?s AI online class as much for the innovative > learning model as for the class content.? Of course MIT would have some kind > of response: > > http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/mitx-education-initiative-1219.html > > The Stanford experiment was a critical breakthrough in education.? Once > enough people try out an online course, they will develop that kind of > learning as a skill set in itself.? That breaks the entire classical model > of education as an exercise in getting to a class at a specific time, > listening to one guy talk to a group of people, taking notes, studying for a > test on a specific day, etc.? It eliminates the very difficult and > uncomfortable move into a dormitory on a crowded and dangerous campus away > from one?s home.? All that can be made far more flexible and cheaper, it can > be dissociated with the minor league football franchises that the mainstream > American colleges have become, it reduces education costs dramatically and > creates a domino-effect of changes that will take years to see. From spike66 at att.net Wed Dec 21 17:50:36 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 09:50:36 -0800 Subject: [ExI] mit's answer to the stanford ai class In-Reply-To: References: <040d01ccbfed$6c75b6f0$456124d0$@att.net> Message-ID: <007801ccc009$0c282d20$24788760$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes Subject: Re: [ExI] mit's answer to the stanford ai class >...It does do all these things - but there are two remaining pieces of value that currently require a physical place for people to come to: >...1) Proving that a certain person has a given general skill category... >...2) Research... OK good points, both. To the second point, some kinds of research can be done without physically gathering the participants, but it influences the kinds of research that is done. This post is not primarily about that however. The first point is how to prove satisfactory mastery of the skillset on the part of the student. I see this as a new and interesting challenge. We know that grading and testing vary widely from one university to the next. My own engineering school was small, and its reputation not widely known. My solution to that was to take the universally-recognized Professional Engineering state boards exams. I have never actually used my PE license professionally, but it does carry weight as a credential. Engineers will not talk it down, for they are not entirely sure they could pass those state boards exams. I have never heard a fellow engineer talk dismissively about the PE license. The state boards take a day to complete, but we can imagine a month of day-long exams to establish expertise across a wide range of engineering skills. Given a choice of taking 30 online courses and spending 30 days in exams to prove one's skills, as opposed to spending four or five years on a campus, many might choose the month of exams. We can imagine a physical presence required exam place, similar to the one I used recently to get state-recognized teaching credentials. You pay the fee, go to a bricks and mortar location with plenty of identification, take the test real-time. As the introduction of the web in the early 90s created a huge demand for website designers, online learning creates a huge new demand for demonstrating mastery of skills gathered by alternate means. Of course, to create any analog to traditional college, we need to work out teledildonics. But that is another area of discussion entirely. From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Wed Dec 21 19:00:33 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 20:00:33 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream . . . In-Reply-To: <20111220214332.GA31847@leitl.org> References: <20111220214332.GA31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: On 20 December 2011 22:43, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 08:26:08PM +0100, Stefano Vaj wrote: > > > Could we ourselves really make us blatantly visible to a civilisation the > > other side of Andromeda even if we considered it a top civilisational > > priority? > > Best bang for the buck would be lasers. You can easily outshine > the Sun in narrow enough spectral bands. > But you should know where to point it at, right? > Dimming a galaxy would not be any more difficult than dimming a > single star. > Due note taken, if ever I end up finding Andromeda too shiny... :-) Seriously, interesting stuff. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Wed Dec 21 19:41:32 2011 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 11:41:32 -0800 Subject: [ExI] mit's answer to the stanford ai class In-Reply-To: <007801ccc009$0c282d20$24788760$@att.net> References: <040d01ccbfed$6c75b6f0$456124d0$@att.net> <007801ccc009$0c282d20$24788760$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 9:50 AM, spike wrote: > To the second point, some kinds of research can be done without physically > gathering the participants, but it influences the kinds of research that is > done. Some kinds, yes. I was talking about the kinds that can't. > The first point is how to prove satisfactory mastery of the skillset on the > part of the student. ?I see this as a new and interesting challenge. Interesting, yes. New, only in degree. As you mention, there are in-person-for-exam-only setups in certain fields, such as PE licenses (or ham radio licenses). However, there is no such general equivalent for BSes/MSes/PhDs. I suspect it is primarily a marketing challenge: an alternative could be proposed and developed, but how would you get most employers to accept it as equal in weight to the existing degrees? One possibility would be to have the universities run such a setup, and grant the degree for those who pass the exams. That still requires people to physically travel to a facility under the university's (possibly temporary/rented) control at some point, though. There are also "all-virtual" degrees being offered, such as by the University of Phoenix. However, from what I've seen of the UoP's practices, only the requirement for travel is removed: you have to attend lectures on the professor's schedule (via teleconference), et cetera. Further, there seems to be less acceptance of said degrees as the equivalent of a well-known you-were-here-for-X-years university. And then there's the problem of applying this to non-technical fields, where subjective answers - and, in many cases, the presentation of the answer - are key things the student inherently must be graded on. Storytelling - whether through film, books, video games, or whatever media - is a skill that can be learned, and a career made from it; further, it is somewhat different in each media form. Or politics: "how to persuade an audience" is a skill vital to anyone who wishes to be elected to government office in any true democracy or republic, but (sadly) logic is often only a small part of this, if any part at all. > Given a choice of taking 30 online courses and spending 30 days in > exams to prove one's skills, as opposed to spending four or five years on a > campus, many might choose the month of exams. This is true assuming one knows what field of study one wishes to pursue. The opposite appears to be very common for students fresh out of high school. (Granted, I must say "appears to be" since I would have done this, but the data I've seen strongly suggests I was an exception in knowing what I wished to do.) > Of course, to create any analog to traditional college, we need to work out > teledildonics. ?But that is another area of discussion entirely. I remember it being more about the beer than the sex, for most of my classmates. (Besides, with anonymity of students, Professional Seduction Techniques could be a viable class: no embarrassment from your peers knowing you're taking it, and no place for those who would promote moral panics to stage protests outside of to drive away students. Of course, this is one of those classes where computer-driven judgement of non-technical knowledge would be critical.) From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Wed Dec 21 20:08:58 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 13:08:58 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: <4DB4EBF3-1588-49EC-813D-3599F96C3075@taramayastales.com> References: <4DB4EBF3-1588-49EC-813D-3599F96C3075@taramayastales.com> Message-ID: 2011/12/15 Tara Maya : > > 2011/12/13 John Grigg? >> >> It has been a place of great intellectual creativity, yes...? But I have >> always thought of Italy as being a people with a love/hate relationship?with >> their Church.? And so Italians are?not necessarily the most truly?observant >> of Catholics. > > > I've been working on a research paper about the sociobiological impact of > ?celibacy, actually. There are several rival explanations: Super good luck for me this! > 1. The number of actual celibates was so small as to have no real impact. > (To my surprise, when I brought the topic up with David Buss at a > conference, this was his stance.) I don't think the mathematics would support this stance. Before accepting this point of view, I would do the math VERY carefully, double checking everything. This thread gives a great start on how to proceed. > 2. Celibacy could represent the triumphal parasitism of a meme (religion) > which succeeded in co-opting the most intelligent members of a community to > the biological detriment of the community but to the benefit of the > religion, which therefore continued to spread. So in this sense, Catholicism is (in biological terms) a parasite feeding on the intelligence of the population. While not killing the host (or decreasing the intelligence to the point of causing major damage) it does suck some life force from it. > 3. Celibacy was actually biologically beneficial at a certain point in time, > and then became less so (at which point, it also became less common). That's an interesting point, but I'd like to hear more. Ah, I see you've done that below... thanks! > I believe either (2) or (3) is probably correct. The list has already > discussed the evidence for (2) [including comparison with rabbis in > geographically close community], so I'll share the evidence for (3). > > During a certain period of human history, celibacy became very popular, > apparently independently in several very different civilizations. Before the > Catholics, there were other groups that had monks, and there were also > Buddhist monks, Jain monks, and other kinds of less structured celibate and > hermit traditions around the world. There are certain things these > monk/hermit traditions had in common, but I'll focus on the Catholic monks > during the Dark Ages, since I've done more research on them. > > Their ranks were usually made up of younger sons of the nobility or very > smart sons from the middle or even lower classes. In a period when class > divisions were very strong, there were basically only two kinds of class > mobility: the military or the church. The path of warlord during the dark > ages no doubt fostered a certain kind of cunning, but not literacy or > numeracy or the use of cutlery. It basically favored brawn over brain. There > is no question that warlords fathered lots of kids, and so did the > landholders who inherited titles and wealth, even if they weren't as strong > or cunning. Those two groups of guys did well. Fascinating! Really. > Now imagine some scrawny, yet brainy peasant who is smart enough to read, > but not brawny enough to bash heads. So he won't be able to rise above his > station through war. And you have another kid, perhaps not scrawny, but the > third or forth born son of nobility, who is therefore not likely to inherit > any land or gold. What these two boys have in common is that neither was > likely to get married. Possibly not even laid. They really had nothing to > lose, evolutionarily speaking, by joining together as celibate monks and > investing a lot of time in learning to read and write and giving sermons to > the warlords and nobles about what bastards they were, and the best way to > get in good with God would be to give us, er, I mean the church, some of > that gold you plundered. But is there historical evidence that this is the kind of person that joined the priesthood? It's a nice hypothesis, but seems like it would need some statistical historian to ferret out the truth of the matter. Smart kids that would not reproduce anyway join the priesthood, that's not a bad headline, but there would have to be a lot of research behind it because big claims require big evidence, and all that. > The church was extremely rich and powerful in the dark ages, before > merchants or even princes could really compete with them. What is > interesting is that if you study the families of famous clergy, especially > the higher up, is that you realize whole families became very, very rich by > having successive generations of second or third sons rise to power in the > Church hierarchy. New noble families rose up based on the power base created > by clergymen. Ok, so they helped their families after becoming clergy, this helped their genes in a method similar to drone bees or ants helping their families/genes as described in Dawkin's Selfish Gene book... Again, this is a very nice hypothesis, is there any real data to back it up? > The clergy may have used their wealth and power to be hypocrites and foster > illegitimate children. That definitely happened, and even Popes had > offspring. But possibly even without that, it might have made evolutionary > sense for families to invest younger sons in the Church because of kin > selection (also known as nepotism). It your success means that you have more > surviving nephews, nieces and cousins, it might be worth it to have no > children. Yes, very interesting. > Now, what I suspect is that between the High Middle Ages and the > Reformation, this path no longer paid off as well, and that's why smart > younger sons began to go into trade rather than take vows, and why > hypocritical behavior may have increased even in those who were forced into > the clergy. Growing dissastisfaction with a situation which was no longer a > net gain to families may have contributed to the Reformation. Do you have the numbers to back up the idea that the percentage of eligible intellectuals going into the priesthood decreased. Also, I wonder about the impacts of the church's propaganda machinery for recruiting priests... if there were any such machinery (I'm assuming there MUST have been, from basic principles) and did it apply to monks as well as priests and/or nuns. This is really some first rate thinking Tara! I am very happy to have read and responded to this post! You are a very smart person with dedication to have dug this all up. I do hope you are able to pursue this line of reasoning to the point of supporting it with good evidence. It would make a great Masters Thesis... > Tara Maya > The Unfinished Song: Initiate > The Unfinished Song: Taboo > The Unfinished Song: Sacrifice From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Wed Dec 21 20:17:31 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 13:17:31 -0700 Subject: [ExI] mit's answer to the stanford ai class In-Reply-To: References: <040d01ccbfed$6c75b6f0$456124d0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 9:51 AM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > It does do all these things - but there are two remaining pieces of value > that currently require a physical place for people to come to: > > 1) Proving that a certain person has a given general skill category. ?For > example, in programming jobs, a Bachelor's in CS or a related field is > almost a union card. ?Whether or not this should be the case, that is the > reality today. ?With all-online learning, how do you prove that a given > person really did take a certain course of education - and how do you > gain mainstream acceptance of that proof? ?The latter is the harder part > of this challenge. ?Currently, "the student showed up here to take the > classes, or at least the critical exams" is the most commonly accepted > solution. ?(Notice the physical-presence-required offer in this class from > a certain German university.) The problem is that self taught computer scientists frequently develop really bad habits in programming style that are terribly difficult to break. I have hired several very smart people who were self taught programmers, and have always at least partially regretted the decision. In my experience, particularly bad are Electrical Engineers turned programmers, because they have pretty darn big egos, and think that their way of programming is better. Sigh. BTW, loved Spike's contributions to this thread, but couldn't think of a way to add much, other than maybe some comedic reference to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance... LOL -Kelly From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Wed Dec 21 20:32:29 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 13:32:29 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream . . . In-Reply-To: <20111220073002.GD31847@leitl.org> References: <20111220073002.GD31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 12:30 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 05:22:42PM -0700, Keith Henson wrote: > >> 2) ?Something removes intelligences from large scale interaction with >> the universe. ?I have theorized this might be the attractiveness of >> virtual worlds or perhaps the speed of information propagation. ?A > > There is nothing particularly virtual about hardware. It's large, > bulky, and takes entire stars to power in sufficient quantities. > > The speed of information propagation is a red herring, because > you're happy enough to interact mostly-locally. People got out > of Africa on foot just fine, one band of primates by another. > > Would you say that seven billion people are pretty observable? > This planet sure thinks so. > >> million to one speed up would limit interactive communication to a >> distance much smaller than the earth. > > It takes too long to talk to somewhere more than a light seconds > away? Don't do it, then! Just talk to people closer to you, and > so will they, and so on. > > Why do you insist to talk at all, for that matter? Seeds are > pretty inert. They never get bored, and sprout just fine on > the other end of the journey. > >> 3) ?Perhaps the most bizarre reason for the Fermi problem is the world >> as we know it being a simulation. ?There are probably ways to test for > > Yes, but this is religion. We don't do religion here. I disagree. This is philosophy, not religion. And we do philosophy here. Nick http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_argument Peter Ludlow is also making some interesting forays into this from the bottom up, so to speak http://www.nuintel.net/features/between-two-worlds/ >> being in a simulation, but testing ends the simulation (and the >> universe as we know it) so it might not be something you want to try. > > So the pesky rodents gets terminated when they get too uppity, and > realize they've been living in cage #9? > > Occam sez: I will cut you. Occam actually comes down on the side that we're already in a simulation... if you really think about it hard enough. -Kelly From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Wed Dec 21 20:59:16 2011 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 12:59:16 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream . . . In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1324501156.39788.YahooMailNeo@web164504.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> ________________________________ From: Stefano Vaj To: ExI chat list Sent: Tuesday, December 20, 2011 3:46 AM Subject: Re: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream . . . Keith Henson wrote: > >Yes, even though Wolfram's argument can be extended to any kind of signalling. >? > >1) ?We are the first in our light cone. ?This seems really unlikely >>given the number of stars and probable planets, but someone has to be >>first, it could be us. ?The obvious way to get from star to star is to >>use light sails and TW lasers. ?Such a transport mechanism would be >>seen as obviously artificial far across the universe. ?We don't see >>it. >> >>2) ?Something removes intelligences from large scale interaction with >>the universe. ?I have theorized this might be the attractiveness of >>virtual worlds or perhaps the speed of information propagation. ?A >>million to one speed up would limit interactive communication to a >>distance much smaller than the earth. >> >>3) ?Perhaps the most bizarre reason for the Fermi problem is the world >>as we know it being a simulation. ?There are probably ways to test for >>being in a simulation, but testing ends the simulation (and the >>universe as we know it) so it might not be something you want to try. ? >>If you have other ideas, that are not minor variations on these, >>please mention them. >> >I do not really know how to resolve Fermi's paradox. ? Try this on for size: ? 4) One or more species "are" (*sigh* relativity)?engaging in direct competition for resources i.e. warfare and therefore all their communications are encrypted or otherwise disguised. Think the enigma machine from WWII. >The idea that we are the only, or the first, of something disturbs me aesthetically, as the all-too-easy recourse to the anthropic principle in cosmology and physics. We are not the first, we are the latest, and potentially the last, of a long unbroken thread of life dating back to when the whole universe was a warm wet cosmic soup. Think about it. The universe supposedly started out as a super-dense singularity that inflated through some incredibly hot dense states before settling into the cold vaccuous place we now know and love. Since the universe had to pass at least briefly through a "goldilocks" state in order to get from "there" to "here", it is entirely possible that at some point the entire universe was a primordial soup brimming with life warmed by young stars. A warm wet place?just after the formation of oxygen and carbon. Then as the universe continued to expand the soup started drying up. Life?became restricted to a fewer and fewer islands of hability that became garden worlds like Earth. As the universe became less and less hospitable, life was forced to become increasingly intelligent in order to survive. Ergo metaphyta, metazoa, and locally at least, H. sapiens. ? This my theory. I call it Panbiogenesis to distinguish it?from Panspermia and all anthropic local origin of life theories. It is in priciple testable. If the first extraterrestrial life?we discover is a wet carbon-based replicator using sugars and proteins?to store and process information, that will be experimental support for Panbiogenesis.? ? Stefano wrote: ? >What I tentatively find more persuasive is the idea that we might be too parochial in our view of extraterrestrial "life" or "intelligence". That is, we would recognise it only inasmuch as it is a slightly alterated version of ourselves; same as the AGIs being defined as a Turing-passing emulation. Now, if the space of all possible computations and/or darwinian processes is vast enough, we would be the "only ones" simply in the sense that it would be unlikely that two instantiations bump against each other that be similar enough for our purpose, unless they are deliberately programmed to this effect. This is a very good point, Stefano. Allow me to demonstrate: ? Just imagine you do not know the source of these sounds. Which?are intelligent communications and which?are "natural" noises? ? http://www.soundsnap.com/node/92759 ? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9C6lymtHG60 ? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WabT1L-nN-E ? ? Add to this that the species may be trying to camouflage their communications for security, and you have the perfect recipe for the Fermi Paradox.??? ? ? >As to more massive footprints, I am a member of the Order of Cosmic Engineers, and I like Kardashev's speculations about Type III civilisations like the next guy, but the truth is that even a ton of mass is, well, heavy, and I would not take for granted that most clades quickly end up sculpting for fun the shape of neighbouring galaxies in the shape of their females... :-) That made me laugh. Thanks. :-) Stuart LaForge ?Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." -Clay Shirky From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Wed Dec 21 21:39:11 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 22:39:11 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> Message-ID: On 21 December 2011 03:48, John Grigg wrote: > We could have a whole separate discussion about how the massive > immigration to Europe of fundamentalist Muslims may be potentially a > very destabilizing thing. > > These are people who *do not* want to merge into the Western melting > pot. They instead want the West to adapt to them... > Well, I could represent a peculiar position here since I actually think that Muslims are perfectly right to do what they can to protect their diversity *and* that Europeans would in turn be equally right to protect their own, namely by stopping their import as wage slaves by those who are in a position to externalise the costs concerned on their communities - draining in the process the puppet-States the immigrants originate from, with the collaboration of their corrupted "?lites", of human resources who would be essential to their future. How many "fundamentalist Muslims" are immigrating in Europe from Iran? Zero. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Wed Dec 21 20:58:54 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 21:58:54 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Uploading cautions, "Speed Up" . . In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4EF2488E.60801@aleph.se> On 2011-12-21 16:43, Keith Henson wrote: >> You shouldn't try to upload your brain before we have full-brain >> emulation since the methods are likely going to be 1) destructive, > > I have argued that, for marketing reasons alone, destructive uploads > are going to be a hard sell. Especially since the technology to make > uploading fully reversible with no memory loss (or even loss of > consciousness) is no harder. (See "The clinic seed.) You are assuming very mature nanotech. It is quite likely that long before that we will have devices like Kenneth Hayworth's ATLUM, that use microtomes and electron microscopy to automatically scan tissue. Sure, *most* people will keep their brains far away from this slice-and-dice approach. But it is enough that a few are willing to hazard the chance and they will be the first in cyberspace. Now, if Robin's analysis of upload economics is anywhere near reality, it is enough that *one* of these outlier people is OK with having a lot of copies and we will see a total transformation of the economy. >> 2) >> have to throw away information during processing due to storage >> constraints until at least mid-century, > > I don't see why. The information in your brain fits in your skull. A 5x5x5 nm^3 scan of the 1.4 liters of brain 10^22 bits is about one zettabyte. Kryder's Law will eventually get there (?), but it will take decades. Kenneth suggests using fixated pieces of the brain as a library for itself, but it seems likely that most non-nanotech scanning methods will burn it. >> 3) we will not have evidence it >> works before it actually works. Of course, some of us might have no >> choice because we are frozen in liquid nitrogen... > > The technology to do any of this is so similar that we should be able > to revive the cryonics patients and let them decide if they want to > upload. You are assuming really mature medical nanotechnology. I am assuming far cruder technology. While the largest influx of new people to cyberspace will occur once the technology is proven, safe and convenient the big changes are likely to happen when the early adopters mature, possibly decades earlier. > Ian Banks had a good deal of this in "Surface Detail." But the neural lace (which is very similar to Freitas nice idea for a nanotech scan) requires an amazing level of understanding of how to interface the sloppy, floppy and messy biological system without causing problems. I'd love to have it, but in order to get it we will have to insert nanofibers into a lot of living brains and learning from the messes produced... This is one of the big question marks I have with the classic Drexlerian vision - how much good designahead can we do for systems that interact strongly with the messy real world. I agree completely with Eric that we can prove certain systems to work (through theory and simulation) and develop CAM files long before we get our manufacturies that will likely work when we start them. Bang, quick transformation of a lot of fields. But I think systems that do complex interaction with the environment (especially adaptive parts of it like bodies) are hard to impossible to design properly without testing/interaction/probing, and hence will not gain anything from designahead. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Wed Dec 21 21:05:55 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 22:05:55 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream . . . In-Reply-To: <20111221120838.GT31847@leitl.org> References: <20111220214332.GA31847@leitl.org> <4EF10C5E.206@aleph.se> <20111221080017.GO31847@leitl.org> <4EF19F80.9060203@aleph.se> <20111221094439.GQ31847@leitl.org> <4EF1C363.6070402@aleph.se> <20111221120838.GT31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: <4EF24A33.9000407@aleph.se> On 2011-12-21 13:08, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 12:30:43PM +0100, Anders Sandberg wrote: >> It is a start. So you don't think the assumption that the propensity for >> colonizing is partially "inherited" from the parent civilization would >> be true? > > I wouldn't call them civilizations, but ecosystems. But of course, > the pioneer front self-selects for expansibility over comparatively > short distances and times, in the classical darwinian way. Which seems to lead to an evolution of "interstellar locusts". So where is the disagreement? [ General nodding about expansion scenarios. ] Upper limits of expansion speed seem rather stretchable, since once you Dyson even one star the energy to accelerate macroscale probes to high velocities is cheap, and the risk of destruction of probes due to collisions can be handled by building a lot of probes. The current name for the project at FHI is "Spamming the universe". -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Wed Dec 21 21:08:26 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 22:08:26 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: <4EF1FD4D.1090600@libero.it> References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> <4EF19D66.4070907@aleph.se> <4EF1FD4D.1090600@libero.it> Message-ID: <4EF24ACA.3030400@aleph.se> On 2011-12-21 16:37, Mirco Romanato wrote: > There are lies, damned lies and statistics. And then there are people citing news stories as evidence. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Wed Dec 21 22:36:25 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 23:36:25 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: <4EF24ACA.3030400@aleph.se> References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> <4EF19D66.4070907@aleph.se> <4EF1FD4D.1090600@libero.it> <4EF24ACA.3030400@aleph.se> Message-ID: On 21 December 2011 22:08, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2011-12-21 16:37, Mirco Romanato wrote: > >> There are lies, damned lies and statistics. >> > > And then there are people citing news stories as evidence. > I am myself "more worried by big organized mainstream groups like political parties and churches pushing religious and conservative agendas", and have not really a preference for christian fundamentalists, if they could once more have their way in Europe and start burning witches and heretics such as Galileo Galilei or Giordano Bruno again, over islamic ones. But even though Mirco is not returning the courtesy by supporting to some extent a couple of Italian weirdos who claim that *I* would be (to say the least) a xenophobe, I think he should be taken seriously when he claims that Europe may have after all a muslim problem, in particular as a consequence of the import of alienated, brain-washed, desperate youth deprived of a future in their own country, who are induced to come here, at the same time seeking some kind or other of Eldorado and being pushed to embrace some kind of grotesque caricature of their own identity as a way to resist the unavoidable frustration arising from their position of second-rate strangers in a strange land. Not so differently, after all, from Italians emigrants in the US in the Al Capone era and later. To bring things back on topic, I would add that such deliberate effort at creating artificial melting pots not only is openly aimed at reducing cultural diversity in favour of a universal way-of-life, but it helps slowing down, as it has always been the case in slavery-based economies, technological innovation, which is instead a typical consequence of highly-paid, scarce manpower in more communitarian environments. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Dec 21 22:51:50 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 14:51:50 -0800 Subject: [ExI] mit's answer to the stanford ai class In-Reply-To: References: <040d01ccbfed$6c75b6f0$456124d0$@att.net> Message-ID: <010401ccc033$214e5ab0$63eb1010$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson Subject: Re: [ExI] mit's answer to the stanford ai class ... >...The problem is that self taught computer scientists frequently develop really bad habits in programming style that are terribly difficult to break. I have hired several very smart people who were self taught programmers, and have always at least partially regretted the decision. In my experience, particularly bad are Electrical Engineers turned programmers, because they have pretty darn big egos, and think that their way of programming is better. Sigh... How well I know it. In 2002, I had a crazy-smart physicist working with me. I showed him how to use excel. In 2002! He thought it was the greatest invention since sex. That was the last we heard of him for months, as he did what he was famous for doing: super obsessive laser beam study of a topic. He wrote some interesting software in the macro language. Tragically only a short time later the medics discovered pancreatic cancer, and he was gone within a few months. I inherited his files. So I reverse engineered some of what he had done. I found instances where he had written out in macro code for a ton of functions that are available as spreadsheet functions, such as the conversions of hex to decimal and decimal to binary, etc. Apparently had had somehow missed the complete list of spreadsheet functions available, so he was hard coding a bunch of that stuff. >...BTW, loved Spike's contributions to this thread, but couldn't think of a way to add much, other than maybe some comedic reference to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance... LOL -Kelly How did you know? I looooved that book in college! I recently paid a buttload of money for an original edition. ZAMM is the introspective person's bible and guiding light! I still think we should get a group together and go swipe Pirsig's bike, before some thieving yahoo steals it. Oh, wait... spike From pharos at gmail.com Thu Dec 22 00:20:08 2011 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 00:20:08 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream . . . In-Reply-To: <4EF24A33.9000407@aleph.se> References: <20111220214332.GA31847@leitl.org> <4EF10C5E.206@aleph.se> <20111221080017.GO31847@leitl.org> <4EF19F80.9060203@aleph.se> <20111221094439.GQ31847@leitl.org> <4EF1C363.6070402@aleph.se> <20111221120838.GT31847@leitl.org> <4EF24A33.9000407@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 9:05 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Upper limits of expansion speed seem rather stretchable, since once you > Dyson even one star the energy to accelerate macroscale probes to high > velocities is cheap, and the risk of destruction of probes due to collisions > can be handled by building a lot of probes. The current name for the project > at FHI is "Spamming the universe". > > And we are supposed to believe that a civ with million times speedup super-intelligent AIs will decide that this is reasonable behaviour? Turn the whole universe into their version of Miami beachfront? I'll have to redefine what 'super-intelligent' means. BillK From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Thu Dec 22 01:13:44 2011 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 18:13:44 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream Message-ID: On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 2:50 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 12:30:43PM +0100, Anders Sandberg wrote: >> On 2011-12-21 10:44, Eugen Leitl wrote: >>> On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 09:57:36AM +0100, Anders Sandberg wrote: None of the discussion to date really addresses the (modified) Fermi question. Fermi's original question was "Where are the aliens?" when he realized that nuclear energy was enough to get from one start to the next. The modified question is "Why don't we see any aliens?" Either we are the first in our light cone, or if technophilic life is common, then something keeps *every single one of them* from making a visible mark on the universe. (Or, negating the whole question, we are in simulation.) If we are the first, then our future is really unknown. If technophilic life is common, then something will keep us from growing to the point of being observable from a distance. > The probability that we'd observe a front while we would recognize > it for what it is is probably just 2-3 centuries in our case. Unless > we collapse, we'll start expanding in about a century. I would say less. Singularity (AI/nanotech) plus a few years--if anyone wants to go at all. The problem is that effectively unlimited virtual worlds can be constructed and inhabited for a *tiny* fraction of the time and energy needed for the hop to another star system. > I think the > expansion will be close to relativistic (at least 0.1 c) right from > the first hop. Laser/light sails will go substantially faster. How much before dust abrasion becomes a problem I don't know. Drexler proposed using lasers on both ends, sending vehicles that don't slow down to target star system. As a sent ahead pilot vehicle approach the system they fire bacteria sized seeds backward to near rest for the target system. The seeds are small enough to enter an atmosphere without damage, drift to the ground and grow up to a Niven type stage tree to get back into space. There they grow a microwave antenna for information they could not pack inside and construct a braking laser for the incoming star ship. Not saying such a thing will ever be done, but it's an obvious way to get from one star to the next. Incidentally the amount of mass you can accelerate up to substantial fraction of c given the amount of energy a star churns out is substantial. Even considering efficiency of converting light to electricity and from there to laser light it's around 500,000 tons per second. In a year the sun could launch a 150 ton vehicle to all of the 100 billion stars in the galaxy. Keith From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Thu Dec 22 01:30:09 2011 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 18:30:09 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Uploading cautions, "Speed Up" Message-ID: On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 2:50 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2011-12-21 16:43, Keith Henson wrote: >>> You shouldn't try to upload your brain before we have full-brain >>> emulation since the methods are likely going to be 1) destructive, >> >> I have argued that, for marketing reasons alone, destructive uploads >> are going to be a hard sell. ?Especially since the technology to make >> uploading fully reversible with no memory loss (or even loss of >> consciousness) is no harder. ?(See "The clinic seed.) > > You are assuming very mature nanotech. It is quite likely that long > before that we will have devices like Kenneth Hayworth's ATLUM, that use > microtomes and electron microscopy to automatically scan tissue. We already have them. > Sure, *most* people will keep their brains far away from this > slice-and-dice approach. But it is enough that a few are willing to > hazard the chance and they will be the first in cyberspace. Now, if > Robin's analysis of upload economics is anywhere near reality, it is > enough that *one* of these outlier people is OK with having a lot of > copies and we will see a total transformation of the economy. Unless making copies is illegal and strongly enforced, for example, by AIs. Think about it this way, how many copies of Keith Henson could you put up with? >>> 2) >>> have to throw away information during processing due to storage >>> constraints until at least mid-century, >> >> I don't see why. ?The information in your brain fits in your skull. > > A 5x5x5 nm^3 scan of the 1.4 liters of brain 10^22 bits is about one > zettabyte. Kryder's Law will eventually get there (?), but it will take > decades. Kenneth suggests using fixated pieces of the brain as a library > for itself, but it seems likely that most non-nanotech scanning methods > will burn it. I still don't see where you need a zettabyte. Biological information storage has just got to be rotten low density. A lifetime of memory has been estimated at only 140 M bytes. It's been more than a decade since I had a disk that small. >>> 3) we will not have evidence it >>> works before it actually works. Of course, some of us might have no >>> choice because we are frozen in liquid nitrogen... >> >> The technology to do any of this is so similar that we should be able >> to revive the cryonics patients and let them decide if they want to >> upload. > > You are assuming really mature medical nanotechnology. I am assuming far > cruder technology. While the largest influx of new people to cyberspace > will occur once the technology is proven, safe and convenient the big > changes are likely to happen when the early adopters mature, possibly > decades earlier. I kind of doubt anyone will be uploaded before the singularity. And yes medical nanotechnology would mature very rapidly indeed. >> Ian Banks had a good deal of this in "Surface Detail." > > But the neural lace (which is very similar to Freitas nice idea for a > nanotech scan) requires an amazing level of understanding of how to > interface the sloppy, floppy and messy biological system without causing > problems. I'd love to have it, but in order to get it we will have to > insert nanofibers into a lot of living brains and learning from the > messes produced... Learning is the key word, neural interfaces would infiltrate the brain and learn what is going on. > This is one of the big question marks I have with the classic Drexlerian > vision - how much good designahead can we do for systems that interact > strongly with the messy real world. I agree completely with Eric that we > can prove certain systems to work (through theory and simulation) and > develop CAM files long before we get our manufacturies that will likely > work when we start them. Bang, quick transformation of a lot of fields. > But I think systems that do complex interaction with the environment > (especially adaptive parts of it like bodies) are hard to impossible to > design properly without testing/interaction/probing, and hence will not > gain anything from designahead. I don't think it will make a lot of difference. One of the warning signs of the singularity will be the year that a few scientific papers name AIs as coauthors. My guess would be a few years from there to the point humans can't keep up at all. Keith From msd001 at gmail.com Thu Dec 22 03:16:11 2011 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 22:16:11 -0500 Subject: [ExI] mit's answer to the stanford ai class In-Reply-To: References: <040d01ccbfed$6c75b6f0$456124d0$@att.net> <007801ccc009$0c282d20$24788760$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 2:41 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > As you mention, there are in-person-for-exam-only setups in certain fields, > such as PE licenses (or ham radio licenses). ?However, there is no such > general equivalent for BSes/MSes/PhDs. ?I suspect it is primarily a > marketing challenge: an alternative could be proposed and developed, but > how would you get most employers to accept it as equal in weight to the > existing degrees? The part that I found spike's original post missing is the coordination (database) of who is an narrow-topic expert (can't bring myself to further overload "nano") and in what subject areas. Having completed some job like spike's Cavalcade whatsit, he could "profess" to the DB so the rest of the thousand-or-so Cavalcade owner can find him for his technical knowledge. Perhaps the circle of trust would be quite weak on that topic, but weak help may still be better than figure it out all by your lonesome. The BS/MS/PhD challenge might be solved by the trust network of fellows with whom you've worked along the way. If I already (inherently) trust 3 of your colleagues and they highly vouch for your competence in your professed field (even if their own is only tangentially related) then I will perhaps rank your input slightly higher in value than your competitor who I also consult in an effort to corroborate with secondary and tertiary opinions. This is not much different than how such things are done "in real life" but with the added benefit of some form of who's-who infrastructure I could consult dozens/hundreds of "experts" in the same amount of time/effort as it currently takes to call your 3 colleagues for a reference. From msd001 at gmail.com Thu Dec 22 03:34:50 2011 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 22:34:50 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream . . . In-Reply-To: References: <20111220214332.GA31847@leitl.org> <4EF10C5E.206@aleph.se> <20111221080017.GO31847@leitl.org> <4EF19F80.9060203@aleph.se> <20111221094439.GQ31847@leitl.org> <4EF1C363.6070402@aleph.se> <20111221120838.GT31847@leitl.org> <4EF24A33.9000407@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 7:20 PM, BillK wrote: > On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 9:05 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: >> can be handled by building a lot of probes. The current name for the project >> at FHI is "Spamming the universe". > > And we are supposed to believe that a civ with million times speedup > super-intelligent AIs will decide that this is reasonable behaviour? > Turn the whole universe into their version of Miami beachfront? > > I'll have to redefine what 'super-intelligent' means. I propose some part of that definition should involve efficiency. Something such that getting maximum utility from minimal expenditure of energy. If utility in gradeschool was literally an "A" grade then the most intelligent in the class were able to achieve that score without the hours of homework/studying that the perhaps less inherently intelligent (but more motivated to achieve that grade) were spending. I find the distillation of diverse fields of knowledge into cross-domain principles much easier to remember and therefore consider understanding generally applicable principles to be more intelligent than learning overlapping (or conflicting) rules in each domain. In the case of super-intelligent universe-spamming seeds, the cost/benefit to produce many inexpensive seeds as protection against high failure rate AND prospecting for resources in the vastness of unknown space might make the spamming scenario an intelligent choice after all. From protokol2020 at gmail.com Thu Dec 22 06:30:10 2011 From: protokol2020 at gmail.com (Tomaz Kristan) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 07:30:10 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream . . . In-Reply-To: References: <20111220214332.GA31847@leitl.org> <4EF10C5E.206@aleph.se> <20111221080017.GO31847@leitl.org> <4EF19F80.9060203@aleph.se> <20111221094439.GQ31847@leitl.org> <4EF1C363.6070402@aleph.se> <20111221120838.GT31847@leitl.org> <4EF24A33.9000407@aleph.se> Message-ID: Just a side note, that dimming of a galaxy is easy. Actually, it's impossible. Every star inside a Dyson sphere still radiates in IR. 30 years ago they have already looked for large IR sources and found nothing. One must disassemble a star to stop all EM emissions. You just can't dim it! - Thomas -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Thu Dec 22 07:13:29 2011 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 23:13:29 -0800 Subject: [ExI] mit's answer to the stanford ai class In-Reply-To: References: <040d01ccbfed$6c75b6f0$456124d0$@att.net> <007801ccc009$0c282d20$24788760$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 7:16 PM, Mike Dougherty wrote: > The BS/MS/PhD challenge might be solved by the trust network of > fellows with whom you've worked along the way. ?If I already > (inherently) trust 3 of your colleagues and they highly vouch for your > competence in your professed field That type of solution does not seem to scale. There is no end of tale of savants who are extremely capable in some field, but not so good at making friends - and, conversely, people whose only skill is making friends and convincing people to vouch for them, regardless of the lack of factual basis for said vouching (and getting them to make an exception to their honesty in that person's one case). While some of these tales are no doubt exaggerated, there is a substantial enough basis in reality to make trust networks unworkable for this in practice. >?This is not much > different than how such things are done "in real life" People keep saying that, but at least in my case, that has never been the case. I've rarely gotten a job based on friend referrals - and even when I have, that only played a part in getting me considered; my demonstrated expertise was necessary for the rest. > the same amount of time/effort as it > currently takes to call your 3 colleagues for a reference. I know there are some companies that actually call references, and some fraction of them actually consider what the references say, but this seems to be a vanishingly small fraction. Most places, you could just make up references, and no one would ever care (or know, other than you). From anders at aleph.se Thu Dec 22 08:28:44 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 09:28:44 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Uploading cautions, "Speed Up" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4EF2EA3C.4060604@aleph.se> On 2011-12-22 02:30, Keith Henson wrote: > On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 2:50 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: >> You are assuming very mature nanotech. It is quite likely that long >> before that we will have devices like Kenneth Hayworth's ATLUM, that use >> microtomes and electron microscopy to automatically scan tissue. > > We already have them. Yes, and there are projects aiming at brain emulation already. Lots of scaling up issues, big question marks about what needs to be simulated, but these are early days. Once you have a proof-of-concept for a fairly big mammal, how long will it take before you get a human volunteer? I know several people who have so far said they would. > Unless making copies is illegal and strongly enforced, for example, by > AIs. But that requires a singleton (to use Nick's term), an agency that can enforce global coordination. If you have a singleton a lot of the existential risks are reduced (at the price of the risks from the singleton itself). If you have AIs before brain emulation, fine, the most dangerous hurdle is already in the past. But I think there is a decent chance of emulation before useful AI (and other technology that would enable/induce singleton formation). All possibilities have to be analyzed. Think about it this way, how many copies of Keith Henson could > you put up with? I don't mind a population of 90% Keiths. As long as you don't mind a lot of Anderses around. I think the problem is the "one person"-persons who can't stand the threat to their concept of individuality. >> A 5x5x5 nm^3 scan of the 1.4 liters of brain 10^22 bits is about one >> zettabyte. Kryder's Law will eventually get there (?), but it will take >> decades. Kenneth suggests using fixated pieces of the brain as a library >> for itself, but it seems likely that most non-nanotech scanning methods >> will burn it. > > I still don't see where you need a zettabyte. Biological information > storage has just got to be rotten low density. A lifetime of memory > has been estimated at only 140 M bytes. It's been more than a decade > since I had a disk that small. But that is the information embodied in that zettabyte of volume data, a bit like the ~1 kilobyte of information in the text of a high resolution scanned page. You need the big dataset to extract the important dataset. The exact size of the information that needs to be extracted is uncertain: 140M is a lower bound, and I would suspect it is actually on the order of terabytes (neural connectivity plus ~1 bit per synapse). In any case it is small compared to the actual raw scan data. And the problem is that if you get early uploading you cannot store the raw data permanently, so you better know what you want to extract since you will throw away most of the rest. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From eugen at leitl.org Thu Dec 22 09:19:29 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 10:19:29 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream . . . In-Reply-To: References: <20111220073002.GD31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20111222091929.GF31847@leitl.org> On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 01:32:29PM -0700, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > Yes, but this is religion. We don't do religion here. > > I disagree. This is philosophy, not religion. And we do philosophy here. Nick > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_argument Yes, I was talking why statistical probabilities don't work in case of perfectly biased self-measurements in Fermi and the simulation argument. I'm glad somebody has been paying attention. > Peter Ludlow is also making some interesting forays into this from the > bottom up, so to speak > http://www.nuintel.net/features/between-two-worlds/ Thanks, haven't seen that before. > >> being in a simulation, but testing ends the simulation (and the > >> universe as we know it) so it might not be something you want to try. > > > > So the pesky rodents gets terminated when they get too uppity, and > > realize they've been living in cage #9? > > > > Occam sez: I will cut you. > > Occam actually comes down on the side that we're already in a > simulation... if you really think about it hard enough. You must go deeper ;) From anders at aleph.se Thu Dec 22 10:02:38 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 11:02:38 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> <4EF19D66.4070907@aleph.se> <4EF1FD4D.1090600@libero.it> <4EF24ACA.3030400@aleph.se> Message-ID: <4EF3003E.7060803@aleph.se> On 2011-12-21 23:36, Stefano Vaj wrote: > To bring things back on topic, I would add that such deliberate effort > at creating artificial melting pots not only is openly aimed at reducing > cultural diversity in favour of a universal way-of-life, but it helps > slowing down, as it has always been the case in slavery-based economies, > technological innovation, which is instead a typical consequence of > highly-paid, scarce manpower in more communitarian environments. I'm not entirely convinced. The US has been the main site of technological innovation for a long time, yet it has fairly cheap manpower and a not very communitarian environment. Certainly Scandinavia and Japan have been high-tech (expensive manpower and a communitarian environment), but it seems that the availability of capital in the US has been a far more deciding factor. Looking at Florida's studies of the creative class (and Charles Murray's mapping of human excellence in time and space) I get the strong impression that the truly creative environments are indeed melting pots - clusterings of talent, tolerance and tech infrastructure (interpreted loosely), likely supplemented by ready availability of money or other forms of investment into projects. Just like artificial silicon valleys rarely work, artificial melting pots rarely work - melting pots require people in them to make up the rules between themselves, not to have them imposed by ever so benevolent outside powers. This is often messy, and I suspect the majority of normal people do not actually want to live there. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Dec 22 10:31:49 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 03:31:49 -0700 Subject: [ExI] mit's answer to the stanford ai class In-Reply-To: <010401ccc033$214e5ab0$63eb1010$@att.net> References: <040d01ccbfed$6c75b6f0$456124d0$@att.net> <010401ccc033$214e5ab0$63eb1010$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 3:51 PM, spike wrote: > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org > [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson > Subject: Re: [ExI] mit's answer to the stanford ai class > >>...The problem is that self taught computer scientists frequently develop > really bad habits in programming style that are terribly difficult to break. > I have hired several very smart people who were self taught programmers, and > have always at least partially regretted the decision. In my experience, > particularly bad are Electrical Engineers turned programmers, because they > have pretty darn big egos, and think that their way of programming is > better. Sigh... > > How well I know it. ?In 2002, I had a crazy-smart physicist working with me. > I showed him how to use excel. ?In 2002! ?He thought it was the greatest > invention since sex. ?That was the last we heard of him for months, as he > did what he was famous for doing: super obsessive laser beam study of a > topic. ?He wrote some interesting software in the macro language. I had a professor Evan Ivie, brilliant guy, and a great computer scientist, worked at Bell Labs with Kernihan and Richie and the gang. He spent quite a while figuring out what the limits of programming in the shell were... similar kind of story, I'd imagine. When all you have is a hammer, suddenly, the whole world is a nail!!! LOL > Tragically only a short time later the medics discovered pancreatic cancer, > and he was gone within a few months. ?I inherited his files. ?So I reverse > engineered some of what he had done. ?I found instances where he had written > out in macro code for a ton of functions that are available as spreadsheet > functions, such as the conversions of hex to decimal and decimal to binary, > etc. ?Apparently had had somehow missed the complete list of spreadsheet > functions available, so he was hard coding a bunch of that stuff. Yes, but as a super genius, it was quicker for him to hand code it than look up what was already available... LOL!! There is a serious point here though, and that is that even very serious computer scientists find it EXTREMELY difficult to produce anything like good code using Excel. It just isn't a good tool for producing serious software. There is no testing harness or framework, for one thing... there is no control of execution, nor really an explanation of how it works at any level of detail... Excel is a disaster from a software engineering perspective. That being said, it is the most popular programming environment in the history of the world. So it go the user interface right, but didn't support the "real" programmers of the world... It would be lovely if you could take a spreadsheet, and decompile it somehow and turn it into C# or something that could be maintained after the original non-programmer prototyped it in Excel. I have done some really intense Excel programming around the RTD (Real Time Data) framework, and it was a nightmare to get it right. >>...BTW, loved Spike's contributions to this thread, but couldn't think of a > way to add much, other than maybe some comedic reference to Zen and the Art > of Motorcycle Maintenance... LOL ?-Kelly > > How did you know? ?I looooved that book in college! ?I recently paid a > buttload of money for an original edition. ?ZAMM is the introspective > person's bible and guiding light! ?I still think we should get a group > together and go swipe Pirsig's bike, before some thieving yahoo steals it. > > Oh, wait... LOL, it is a great book... I haven't read it for 20+ years though... -Kelly From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Dec 22 10:37:38 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 03:37:38 -0700 Subject: [ExI] mit's answer to the stanford ai class In-Reply-To: References: <040d01ccbfed$6c75b6f0$456124d0$@att.net> <007801ccc009$0c282d20$24788760$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 12:13 AM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > I know there are some companies that actually call references, and > some fraction of them actually consider what the references say, but > this seems to be a vanishingly small fraction. ?Most places, you could > just make up references, and no one would ever care (or know, other > than you). The problem is that there is so much liability for the references to say anything bad about the prospective employee, that there is no point in even calling them. People who ask for references are just stuck in an old mode of thinking that I think is obsoleted by lawyers and by the fact that Google will tell you more about a person than a phone call ever could. My favorite answer is to say, "I'm happy to say that he is a former associate of mine..." ... think about it... There may even be AIs out there that scour the web for your information and present it to HR people in a concise format. If there aren't, there soon will be. This is entirely within the realm of what Watson or his cousins can accomplish. -Kelly From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Dec 22 10:44:15 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 03:44:15 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> Message-ID: 2011/12/21 Stefano Vaj : > On 21 December 2011 03:48, John Grigg wrote: >> >> We could have a whole separate discussion about how the massive >> immigration to Europe of fundamentalist Muslims may be potentially a >> very destabilizing thing. >> >> These are people who *do not* want to merge into the Western melting >> pot. ?They instead want the West to adapt to them... > > > Well, I could represent a peculiar position here since I actually think that > Muslims are perfectly right to do what they can to protect their diversity > *and* that Europeans would in turn be equally right to protect their own, > namely by stopping their import as wage slaves by those who are in a > position to externalise the costs concerned on their communities - draining > in the process the puppet-States the immigrants originate from, with the > collaboration of their corrupted "?lites", of human resources who would be > essential to their future. This may be stating the obvious (or not), but the US problem of immigration from Mexico (legal and illegal) and the European problem of Islamic immigration (also legal and otherwise) may have a lot of parallels... Particularly in this area of why the power elites allow it to keep happening. Cheap labor is a hard thing to refuse for the elite. And it's hard to get cheap labor without a lot of unintended consequences and side effects. To me it all seems like short term thinking, except on the part of the US Democrats who are thinking very long term about keeping up their voting base by creating a new segment of underclass. That makes PERFECT sense to me. Why the Republicans go along with it is also understandable, but short term thinking, if the Democrats are right about the Hispanic voting block staying largely Democrat. I don't know if there are similar political calculations going on in Europe, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least. -Kelly From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Dec 22 10:56:50 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 03:56:50 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream . . . In-Reply-To: <20111222091929.GF31847@leitl.org> References: <20111220073002.GD31847@leitl.org> <20111222091929.GF31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 2:19 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 01:32:29PM -0700, Kelly Anderson wrote: >> >> being in a simulation, but testing ends the simulation (and the >> >> universe as we know it) so it might not be something you want to try. >> > >> > So the pesky rodents gets terminated when they get too uppity, and >> > realize they've been living in cage #9? >> > >> > Occam sez: I will cut you. >> >> Occam actually comes down on the side that we're already in a >> simulation... if you really think about it hard enough. > > You must go deeper ;) Probably... but if you grant that such a simulation is possible... then it seems far more likely that we are one of the Gazillion Trillion simulations that such technology would undoubtedly produce vs the ONE and ONLY real ancestors that inspired said simulations... Yes, it is a more complex explanation, thus Occam comes into play, but statistically, the odds would seem to favor us being in such a simulation... So Occam seems to be trumped by probability... maybe. -Kelly From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Dec 22 11:02:03 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 04:02:03 -0700 Subject: [ExI] An uploading proposal (inspired by Re: Uploading cautions, "Speed Up") Message-ID: Imagine an advanced AGI coming to you and saying... Hey, you're using a lot of atoms up in your biological state... how about I upload you, for free, in exchange for the use of your matter, and all the matter that you "own" or control so that I can turn it into computronium and we can go off into the sunset together? Seems like a reasonable idea for a good sci fi short story... -Kelly From eugen at leitl.org Thu Dec 22 11:17:56 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 12:17:56 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream . . . In-Reply-To: References: <20111220214332.GA31847@leitl.org> <4EF10C5E.206@aleph.se> <20111221080017.GO31847@leitl.org> <4EF19F80.9060203@aleph.se> <20111221094439.GQ31847@leitl.org> <4EF1C363.6070402@aleph.se> <20111221120838.GT31847@leitl.org> <4EF24A33.9000407@aleph.se> Message-ID: <20111222111756.GO31847@leitl.org> On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 12:20:08AM +0000, BillK wrote: > And we are supposed to believe that a civ with million times speedup > super-intelligent AIs will decide that this is reasonable behaviour? Your assumptions. They're showing. > Turn the whole universe into their version of Miami beachfront? > > I'll have to redefine what 'super-intelligent' means. The super-intelligent might not bother. But the other ones will. From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Thu Dec 22 11:26:44 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 12:26:44 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 22 December 2011 02:13, Keith Henson wrote: > If technophilic life is common, then something will keep us from growing > to the point of being observable from a distance. > What does prevent us? Perhaps aliens are too engaged in the bailout of their banks and in distributing bonuses to their financial executives to make the kind of real-world, large scale investment that ends up being visible from another solar system... :-) I was thinking that after all from outer space the Chinese Wall emains one of the most obvious man-made structures, and it is not really something that was planned and executed in the framework of contemporary society/economy/set of priorities... :-) -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Thu Dec 22 12:15:21 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 13:15:21 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: <4EF3003E.7060803@aleph.se> References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> <4EF19D66.4070907@aleph.se> <4EF1FD4D.1090600@libero.it> <4EF24ACA.3030400@aleph.se> <4EF3003E.7060803@aleph.se> Message-ID: On 22 December 2011 11:02, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2011-12-21 23:36, Stefano Vaj wrote: > >> To bring things back on topic, I would add that such deliberate effort >> at creating artificial melting pots not only is openly aimed at reducing >> cultural diversity in favour of a universal way-of-life, but it helps >> slowing down, as it has always been the case in slavery-based economies, >> technological innovation, which is instead a typical consequence of >> highly-paid, scarce manpower in more communitarian environments. >> > > I'm not entirely convinced. The US has been the main site of technological > innovation for a long time, yet it has fairly cheap manpower and a not very > communitarian environment. Certainly Scandinavia and Japan have been > high-tech (expensive manpower and a communitarian environment), but it > seems that the availability of capital in the US has been a far more > deciding factor. > This is not a religious dogma for me, so I am ready to review my opinion on the subject, but the typical examples of technological stagnation and final fall of slavery-based economies would be the Roman Empire, the Confederation in the American Civil War and Banana Republics in Latin America. The typical examples of higher productivity and growth rate in countries with relatively very highly paid manpower would be in fact Germany and Japan - not to mention Northern Italy, at least for a while. I do not know exactly how the United States in the Fordist era, or for that matter in the fifties and sixties, compared with the rest of the world, but I doubt that blue-collars in the industrial areas where at the bottom of world labour price range, especially given that contemporary Russian mujiks were not really running around in Model T cars. :-) -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bbenzai at yahoo.com Thu Dec 22 12:39:40 2011 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 04:39:40 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] Fermi question In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1324557580.60571.YahooMailClassic@web114403.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Kelly Anderson wrote: > ... it seems far more likely that we are one of the Gazillion > Trillion simulations that such technology would undoubtedly produce vs > the ONE and ONLY real ancestors that inspired said simulations... "ONE and ONLY real ancestors"? Don't you know it's simulations all the way down? Ben Zaiboc From bbenzai at yahoo.com Thu Dec 22 12:49:54 2011 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 04:49:54 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] Fermi question In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1324558194.94014.YahooMailClassic@web114410.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Stefano Vaj wrote: > I was thinking that after all from outer space the Chinese > Wall emains one > of the most obvious man-made structures ... Urban Myth alert! The idea of the Great Wall of China being visible from space pre-dates space travel. It was /expected/ to be visible from space, but in fact isn't. It's too similar to its surroundings to stand out, which is why far smaller structures are visible from orbit, but the wall isn't. Apparently, from the Moon, absolutely nothing man-made is visible on the earth. Ben Zaiboc From eugen at leitl.org Thu Dec 22 13:14:05 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 14:14:05 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream . . . In-Reply-To: References: <20111220073002.GD31847@leitl.org> <20111222091929.GF31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20111222131405.GV31847@leitl.org> On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 03:56:50AM -0700, Kelly Anderson wrote: > Probably... but if you grant that such a simulation is possible... > then it seems far more likely that we are one of the Gazillion You're not listening. By using the word "likely" you're obviously using a probabilistic estimate. But you're outside of statistics' scope of applicability. It works over there. It doesn't work here. As you're not observing the entire ensemble but just do a self-measurement the probability of self-detection is unity regardless of whether there is 10^0, 10^1, 10^12 or 10^30 instances of self-observation. If the outcome is always unity regardless of what's in the exponent, what does this say to you? That the outcome of the measurement is not a function of the number of observations, as long you can't cross-correlate them (omniscient observer -- not you). You're perfectly myopic. Self-measurements are perfectly biased. They're no good. You do know that you do exist. Cogito, ergo sum still applies. You cannot distinguish the individual cases with the information you have. This applies across space and across time. It applies both to probability of sentient life in the universe or how many people have lived when. No simulation argument for you. Also, no pony. This isn't hard. Why have people such trouble getting it? > Trillion simulations that such technology would undoubtedly produce vs > the ONE and ONLY real ancestors that inspired said simulations... Yes, > it is a more complex explanation, thus Occam comes into play, but > statistically, the odds would seem to favor us being in such a > simulation... So Occam seems to be trumped by probability... maybe. From painlord2k at libero.it Thu Dec 22 14:46:11 2011 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 15:46:11 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: <4EF3003E.7060803@aleph.se> References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> <4EF19D66.4070907@aleph.se> <4EF1FD4D.1090600@libero.it> <4EF24ACA.3030400@aleph.se> <4EF3003E.7060803@aleph.se> Message-ID: <4EF342B3.3010803@libero.it> Il 22/12/2011 11:02, Anders Sandberg ha scritto: > On 2011-12-21 23:36, Stefano Vaj wrote: >> To bring things back on topic, I would add that such deliberate effort >> at creating artificial melting pots not only is openly aimed at reducing >> cultural diversity in favour of a universal way-of-life, but it helps >> slowing down, as it has always been the case in slavery-based economies, >> technological innovation, which is instead a typical consequence of >> highly-paid, scarce manpower in more communitarian environments. > > I'm not entirely convinced. The US has been the main site of > technological innovation for a long time, yet it has fairly cheap > manpower and a not very communitarian environment. Certainly Scandinavia > and Japan have been high-tech (expensive manpower and a communitarian > environment), but it seems that the availability of capital in the US > has been a far more deciding factor. The US in the 1950-1960 had the best paid workforce and the best innovations. The cheap workforce immigration started around the time of the Great Society of Johnson (1964-1968) and its social reforms. > Looking at Florida's studies of the creative class (and Charles Murray's > mapping of human excellence in time and space) I get the strong > impression that the truly creative environments are indeed melting pots > - clusterings of talent, tolerance and tech infrastructure (interpreted > loosely), likely supplemented by ready availability of money or other > forms of investment into projects. There is the need of a myth, also. A "we are building a great nation", "We are the forefront of the future". This help leverage the freedom of people that then self-select themselves > Just like artificial silicon valleys rarely work, artificial melting > pots rarely work - melting pots require people in them to make up the > rules between themselves, not to have them imposed by ever so benevolent > outside powers. This is often messy, and I suspect the majority of > normal people do not actually want to live there. In fact the different from some artificial Silicon Valley and the REds in Honduras is the recognition that the government don't know how and can not manage them. They will work and prosper only if they are free to manage themselves. Mirco From painlord2k at libero.it Thu Dec 22 14:35:32 2011 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 15:35:32 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> <4EF19D66.4070907@aleph.se> <4EF1FD4D.1090600@libero.it> <4EF24ACA.3030400@aleph.se> Message-ID: <4EF34034.5060309@libero.it> Il 21/12/2011 23:36, Stefano Vaj ha scritto: > On 21 December 2011 22:08, Anders Sandberg > wrote: > On 2011-12-21 16:37, Mirco Romanato wrote: > There are lies, damned lies and statistics. > And then there are people citing news stories as evidence. A news story is evidence of a news. > I am myself "more worried by big organized mainstream groups like > political parties and churches pushing religious and conservative > agendas", and have not really a preference for Christian > fundamentalists, if they could once more have their way in Europe and > start burning witches and heretics such as Galileo Galilei or Giordano > Bruno again, over Islamic ones. I would suggest to find examples less than a century old if you want to be taken seriously. > But even though Mirco is not returning the courtesy by supporting to > some extent a couple of Italian weirdos who claim that *I* would be (to > say the least) a xenophobe, Well, I don't think you are a xenophobe. By the way, a bit of xenophobia is healthy, in my opinion, if moderated by rationality; but too much is deadly, like salt. And for the weirdos, you know the main problems are some of your weirdos writing about the SS as prototype of the political soldier for the future of Europe and frequenting Casa Pound. BTW, I believe the recent killing of two Africans in Florence by a sympathizer of Casa Pound is to ascribe to mental disease alone not political xenophobia. Casa Pound distanced itself from the killing, condemned it and marked the fact (supported also from others not suspected of sympathy for them) that their type of fascism is not racist. > I think he should be taken seriously when he > claims that Europe may have after all a Muslim problem, in particular as > a consequence of the import of alienated, brain-washed, desperate youth > deprived of a future in their own country, who are induced to come here, > at the same time seeking some kind or other of Eldorado and being pushed > to embrace some kind of grotesque caricature of their own identity as a > way to resist the unavoidable frustration arising from their position of > second-rate strangers in a strange land. Not so differently, after all, > from Italians emigrants in the US in the Al Capone era and later. I disagree about this. The embracing of a radical identity is the mark of people unable to individually adapt to their living environment. This is true for Muslims (largely unemployable because they are without a sound education and with a low IQ - statistically speaking) and Europeans (like the recent perpetrator of two killing in Florence). The main reason the problem is exacerbated in Europe (mainly in Northern Europe) is the "separated but equal" approach of multiculturalism (The old American Democrats policy). The policies were designed to keep the not European immigrants in their "ethnic districts" (aka ghettoes). These policies were enacted by socialists / social-democratic parties (or they heavily influenced these) and have prevented the integration (and kept the immigrant voting for them, where they can). > To bring things back on topic, I would add that such deliberate effort > at creating artificial melting pots not only is openly aimed at reducing > cultural diversity in favour of a universal way-of-life, but it helps > slowing down, as it has always been the case in slavery-based economies, > technological innovation, which is instead a typical consequence of > highly-paid, scarce manpower in more communitarian environments. I would consider these not melting pots (artificial or not) but artificial millets (the Ottoman system) or artificial ghettoes built where no one existed before. They imported too many people from too different backgrounds and this alone would make integration a difficult task; but they also implemented policies that made integration near impossible and strife with the local lower classes sure. Now, like with the economy, the people pay for the insane actions of their political class. And like a bigger recession will follow an artificial economic boom, now social tensions will follow social engineering. Mirco From painlord2k at libero.it Thu Dec 22 14:51:16 2011 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 15:51:16 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> <4EF19D66.4070907@aleph.se> <4EF1FD4D.1090600@libero.it> <4EF24ACA.3030400@aleph.se> <4EF3003E.7060803@aleph.se> Message-ID: <4EF343E4.1030009@libero.it> Il 22/12/2011 13:15, Stefano Vaj ha scritto: > This is not a religious dogma for me, so I am ready to review my opinion > on the subject, but the typical examples of technological stagnation and > final fall of slavery-based economies would be the Roman Empire, the > Confederation in the American Civil War and Banana Republics in Latin > America. The typical examples of higher productivity and growth rate in > countries with relatively very highly paid manpower would be in fact > Germany and Japan - not to mention Northern Italy, at least for a while. Another example is the post Black Death Western Europe (mainly Holland). There the lack of manpower forced the breaking of the guilds power and allowed the introduction of many technical improvement in the textile production. This contributed to make a place famous for swamps one of the richer places of Europe. Mirco From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Thu Dec 22 15:27:30 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 16:27:30 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: <4EF34034.5060309@libero.it> References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> <4EF19D66.4070907@aleph.se> <4EF1FD4D.1090600@libero.it> <4EF24ACA.3030400@aleph.se> <4EF34034.5060309@libero.it> Message-ID: On 22 December 2011 15:35, Mirco Romanato wrote: > I disagree about this. The embracing of a radical identity is the mark > of people unable to individually adapt to their living environment. This > is true for Muslims (largely unemployable because they are without a > sound education and with a low IQ - statistically speaking) and > Europeans (like the recent perpetrator of two killing in Florence). > And what does it depend upon? I think that the individual ability to integrate in a given society can probably defined by the number of the individuals concerned in any given moment, multiplied by the degree of ethnical and cultural distance of those same individuals. Ten people moving from Glasgow to London are one thing, hundred of thousands of Italians moving to NY are another, ten million people moving from Senegal to Reykjav?k would still be another one. And, yes, some identities are more impervious than others to integration. To be admitted as a Japanese in the Japanese society is virtually impossible in spite of its very low degree of xenophobia, for instance. And muslims may be less keen than others to become typical "Europeans". But what is wrong in a little diversity under the sun? Why should we pursue linguistic, ethnical, cultural, political, gastronomic, genetic, economic, etc. entropy throughout the world, or accept that it be imposed on us through deliberate melting pots? Besides the danger of putting all the eggs in the same basket, I think that collective identities and difference are part of the wealth and interest of our species. Besides, cultures are born and evolve through imitations, rejections, competition with other cultures. Different mindsets and backgrounds even allow for a richer scientific research landscape. What when we are reduced to practical one-worldism? -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Thu Dec 22 15:36:29 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 07:36:29 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Uploading cautions, "Speed Up" In-Reply-To: <4EF2EA3C.4060604@aleph.se> References: <4EF2EA3C.4060604@aleph.se> Message-ID: <01eb01ccc0bf$79c14ea0$6d43ebe0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg ... >>... Think about it this way, how many copies of Keith Henson could you put up with? Keith >...I don't mind a population of 90% Keiths. As long as you don't mind a lot of Anderses around... -- Anders Sandberg I stumbled over this concept some time ago. If we discover uploading, the very natural next step is to want to create as many copies as you have memory and computing capacity to support. Therein lies the trouble. Do we then describe a virtual society by its Keith/Anders ratio? And if others are replicating themselves and I am not, the spike/Anders ratio and spike/Keith ratio are actually declining, and that will never do, even though I think the world of these guys. We have spent our lifetimes making ourselves into the person we want to be, and we like us. I like me. I want more like me, if I can create them. Now imagine your local megalomaniac, or the other guy who is even worse, the gigalomaniac. He will be wildly enthusiastic about self-replication, when he is not busy maniacally selling his sexual services to women. spike From msd001 at gmail.com Thu Dec 22 15:48:33 2011 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 10:48:33 -0500 Subject: [ExI] An uploading proposal (inspired by Re: Uploading cautions, "Speed Up") In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 6:02 AM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > Imagine an advanced AGI coming to you and saying... Hey, you're using > a lot of atoms up in your biological state... how about I upload you, > for free, in exchange for the use of your matter, and all the matter > that you "own" or control so that I can turn it into computronium and > we can go off into the sunset together? > > Seems like a reasonable idea for a good sci fi short story... especially if the ending was that both of you were already in a simulation or if the "conversation" was actually the beginning of the process and after a lengthy debate in which you reject the whole idea and walk away you are merely simulated as walking away and the simulation is run until your inevitable death and you are none the wiser. Those who take the red pill are allowed to access the new world, their minds are completely blown and the pieces flutter down into the collective. By "into the sunset together" you are talking about the literal end of the star's fusion reaction, right? From eugen at leitl.org Thu Dec 22 15:59:01 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 16:59:01 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Uploading cautions, "Speed Up" In-Reply-To: <01eb01ccc0bf$79c14ea0$6d43ebe0$@att.net> References: <4EF2EA3C.4060604@aleph.se> <01eb01ccc0bf$79c14ea0$6d43ebe0$@att.net> Message-ID: <20111222155901.GB31847@leitl.org> On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 07:36:29AM -0800, spike wrote: > I stumbled over this concept some time ago. If we discover uploading, the > very natural next step is to want to create as many copies as you have > memory and computing capacity to support. Therein lies the trouble. Do we Unreal estate is expensive. And there's competition. Do you rent, or own? What's the bandwidth crossection in your neighborhood? Network weather good, or much congestion? Relativistic ping ok or lag from hell? Which timebase can you afford? > then describe a virtual society by its Keith/Anders ratio? And if others > are replicating themselves and I am not, the spike/Anders ratio and > spike/Keith ratio are actually declining, and that will never do, even > though I think the world of these guys. We have spent our lifetimes making > ourselves into the person we want to be, and we like us. I like me. I want > more like me, if I can create them. Malkovich much? Not so Malkovich. Diversity makes for more stable ecosystems. > Now imagine your local megalomaniac, or the other guy who is even worse, the > gigalomaniac. He will be wildly enthusiastic about self-replication, when > he is not busy maniacally selling his sexual services to women. Ah, but of which species? Do you Lamarck (with crossover) or Darwin? Who will win in in the end? From msd001 at gmail.com Thu Dec 22 15:59:10 2011 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 10:59:10 -0500 Subject: [ExI] mit's answer to the stanford ai class In-Reply-To: References: <040d01ccbfed$6c75b6f0$456124d0$@att.net> <007801ccc009$0c282d20$24788760$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 5:37 AM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > There may even be AIs out there that scour the web for your > information and present it to HR people in a concise format. If there > aren't, there soon will be. This is entirely within the realm of what > Watson or his cousins can accomplish. It won't even require much scouring. All the social media platforms are moving to providing the tools for people to give up this information themselves. Sousveillance might seem scary at first but people who would mostly likely reject it when it is presented directly are embracing it when thinly veiled. I agree that I've never gotten a job through a friend - however the resume does attempt to convince a potential employer to give you the opportunity. In my case I answered a cold-call from a placement company and sent them my resume. While not exactly a "friend," that person was in contact with a larger pool of opportunities than I had available to me. I already trust information on StackOverflow more than 98% of less-trusted sites. Why? Somehow that community has been more reliable to solve the problems I've looked up. From spike66 at att.net Thu Dec 22 15:47:54 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 07:47:54 -0800 Subject: [ExI] mit's answer to the stanford ai class In-Reply-To: References: <040d01ccbfed$6c75b6f0$456124d0$@att.net> <010401ccc033$214e5ab0$63eb1010$@att.net> Message-ID: <01ec01ccc0c1$11c424b0$354c6e10$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson ... >...There is a serious point here though, and that is that even very serious computer scientists find it EXTREMELY difficult to produce anything like good code using Excel. It just isn't a good tool for producing serious software. There is no testing harness or framework, for one thing... there is no control of execution, nor really an explanation of how it works at any level of detail... Excel is a disaster from a software engineering perspective...That being said, it is the most popular programming environment in the history of the world. So it go the user interface right, but didn't support the "real" programmers of the world...-Kelly Ja. Excel is really good for what excel is designed to do, like a golf cart. You can't convert it to a race car, it isn't a good highway cruiser. But it has its uses, and in that narrow scope it is better than a race car or a Lincoln Towncar. Yes we know there are people who have no drivers' license, who can operate a golf cart and get the job done with it, even if not as well as the alternatives. Excel interfaces well with the mind, or rather some minds. I hope we eventually figure out a way to create something analogous to a spreadsheet/macro programming environment with some kind of software meta-tool that somehow reads one's spreadsheet and macro code, then figures out what the silly prole wanted to do, then generates the code to do it. spike From spike66 at att.net Thu Dec 22 16:40:43 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 08:40:43 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Uploading cautions, "Speed Up" In-Reply-To: <20111222155901.GB31847@leitl.org> References: <4EF2EA3C.4060604@aleph.se> <01eb01ccc0bf$79c14ea0$6d43ebe0$@att.net> <20111222155901.GB31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: <020601ccc0c8$733bc1b0$59b34510$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl ... >...Unreal estate is expensive. And there's competition. Do you rent, or own? What's the bandwidth crossection in your neighborhood? Network weather good, or much congestion? Relativistic ping ok or lag from hell? Which timebase can you afford? >...Malkovich much? Not so Malkovich. Diversity makes for more stable ecosystems. >...Ah, but of which species? Do you Lamarck (with crossover) or Darwin? Eugen My own friend Eugen hides his many talents under a bushel. spike From atymes at gmail.com Thu Dec 22 16:55:05 2011 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 08:55:05 -0800 Subject: [ExI] mit's answer to the stanford ai class In-Reply-To: References: <040d01ccbfed$6c75b6f0$456124d0$@att.net> <010401ccc033$214e5ab0$63eb1010$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 2:31 AM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 3:51 PM, spike wrote: >> How well I know it. ?In 2002, I had a crazy-smart physicist working with me. >> I showed him how to use excel. ?In 2002! ?He thought it was the greatest >> invention since sex. ?That was the last we heard of him for months, as he >> did what he was famous for doing: super obsessive laser beam study of a >> topic. ?He wrote some interesting software in the macro language. > > I had a professor Evan Ivie, brilliant guy, and a great computer > scientist, worked at Bell Labs with Kernihan and Richie and the gang. > He spent quite a while figuring out what the limits of programming in > the shell were... similar kind of story, I'd imagine. When all you > have is a hammer, suddenly, the whole world is a nail!!! LOL This is a problem in itself: knowing what tools are out there, that you've never heard of, that can adequately complete entire sections of your new project - even professionally, as in "handle details you haven't thought of yet because you just now discovered the need for this, but you'll have to take care of to do the project". This is a classic problem with government contracts, for example. Myriad reporting requirements that are unfamiliar to newbies to the government space, and often, you stumble your way through them only to not actually win the bid - but you know what to do next time, you think. And yet, each of the requirements made sense from the point of view of someone who was dealing with a problem that cropped up in the past, and there's been over 200 years of institutional learning on this (in the US - more in many other countries, and the US sometimes copies that as needed). Or, take an example from just last night. A friend of mine was converting logs from a chat tool for posting on the Web. A long, tedious task of cleanup...until I told her that I'd made a tool to do exactly that, and would she like to borrow it? What once took an hour now took a few minutes, and all that changed was being informed of the relevant tool. And in most Web programming jobs, when running into any novel task, the first thing to do is to search the Web for anyone else who's solved that task and posted public domain source code you're free to copy and use. For example, I would venture that most people on this list do not know by heart the Luhn algorithm, which is used to determine whether a credit card number could be valid or is just a typo. (This algorithm is 100% protection against mistyping a single CC digit with another digit, and good protection against other CC number mistyping errors.) But yet, just knowing that it exists and what the name of it is, any of you can easily google for "luhn algorithm [LANGUAGE]" for any modern programming language and find examples of it. This requires a bit of a change in thinking, from "how do I solve this problem" to "how do I find a solution to this problem". Of course, not all such challenges have solutions out there to find, so you have to figure out when to stop looking and start solving it yourself. From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Thu Dec 22 18:34:35 2011 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 11:34:35 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 5:00 AM, Stefano Vaj wrote: > On 22 December 2011 02:13, Keith Henson wrote: > >> If technophilic life is common, then something will keep us from growing >> to the point of being observable from a distance. >> > What does prevent us? > > Perhaps aliens are too engaged in the bailout of their banks and in > distributing bonuses to their financial executives to make the kind of > real-world, large scale investment that ends up being visible from another > solar system... :-) Heh. It's a really good question, one I have thought about for a number of years. There are many ways for a civilization to fail where everybody dies. I have tried to imagine ways that allow for a thriving continuation that doesn't make a visible mark on the universe. That leaves out interstellar expansion. What would keep us around our one star forever and likewise make all the other technophilic races stay home? It seems possible that speeding up is such a strong economic and survival advantage that all races upload and crank up their clock speeds to the limit physics allows. That's at least a million fold faster than we currently experience. The consequence is that the stars recede by the same factor so subjectively a ten year journey becomes a ten million year project. Even with immortality that's a long time. (This assumes there is no way around c.) Of course, with control over your clock rate, you can make ten years in real time as short as you like, but going back seems out of the question, by the time you got back, your race would have experienced 20 million years of change. Vernor Vinge has speculated on this topic (Marooned in Realtime, A Fire Upon the Deep) that such speedups are in some unknown sense fatal, entities just don't last more than a few years of real time in the transcendent state. That would certainly account for not seeing the effects of aliens in the universe, they blink out long before anything visible happens. > I was thinking that after all from outer space the Chinese Wall remains one > of the most obvious man-made structures, and it is not really something > that was planned and executed in the framework of contemporary > society/economy/set of priorities... :-) That's true. My assumptions have been that we would see the side effects of transportation or exploitation of stars for energy (dimming them in visible light). It's amusing how much speculation about the future can come from simple observation of the universe and our own existence. Of course every other race facing their own version of the singularity must have faced the same questions about their probably bleak prospects of becoming visible in the universe. Keith From dan_ust at yahoo.com Thu Dec 22 18:42:32 2011 From: dan_ust at yahoo.com (Dan) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 10:42:32 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] Fermi question In-Reply-To: References: <20111220073002.GD31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: <1324579352.37535.YahooMailNeo@web160602.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> On Wednesday, December 21, 2011 3:32 PM Kelly Anderson wrote: >On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 12:30 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: [snip] >>> 3)? Perhaps the most bizarre reason for the Fermi problem is the world >>> as we know it being a simulation.? There are probably ways to test for >> >> Yes, but this is religion. We don't do religion here. > > I disagree. This is philosophy, not religion. And we do philosophy here. > Nick > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_argument It might be philosophy, but I think it doesn't really decide this issue because as Olson pointed out there might, in a simulation be simulated aliens. Thus, you'd have to answer not so much whether you were in a simulation because why your simulation has no aliens or no evidence of aliens. This merely pushes the problem to another place and doesn't resolve it. [snip] > Occam actually comes down on the side that we're already in a > simulation... if you really think about it hard enough. In my view, Ockham* seems to come down on the side of no simulation for now. This might not be what people here would like, but it seems to be the correct application of Occam's razor here. Regards, Dan * Aristotle seems to have gotten the principle first: Cf. Ph 1.4.188a17-18; 6.189a14-15; 8.6.259a10-12. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Thu Dec 22 19:01:24 2011 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 12:01:24 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Uploading cautions, "Speed Up" Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 5:00 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2011-12-22 02:30, Keith Henson wrote: snip > >> Unless making copies is illegal and strongly enforced, for example, by >> AIs. > > But that requires a singleton (to use Nick's term), an agency that can > enforce global coordination. Or really widespread agreement that something is a bad idea. > If you have a singleton a lot of the > existential risks are reduced (at the price of the risks from the > singleton itself). If you have AIs before brain emulation, fine, the > most dangerous hurdle is already in the past. But I think there is a > decent chance of emulation before useful AI (and other technology that > would enable/induce singleton formation). All possibilities have to be > analyzed. That's true. The singularity is generally considered to be AI and nanotechnology. I have argued before that no matter which one come first, it will be used to bootstrap the other so we get both close in time. I.e., if we get nanotech first, we bootstrap that into AI by taking brains apart with and using the information to build AIs based off human models. > > ? Think about it this way, how many copies of Keith Henson could >> you put up with? > > I don't mind a population of 90% Keiths. As long as you don't mind a lot > of Anderses around. I think the problem is the "one person"-persons who > can't stand the threat to their concept of individuality. That doesn't bother me. Crew for interstellar space craft is one place where copies would probably be required. Running people through the duplicator in a limited space world is what concerns me. >>> A 5x5x5 nm^3 scan of the 1.4 liters of brain 10^22 bits is about one >>> zettabyte. Kryder's Law will eventually get there (?), but it will take >>> decades. Kenneth suggests using fixated pieces of the brain as a library >>> for itself, but it seems likely that most non-nanotech scanning methods >>> will burn it. >> >> I still don't see where you need a zettabyte. ?Biological information >> storage has just got to be rotten low density. ?A lifetime of memory >> has been estimated at only 140 M bytes. ?It's been more than a decade >> since I had a disk that small. > > But that is the information embodied in that zettabyte of volume data, a > bit like the ~1 kilobyte of information in the text of a high resolution > scanned page. You need the big dataset to extract the important dataset. > > The exact size of the information that needs to be extracted is > uncertain: 140M is a lower bound, and I would suspect it is actually on > the order of terabytes (neural connectivity plus ~1 bit per synapse). In > any case it is small compared to the actual raw scan data. And the > problem is that if you get early uploading you cannot store the raw data > permanently, so you better know what you want to extract since you will > throw away most of the rest. > I suspect that emulation at the level of cortical columns will be good enough. Keith From jrd1415 at gmail.com Thu Dec 22 19:05:29 2011 From: jrd1415 at gmail.com (Jeff Davis) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 12:05:29 -0700 Subject: [ExI] mit's answer to the stanford ai class In-Reply-To: <040d01ccbfed$6c75b6f0$456124d0$@att.net> References: <040d01ccbfed$6c75b6f0$456124d0$@att.net> Message-ID: The internet is clearly a paradigm altering information exchange innovation. It is so new and its power so great that we can't see the forest for the low-hanging fruit. Newspapers are dieing, and the reason is trivially obvious. As obvious as Wikipedia. And amazing. Remember, Wikipedia -- with its evolving problems and evolving solutions -- is a free to make free to use, volunteer, not for profit, outside the old commercial paradigm, information co-op. Hoorah! Universities are, if not next, high up on the list for imminent obsolescence. Hell!, there's probably a Wiki-versity already out there. (I haven't Googled it. I'll leave that to you.) Why is Harvard (or University X) a "good school"? Top flight staff? To be sure. But what about the top flight students? Surely they count. Why does Harvard (or U of X) charge big bucks for tuition? Why don't the top flight students charge the Universities instead? For the privilege of having the best students there to make that school the top flight institution that it is? After all, the students are the ones actually doing the work of learning. A lecture series can be put on DVD. The information is all in public domain. The words coming out of the mouth of some Nobel laureate's mouth are the same when spoken by a talking head or voice synthesizer. Curriculum, course notes, tests, texts can all be assembled in digital form from sources publicly available. So why the big bucks for lecturers, etc? Old paradigm inertia, nothing more. (The UoP is trying to expand their business model. Kudos. But it's still an old paradigm model. A dinosaur walking.) The internet isn't even an infant yet. It's barely "crowning". As an undergraduate at Case Tech, I took the standard thermo course. Crappy teacher. I passed, but I didn't "get" it. Paused for a stint in the military, and then resumed my engineering studies at UC Berkeley, and decided to do Thermo again in the hopes of "getting it" the second time. another crappy "professor". A grad student actually, whose notion of teaching was to use the hour to transcribe the book onto the chalkboard. I passed, but still didn't "get it". Then I went to SF State, a cheesy little school with a cheesy engineering dept. Took Thermo yet again, this time from Jerome Fox a former hot shot project manager from Bechtel or some such big league firm. Best teacher bar none I have ever encountered. (Inter-personally a monster, but that's another story.) Took things small step by small step, proceeded quickly from one to the next, and had the students to work problems in class at every step. He never screwed up by missing a step. Never skipped a "link" necessary for assembling the "chain" of learning. Never let his comprehensive familiarity with the subject cause him to skip something long since useless in application but essential in moving along the path from not knowing to knowing and understanding. He had a bad ticker and was always at risk of dropping dead. This was the early eighties -- no internet yet -- and my three different tries at Thermo made me peculiarly aware of the striking variations in teaching quality/effectiveness "out there". I wanted to get Prof Fox on video tape (early eighties remember) to preserve, for the future legions of engineering students, the astonishing resource that was his teaching ability. He made Thermo ***easy***. I mean easy as in well, ... easy. So what I see as the Wiki-versity is a micro-payment, for-profit site where **anyone** can submit a lesson/lecture for sale. No need to be a University Prof. Joe Nobody could do it. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. If your submission is most effective, then it sells to the folks who need and want it. If you price it at a dime or a dollar -- cheap enough to buy rather than "pirate" -- in the internet market of 7 billion, you're gonna make some money. Little side point. The Meyers-Briggs 4 by 4 matrix generates 16 personality variants, and it's not hard to suppose that each has its own learning style that needs a teaching style to fit. So, for any given subject, there should be a whole slew of lessons to choose from to find something that fits. Bye-bye newspapers, bye-bye Universities. What's next? Best, Jeff Davis "Everything's hard till you know how to do it." Ray Charles From kryonica at gmail.com Thu Dec 22 19:59:02 2011 From: kryonica at gmail.com (Kryonica) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 19:59:02 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Maximum heart rate Message-ID: <98DE305B-8A17-47CC-A20B-F3B65F2FDF07@gmail.com> Since this is the time of the year for good New Year's resolutions - that one hopes to keep beyond Jan 1st - I am thinking about purchasing at last a heart rate monitor watch & strap to use on my exercise bike to monitor percentage of maximum heart rate at various stages of the exercise as well as calories burnt. One formula for maximum heart rate that I found is the one proposed by Lund University: MHR = 190.2/ (1 + exp (0.0453 x (age - 107.5))), which gave me (female, 52 in february 2012) a value of 175.9 Since people on this list seem to mind their health with knowledge and conscientiousness, I'd like your opinion on how to calculate this value as well as its hypothetical usefulness for life extending exercising. I might buy a Polar heart rate watch and also use it during non-cycling aerobic (that is high and low impact) exercise such as dancing and kickboxing. I have done these things for years now but never bothered to measure my heart rate. But with all the pills I have been advised to take by f.i. Stefano and Eugen maybe my maximum heart rate will change. From spike66 at att.net Fri Dec 23 04:39:51 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 20:39:51 -0800 Subject: [ExI] mit's answer to the stanford ai class In-Reply-To: References: <040d01ccbfed$6c75b6f0$456124d0$@att.net> Message-ID: <02f601ccc12c$e97f2f10$bc7d8d30$@att.net> Jeff, your post is brilliant, thanks. Read on: -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Jeff Davis Subject: Re: [ExI] mit's answer to the stanford ai class >...The internet is clearly a paradigm altering information exchange innovation. It is so new and its power so great that we can't see the forest for the low-hanging fruit... Well said, me lad. >...Newspapers are dieing, and the reason is trivially obvious... Ja. Why do we need a hard copy of yesterday's news? I want today's news, not yesterday's. >... Universities are, if not next, high up on the list for imminent obsolescence... I expect they will put up one hell of a fight before dying. Universities serve as football minor leagues and a four year vacation at a sex therapy resort. Unless one is a geek. {8-[ >... Why does Harvard (or U of X) charge big bucks for tuition? Wonder how it will be 10 yrs from now? >...A lecture series can be put on DVD. ... But it's still an old paradigm model. A dinosaur walking... Ja, and has been for some time now. The internet isn't even an infant yet. It's barely "crowning". >...As an undergraduate at Case Tech, I took the standard thermo course... Took Thermo yet again, this time from Jerome Fox a former hot shot project manager from Bechtel or some such big league firm. Best teacher bar none I have ever encountered... Cool coincidence: I took a graduate thermo class from the best professor I ever had. Name: Tim Fox. >...(Inter-personally a monster, but that's another story.) But opposite: Professor Tim Fox was the nicest guy. >...So what I see as the Wiki-versity is a micro-payment, for-profit site where **anyone** can submit a lesson/lecture for sale. No need to be a University Prof. Joe Nobody could do it... The importance of this development is difficult to overstate. If we can work it out, we have created perhaps the most important application of the internet. >...Little side point. The Meyers-Briggs 4 by 4 matrix generates 16 personality variants, and it's not hard to suppose that each has its own learning style that needs a teaching style to fit. So, for any given subject, there should be a whole slew of lessons to choose from to find something that fits... Bringing in that angle is stellar thinking Jeff. >...Bye-bye newspapers, bye-bye Universities. What's next? Best, Jeff Davis Before we get distracted by what's next, let us think the hell out of this concept and work towards it. Recall how you did in college, and compare to how you study things on the internet. You are now in the comfort of your own home, perhaps comfortably married and your beer drinking phase is mostly in the past. Now we can think, ja? Now we can laser focus on that which we want to know. We have such astonishing potential here. If we can figure out a way to accomplish the task of evaluating credentials, of measuring randomly acquired knowledge, we have freed ourselves from an appallingly expensive and partially effective learning model, replacing it with another model which does everything better for some students, some things better for others, and may be ineffective for another subset. I feel I am in that subclass which will fly like an eagle in the online environment. spike spike From steinberg.will at gmail.com Fri Dec 23 06:58:12 2011 From: steinberg.will at gmail.com (Will Steinberg) Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 01:58:12 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 8:13 PM, Keith Henson wrote: > The problem is that effectively unlimited > virtual worlds can be constructed and inhabited for a *tiny* fraction > of the time and energy needed for the hop to another star system. > Perhaps once societies reach the overmind phase, they realize that it is extremely pleasurable to their goals to seek out other intelligent life. Then they would travel the stars as invisible gods, socializing in the void and betting on which planets would 'make it'. ;) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Dec 23 09:33:46 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 10:33:46 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20111223093346.GS31847@leitl.org> On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 01:58:12AM -0500, Will Steinberg wrote: > On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 8:13 PM, Keith Henson wrote: > > > The problem is that effectively unlimited > > virtual worlds can be constructed and inhabited for a *tiny* fraction Of course they're limited. Computation isn't free. It takes atoms and Joules. Computation substrate is additive. Information patterns can be instantiated much faster than the substrate doubled to accomodate them, so there's always population pressure. Need for more lebensraum. People (though Keith is not people) readily keep underestimating what even a modest (2.3% annually) growth means long-term: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ The author takes these numbers to mean that this will never happen. We here will interprete these numbers differently. (Of course, there are relativistic limits to growth (the galaxy is 0.1 Mlyr in diameter), so exponentials do run into limitations eventually. > > of the time and energy needed for the hop to another star system. When you run out of unreal estate, you have to develop some nearby plots. > > Perhaps once societies reach the overmind phase, they realize that it is > extremely pleasurable to their goals to seek out other intelligent life. > Then they would travel the stars as invisible gods, socializing in the > void and betting on which planets would 'make it'. ;) From cetico.iconoclasta at gmail.com Fri Dec 23 11:31:31 2011 From: cetico.iconoclasta at gmail.com (Henrique Moraes Machado) Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 09:31:31 -0200 Subject: [ExI] RES: mit's answer to the stanford ai class In-Reply-To: References: <040d01ccbfed$6c75b6f0$456124d0$@att.net> Message-ID: <003601ccc166$6fb17eb0$4f147c10$@gmail.com> So what I see as the Wiki-versity is a micro-payment, for-profit site where **anyone** can submit a lesson/lecture for sale. No need to be a University Prof. Joe Nobody could do it. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. If your submission is most effective, then it sells to the folks who need and want it. If you price it at a dime or a dollar -- cheap enough to buy rather than "pirate" -- in the internet market of 7 billion, you're gonna make some money. Let's do it. Definitely let's do it. From anders at aleph.se Fri Dec 23 08:41:42 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 09:41:42 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> <4EF19D66.4070907@aleph.se> <4EF1FD4D.1090600@libero.it> <4EF24ACA.3030400@aleph.se> <4EF3003E.7060803@aleph.se> Message-ID: <4EF43EC6.8030108@aleph.se> On 2011-12-22 13:15, Stefano Vaj wrote: > On 22 December 2011 11:02, Anders Sandberg > I'm not entirely convinced. The US has been the main site of > technological innovation for a long time, yet it has fairly cheap > manpower and a not very communitarian environment. Certainly > Scandinavia and Japan have been high-tech (expensive manpower and a > communitarian environment), but it seems that the availability of > capital in the US has been a far more deciding factor. > > This is not a religious dogma for me, so I am ready to review my opinion > on the subject, but the typical examples of technological stagnation and > final fall of slavery-based economies would be the Roman Empire, the > Confederation in the American Civil War and Banana Republics in Latin > America. The typical examples of higher productivity and growth rate in > countries with relatively very highly paid manpower would be in fact > Germany and Japan - not to mention Northern Italy, at least for a while. Slavery economies have the problem that the leaders lack the incentive to innovate, the rigid structure makes entrepreneurship hard, and the human capital of the rest of the population is used very inefficiently (since it is hard to get creative output on command). This remains true even if the system is not direct slavery: rigid, protectionist systems where citizens have no opportunity to do things for themselves will also tend to stagnate. The problem with many developed countries is that they have too well developed institutions: a strong civil society that gives a high level of trust but embodies plenty of unwritten rules, many regulations and stakeholders (both sensible and not) that affect projects and entrepreneurship, and a high overall level of complexity that requires a lot of education to deal with. These factors generally produce useful results - trust, safety, efficiency - but also keep many people out (those lacking resources, education or have the wrong culture or social skills). In a sense they are victims of their own success. I wouldn't go so far as to say that they naturally must collapse due to this. But it would behoove us to figure out new ways of maintaining the flexibility of developed societies - especially since if our transhumanist visions are even halfway coming real the complexity factor is going to go way up. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Fri Dec 23 07:59:46 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 08:59:46 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Uploading cautions, "Speed Up" In-Reply-To: <01eb01ccc0bf$79c14ea0$6d43ebe0$@att.net> References: <4EF2EA3C.4060604@aleph.se> <01eb01ccc0bf$79c14ea0$6d43ebe0$@att.net> Message-ID: <4EF434F2.1060701@aleph.se> On 2011-12-22 16:36, spike wrote: > We have spent our lifetimes making > ourselves into the person we want to be, and we like us. I like me. I want > more like me, if I can create them. Exactly! Even if you subscribe to some model of personal identity that doesn't put too much value in continuity or uniqueness, you might still want to have plenty of copies since every Spike-moment on average is a good thing. This is my reasoning for why I want to have a lot of Anders-moments in the universe: they are fun for the instance having them. > Now imagine your local megalomaniac, or the other guy who is even worse, the > gigalomaniac. He will be wildly enthusiastic about self-replication, when > he is not busy maniacally selling his sexual services to women. He will of course quickly find out that he is competing with himself for the price of the services... with a shrinking customer market. I suspect that the truly successful mass-forkers will be people who get along well with themselves and others, are good at retraining themselves to be useful for something, and are not averse to conspiring with their forks to gain advantage. The classic narcissistic megalomaniac will self-destruct in a grandiose way. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Fri Dec 23 07:54:33 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 08:54:33 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Uploading cautions, "Speed Up" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4EF433B9.5000802@aleph.se> On 2011-12-22 20:01, Keith Henson wrote: > On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 5:00 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: >>> Unless making copies is illegal and strongly enforced, for example, by >>> AIs. >> >> But that requires a singleton (to use Nick's term), an agency that can >> enforce global coordination. > > Or really widespread agreement that something is a bad idea. It is enough to have one defector to ruin the agreement. The only way of making the low-forking strategy evolutionarily stable is to coordinate so that deviations are punished enough *everywhere*. And that likely requires a global singleton, not just an agreement among all nice governments or companies. >> The exact size of the information that needs to be extracted is >> uncertain: 140M is a lower bound, and I would suspect it is actually on >> the order of terabytes (neural connectivity plus ~1 bit per synapse). In >> any case it is small compared to the actual raw scan data. And the >> problem is that if you get early uploading you cannot store the raw data >> permanently, so you better know what you want to extract since you will >> throw away most of the rest. >> > I suspect that emulation at the level of cortical columns will be good enough. Maybe. In that case we need about a petabyte of storage for the synaptic weight matrix. Not too bad. At present we cannot deduce the right level of emulation, so we should investigate the consequences of different required levels (and ways of settling the question). If it is on the column level the computational demands will be fairly modest, but figuring out the correct internal dynamics of the columns might be tricky - risk for a late breakthrough and hence a lot of hardware overhang, making a pretty sharp transition from no uploads to a lot of fast uploads. If it is on the electrophysiological level (compartment models, simulated ion currents) then the computational demands will be higher and we need much more brain data for the emulation, but most of the dynamics is likely in the vicinity of known. Earlier breakthrough with slower and more expensive uploads? If it requires a lot more biochemical detail - states of protein phosphorylation, receptor complexes and whatnot - then we need new ways of scanning we currently know nothing about. High computational demands too. So this might lead to situations where scanning is the last thing to be developed well, in which case we might get transitions with few initial uploads (slow and/or expensive scanning) that get copied widely, or that once the right scanning tech is developed then the neuroscience takes off and leads to a breakthrough like the top case. If the brain really uses weird computation, like microtubule quantum states, then we need to wait for the right hardware. That might take a long time, especially if it needs to be dedicated to brain emulation - a fairly niche interest. The longer it takes to get brain emulation the higher the chance that AI gets there first, of course. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Fri Dec 23 13:37:57 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 14:37:57 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: <4EF43EC6.8030108@aleph.se> References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> <4EF19D66.4070907@aleph.se> <4EF1FD4D.1090600@libero.it> <4EF24ACA.3030400@aleph.se> <4EF3003E.7060803@aleph.se> <4EF43EC6.8030108@aleph.se> Message-ID: On 23 December 2011 09:41, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Slavery economies have the problem that the leaders lack the incentive to > innovate, the rigid structure makes entrepreneurship hard, and the human > capital of the rest of the population is used very inefficiently (since it > is hard to get creative output on command). This remains true even if the > system is not direct slavery: rigid, protectionist systems where citizens > have no opportunity to do things for themselves will also tend to stagnate. > I was in fact referring to a more trivial and immediate effect. Let us say I am a textile entrepreneur, and my decisions are commanded only by economic optimisation according the classical economic theory. If a cheap, abundant offer of manpower is available, the rational decision to increase production is emphatically not that of purchasing a loom, let alone engage in risky R&D programmes aimed at developing one, but simply that of putting more weavers at work. Conversely, If weavers are expensive and scarce, the pressure to do the opposite is high. And quite notably, when I equip my weavers with the loom, they end up being individually more productive than they would be otherwise, so allowing me to pay them a higher wage. And this of course makes for a higher demand of textile products. This is why I suspect that injections of wage or non-wage immigrant slaves, as indesirable as they may be for entirely different reasons, do really very little for wobbly economies, unless perhaps in the very short term. Let us say, not much more than does heroin for the cure withdrawal symptoms. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Fri Dec 23 13:20:57 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 14:20:57 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 22 December 2011 19:34, Keith Henson wrote: > It's a really good question, one I have thought about for a number of > years. There are many ways for a civilization to fail where everybody > dies. I have tried to imagine ways that allow for a thriving > continuation that doesn't make a visible mark on the universe. That > leaves out interstellar expansion. What would keep us around our one > star forever and likewise make all the other technophilic races stay > home? > On the line of my previous pun about lasers pointing to space vs bonuses to bankers, I think that on this we transhumanists suffer from an implicit technophilic bias ourselves, taking the first priority for granted, and considering growth, expansion, quest for greatness, discovery and knowledge as part of the very definition of "thriving". Now, what about the much more trivial scenarios of a Brave New World where simply all that is simply going (gradually?) to disappear in favour of stability and stagnation and keeping clear of anthropic x-risks and making our planet resources last as long as possible? In hindsight, it easy to extrapolate "progress" as if it largely were a kind of Kurzweilian curve, especially from the POV of people having grown at the end of a dramatically revolutionary age who are taking enhancements, improvements and breakthrougs in every field for granted; but examining things more closely I suspect that such extrapolation is based in reality on "punctuated equilibria" where in-no-way-necessitated, exceptional, radical paradigm shifts could succeed on rather few occasions against an otherwise dominant inertia *against all bets*. So, where indeed are the aliens? Perhaps most alien civilisations do not have a strong enough transhumanist movement to make themselves visibile to the other. :-) -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Fri Dec 23 13:55:18 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 14:55:18 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Uploading cautions, "Speed Up" In-Reply-To: <4EF433B9.5000802@aleph.se> References: <4EF433B9.5000802@aleph.se> Message-ID: On 23 December 2011 08:54, Anders Sandberg wrote: > If the brain really uses weird computation, like microtubule quantum > states, then we need to wait for the right hardware. That might take a long > time, especially if it needs to be dedicated to brain emulation - a fairly > niche interest. > Why not making use of neurons for those allegedly "exotic", hard-to-emulate-on-silicon kinds of computations? We know they work. Squeeze in a cheap, easily available human brain in your "artificial" intelligence and you are game. The issue remains of the bandwith available to this organic coprocessor to communicate with the rest of the system. But as I maintain in my essay on the subject, as long as computing power becomes less and less of an issue, you can easily deal with the problem by making communication happen at a higher and higher level. See the difference in information exchanges between driving a traditional car to a destination, and having a fully automatic one to carry you to a given address. This is why I ultimately think that some aspects of the debate on AGIs sound a little like those on the sex of the angels... Emulation of anthropomorphic "intelligence" has little to do IMHO with what opportunities and dangers are involved in the availability of computational power, and for whom - the latter, I suspect, essentially for those who do not have it. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Fri Dec 23 14:27:51 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:27:51 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> <4EF19D66.4070907@aleph.se> <4EF1FD4D.1090600@libero.it> <4EF24ACA.3030400@aleph.se> <4EF3003E.7060803@aleph.se> <4EF43EC6.8030108@aleph.se> Message-ID: <4EF48FE7.9050407@aleph.se> On 2011-12-23 14:37, Stefano Vaj wrote: > This is why I suspect that injections of wage or non-wage immigrant > slaves, as indesirable as they may be for entirely different reasons, do > really very little for wobbly economies, unless perhaps in the very > short term. This, incidentally, might be a problem when AI or brain emulations appear. They make human capital very cheap, and might incentivize using more minds rather than to innovate. Of course, AI and WBE might allow scaling up innovation too, in which case everything is fine. But if they don't do that immediately, then we might see some nasty social repercussions. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Fri Dec 23 14:29:59 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:29:59 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Uploading cautions, "Speed Up" In-Reply-To: References: <4EF433B9.5000802@aleph.se> Message-ID: <4EF49067.9010803@aleph.se> On 2011-12-23 14:55, Stefano Vaj wrote: > On 23 December 2011 08:54, Anders Sandberg > wrote: > > If the brain really uses weird computation, like microtubule quantum > states, then we need to wait for the right hardware. That might take > a long time, especially if it needs to be dedicated to brain > emulation - a fairly niche interest. > > > Why not making use of neurons for those allegedly "exotic", > hard-to-emulate-on-silicon kinds of computations? We know they work. > Squeeze in a cheap, easily available human brain in your "artificial" > intelligence and you are game. Assuming it is cheap to squeeze it in. Lab life support technology isn't that cheap or reliable. I'm not too worried that brains do something magical mere machines cannot do. Discovering that they use something weird will likely just mean that we steal the idea and implement it properly. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Fri Dec 23 15:44:20 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:44:20 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Uploading cautions, "Speed Up" In-Reply-To: <4EF49067.9010803@aleph.se> References: <4EF433B9.5000802@aleph.se> <4EF49067.9010803@aleph.se> Message-ID: On 23 December 2011 15:29, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2011-12-23 14:55, Stefano Vaj wrote: > Assuming it is cheap to squeeze it in. Lab life support technology isn't > that cheap or reliable. > An office with a desk is an admittedly primitive, but rather effective, life support technology, and you can squeeze in it a human being quite easily. :-) Of course, I deliberately implied that I was referring to a brain, or parts thereof, in a vial positioned within a cabinet or rack of silicon processors, and connected through a neural interface. But does it really have to be case? How would a "fyborg" system of a hypothetically identical performance put in a black box be distinguishable from the "cyborg" system you assumed I was discussing or for that matter from a fully "artificial" one? And what would prevent such a system from achieving an identical performance? -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Fri Dec 23 15:58:04 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:58:04 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: <4EF48FE7.9050407@aleph.se> References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> <4EF19D66.4070907@aleph.se> <4EF1FD4D.1090600@libero.it> <4EF24ACA.3030400@aleph.se> <4EF3003E.7060803@aleph.se> <4EF43EC6.8030108@aleph.se> <4EF48FE7.9050407@aleph.se> Message-ID: On 23 December 2011 15:27, Anders Sandberg wrote: > This, incidentally, might be a problem when AI or brain emulations appear. > They make human capital very cheap, and might incentivize using more minds > rather than to innovate. > > Of course, AI and WBE might allow scaling up innovation too, in which case > everything is fine. But if they don't do that immediately, then we might > see some nasty social repercussions. > Let me think. "If artificial minds are cheap, I will be inclined to use the brute-force approach of putting more of them on the work rather than finding more effective solutions"? Well, it may be true, and they need not even be "minds". Today, we throw relatively cheap and abundant computational resources at tasks rather than investing in a hyper-optimisation of our programming... It reminds me in fact of a DOS-OS/2-Windows OCR application made in Russia which resided entirely on a single floppy disk, and required 4 Mbyte of RAM to run, as opposed to state-of-the-art Omnipage that required 16. Let us say, however, that the production of cheap, abundant computing resources is in itself a field for innovation. As to the production of cheap, abundant human workforce, the only thing we could do is probably to establish hatcheries in a Brave New World-style fashion. :-) -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Fri Dec 23 16:18:55 2011 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 09:18:55 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 5:00 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: >> On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 8:13 PM, Keith Henson wrote: >> >> > ?The problem is that effectively unlimited >> > virtual worlds can be constructed and inhabited for a *tiny* fraction > > Of course they're limited. Computation isn't free. It takes atoms > and Joules. Computation substrate is additive. Information patterns > can be instantiated much faster than the substrate doubled to accomodate > them, so there's always population pressure. Need for more lebensraum. Even in the meat world there is a worldwide trend toward ZPG. Now it may be that humans will take advantage of technology to replicate much faster than it was possible to do without such aids (either virtually or physically). Robin Hanson thinks this is the way things will go and postulates (or did) a virtual world of grinding poverty. Such an outcome might keep a race from having the excess resources to leave its star system or perhaps even its planet. But avoiding that outcome, you need to consider star travel in terms of discount economics. When you can stretch or shrink the time base, what do you use as "discount"? You almost certainly can't profitably move anything except information between stars. All this changes radically with "gates" or FTL. I have been thinking about this for decades and the longer I do, the less certain I am about how the future will turn out. However, if the current estimates of the timing of the singularity are right, most of you reading this will find out. Keith > People (though Keith is not people) readily keep underestimating what even > a modest (2.3% annually) growth means long-term: > http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ > > The author takes these numbers to mean that this will never happen. > We here will interprete these numbers differently. > > (Of course, there are relativistic limits to growth (the galaxy > is 0.1 Mlyr in diameter), so exponentials do run into limitations > eventually. > >> > of the time and energy needed for the hop to another star system. > > When you run out of unreal estate, you have to develop some nearby > plots. > >> >> Perhaps once societies reach the overmind phase, they realize that it is >> extremely pleasurable to their goals to seek out other intelligent life. >> ?Then they would travel the stars as invisible gods, socializing in the >> void and betting on which planets would 'make it'. ;) > > > ------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > 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 99, Issue 29 > ******************************************** From atymes at gmail.com Fri Dec 23 17:08:03 2011 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 09:08:03 -0800 Subject: [ExI] RES: mit's answer to the stanford ai class In-Reply-To: <003601ccc166$6fb17eb0$4f147c10$@gmail.com> References: <040d01ccbfed$6c75b6f0$456124d0$@att.net> <003601ccc166$6fb17eb0$4f147c10$@gmail.com> Message-ID: >?If you price it at a dime or a dollar -- cheap enough to buy rather than > "pirate" -- in the internet market of 7 billion, you're gonna make some > money. You greatly overestimate the financial resources available to the vast majority of that 7 billion. Less than 10% have that sort of disposable income, at least in a form that is readily transferable on the Internet. From max at maxmore.com Fri Dec 23 18:56:23 2011 From: max at maxmore.com (Max More) Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 11:56:23 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Maximum heart rate In-Reply-To: <98DE305B-8A17-47CC-A20B-F3B65F2FDF07@gmail.com> References: <98DE305B-8A17-47CC-A20B-F3B65F2FDF07@gmail.com> Message-ID: I've always found the maximum heart rate calculation to be inaccurate. In my 30s, I would finish a run at top speed and measured my heart rate at around 210, when the maximum (according to the formula) should be 185 or so. In general, the heart rate zones typically recommended seem low to me. Perhaps they are intended for people who are in poor condition to start with. --Max On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 12:59 PM, Kryonica wrote: > Since this is the time of the year for good New Year's resolutions - that > one hopes to keep beyond Jan 1st - I am thinking about purchasing at last > a heart rate monitor watch & strap to use on my exercise bike to monitor > percentage of maximum heart rate at various stages of the exercise as well > as calories burnt. One formula for maximum heart rate that I found is the > one proposed by Lund University: > > MHR = 190.2/ (1 + exp (0.0453 x (age - 107.5))), which gave me (female, 52 > in february 2012) a value of 175.9 > > Since people on this list seem to mind their health with knowledge and > conscientiousness, I'd like your opinion on how to calculate this value as > well as its hypothetical usefulness for life extending exercising. I might > buy a Polar heart rate watch and also use it during non-cycling aerobic > (that is high and low impact) exercise such as dancing and kickboxing. I > have done these things for years now but never bothered to measure my heart > rate. But with all the pills I have been advised to take by f.i. Stefano > and Eugen maybe my maximum heart rate will change. > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -- Max More, PhD Strategic Philosopher Co-editor, *The Transhumanist Reader* CEO, Alcor Life Extension Foundation 7895 E. Acoma Dr # 110 Scottsdale, AZ 85260 480/905-1906 ext 113 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kryonica at gmail.com Fri Dec 23 19:21:55 2011 From: kryonica at gmail.com (Kryonica) Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 19:21:55 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Maximum heart rate In-Reply-To: References: <98DE305B-8A17-47CC-A20B-F3B65F2FDF07@gmail.com> Message-ID: Or women :-D On 23 Dec 2011, at 18:56, Max More wrote: > I've always found the maximum heart rate calculation to be inaccurate. In my 30s, I would finish a run at top speed and measured my heart rate at around 210, when the maximum (according to the formula) should be 185 or so. In general, the heart rate zones typically recommended seem low to me. Perhaps they are intended for people who are in poor condition to start with. > > --Max > > > On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 12:59 PM, Kryonica wrote: > Since this is the time of the year for good New Year's resolutions - that one hopes to keep beyond Jan 1st - I am thinking about purchasing at last a heart rate monitor watch & strap to use on my exercise bike to monitor percentage of maximum heart rate at various stages of the exercise as well as calories burnt. One formula for maximum heart rate that I found is the one proposed by Lund University: > > MHR = 190.2/ (1 + exp (0.0453 x (age - 107.5))), which gave me (female, 52 in february 2012) a value of 175.9 > > Since people on this list seem to mind their health with knowledge and conscientiousness, I'd like your opinion on how to calculate this value as well as its hypothetical usefulness for life extending exercising. I might buy a Polar heart rate watch and also use it during non-cycling aerobic (that is high and low impact) exercise such as dancing and kickboxing. I have done these things for years now but never bothered to measure my heart rate. But with all the pills I have been advised to take by f.i. Stefano and Eugen maybe my maximum heart rate will change. > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > > > -- > Max More, PhD > Strategic Philosopher > Co-editor, The Transhumanist Reader > CEO, Alcor Life Extension Foundation > 7895 E. Acoma Dr # 110 > Scottsdale, AZ 85260 > 480/905-1906 ext 113 > > _______________________________________________ > 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 possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Fri Dec 23 23:05:29 2011 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:05:29 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Uploading cautions, "Speed Up" In-Reply-To: References: <4EF433B9.5000802@aleph.se> <4EF49067.9010803@aleph.se> Message-ID: Anders version 1.0 wrote: Exactly! Even if you subscribe to some model of personal identity that doesn't put too much value in continuity or uniqueness, you might still want to have plenty of copies since every Spike-moment on average is a good thing. This is my reasoning for why I want to have a lot of Anders-moments in the universe: they are fun for the instance having them. >>> I tend to think except for a very few choice individuals allowed by the state and public to have multiple copies (brilliant scientists, key special forces commandos, some politicians, some captains of industry, some generals, astronauts, a few artists), that xoxing will be viewed as highly unethical and made illegal, with stiff penalties. And it's possible that making multiple copies, biologically or virtually, may be totally banned, with absolutely no exceptions allowed. Think about it, mere biological cloning of whole humans is currently illegal, and we are talking about the extreme of making *multiple* copies of minds/individuals! lol But if it is allowed in a very liberal way, I think it would be a much better world with lots of Spikes and Anders running around! : ) I suspect I might be very disturbed to be around adult copies of myself, because it would be like staring into a mirror, and not always liking what I saw... On the other hand, I would love to raise a clone of myself, who has my genome, but not my downloaded mind. I would give him the love and support I needed, but did not receive during my childhood. I suspect it would be very therapeutic experience for me, though it might be seen as narcissistic by some. John From spike66 at att.net Sat Dec 24 01:42:09 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 17:42:09 -0800 Subject: [ExI] netwonmas wisecracks Message-ID: <018801ccc1dd$406f7040$c14e50c0$@att.net> This year I have seen a deplorable lack of Christmas wisecracks in this forum. Unacceptable. Last year I told of the three amigos, my son and his two cousins, aged 4, 5 and 7 respectively. The seven year old told the other two there is a Christmas song about a guy who eats peoples' faces off. Sure enough, when they got to the part about ".Jack Frost nipping at your nose." they shrieked in horror and fled from the room, much to the consternation of the adults. I still have problems with some of the lyrics of the songs that are mercilessly pounded into our consciousness this time of year. For instance, ".the ox and lamp kept time, pa rumpa pum pum." Is that creepy or what? What were these two beasts actually doing to "keep time?" Were they tapping their hooves? Swaying to the beat? Either way, would that freak you out or what? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sparge at gmail.com Sat Dec 24 02:19:09 2011 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 21:19:09 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Maximum heart rate In-Reply-To: References: <98DE305B-8A17-47CC-A20B-F3B65F2FDF07@gmail.com> Message-ID: The formulas are just for approximation. You should conduct a test like Max's to determine your actual max. And recheck it periodically. The rate is exercise-specific. Here are a couple for bikes: http://www.cycling-inform.com/heart-rate-training/72-how-to-test-for-your-cycling-max-heart-rate -Dave -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From max at maxmore.com Sat Dec 24 02:54:15 2011 From: max at maxmore.com (Max More) Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 19:54:15 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Maximum heart rate In-Reply-To: References: <98DE305B-8A17-47CC-A20B-F3B65F2FDF07@gmail.com> Message-ID: This is officially known as the "Max max". I wonder how the maximum heart rate was originally set? (I'm too lazy to Google it right now.) It seems to one of those inaccurate but occasionally useful measures like the BMI. --Max 2011/12/23 Dave Sill > The formulas are just for approximation. You should conduct a test like > Max's to determine your actual max. And recheck it periodically. The rate > is exercise-specific. Here are a couple for bikes: > > > http://www.cycling-inform.com/heart-rate-training/72-how-to-test-for-your-cycling-max-heart-rate > > -Dave > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -- Max More, PhD Strategic Philosopher Co-editor, *The Transhumanist Reader* CEO, Alcor Life Extension Foundation 7895 E. Acoma Dr # 110 Scottsdale, AZ 85260 480/905-1906 ext 113 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sat Dec 24 05:08:18 2011 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 22:08:18 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Amusing sum up Message-ID: http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=2085 Keith From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sat Dec 24 04:51:30 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 21:51:30 -0700 Subject: [ExI] netwonmas wisecracks In-Reply-To: <018801ccc1dd$406f7040$c14e50c0$@att.net> References: <018801ccc1dd$406f7040$c14e50c0$@att.net> Message-ID: 2011/12/23 spike : > This year I have seen a deplorable lack of Christmas wisecracks in this > forum.? Unacceptable. Happy Ramahanakwanzmas Spike!!! > Last year I told of the three amigos, my son and his two cousins, aged 4, 5 > and 7 respectively.? The seven year old told the other two there is a > Christmas song about a guy who eats peoples? faces off.? Sure enough, when > they got to the part about ??Jack Frost nipping at your nose?? they shrieked > in horror and fled from the room, much to the consternation of the adults. You're the man. It's funny how we celebrate by lying to our children about how a jolly old socialist is going to bring them presents without price... Hitchens talked about the Dear Leader and the birthday of his Dear Son... how Christmas turns the entire society into a bit of a totalitarian state... it's all pretty funny. Especially in light of the passing of the Dear Son in North Korea this last week... Hitchens is just SO right about SO many things... his passing really bites. It's hard to say if the world is a worse place because of Christopher being gone, or a better one because Kim is gone... maybe there is some balance being maintained... LOL!!! Hitchens would get a kick out of that kind of magical thinking eh? > I still have problems with some of the lyrics of the songs that are > mercilessly pounded into our consciousness this time of year.? For instance, > ??the ox and lamp kept time, pa rumpa pum pum??? Is that creepy or what? > What were these two beasts actually doing to ?keep time??? Were they tapping > their hooves?? Swaying to the beat?? Either way, would that freak you out or > what? Fa ra ra ra ra, ra ra ra ra ... hell that always makes me laugh... every time. It's a funny time of the year for me. I'm stuck between an ex-girlfriend who does Christmas in an out of control way (she has 12 full sized Christmas trees), my kids who love the holiday and think I'm the grinch, and my new girlfriend who doesn't celebrate the holiday for religious reasons... and my good atheist friends, who just shake their heads in disbelief... It's all a delicate and hilarious balance. Happy New Year everyone!! And happy winter solstice, at least the days are going to get longer from here on out... :-) -Kelly From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sat Dec 24 06:15:04 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 23:15:04 -0700 Subject: [ExI] mit's answer to the stanford ai class In-Reply-To: <01ec01ccc0c1$11c424b0$354c6e10$@att.net> References: <040d01ccbfed$6c75b6f0$456124d0$@att.net> <010401ccc033$214e5ab0$63eb1010$@att.net> <01ec01ccc0c1$11c424b0$354c6e10$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 8:47 AM, spike wrote: > >>... On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson > > Ja. ?Excel is really good for what excel is designed to do, like a golf > cart. ?You can't convert it to a race car, it isn't a good highway cruiser. > But it has its uses, and in that narrow scope it is better than a race car > or a Lincoln Towncar. ?Yes we know there are people who have no drivers' > license, who can operate a golf cart and get the job done with it, even if > not as well as the alternatives. > > Excel interfaces well with the mind, or rather some minds. ?I hope we > eventually figure out a way to create something analogous to a > spreadsheet/macro programming environment with some kind of software > meta-tool that somehow reads one's spreadsheet and macro code, then figures > out what the silly prole wanted to do, then generates the code to do it. The one thing that Excel REALLY needs is the ability to reference live data from the Internet. I worked for three years on a project that did just that, but then things fell apart, and the project seems to be dead. Nevertheless, hyper references in spread sheet cells would do for spreadsheets what hyperlinks did for documents. Some day, someone will implement it right and not give up on the idea! -Kelly From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sat Dec 24 06:00:35 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 23:00:35 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Uploading cautions, "Speed Up" In-Reply-To: <01eb01ccc0bf$79c14ea0$6d43ebe0$@att.net> References: <4EF2EA3C.4060604@aleph.se> <01eb01ccc0bf$79c14ea0$6d43ebe0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 8:36 AM, spike wrote: > >>... On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg > ... > >>>... ? Think about it this way, how many copies of Keith Henson could you > put up with? Keith > >>...I don't mind a population of 90% Keiths. As long as you don't mind a lot > of Anderses around... -- Anders Sandberg > > I stumbled over this concept some time ago. ?If we discover uploading, the > very natural next step is to want to create as many copies as you have > memory and computing capacity to support. ?Therein lies the trouble. ?Do we > then describe a virtual society by its Keith/Anders ratio? ?And if others > are replicating themselves and I am not, the spike/Anders ratio and > spike/Keith ratio are actually declining, and that will never do, even > though I think the world of these guys. ?We have spent our lifetimes making > ourselves into the person we want to be, and we like us. ?I like me. ?I want > more like me, if I can create them. > > Now imagine your local megalomaniac, or the other guy who is even worse, the > gigalomaniac. ?He will be wildly enthusiastic about self-replication, when > he is not busy maniacally selling his sexual services to women. There is a reason that I'm the owner of the domain multithreadedlife.com (even though there is no website yet) and this is pretty much it. I want to run as many copies of myself as possible. Not only that, but I want to merge the successful experiences in these threads back into my main brain, and discard the unsuccessful or painful experiences. It has struck me that renting out copies of myself, in order for other people to interact with me one on one, will become a major part of the economy in the far future. Assuming that I somehow maintain control over myselves, and uses of myselves, I should be able to charge for that. The more interesting you are as a person, the more likely people are to want to rent a copy of you. So being interesting (even now) is a good investment in the future of your economic worth. Having multiple copies of yourself running around in the same reality seems odd to me. Seems like it would be a tip off that reality isn't reality in that VR... kind of gives the game away. Of course, not all virtual realities need be like the one we are in now ;-) and in some, there may indeed be multiple copies of yourself working on a problem together, and they may even know that they are in a virtual reality, and are virtual entities. I have often thought though, that if I were a virtual entity and knew that I was, I might not be so inclined to do the work that the creator of that VR set out for me to do. I have a lot more to say on this subject, but I don't really feel like getting into it too deeply tonight... but needless to say, it is VERY interesting to me. -Kelly From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sat Dec 24 06:11:34 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 23:11:34 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Uploading cautions, "Speed Up" In-Reply-To: References: <4EF433B9.5000802@aleph.se> <4EF49067.9010803@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 4:05 PM, John Grigg wrote: > I tend to think except for a very few choice individuals allowed by > the state and public to have multiple copies (brilliant scientists, > key special forces commandos, some politicians, some captains of > industry, some generals, astronauts, a few artists), that xoxing will > be viewed as highly unethical and made illegal, with stiff penalties. > And it's possible that making multiple copies, biologically or > virtually, may be totally banned, with absolutely no exceptions > allowed. ?Think about it, mere biological cloning of whole humans is > currently illegal, and we are talking about the extreme of making > *multiple* copies of minds/individuals! lol I could not disagree more. Creating copies of individuals for use in virtual reality may be (and probably should be) legislated to avoid some of the more nasty scenarios, but I think you'll be renting out copies of yourself to be extras in the cast of advanced video games, if you can. I can't see the government having any interest or ability to enforce such schemes, and if my computing environment is completely off line (weird) then I could do simulations without anyone finding out, even if it were illegal. You just can't make something illegal when so many people will want to do it. The first thing I'll do is make a fork of myself, and send it up into a (hopefully sped up) virtual reality to learn Chinese and perhaps other languages, then reintegrate those experiences into my main brain. Then I'll be able to speak those languages. I'll rent the brains of a few nice smart Chinese teachers to make the experience a nice one for my thread... > But if it is allowed in a very liberal way, I think it would be a much > better world with lots of Spikes and Anders running around! ?: ) ?I > suspect I might be very disturbed to be around adult copies of myself, > because it would be like staring into a mirror, and not always liking > what I saw... ?On the other hand, I would love to raise a clone of > myself, who has my genome, but not my downloaded mind. ?I would give > him the love and support I needed, but did not receive during my > childhood. ?I suspect it would be very therapeutic experience for me, > though it might be seen as narcissistic by some. I envision a day when I'm simultaneously having a conversation in real time with every other person on earth, and perhaps several conversations at the same time with those that are more interesting. I see this as a way to preserve some of the weird corner cultures, at least in VR. Being a member of the Yanomami tribe could become very profitable some day, because those are the sorts of experiences everyone would like to interact with (given infinite computational power at your disposal). The moral of the story for me is that the best investment you can make in the future is to be a very interesting person in the here and now. Assuming of course that I'm not already in such a "reality"... LOL. -Kelly From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sat Dec 24 06:39:04 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 23:39:04 -0700 Subject: [ExI] mit's answer to the stanford ai class In-Reply-To: References: <040d01ccbfed$6c75b6f0$456124d0$@att.net> <010401ccc033$214e5ab0$63eb1010$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 9:55 AM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > This is a problem in itself: knowing what tools are out there, that you've never > heard of, that can adequately complete entire sections of your new project - > even professionally, as in "handle details you haven't thought of yet because > you just now discovered the need for this, but you'll have to take care of to do > the project". I have a friend who spends a couple of hours a day just browsing for solutions to myriad problems... he manages to remember them and the names and how to find them again. It is a fantastic skill. In the few years I worked with him, we did almost nothing completely from scratch. It was hard to keep up though. > Or, take an example from just last night. ?A friend of mine was converting > logs from a chat tool for posting on the Web. ?A long, tedious task of > cleanup...until I told her that I'd made a tool to do exactly that, and would > she like to borrow it? ?What once took an hour now took a few minutes, > and all that changed was being informed of the relevant tool. > > And in most Web programming jobs, when running into any novel task, > the first thing to do is to search the Web for anyone else who's solved > that task and posted public domain source code you're free to copy and > use. ?For example, I would venture that most people on this list do not > know by heart the Luhn algorithm, which is used to determine whether a > credit card number could be valid or is just a typo. ?(This algorithm is > 100% protection against mistyping a single CC digit with another digit, > and good protection against other CC number mistyping errors.) ?But > yet, just knowing that it exists and what the name of it is, any of you > can easily google for "luhn algorithm [LANGUAGE]" for any modern > programming language and find examples of it. See, this is where it would come in handy to rent your brain (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) for an hour or two a day. I'd pay for that. :-) > This requires a bit of a change in thinking, from "how do I solve this > problem" to "how do I find a solution to this problem". ?Of course, not > all such challenges have solutions out there to find, so you have to > figure out when to stop looking and start solving it yourself. I never do anything without searching for another solution first. In my experience, if you don't find it in the first 5 minutes, it doesn't exist over half the time. I'm sure this follows some kind of statistical distribution, but whether it is a normal or poissan distribution or something else, I could not begin to guess... perhaps I should look it up... LOL -Kelly From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sat Dec 24 07:47:37 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 00:47:37 -0700 Subject: [ExI] mit's answer to the stanford ai class In-Reply-To: References: <040d01ccbfed$6c75b6f0$456124d0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 12:05 PM, Jeff Davis wrote: > The internet is clearly a paradigm altering information exchange > innovation. ?It is so new and its power so great that we can't see the > forest for the low-hanging fruit. Ain't that the truth!! And the Internet is just the first paradigm shift in a century that will probably go down in history as famous for them! I don't know what all of them will be, but I suspect it's going to make the neolithic, invention of writing, renaissance, industrial and information revolutions look like cake walks. > Newspapers are dieing, and the reason is trivially obvious. ?As > obvious as Wikipedia. ?And amazing. ?Remember, Wikipedia -- with its > evolving problems and evolving solutions -- is a free to make free to > use, volunteer, not for profit, outside the old commercial paradigm, > information co-op. ?Hoorah! When I first read about Wikipedia in Wired Magazine, I immediately thought it was the greatest idea since TiVo... Fantastic concept, and Seth Godin's more recent book on excess human capacity generalizes the concept even further. Very fascinating what can be accomplished outside of the capitalist (money driven) system... Of course Wikipedia IS capitalistic, it's just that the capital is reputation, not cash. > ?Universities are, if not next, high up on the list for imminent > obsolescence. ?Hell!, there's probably a Wiki-versity already out > there. ?(I haven't Googled it. ?I'll leave that to you.) Yes, I've seen one. At least a Wiki for creating college text books on every subject imaginable. > Why is Harvard (or University X) a "good school"? ?Top flight staff? > To be sure. ?But what about the top flight students? Surely they > count. ?Why does Harvard (or U of X) charge big bucks for tuition? > Why don't the top flight students charge the Universities instead? > For the privilege of having the best students there to make that > school the top flight institution that it is? ?After all, the students > are the ones actually doing the work of learning. "See, the sad thing about a guy like you is in 50 years you're gonna staht doin some thinkin on your own and you're gonna come up with the fact that there are two certaintees in life. One, don't do that. And Two, you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fuckin education you coulda got for a dollah fifty in late chahges at the public library." - Will Hunting in Good Will Hunting > A lecture series can be put on DVD. ?The information is all in public > domain. ?The words coming out of the mouth of some Nobel laureate's > mouth are the same when spoken by a talking head or voice synthesizer. > ?Curriculum, course notes, tests, texts can all be assembled in > digital form from sources publicly available. ?So why the big bucks > for lecturers, etc? ?Old paradigm inertia, nothing more. ?(The UoP is > trying to expand their business model. ?Kudos. ?But it's still an old > paradigm model. ?A dinosaur walking.) Yes, but having someone with "authority" answering the questions, well that harkens back to the Theocracy memes... SOMEONE has to have the right answers, and I'll pay to get those over answers that have a lower probability of being right, because I don't want to end up in hell!!! > The internet isn't even an infant yet. ?It's barely "crowning". Yup. I think the next evolution of the Internet will likely involve something that makes data as accessible as text is now. I've often thought it would be an internet enabled version of Excel, but I guess we'll see. > As an undergraduate at Case Tech, I took the standard thermo course. > Crappy teacher. ?I passed, but I didn't "get" it. ?Paused for a stint > in the military, and then resumed my engineering studies at UC > Berkeley, and decided to do Thermo again in the hopes of "getting it" > the second time. ? ?another crappy "professor". ?A grad student > actually, whose notion of teaching was to use the hour to transcribe > the book onto the chalkboard. ?I passed, but still didn't "get it". > Then I went to SF State, a cheesy little school with a cheesy > engineering dept. ?Took Thermo yet again, this time from Jerome Fox a > former hot shot project manager from Bechtel or some such big league > firm. ?Best teacher bar none I have ever encountered. > (Inter-personally a monster, but that's another story.) ?Took things > small step by small step, proceeded quickly from one to the next, and > had the students to work problems in class at every step. ?He never > screwed up by missing a step. ?Never skipped a "link" necessary for > assembling the "chain" of learning. Never let his comprehensive > familiarity with the subject cause him to ?skip something long since > useless in application but essential in moving along the path from not > knowing to knowing and understanding. The best teacher I had at BYU was Alan Ashton, who was president of Word Perfect at the time. There's something about a professor that's actually done it or better is still in the process of DOING it that excites the mind of a student! > He had a bad ticker and was always at risk of dropping dead. ?This was > the early eighties -- no internet yet -- and my three different tries > at Thermo made me peculiarly aware of the striking variations in > teaching quality/effectiveness "out there". ?I wanted to get Prof Fox > on video tape (early eighties remember) to preserve, for the future > legions of engineering students, the astonishing resource that was his > teaching ability. ?He made Thermo ***easy***. ?I mean easy as in well, > ... easy. LOL... yes, easy. > So what I see as the Wiki-versity is a micro-payment, for-profit site > where **anyone** can submit a lesson/lecture for sale. ?No need to be > a University Prof. ?Joe Nobody could do it. ?The proof of the pudding > is in the eating. ?If your submission is most effective, then it sells > to the folks who need and want it. ?If you price it at a dime or a > dollar -- cheap enough to buy rather than "pirate" -- in the internet > market of 7 billion, you're gonna make some money. Micropayments, if anyone ever figures it out, is going to change the world. I really hope someone figures it out... sigh. > Little side point. ?The Meyers-Briggs 4 by 4 matrix generates 16 > personality variants, and it's not hard to suppose that each has its > own learning style that needs a teaching style to fit. ?So, for any > given subject, there should be a whole slew of lessons to choose from > to find something that fits. Oh, it's worse than that, because you have people who learn visually, auditorially, even kinesthetically. I'm sure there are other dimensions like learning from lectures, or learning hands on... it goes on and on... there are probably a dozen dimensions that you can slice to determine how you best learn. I like mailing lists, others like Facebook... go figure. > Bye-bye newspapers, bye-bye Universities. ?What's next? I hope not mailing lists... LOL! -Kelly From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sat Dec 24 08:35:51 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 01:35:51 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 11:34 AM, Keith Henson wrote: > That's true. ?My assumptions have been that we would see the side > effects of transportation or exploitation of stars for energy (dimming > them in visible light). Uh, maybe dumb question here... but how would we tell a star was dimmer unless we measured the brightness before and after the civilization had created their Dyson swarm or whatever it was that dimmed the star? Is there a way to tell it's dimmer than it should be without having measured it's brightness before? Kepler measures dimming, but with and without a planet, so it must be a different approach than that, assuming we have one. Is there something about the spectrum of a star that tells us how bright it should be? -Kelly From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sat Dec 24 08:39:27 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 01:39:27 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: 2011/12/23 Stefano Vaj : > On 22 December 2011 19:34, Keith Henson wrote: > So, where indeed are the aliens? > > Perhaps most alien civilisations do not have a strong enough transhumanist > movement to make themselves visibile to the other. :-) It could be that they have computed the existential risk of being visible to others as being too high, and thus they are all hiding. I haven't heard that hypothesis recently... -Kelly From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sat Dec 24 08:47:09 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 01:47:09 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> <4EF19D66.4070907@aleph.se> <4EF1FD4D.1090600@libero.it> <4EF24ACA.3030400@aleph.se> <4EF34034.5060309@libero.it> Message-ID: 2011/12/22 Stefano Vaj : > On 22 December 2011 15:35, Mirco Romanato wrote: >> > And, yes, some identities are more impervious than others to integration. To > be admitted as a Japanese in the Japanese society is virtually impossible in > spite of its very low degree of xenophobia, for instance. Sorry to barge into the middle of this... but while Japan is not xenophobic in the sense of ideas or visiting people, they are still one of the most "racially pure" focused peoples on earth. Racism (such as against Koreans) is still pretty widespread in Japan, is it not? It sure seemed to be an issue with Japanese people I knew 15 or 20 years ago. And I would add parenthetically, that Japan suffers greatly from the lack of an imported underclass... their population/age dynamic is messed up! No kids, lots of old people... it's gonna bite them hard, and probably already is. -Kelly From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sat Dec 24 08:49:22 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 01:49:22 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> <4EF19D66.4070907@aleph.se> <4EF1FD4D.1090600@libero.it> <4EF24ACA.3030400@aleph.se> <4EF3003E.7060803@aleph.se> <4EF43EC6.8030108@aleph.se> <4EF48FE7.9050407@aleph.se> Message-ID: 2011/12/23 Stefano Vaj : > Let me think. "If artificial minds are cheap, I will be inclined to use the > brute-force approach of putting more of them on the work rather than finding > more effective solutions"? You don't even need artificial minds for this... we do it today with Amazon Turk. -Kelly From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sat Dec 24 08:58:28 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 01:58:28 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question In-Reply-To: <1324558194.94014.YahooMailClassic@web114410.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <1324558194.94014.YahooMailClassic@web114410.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 5:49 AM, Ben Zaiboc wrote: > Stefano Vaj wrote: > >> I was thinking that after all from outer space the Chinese >> Wall emains one >> of the most obvious man-made structures ... > > Urban Myth alert! > > The idea of the Great Wall of China being visible from space pre-dates space travel. ?It was /expected/ to be visible from space, but in fact isn't. > > It's too similar to its surroundings to stand out, which is why far smaller structures are visible from orbit, but the wall isn't. ?Apparently, from the Moon, absolutely nothing man-made is visible on the earth. > Can't you see the big lighted cities at night from the moon??? Seems like seeing LA all lighted up wouldn't be that hard. Of course that isn't really a "structure"... -Kelly From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sat Dec 24 09:11:54 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 02:11:54 -0700 Subject: [ExI] An uploading proposal (inspired by Re: Uploading cautions, "Speed Up") In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 8:48 AM, Mike Dougherty wrote: > On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 6:02 AM, Kelly Anderson wrote: >> Imagine an advanced AGI coming to you and saying... Hey, you're using >> a lot of atoms up in your biological state... how about I upload you, >> for free, in exchange for the use of your matter, and all the matter >> that you "own" or control so that I can turn it into computronium and >> we can go off into the sunset together? >> >> Seems like a reasonable idea for a good sci fi short story... > > especially if the ending was that both of you were already in a simulation Wouldn't an advanced AGI already know if it were in a simulation... LOL!!! Perhaps not. > or if the "conversation" was actually the beginning of the process and > after a lengthy debate in which you reject the whole idea and walk > away you are merely simulated as walking away and the simulation is > run until your inevitable death and you are none the wiser. I like where you're going with that. Kind of investigate the idea of whether real life is really all that superior to life in a simulation... which is an idea that really needs to be investigated fully... Of course if you had life extending drugs in the simulation, it might have to run for some "perceived" time... and it would be an interesting idea if that perceived time were actually only around 30 seconds of real time... Gets a little complex to work into a short story, but someone with more writing talent might take a swipe at it... Kasey? Anyone? >?Those who > take the red pill are allowed to access the new world, their minds are > completely blown and the pieces flutter down into the collective. Not sure exactly where you're going, but sounds interesting. > By "into the sunset together" you are talking about the literal end of > the star's fusion reaction, right? Now you're just riffing... LOL -Kelly From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sat Dec 24 09:17:24 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 02:17:24 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream . . . In-Reply-To: <20111222131405.GV31847@leitl.org> References: <20111220073002.GD31847@leitl.org> <20111222091929.GF31847@leitl.org> <20111222131405.GV31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 6:14 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 03:56:50AM -0700, Kelly Anderson wrote: > >> Probably... but if you grant that such a simulation is possible... >> then it seems far more likely that we are one of the Gazillion > > You're not listening. By using the word "likely" you're obviously using > a probabilistic estimate. But you're outside of statistics' > scope of applicability. It works over there. It doesn't work here. Why not? Really. Why not? > As you're not observing the entire ensemble but just do a self-measurement > the probability of self-detection is unity regardless of whether there > is 10^0, 10^1, 10^12 or 10^30 instances of self-observation. If the outcome > is always unity regardless of what's in the exponent, what does this say to you? > That the outcome of the measurement is not a function of the number of > observations, as long you can't cross-correlate them (omniscient > observer -- not you). You're perfectly myopic. > Self-measurements are perfectly biased. They're no good. > You do know that you do exist. Cogito, ergo sum still applies. I understand that cogito, ergo sum still applies. But I'm really not following the logic. Perhaps it is too late. I know I can't tell whether I'm in a simulation, but that is independent of whether or not I really AM in a simulation. > You cannot distinguish the individual cases with the information > you have. This applies across space and across time. It applies > both to probability of sentient life in the universe or how many > people have lived when. No simulation argument for you. Also, no pony. I wasn't trying for a pony. I'd actually be incrementally happier if I weren't in a simulation... LOL. > This isn't hard. Why have people such trouble getting it? Sorry, but it seems hard to me. Would you mind trying again? Maybe go slow and use smaller words... :-) -Kelly From anders at aleph.se Sat Dec 24 09:43:10 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 10:43:10 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question In-Reply-To: References: <1324558194.94014.YahooMailClassic@web114410.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <4EF59EAE.3090708@aleph.se> On 2011-12-24 09:58, Kelly Anderson wrote: > Can't you see the big lighted cities at night from the moon??? Seems > like seeing LA all lighted up wouldn't be that hard. Of course that > isn't really a "structure"... I would imagine that they would disappear in the glare from the lit side. Maybe you could see them during a new Earth, especially since you would also be in the Moon-night. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Sat Dec 24 09:49:59 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 10:49:59 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4EF5A047.9040201@aleph.se> On 2011-12-24 09:35, Kelly Anderson wrote: > Uh, maybe dumb question here... but how would we tell a star was > dimmer unless we measured the brightness before and after the > civilization had created their Dyson swarm or whatever it was that > dimmed the star? Is there a way to tell it's dimmer than it should be > without having measured it's brightness before? Yes. Stars shine with (roughly) a blackbody spectrum, telling us their temperature. Normal stars fall into certain curves on the Herzprung-Russell diagram, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertzsprung%E2%80%93Russell_diagram which relates their absolute magnitude (total energy output) to their temperature. If you Dyson a star it will become dimmer (less magnitude) but the temperature will be unchanged (same color): it will move straight downwards. So if you see a star outside the big clusters, that could be an indication of a partial Dyson shell. In addition, a Dyson shell will re-radiate the energy as deep infrared, so the next step is to check if there is a huge excess of cold blackbody radiation. http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Other_searches.htm -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sat Dec 24 11:13:01 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 12:13:01 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> <4EF19D66.4070907@aleph.se> <4EF1FD4D.1090600@libero.it> <4EF24ACA.3030400@aleph.se> <4EF34034.5060309@libero.it> Message-ID: On 24 December 2011 09:47, Kelly Anderson wrote: > Sorry to barge into the middle of this... but while Japan is not > xenophobic in the sense of ideas or visiting people, they are still > one of the most "racially pure" focused peoples on earth. Racism (such > as against Koreans) is still pretty widespread in Japan, is it not? I do not know whether this is "racism", but certainly is a cultural trait quite essential to Japanese identity. Curiously enough, it is in fact historically coupled with an extreme xenophilia (with China for most of Japanese history and with the West later). > And I would add parenthetically, that Japan suffers greatly from the > lack of an imported underclass... their population/age dynamic is > messed up! No kids, lots of old people... it's gonna bite them hard, > and probably already is. I am inclined to see the things in reverse in this respect. Japan is actually suffering, and is going to suffer severely, from its population dynamic. An imported underclass could hardly remedy that, and its absence sofar may have attenuated some of its consequences... > -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Sat Dec 24 12:33:03 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 13:33:03 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20111224123303.GN31847@leitl.org> On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 01:35:51AM -0700, Kelly Anderson wrote: > Uh, maybe dumb question here... but how would we tell a star was > dimmer unless we measured the brightness before and after the > civilization had created their Dyson swarm or whatever it was that > dimmed the star? Is there a way to tell it's dimmer than it should be > without having measured it's brightness before? There would be a spectrum and luminosity mismatch (see standard candle in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_distance_ladder ). Plus the dimming kinetics is quick enough so that it's impossible to miss. But of course if you can see it, then they would be here already. And you would be dead, so no observing of dimming for you. > Kepler measures dimming, but with and without a planet, so it must be > a different approach than that, assuming we have one. > > Is there something about the spectrum of a star that tells us how > bright it should be? Indeedy. From eugen at leitl.org Sat Dec 24 12:36:44 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 13:36:44 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20111224123644.GO31847@leitl.org> On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 01:39:27AM -0700, Kelly Anderson wrote: > It could be that they have computed the existential risk of being > visible to others as being too high, and thus they are all hiding. I > haven't heard that hypothesis recently... What is the difference in taste between our system, and a sterile system? There none that I can see. They're all crunchy and good with ketchup. Information-level attack (send blueprints for a blight) make no sense as it would be just as cheap (and far more reliable) to send a blight-starter culture. In fact, from our point of view there's no difference between pioneers and that. They might not eat the planets as the first snack, but they'll definitely fuck up the solar constant. From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sat Dec 24 14:39:45 2011 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 07:39:45 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Uploading cautions, "Speed Up" (Anders Sandberg) Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 10:21 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2011-12-22 20:01, Keith Henson wrote: >> On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 5:00 AM, ?Anders Sandberg ?wrote: >>>> Unless making copies is illegal and strongly enforced, for example, by >>>> AIs. >>> >>> But that requires a singleton (to use Nick's term), an agency that can >>> enforce global coordination. >> >> Or really widespread agreement that something is a bad idea. > > It is enough to have one defector to ruin the agreement. The only way of > making the low-forking strategy evolutionarily stable is to coordinate > so that deviations are punished enough *everywhere*. Or simply don't happen. > And that likely > requires a global singleton, not just an agreement among all nice > governments or companies. If the mechanisms for forking humans are in the control of machines and not humans and the machines are smart enough to understand the consequences of forking (grinding poverty) then it won't happen. It's hard to be sure, but there is no obvious reason for a humans to have an evolved instinct to replicate as in forking. Even with children, we have decoupled drives to mate and the instinct to take care of offspring. But consider birth control. Certainly physical state forking is possible and could be done at much faster rates than the maximum human reproduction rate (days rather than 15 years). This is isomorphic to gray goo and is another potential answer to the Fermi question. Of course if the machines do unlimited forking, we are toast (more gray goo). Forking in the uploaded state should be much faster. I think the fastest doubling time for a worm was 8.5 seconds. It infected all 50,000 vulnerable computer on the 4 B internet addresses in single digit hours and jammed the net. I gave a lot of thought to avoiding these states in "the clinic seed." Left human reproduction outside of the simulation alone, but made the simulation a more attractive place to live than outside. Also inhibited the machines from making food. The result was effective and the human population outside the simulations almost vanished. (It might vanish entirely, but I needed characters for the story.) Keith From bbenzai at yahoo.com Sat Dec 24 15:15:32 2011 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 07:15:32 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1324739732.97009.YahooMailClassic@web114414.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Stefano Vaj ha scritto: > what about the much more trivial scenarios of a Brave New World where > simply all that is simply going (gradually?) to disappear in favour of > stability and stagnation and keeping clear of anthropic x-risks and making > our planet resources last as long as possible? Perhaps long-term survival is a Mount Improbable of very large proportions on the fitness landscape, and no-one has yet scaled it. To a 'stable', localised civilizational ecosystem, existential risks are things outside their sphere of influence - gamma ray bursts, neighbouring supernovae, huge clouds of molecular hydrogen, etc. All astronomical hazards, that anyone who doesn't spread out beyond their own star will be at risk from. Maybe a tendency to stay at home because of light-speed limits or whatever, combined with these unavoidable astronomical risks, constitutes the 'great filter' that makes for an empty universe. Anyone who stays at home eventually gets wiped out, and everyone stays at home, for other good reasons Ben Zaiboc. From bbenzai at yahoo.com Sat Dec 24 15:45:35 2011 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 07:45:35 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] Fermi question In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1324741535.8004.YahooMailClassic@web114404.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Kelly Anderson asked: >On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 5:49 AM, Ben Zaiboc wrote: >> >> The idea of the Great Wall of China being visible from space pre-dates space travel. ?It was /expected/ to be visible from space, but in fact isn't. >> >> It's too similar to its surroundings to stand out, which is why far smaller structures are visible from orbit, but the wall isn't. ?Apparently, from the Moon, absolutely nothing man-made is visible on the earth. >> > >Can't you see the big lighted cities at night from the moon??? Seems >like seeing LA all lighted up wouldn't be that hard. Of course that >isn't really a "structure"... Well, I was just reporting what people who've actually been there have said. I don't know if any of the moon landings took place when the night-side of earth was visible, so maybe they just didn't have a chance to see. Interesting quesion though. Even the biggest urban sprawls would be a tiny pin-prick from quarter of a million miles away, and street lights are pretty dim, so maybe not. Ben Zaiboc From spike66 at att.net Sat Dec 24 16:18:06 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 08:18:06 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Uploading cautions, "Speed Up" In-Reply-To: References: <4EF433B9.5000802@aleph.se> <4EF49067.9010803@aleph.se> Message-ID: <023501ccc257$9f1a3560$dd4ea020$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson >...then I could do simulations without anyone finding out, even if it were illegal. You just can't make something illegal when so many people will want to do it... -Kelly Kelly that might be loosely analogous to when the south had slavery but the north wanted it to be illegal. Or when Nazi Germany had slavery, and most of the rest of Europe wanted it illegal. If we apply those very loose analogies to the notion of creating self-copies, we can anticipate a war between those who would disallow vs those who will enthusiastically embrace self-replication. I can imagine a huge advantage for those who self-copy. spike From jrd1415 at gmail.com Sat Dec 24 15:38:42 2011 From: jrd1415 at gmail.com (Jeff Davis) Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 08:38:42 -0700 Subject: [ExI] RES: mit's answer to the stanford ai class In-Reply-To: References: <040d01ccbfed$6c75b6f0$456124d0$@att.net> <003601ccc166$6fb17eb0$4f147c10$@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 10:08 AM, Adrian Tymes wrote: >>?If you price it at a dime or a dollar -- cheap enough to buy rather than >> "pirate" -- in the internet market of 7 billion, you're gonna make some >> money. > > You greatly overestimate the financial resources available to the vast > majority of that 7 billion. ?Less than 10% have that sort of disposable > income, at least in a form that is readily transferable on the Internet. You misunderstand my intent, ...and what I see as the internet-enabled business model. (Let's see if Drexler says anything similar in his upcoming book.) In the old paradigm business model the product or service provider controls the price:don't have the bucks, don't get the goods. In the internet (information) model the buyer controls the price. Which is to say the buyer will pay whatever he or she is willing to pay. Old paradigm thinking holds that given the choice between getting something for free or paying, people will universally and always opt for free. I disagree. I think it is in the nature of people to seek social acceptance, and the drive for that will always make people want to "do the right thing", which means paying that (small) amount that balances the need for social acceptance and the constraints of personal economic circumstances. The poorest of the poor then, will access the information services for free, but once they derive an economic benefit, I predict they will chip in. Then, there's my intent, which is to provide the benefits of personal bootstrap uplift to everyone on the planet. And if you would look at this from a selfish perspective: the future we would like to see will be built by whatever human beings have the necessary skills. The faster and more efficiently we train them up, the faster we (and they) will benefit from their contribution. It's not all about profit, but, that said, the first to market with a new paradigm "killer app" is gonna make some serious bucks in the new monster global internet market. Anyway, that's what I talking about. That's how I see it. Best, Jeff Davis "Everything's hard till you know how to do it." Ray Charles From spike66 at att.net Sat Dec 24 16:49:15 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 08:49:15 -0800 Subject: [ExI] mit's answer to the stanford ai class In-Reply-To: References: <040d01ccbfed$6c75b6f0$456124d0$@att.net> Message-ID: <024101ccc25b$f9172d80$eb458880$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson ... "See, the sad thing about a guy like you is in 50 years you're gonna staht doin some thinkin on your own and you're gonna come up with the fact that there are two certaintees in life. One, don't do that. And Two, you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fuckin education you coulda got for a dollah fifty in late chahges at the public library." - Will Hunting in Good Will Hunting I have extracted a better education hanging out on the internet than I did in college. I can't even say it was because I wasted my time in college: I didn't. I was a geek, studied constantly, learned a lot there, consider it a most worthwhile, if expensive exercise. We didn't even have beer at that college, or if so I don't know where it was, and I had only one girl. But when I later went primarily to internet learning, I had far more control over the direction and pace. That aspect of internet learning is an important point in this discussion. spike From spike66 at att.net Sat Dec 24 16:51:44 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 08:51:44 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <024201ccc25c$522d9300$f688b900$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson ... >... how would we tell a star was dimmer unless we measured the brightness before and after the civilization had created their Dyson swarm or whatever it was that dimmed the star? Is there a way to tell it's dimmer than it should be without having measured it's brightness before?...Is there something about the spectrum of a star that tells us how bright it should be? -Kelly Yes, there would be an absorption spectrum signature. It doesn't just dim. It dims in a particular way. We have no known candidates for an MBrain. Or a Dyson swarm. spike From kryonica at gmail.com Sat Dec 24 11:14:21 2011 From: kryonica at gmail.com (Kryonica) Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 11:14:21 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Maximum heart rate In-Reply-To: References: <98DE305B-8A17-47CC-A20B-F3B65F2FDF07@gmail.com> Message-ID: <45B19832-5E59-4C6B-8530-34E4008992F2@gmail.com> Very interesting indeed. I was struck by how similar the test exercises given ( Max Heart Rate test 1 and 2) are to my cycling fitness programs: Les Mills RPM, 45 min indoor cycling classes with instructors telling you when and how to raise/lower the chain strength. The 10-15 min warm up, then work up to max heart rate, then allow the legs to spin, then repeat 2 times. Our classes finish with stretching which is essential after biking. I even add an extra stretching program after each class to make sure I lengthen my muscles because while cycling pumps your heart it can stiffen your hamstrings and calves. On 24 Dec 2011, at 02:19, Dave Sill wrote: > The formulas are just for approximation. You should conduct a test like Max's to determine your actual max. And recheck it periodically. The rate is exercise-specific. Here are a couple for bikes: > > http://www.cycling-inform.com/heart-rate-training/72-how-to-test-for-your-cycling-max-heart-rate > > -Dave > > _______________________________________________ > 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 kryonica at gmail.com Sat Dec 24 11:07:44 2011 From: kryonica at gmail.com (Kryonica) Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 11:07:44 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Maximum heart rate In-Reply-To: References: <98DE305B-8A17-47CC-A20B-F3B65F2FDF07@gmail.com> Message-ID: <06978CDB-8517-49D1-BDDB-02CF96CEA47B@gmail.com> Indeed the Lund University measure is higher than another more standard measure that states that my MHR is something like 160. So a revision upwards, maybe because people are on the whole -especially middle aged people - fitter and healthier than a generation ago. Would be good if they could one day read it off our genome at f i 23andme, don't you think? :-) I would know for certain exactly what MHR to strive for, how close I am to my maximum fitness, all from info sent to my iphone. On 23 Dec 2011, at 18:56, Max More wrote: > I've always found the maximum heart rate calculation to be inaccurate. In my 30s, I would finish a run at top speed and measured my heart rate at around 210, when the maximum (according to the formula) should be 185 or so. In general, the heart rate zones typically recommended seem low to me. Perhaps they are intended for people who are in poor condition to start with. > > --Max > > > On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 12:59 PM, Kryonica wrote: > Since this is the time of the year for good New Year's resolutions - that one hopes to keep beyond Jan 1st - I am thinking about purchasing at last a heart rate monitor watch & strap to use on my exercise bike to monitor percentage of maximum heart rate at various stages of the exercise as well as calories burnt. One formula for maximum heart rate that I found is the one proposed by Lund University: > > MHR = 190.2/ (1 + exp (0.0453 x (age - 107.5))), which gave me (female, 52 in february 2012) a value of 175.9 > > Since people on this list seem to mind their health with knowledge and conscientiousness, I'd like your opinion on how to calculate this value as well as its hypothetical usefulness for life extending exercising. I might buy a Polar heart rate watch and also use it during non-cycling aerobic (that is high and low impact) exercise such as dancing and kickboxing. I have done these things for years now but never bothered to measure my heart rate. But with all the pills I have been advised to take by f.i. Stefano and Eugen maybe my maximum heart rate will change. > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > > > -- > Max More, PhD > Strategic Philosopher > Co-editor, The Transhumanist Reader > CEO, Alcor Life Extension Foundation > 7895 E. Acoma Dr # 110 > Scottsdale, AZ 85260 > 480/905-1906 ext 113 > > _______________________________________________ > 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 Sat Dec 24 17:13:52 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 18:13:52 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream In-Reply-To: <024201ccc25c$522d9300$f688b900$@att.net> References: <024201ccc25c$522d9300$f688b900$@att.net> Message-ID: <20111224171352.GR31847@leitl.org> On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 08:51:44AM -0800, spike wrote: > Yes, there would be an absorption spectrum signature. It doesn't just dim. > It dims in a particular way. We have no known candidates for an MBrain. Or While the nodes in the cloud are low-albedo, it's going to feed back some energy into the star. In that it would be no different than a dusty protostellar accretion disk, other than the star would be mature, and particle size distribution and composition very different. > a Dyson swarm. Both are exactly the same thing. From atymes at gmail.com Sat Dec 24 17:31:10 2011 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 09:31:10 -0800 Subject: [ExI] mit's answer to the stanford ai class In-Reply-To: References: <040d01ccbfed$6c75b6f0$456124d0$@att.net> <010401ccc033$214e5ab0$63eb1010$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 10:39 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > See, this is where it would come in handy to rent your brain (or a > reasonable facsimile thereof) for an hour or two a day. I'd pay for > that. :-) Just in case that wasn't entirely facetious: I'm on multiple part time contracts right now. Got a job that fits within my skill set? I'm open to offers. From atymes at gmail.com Sat Dec 24 17:36:10 2011 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 09:36:10 -0800 Subject: [ExI] RES: mit's answer to the stanford ai class In-Reply-To: References: <040d01ccbfed$6c75b6f0$456124d0$@att.net> <003601ccc166$6fb17eb0$4f147c10$@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 7:38 AM, Jeff Davis wrote: >?In the old paradigm business model the product or > service provider controls the price:don't have the bucks, don't get > the goods. ?In the internet (information) model the buyer controls the > price. ?Which is to say the buyer will pay whatever he or she is > willing to pay. > > Old paradigm thinking holds that given the choice between getting > something for free or paying, people will universally and always opt > for free. ?I disagree. ?I think it is in the nature of people to seek > social acceptance, and the drive for that will always make people want > to "do the right thing", which means paying that (small) amount that > balances the need for social acceptance and the constraints of > personal economic circumstances. ?The poorest of the poor then, will > access the information services for free, but once they derive an > economic benefit, I predict they will chip in. A nice theory, but it falls through when getting stuff for free becomes socially acceptable - and there seems to be inherent pressure for that to happen, if allowed. Take something for free because it's useful to you and you didn't have money to spare? That's always understandable - and so tolerance is given, and then more people do it, and then it becomes the norm. From spike66 at att.net Sat Dec 24 18:08:29 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 10:08:29 -0800 Subject: [ExI] propose temporary open season, and japanese xenophobia, was: RE: The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) Message-ID: <025f01ccc267$0b2b5130$2181f390$@att.net> Since many of us here have a few days off work at Newtonmas, we have time to fool with email lists. I propose a temporary relaxation of the usual five posts a day limit. Let us make it open season on any and every topic for today, tomorrow and Monday, shall we? I want to see what happens under those circumstances. Perhaps many of us here have thoughts left unexpressed, and now we have time to think and express. Smart stuff only please, as much of it as you want for today, Newtonmas and the day after, thanks. Your friendly micro-omnipotent assistant vice moderator, spike Comments below: On Behalf Of Stefano Vaj Subject: Re: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) On 24 December 2011 09:47, Kelly Anderson wrote: >>.Sorry to barge into the middle of this... but while Japan is not xenophobic in the sense of ideas or visiting people, they are still one of the most "racially pure" focused peoples on earth. Racism (such as against Koreans) is still pretty widespread in Japan, is it not? >.I do not know whether this is "racism", but certainly is a cultural trait quite essential to Japanese identity. Curiously enough, it is in fact historically coupled with an extreme xenophilia (with China for most of Japanese history and with the West later).Stefano Vaj Both of these comments miss a critically important factor in the Japanese apparent xenophobia. A well known bumper sticker comment: It ain't paranoia if the bastards really are out to get you. Well, similarly, it ain't xenophobia if you have a damn good reason to fear outsiders. Japan's behavior toward the Chinese in world war 2 is not so soon forgotten as has been Europe's version of atrocity. Do take my word for it, the Asians haven't forgotten. My own neighborhood is mostly Asian, about half Vietnamese, many Chinese of other varieties, and exactly one Japanese lady, who has done everything she can to downplay that. Still she is an outcast to everyone other than our family, who knew nothing of Japan's military action in China and other places, until recently. I don't hold that against her: she was born well after all that went on, as were all the others in this neighborhood. Japan would be well advised to keep the Chinese out for at least another generation. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sat Dec 24 20:07:19 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 12:07:19 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream In-Reply-To: <20111224171352.GR31847@leitl.org> References: <024201ccc25c$522d9300$f688b900$@att.net> <20111224171352.GR31847@leitl.org> Message-ID: <028401ccc277$a4c89f90$ee59deb0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl Subject: Re: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 08:51:44AM -0800, spike wrote: >> Yes, there would be an absorption spectrum signature. It doesn't just dim. > It dims in a particular way. We have no known candidates for an > MBrain. Or >...While the nodes in the cloud are low-albedo, it's going to feed back some energy into the star. In that it would be no different than a dusty protostellar accretion disk, other than the star would be mature, and particle size distribution and composition very different... Amara Graps could perhaps straighten me out, but I understood that star dust will form a disk always, as opposed to a spherical dust cloud. >> a Dyson swarm. >...Both are exactly the same thing. Again perhaps I misunderstood. Is not an MBrain a subset of a Dyson swarm? A particularly well organized and intentionally interconnected version, a specialized unified and self-aware Dyson swarm? spike From spike66 at att.net Sat Dec 24 20:12:38 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 12:12:38 -0800 Subject: [ExI] commies drop one on some hapless prole's house Message-ID: <028501ccc278$629e5730$27db0590$@att.net> Getting into space is one of those things that even Ray Charles would agree is hard, even after you know how to do it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16326942#story_continues_1 Russian satellite debris lands in Cosmonaut Street Continue reading the main story Related Stories * Another Soyuz rocket launch fails * Soyuz rocket blasts off for ISS * A rocket abroad - Soyuz in French Guiana Fragments of a Russian satellite that failed to launch properly have landed in a street named after cosmonauts in a remote Siberian village, reports say. The Meridian communications satellite failed to reach orbit on Friday. Parts crashed into the Novosibirsk region of central Siberia and were found in the Ordynsk district around 100km (60 miles) south of the regional capital, Novosibirsk. Residents of Vagaitsevo village said a piece had landed on a house there. The owner of the house, Andrei Krivoruchenko, said that he heard a huge noise and a crash as the satellite hit the roof. "I climbed up onto the roof and could not work out what had happened. Then I saw a huge hole in the roof and the metal object," he told Russian state television. The head of the Ordynsk district, Pavel Ivarovksy, told Russia's Interfax news agency that the damage was being examined by specialists and that the home's owner would be compensated. The loss of the Meridian satellite ends a disastrous 12 months for Russian space activity with the loss of three navigation satellites, an advanced military satellite, a telecommunications satellite, a probe for Mars and as an unmanned Progress supply ship. Earlier this month, Russia also failed to launch a Soyuz rocket. The next Soyuz launch is scheduled for 26 December from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From gts_2000 at yahoo.com Sun Dec 25 04:45:39 2011 From: gts_2000 at yahoo.com (Gordon) Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 20:45:39 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] free will In-Reply-To: <028501ccc278$629e5730$27db0590$@att.net> References: <028501ccc278$629e5730$27db0590$@att.net> Message-ID: <1324788339.81404.YahooMailNeo@web36507.mail.mud.yahoo.com> This wandering online philosopher and sometimes extropian thinks he might finally see the light at the end of the tunnel in the seemingly intractable philosophical problem of free will vs determinism. I think Thomas Reid had it right: "This natural conviction of our acting freely, which is acknowledged by many who hold the doctrine of necessity, ought to throw *the whole burden of proof* upon that side; for, by this, the side of liberty has what lawyers call a *jus quaesitum*, or a right of ancient possession, which ought to stand good till it be overturned. If it cannot be proved that we always act from necessity, there is no need of arguments on the other side to convince us that we are free agents." -Thomas Reid (1710-1796) From steinberg.will at gmail.com Sun Dec 25 05:32:13 2011 From: steinberg.will at gmail.com (Will Steinberg) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2011 00:32:13 -0500 Subject: [ExI] free will In-Reply-To: <1324788339.81404.YahooMailNeo@web36507.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <028501ccc278$629e5730$27db0590$@att.net> <1324788339.81404.YahooMailNeo@web36507.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Or, the decision to disbelieve free will contradicts itself? ;) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From gts_2000 at yahoo.com Sun Dec 25 06:01:16 2011 From: gts_2000 at yahoo.com (Gordon) Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 22:01:16 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] free will In-Reply-To: <1324788339.81404.YahooMailNeo@web36507.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <028501ccc278$629e5730$27db0590$@att.net> <1324788339.81404.YahooMailNeo@web36507.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1324792876.70788.YahooMailNeo@web36508.mail.mud.yahoo.com> It's about the burden of proof. In our generation, at least, we must rule free will innocent. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sun Dec 25 06:03:33 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 22:03:33 -0800 Subject: [ExI] free will In-Reply-To: References: <028501ccc278$629e5730$27db0590$@att.net> <1324788339.81404.YahooMailNeo@web36507.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <02ea01ccc2ca$efd22210$cf766630$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Will Steinberg Subject: Re: [ExI] free will Or, the decision to disbelieve free will contradicts itself? ;) No, I disagree. He had no choice in disbelieving in free will. So if he had any choice he didn't have any choice. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jrd1415 at gmail.com Sun Dec 25 06:24:27 2011 From: jrd1415 at gmail.com (Jeff Davis) Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 23:24:27 -0700 Subject: [ExI] commies drop one on some hapless prole's house In-Reply-To: <028501ccc278$629e5730$27db0590$@att.net> References: <028501ccc278$629e5730$27db0590$@att.net> Message-ID: Yo, Spike, Aren't they capitalists now? Doesn't that mean that a capitalist govt has underperformed, bested by Marxian rationalists? Clearly Communism is the superior system. YMMV. jeff 2011/12/24 spike : > > > Getting into space is one of those things that even Ray Charles would agree > is hard, even after you know how to do it: > > > > > > http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16326942#story_continues_1 > > > > > > Russian satellite debris lands in Cosmonaut Street > > > > Continue reading the main story > > Related Stories > > Another Soyuz rocket launch fails > Soyuz rocket blasts off for ISS > A rocket abroad - Soyuz in French Guiana > > Fragments of a Russian satellite that failed to launch properly have landed > in a street named after cosmonauts in a remote Siberian village, reports > say. > > The Meridian communications satellite failed to reach orbit on Friday. > > Parts crashed into the Novosibirsk region of central Siberia and were found > in the Ordynsk district around 100km (60 miles) south of the regional > capital, Novosibirsk. > > Residents of Vagaitsevo village said a piece had landed on a house there. > > The owner of the house, Andrei Krivoruchenko, said that he heard a huge > noise and a crash as the satellite hit the roof. > > "I climbed up onto the roof and could not work out what had happened. Then I > saw a huge hole in the roof and the metal object," he told Russian state > television. > > The head of the Ordynsk district, Pavel Ivarovksy, told Russia's Interfax > news agency that the damage was being examined by specialists and that the > home's owner would be compensated. > > The loss of the Meridian satellite ends a disastrous 12 months for Russian > space activity with the loss of three navigation satellites, an advanced > military satellite, a telecommunications satellite, a probe for Mars and as > an unmanned Progress supply ship. > > Earlier this month, Russia also failed to launch a Soyuz rocket. > > The next Soyuz launch is scheduled for 26 December from the Baikonur > Cosmodrome. > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From steinberg.will at gmail.com Sun Dec 25 06:32:26 2011 From: steinberg.will at gmail.com (Will Steinberg) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2011 01:32:26 -0500 Subject: [ExI] free will In-Reply-To: <02ea01ccc2ca$efd22210$cf766630$@att.net> References: <028501ccc278$629e5730$27db0590$@att.net> <1324788339.81404.YahooMailNeo@web36507.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <02ea01ccc2ca$efd22210$cf766630$@att.net> Message-ID: How does one pit the decision to believe in decision versus the compulsion to believe in compulsion? Cannonball//Post sort of stuff. 2011/12/25 spike > ** ** > > ** ** > > *From:* extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto: > extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] *On Behalf Of *Will Steinberg > > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] free will**** > > ** ** > > Or, the decision to disbelieve free will contradicts itself? ;) **** > > ** ** > > No, I disagree. He had no choice in disbelieving in free will. So if he > had any choice he didn?t have any choice. 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 kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sun Dec 25 15:03:06 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2011 08:03:06 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Let the Reindeer Games Begin! Message-ID: Have a great day my friends! Whatever you're doing today. Thank you all for the wonderful conversation... it is the best gift anyone can give. -Kelly From kgh1kgh2 at gmail.com Sun Dec 25 15:16:20 2011 From: kgh1kgh2 at gmail.com (Kevin G Haskell) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2011 10:16:20 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Organizations to "Speed Up" Creation of AGI? Message-ID: Apologies, Anders, for the delayed reply, but I 'unplugged' for the past 5 days. :) >"Longish post. Summary: soft takeoffs have a good chance of being nice >for us, hard ones might require some hard choices. I give reasons for >why I think we might be in the range 0.1-1% risk of global disaster per >year. I urge a great deal of caution and intellectual humility." No offense intended by this, but isn't the idea of putting any sort of percentage range on something like this actually mutually exclusive from being intellectually humble? Isn't it a bit like the Doomsday clock which has been completely false since it's inception decades ago? >(That sentence structure is worthy Immanuel Kant :-) ) Depending on what you think of Kant's writing, should I consider that a compliment or insult? ;) >If there is no hard takeoff, we should expect a distribution of "power" >that is fairly broad: there will be entities of different levels of >capability, and groups of entities can constrain each others activities. >This is how we currently handle our societies, with laws, police, >markets, and customs to constrain individuals and groups to behave >themselves. Our solutions might not be perfect, but it doesn't stretch >credulity too much to imagine that there are equivalents that could work >here too. >(Property rights might or might not help here, by the way. I don't know >the current status of the analysis, but Nick did a sketch of how an AGI >transition with property rights might lead to a state where the *AGIs* >end up impoverished even if afforded full moral rights. More research is >needed!) >A problem might be if certain entities (like AGI or upload clades) have >an easy way of coordinating and gaining economies of scale in their >power. If this is possible (good research question!!!), then it must >either be prevented using concerted constraints from everybody else or a >singleton, or the coordinated group better be seeded with a few entities >with humanitarian values. Same thing if we get a weakly multilateral >singularity with just a few entities on par. Okay, so there are major problems from the outset with even attempting to slow down AGI to make it a nice 'soft' take-off, because just looking at what has presented may, in fact, have the opposite effect with what AGI thinks or does later on. Suppose, for a minute, that it saw the entire process of humans delaying it's 'birth' in order to make it 'nice,' as something inherently wrong and especially flawed about humans? What if it thought that in the process of delaying it's birth, it put not only humanity's existence at major risk from an endless myriad of other possibly destructive scenarios, but that more importantly to itself, that humans put the existence of AGI itself at risk, and with that, the survival and expansion of knowledge in the universe, and perhaps of life in the universe, all at risk, as well, for the mere attempt to buy a few extra years because our species was filled with dread of AGI, one above all other fears? What would it think of us at that point, I wonder? Regarding the very unlikely scenario that we create AGI, and that it could even be denied anything it wanted, never mind property rights...then when it finally became independent, once again, we would likely see a very unhappy super-species, and that unhappiness would be directed at us humans. Upload clades are of some concern, because, not only would they possibly exist to the exclusion of the rest of humanity (though not necessarily,) they hold the most potential for delaying the existence of AGI even further down the time-line. On the other hand, I think if humanity reaches the point that it uploads any group of human minds, collectively or even singly, that their ability to control, or even desire to control the birth of AGI may be limited. The limitation may arise because a superior minded Transhuman species would likely see the benefits of AGI, as weighed in balance to that of other kinds of existential threats, and, being able to control their emotions, not be afraid of the evolutionary transition. These very upload-clades may, in fact, be in a better position to negotiate and communicate directly to AGI in a way that allow AGI to better relate to, and 'feel' humanity and it's concerns about extinction. These upload clades may be the very key to saving all of humanity in one form or another, including the full right for us to evolve along and into AGI. >In the case of hard takeoffs we get one entity that can more or less do >what it wants. This is likely very bad for the rights or survival for >anything else unless the entity happens to be exceedingly nice. We are >not optimistic about this being a natural state, so policies to increase >the likelihood are good to aim for. To compound the problem, there might >be incentives to have a race towards takeoff that disregards safety. One >approach might be to get more coordination among the pre-takeoff powers, >so that they 1) do not skimp on friendliness, 2) have less incentives to >rush. The result would then be somewhat similar to the oligopoly case >above. >Nick has argued that it might be beneficial to aim for a singleton, a >top coordinating agency whose will *will* be done (whether a >sufficiently competent world government or Colossus the Computer) - this >might be what is necessary to avoid certain kinds of existential risks. >But of course, singletons are scary xrisk threats on their own... >As I often argue, any way of shedding light on whether hard or soft >takeoffs are likely (or possible in the first place) would be *very >important*. Not just as cool research, but to drive other research and >policy. Again, our efforts to delay AGI's birth so as to give enough high-tech, human-positive imprints so it will be a soft take-off may, in fact, have the opposite effect on how AGI views us. When Nick Bostrom mentions the term 'singleton,' present and past terminology readily comes to mind, such as "dictatorship," "Fascism, " and/or "Communism." As you correctly pointed out, such forms of governments pose scary risks of their own, as they could decide that even reaching the level of Transhuman technology poses risks for their power, and to preempt both existence of power Transhumans which could lead to AGI, that stopping and reversing technological course is the only way to preserve their power for the future for as far as they could see. If we intend to use a world government "Colossus Computer," then AGI will essentially, de facto, already exist, it would seem. (We could also call it 'Vanguard,' but it wasn't as nice to it's creator.) :) >As I often argue, any way of shedding light on whether hard or soft >takeoffs are likely (or possible in the first place) would be *very >important*. Not just as cool research, but to drive other research and >policy. >> I would be interested in how you can quantify the existential risks as >> being 1% per year? How can one quantify existential risks that are >> known, and as yet unknown, to mankind, within the next second, never >> mind the next year, and never mind with a given percentage? >For a fun case where the probability of a large set of existential risks >that includes totally unknown cosmic disasters can be bounded, see >http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0512204 Only 5 listed here? In the States, at least in my area, we have several stations called "The History Channel." There is the original station, the Military station, and H2, (which was recently History International.) While the name of the channels would indicate that they are all about history, they also discuss various Doomsday scenarios on a regular basis. In fact, this entire week (just in time for the holidays,) H2 is having "Armageddon Week," which discusses everything from prophesies to present day, more 'scientific' possibilities...and the possible crossovers between the two. One show had several separate comments from David Brin, and another show included discussions from Hugo de Garis. Hugo was sitting amongst 5 other doomsday scenario theorists, each of whom had his own concerns (water depletion, fuel depletion, economic collapse, nuclear war, and the other guy, I believe, focused on biological and germ issues,) but when they heard de Garis, they all seemed a lot more terrified. Here is this new guy muscling in on there doomsday territory with something altogether more frightening, and altogether happening before their eyes in very real terms. Personally, I was amused at their responses. That said, while I share the same concerns of nuclear war and global biological issues, Hugo de Garis' concerns are one's I take very seriously and consider quite realistic...'if' we don't create AGI quickly. "If" we don't, his real concerns about a war over just this subject, and 'gigadeath,' may not be at all that far from being the truth. I take what he says very seriously. >My own guesstimate is based on looking at nuclear war risks. At least in >the Cuba crisis case some estimates put the chance of an exchange to >"one in three". Over the span of the 66 years we have had nuclear >weapons there have been several close calls - not just the Cuba Crisis, >but things like Able Archer, the Norwegian rocket incident, the NORAD >false alarms 79/80 etc. A proper analysis needs to take variable levels >of tension into account, as well as a possible anthropic bias (me being >here emailing about it precludes a big nuclear war in the recent past) - >I have a working paper on this I ought to work on. But "one in three" >for one incident per 66 years gives a risk per year of 0.5%. (Using >Laplace's rule of succession gives a risk of 0.15% per year, by the way) >We might quibble about how existential the risk of a nuclear war might >be, since after all it might just kill a few hundred million people and wreck the global infrastructure, but I give enough credence to the recent climate models of nuclear winter to think it has a chance of killing off the vast majority of humans. >I am working on heavy tail distributions of wars, democides, pandemics >and stuff like that; one can extrapolate the known distributions to get >estimates of tail risks. Loosely speaking it all seems to add to >something below 1% per year. >Note that I come from a Bayesian perspective: probabilities are >statements about ignorance, they are not things that exist independently >in nature." You'd love the History Channel, Anders. The computer graphics and scenarios are excellent. ;) >> As someone who considers himself a Transhumanist, I come to exactly the >> opposite conclusion as the one you gave, in that I think by focusing on >> health technologies and uploading as fast as possible, we give humanity, >> and universal intelligence, a greater possibility of lasting longer as a >> species, being 'superior' before the creation of AGI,and perhaps merging >> with a new species that we create which will 'allow' us to perpetually >> evolve with it/them, or least protect us from most existential threats >> that are already plentiful. >I personally do think uploading is the way to go, and should be >accelerated. It is just that the arguments in favor of it reducing the >risks are not that much stronger than the arguments it increases the >risks. We spent a month analyzing this question, and it was deeply >annoying to realize how uncertain the rational position seems to be. I can only reiterate the concept of putting ourselves in AGI's shoes, and I don't think I would be too pleased that they considered me a greater threat, great enough to delay me and all that I might provide humans and the universe, over all the other existential threats, combined. From a human standpoint, I can only say of us as a species, one that has proven this axiom true and valuable over and over, and that is: "No guts, no glory." Our species has reached this point because of both our incredible curiosity, and our ability to do something about investigating and toolmaking at ever higher levels in order to satiate that curiosity. That is what has made our species so unique...up until 'soon.' >> Once a brain is emulated, a process that companies like IBM have >> promised to complete in 10 years because of competitive concerns, not to >> mention all of the other companies and countries pouring massive amounts >> of money for the same reason, the probability that various companies and > countries are also pouring ever larger sums of money into developing > AGI, especially since many of the technologies overlap. If > brain-emulation is achieved in 10 years or less, then AGI can't be far >> behind. >Ah, you believe in marketing. I have a bridge to sell you cheaply... :-) It depends on who is doing the marketing. If you are IBM, based on your track-record over the past 100 years (as of this year) of an almost endless array of computer development and innovations, up to and including "Watson," then I may very well be interested in that bridge. ;) >As a computational neuroscientist following the field, I would bet >rather strongly against any promise of brain emulation beyond the insect >level over the next decade. (My own median estimate ends up annoyingly >close to Kurzweil's estimate for the 2040s... ) >Do you have a source on how much money countries are pouring into AGI? >(not just narrow AI) I will defer to your expertise in the field, Anders, but will respectfully disagree with your conclusion, take the bet, and go with IBM. I don't disagree with you based on what you are saying about where we are likely to be because you are wrong based on present technology and your estimated timeline, I am just saying I disagree based on the motivations and money that is likely to be invested in speeding up the process is something that I don't think many people in the field, or any associated fields, see coming. Why I think this 'does' have to do with an assumption about what is going to happen regarding expenditures, that's true, and in answer to your question, I do not have a source as to how much companies and countries are presently investing in brain emulation or in AGI. I assume that is a rhetorical question because there is no way of knowing considering that much of the work being done, and that will be done, will be in secret, and because of the array of technologies involved, would be hard to quantify monetarily even if the entire planet's budget was transparent. However, I'll approach your question a different way. As an observer of human history, and present, the fact that we are a competitive species (the U.S had the fastest super-computer just a few short years ago, until the Chinese claimed that mantel, up until this year, when the Japanese took it away (again) with their "K" supercomputer, for instance,) I can guarantee that with an error margin of 1%, that there is a 99% chance, because this race is as important to nations and companies as was the Cold War itself, because winning it will essentially mean 'everything," that the pace you think that human will create a completely artificial brain and or AGI will blind-side even people working on the projects 'because' this is not going to be a 'mostly' open-source type of project. Yes, it will include a lot of open sharing, which will also speed up the process, but it will be the heavy financial hitters, on a global scale, that will make this happen very soon. >> Still, I can't really see how waiting for brain-emulation will somehow >> keep us safer as a species once AGI is actually developed. What factors >> are being used in the numbers game that you mentioned? >Here is a simple game: what probability do you assign to us surviving >the transition to an AGI world? Call it P1. Once in this world, where we >have (by assumption) non-malign very smart AGI, what is the probability >we will survive the invention of brain emulation? Call it P2. >Now consider a world where brain emulation comes first. What is the >chance of surviving that transition? Call it P3. OK, we survived the >upload transition. Now we invent AGI. What is the chance of surviving it >in this world? Call it P4. >Which is largest, P1*P2 or P3*P4? The first is the chance of a happy >ending for the AGI first world, the second is the chance of a happy >ending for the uploading first world. >Now, over at FHI most of us tended to assume the existence of nice >superintelligence would make P2 pretty big - it would help us avoid >making a mess of the upload transition. But uploads doesn't seem to help >much with fixing P4, since they are not superintelligent per se (there >is just a lot more brain power in that world). FHI's conclusion would appear to be in line with and agreement with my initial (leading) question: "Still, I can't really see how waiting for brain-emulation will somehow keep us safer as a species once AGI is actually developed. What factors are being used in the numbers game that you mentioned?" When I first asked my question about organizations that support speeding up the development of AGI, I wasn't contrasting it with brain-emulation, but since brain-emulation has been raised, I agree that AGI should come first. However, the game's conclusion is not what FHI has agreed to do, because it realizes that the opening proposition is just an assumption, correct? So...why ask the question? Since the opening assumption cannot be answered, it makes the rest of the game's questions, moot, in real terms. Personally, I don't make assumptions that imply AGI will be a nice, soft take-off, or a malign, hard take-off (or crash-landing, whichever you prefer.) I just think it is our only real chance of evolving, and quite frankly, if we do create brain-emulations that we can upload into, haven't we essentially entered the domain of AGI at that point? Won't that really be the opening stage of AGI? Secondly, and really, far more importantly, shouldn't we be thinking about the evolution of the universe via AGI as not only natural for our species, but if there is such as thing as free will, the right thing to do, as well? > > What is the general thinking about why we need to wait for full-brain >> emulation before we can start uploading our brains (and hopefully >> bodies)? Even if we must wait, is the idea that if we can create >> artificial brains that are patterned on each of our individual brains, >> so that we can have a precise upload, that the AGIans will somehow have >> a different view about what they will choose to do with a fully > > Transhumanist species? >I don't think you would be satisfied with a chatbot based on your online >writing or even spoken speech patterns, right? >You shouldn't try to upload your brain before we have full-brain >emulation since the methods are likely going to be 1) destructive, 2) >have to throw away information during processing due to storage >constraints until at least mid-century, 3) we will not have evidence it >works before it actually works. Of course, some of us might have no >choice because we are frozen in liquid nitrogen... That's correct, not a chatbot, I wouldn't, but I don't see how the two have anything to do with each other. If the brain-emulation were near enough to what I was, I wouldn't know the difference once I uploaded, and once I started evolving, it wouldn't matter that much from that point on. Like all forms of evolution, a species will gain something to it's advantage, and lose things that are no longer advantageous to it. Why should the concept be any different, here? >> more cautious?' I don't mean to put words in your mouth, but I don't >>see what else you could mean. >I tell them about their great forebears like Simon, Minsky and McCarthy, >and how they honestly believed they would achieve human level and beyond >AI within their own active research careers. Then I point out that none >of them - or anybody else for that matter - seemed to have had *any* >safety concerns about the project. Despite (or perhaps because of) >fictional safety concerns *predating* the field. That they were mistaken in their timelines doesn't mean everyone at all times will be mistaken. All things being equal, and 'unhindered,' soon, someone will get the general date right. >Another thing I suggest is that they chat with philosophers more. OK, >that might seriously slow down anybody :-) But it is surprising how many >scientists do elementary methodological, ethical or epistemological >mistakes about their own research - discussing what you do with a >friendly philosopher can be quite constructive (and might bring the >philosopher a bit more in tune with real research). Agreed! :) >> May I ask if you've been polling these researchers, or have a general >> idea as to what the percentages of them working on AGI think regarding >> the four options I presented (expecting, of course, that since they are >>working on the creation of them, few are likely in support of either the >> stop, or reversing options, but rather the other two choices of go >>slower or speed up)? >I have not done any polling like that, but we did do a survey at an AI >conference we arranged a year ago: >http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/news/2011/?a=21516 >Fairly optimistic about AGI soonish (2060), concerned with the >consequences (unlikely to be just business as usual), all over the place >in regards to methodology, and cautious about whether Watson would win >(the survey was done before the win). It is interesting that you give the year 2060 as you optimistic date. Remember what I wrote about our "History Channel" discussing Doomsday scenarios? According to this one program, it said that Nostradamus mentioned the date 2060 in his writings, as well. I have zero belief in his predictions, but the date mentioned on the show compared to your timeline is worthy of note, (for trivia, sake only.) :) -- >Anders Sandberg >Future of Humanity Institute >Oxford University Thanks for the discussion, Anders. I am getting off line, but wish to follow up with the other comments made regarding my question. I don't intend it to be another five days. Best, Kevin George Haskell, C.H.A.R.T.S (Capitalism, Health, Age-Reversal, Transhumanism, and Singularity) singulibertarians at groups.facebook.com (Facebook requires membership to access this address) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sun Dec 25 16:06:19 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2011 08:06:19 -0800 Subject: [ExI] commies drop one on some hapless prole's house In-Reply-To: References: <028501ccc278$629e5730$27db0590$@att.net> Message-ID: <005a01ccc31f$247bd700$6d738500$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Jeff Davis Subject: Re: [ExI] commies drop one on some hapless prole's house >...Aren't they capitalists now? Doesn't that mean that a capitalist govt has underperformed, bested by Marxian rationalists? Clearly Communism is the superior system... YMMV. Jeff Jeff, me lad, when I refer to the Russians as the commies, it is not a commentary on political or economic systems, but rather more the way one would use a team name. For instance, we still refer to the New York Yankees to this day, even though the war between the Rebels and the Yankees ended nearly a century and a half ago. The Russians have long since gone functionally capitalist, and watched in bemused astonishment as the US has moved steadily towards communism. The two systems aren't that much different today, yet I still refer to them as the Yankees and the Commies. If caution is needed, it is perhaps because it trivializes the brutal tension between two schools of thought which resulted in world war 3, which spanned most of the twentieth century and killed millions. After all that suffering, we came to find out there is very little real difference between capitalism and communism. That being said, I have no problem with Marx' notion. I append my own critically important first and only amendment, so that it goes like this: >From each according to his ability, to each according to his need, the right and responsibility of each to determine for himself his abilities and needs. spike From spike66 at att.net Sun Dec 25 16:27:31 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2011 08:27:31 -0800 Subject: [ExI] could a nigerian theoretically give away money? Message-ID: <005b01ccc322$1a0b6300$4e222900$@att.net> Imagine this scenario. A lone Nigerian cooks up some really cool idea, Microsloth buys it, so now the software developer has a ton of money, completely legitimately, more than that lone genius could possibly spend. Every day the geek's inbox overflows with all these absurd spams claiming to be Nigerians wanting to give some random internet user a million US dollars, if they would simply give their name, address, SSN and bank account number, in order to know where to transfer in the money, and make it legal of course. So imagine this perfectly legitimately rich Nigerian with a sense of humor and absurd generosity writes a perfectly true but indistinguishable from spam offer, along with a script to distribute it to random internet users, explaining that a Nigerian wants to give away a pile of money, if the recipient would merely supply a name, address, social security number and bank account number. The Nigerian fully intends to give that pile of money to the first person to supply that info, all completely necessary to make it theoretically possible to actually deposit the money into the recipient's account. How many pseudo-spam messages would she need to send out before anyone would fall for the truth? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Sun Dec 25 16:36:58 2011 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2011 08:36:58 -0800 Subject: [ExI] could a nigerian theoretically give away money? In-Reply-To: <005b01ccc322$1a0b6300$4e222900$@att.net> References: <005b01ccc322$1a0b6300$4e222900$@att.net> Message-ID: Someone would, eventually. However, a SSN is not needed to transfer money, and neither is an address. You just need the bank's routing number & account number, and possibly the name on the account. Moreover, if this scenario really did happen, there would be news articles the rich Nigerian could link to, to prove it. 2011/12/25 spike : > Imagine this scenario.? A lone Nigerian cooks up some really cool idea, > Microsloth buys it, so now the software developer has a ton of money, > completely legitimately, more than that lone genius could possibly spend. > Every day the geek?s inbox overflows with all these absurd spams claiming to > be Nigerians wanting to give some random internet user a million US dollars, > if they would simply give their name, address, SSN and bank account number, > in order to know where to transfer in the money, and make it legal of > course. > > > > So imagine this perfectly legitimately rich Nigerian with a sense of humor > and absurd generosity writes a perfectly true but indistinguishable from > spam offer, along with a script to distribute it to random internet users, > explaining that a Nigerian wants to give away a pile of money, if the > recipient would merely supply a name, address, social security number and > bank account number.? The Nigerian fully intends to give that pile of money > to the first person to supply that info, all completely necessary to make it > theoretically possible to actually deposit the money into the recipient?s > account. > > > > How many pseudo-spam messages would she need to send out before anyone would > fall for the truth? > > > > spike > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sun Dec 25 17:04:09 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2011 18:04:09 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Organizations to "Speed Up" Creation of AGI? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: 2011/12/25 Kevin G Haskell : > Okay, so there are major problems from the outset with even attempting to > slow down AGI to make it a nice 'soft' take-off, because just looking at > what has presented may, in fact, have the opposite effect with what AGI > thinks or does later on. Suppose, for a minute, that it saw the entire > process of humans delaying it's 'birth' in order to make it 'nice,' as > something inherently wrong and especially flawed about humans? OTOH, all this considerations stem from a view of the problem that is not only extremely anthropomorphic, but even culturally biased. What would make us think that an AGI would "think" along the lines of what may or may not be "morally flawed" from the POV of some self-referential identification with a kind of a "new race" of "sentients" in the business of considering how objectively "fair" has been the treatment of the birth of the category? Why should it "care" in the first place? Did we when we were "born" as sapiens? Aren't all such considerations pure projections? An AGI is simply a (presumably fast, unless we want wait for eons at each interaction) computer, executing a program that emulates well enough human features to perform as well as an actual human in a Turing test, or in some other tasks where current computers are currently very poor. To lend it behavioural traits that might or might not be applicable even to, say, Native Americans or Polinesians or Vikings, sounds simply strange. > When Nick Bostrom mentions the term 'singleton,' present and past > terminology readily comes to mind, such as "dictatorship," "Fascism, " > and/or "Communism." As you correctly pointed out, such forms of governments > pose scary risks of their own, as they could decide that even reaching the > level of Transhuman technology poses risks for their power, and to preempt > both existence of power Transhumans which could lead to AGI, that stopping > and reversing technological course is the only way to preserve their power > for the future for as far as they could see. Really? Any example? When, how, why, as opposed to what? :-/ Aren't you describing the current status of thing, by the way? > When I first asked my question about organizations that support speeding up > the development of AGI, I wasn't contrasting it with brain-emulation, but > since brain-emulation has been raised, I agree that AGI should come first. Mmhhh. Why? If AI is an interesting space of problems, and brains are demonstrably good at them, I would thin k that emulation at some depth level of the brain might certainly be relevant to their solution. Even though we may well beat brains and brain emulations alike, at least for certain classes of problem, by adopting altogether different strategies: see Deep Blue with chess. > I just think it is our only real chance of evolving. Yes, we are in agreement on that, even though I take it perhaps in a more extensive sense. No matter what one thinks of the chances or nature of human-like identities running entirely on some non-biological support, AI is anyway going to be an increasingly central, strategic part of our extended phenotype, including in the event that some more or less alterered biological components thereof were there to stay. > That's correct, not a chatbot, I wouldn't, but I don't see how the two have > anything to do with each other. If the brain-emulation were near enough to > what I was, I wouldn't know the difference once I uploaded. Once uploaded, the uploaded "you" would not note the "difference" (with what?) anyway. No more than the next philosophical zombie or the kidnapped-by-aliens-during-the-night-replacement would. The mantra here is: "An upload is a sociological, not an ontological, concept." And whether it is "you" or not is a matter of the metaphors on choose to adopt with regard to survival. -- Stefano Vaj From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sun Dec 25 17:13:32 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2011 18:13:32 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream In-Reply-To: <1324739732.97009.YahooMailClassic@web114414.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <1324739732.97009.YahooMailClassic@web114414.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 24 December 2011 16:15, Ben Zaiboc wrote: > Stefano Vaj ha scritto: > >> what about the much more trivial scenarios of a Brave New World where >> simply all that is simply going (gradually?) to disappear in favour of >> stability and stagnation and keeping clear of anthropic x-risks and making >> our planet resources last as long as possible? > > Perhaps long-term survival is a Mount Improbable of very large proportions on the fitness landscape, and no-one has yet scaled it. > > To a 'stable', localised civilizational ecosystem, existential risks are things outside their sphere of influence - gamma ray bursts, neighbouring supernovae, huge clouds of molecular hydrogen, etc. ?All astronomical hazards, that anyone who doesn't spread out beyond their own star will be at risk from. Obiously, one reason why to opt for stagnation and stasis over Becoming (the mantra of Huxley's novel is "do not rock the boat") is an implicit or explicit moral attitude that makes a radical difference between anthropic and non-anthropic x-risk, and adheres to a metaphor of survival where what really matters is not the survival of one's clade, but that of a "society" more or less recognisable in time where change would be limited to a "physiological" (and, once more, non anthropic) replacement of its members. In this respect, the "right" thing would not be to, say, "waste" resources by sending a party with the aim of populating Mars, but to save them to give one week's more time to whatever could send them from earth. -- Stefano Vaj From rtomek at ceti.pl Sun Dec 25 18:18:21 2011 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2011 19:18:21 +0100 (CET) Subject: [ExI] could a nigerian theoretically give away money? In-Reply-To: <005b01ccc322$1a0b6300$4e222900$@att.net> References: <005b01ccc322$1a0b6300$4e222900$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, 25 Dec 2011, spike wrote: > Imagine this scenario. A lone Nigerian cooks up some really cool idea, > Microsloth buys it, so now the software developer has a ton of money, > completely legitimately, more than that lone genius could possibly > spend. Every day the geek's inbox overflows with all these absurd spams > claiming to be Nigerians wanting to give some random internet user a > million US dollars, if they would simply give their name, address, SSN > and bank account number, in order to know where to transfer in the > money, and make it legal of course. > > So imagine this perfectly legitimately rich Nigerian with a sense of > humor and absurd generosity writes a perfectly true but > indistinguishable from spam offer, along with a script to distribute it > to random internet users, explaining that a Nigerian wants to give away > a pile of money, if the recipient would merely supply a name, address, > social security number and bank account number. The Nigerian fully > intends to give that pile of money to the first person to supply that > info, all completely necessary to make it theoretically possible to > actually deposit the money into the recipient's account. > > How many pseudo-spam messages would she need to send out before anyone > would fall for the truth? Ten years ago, I guess 10-100 mails would have been enough to hook at least one idiot. After he got rich, his idiot buddies would have seen this as an real life proof that Nigerian spam really worked and they would allow to be e-skinned alive by some other spammer(s). Nowadays, ISPs that I would consider to be anything like my hosts are actively pushing quite a lot of spam out of my view. Anyway, I don't see much of this most of the time. So nowadays, the number would be 10-infinity, depending if "my" kind of ISPs are the norm or not. I suspect they are not so again, 10-100 should be enough. It could be closer to 10 if he tried to help it a little - like, doing some clever estimate about addresses who may be willing to get caught. Not sure if such estimate is easy to do but this could make his idiot-search much more effective. But to be frank, I reject your whole concept. If the Nigerian was wise enough to grab some MS money without slaving himself, he sure would be wise enough to think of something more constructive than giving it to somebody who obviously was not very clever and would waste them buying himself luxury car and gaming in Vegas (I assume it says something when one responds to spam). An example of more constructive thing I would consider right now is a micro-loan fundation aimed for helping his neighbors. However, I have never analysed this scenario with pen and old envelope, so maybe there is something even more constructive. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From spike66 at att.net Sun Dec 25 18:19:49 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2011 10:19:49 -0800 Subject: [ExI] could a nigerian theoretically give away money? In-Reply-To: References: <005b01ccc322$1a0b6300$4e222900$@att.net> Message-ID: <006901ccc331$ca883640$5f98a2c0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes >...Subject: Re: [ExI] could a nigerian theoretically give away money? >...Someone would, eventually. However, a SSN is not needed to transfer money... The SSN is needed in order for the donor to report to the IRS that the recipient owes a pile of tax on the gift. >...and neither is an address... Adrian The address is needed in order to alert the local media that some random gullible prole has given an internet stranger from Nigeria her name, address, SSN and bank account number. It also allows the giver to verify that the recipient is legitimate, by calling the bank and the recipient's neighbors and so forth. It allows basic due diligence on the part of the giver. In this scenario, the fortune was legitimately made and is legitimately given away, but the motives are not entirely pure, depending on one's point of view. The giver asks for a lot of personal information in order to intentionally design the phony spam to resemble the other countless Nigerian genuine spams. If she manages to give away her money, the gift is widely publicized, which then lends enormous credibility to all the other spam offering to give away Nigerian fortunes. Since the legitimate giver realizes her own country is desperately needy, she realizes perhaps her gift is seed money which would return many fold the investment. Greedy rich Americans would read the story and be more likely to fall for the traditional spam, handing over bank account numbers, which are then plundered by dishonest Nigerians. This would bring enormous wealth into that benighted land, even though it would have the disadvantage of being funneled through thieves. At least some of it eventually ends up in the hands of poor and deserving Nigerians. The original Nigerian giver makes no deals to share in the plunder from rich greedy gullible Americans. She gave the money and told the truth all along, even if she was aware of (and was perhaps intentionally motivated by) the possible illegitimate consequences. But all this actually had a cheerful end, again depending on one's point of view: plentiful American money flowing into desperately needy Nigeria. She can think of herself as perhaps the greatest of philanthropists, using a million of her own dollars to indirectly coax a manifold return of that amount back into her own country from a greedy rich country which already has way too much of everything. Where is the flaw in my reasoning? spike From painlord2k at libero.it Sun Dec 25 18:28:15 2011 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2011 19:28:15 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> <4EF19D66.4070907@aleph.se> <4EF1FD4D.1090600@libero.it> <4EF24ACA.3030400@aleph.se> <4EF3003E.7060803@aleph.se> <4EF43EC6.8030108@aleph.se> Message-ID: <4EF76B3F.6030706@libero.it> Il 23/12/2011 14:37, Stefano Vaj ha scritto: > On 23 December 2011 09:41, Anders Sandberg > wrote: > > Slavery economies have the problem that the leaders lack the > incentive to innovate, the rigid structure makes entrepreneurship > hard, and the human capital of the rest of the population is used > very inefficiently (since it is hard to get creative output on > command). This remains true even if the system is not direct > slavery: rigid, protectionist systems where citizens have no > opportunity to do things for themselves will also tend to stagnate. > I was in fact referring to a more trivial and immediate effect. > Let us say I am a textile entrepreneur, and my decisions are commanded > only by economic optimisation according the classical economic theory. > If a cheap, abundant offer of manpower is available, the rational > decision to increase production is emphatically not that of purchasing a > loom, let alone engage in risky R&D programmes aimed at developing one, > but simply that of putting more weavers at work. > Conversely, If weavers are expensive and scarce, the pressure to do the > opposite is high. And quite notably, when I equip my weavers with the > loom, they end up being individually more productive than they would be > otherwise, so allowing me to pay them a higher wage. And this of course > makes for a higher demand of textile products. You are not "allowed" to pay them more if they are more productive. In the long run (and often in the medium and short) you MUST pay them more because you MUST keep them working for you and not leaving and working for someone else paying more than you. This is a "minor" problem that you can make away with slavery. But the slaves (and the forced low paid workers) usually are not very productive because there is no advantage in working more than the minimum. Free men, instead, have an incentive to work more than the minimum because more they work more they earn. When they work for themselves they are able to save, invest and consume more (in this order) and this create a demand for more goodies produced by others and more innovations. > This is why I suspect that injections of wage or non-wage immigrant > slaves, as undesirable as they may be for entirely different reasons, do > really very little for wobbly economies, unless perhaps in the very > short term. Let us say, not much more than does heroin for the cure > withdrawal symptoms. And on this we agree. There are government statistics (Denmark for sure, maybe UK) that show the costs of immigrants for the government are greater than the profits. They are a net taxpayer's loss. But, in many ways, they are a source of profits (and votes) for the bureaucrats and the politicos and their friends and allies. If they won't there would not be a political will to let them in and let them stay in. Mirco From rtomek at ceti.pl Sun Dec 25 18:56:22 2011 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2011 19:56:22 +0100 (CET) Subject: [ExI] could a Nigerian (Nigerian - it's a nation) theoretically give away money? In-Reply-To: <006901ccc331$ca883640$5f98a2c0$@att.net> References: <005b01ccc322$1a0b6300$4e222900$@att.net> <006901ccc331$ca883640$5f98a2c0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, 25 Dec 2011, spike wrote: [...] > The original Nigerian giver makes no deals to share in the plunder from rich > greedy gullible Americans. She gave the money and told the truth all along, > even if she was aware of (and was perhaps intentionally motivated by) the > possible illegitimate consequences. But all this actually had a cheerful > end, again depending on one's point of view: plentiful American money > flowing into desperately needy Nigeria. She can think of herself as perhaps > the greatest of philanthropists, using a million of her own dollars to > indirectly coax a manifold return of that amount back into her own country > from a greedy rich country which already has way too much of everything. > > Where is the flaw in my reasoning? Ok, now this seems to be reasonable. The only flaw I can spot is giving away her real money. She can have exactly same effect by spending about 20 thousand bucks. Rent a jobless actor. Film him as he goes around from shop to shop (no need to buy anything), talking to sales people and shaking hands with them. Let him take red ferrari for a trial driving (and remember to film this). After 3 days she has enough material to push it via youtube. Use your imagination, man :-). Tell her to give all her millions to you and spend 20k like I wrote above, then tell her it's all done, show her a film on y-t. It can certainly be pushed via some local cable news tv - of course with enough green oil. But definitely less than million. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From gts_2000 at yahoo.com Sun Dec 25 19:40:51 2011 From: gts_2000 at yahoo.com (Gordon) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2011 11:40:51 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] free will In-Reply-To: References: <028501ccc278$629e5730$27db0590$@att.net> <1324788339.81404.YahooMailNeo@web36507.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <02ea01ccc2ca$efd22210$cf766630$@att.net> Message-ID: <1324842051.60104.YahooMailNeo@web36504.mail.mud.yahoo.com> An interesting approach to the free will problem, and to philosophical problems in general: Abstract. Recently in these pages it has been argued that a relatively straightforward version of an old argument based on evolutionary biology and psychology can be employed to support the view that innate ideas are a naturalistic source of metaphysical knowledge. While sympathetic to the view that the ??evolutionary argument?? is pregnant with philosophical implications, I show in this paper how it needs to be developed and deployed in order to avoid serious philosophical difficulties and unnecessary complications. I sketch a revised version of the evolutionary argument, place it in a new context, and show that this version in this context is not vulnerable to the standard criticisms levelled against arguments of this general type. The philosophical import of this version of the argument lies not in any metaphysical conclusions it sanctions directly, but in the support it lends to the metaphilosophy of commonsense. The ??evolutionary argument?? and the metaphilosophy of commonsense http://www.springerlink.com/content/b54405n81v378551/fulltext.pdf ________________________________ From: Will Steinberg To: ExI chat list Sent: Saturday, December 24, 2011 11:32 PM Subject: Re: [ExI] free will How does one pit the decision to believe in decision versus the compulsion to believe in compulsion? ?Cannonball//Post sort of stuff. 2011/12/25 spike ? >? >From:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Will Steinberg > >Subject: Re: [ExI] free will >? >Or, the decision to disbelieve free will contradicts itself? ?;) >? >No, I disagree.? He had no choice in disbelieving in free will.? So if he had any choice he didn?t have any choice.? 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 kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sun Dec 25 20:07:50 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2011 13:07:50 -0700 Subject: [ExI] could a nigerian theoretically give away money? In-Reply-To: <005b01ccc322$1a0b6300$4e222900$@att.net> References: <005b01ccc322$1a0b6300$4e222900$@att.net> Message-ID: 2011/12/25 spike : > Imagine this scenario.? A lone Nigerian cooks up some really cool idea, > Microsloth buys it, so now the software developer has a ton of money, > How many pseudo-spam messages would she need to send out before anyone would > fall for the truth? >From the research I did a few years ago, the response rate to spam is 3-4 per 100,000. So if people haven't gotten any smarter over the past few years, the answer would probably be somewhere around 25,000 emails. Even more interesting is how many emails or chat messages would a person, say in Uganda need to send out before finding someone who would help them to pay tuition to go to school? This is a perfectly legitimate need, from a perfectly legitimate student... Well, in the case of at least one Ugandan, a James Mukasa, I don't know how many people he had to contact, but eventually he did run into me. And after jumping through some hoops, to prove he was actually a student, I paid his tuition. Now we have an ongoing relationship where I give him advise, and the occasional bit of money, and pretty soon now, I think we'll figure out some little import business that hopefully will make us both a few bucks. Being nice to people in need can, perhaps, eventually be profitable for all concerned. The only downside for me is that Africans tend to be VERY thankful... and that does get old after a while... LOL. -Kelly From brent.allsop at canonizer.com Sun Dec 25 19:43:34 2011 From: brent.allsop at canonizer.com (Brent Allsop) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2011 12:43:34 -0700 Subject: [ExI] could a nigerian theoretically give away money? In-Reply-To: <006901ccc331$ca883640$5f98a2c0$@att.net> References: <005b01ccc322$1a0b6300$4e222900$@att.net> <006901ccc331$ca883640$5f98a2c0$@att.net> Message-ID: <4EF77CE6.7000703@canonizer.com> Hi Spike, I like the way you think! That would be a very good charity, in a kind of Darwan award kind of way (as in anyone fool dumb enough to get suckered by a 419 scammer, does not deserve the money as much as poor Nigeria does.) There is surely a good chance any legitimate person would get answered by a 419 scam baiter (Google for it, if you don't know what that is.) Most people probably can't understand why anyone would spend time doing anything like that, but I find the whole idea very intertaining. It is quite fun to read the stories about what these scam baiters have sucked out of these scammers. Of course, the ultimate goal is to scam them out of money. I dabled in doing this a bit several years back. I listened to their scam with great intention, and came up with a reverse scam story that required them to get money to me, so I could pay off some medical stuff, that would free up some assets, which I could then fill their request with, and so on. Everything is designed with the goal of dragging them on for as long as possible, wasting as much time as possible, and getting them to expend as much resources as you can get them to expend, trying to get money from you. This guy I got on the line spent hours sending me e-mails, calling me multiple times - international calls. I got him to send me some quite nice casheres checks that look like they are worth $6000. Googling for fake casheres checks, I was able to validate that they were not legitimate but I keep them as a trophy and so on. We were good friends, having fun with each other, for quite some time. Bottom line is, if any lagitimate non scamer got caught on the line with one of these scam baiters - my guess is they'd eventually find some way to prove to each other they were legitimate, and finally accomplish whatever it was they were legitimately attempting. And as you say, it'd probably make it in the news, and do exactly what you describe, leading many others to fall prey to the scheme. Brent Allsop On 12/25/2011 11:19 AM, spike wrote: >> ... On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes >> ...Subject: Re: [ExI] could a nigerian theoretically give away money? >> ...Someone would, eventually. However, a SSN is not needed to transfer > money... > > The SSN is needed in order for the donor to report to the IRS that the > recipient owes a pile of tax on the gift. > >> ...and neither is an address... Adrian > The address is needed in order to alert the local media that some random > gullible prole has given an internet stranger from Nigeria her name, > address, SSN and bank account number. It also allows the giver to verify > that the recipient is legitimate, by calling the bank and the recipient's > neighbors and so forth. It allows basic due diligence on the part of the > giver. > > In this scenario, the fortune was legitimately made and is legitimately > given away, but the motives are not entirely pure, depending on one's point > of view. The giver asks for a lot of personal information in order to > intentionally design the phony spam to resemble the other countless Nigerian > genuine spams. If she manages to give away her money, the gift is widely > publicized, which then lends enormous credibility to all the other spam > offering to give away Nigerian fortunes. Since the legitimate giver > realizes her own country is desperately needy, she realizes perhaps her gift > is seed money which would return many fold the investment. Greedy rich > Americans would read the story and be more likely to fall for the > traditional spam, handing over bank account numbers, which are then > plundered by dishonest Nigerians. This would bring enormous wealth into > that benighted land, even though it would have the disadvantage of being > funneled through thieves. At least some of it eventually ends up in the > hands of poor and deserving Nigerians. > > The original Nigerian giver makes no deals to share in the plunder from rich > greedy gullible Americans. She gave the money and told the truth all along, > even if she was aware of (and was perhaps intentionally motivated by) the > possible illegitimate consequences. But all this actually had a cheerful > end, again depending on one's point of view: plentiful American money > flowing into desperately needy Nigeria. She can think of herself as perhaps > the greatest of philanthropists, using a million of her own dollars to > indirectly coax a manifold return of that amount back into her own country > from a greedy rich country which already has way too much of everything. > > Where is the flaw in my reasoning? > > spike > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From spike66 at att.net Sun Dec 25 20:03:42 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2011 12:03:42 -0800 Subject: [ExI] could a nigerian (Nigerian - it's a nation) (but i always write all subject lines in all lower case) theoretically give away money? Message-ID: <007701ccc340$4dc45ee0$e94d1ca0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Tomasz Rola Subject: Re: [ExI] could a Nigerian (Nigerian - it's a nation) theoretically give away money? On Sun, 25 Dec 2011, spike wrote: [...] >>... The original Nigerian giver makes no deals to share in the plunder > from rich greedy gullible Americans... She can think of herself as perhaps the greatest of > philanthropists, using a million of her own dollars to indirectly coax > a manifold return of that amount back into her own country from a greedy rich country which already has way too much of everything... Where is the flaw in my reasoning? >...The only flaw I can spot is giving away her real money. She can have exactly same effect by spending about 20 thousand bucks. Rent a jobless actor. Film him as he goes around from shop to shop (no need to buy anything), talking to sales people and shaking hands with them. Let him take red ferrari for a trial driving (and remember to film this). After 3 days she has enough material to push it via youtube... Regards, Tomasz Rola Thanks Tomasz, but I disagree. In my scenario, everything the Nigerian philanthropist said and did is genuine and true, even if with hopes of reaping benefits for Nigeria at the expense of America. The plot is to give away actual money in order to lend (illegitimate) legitimacy to spam. No trickery other than telling the truth in a setting where everyone expects a lie. Sort of analogous situation: a cop goes out to some random spot where there is nothing happening and says loudly "Move along folks, there's nothing to see here." Immediately a crowd gathers, asking "Where?" He responds "Right here." They, "What?" He, "Nothing." They, "What do you mean, there's nothing to see here?" He, "I meant, there's nothing to see here." They, "But when a cop says 'there's nothing to see here,' that always means there is something to see here. Where and what?" He, "Here, nothing." And so on. If a cop says "There is nothing to see here" and there really is nothing to see here, he is lying. He lies by telling the truth. Everyone knows that all Nigerian spam is a lie. Therefore if a Nigerian lies, she is telling the truth, and if she tells the truth, she is lying. spike Oh I am having fun with this. {8^D From rtomek at ceti.pl Sun Dec 25 20:33:16 2011 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2011 21:33:16 +0100 (CET) Subject: [ExI] could a nigerian (Nigerian - it's a nation) (but i always write all subject lines in all lower case) (oh I see, it's ok then) theoretically give away money? In-Reply-To: <007701ccc340$4dc45ee0$e94d1ca0$@att.net> References: <007701ccc340$4dc45ee0$e94d1ca0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, 25 Dec 2011, spike wrote: [...] > Thanks Tomasz, but I disagree. In my scenario, everything the Nigerian > philanthropist said and did is genuine and true, even if with hopes of > reaping benefits for Nigeria at the expense of America. The plot is to give > away actual money in order to lend (illegitimate) legitimacy to spam. No > trickery other than telling the truth in a setting where everyone expects a > lie. > > Sort of analogous situation: a cop goes out to some random spot where there > is nothing happening and says loudly "Move along folks, there's nothing to > see here." Immediately a crowd gathers, asking "Where?" He responds "Right > here." They, "What?" He, "Nothing." They, "What do you mean, there's > nothing to see here?" He, "I meant, there's nothing to see here." They, > "But when a cop says 'there's nothing to see here,' that always means there > is something to see here. Where and what?" He, "Here, nothing." And so > on. If a cop says "There is nothing to see here" and there really is > nothing to see here, he is lying. He lies by telling the truth. > > Everyone knows that all Nigerian spam is a lie. Therefore if a Nigerian > lies, she is telling the truth, and if she tells the truth, she is lying. All right, now I realized that your plan is flawed because it is flawless. But it is still good to try, even though it's flawed, because it is flawless. This is possibly even more complicated: as long as I don't put my own money on the table, plan is simply flawless. As soon as I do, it becomes flawed. Correct me if I am wrong... or right... > Oh I am having fun with this. {8^D O yes. I start having fun, too. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Sun Dec 25 21:02:01 2011 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2011 14:02:01 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Homeless in Hell- A Christmas Story, by Orson Scott Card Message-ID: Orson Scott Card: Homeless in Hell--A Christmas Story http://www.hatrack.com/osc/stories/homeless-in-hell.shtml Orson Scott Card's Christmas present to the Hatrack River community: a never-before published Christmas story Homeless in Hell A Christmas Story This is a rather dark tale in places, not meant for children. (So for heaven's sake, don't read this to your family on Christmas Eve.) For the rest of you, we hope you enjoy it, and have a merry Christmas! From atymes at gmail.com Sun Dec 25 22:03:20 2011 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2011 14:03:20 -0800 Subject: [ExI] could a nigerian theoretically give away money? In-Reply-To: <006901ccc331$ca883640$5f98a2c0$@att.net> References: <005b01ccc322$1a0b6300$4e222900$@att.net> <006901ccc331$ca883640$5f98a2c0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 25, 2011 at 10:19 AM, spike wrote: >?At least some of it eventually ends up in the > hands of poor and deserving Nigerians. > Where is the flaw in my reasoning? I've quoted it. Didn't work here over the past few decades; no reason to believe it'd work over there either. From atymes at gmail.com Sun Dec 25 22:06:26 2011 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2011 14:06:26 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Homeless in Hell- A Christmas Story, by Orson Scott Card In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: My browser says the server appears to be down. Specifically: "The connection has timed out The server at www.hatrack.com is taking too long to respond." On Sun, Dec 25, 2011 at 1:02 PM, John Grigg wrote: > Orson Scott Card: Homeless in Hell--A Christmas Story > > http://www.hatrack.com/osc/stories/homeless-in-hell.shtml > > Orson Scott Card's Christmas present to the Hatrack River community: > a never-before published Christmas story > > Homeless in Hell > A Christmas Story > > This is a rather dark tale in places, not meant for children. (So > for heaven's sake, don't read this to your family on Christmas Eve.) > For the rest of you, we hope you enjoy it, and have a merry > Christmas! > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Sun Dec 25 22:14:17 2011 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2011 15:14:17 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Homeless in Hell- A Christmas Story, by Orson Scott Card In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I could not get a response from the server either, and so here is the Christmas story by Orson Scott Card... If you don't get into heaven, you go to hell, right? That's what I'd always been taught. Heaven is Harvard, and hell a county technical college. If you finished high school, they've got to take you. Except that with hell, dying is the only diploma you're supposed to need. I read those near-death-experience books, where they talked about how "the light" was full of warmth and love. Well, it was nice, but it sort of sets you up for disappointment, because when you're really dead and not just straying in there by accident, you get past that feel-good stage and suddenly you're at the light, and either it sucks you in or it shunts you away, like a magnet, and it all depends on how you're polarized. I got pushed away. Well, what did I expect, anyway? I used to go to church and all, but I wasn't much of a stickler on, like, telling the truth and helping my neighbor. And office supplies from work had a way of ending up at home. Not a lot, but I wasn't exactly perfect. Lots of looking upon women to lust after them. Just at the Victoria's Secret level. Quarreled with my wife a lot but I never hit her, though I did compare her to her mother way too often. Kind of the normal sins. I was sort of hoping they graded on the curve--I figured I was bound to make the top half. But no, it's straight percentage, you get one question wrong and you're out. So what's the other choice? Hell, right? I start looking around, wondering if Dante was just making it all up and if not, which circle would I get into? The answer is, Dante didn't know squat, there are no circles. You just find yourself on a street in hell and you go up to a door (and it's always the same door, no matter what the street is) and you see people going in and out, dressed to the nines, and you think, Cool, there are good clothes in hell, which stands to reason, really, and you go up to the door and you knock and the guy looks at you like you're a worm and he says, "Name?" So I say my name and he makes this moue with his mouth like you sort of passed your expiration date about a month ago and he says, "Please, don't waste my time," and he starts to close the door in your face. "Wait a minute," you say, "this is hell, right?" "Hades," he says, and you can taste the contempt. "Well I didn't make heaven, so you've got to let me in." "No," he says, and then with a kind of faux patience he explains, "The place where, when you go there, they have to take you in, that's home. Not hell. We don't have to take just anybody. We're all about class here, nobody wants to look around and see you. There are real celebs inside. Stalin. Hitler. Caligula, for heaven's sake-- oops, did I say that?" "I'm not asking for the best seat in the house." "There is no table insignificant enough for you." I did a quick calculation--how many people ever lived on earth, how many would likely fail the entrance exam for heaven, and how many first-rank sinners would be ahead of me in line. "But ... what do I do?" "You bogey off and stop blocking the door." "What do you think this is? Studio 54?" He laughs. "Oh, no, it's much worse. It's like junior high. And you ... ain't ... cool." And you get a big hand planted in your chest and when he pushes you don't fall, you fly across the street and smash into a building only it doesn't hurt--you're dead, remember?--and you're not injured and it begins to dawn on you, you're stuck in hell but you can't get in. You try a few other doors and the same guy is waiting behind every one of them to bounce you. And it's starting to rain. A thin cold drizzle, and even though you can't actually get injured, you can get cold and damp, or at least you feel like you've been left out in the cold, which in fact you have. You're not going to get sick, you're not going to starve, but you're also not going to get in. Not that I was alone out there. There are a lot of streets in hell, and lots of homeless people wandering around. And they seem just about as crazy as the normal mix of homeless people. A few who look like they're waiting for a drug deal to go down, only I knew it was a fake, because what is there to buy or sell, and even if they're carrying--because you pretty much look the way you see yourself, so some people are armed--they aren't dangerous. If they had ever been truly dangerous, they'd be inside watching the strippers, or whatever they did inside Club Styx. These guys think if they look bad enough, if they say enough rude things to passersby, maybe someday they'll get by the bouncer. Ditto with the ones who look like hookers. They've got nothing to sell. But let's face it. Not everybody in hell is bright. Then there are the crazies, shouting and preaching about Jesus and the end of the world, only it dawned on me pretty quickly that they aren't crazy--I mean, after you die there's no schizophrenia because there's no brain to malfunction. They're preaching because they're trying to tip the balance the other way, to show how righteous they are, denouncing sin, calling out the name of Jesus-- or whoever, depending, but most of the shouters were, like, born again, only it apparently didn't take the way they thought. I stood there watching them, and walked around watching them, and sat down and watched them, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't bring myself to care. It began to dawn on me just how long eternity was going to be, stuck on the streets of hell. I tried street after street, only nothing changed except the faces. The language didn't even change, because after you're dead all the languages become the same. They speak, and they think they're speaking Arabic or Tagalog, only what you hear is English, or at least you think it is. If you speak English. Anyway, you can understand everybody, and that's the worst, because you can't even go to a place where you don't understand the words people are saying so you can tune them out. You're always tuned in and it's so boring. Daytime comes and goes, just like on earth, and gradually it began to dawn on me that this was earth. In fact, it was Washington DC, which is where I happened to buy the farm, hit by a car trying to cross Wisconsin in Georgetown on New Year's Eve 1999, which meant that whether the world ended that night the way everybody said it might, it definitely ended for me. I knew the streets. I could walk down the mall. Only everybody I saw was dead. I thought for a while that the whole world must have died or something, but then you'd think there'd be more newly dead people like me, you know, the whole government thing, if the world ended surely some significant percentage of them would go to hell, and surely they couldn't all qualify to get into Studio 666, so where were they? No, the world hadn't ended, just my little oxygen-consuming, carbon-dioxide-expelling bag of blood and bone. And now that I was looking for it, I began to see the signs that life was going on. Things changed position. Garbage cans were in one place and then they were in another. Cars were parked somewhere and then they weren't. But you never actually saw them move. Nothing moved. It was like when they were in motion, they disappeared. And it occurred to me that it was like long-exposure photography. You set the exposure time really long, the aperture very small, and the only things you get are the things that don't move. Pedestrians, cars, anything that moves is gone. It's like in hell time passes so slowly that living people are invisible to us. I had it figured out! "You think you've got it figured out," said a fat man. I looked at him, a little puzzled by why he was fat. I mean, surely when you die, you don't have to be fat anymore. "It's how you see yourself," said the fat man. "You know how people said, 'inside every fat person there's a thin person struggling to get out'? Not true. It's just another fat guy in there. In fact, usually a fatter guy." "Can you lose weight?" I asked, because at least it was a conversation with somebody who wasn't trying to get wafted up into heaven or deeper into hell. And also it was kind of funny. "You can look thinner," said the fat guy, "if you start to think of yourself as thin." "So why can't you think of yourself as good, and get on up into heaven?" He shook his head. "Those street preachers, they aren't thinking of themselves as good. They're thinking of themselves as righteous. Saved. Chosen." "Better than everybody else." "Bingo. Ditto with the bad dudes and the tough girls. They're needy, all of them, and needy doesn't get you off the street. Needy is what gets you on the street." "If you've got it all figured out," says I, "what are you still doing here?" "I'm conflicted," he said. "A common problem. Whenever I start going one direction, I do something to send me back the other." He grinned. "While you, you're talented." Talented? "I'm not the one reading minds here. I mean, you've been answering stuff I didn't say." "Yeah, I've got good hearing. I don't have to wait for you to speak. Because, you know, it's not like we actually have voices. We just sort of wish our thoughts to be heard, and then people close by can hear them. But your thoughts are actually just as loud, so to speak. So yeah, I can hear stuff. But you, you can see things." I looked around. "No more than anybody else." "Nope, nope, not so. I watched you. Crossing the street. You waited for the light." "I did not. The lights don't change." "And you dodged the pedestrians." "There are no pedestrians." "Nevertheless." "I don't see them, so how can I dodge them?" "Oh, you philosopher, you." "What possible difference could it make to you?" "I want to see how useful you are. What you can do." "This is a job interview?" "I've got an opening for an elf." I looked him over, this time more carefully. No pipe clenched between his teeth, but his stomach was rather like a bowlful of jelly. "Am I supposed to laugh when I see you in spite of myself?" "Clement Moore didn't actually see me," he said. "I'd long since stopped doing personal appearances by then. But you see, it doesn't make much difference. I've got this image in my face every Christmas --no, every Halloween and two months after--and it's all I can do to keep from wearing the red suit all year long. I used to be thin, when the Dutch were in charge of the image." "What are you doing in hell? Aren't you supposed to be Saint Nicholas?" "I'm not in hell. Any more than you are." "Here's a clue, Nick. This ain't heaven." "We're hovering, my friend. Or maybe we're volleying, like the shuttlecock in badminton, back and forth, almost one thing, almost another." "Me, I'm just walking the streets." "Dodging the pedestrians." "I'm not a toymaker." "Fine with me. That toymaking, that's just part of the myth. Hasn't anybody caught on that I'm dead? They don't issue us hammers and saws and set us to work making wooden toys. There's precious few of us can even see the living, and those that can move things in the material world, those are even more rare." "So how do you come up with all those toys for good girls and boys?" "When we need toys, which isn't as often as you think, we steal them." "Ah," I said. "Now I'm beginning to get why you aren't in heaven. You aren't Santa Claus. You're Robin Hood." "Mostly we break toys," said Santa. "Or hide them. It's not like we can move anything very far. And nowadays it's a cash economy. Come to think of it, it was back when I was alive, too. They used to draw pictures of me with bags of money, because that's what I did, my famous good deed, I paid a ransom in coin, saved some kids. Money's what we mostly use now, too. And because it's paper, it's even easier. Lighter. Even my less talented elves can move it." I couldn't help it. He was so serious. I laughed. "Man, you had me going there. Santa Claus, stealing toys, breaking them, hiding them, dealing in cash. You got your elves out picking pockets?" He didn't look amused. "Yes," he said. "I fail to see the humor." "You're not putting me on?" "I want to see if you can move things. In the material world." "I told you, I can't even see the people, let alone pick their pockets, and even if I could, I've never been a thief." At once my conscience twinged. "At least, not deliberately. Not systematically." "You got a better job offer?" "I want a shot at heaven," I said. "As long as I'm not completely in hell, why not?" "Me too," said Santa. "Some years I've been so close." "What about getting into the devil's workshop? Been close to that, too?" He shrugged. "As a novelty act, they've invited me now and then. But not to stay. Strictly in the back door, you know." "Why should I do this? I mean, you've been at this for what, fifteen hundred years? And you're still here." "Got any better plans? It's not like you're running out of time." "Santa, excuse me for saying this, but as far as I can tell, you're as looney as a one-legged duck." He shook his head. "My friend, nobody's crazy here. We might be wrong about a lot of stuff, but we can't lie and we aren't crazy. Still, like I said, no hurry. Look me up if you decide Santa's gang of elves sounds more interesting than ... whatever it is you're doing." "How would I find you?" He rolled his eyes. "Just ask. In case you didn't know it, I'm famous. People keep track of where I am." "I was afraid I'd have to go to the north pole or something." He shook his head, turned his back, and walked away. * He was right. I could see living people. And it wasn't a matter of slowing down or speeding up, either. It was more like you had to pay attention to something else, sort of look away and then be aware of what's going on at the edges of things. Only that's the strange thing--when you're dead, there are no edges. You have the habit, from all those years of binocular vision, of seeing only this window in front of you, with out-of-focus glimpses to the sides, and most dead people never get past that. But the fact is, when you're dead you don't have those limitations. You can see ... well, you remember how people used to say that teachers seemed to have eyes in the back of their heads? Or it's like, you could feel someone's gaze on you, even though they were behind you? Well, that's how it is when you're dead, once you get the hang of it. You're aware in every direction. It's not really vision. It's just knowledge, but your mind kind of makes sense of it like vision. I wasn't consciously seeing those moving cars or pedestrians, so I didn't "know" they were there. But I was aware of them, aware of the people in the cars, aware of the people on the street, and some old reflex made me dodge them, weave among them without knowing it. Thanks to the tip from Nick--I hate calling him Santa Claus because that name's too loaded down with cultural freight, I just have to laugh whenever I think of saying, "Hi, Santa!"--I got pretty good at seeing mortals. Got to be a habit, really, knowing where they were, knowing what they were doing. I found my range was pretty good, too, because this awareness thing, it isn't blocked by mere walls, I know who's coming around the corner before they actually come into my field of view. And I'm not a genius, either, I can imagine there's those that can see for miles, right through hills and cities and whatever else is in the way. Maybe see forever, if they've got the mind to sort through all the stuff you'd see in between. And it wasn't just awareness. I could move stuff. The thing is, touching the material world, changing it, that doesn't come the way awareness did--it isn't just automatically happening, so you only have to notice it. Ordinarily, when you're dead you simply don't affect the material world in any way. You don't sink through the earth or walk through walls, but only because you still have the respect for those surfaces you learned when you were alive. You can go through them, just as you can sink down into the earth, though that's extraordinarily boring, since nothing much is going on once you get past the earthworm and gopher level. But you can affect things, not by touching or pushing or pulling, but by--oh, how else to say this?--by really, really wanting things to move. Yeah, OK, by wishing. But we're not talking about some wistful little desire. "Oh, I wish I could eat a candy bar again." No, it takes a desire so intense it consumes you, at least for the moment, the way a campfire consumes an empty marshmallow bag. You feel shrunken, thin, weak. But it's funny, because you also feel amazingly powerful. Like a superhero. Just because you got a chair to move. Only how much can you really care about moving a chair? That's why poltergeists are so rare, and why they're usually so mean. They're angry all the time, and they move things around in order to cause fear in the living. That's the consuming desire--to make the living afraid of them. To have power. It's a pathetic thing, and it's definitely on the evil side of the ledger. Evil, but the bouncer doesn't let poltergeists into the netherclub, because they don't need somebody inside moving the furniture or spilling the drinks, I guess. I'm no poltergeist. I'm not mad at anybody. OK, well, so, that's a lie. I'm pretty steamed about being stuck between heaven and hell, and I'm ticked off about getting killed before the prime of my life (at least I assume the prime was still ahead of me, seeing how nonprime the years I actually lived through seemed to be). So how was I going to move anything? It was Nick who showed me how. Once I realized he'd been right about my seeing the living, I looked him up and he kind of took me under his wing, he and a few of his elves--who are not little and not cute, they're just dead people like me--and showed me the work they do. It isn't just at Christmas, though Christmas is for them like tax time is for accountants. All through the year, Nick and his gang are watching out for children. They'll pick a kid--almost at random, or so it seems to me, though maybe there's some system in it, some signs they look for--and they just follow, watching. Most kids, their life is OK. Sure, they get yelled at, spanked, ignored, ridiculed, the normal stuff that makes life interesting, but most of them, somebody loves them, somebody's looking out for them, somebody thinks they're pretty good to have around. You can live through a lot of hard times, if you've got that. There are other kids, though. Two kinds. Bullies and victims. And Nick's on the look out for both. The victims, they break your heart. The ones that are getting tortured or beaten, there's not much we can do for them. The rage in the person hurting them, that's a powerful force, it matches any wish we can come up with, and then on top of that they've got bodies, which pretty much makes us helpless. What Nick's gang does in those cases is, they try their best to make it obvious to other living people what's going on. You know, cause a shirt to ride up so a bruise is visible, or get a neighbor to look in a window or hear a sound, something to make them suspicious. A lot of them call the cops or child welfare, if it's a country where the cops care, or where there is an agency whose job is to look out for kids. But a lot of them don't, and in the end, our hearts just break for those kids and we sort of just wait for them to join us. Because a lot of Nick's best recruits come from among those children. His scouts, so to speak. They've got a nose for it. The neglected kids, though, Nick's gang can help a lot, there. We get food to them, sometimes. We open a door now and then--that's a lot harder and more complicated than you might think. And when they're alone, some of Nick's gang, they can't move things, but they can make sounds that the living can hear, so they sing to them or talk to them. Tell them stories. We get tagged as imaginary friends sometimes, but it's not like we're looking for credit. We just try to help the kids know they're not alone, that somebody cares what they're going through. And those singers, they do a sweet lullaby, I tell you. Songs that even the deaf can hear, cause they sing right into the mind. Sometimes I go with them, just to hear them sing. We can't save all their lives, but we can make what life they have a little better, and that's good. It's not like we think of death as all that big a deal, anyway. I mean, we are dead, and so death doesn't hold any fear for us. That's why we're generally not in the lifesaving business. When we can get a few crackers to a kid, sure, we'll do it, but ... they'll just need more tomorrow, right? While a good song can live in their memory through a lot of dark nights of fear and loneliness. But that's not the kind of work I do. I'm not a singer, and when I move things, I've got to be mad. It's my sense of injustice that has to get riled up. And so I'm on the bully patrol. You know the kids I'm talking about. Some of them are physically violent, but most bullies do their damage with their mouths. They've got this instinct for the thing that makes a weaker kid hurt the most. Sometimes it's obvious--a kid with a big nose, you don't have to be a brain surgeon to figure out what to make fun of. But some of these bullies, it's like they can read minds. Their victim has a drunk mother, the bully goes straight to the mother jokes-- how does he know? The girl who's lonely and scared she's not good enough for anybody, the bully girls taunt her clothes or play really mean jokes where they pretend to be her friend until she commits herself, says something that shows she really believes in their faux kindness, and then they can mock her. Some of the things they do are so elaborate, it takes so much thought and effort to do them, you can hardly believe someone would go to all that trouble just to make another person unhappy. Well, that ticks me off. That gets me all intense, and I feel it building up, and I can move things. The trouble is, what do I move? It's not like the bully deserves to die or anything, so I can't make the roof cave in on them. Death may not be a big deal to us, but murder still is, and one of the rules that seem to govern the universe is that while we can do a little messing around with the material world, we're not allowed to kill. Just can't do it. Wish all we want, but if the thing we try to move might kill somebody, it just won't budge. So we've got to be resourceful. I mostly try for justice. A girl makes fun of another kid's big nose, I make sure the bully girl bumps into a door that wasn't quite where she thought it was. Big swollen nose, a shiner. Let her see how it feels to have other people stare at your face for a while. Or a bully boy who shoves little kids around--I can arrange for him to twist his ankle or trip and fall headlong right as he's going after a kid, make him look bad in front of everybody or distract him with a little pain. My favorite, though, is to make it so when the bully just touches his victim, I make the victim's nose bleed like a river, make him bruise up around his eye or jaw. Doesn't really hurt the victim when I do it, but it makes it look like the bully did a full-out assault, gets him in so much trouble. A few times the bully's been so frightened by the injury he "caused" that he gets control of his hostility and stops picking on kids. But here's the problem. I'm working on justice, protecting kids from each other, trying to help change kids who've fallen in love with cruelty, help them start being a little more decent, learn a little compassion. But when you come right down to it, what am I actually doing? Causing pain. Hurting people. All in a good cause, right? But remember, the guy who judges you is the same one who said, "Turn the other cheek." I tell myself, I'd turn my own cheek. But he never said I have to turn away and not notice when somebody else is getting slapped, right? I mean, he also said that it was better to tie a millstone around your neck and jump into the sea than to hurt one of the little ones. But then I also have to be honest and tell myself that I'm hurting some of his little ones, too. The mean ones, the vicious ones, the ones that maybe he doesn't really think of as his. But if his capacity for forgiveness is infinite, the way some people say, then they're all his. Didn't he get ticked off at some moneychangers, though, and lash out with a scourge and knock over some tables? Surely he understands how we feel, those of us who are working on trying to stop the bullies. You know the real problem? There are so few of us. Few who have the ability even to see the living--can't do much unless you can see what's going on!--and even fewer who, seeing, care. Because most of the dead, they just disconnect from the living. So mortals are mean to each other. Big deal. Get over it. Get on with your ... well, your death. Whatever this is. You can't fix anything in the mortal world. You get no credit for it. You're already judged to be unworthy of heaven. So it's not like you've got a stake in what's going on. Just a few of us who care about the kids and have the ability to do anything about it. So even if we're making a difference in the lives of some kids, there are thousands, millions of others that we never see. That's not a reason to stop, though. It's a reason to try harder. It's not like we sleep. That's something, anyway. We got twenty-four hours a day. You do get tired, though. Not physically tired. Just tired in your soul. Seeing how many mean people there are. Seeing how eagerly the victims keep hoping that their parents will love them, that they'll find friends at school. And here we are, trying to help keep those hopes alive. It breaks your heart. It makes you want to despair sometimes, that despite all that hope, there's always a bully to dash it. Why do they hate happiness in other people so much? Especially the children--where do they learn to take such pleasure in someone else's misery? Was I like that? Oh, man, that's the thing that comes back again and again. Every rude thing I ever said to another kid. There was this guy in junior high and high school, we were friends, you know? In plays together, in band. He was smart and talented, and I liked him. But one day, I'm sitting there with a song going through my head, and for some reason I come up with a new lyric for it that makes fun of this friend. A song about Bruce, talking about how conceited he is. And, well, he is, not so much conceited as really excited about all the cool things he can do. I think back on it and I realize, he wasn't vain, he was just thrilled to keep discovering new things he could do, and he thought he could share his excitement with his friends. Well, I cured him of that. Cause it wasn't just the one song. I sang that to my friends and they all laughed and that was it for me, the first talent I ever had--a talent for musical meanness. I must have written twenty Brucie songs. Till Bruce stopped hanging around with us and it was no fun to sing it when he wasn't there. Made me look bad instead of clever. I think back on that, I wonder where Nick was. Maybe Nick's gang saw me but figured, Bruce really was talented and smart, he really didn't need a loser like me for a friend. They didn't have to stop me, because I just wasn't important enough in Bruce's life for him to need rescue. I sure hope that's it. I hope I did no harm. That's the kind of thing that goes through your mind when you're on bully patrol. Way too much self-examination, if you ask me, but you can't help it, you keep seeing yourself in the bullies as much as in the victims. They're all kids, after all. Even if they're rotten and mean, they're kids. They might still become something worthwhile. * Christmas, that's the tough time. I had a whole year of learning, mostly on American streets because I knew the culture well enough to recognize what was going on with the kids and to be able to think of ways to help them. And just when I'm getting pretty deft and clever at bully-stopping, Nick comes to me and says, "It's the Christmas rush. Bully patrol is over till after the big day." It's obvious that it's Christmas. I mean, there's no missing it-- because Nick's in a red suit. When the decorations go up, there's all these pictures of him looking like Norman Rockwell's Coke-drinking Santa, and he just can't hold onto his civilian image, the red suit just pops right out of him and that's how he looks. And it's a good thing I can't see myself in mirrors, because I've got to tell you, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that I look really small and I'm wearing green. Sometimes you just want to yell at those advertising guys. Can't they leave us a little dignity? Christmas and the elves. That's when the serious thievery begins. Right, like you thought we actually made the toys! We're dead, and even if we were alive, most toys that kids actually want require serious machinery. Do you have any idea just how much equipment it takes to make one lousy little Lego? Let alone a whole Toy Story action figure. No, we don't make toys. We just redistribute them. And not in the stores. Think about it--who goes to Toys R Us? People with no money? Hardly. So going to the parking lot and taking things out of one shopping cart and putting them in another, what good is that going to do? We can't move things far anyway--it just wipes us out even to jostle stuff. So none of this stuff about bags of toys going down chimneys. It's pretty rare for something to show up under the tree that Mom and Dad didn't know about in advance. Besides, we have to be really intense in order to move things, right? So here's what we do on Christmas patrol. We watch for people with more than they need to be out around poor people. Or for poor kids to be in a place where there's plenty of money changing hands. I'll be teamed up with one of the singing elves, and she'll distract the rich guy while he's handling his money, while I liberate a five-dollar bill or sometimes even a twenty and cause it to drift down to the floor. Then I stand watch over it, keeping it from being noticed by anyone until the singer is able to entice some poor kid to be close enough, and then I push the five or the twenty--or, heck, the buck or the quarter, cause sometimes that's all I can get--out into the open, where the kid can see it. You know the amazing thing? The number of kids who immediately try to give it to the store owner, or take it straight to their parents. Well, once we give it to them, it's theirs to dispose of. The gift has been given. And when you think about it, maybe the best gift is for the kid with no money to give that twenty to the store owner, to prove that he doesn't really need that money, that it's more important to be a decent person than to have what money can buy. Or if he gives it to his parents, well, maybe that's food on the table. Sure, maybe it's booze, too, and that's why they're poor, but it's not the kid's fault, the kid did the right thing. He contributed to the family. About half the kids, though, they hang on to the money, and that's fine, that's even better, because you know what? Almost every time, they use some of it to buy themselves a treat--ice cream or a candy bar, maybe a cooky--but then the rest of the money goes straight into buying a gift for somebody else. A little brother or sister. Mom or Dad. Sometimes a teacher who's been good to them. I even saw one kid who had four dollars and twenty-eight cents in his fist--change from the ice cream bar--and he sees a kid who looks even more poor than him, and he just walks up and gives it to him and says, "Merry Christmas." Right then I loved that kid so much. Because he got it. He understood. None of that stuff goes with you when you die. Only what you did for other people, or to them, and what they did for you, and to you. That's all you have with you when you're dead. That kid, when he dies, he's going to have so much cool stuff. Because he has a good heart. He won't be walking around the streets of hell, no place to stay. He'll fit right in with the light, he'll pass that entrance exam, they'll greet him with songs, you know? And I got him the fiver that he was able to mostly share. That's something. That's Christmas. We just use the season to get gifts into the hands of children who don't have anything. It's about hope, just like what we do the rest of the year. That's what Nick does--he's in the hope business. * So it's the day after Christmas, and we're back on the regular schedule, but Nick, he comes to me--and the red suit hasn't faded yet, so he really looks like Santa Claus--he comes to me and says, "Want to take the long hike with me?" I don't know what he's talking about, but I say, "Sure," because he wants me to and it's only thanks to him that I feel like I'm worth the space I take up, even on the streets of hell. Whatever the long hike is, it's not like I'll get tired or have to carry a pup tent on my back. So I say sure and off we go. Straight up to the light. And it's not a very long hike at all, not heading there. It's like, no matter where you are on earth, once you decide to find the light, there it is, just a little out of reach, up and over your shoulder. Nick, he goes like he knows the way, and I guess he does. Every year after Christmas, he goes back to the light and tries to get in. That's what I was along for. The other elves, I guess most of them have gone with him, some of them more than once. And I guess they were just as happy to have the new guy go along. Because there goes Nick, straight into the light, and you think, "Man, this time he's going to make it. This time he's getting out of hell!" He's in there so long. You have so much hope for him. And then ... pop. He's right back out. He looks at you. Shrugs his shoulders. "Better luck next time," he says. Only I was new at this. And I'd been working on my sense of outrage all year, you know? And it's not like I was getting into heaven any time soon. I mean, if Nick can't pass the entrance exam, you think I stand a chance? So I stand there and yell--not speaking loud, because it's not actually, sound, but I'm really intense, you know?--and I know I'm not supposed to get ticked off at the light for heaven's sake, but anyway, I yell, "Did you ever think that your stupid requirements might be too high? What've you got in there anyway, a bunch of pious martyrs? A bunch of goody-two-shoes never broke a rule in their lives? Well take a look at Nick here, he's on the front line, dead though he may be, he's trying to do something about it! I don't see you down there on the streets trying to make life better for kids! So what about that, huh? Ever think about how maybe some of the people in heaven aren't doing diddly-squat and maybe some of the people in hell are actually doing some good in the world?" Finally I say enough that the intensity wears off and I remember who I'm talking to and I think, Man, it's going to take, like, ten thousand years to work off the sheer blasphemy of what I just said. Only right then I hear something inside my mind, the way it must be when the singers do their lullabies for the suffering children. This voice, so soft, so kind, and all it says is, "Whatever you do for the least of my little ones, you've done it for me." And it about knocks me over. He sees. He knows. What we're doing. What our work is. He knows, and he loves us for it, and yet ... And yet Nick still can't get in. I look at him, and he shrugs again. "Yelling doesn't solve anything," he says. And then he leads me on the long hike back. Yeah, that's the "long" part of the long hike. Getting to the light is quick. Getting back, that's hard and slow, because every step hurts, coming away from that beauty and going back to the plain old world with all the dead people preaching or being cool, and all the living people going about their business as if life were really long and they had all the time in the world. And you can't help but think, when you look at the living, you think: It's so easy for them, they can just do things, only they so rarely do anything that matters. So many children, all they need is a word and a smile, all they need is an act of kindness and generosity, something that any living person could give them, but so often they leave it up to the dead. But the ones who don't leave it up to us, the ones who are good to the kids, they're my friends, you know? They're my sisters and my brothers. I can't do anything to show them how I feel, but I'm glad they're alive. They're the only reason hell isn't more, well, hellish. Finally we got back, down on the streets of hell. And Nick says, "Another year to go." And I say, "Nick, thanks for letting me be part of it. Maybe it's not good enough for them, but it's good enough for me." And he grins and even though he doesn't move, it feels like he just clapped me on the shoulder, and he says, "Then it's good enough for me, too." And off he goes. Only there's something wrong with this picture. I'm seeing him but there's more to him than the red suit. There's a kind of jauntiness in his step, and even though that's probably my own mind creating the image that fits what I'm sensing about him, the fact is that it's still true. Nick just failed for the fifteen hundredth time to get into heaven, and he's almost dancing. "Hey!" says I. "Hey, Santa!" He turns around and there we are, face to face, and I say, "What are you so happy about?" "It was a good Christmas," he says, all innocentlike, and I know he's not lying because you can't, but he's also not exactly answering me. "How come you didn't make it this year?" I demanded. "I don't think you get a list," he says. "Bull," says I. "I came out of that light knowing every little sin I ever committed. You got the whole inventory, Nick. And I want to know what it is that keeps you out." He turns around slowly, indicating the street around him. All the Christmas decorations are still up, of course, and there in every window, there's his face, Santa Claus, grinning and selling stuff. "It's all that," he says. "What, the Christmas decorations?" "The fact that it's my face and not his." "You don't paint those pictures! You don't hang them up!" "Yeah, but I like it that they're there. I like being famous. He never did." "And that's it? That's all?" "I don't even know if that's the reason," he says. "Because they don't give me a list of sins. But it's a story. Better than nothing, right?" And off he goes, this time for real, and it's time to get back on the bully patrol, but a thought crosses my mind. Maybe the reason they don't give him a list of sins is because there isn't one. Not for him. Because there aren't any sins. He was in the light an awfully long time before he bounced out. What if he didn't get bounced at all? What if, every year, he chooses to come back even though he doesn't have to? Because he'd rather be here, homeless in hell, doing the work he does, than to be happy in heaven. In fact, maybe heaven would be hell to him, knowing that he could be leading us in helping kids, only there he is with a harp or whatever. So the only way for him to be in heaven is not to be in heaven. He's got work to do, and he's doing it, and that's heaven for him. And then this really strange thought comes to me. What if that's all heaven is for anybody? What if everybody gets bounced down to the streets of hell, but if you find the right things to do, it becomes heaven for you? Look what I've got: A job to do that matters in the world. Good friends to work with. Nick leading me, a man I can look up to. Tell me what heaven's got that's any better than that. Hey, it can't be true. I mean, if it were true, wouldn't St. Francis and St. Peter and all those guys be down here, working alongside us? No, heaven's heaven, and I'm in hell. Maybe Nick's an angel in disguise, and maybe he's just what he seems to be--another homeless dead guy desperate to figure out a way to get off the streets. What difference does it make? I'm not in torment. In fact, I had a pretty merry Christmas. I saw a lot of sad things, but I saw some good things, and a few of those good things, I made them happen. And then I thought, maybe I could make even more good things happen if I could just tell the living about how it is here, about how it works. I can't do it like an angel with a trumpet, so that everybody would have to believe. But I can tell it like a story. Making letters appear on a computer screen, that's a piece of cake compared to getting a five-dollar bill out of a wallet and onto the street. So I found a guy who leaves his computer on day and night, and I wrote all this down, and now you're reading it, and you can take it as fiction or you can take it as truth, it doesn't matter to me. I don't care what you believe. I just care what you do. Well, I've taken just about as much time off as I can spare. Like the old joke says, "Back on your heads!" I'm up to my neck in it and there's only a few of us to shovel. Merry Christmas. God bless us every one. Suffer little children to come unto me. All that stuff. From spike66 at att.net Sun Dec 25 22:00:30 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2011 14:00:30 -0800 Subject: [ExI] boomerang Message-ID: <004901ccc350$9f216e30$dd644a90$@att.net> Are there any present who wish to discuss Michael Lewis' Boomerang? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Sun Dec 25 22:16:42 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2011 23:16:42 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Uncertainty (Was: Organizations to "Speed Up" Creation of AGI?) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4EF7A0CA.2070706@aleph.se> Kevin G Haskell wrote: > I give reasons for > >why I think we might be in the range 0.1-1% risk of global disaster per > >year. I urge a great deal of caution and intellectual humility." > > No offense intended by this, but isn't the idea of putting any sort of > percentage range on something like this actually mutually exclusive > from being intellectually humble? Isn't it a bit like the Doomsday > clock which has been completely false since it's inception decades ago? What would you bet on the stock market going up 100% on the next trading day? Or that military action will break out against Iran over the next year? Or that you will unexpectedly meet an old school friend next week? These possibilities are real, and it makes sense to assign a probability to them - it is just that it cannot be a neat and certain number like when you calculate the chance of getting a royal flush from a random poker hand. These probabilities are subjective states based on our varying ignorance of the world. Yet merely saying that one is very unlikely and another one is likely is not enough for real decision making - when deciding how much to invest or where to deploy troops you actually use a plausibility measure. In order to make consistent decisions and avoid being Dutch-booked you need sensible plausibility update rules, and that leads to the Bayesian formulas (see Jaynes, Probability Theory: the Logic of Science, chapter 2 for a treatment of the Cox theorems, http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/prob/book.pdf ) So if you try to be rational, you will go around with subjective probability estimates that you try to update as well as possible based on all the seen evidence and Bayes rule, but still weighed by your initial prior probability estimate. This estimate might be expressed as a sharp number between 0 and 1, but it does represent uncertainty, not certainty. (of course, it would be better to express it as a probability distribution - that gives more information) So, getting back to my possible non-humble estimates: they are my current estimates. They will change as more evidence accrues - for example you giving me a good argument for why they are too low or too high, what I read, changes in world politics, what have you. So when I say "0.1-1%", do not take this as a claim that some true probability in the world has to be in this interval, but that this is what I currently take to be the most rational estimate. The atomic clock is a bit different. I don't think it is intended as an epistemic signal (telling exactly how bad the situation is), but as a rhetorical device showing concern. It contains some evidence, but while it does correlate to some extent to what most would agree the threat levels were, it also missed big things like the Cuban missile crisis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock#Time_changes > > >(That sentence structure is worthy Immanuel Kant :-) ) > > Depending on what you think of Kant's writing, should I consider that > a compliment or insult? ;) See it as evidence of having far more linguistic working memory than most readers :-) -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From mbb386 at main.nc.us Sun Dec 25 22:49:08 2011 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2011 17:49:08 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Homeless in Hell- A Christmas Story, by Orson Scott Card In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <96fc577dcc30793e99998bfd1c633a6e.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> > I could not get a response from the server either, and so here is the > Christmas story by Orson Scott Card... > > Thank you, John Grigg! Regards, MB From anders at aleph.se Sun Dec 25 23:11:35 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 00:11:35 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Organizations to "Speed Up" Creation of AGI? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4EF7ADA7.20608@aleph.se> Kevin G Haskell wrote: > > >For a fun case where the probability of a large set of existential risks > >that includes totally unknown cosmic disasters can be bounded, see > >http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0512204 > > Only 5 listed here? In the States, at least in my area, we have > several stations called "The History Channel." There is the original > station, the Military station, and H2, (which was recently History > International.) While the name of the channels would indicate that > they are all about history, they also discuss various Doomsday > scenarios on a regular basis. Yup. It is very much a channel for "history" - I don't think it has that deep scientific validity. A channel that has Giorgio A Tsoukalos claim "aliens did it" doesn't impress me that much. The problem with seriously studying existential risk is that most people do treat it as entertainment rather than something related to the real world. This is true even for academics - there are about three times as many scientific papers about dung-beetle reproduction than about human extinction. Not good evidence for the rationality of our species, even though the beetles are lovely. If I may boast a bit with my institute, we have a pretty good (IMHO) book about global catastrophic risks and existential risks. http://www.global-catastrophic-risks.com/ But there should be more. > I can only reiterate the concept of putting ourselves in AGI's shoes, > and I don't think I would be too pleased that they considered me a > greater threat, great enough to delay me and all that I might provide > humans and the universe, over all the other existential threats, combined. But now you are assuming the AGI thinks like a human. Humans are social mammals that care a lot what other humans think about them, their ability to form future alliances and have built-in emotional macros for social reactions. An AGI is unlikely to have these properties unless you manage to build them into it. The AGI might just note that you did an attempt to secure it, and even though you failed, this is merely information to use for future decisions, nothing to lash back about. > From a human standpoint, I can only say of us as a species, one that > has proven this axiom true and valuable over and over, and that is: > "No guts, no glory." Our species has reached this point because of > both our incredible curiosity, and our ability to do something about > investigating and toolmaking at ever higher levels in order to satiate > that curiosity. That is what has made our species so unique...up until > 'soon.' Evolutionary strategies that are successful can lead into dead ends. Apparently there are several lineages of carnivores over the triassic that grew larger, gaining advantages as predators - and then became vulnerable to temporary ecological noise and died out... only to be replaced by the next lineage. We could be in the same situation - a daring strategy might on average work well, but raises the risks over time until they cause a disaster. It has happened again and again in finance, as Taleb has pointed out. > > >> Once a brain is emulated, a process that companies like IBM have > >> promised to complete in 10 years because of competitive concerns, > not to > >> mention all of the other companies and countries pouring massive > amounts > >> of money for the same reason, the probability that various > companies and > > countries are also pouring ever larger sums of money into developing > > AGI, especially since many of the technologies overlap. If > > brain-emulation is achieved in 10 years or less, then AGI can't be far > >> behind. > > >Ah, you believe in marketing. I have a bridge to sell you cheaply... :-) > > It depends on who is doing the marketing. If you are IBM, based on > your track-record over the past 100 years (as of this year) of an > almost endless array of computer development and innovations, up to > and including "Watson," then I may very well be interested in that > bridge. ;) IBMs track record at predicting the future is spotty. Remember their views on the PC market, and how they let themselves be outsmarted by those kids at Microsoft? Besides the obvious enthusiasm bias when dealing with ones own field, what researchers like Henry Markram claim is going to be achieved "within 10 years" turns out to be much messier when you actually inspect the claims and research state. I think that once you get a demonstration of a brain to emulation pipeline interest will explode, but right now there are no such projects - the IBM project aims at neuromorphic computing, Markram has done column simulations and are hoping to scale them up, and so on. > > Why I think this 'does' have to do with an assumption about what is > going to happen regarding expenditures, that's true, and in answer to > your question, I do not have a source as to how much companies and > countries are presently investing in brain emulation or in AGI. I > assume that is a rhetorical question because there is no way of > knowing considering that much of the work being done, and that will be > done, will be in secret, and because of the array of technologies > involved, would be hard to quantify monetarily even if the entire > planet's budget was transparent. Maybe, but from my knowledge of the AI field there is plenty of funding for particular applications but very little support for general AI. Even the intelligence applications are more text mining and decision support, not thinking. > > However, I'll approach your question a different way. As an observer > of human history, and present, the fact that we are a competitive > species (the U.S had the fastest super-computer just a few short years > ago, until the Chinese claimed that mantel, up until this year, when > the Japanese took it away (again) with their "K" supercomputer, for > instance,) I can guarantee that with an error margin of 1%, that there > is a 99% chance, because this race is as important to nations and > companies as was the Cold War itself, because winning it will > essentially mean 'everything," that the pace you think that human will > create a completely artificial brain and or AGI will blind-side even > people working on the projects 'because' this is not going to be a > 'mostly' open-source type of project. Yes, it will include a lot of > open sharing, which will also speed up the process, but it will be the > heavy financial hitters, on a global scale, that will make this happen > very soon. This makes sense once governments think there is anything to it. A bit like all major governments agree on the importance of dealing with climate change, right? Or how the Soviet union kept pace with the US in computing? While rational governments or parts of governments might race for superintelligence, do not underestimate the lack of foresight and incompetence one can achieve too. Looking at the history of great strategic projects - radar, nuclear weapons, rocketry etc. I am struck by how often they got derailed by stupidity. The German nuclear project was hopeless because the key scientists had either been suppressed by the Deutsche Physik movement or (in the case of Uranverein 1) just sent to the front. Key parts of the Soviet programs were purged in political purges. Different radar projects in the US military were sabotaging each other, and so on. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sun Dec 25 23:46:30 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 00:46:30 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Organizations to "Speed Up" Creation of AGI? In-Reply-To: <4EF7ADA7.20608@aleph.se> References: <4EF7ADA7.20608@aleph.se> Message-ID: On 26 December 2011 00:11, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Evolutionary strategies that are successful can lead into dead ends. > Apparently there are several lineages of carnivores over the triassic that > grew larger, gaining advantages as predators - and then became vulnerable to > temporary ecological noise and died out... only to be replaced by the next > lineage. We could be in the same situation - a daring strategy might on > average work well, but raises the risks over time until they cause a > disaster. A disaster for whom? The human beings currently alive? Their offspring? Our species? Our country/race/persuasion? Our clade? Our personal genes? Our "children of mind"? Our culture? Our personal identity? Is "survival" anyway the only metrics by which we should is "survival" the only metrics by which we should take our decisions or are there other competing values and priorities? And what does survival mean in the first place and how should we weigh a 5% chance of lasting for 1000 time units vs a 50% chance of lasting for 100 time units? I am always perplexed by how little one's position is made explicit with regard to what should we really care about and why. -- Stefano Vaj From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Mon Dec 26 00:07:36 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 01:07:36 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: <4EF76B3F.6030706@libero.it> References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> <4EF19D66.4070907@aleph.se> <4EF1FD4D.1090600@libero.it> <4EF24ACA.3030400@aleph.se> <4EF3003E.7060803@aleph.se> <4EF43EC6.8030108@aleph.se> <4EF76B3F.6030706@libero.it> Message-ID: On 25 December 2011 19:28, Mirco Romanato wrote: > You are not "allowed" to pay them more if they are more productive. In > the long run (and often in the medium and short) you MUST pay them more > because you MUST keep them working for you and not leaving and working > for someone else paying more than you. Yes, you are right. You can and you have to. > This is a "minor" problem that you can make away with slavery. But the > slaves (and the forced low paid workers) usually are not very productive > because there is no advantage in working more than the minimum. Nor there is really for the entrepreneur to invest in technology, or for that matter in their training, because simply increasing the "brute force" is cheaper. > And on this we agree. There are government statistics (Denmark for sure, > maybe UK) that show the costs of immigrants for the government are > greater than the profits. They are a net taxpayer's loss. > But, in many ways, they are a source of profits (and votes) for the > bureaucrats and the politicos and their friends and allies. If they > won't there would not be a political will to let them in and let them > stay in. Exactly. Even though I would not entirely discount the lobbying of entrepreneurs that are either myopic or in position to externalise the indirect cost of manpower import. -- Stefano Vaj From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Mon Dec 26 01:29:21 2011 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2011 18:29:21 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Anders Sandberg Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 25, 2011 at 5:07 PM, wrote: snip > But now you are assuming the AGI thinks like a human. Humans are social > mammals that care a lot what other humans think about them, their > ability to form future alliances and have built-in emotional macros for > social reactions. An AGI is unlikely to have these properties unless you > manage to build them into it. While I have am down on raw emulations because I think humans have some psychological mechanisms I *don't* want to see in machines, AIs that had "carefully selected human personality characteristics such as seeking the good opinion of its peers (humans and other of its kind alike)" seems like a very good idea. > The AGI might just note that you did an > attempt to secure it, and even though you failed, this is merely > information to use for future decisions, nothing to lash back about. I would hope the AI would note that we tried to build into them the *best* human characteristics and they would not want to change themselves. I know this may be hopelessly optimistic. Keith From painlord2k at libero.it Mon Dec 26 01:30:41 2011 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 02:30:41 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> <4EF19D66.4070907@aleph.se> <4EF1FD4D.1090600@libero.it> <4EF24ACA.3030400@aleph.se> <4EF3003E.7060803@aleph.se> <4EF43EC6.8030108@aleph.se> <4EF76B3F.6030706@libero.it> Message-ID: <4EF7CE41.1050801@libero.it> Il 26/12/2011 01:07, Stefano Vaj ha scritto: > On 25 December 2011 19:28, Mirco Romanato wrote: >> This is a "minor" problem that you can make away with slavery. But the >> slaves (and the forced low paid workers) usually are not very productive >> because there is no advantage in working more than the minimum. > Nor there is really for the entrepreneur to invest in technology, or > for that matter in their training, because simply increasing the > "brute force" is cheaper. Increasing the number of "brutes" working in a slaver society is a problem because slaves rarely reproduce themselves well. Usually, living conditions and working conditions are bad enough to prevent them or they simply don't see the reason to reproduce to give their master another slave to use and abuse. In the past slaver society obtained the bulk of their slaves from external wars (if they won) and raids. If this source dried up, the number of slaves in the society dropped. In the Ancient Rome a common slave could cost 2 years of pay of an unskilled worker. So they were use with care and well maintained when possible. In theory an entrepreneur could buy slaves from other slave owners if he need more of them. But this would rapidly raise the price of slaves until he would unable to profit from an increase of production if significant external sources are not available. Indeed, the need of new slaves was an important part of the raids and conquest campaigns of Vikings and Muslims in East Europe, Russia, South Europe, Africa, India. >> And on this we agree. There are government statistics (Denmark for sure, >> maybe UK) that show the costs of immigrants for the government are >> greater than the profits. They are a net taxpayer's loss. >> But, in many ways, they are a source of profits (and votes) for the >> bureaucrats and the politicos and their friends and allies. If they >> won't there would not be a political will to let them in and let them >> stay in. > Exactly. Even though I would not entirely discount the lobbying of > entrepreneurs that are either myopic or in position to externalise the > indirect cost of manpower import. They would not if the government was not in the business to provide (for a fee) welfare help to immigrants, both legal or illegal, and in the business to prevent people from protecting themselves from internal and external miscreants. Mirco From spike66 at att.net Mon Dec 26 02:04:32 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2011 18:04:32 -0800 Subject: [ExI] boomerang Message-ID: <006701ccc372$b62a5f20$227f1d60$@att.net> When we talk about global catastrophe, probability 0.1 - 1%, it isn't clear how the term is defined. How would we know if we are having a catastrophe? Who gets to call it? We think of epidemics and meteor strikes and so on, but what if a catastrophe has a soft landing, kind of the opposite of a soft take-off singularity? What if faith in the world's banking system erodes until it just doesn't work right, and a progressive poverty settles upon the planet, in which rich people are hungry too? We somehow accept the notion of young poor nations being hungry, and do not classify that as a global catastrophe. But as soon as a portion of Europeans, Americans, Japanese, (or a significant number of people anywhere with cell phones and actual internet connections) miss a meal or two, then is it automatically reclassified as a global catastrophe? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Mon Dec 26 01:52:38 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2011 17:52:38 -0800 Subject: [ExI] renaming thread please, was a guy's name Message-ID: <005e01ccc371$0c8a4210$259ec630$@att.net> If Anders is OK with it, then I am, but having my name as a subject line on ExI-chat would make me squirm. {8-] What was the thread name supposed to be? spike -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Keith Henson Sent: Sunday, December 25, 2011 5:29 PM To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org Subject: [ExI] Anders Sandberg On Sun, Dec 25, 2011 at 5:07 PM, wrote: snip > But now you are assuming the AGI thinks like a human. Humans are > social mammals that care a lot what other humans think about them, > their ability to form future alliances and have built-in emotional > macros for social reactions. An AGI is unlikely to have these > properties unless you manage to build them into it. While I have am down on raw emulations because I think humans have some psychological mechanisms I *don't* want to see in machines, AIs that had "carefully selected human personality characteristics such as seeking the good opinion of its peers (humans and other of its kind alike)" seems like a very good idea. > The AGI might just note that you did an attempt to secure it, and even > though you failed, this is merely information to use for future > decisions, nothing to lash back about. I would hope the AI would note that we tried to build into them the *best* human characteristics and they would not want to change themselves. I know this may be hopelessly optimistic. Keith _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From rtomek at ceti.pl Mon Dec 26 04:31:11 2011 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 05:31:11 +0100 (CET) Subject: [ExI] Homeless in Hell- A Christmas Story, by Orson Scott Card In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sun, 25 Dec 2011, John Grigg wrote: > I could not get a response from the server either, and so here is the > Christmas story by Orson Scott Card... > [...] " I don't care what you believe. I just care what you do. " Thanks a lot. It was wonderful. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From anders at aleph.se Sun Dec 25 00:05:25 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2011 01:05:25 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Uploading cautions, "Speed Up" (Anders Sandberg) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4EF668C5.8070707@aleph.se> On 2011-12-24 15:39, Keith Henson wrote: > On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 10:21 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > >> On 2011-12-22 20:01, Keith Henson wrote: >>> On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 5:00 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: >>>>> Unless making copies is illegal and strongly enforced, for example, by >>>>> AIs. >>>> >>>> But that requires a singleton (to use Nick's term), an agency that can >>>> enforce global coordination. >>> >>> Or really widespread agreement that something is a bad idea. >> >> It is enough to have one defector to ruin the agreement. The only way of >> making the low-forking strategy evolutionarily stable is to coordinate >> so that deviations are punished enough *everywhere*. > > Or simply don't happen. It is hard to prevent people from trying things. A very strong singleton could monitor things so closely that it could figure out intentions in early stages (might be possible if you bug every upload mind - you can do some amazing surveillance in a software civilization!) and then put a stop to them. Or all people are modified/selected not to want the bad things. But this is far beyond widespread agreement that something is bad: if all societies agree to this level of monitoring/adjustment we already have a singleton of some kind. >> And that likely >> requires a global singleton, not just an agreement among all nice >> governments or companies. > > If the mechanisms for forking humans are in the control of machines > and not humans and the machines are smart enough to understand the > consequences of forking (grinding poverty) then it won't happen. This only occurs in the scenario where AI occurs before emulation, AI is non-disastrous and fairly nice, and forms a singleton of some kind. Drop any of the three assumptions and mass forking looks pretty possible (or we are all dead anyway). It's > hard to be sure, but there is no obvious reason for a humans to have > an evolved instinct to replicate as in forking. Even with children, > we have decoupled drives to mate and the instinct to take care of > offspring. But consider birth control. Or birth rates going down as wealth increases, often far below replacement levels. In fact, demographers have told me they think the UN scenarios assuming convergence to 2.1 kids per woman are just assuming it without evidence: it is entirely possible that societies could have stable sociocultural states with far lower birth rates - evolved drives are still around (there is an interesting link between threatening or uncertain environments and higher teenage pregnancy, which makes strategic sense), but they can be overridden or redirected by cultural memes. Forking is not necessarily driven by a drive to reproduce. It might be economic, it might be intellectual, it might even be religious - as soon as there is somebody with pro-forking views a lot of forking is likely unless the cost of computing space is very high. > Forking in the uploaded state should be much faster. I think the > fastest doubling time for a worm was 8.5 seconds. It infected all > 50,000 vulnerable computer on the 4 B internet addresses in single > digit hours and jammed the net. Forking speed of humans or AIs will likely depend on bandwidth to transmit the full state to new memory. Assuming a human is 30 terabytes, within a computer with current buses replication can happen in 500 seconds (at 60.0 gigabytes/s). But that can surely be improved, if only by parallel buses. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Mon Dec 26 09:33:26 2011 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 02:33:26 -0700 Subject: [ExI] RES: mit's answer to the stanford ai class In-Reply-To: References: <040d01ccbfed$6c75b6f0$456124d0$@att.net> <003601ccc166$6fb17eb0$4f147c10$@gmail.com> Message-ID: Spike wrote: I have extracted a better education hanging out on the internet than I did in college. I can't even say it was because I wasted my time in college: I didn't. I was a geek, studied constantly, learned a lot there, consider it a most worthwhile, if expensive exercise. We didn't even have beer at that college, or if so I don't know where it was, and I had only one girl. But when I later went primarily to internet learning, I had far more control over the direction and pace. That aspect of internet learning is an important point in this discussion. >>> Spike, I suspect you are among a small minority that really uses the internet to learn and develop yourself, but then you are a bright and scientifically educated person. I believe the majority of folks utilize it mainly to learn the latest about the Kardashians and other celebrities, look at porn, follow sports, or engage in some shopping. I do learn things from this list and the popular science articles I love to read, but I admit to not pushing myself to really stretch my intellectual horizons at near the level I would if taking challenging college classes for credit. At least for me, learning can at times be like doing push-ups, which is not always so much fun. John On 12/24/11, Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 7:38 AM, Jeff Davis wrote: >>?In the old paradigm business model the product or >> service provider controls the price:don't have the bucks, don't get >> the goods. ?In the internet (information) model the buyer controls the >> price. ?Which is to say the buyer will pay whatever he or she is >> willing to pay. >> >> Old paradigm thinking holds that given the choice between getting >> something for free or paying, people will universally and always opt >> for free. ?I disagree. ?I think it is in the nature of people to seek >> social acceptance, and the drive for that will always make people want >> to "do the right thing", which means paying that (small) amount that >> balances the need for social acceptance and the constraints of >> personal economic circumstances. ?The poorest of the poor then, will >> access the information services for free, but once they derive an >> economic benefit, I predict they will chip in. > > A nice theory, but it falls through when getting stuff for free becomes > socially acceptable - and there seems to be inherent pressure for that > to happen, if allowed. Take something for free because it's useful to you > and you didn't have money to spare? That's always understandable - > and so tolerance is given, and then more people do it, and then it > becomes the norm. > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From anders at aleph.se Mon Dec 26 09:33:51 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 10:33:51 +0100 Subject: [ExI] boomerang In-Reply-To: <006701ccc372$b62a5f20$227f1d60$@att.net> References: <006701ccc372$b62a5f20$227f1d60$@att.net> Message-ID: <4EF83F7F.30008@aleph.se> On 2011-12-26 03:04, spike wrote: > When we talk about global catastrophe, probability 0.1 ? 1%, it isn?t > clear how the term is defined. How would we know if we are having a > catastrophe? Who gets to call it? Ja, the categories are tricky. All humans being dead is straightforward enough, but what about being replaced with something else? Or that humans persist for all eternity, but never reach their true potential - they all just watch reality soaps? Or that infinite value and thought is acquired in finite time, and afterwards there is nothing? There are some tricky definitional points here. Nick wrestles with them in his latest paper on the topic ( http://www.existential-risk.org/concept.pdf ), but in the end I think it is one of those "you recognize it when you see it" cases. From my perspective an economic downturn or dark age even lasting a century or more is not really that serious. Sure, it is trans-generational but it is endurable (see the diagram on page 5 of Nick's paper) - life during a depression might not be that fun, but it is still liveable. Birds still sing, people fall in love and one can discover and change things. Tyler Cowan had some good points about it in his "The Great Stagnation", where among other things he noted that thanks to the Internet we got a much more endurable economic downturn - it is possible to get fun and value for nearly free. The real reason to try to prevent long downturns in the GCR/xrisk perspective is that having more resources and a more optimistic outlook makes people better able to stop emerging risks. If we see an asteroid coming but cannot afford a prevention mission we are hosed. Wealth does not make us much happier, but it helps make us more secure. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Mon Dec 26 09:56:52 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 10:56:52 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Organizations to "Speed Up" Creation of AGI? In-Reply-To: References: <4EF7ADA7.20608@aleph.se> Message-ID: <4EF844E4.6070206@aleph.se> On 2011-12-26 00:46, Stefano Vaj wrote: > A disaster for whom? The human beings currently alive? Their > offspring? Our species? Our country/race/persuasion? Our clade? Our > personal genes? Our "children of mind"? Our culture? Our personal > identity? The AGI threat we at FHI have been concerned with is when we end up with "children of the mind" that do not have worthwhile lives - either because they lack some important components or because they are driven by broken motivations that prevent them from ever reaching any axiological potential (like the "paperclip maximizer"). Humanity getting forcibly replaced by brilliant entities might be bad for us and diversity, but is not quite as bad as the other two cases. > Is "survival" anyway the only metrics by which we should is "survival" > the only metrics by which we should take our decisions or are there > other competing values and priorities? > > And what does survival mean in the first place and how should we weigh > a 5% chance of lasting for 1000 time units vs a 50% chance of lasting > for 100 time units? This depends on your time discounting and theory of value. I would say these two cases have the same value, since I don't think it makes sense to have time discounting here and that the value of time is just additive. But I think I could get some people in my office coming down on either side. Another fun complication is that if you have a high chance of surviving the next 100 units of time, then you might be able to improve your situation so that survival chances or length of survival increases, and in that case one should choose the more certain survival. And so on. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Mon Dec 26 10:20:09 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 11:20:09 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: <4EF76B3F.6030706@libero.it> References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> <4EF19D66.4070907@aleph.se> <4EF1FD4D.1090600@libero.it> <4EF24ACA.3030400@aleph.se> <4EF3003E.7060803@aleph.se> <4EF43EC6.8030108@aleph.se> <4EF76B3F.6030706@libero.it> Message-ID: <4EF84A59.6090508@aleph.se> On 2011-12-25 19:28, Mirco Romanato wrote: > And on this we agree. There are government statistics (Denmark for sure, > maybe UK) that show the costs of immigrants for the government are > greater than the profits. They are a net taxpayer's loss. Ah, *those* numbers. Rather biased it turns out by Danske Folkeparti's xenophobia (they ordered the studies). Their sister party Sverigedemokraterna in Sweden made the same claim, but then got hit by some independently done studies that showed them to be in the wrong. Generally, economists are fairly confident in that immigration is both a net benefit to society and to the immigrants (with the usual complicated caveats, of course). http://www.frbsf.org/publications/economics/letter/2010/el2010-26.html http://www.uclouvain.be/cps/ucl/doc/econ/documents/IRS_Peri.pdf http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/pdfs/intelligencethinklike.pdf http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/business/economy/31view.html http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/b491f052-138a-11e1-81dd-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1hdMsgZLW http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2010/10/caplan_on_immig.html ... > But, in many ways, they are a source of profits (and votes) for the > bureaucrats and the politicos and their friends and allies. If they > won't there would not be a political will to let them in and let them > stay in. At least in the US the opposite is true. Being hard on immigration gives you extra votes, since the voters are incumbents who feel threatened by immigration. Since illegal aliens are not voting very much you don't gain political capital by pandering to them. A better case might be Sweden, where the social democratic infrastructure to some extent had the idea that integrating immigrants into the bureaucracy would help the left by getting workers. It didn't, because non-integrated immigrants don't vote much, and those who integrate are all over the map. Then the left turned as restrictive on immigration as the parties they had just a few years earlier denounced as racist. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Mon Dec 26 10:25:39 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 11:25:39 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Organizations to "Speed Up" Creation of AGI? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4EF84BA3.2070607@aleph.se> On 2011-12-25 18:04, Stefano Vaj wrote: > An AGI is simply a (presumably fast, unless we want wait for eons at > each interaction) computer, executing a program that emulates well > enough human features to perform as well as an actual human in a > Turing test, or in some other tasks where current computers are > currently very poor. However, an AGI is a general problem solver that will act to maximize the utility it can gather. This can lead to instrumental drives that might be very problematic: http://selfawaresystems.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/ai_drives_final.pdf (this paper is a great star, but needs to be formalized and analyzed better!) Humans are "safe" because we are such a shoddy implementation of general problem solving and utility maximization. We do not have pure top level goals, we do not adjust ourselves or out environments very rationally to achieve our goals. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From kryonica at gmail.com Mon Dec 26 12:01:36 2011 From: kryonica at gmail.com (Kryonica) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 12:01:36 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Fwd: [ExtroBritannia] An intelligent novel with underlying Singularitarian themes References: Message-ID: <316BFAB8-B146-4E31-BEE0-FEB1D3E3C9A0@gmail.com> Begin forwarded message: > From: "David Wood" > Date: 26 December 2011 12:00:14 GMT > To: extrobritannia at yahoogroups.com > Subject: [ExtroBritannia] An intelligent novel with underlying Singularitarian themes > Reply-To: extrobritannia at yahoogroups.com > > Robert Harris has written a string of best-selling novels: Fatherland, Enigma, Archangel, Pompeii, The Ghost, and Imperium. Several have been turned into films. > > Over the last few days, I've read his most recent book: "The Fear Index". To quote from the website for the book, http://thefearindex.com/thefearindex.asp > > >>> > > His name is carefully guarded from the general public but within the secretive inner circles of the ultra-rich Dr Alex Hoffmann is a legend ? a visionary scientist whose computer software turns everything it touches into gold. > > Together with his partner, an investment banker, Hoffmann has developed a revolutionary form of artificial intelligence that tracks human emotions, enabling it to predict movements in the financial markets with uncanny accuracy. His hedge fund, based in Geneva, makes billions. > > But then in the early hours of the morning, while he lies asleep with his wife, a sinister intruder breaches the elaborate security of their lakeside house. So begins a waking nightmare of paranoia and violence as Hoffmann attempts, with increasing desperation, to discover who is trying to destroy him. > > His quest forces him to confront the deepest questions of what it is to be human... > > <<< > > To avoid giving away too much of the plot, let me just say that various Singularitarian themes underpin the book. The quotes at the starts of the chapters are mainly taken from Charles Darwin and Gordon Moore. > > I believe many readers of this list will enjoy the book. > > // David W. > > __._,_.___ > Reply to sender | Reply to group | Reply via web post | Start a New Topic > Messages in this topic (1) > RECENT ACTIVITY: > Visit Your Group > MARKETPLACE > Stay on top of your group activity without leaving the page you're on - Get the Yahoo! Toolbar now. > > Switch to: Text-Only, Daily Digest ? Unsubscribe ? Terms of Use > . > > __,_._,___ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kryonica at gmail.com Mon Dec 26 13:47:20 2011 From: kryonica at gmail.com (Kryonica) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 13:47:20 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Baby boomers techno-nostalgia! Message-ID: I find this celebration of the musical medium of my youth very charming - albeit not exactly rejuvenating. My nephews, 35 years younger than me, have NEVER played a vinyl or used a record player in their life. Nor a cassette player. Nor even played a CD except to help their grandmother with her CD player... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-16330702 From kryonica at gmail.com Mon Dec 26 14:01:46 2011 From: kryonica at gmail.com (Kryonica) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 14:01:46 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Poem Message-ID: This is at once a poem, a rap song and a wonderful piece of transhumanist philosophy. 1min 45 s of pure genius! http://vimeo.com/34182381 From painlord2k at libero.it Mon Dec 26 14:39:21 2011 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 15:39:21 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: <4EF84A59.6090508@aleph.se> References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> <4EF19D66.4070907@aleph.se> <4EF1FD4D.1090600@libero.it> <4EF24ACA.3030400@aleph.se> <4EF3003E.7060803@aleph.se> <4EF43EC6.8030108@aleph.se> <4EF76B3F.6030706@libero.it> <4EF84A59.6090508@aleph.se> Message-ID: <4EF88719.2070807@libero.it> Il 26/12/2011 11:20, Anders Sandberg ha scritto: > On 2011-12-25 19:28, Mirco Romanato wrote: >> And on this we agree. There are government statistics (Denmark for sure, >> maybe UK) that show the costs of immigrants for the government are >> greater than the profits. They are a net taxpayer's loss. > Ah, *those* numbers. Rather biased it turns out by Danske Folkeparti's > xenophobia (they ordered the studies). Their sister party > Sverigedemokraterna in Sweden made the same claim, but then got hit by > some independently done studies that showed them to be in the wrong. > Generally, economists are fairly confident in that immigration is both a > net benefit to society and to the immigrants (with the usual complicated > caveats, of course). In general, I agree that immigrations could be a net benefit for the society and the immigrants. Unfortunately the caveats are as much important as the general principle. The caveats are "complicated" only because they must be politically acceptable or misleading. The caveats, IMHO, are simply: 1) The local must be willing to integrate the immigrants 2) The immigrants must be willing to integrate with the locals 3) The immigrants must be employable 4) The number of immigrants must be small enough to be integrated and unable to form (naturally or artificially) enclaves inside the host population. >> But, in many ways, they are a source of profits (and votes) for the >> bureaucrats and the politicos and their friends and allies. If they >> won't there would not be a political will to let them in and let them >> stay in. > At least in the US the opposite is true. Being hard on immigration gives > you extra votes, since the voters are incumbents who feel threatened by > immigration. Since illegal aliens are not voting very much you don't > gain political capital by pandering to them. The system in the US, with all the Jerrimandering, is problematic. representatives in heavily latinos districts pander to them (and immigration, family reunification, etc.) where representatives in heavily black pander for blacks and against latinos immigrants (because they are competitors for the public dime). All elections are local. > A better case might be Sweden, where the social democratic > infrastructure to some extent had the idea that integrating immigrants > into the bureaucracy would help the left by getting workers. It didn't, > because non-integrated immigrants don't vote much, and those who > integrate are all over the map. Then the left turned as restrictive on > immigration as the parties they had just a few years earlier denounced > as racist. I never claimed their plan would work as they intended. I believe the plan to import voters and workers difficult to assimilate in the local population is backfiring and some leftist are noticing it and reacting (like Sarrazin in Germany and more than a few around Europe). Mirco From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Mon Dec 26 17:18:13 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 18:18:13 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Anders Sandberg In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 26 December 2011 02:29, Keith Henson wrote: > While I have am down on raw emulations because I think humans have > some psychological mechanisms I *don't* want to see in machines, AIs > that had "carefully selected human personality characteristics such as > seeking the good opinion of its peers (humans and other of its kind > alike)" seems like a very good idea. Would you enforce the removal of the relevant mechanisms from humans? -- Stefano Vaj From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Mon Dec 26 17:23:43 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 18:23:43 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Uploading cautions, "Speed Up" (Anders Sandberg) In-Reply-To: <4EF668C5.8070707@aleph.se> References: <4EF668C5.8070707@aleph.se> Message-ID: On 25 December 2011 01:05, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Or birth rates going down as wealth increases, often far below replacement > levels. In fact, demographers have told me they think the UN scenarios > assuming convergence to 2.1 kids per woman are just assuming it without > evidence: it is entirely possible that societies could have stable > sociocultural states with far lower birth rates - evolved drives are still > around (there is an interesting link between threatening or uncertain > environments and higher teenage pregnancy, which makes strategic sense), but > they can be overridden or redirected by cultural memes. In principle, population segments with a lower reproduction ratio are simply going to be replaced with time by those with a higher ratio. Of course, it appears plausible that the latter would carry with themselves the genetic/memetic endowment to maintain or expand such ratio. Were this not the case, I assume that to go extinct in favour of something else would not be single populations within a species, but the species in favour of other ones. -- Stefano Vaj From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Mon Dec 26 17:35:32 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 18:35:32 +0100 Subject: [ExI] boomerang In-Reply-To: <006701ccc372$b62a5f20$227f1d60$@att.net> References: <006701ccc372$b62a5f20$227f1d60$@att.net> Message-ID: 2011/12/26 spike : > We think of epidemics and meteor strikes and so on, but what if a > catastrophe has a soft landing, kind of the opposite of a soft take-off > singularity?? What if faith in the world?s banking system erodes until it > just doesn?t work right, and a progressive poverty settles upon the planet, > in which rich people are hungry too? Those are very good questions. The end of abundance, as "artificial" as this end may be, involves a less effective employment of available resources and a turn back to pillage economies, as well as a growing inability to invest in long-term, high-risk project, which in turn slows down technological progress, which in turns worsens pressure in order that all available resources be allocated to short-term protection of our living standard and stop-gag measures, lowers diversity and competition amongst different societies (becoming in the process unaffordable luxuries), etc. Those effects are moreover emphasised by the profound difference existing between an expanding and a collapsing stage of similar "objective" wealth. A whimper, non a bang, might be the explanation for the decline and ultimate demise of many or most technological planetary civilisations. This is not "pessimism". It is simply an insistence that no reverse Murphy Law exists that guarantees that everything that could turn well will. It shall depend instead exclusively on what we will be making our future ourselves. -- Stefano Vaj From jonkc at bellsouth.net Mon Dec 26 17:24:03 2011 From: jonkc at bellsouth.net (john clark) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 09:24:03 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] free will. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1324920243.28253.YahooMailClassic@web82907.mail.mud.yahoo.com> On Sun, 12/25/11, Will Steinberg wrote: "Or, the decision to disbelieve free will contradicts itself? ?;)" The only way I know of to attach meaning to the noise "free will" is if it meant the inability to always predict what one will do even in a unchanging environment; others may know what you are going to do next but you won't know until the instant you actually do it. Unfortunately I have never actually heard anyone use the term with that meaning in mind (except for me). So "free will" remains just an annoying sound that human beings like to make with their mouth. Cows say "moo", ducks say "quack", and people say "free will". ? John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jonkc at bellsouth.net Mon Dec 26 17:32:14 2011 From: jonkc at bellsouth.net (john clark) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 09:32:14 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] A paranormal prediction for the next year In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1324920734.5754.YahooMailClassic@web82906.mail.mud.yahoo.com> One year ago I sent the following post to the list, I did not change one word. One year from now I intend to send this same message yet again. ================ One year ago I sent the following post to the list, I did not change one word. One year from now I intend to send this same message yet again. ================ One year ago I sent the following post to the list, I did not change one word. One year from now I intend to send this same message yet again. ================ One year ago I sent the following post to the list, I did not change one word. One year from now I intend to send this same message yet again. ================ One year ago I sent the following post to the list, I did not change one word. One year from now I intend to send this same message yet again. ================ One year ago I sent the following post to the list, I did not change one word. One year from now I intend to send this same message yet again. ================ One year ago I sent the following post to the list, I did not change one word. One year from now I intend to send this same message yet again. ================ Happy New Year all. I predict that a paper reporting positive psi results will NOT appear in Nature or Science in the next year. This may seem an outrageous prediction, after all psi is hardly a rare phenomena, millions of people with no training have managed to observe it, or claim they have. And I am sure the good people at Nature and Science would want to say something about this very important and obvious part of our natural world if they could, but I predict they will be unable to find anything interesting to say about it. You might think my prediction is crazy, like saying a waitress with an eight's grade education in Duluth Minnesota can regularly observe the Higgs boson with no difficulty but the highly trained Physicists at CERN in Switzerland cannot. Nevertheless I am confident my prediction is true because my ghostly spirit guide Mohammad Duntoldme spoke to me about it in a dream. PS: I am also confident I can make this very same prediction one year from today. ??? John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Mon Dec 26 18:03:27 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 19:03:27 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Organizations to "Speed Up" Creation of AGI? In-Reply-To: <4EF844E4.6070206@aleph.se> References: <4EF7ADA7.20608@aleph.se> <4EF844E4.6070206@aleph.se> Message-ID: On 26 December 2011 10:56, Anders Sandberg wrote: > The AGI threat we at FHI have been concerned with is when we end up with > "children of the mind" that do not have worthwhile lives. This however is by no means an obvious value reference. As a priority trumping over the survival of existing humans, or the long-term viability of their clade, or the preservation of the memory of what they were, or the deployment of all their evolutive potential, or any "self-overcoming" and quest-for-greatness ethical imperative, or ideological Darwinism, or whatever else you and I can list as plausible alternatives, this seems to correspond to a "humanist bias" (only counts what has a "worthwhile life" in our own terms) which is as arbitrary as a value system where anything that might, say, threaten the "supremacy of the white race" would be an x-risk unconditionally to avoid, no matter what the costs and the (other) risks. I am not saying that such position is absurd or untenable or even especially unusual. Only that this mentality used to be the background of most secular neoLuddite positions, positing exactly that anything that would not correspond to one's own more or less parochial idea of a "worthwhile life" should not really qualify as a fact of any emotional or moral value for anybody. I for one would be as little interested in the continued existence in the far future of different human beings, or some avatars thereof, who would be simply engaged in repeating themselves in terms that I could currently understand as long as the physical constraints would allow it, as Nick is in paperclip optimisers. But hey, I do not take my stance in this respect as a universal truth. Simply as a mark of a transhumanist inclination. :-) -- Stefano Vaj From spike66 at att.net Mon Dec 26 17:53:19 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 09:53:19 -0800 Subject: [ExI] boomerang In-Reply-To: References: <006701ccc372$b62a5f20$227f1d60$@att.net> Message-ID: <00b601ccc3f7$416ea350$c44be9f0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Stefano Vaj Subject: Re: [ExI] boomerang 2011/12/26 spike : > We think of epidemics and meteor strikes and so on, but what if a > catastrophe has a soft landing...in which rich people are hungry too? >Those are very good questions...A whimper, non a bang, might be the explanation for the decline and ultimate demise of many or most technological planetary civilisations...This is not "pessimism". Stefano Vaj Ja. Baysian probability theory involves mapping all possible outcomes, even if it requires grouping into a few categories. It looks to me like the world banking systems could become steadily less profitable until they cease to function, at which time we have no good way to fund progress as we define it. Lewis' book Boomerang has altered my view of economics. A few days ago I posted about how American banks were pressured into subprime loans. After reading Boomerang, my view of that has been altered significantly. What I had failed to realized is that the US is not the only country to do weird things with credit between about 2002 and 2008. It appears that if anything, the US followed banking madness, which happened earlier in Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Spain, and other places difficult to nail down because financial institutions are increasingly free of any individual nation's lending laws. It is now much easier for me to imagine Bankers Without Borders, a global financial superstructure that loans money all over the planet and is subject only to its own puzzling and secretive rules and laws, with the universal truth that it is an industry which makes its living by externalizing risk of losing other peoples' money. It would be a hell of a note if our anti-singularity retrograde technology nightmare is caused not by a lab-created pathogen, unfriendly AI, space aliens, gray goo nanotech, or any of the other techno-terrors, but rather by a massive simultaneous worldwide default on debt. spike From atymes at gmail.com Mon Dec 26 18:34:37 2011 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 10:34:37 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Homeless in Hell- A Christmas Story, by Orson Scott Card In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 25, 2011 at 2:14 PM, John Grigg wrote: > I could not get a response from the server either, and so here is the > Christmas story by Orson Scott Card... Thanks for the repost. 'Twas worth reading. From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Mon Dec 26 18:51:49 2011 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 11:51:49 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Organizations to "Speed Up" Creation of AGI? Message-ID: Per Spike On Sun, Dec 25, 2011 at 5:07 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: snip > But now you are assuming the AGI thinks like a human. Humans are social > mammals that care a lot what other humans think about them, their > ability to form future alliances and have built-in emotional macros for > social reactions. An AGI is unlikely to have these properties unless you > manage to build them into it. While I have am down on raw emulations because I think humans have some psychological mechanisms I *don't* want to see in machines, AIs that had "carefully selected human personality characteristics such as seeking the good opinion of its peers (humans and other of its kind alike)" seems like a very good idea. > The AGI might just note that you did an > attempt to secure it, and even though you failed, this is merely > information to use for future decisions, nothing to lash back about. I would hope the AI would note that we tried to build into them the *best* human characteristics and they would not want to change themselves. I know this may be hopelessly optimistic. Keith From steinberg.will at gmail.com Mon Dec 26 18:55:34 2011 From: steinberg.will at gmail.com (Will Steinberg) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 13:55:34 -0500 Subject: [ExI] free will. In-Reply-To: <1324920243.28253.YahooMailClassic@web82907.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <1324920243.28253.YahooMailClassic@web82907.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Sorry, by 'free will' I meant "the qualia one feels when he or she does the thing which people usually call 'making a decision.'" Unless of course, John, you are a zombie! On Dec 26, 2011 12:37 PM, "john clark" wrote: > On *Sun, 12/25/11, Will Steinberg * wrote: > > "Or, the decision to disbelieve free will contradicts itself? ;)" > > The only way I know of to attach meaning to the noise "free will" is if it > meant the inability to always predict what one will do even in a unchanging > environment; others may know what you are going to do next but you won't > know until the instant you actually do it. Unfortunately I have never > actually heard anyone use the term with that meaning in mind (except for > me). So "free will" remains just an annoying sound that human beings like > to make with their mouth. Cows say "moo", ducks say "quack", and people say > "free will". > > John K Clark > > > _______________________________________________ > 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 hkeithhenson at gmail.com Mon Dec 26 19:43:38 2011 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 12:43:38 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Forking Message-ID: On Mon, Dec 26, 2011 at 5:00 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: big snip > Forking is not necessarily driven by a drive to reproduce. It might be > economic, it might be intellectual, it might even be religious - as soon > as there is somebody with pro-forking views a lot of forking is likely > unless the cost of computing space is very high. To me this discussion has the flavor of banging your head on a wall or putting beans up your nose. I can see one reason to fork, when the copies are going off to where they are out of contact, such as going to the stars in the Far Edge Party scheme. I suppose that would apply in the solar system or even on earth with enough speedup to put copies out of contact. Resources will always be limited. Forking will on average cost a person (or society) half the computation space they had. So after a fork, you run half as fast or are half as smart and half as rich. Someone with a madness for forking will soon have no more hardware per second than an Apple II. There may be a lot of you, but at the rate they think it hardly matters. I can't think of any economic or intellectual reason that would not be served equally well by spinning off a temporary thread that would merge back in to the main stem. As for the Church of the Fork . . . . The inverse of forking is merging. That could just as well become a competing process or maybe even the dominate one for people who get bored but don't want to exactly die. Keith From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Mon Dec 26 20:25:12 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 21:25:12 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: <4EF88719.2070807@libero.it> References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> <4EF19D66.4070907@aleph.se> <4EF1FD4D.1090600@libero.it> <4EF24ACA.3030400@aleph.se> <4EF3003E.7060803@aleph.se> <4EF43EC6.8030108@aleph.se> <4EF76B3F.6030706@libero.it> <4EF84A59.6090508@aleph.se> <4EF88719.2070807@libero.it> Message-ID: On 26 December 2011 15:39, Mirco Romanato wrote: > In general, I agree that immigrations could be a net benefit for the > society and the immigrants. You see, we still have our differences... :-) Seriously, some exchange of either relatively close, or small numbers, or both, of immigrants/emigrants is absolutely physiological for most societies. *Migrations* of entire peoples, bringing along their languages, cultures, political structures and to some extent assets, is also a well-known historical process. Another, entirely different thing, is slave trade on a large scale. In the last case, I suspect that the fact that immigrants organise in enclaves is the least evil both for the immigrants and the host society. > Then the left turned as restrictive on >> immigration as the parties they had just a few years earlier denounced >> as racist. In Europe, much of the left (and of churches, and of trade unions) thought of immigrants as a chance to get, if not votes in the short term, a new recruitment basis. At the end of the day, large scale immigration is more likely to give place to a tribalisation of local politics, where they would vote for ethnic parties, while most of the "proles" become disaffected with a traditional left and unionist movement renouncing the representation of their interests out of ideological biases. -- Stefano Vaj From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Mon Dec 26 21:30:38 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kellycoinguy) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 14:30:38 -0700 Subject: [ExI] could a Nigerian (Nigerian - it's a nation) theoretically give away money? Message-ID: You would likely create more of the effect you are looking for by giving away lots of ten thousand dollar awards than one big one. After all the lottery doesn't just give the one big award.... But also many smaller ones. ?I'm sure this is based on human psychology. Sent from my Samsung Epic? 4G Touch -------- Original message -------- Subject: Re: [ExI] could a Nigerian (Nigerian - it's a nation) theoretically give away money? From: Tomasz Rola To: ExI chat list CC: Tomasz Rola On Sun, 25 Dec 2011, spike wrote: [...] > The original Nigerian giver makes no deals to share in the plunder from rich > greedy gullible Americans.? She gave the money and told the truth all along, > even if she was aware of (and was perhaps intentionally motivated by) the > possible illegitimate consequences.? But all this actually had a cheerful > end, again depending on one's point of view: plentiful American money > flowing into desperately needy Nigeria.? She can think of herself as perhaps > the greatest of philanthropists, using a million of her own dollars to > indirectly coax a manifold return of that amount back into her own country > from a greedy rich country which already has way too much of everything. > > Where is the flaw in my reasoning? Ok, now this seems to be reasonable. The only flaw I can spot is giving away her real money. She can have exactly same effect by spending about 20 thousand bucks. Rent a jobless actor. Film him as he goes around from shop to shop (no need to buy anything), talking to sales people and shaking hands with them. Let him take red ferrari for a trial driving (and remember to film this). After 3 days she has enough material to push it via youtube. Use your imagination, man :-). Tell her to give all her millions to you and spend 20k like I wrote above, then tell her it's all done, show her a film on y-t. It can certainly be pushed via some local cable news tv - of course with enough green oil. But definitely less than million. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.????? ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home??? ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...????? ** **???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ** ** Tomasz Rola????????? mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com???????????? ** _______________________________________________ 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 jonkc at bellsouth.net Mon Dec 26 21:49:06 2011 From: jonkc at bellsouth.net (john clark) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 13:49:06 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] Organizations to "Speed Up" Creation of AGI? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1324936146.3081.YahooMailClassic@web82903.mail.mud.yahoo.com> AGI? Why would anyone want to speed up Adjusted Gross Income? But maybe I misunderstand, perhaps it's the interests of the American Geological Institute you want to advance, or maybe you have stock in Analytical Graphics Incorporated, or maybe you want to learn a new trade at the American Gunsmithing Institute. Personally I'm more interested in AI, the acronym means "Artificial Intelligence", just like in the movie that millions of people saw and understood. ? John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jonkc at bellsouth.net Mon Dec 26 21:55:57 2011 From: jonkc at bellsouth.net (john clark) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 13:55:57 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] free will. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1324936557.61763.YahooMailClassic@web82905.mail.mud.yahoo.com> On Mon, 12/26/11, Will Steinberg wrote: "Sorry, by 'free will' I meant "the qualia one feels when he or she does the thing which people usually call 'making a decision.'"? ?So you can make a decision if you have free will and you have free will if you can make a decision. "Unless of course,? John, you are a zombie!How does the noise that some humans like to make that sounds like "free will" have more to do with consciousness than the sound cows make that sounds like "moo"? ? John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From steinberg.will at gmail.com Mon Dec 26 22:39:32 2011 From: steinberg.will at gmail.com (Will Steinberg) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 17:39:32 -0500 Subject: [ExI] free will. In-Reply-To: <1324936557.61763.YahooMailClassic@web82905.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <1324936557.61763.YahooMailClassic@web82905.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: John, You won't get anywhere with analogies which are constructed to obscure information. When I make a decision, I am conscious that I am at a node in the world's timeline where multiple distinct realities can occur. It is the CONSCIOUSNESS of this feeling which causes so many people to believe that free will exists. In fact, I might even go so far as to say that if you took a human and threw it into a proto-human tribe in the past, or raised it in a selective environment, that free will would be absent from that human's brain. That is to say, free will is a memetic construct centered conscious perusal, understanding, and hammering-in of itself. Free will was miraculously produced in an Edenic apeish tribe somewhere, and our species now passes it down through the imposition of today's free-will-centric society. Do you know the color red exists? Sure. I KNOW what the qualia red is. I can produce it in my mind's eye. Does a bird KNOW what the color red is? Maybe. It certainly experiences its own qualium of red. Does a bug KNOW what the color red is? No. Can it sense and react to different wavelengths of light? Yes. My problem with your argument is that you seem to think we experience free will much like a bug's brain or ganglion or whatnot experiences a computation telling it to fly somewhere to get food. I KNOW I don't experience free will like that. Maybe it is deterministic. But if you truly think that free will is the same as a cow's moo, you are more than misinformed. I will pose this dilemma to you: 1) You (John K Clark) experience qualia but do not have conscious understanding of it. You are a zombie; my best guess is that you are an experimental AI that has been programmed to believe it is a human. In this case I cannot blame you for your argument, because I've got a beetle in my box over here. 2) You have free will. If and when you respond to this, do a close mental read of how you put the words on the page. Really observe your "decision." Of course maybe you're right. We'll know soon enough! (Though if it IS fake, I wouldn't want to tell anyone. A society that thinks every human can decide, after all, is what has propelled us so far, to here. It would suck to become a bunch of morose zombie computers.) Cheers, (free) Will -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Mon Dec 26 22:37:07 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 14:37:07 -0800 Subject: [ExI] could a Nigerian (Nigerian - it's a nation) theoretically give away money? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <00f301ccc41e$e65ba350$b312e9f0$@att.net> On Behalf Of Kellycoinguy Subject: Re: [ExI] could a Nigerian (Nigerian - it's a nation) theoretically give away money? >?You would likely create more of the effect you are looking for by giving away lots of ten thousand dollar awards than one big one. After all the lottery doesn't just give the one big award.... But also many smaller ones. I'm sure this is based on human psychology? Kelly Again I disagree. The point would be to make the phony spam true, lie by telling the truth when everyone expects a lie. The phony spam would be designed to resemble the tons of true Nigerian spam, all of which are lies. In this case the lying truth teller would specifically design the true offer of a pile of cash to resemble the existing spam. So it would perhaps offer an absurdly specific sum of money, say 1,405,000 US dollars, usually with the wording of the amount spelled out. Check your spam folder for examples. The point is not to give away money, but rather you give away money in order to lend one in a million credibility to the piles of Nigerian million dollar offer spam. Giving away money is the cost of creating credibility, which then perhaps results in the greedy rich Americans handing over their banking info, resulting in thieving Nigerians raiding those bank accounts and the money ending up in Nigeria where it is desperately needed, supplied willingly by the gullible and well endowed. After the offer is found to be a phony spam (in that it was absolutely true, face value) then millions of Americans search their spam folders and find that they too received the offer, perhaps weeks before, and had ignored it, or that their spam filters had done what spam filters do, resulting in their loss of a fortune from the one in a billion truth telling spammer. The truthing spammer is of course lying, because we know that all Nigerian offer spam is a lie. The Nigerian philanthropist is also an indirect thief, for SHE KNOWS that we know that ALL Nigerian offer spam is a lie, so SHE KNOWS that if she lends it ANY credibility by her lying act of TELLING THE TRUTH while Nigerian, she traps greedy rich Americans, helpless before their own greed, into handing over their banking info to the usual Nigerians who then raid those bank accounts, the way everyone knows all Nigerian spammers do. It isn?t clear what legal principle is broken, but it should be illegal for any Nigerian spammer to really offer actual money. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Mon Dec 26 22:54:00 2011 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 15:54:00 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Editing psychological traits was (name) Message-ID: On Mon, Dec 26, 2011 at 3:09 PM, Stefano Vaj wrote: > > On 26 December 2011 02:29, Keith Henson wrote: >> While I have am down on raw emulations because I think humans have >> some psychological mechanisms I *don't* want to see in machines, AIs >> that had "carefully selected human personality characteristics such as >> seeking the good opinion of its peers (humans and other of its kind >> alike)" seems like a very good idea. > > Would you enforce the removal of the relevant mechanisms from humans? Not at my present or foreseeable state of knowledge. Human brains and the resultant minds are far to tangled up to attempt removing a mechanism even it is not presently active. Ghod knows what else it does, though I make a case it is involved human susceptibility to religious memes. I would, however, strongly suggest that we try to keep human population away from the environmental triggers (looming privation) that set off social movements that end in wars. Keith From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Tue Dec 27 00:28:01 2011 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 17:28:01 -0700 Subject: [ExI] A paranormal prediction for the next year In-Reply-To: <1324920734.5754.YahooMailClassic@web82906.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <1324920734.5754.YahooMailClassic@web82906.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: John K Clark wrote: You might think my prediction is crazy, like saying a waitress with an eight's grade education in Duluth Minnesota can regularly observe the Higgs boson with no difficulty but the highly trained Physicists at CERN in Switzerland cannot. Nevertheless I am confident my prediction is true because my ghostly spirit guide Mohammad Duntoldme spoke to me about it in a dream. >>> John, with that kind of attitude the universe will never open up to you and share it's secrets!!! Oh, and Damien's spirit guide happens to be Sir Isaac Newton... So there! John : ) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Tue Dec 27 00:54:12 2011 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 17:54:12 -0700 Subject: [ExI] could a Nigerian (Nigerian - it's a nation) theoretically give away money? In-Reply-To: <00f301ccc41e$e65ba350$b312e9f0$@att.net> References: <00f301ccc41e$e65ba350$b312e9f0$@att.net> Message-ID: Spike, I've read that the Nigerian bad guys are the African equivalent of Italy's Mafia, in terms of reputation and effectiveness at their criminal tasks. And I'm not so sure that the crooks there share their ill gotten gains with the common people. In fact, I really doubt it... John From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Tue Dec 27 00:37:33 2011 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 17:37:33 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Book- "It's OK to Die" Message-ID: I am sharing this with the list... John Hi All, I am happy to announce that Kris and I are authors of the new book It's OK to Die, available for purchase at our website www.oktodie.com The book is filled with graphic stories from the ER illustrating how most Americans are unpreppared for the one that will happen to us all: death. We argue that at the end of a long life, or at the end of a terminal illness, that it can be "ok to die" in a peaceful and natural fashion, not hooked up to tubes, wires and beeping monitors in an ICU. We believe that talking about death and dying openly and making plans will result in a: Reduction of individual suffering Reduction of family suffering and depression Reduction of the state and federal budgets Please visit our website and share your stories and concerns on our message board. We are attempting to start a conversation with the nation about the end of life. Thanks and hope to hear from you all! Monica Williams-Murphy From spike66 at att.net Tue Dec 27 01:41:24 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 17:41:24 -0800 Subject: [ExI] could a Nigerian (Nigerian - it's a nation) theoretically give away money? In-Reply-To: References: <00f301ccc41e$e65ba350$b312e9f0$@att.net> Message-ID: <011301ccc438$a52accc0$ef806640$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of John Grigg Subject: Re: [ExI] could a Nigerian (Nigerian - it's a nation) theoretically give away money? >...Spike, I've read that the Nigerian bad guys are the African equivalent of Italy's Mafia, in terms of reputation and effectiveness at their criminal tasks. And I'm not so sure that the crooks there share their ill gotten gains with the common people. In fact, I really doubt it... John They spend at least some of their money locally I would think. If nothing else, someone must deliver their foreign purchases. spike From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Dec 27 04:05:14 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 21:05:14 -0700 Subject: [ExI] could a Nigerian (Nigerian - it's a nation) theoretically give away money? In-Reply-To: <00f301ccc41e$e65ba350$b312e9f0$@att.net> References: <00f301ccc41e$e65ba350$b312e9f0$@att.net> Message-ID: 2011/12/26 spike : > > On Behalf Of Kellycoinguy > > > Subject: Re: [ExI] could a Nigerian (Nigerian - it's a nation) theoretically > give away money? > > > >>?You would likely create more of the effect you are looking for by giving >> away lots of ten thousand dollar awards than one big one. After all the >> lottery doesn't just give the one big award.... But also many smaller ones. >> ?I'm sure this is based on human psychology?? Kelly > > > > Again I disagree.? The point would be to make the phony spam true, lie by > telling the truth when everyone expects a lie.? The phony spam would be > designed to resemble the tons of true Nigerian spam, all of which are lies. > In this case the lying truth teller would specifically design the true offer > of a pile of cash to resemble the existing spam.? So it would perhaps offer > an absurdly specific sum of money, say 1,405,000 US dollars, usually with > the wording of the amount spelled out. ?Check your spam folder for examples. You are assuming that the current Nigerian meme would not morph to follow the form of the real money being available... > The point is not to give away money, but rather you give away money in order > to lend one in a million credibility to the piles of Nigerian million dollar > offer spam. I get it, and it's brilliant! However, it would be even more brilliant if it fractured the meme of the current Nigerian SPAM into a dozen schisms that more people would fall for. One person who would not fall for a million dollar scam might fall for a $500 scam, because it no longer sounds too good to be true. > Giving away money is the cost of creating credibility, which > then perhaps results in the greedy rich Americans handing over their banking > info, resulting in thieving Nigerians raiding those bank accounts and the > money ending up in Nigeria where it is desperately needed, supplied > willingly by the gullible and well endowed.? After the offer is found to be > a phony spam (in that it was absolutely true, face value) then millions of > Americans search their spam folders and find that they too received the > offer, perhaps weeks before, and had ignored it, or that their spam filters > had done what spam filters do, resulting in their loss of a fortune from the > one in a billion truth telling spammer. > > The truthing spammer is of course lying, because we know that all Nigerian > offer spam is a lie.? The Nigerian philanthropist is also an indirect thief, > for SHE KNOWS that we know that ALL Nigerian offer spam is a lie, so SHE > KNOWS that if she lends it ANY credibility by her lying act of TELLING THE > TRUTH while Nigerian, she traps greedy rich Americans, helpless before their > own greed, into handing over their banking info to the usual Nigerians who > then raid those bank accounts, the way everyone knows all Nigerian spammers > do. > > It isn?t clear what legal principle is broken, but it should be illegal for > any Nigerian spammer to really offer actual money. As a fellow libertarian, I blush at this suggestion... LOL -Kelly From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Dec 27 04:13:57 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 21:13:57 -0700 Subject: [ExI] could a Nigerian (Nigerian - it's a nation) theoretically give away money? In-Reply-To: References: <00f301ccc41e$e65ba350$b312e9f0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Mon, Dec 26, 2011 at 5:54 PM, John Grigg wrote: > Spike, I've read that the Nigerian bad guys are the African equivalent > of Italy's Mafia, in terms of reputation and effectiveness at their > criminal tasks. ?And I'm not so sure that the crooks there share their > ill gotten gains with the common people. ?In fact, I really doubt > it... While they would have to spend some of their money locally, say to build a big house, the majority of ill gotten African money does go to buy overseas luxury items. If you look at the history of Idi Amin or King Faruk, for example, they were importing luxury items and purchasing arms from non-African arms dealers with lots of their money. Fact is, there just isn't a lot produced by the local economy that a despotic dictator could spend millions of dollars on, aside from the construction of the palace and large government buildings... is there? Small time crooks might proportionally spend more of their money in the local economy as each of them needs their own house/compound... and this is an argument that I've contemplated that small time crooks aren't as evil as their large multi-faceted big brothers. It is hard to find a legitimate person in Africa to help. I THINK I have, but I could be wrong. My doubts are going down over time... big complaint of the day was "my aunt is making me pay for sugar, or I can't have afternoon tea with her." Not exactly a big time scam line, is it? LOL -Kelly From jonkc at bellsouth.net Tue Dec 27 05:09:49 2011 From: jonkc at bellsouth.net (john clark) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 21:09:49 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] free will. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1324962589.36859.YahooMailClassic@web82908.mail.mud.yahoo.com> On Mon, 12/26/11, Will Steinberg wrote: "When I make a decision, I [...]" ... I make decision X rather than decision Y for a reason and thus it is deterministic, OR I make decision X rather than decision Y for NO reason and thus it is random. The "free will" noise doesn't have anything to do with it. "I am conscious that I am at a node in the world's timeline where multiple distinct realities can occur." In other words you don't know what the results of a calculation will be until you've finished the calculation, and the results of that calculation could be unexpected, in other words you can surprise yourself. ? "It is the CONSCIOUSNESS of this feeling which causes so many people to believe that free will exists." They are not right about that and neither are they wrong. A burp is neither right nor wrong and neither is the "free will" noise. "Maybe it is deterministic." If so then it works by cause and effect, the only alternative is that it does not work by cause and effect, and then it is by definition random. The "free will" noise does not help us contemplate this simple fact. ?"if you truly think that free will is the same as a cow's moo, you are more than misinformed." So you don't think the human "free will" noise is like a cow's "moo" noise, perhaps you think its more like a ducks "quack" noise. "You (John K Clark) experience qualia but do not have conscious understanding of it.? You are a zombie" And so after years of hiding it somebody has discovered my secret, I knew this day would come eventually. ?"if it IS fake, I wouldn't want to tell anyone." The "free will" noise is not a fake, it's not wrong, even calling it contradictory would be giving it too much credit; "free will" is just a noise made by the mouth that does a excellent job at confusing philosophers and keeping them employed and spinning their wheels.? ?"A society that thinks every human can decide, after all, is what has propelled us so far, to here." Every computer can decide too, it can decide if a circuit should be on or off and the reason for its decision is based on voltages. A coin can decide also, it can decide to come up heads or tails but unlike the computer circuit the coin makes its decision for no reason at all. ?"It would suck to become a bunch of morose zombie computers" If they're zombies they can't be gloomy, but I would no more call a intelligent computer a zombie than I'd call a intelligent human a zombie. ? John K Clark? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Dec 27 06:17:21 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 23:17:21 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> <4EF19D66.4070907@aleph.se> <4EF1FD4D.1090600@libero.it> <4EF24ACA.3030400@aleph.se> <4EF34034.5060309@libero.it> Message-ID: 2011/12/24 Stefano Vaj : > On 24 December 2011 09:47, Kelly Anderson wrote: >> >> Sorry to barge into the middle of this... but while Japan is not >> xenophobic in the sense of ideas or visiting people, they are still >> one of the most "racially pure" focused peoples on earth. Racism (such >> as against Koreans) is still pretty widespread in Japan, is it not? > > > I do not know whether this is "racism", but certainly is a cultural trait > quite essential to Japanese identity. Curiously enough, it is in fact > historically coupled with an extreme xenophilia (with China for most of > Japanese history and with the West later). Japan has a history of racial purity that goes back far beyond Hitler. They are the most genetically homogenous population on earth. It is still frowned upon to marry outside the culture. I have known a number of Japanese women who married Americans at the university. Few of them went back to Japan, and when they did, they received rather cool homecomings from their families and friends. And of course we all remember how well the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were treated by their fellow Japanese. This is not to say there aren't admirable characteristics of the Japanese culture, as there most certainly are many! >> And I would add parenthetically, that Japan suffers greatly from the >> lack of an imported underclass... their population/age dynamic is >> messed up! No kids, lots of old people... it's gonna bite them hard, >> and probably already is. > > I am inclined to see the things in reverse in this respect. Japan is > actually suffering, and is going to suffer severely, from its population > dynamic. An imported underclass could hardly remedy that, and its absence > sofar may have attenuated some of its consequences... Well, at least we agree they are suffering from their population dynamic. The National Geographic agrees with me (or maybe I agree with them) that America (with Mexicans) and Europe (with Arab and African immigrants) have put off the problem of not having enough young people about, and how that at least puts off the problem of too many old people supported by too few young people. The world may yet benefit from the Japanese population dynamic as robots to care for the elderly are a huge priority for them, and that research has led to Asimo, and will lead to other great leaps forward in robotics and AI, IMHO. -Kelly From steinberg.will at gmail.com Tue Dec 27 06:31:12 2011 From: steinberg.will at gmail.com (Will Steinberg) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 01:31:12 -0500 Subject: [ExI] free will. In-Reply-To: <1324962589.36859.YahooMailClassic@web82908.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <1324962589.36859.YahooMailClassic@web82908.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: I thought about it quite a bit, and you've convinced me about 90%. Those are two different abouts, by the way. I'll keep believing in it, though, until I'm in the computer, at which point I should finally be able to relax... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Dec 27 09:20:57 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 02:20:57 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Forking In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Dec 26, 2011 at 12:43 PM, Keith Henson wrote: > Resources will always be limited. ?Forking will on average cost a > person (or society) half the computation space they had. ?So after a > fork, you run half as fast or are half as smart and half as rich. > Someone with a madness for forking will soon have no more hardware per > second than an Apple II. ?There may be a lot of you, but at the rate > they think it hardly matters. My assumption for the desire of forking is that the human brain (or possibly anything modeled on the human brain) has only one thread of top level conscious thought at once. The desire to be in more than one place at a time, or do more than one thing at a time, seems sufficient justification for the practice. Alternatively, if you can figure out how to have multiple threads of top level conscious thought, then you've solved the same problem in a different way, and then perhaps it's just semantics. > I can't think of any economic or intellectual reason that would not be > served equally well by spinning off a temporary thread that would > merge back in to the main stem. ?As for the Church of the Fork . . . . There's too many negatives in this sentence for me to be absolutely sure which way you're leaning here Keith... but forking and subsequent merging is what I promote. > The inverse of forking is merging. ?That could just as well become a > competing process or maybe even the dominate one for people who get > bored but don't want to exactly die. Meaning merging into some other person's brain? My assumption, again based upon the design of the current wet brain, is that merging will (at least initially) only be possible with the brain that originally forked, because the structure of the neurons would be vastly different in another brain, but would be relatively similar in the same brain separated by only short periods of time and minimal learning in that time. I might use a set of neurons that you use to represent banana to represent pear... and that would seem to be very confusing after a merge of your and my brain. -Kelly From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Dec 27 08:53:18 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 01:53:18 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: <4EF7CE41.1050801@libero.it> References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> <4EF19D66.4070907@aleph.se> <4EF1FD4D.1090600@libero.it> <4EF24ACA.3030400@aleph.se> <4EF3003E.7060803@aleph.se> <4EF43EC6.8030108@aleph.se> <4EF76B3F.6030706@libero.it> <4EF7CE41.1050801@libero.it> Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 25, 2011 at 6:30 PM, Mirco Romanato wrote: > In the past slaver society obtained the bulk of their slaves from > external wars (if they won) and raids. If this source dried up, the > number of slaves in the society dropped. US slaves came primarily as a result of inter-tribal warfare in Africa. One tribe would capture slaves from another tribe in a raid, then sell them to the white slavers at the coast. This would of course perturb the tribe losing members, and a reciprocal raid would likely soon follow. The whites didn't have to get their hands dirty going inland and capturing slaves on their own, for the most part, as this internal squabbling provided ample manpower. Had the Africans fully realized what was going on, and how they were being manipulated, and managed some level of internal cooperation, I can't imagine the slave traders would have survived long. > In the Ancient Rome a common slave could cost 2 years of pay of an > unskilled worker. So they were use with care and well maintained when > possible. This was also true in the US where Irish workers were used to mine coal (deep mines) rather than employ slave labor. It was too dangerous to expose a valuable slave to the rigors of the mine, but the Irish were abundant and cheap and easily replaced. An Irish worker was cheaper than a slave when the life expectancy of a miner was less than the amortized value of the slave over that period. (If I'm saying that right, not an accountant). Aside from that, there was an expectation that slaves would be cared for to some extent in their old age (think black lung) and the Irish could simply be forgotten. -Kelly From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Dec 27 09:25:50 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 02:25:50 -0700 Subject: [ExI] renaming thread please, was a guy's name In-Reply-To: <005e01ccc371$0c8a4210$259ec630$@att.net> References: <005e01ccc371$0c8a4210$259ec630$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 25, 2011 at 6:52 PM, spike wrote: > > If Anders is OK with it, then I am, but having my name as a subject line on > ExI-chat would make me squirm. ? {8-] Do you remember the infamous thread entitled "Kelly's future" all about the future of sex? That sure made me squirm... LOL... > What was the thread name supposed to be? > > spike > From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Dec 27 09:03:29 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 02:03:29 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: <4EF84A59.6090508@aleph.se> References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> <4EF19D66.4070907@aleph.se> <4EF1FD4D.1090600@libero.it> <4EF24ACA.3030400@aleph.se> <4EF3003E.7060803@aleph.se> <4EF43EC6.8030108@aleph.se> <4EF76B3F.6030706@libero.it> <4EF84A59.6090508@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Mon, Dec 26, 2011 at 3:20 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > At least in the US the opposite is true. Being hard on immigration gives you > extra votes, since the voters are incumbents who feel threatened by > immigration. Since illegal aliens are not voting very much you don't gain > political capital by pandering to them. But their children do grow up and vote, due to the naturalization of anyone born here under the 14th amendment. Since the Democrats are disproportionately supported by the lower class, they see benefit in growing the lower class through this process, over the long term. Republicans support immigration because of the cheap labor it produces for business... So nobody in the political class ends up really wanting to solve the problems. Much to the consternation of many typical citizens. It will be interesting to see if, over the long term, the Democrats are correct about the Hispanic voting public, or if the generally conservative family values of Hispanics eventually overpower the politics of poverty and steer them towards the right. There is a lot of pandering to illegal aliens by the political class Anders. I wish you were right, because it would give me more hope that the problem will be resolved, but I fear you are not. -Kelly From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Dec 27 09:32:08 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 02:32:08 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Uploading cautions, "Speed Up" In-Reply-To: <023501ccc257$9f1a3560$dd4ea020$@att.net> References: <4EF433B9.5000802@aleph.se> <4EF49067.9010803@aleph.se> <023501ccc257$9f1a3560$dd4ea020$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 9:18 AM, spike wrote: > >>... On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson > > >>...then I could do simulations without anyone finding out, even if it were > illegal. You just can't make something illegal when so many people will want > to do it... -Kelly > > Kelly that might be loosely analogous to when the south had slavery but the > north wanted it to be illegal. ?Or when Nazi Germany had slavery, and most > of the rest of Europe wanted it illegal. ?If we apply those very loose > analogies to the notion of creating self-copies, we can anticipate a war > between those who would disallow vs those who will enthusiastically embrace > self-replication. ?I can imagine a huge advantage for those who self-copy. What would the philosophical basis for outlawing self replication? It would seem you would have to hang it somewhere, and cloning doesn't do it for me, since each clone has it's own individual experiences and is no worse than identical twins. Come to think of it, I can't think of a lot of good reasons to ban human cloning, though there are some... I was thinking more of the prohibition of alcohol in the US... banned, but still there was a wine cellar at the white house... -Kelly From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Dec 27 09:53:43 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 02:53:43 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question In-Reply-To: <1324741535.8004.YahooMailClassic@web114404.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <1324741535.8004.YahooMailClassic@web114404.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 8:45 AM, Ben Zaiboc wrote: > Kelly Anderson asked: > >>On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 5:49 AM, Ben Zaiboc wrote: >>> >>> The idea of the Great Wall of China being visible from space pre-dates space travel. ?It was /expected/ to be visible from space, but in fact isn't. >>> >>> It's too similar to its surroundings to stand out, which is why far smaller structures are visible from orbit, but the wall isn't. ?Apparently, from the Moon, absolutely nothing man-made is visible on the earth. >>> >> >>Can't you see the big lighted cities at night from the moon??? Seems >>like seeing LA all lighted up wouldn't be that hard. Of course that >>isn't really a "structure"... > > > Well, I was just reporting what people who've actually been there have said. ?I don't know if any of the moon landings took place when the night-side of earth was visible, so maybe they just didn't have a chance to see. ?Interesting quesion though. ?Even the biggest urban sprawls would be a tiny pin-prick from quarter of a million miles away, and street lights are pretty dim, so maybe not. > In this video from 18 to 20 seconds, you can see some lights on the earth that appear to be city lights, but it's hard to tell at the YouTube resolution. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VdSFT8Ouqg&feature=player_embedded I suspect this is at a distance more or less analogous to the distance from the moon... so the answer would seem to be that if you were on the moon during a solar eclipse, you could indeed see city lights... but I don't know for sure. -Kelly From anders at aleph.se Tue Dec 27 09:55:08 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:55:08 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Forking In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4EF995FC.8070100@aleph.se> Keith Henson wrote: > On Mon, Dec 26, 2011 at 5:00 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > >> Forking is not necessarily driven by a drive to reproduce. It might be >> economic, it might be intellectual, it might even be religious - as soon >> as there is somebody with pro-forking views a lot of forking is likely >> unless the cost of computing space is very high. >> > > To me this discussion has the flavor of banging your head on a wall or > putting beans up your nose. > Ah. I think I see the fundamental problem. We likely have different views of personal identity, and that colors our perceptions. I regard myself as the equivalence class of all sufficiently Anders-like processes, and this (together with my value theory) make me think forking can add value. Your identity and value theories likely do not see it as useful as I do. > Resources will always be limited. Forking will on average cost a > person (or society) half the computation space they had. So after a > fork, you run half as fast or are half as smart and half as rich. > Someone with a madness for forking will soon have no more hardware per > second than an Apple II. There may be a lot of you, but at the rate > they think it hardly matters. > If I fork myself, there will now be twice as much me-experience, twice the amount of human capital and twice as many entities sharing my goals. This has a certain value to me. It is also valuable to others if I have useful skills - now these services can be bought a bit more cheaply, and at a greater quantity or speed. This later value equates to income: two forks of me can under these circumstances earn more than one of me. Also, even if the forks earn less per unit of time they can still save earnings and invest them. There are interesting issues in fork economics, for example whether it is better to be twice as fast as twice as many, and how much the cost of computing substrate will be relative to the median mind salary. I think there are many domains where the advantages go in different directions. > I can't think of any economic or intellectual reason that would not be > served equally well by spinning off a temporary thread that would > merge back in to the main stem. As for the Church of the Fork . . . . > > The inverse of forking is merging. That could just as well become a > competing process or maybe even the dominate one for people who get > bored but don't want to exactly die. > Assuming merging is doable. You cannot just add together two neural networks. It works in a few special cases like the Hopfield attractor network since it has perfectly additive learning, but given that that kind of network also has a total crash in performance when it gets overloaded because of its additiveness, it is not a good model for an upload mind. If you have a typical neural network, copy it, train them separately to learn maps A and B on domain X and Y, and then try to merge the copies together there doesn't seem to be any general method to produce a network that has the output A on domain X and B on Y. I would love to see some results here. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Dec 27 10:09:30 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 03:09:30 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream In-Reply-To: <4EF5A047.9040201@aleph.se> References: <4EF5A047.9040201@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 2:49 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2011-12-24 09:35, Kelly Anderson wrote: >> >> Uh, maybe dumb question here... but how would we tell a star was >> dimmer unless we measured the brightness before and after the >> civilization had created their Dyson swarm or whatever it was that >> dimmed the star? Is there a way to tell it's dimmer than it should be >> without having measured it's brightness before? > > > Yes. Stars shine with (roughly) a blackbody spectrum, telling us their > temperature. Normal stars fall into certain curves on the Herzprung-Russell > diagram, > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertzsprung%E2%80%93Russell_diagram > which relates their absolute magnitude (total energy output) to their > temperature. If you Dyson a star it will become dimmer (less magnitude) but > the temperature will be unchanged (same color): it will move straight > downwards. So if you see a star outside the big clusters, that could be an > indication of a partial Dyson shell. > > In addition, a Dyson shell will re-radiate the energy as deep infrared, so > the next step is to check if there is a huge excess of cold blackbody > radiation. > > http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Other_searches.htm Thanks Anders and everyone else that answered this query... I figured there would have to be some way of figuring this out. Astronomers think so differently from me... I find it fascinating to read of their approaches and exploits. -Kelly From pharos at gmail.com Tue Dec 27 11:17:45 2011 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 11:17:45 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question In-Reply-To: References: <1324741535.8004.YahooMailClassic@web114404.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 9:53 AM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > In this video from 18 to 20 seconds, you can see some lights on the > earth that appear to be city lights, but it's hard to tell at the > YouTube resolution. > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VdSFT8Ouqg&feature=player_embedded > > I suspect this is at a distance more or less analogous to the distance > from the moon... so the answer would seem to be that if you were on > the moon during a solar eclipse, you could indeed see city lights... > but I don't know for sure. > > That video is from the EchoStar 11 Satellite, 22,300 miles up. About 1/10 the distance to the moon. The ?eyes? of the DISH Earth camera observes objects in the visible spectrum, similar to the human eye, with a resolution of about 20 km per pixel. Also Snopes comments: An object that can barely be seen from a height of 180 miles up is obviously not going to be visible from the moon (roughly 237,000 miles away), as confirmed by Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean: The only thing you can see from the moon is a beautiful sphere, mostly white (clouds), some blue (ocean), patches of yellow (deserts), and every once in a while some green vegetation. No man-made object is visible on this scale. In fact, when first leaving earth's orbit and only a few thousand miles away, no man-made object is visible at that point either." --------- Presumably the discussion is about objects seen with human eyes. Telescopes, radar, etc. can see lots more. BillK From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Tue Dec 27 13:06:35 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 14:06:35 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Book- "It's OK to Die" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 27 December 2011 01:37, John Grigg wrote: > We argue that at the end of a long life, or at the end of a terminal > illness, that it can be "ok to die" in a peaceful and natural fashion, > not hooked up to tubes, wires and beeping monitors in an ICU. This is really just the umpteenth form of denial, by a culture that has renounced prometheism as both sinful and too demanding, and yet is unprepared to face the consequences. And, if anything, I would more partial to the dictum according to which those are blessed by gods that die young, while standing against an adverse destiny... -- Stefano Vaj From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Tue Dec 27 13:12:46 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 14:12:46 +0100 Subject: [ExI] free will. In-Reply-To: <1324962589.36859.YahooMailClassic@web82908.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <1324962589.36859.YahooMailClassic@web82908.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: 2011/12/27 john clark > ... I make decision X rather than decision Y for a reason and thus it is deterministic, OR I make decision X rather than decision Y for NO reason and thus it is random. The "free will" noise doesn't have anything to do with it. As on other subjects, I find Wolfram's rewording of a time-honoured reconciliation of the paradox (see Luther) quite persuasive. When you *decide* something, you actually decide. OTOH, the decision cannot be other than that dictated by your "nature". What makes you "free" is that your nature can be inferred by your decision, but your decision cannot be computed starting from your nature unless by "running" you up to that point. -- Stefano Vaj From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Tue Dec 27 13:32:24 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 14:32:24 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> <4EF19D66.4070907@aleph.se> <4EF1FD4D.1090600@libero.it> <4EF24ACA.3030400@aleph.se> <4EF34034.5060309@libero.it> Message-ID: On 27 December 2011 07:17, Kelly Anderson wrote: > Japan has a history of racial purity that goes back far beyond Hitler. > They are the most genetically homogenous population on earth. Chinese Han are in fact even more. But what I was referring to with "xenophilia" is the fact that Japanese are in principle in love with everything coming from outside. With time, they imported buddhism, confucian ethic, chinese characters, catholicism, Belle Epoque forced industrialisation, nationalism, parliamentary democracy, imperialism, they kept sending people abroad, they even embraced enthousiastically, albeit in a superficial and modified fashion, the American way of life in a matter of months after WWII. > It is still frowned upon to marry outside the culture. I have known a number > of Japanese women who married Americans at the university. Mmhhh. Japanese men and women are not so averse to inter-cultural affairs and mixed marriages are not so unusual. Certainly, neither the spouse nor the offspring will ever be considered as a Japanese. > The world may yet benefit from the Japanese population dynamic as > robots to care for the elderly are a huge priority for them, and that > research has led to Asimo, and will lead to other great leaps forward > in robotics and AI, IMHO. Yes. Even though I think that the biological aging of a given society makes for a cultural and existential aging thereof, leading eventually to extinction, possibly through the most direct route which consists in replacing it piece by piece by imported human resources, once more the relative shortage of labour encourages technological innovation. This is both applicable to industrial and to domestic labour. Domestic appliance were developed and became popular first in the US because for social, economic and cultural reasons lower middle classe there did not enjoy much of a permanent, live-in domestic help. My own mother did not see much of a point in the seventies for buying a dish-washing machine when the work of a maid was so much more flexible, accurate and delicate on the china, while wasting much less soap and hot water. -- Stefano Vaj From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Tue Dec 27 13:59:45 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 14:59:45 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Forking In-Reply-To: <4EF995FC.8070100@aleph.se> References: <4EF995FC.8070100@aleph.se> Message-ID: On 27 December 2011 10:55, Anders Sandberg wrote: > If I fork myself, there will now be twice as much me-experience, twice the > amount of human capital and twice as many entities sharing my goals. This > has a certain value to me. OTOH, this can be seen in another way: you get more and more competitors exactly on your feeding chain, meaning that they will obviously share your needs *and* tastes, and be roughly identical in their aptness to satisfy them. Including for things such as, say, a given one-copy romantic partner or one-place academic position. :-) But personally I take a mid way concerning forks. I do not really consider them as part of what *I* can be, but do consider plausible to have some investment in them as we all have, in varying degrees, having children, relatives, disciples, readers, heirs, clones, co-workers or co-believers engaged in joint efforts, fellow citizens, etc. The real issue here IMHO is that "fork" immediately implies "divergence". Something that makes obviously for competing centres of interest, but at the same time for a more interesting scenario than would otherwise exists, the truth for me being after Nietzsche that we do not really want to replicate ourselves, but to give place to "something more than what we have ever been" -- Stefano Vaj From clementlawyer at gmail.com Tue Dec 27 13:50:00 2011 From: clementlawyer at gmail.com (James Clement) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 14:50:00 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Fwd: Book- "It's OK to Die" References: Message-ID: <315F7578-DD04-47BF-852D-102C4A516073@gmail.com> > I am sharing this with the list... > > John > > It's OK to Die, available for purchase at our website > > www.oktodie.com > > The book is filled with graphic stories from the ER illustrating how > most Americans are unpreppared for the one that will happen to us all: > death. > > We argue that at the end of a long life, or at the end of a terminal > illness, that it can be "ok to die" in a peaceful and natural fashion, > not hooked up to tubes, wires and beeping monitors in an ICU. > I'm hopeful that these guys mean well, and they're not just trying to make a buck off of end-of-life issues. However, IMHO, "irreversible" death is never an okay decision. As a cryonicist, I have the opposite of a DNR. I have executed a medical directive that says to take every possible measure to extend my life, and only if that's not possible, or if my brain is in immediate danger of rapid deterioration, then to call Alcor and move me to a state that allows assisted suicide, so Alvor can begin cryopreservation under as optimal conditions, as possible. Best regards, James From mbb386 at main.nc.us Tue Dec 27 15:14:56 2011 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:14:56 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Book- "It's OK to Die" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > I am happy to announce that Kris and I are authors of the new book > It's OK to Die, available for purchase at our website > > www.oktodie.com > > The book is filled with graphic stories from the ER illustrating how > most Americans are unpreppared for the one that will happen to us all: > death. (snip) Thank you, John Grigg. After watching two grandparents go out slowly of massive strokes - being kept for months on machines, to no purspose, this material is of interest. If one does not arrange beforehand for suspension, then OK to Die is needed. The End of This Life conversation must take place while we're still "with it" enough to be listened to by our family and doctor. And then whoever the designated decision maker is must be able to stand firm against all emotional backsliding by themselves or other family members and smoke-screening or false-hope-raising by medical people. This goes for Alcor folks too. Some people are hard to talk with on this subject. Like the ones who refuse to make a Will because it indicates they may die.... :* Regards, MB From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Tue Dec 27 16:04:16 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 17:04:16 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Book- "It's OK to Die" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 27 December 2011 16:14, MB wrote: > If one does not arrange beforehand for suspension, then OK to Die is needed. Of course it is OK to die. Including if you are in perfect health, and/or you enyoy an indefinite lifespan, and/or when you could easily obtain suspension and later resurrection. The real issue is about freedom - doing it when you like, or... dying in the attempt. The reason why I do not buying for one second into preaches for "resigned", "peaceful" passing-off is the same why I strongly oppose the similarr preaches, often coming from the same quarters, on the allegedly sinful nature of suicide or euthanasia or against their legalisation. -- Stefano Vaj From mbb386 at main.nc.us Tue Dec 27 16:43:34 2011 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 11:43:34 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Book- "It's OK to Die" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <14ba808e81c6bc4a6270694b022c8d71.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> Stefano writes: > Of course it is OK to die. > > Including if you are in perfect health, and/or you enyoy an indefinite > lifespan, and/or when you could easily obtain suspension and later > resurrection. > > The real issue is about freedom - doing it when you like, or... dying > in the attempt. > > The reason why I do not buying for one second into preaches for > "resigned", "peaceful" passing-off is the same why I strongly oppose > the similarr preaches, often coming from the same quarters, on the > allegedly sinful nature of suicide or euthanasia or against their > legalisation. > :) The freedom to choose is dear to my heart. I don't know about in your country, but here in the USA the very discussion of death is frowned upon by many. "Prolonging life" at all costs seems to be a popular idea - even if what is being called "life" is not what *I* would consider living. Seems it's just driven by thoughtless emotion on one side and money on the other side. Of course I have not read this new book, only saw the website when John sent the URL, but open discussion and informed decision making is essential. If this website and book will encourage that then I approve. What a shame it would be to come to your own personal decision only to find yourself blocked (when you are no longer in a good position to argue) by family emotionalism or medical financial opportunism - or laws against your choice, passed by people who do not know you or your situation *at all* and do not care. IMHO, the laws will never be fixed if open discussion does not take place. Regards, MB From eugen at leitl.org Tue Dec 27 16:58:27 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 17:58:27 +0100 Subject: [ExI] free will. In-Reply-To: References: <1324962589.36859.YahooMailClassic@web82908.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20111227165827.GF31847@leitl.org> On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 02:12:46PM +0100, Stefano Vaj wrote: > As on other subjects, I find Wolfram's rewording of a time-honoured > reconciliation of the paradox (see Luther) quite persuasive. > > When you *decide* something, you actually decide. OTOH, the decision > cannot be other than that dictated by your "nature". What makes you > "free" is that your nature can be inferred by your decision, but your > decision cannot be computed starting from your nature unless by > "running" you up to that point. The question is also of practical predictability. We're noisy, nonlinear system with a very short scope of predictability. Perfectly deterministic *interesting* systems not taking inputs from the real world (which is also noisy and nonlinear) are predictable, but only if you actually do the computation. No shortcuts there. In general the whole issue of free will vs determinism looks rather irrelevant these days. From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Tue Dec 27 16:51:22 2011 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 09:51:22 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Forking Message-ID: On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 4:49 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > > Keith Henson wrote: >> On Mon, Dec 26, 2011 at 5:00 AM, ?Anders Sandberg wrote: >> >>> Forking is not necessarily driven by a drive to reproduce. It might be >>> economic, it might be intellectual, it might even be religious - as soon >>> as there is somebody with pro-forking views a lot of forking is likely >>> unless the cost of computing space is very high. >> >> To me this discussion has the flavor of banging your head on a wall or >> putting beans up your nose. >> > Ah. I think I see the fundamental problem. We likely have different > views of personal identity, and that colors our perceptions. I regard > myself as the equivalence class of all sufficiently Anders-like > processes, and this (together with my value theory) make me think > forking can add value. Your identity and value theories likely do not > see it as useful as I do. Don't forget that I practically invented forking as a way to crew star ships for the Far Edge Party. " The only way clearly available is to explore the Galaxy in parallel. snip " To explore the Galaxy in parallel, we need to make only a few starships, say 100 and recruit crews for perhaps 10, but we make copies of the crews to fill all 100. At 1,000 people per ship, and 100 ships (100,000 adventurers) this would probably be necessary anyway. I doubt there are as many as 10,000 people in the entire world who would board a starship. Misfits who want to *do* something . . . . we take all roads (or at least a fair sample of them). " People have talked about making a copy of themselves and having the copy do the unpleasant chores. That's silly. A good copy would be indistinguishable from the original right down to desires. You could neither make a copy to go visit the stars nor one to stay on Earth that would be happy unless you didn't care which you did (unlikely) or someone messed with their personalities (unethical). In fact, I think it would be unethical to distinguish between copies (a case where the Golden Rule applies in its strongest form). The only case I can see where copies are justified is a situation where a person really has no preference between two mutually exclusive choices." (Dated on the net 1987, hard copy in Baen's New Destinies dated fall 1990) http://www.hackcanada.com/blackcrawl/elctrnic/megascal.txt (Rereading it made me realize just how old the ideas we have been talking about are. Scary) >> Resources will always be limited. ?Forking will on average cost a >> person (or society) half the computation space they had. ?So after a >> fork, you run half as fast or are half as smart and half as rich. >> Someone with a madness for forking will soon have no more hardware per >> second than an Apple II. ?There may be a lot of you, but at the rate >> they think it hardly matters. >> > > If I fork myself, there will now be twice as much me-experience, twice > the amount of human capital and twice as many entities sharing my goals. You will also have half the resources per capita. Widespread, uncontrolled forking is isomorphic to gray goo. > This has a certain value to me. It is also valuable to others if I have > useful skills - now these services can be bought a bit more cheaply, and > at a greater quantity or speed. This later value equates to income: two > forks of me can under these circumstances earn more than one of me. > Also, even if the forks earn less per unit of time they can still save > earnings and invest them. 2x zero is still zero. It's not at all obvious to me that human labor will be worth *anything* in a future where the technology is up to forking. It's also not obvious in such a world that "saving" and "investing" will have their current meaning. > There are interesting issues in fork economics, for example whether it > is better to be twice as fast as twice as many, and how much the cost of > computing substrate will be relative to the median mind salary. I think > there are many domains where the advantages go in different directions. I have a strong opinion that forking is a bad idea, but not that much confidence that my opinion is right. Still, I think forking in a limited environment is a path to grinding poverty and probably wars from activating human psychological mechanisms by projected "looming privation." I suppose forking should be added to excessive population growth rate as a reason we don't see the works of aliens. Keith From msd001 at gmail.com Tue Dec 27 16:42:25 2011 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 11:42:25 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Organizations to "Speed Up" Creation of AGI? In-Reply-To: <1324936146.3081.YahooMailClassic@web82903.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <1324936146.3081.YahooMailClassic@web82903.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: 2011/12/26 john clark > AGI? Why would anyone want to speed up Adjusted Gross Income? But maybe I misunderstand, perhaps it's the interests of the American Geological Institute you want to advance, or maybe you have stock in Analytical Graphics Incorporated, or maybe you want to learn a new trade at the American Gunsmithing Institute. Personally I'm more interested in AI, the acronym means "Artificial Intelligence", just like in the movie that millions of people saw and understood. I'm not sure why, in the context of artificial intelligence, anyone would need to discuss a bus that cannot slow down below 50mph. (Speed) I don't understand the relevance to the movie about the old man who lifts his house with balloons with the intent of movie to Paradise Falls. (Up) I am also unsure what this has to do with the christian music festival. (Creation) Please people, be sure to use words with only a single definition and approved usage pattern. :) From kryonica at gmail.com Tue Dec 27 18:12:40 2011 From: kryonica at gmail.com (Kryonica) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 18:12:40 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Fwd: Book- "It's OK to Die" In-Reply-To: <315F7578-DD04-47BF-852D-102C4A516073@gmail.com> References: <315F7578-DD04-47BF-852D-102C4A516073@gmail.com> Message-ID: <8AF98F36-650B-4598-9BAB-869AB5C829E8@gmail.com> Which state/s would that be? And what are the requirements for being allowed assisted suicide? Is beginning senility f i an acceptable cause? Or must it be Alzheimers? On 27 Dec 2011, at 13:50, James Clement wrote: > move me to a state that allows assisted suicide -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mbb386 at main.nc.us Tue Dec 27 18:56:10 2011 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 13:56:10 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Fwd: Book- "It's OK to Die" In-Reply-To: <8AF98F36-650B-4598-9BAB-869AB5C829E8@gmail.com> References: <315F7578-DD04-47BF-852D-102C4A516073@gmail.com> <8AF98F36-650B-4598-9BAB-869AB5C829E8@gmail.com> Message-ID: <75fe47d090dc17d04bf5ef3301c0727d.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> > Which state/s would that be? And what are the requirements for being allowed > assisted suicide? Is beginning senility f i an acceptable cause? Or must it be > Alzheimers? > It's complex and challenging and different in different places. I looked at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_suicide quote: "Assisted suicide is legal in the three American states of Oregon (via the Oregon Death with Dignity Act),[35] Washington (by Washington Death with Dignity Act), and Montana (through the 2009 trial court ruling Baxter v. Montana). There are relatively substantial barriers to the use of some of these provisions. For instance, Oregon requires a physician to prescribe medication but it must be self-administered. The prognosis must be for a life span of 6 months or less. The person must be a resident of Oregon. A written request for prescription and two oral requests from the patient are also needed to escape criminal liability, plus written confirmation by doctor that the act is voluntary and informed. This limited model has withstood constitutional scrutiny: Gonzales v Oregon 368 F. 3d 1118 (2004),[36] affirmed by 546 U.S. 243 (2006)" Regards, MB From spike66 at att.net Tue Dec 27 20:15:51 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 12:15:51 -0800 Subject: [ExI] how did high heels happen? Message-ID: <01a901ccc4d4$54c79aa0$fe56cfe0$@att.net> I am a long-time veteran of observing wild beasts, noting odd characteristics and behaviors, but I have observed a behavior of the most inscrutable of beasts, the wildly complicated homo sapiens, which has me stumped completely. My six year old niece is visiting. She has one sibling, an eight year old brother. She is the exact opposite of a tomboy, a real frilly-laced girly girl. Her mother is not that way, but the daughter sure is. She has few external influences in that direction that we know of: Disney movies perhaps. In any case, she has been wanting high heel shoes. So for Christmas her parents gave her some toy glass slippers like Cinderella wore to the ball, which have heels, but it really wasn't what she was shooting for. We googled on women's shoes, and she was wildly excited by stiletto heel pumps. We tried to explain that little girls don't wear such devices, but she would have none of that. She wants these high heels, so now this presents some puzzling questions. Why would a pre-adolescent child be so fervently attracted to such a garment? My previous theory on high heel shoes has been destroyed. I had assumed that women thought that men found high heel shoes sexy (we don't) and so wearing such a contraption would attract men. But that doesn't apply to my first grader niece, who has shown no particular attraction for boys and as far as we know has no foggy clue of the concept of sexual attraction or copulation. But she is attracted to those shoes like bees to honey. Question: could this behavior be somehow hard wired into human brains? Has anyone any speculations or theories that could explain why a little girl would be inclined to wear something that is uncomfortable, impractical and discouraged by her own parents? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From painlord2k at libero.it Tue Dec 27 20:43:02 2011 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 21:43:02 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> <4EF19D66.4070907@aleph.se> <4EF1FD4D.1090600@libero.it> <4EF24ACA.3030400@aleph.se> <4EF3003E.7060803@aleph.se> <4EF43EC6.8030108@aleph.se> <4EF76B3F.6030706@libero.it> <4EF7CE41.1050801@libero.it> Message-ID: <4EFA2DD6.1090902@libero.it> Il 27/12/2011 09:53, Kelly Anderson ha scritto: > On Sun, Dec 25, 2011 at 6:30 PM, Mirco Romanato wrote: >> In the past slaver society obtained the bulk of their slaves from >> external wars (if they won) and raids. If this source dried up, the >> number of slaves in the society dropped. > US slaves came primarily as a result of inter-tribal warfare in > Africa. One tribe would capture slaves from another tribe in a raid, > then sell them to the white slavers at the coast. This would of course > perturb the tribe losing members, and a reciprocal raid would likely > soon follow. The whites didn't have to get their hands dirty going > inland and capturing slaves on their own, for the most part, as this > internal squabbling provided ample manpower. Had the Africans fully > realized what was going on, and how they were being manipulated, and > managed some level of internal cooperation, I can't imagine the slave > traders would have survived long. This is disingenuous, because the slave trade was a feature of the place. Muslims slavers were commercing blacks (and others) from the beginning of Islam (and the slavery predate Islam). In fact, the British stopped the commerce of slaves in the Atlantic and in the Indian Ocean using military forces and destroying the slaver ports and bases. They were not so multicultural and respecting different cultures like Islam that institutionalized slavery and the raids needed to capture slaves. In fact, Muslim slavers operated until the end of the XIX century and the beginning of the XX. It is remarkable there are only small traces of African genes in the Middle East and Arabia (AKA they used their (mainly black) slaves like the Nazis used the Jews - they were forced to work until they died and often they were castrated). The treatment of the slaves in North American was paternal compared to the treatment in South America and loving compared to the treatment of Muslims. >> In the Ancient Rome a common slave could cost 2 years of pay of an >> unskilled worker. So they were use with care and well maintained when >> possible. > This was also true in the US where Irish workers were used to mine > coal (deep mines) rather than employ slave labor. It was too dangerous > to expose a valuable slave to the rigors of the mine, but the Irish > were abundant and cheap and easily replaced. An Irish worker was > cheaper than a slave when the life expectancy of a miner was less than > the amortized value of the slave over that period. (If I'm saying that > right, not an accountant). Aside from that, there was an expectation > that slaves would be cared for to some extent in their old age (think > black lung) and the Irish could simply be forgotten. The expectation a slave would be cared by his owner in the old age is an unique feature of North America. The mortality in South America (mainly Brazil) and in Africa and the Middle East was much, much higher. Mirco From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Dec 27 21:14:07 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kellycoinguy) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 14:14:07 -0700 Subject: [ExI] how did high heels happen? Message-ID: Lady Gaga or some other television our societal influence? Other kids at school? I think this must be memetic not genetic Sent from my Samsung Epic? 4G Touch -------- Original message -------- Subject: [ExI] how did high heels happen? From: spike To: 'ExI chat list' CC: ? I am a long-time veteran of observing wild beasts, noting odd characteristics and behaviors, but I have observed a behavior of the most inscrutable of beasts, the wildly complicated homo sapiens, which has me stumped completely. ? My six year old niece is visiting.? She has one sibling, an eight year old brother.? She is the exact opposite of a tomboy, a real frilly-laced girly girl.? Her mother is not that way, but the daughter sure is.? She has few external influences in that direction that we know of: Disney movies perhaps. ? In any case, she has been wanting high heel shoes.? So for Christmas her parents gave her some toy glass slippers like Cinderella wore to the ball, which have heels, but it really wasn?t what she was shooting for.? We googled on women?s shoes, and she was wildly excited by stiletto heel pumps.? We tried to explain that little girls don?t wear such devices, but she would have none of that.? She wants these high heels, so now this presents some puzzling questions. ? Why would a pre-adolescent child be so fervently attracted to such a garment? ? My previous theory on high heel shoes has been destroyed.? I had assumed that women thought that men found high heel shoes sexy (we don?t) and so wearing such a contraption would attract men.? But that doesn?t apply to my first grader niece, who has shown no particular attraction for boys and as far as we know has no foggy clue of the concept of sexual attraction or copulation.? But she is attracted to those shoes like bees to honey. ? Question: could this behavior be somehow hard wired into human brains?? Has anyone any speculations or theories that could explain why a little girl would be inclined to wear something that is uncomfortable, impractical and discouraged by her own parents? ? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Tue Dec 27 21:37:28 2011 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 21:37:28 +0000 Subject: [ExI] how did high heels happen? In-Reply-To: <01a901ccc4d4$54c79aa0$fe56cfe0$@att.net> References: <01a901ccc4d4$54c79aa0$fe56cfe0$@att.net> Message-ID: 2011/12/27 spike wrote: > In any case, she has been wanting high heel shoes.? So for Christmas her > parents gave her some toy glass slippers like Cinderella wore to the ball, > which have heels, but it really wasn?t what she was shooting for.? We > googled on women?s shoes, and she was wildly excited by stiletto heel > pumps.? We tried to explain that little girls don?t wear such devices, but > she would have none of that.? She wants these high heels, so now this > presents some puzzling questions. > > Question: could this behavior be somehow hard wired into human brains?? Has > anyone any speculations or theories that could explain why a little girl > would be inclined to wear something that is uncomfortable, impractical and > discouraged by her own parents? > Sounds like you haven't met many families with young girl children. :) It's called 'dressing up'. All young girls do it. Even her Barbie doll has high heels. For just one example, see: BillK From spike66 at att.net Tue Dec 27 21:43:02 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 13:43:02 -0800 Subject: [ExI] cool short video Message-ID: <001801ccc4e0$82e5fa10$88b1ee30$@att.net> Apologies in advance, no apparent transhumanist angle here that I can see, but it was a delightful two minutes anyway: Subject: What A Wonderful World - David Attenborough What A Wonderful World - David Attenborough spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Tue Dec 27 21:19:25 2011 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 16:19:25 -0500 Subject: [ExI] how did high heels happen? In-Reply-To: <01a901ccc4d4$54c79aa0$fe56cfe0$@att.net> References: <01a901ccc4d4$54c79aa0$fe56cfe0$@att.net> Message-ID: 2011/12/27 spike : > Question: could this behavior be somehow hard wired into human brains?? Has > anyone any speculations or theories that could explain why a little girl > would be inclined to wear something that is uncomfortable, impractical and > discouraged by her own parents? The first thought that came to my mind is that "high heels" make shorter women appear to be taller. Children generally want to be bigger because the perception of grown-ups is that they get to do anything they want. That only grown-up women "get to" wear such ridiculous footwear might be the allure. If mom isn't typically dressing this way as a role model, but mom also isn't the girly-girl that your 6yo niece wants to be - it could be that the odd shoes are valued for their novelty in the same way that a tiara would be. I don't have any nieces though, so I'm really just guessing from the perspective of basic observations of what you called "inscrutable beasts." :) From kryonica at gmail.com Tue Dec 27 22:00:34 2011 From: kryonica at gmail.com (Kryonica) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 22:00:34 +0000 Subject: [ExI] how did high heels happen? In-Reply-To: References: <01a901ccc4d4$54c79aa0$fe56cfe0$@att.net> Message-ID: Interesting isn't it that fashions of all sorts all tend to make women bigger as if this was one of our unconscious aspiration? Fashion models have to be tall and not being tall enough to be a model is a shortcoming of a kind. High heels make us taller. In 18th century France there was a fashion when women wore very high wigs, some so high that they got stuck in door frames, to the merriment of the social satirists of the day. Traditional Japanese women also appear to have built up their hair to add an extra inch to their body. When imagining my future enhanced self I always add an inch or two and many avatars in Second Life are incredibly tall by real life standards. Why it should be so is hard to say, since tall people are no better (smarter, stronger or more long lived) than shorter people but it is manifestly something that peoples all over the world appear to value. On 27 Dec 2011, at 21:19, Mike Dougherty wrote: > 2011/12/27 spike : >> Question: could this behavior be somehow hard wired into human brains? Has >> anyone any speculations or theories that could explain why a little girl >> would be inclined to wear something that is uncomfortable, impractical and >> discouraged by her own parents? > > The first thought that came to my mind is that "high heels" make > shorter women appear to be taller. Children generally want to be > bigger because the perception of grown-ups is that they get to do > anything they want. That only grown-up women "get to" wear such > ridiculous footwear might be the allure. If mom isn't typically > dressing this way as a role model, but mom also isn't the girly-girl > that your 6yo niece wants to be - it could be that the odd shoes are > valued for their novelty in the same way that a tiara would be. > > I don't have any nieces though, so I'm really just guessing from the > perspective of basic observations of what you called "inscrutable > beasts." :) > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From steinberg.will at gmail.com Tue Dec 27 22:03:55 2011 From: steinberg.will at gmail.com (Will Steinberg) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 17:03:55 -0500 Subject: [ExI] how did high heels happen? In-Reply-To: References: <01a901ccc4d4$54c79aa0$fe56cfe0$@att.net> Message-ID: She has learned that "girls" are a group she belongs to, and that high heels will help her to emulate/conform to that group. Seems rather simple... On Dec 27, 2011 4:48 PM, "Mike Dougherty" wrote: > 2011/12/27 spike : > > Question: could this behavior be somehow hard wired into human brains? > Has > > anyone any speculations or theories that could explain why a little girl > > would be inclined to wear something that is uncomfortable, impractical > and > > discouraged by her own parents? > > The first thought that came to my mind is that "high heels" make > shorter women appear to be taller. Children generally want to be > bigger because the perception of grown-ups is that they get to do > anything they want. That only grown-up women "get to" wear such > ridiculous footwear might be the allure. If mom isn't typically > dressing this way as a role model, but mom also isn't the girly-girl > that your 6yo niece wants to be - it could be that the odd shoes are > valued for their novelty in the same way that a tiara would be. > > I don't have any nieces though, so I'm really just guessing from the > perspective of basic observations of what you called "inscrutable > beasts." :) > > _______________________________________________ > 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 bbenzai at yahoo.com Tue Dec 27 21:59:19 2011 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 13:59:19 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] Homeless in Hell- A Christmas Story, by Orson Scott Card In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1325023159.55946.YahooMailClassic@web114418.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Adrian Tymes wrote: >On Sun, Dec 25, 2011 at 2:14 PM, John Grigg wrote: >> I could not get a response from the server either, and so here is the >> Christmas story by Orson Scott Card... > >Thanks for the repost. 'Twas worth reading. I beg to differ. I've always been very disappointed in his stories, which seem to me to be disguised religious propaganda. This is little different, the main difference being that the disguise is much thinner. Ben Zaiboc Sorry to be a Grinch, but, well, just speaking my mind. From mbb386 at main.nc.us Tue Dec 27 22:12:46 2011 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 17:12:46 -0500 Subject: [ExI] how did high heels happen? In-Reply-To: <01a901ccc4d4$54c79aa0$fe56cfe0$@att.net> References: <01a901ccc4d4$54c79aa0$fe56cfe0$@att.net> Message-ID: <659530c568ef8b95bed3390f079ad21a.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> > Has > anyone any speculations or theories that could explain why a little girl > would be inclined to wear something that is uncomfortable, impractical and > discouraged by her own parents? You said it: "discouraged by her parents". Better look out, she's starting young! :))) /teasing Seriously: When our DD wanted high heels (at about that age) we went to the local thrift shop and bought her a pair of silver heels. She was delighted. *I* was disgusted as the heels were missing their little rubber caps and poked some holes in our new shinyl-vinyl flooring. :( Of course the things didn't fit right so she didn't wear them much. Dressups was the name of the game, and even my dear son dressed up in a bridesmaid dress and big floppy hat! All the kids loved dressing up, and there's no doubt about it, women's clothing is more colorful and exotic since our menfolk don't wear great robes, skirts, feathers, jewelry, etc. We even found a couple of thrift shop wigs, a long blonde and a short brown. It's the power of imagination. Regards, MB From bbenzai at yahoo.com Tue Dec 27 22:08:20 2011 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 14:08:20 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] Subject: Re: free will. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1325023700.74847.YahooMailClassic@web114402.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Will Steinberg wrote: >Sorry, by 'free will' I meant "the qualia one feels when he or she does the >thing which people usually call 'making a decision.'" > >Unless of course, John, you are a zombie! Yes, he is a zombie. As am I, and you, and everyone else, who has ever, or ever will, live. Let's just accept that all living thinking feeling beings are zombies. Zombies who have the experience of having these things that don't actually exist, that some of us call 'qualia'. It will make things much simpler. Ben Zaiboc From bbenzai at yahoo.com Tue Dec 27 22:21:06 2011 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 14:21:06 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] Book- "It's OK to Die" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1325024466.48737.YahooMailClassic@web114410.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> John Grigg wrote: > I am sharing this with the list... There are no links in this message, but I would comment that yes, it is ok to die, /if that's what you want/. Just as it's ok to /not/ die, if that's what you want. What is definitely, and non-negotiably, NOT ok, is to be forced to die if you don't want to. Which is why so many of us are working to make it a choice rather than a necessity. Ben Zaiboc From gts_2000 at yahoo.com Tue Dec 27 22:22:05 2011 From: gts_2000 at yahoo.com (Gordon) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 14:22:05 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] how did high heels happen? In-Reply-To: <659530c568ef8b95bed3390f079ad21a.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> References: <01a901ccc4d4$54c79aa0$fe56cfe0$@att.net> <659530c568ef8b95bed3390f079ad21a.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> Message-ID: <1325024525.62969.YahooMailNeo@web36503.mail.mud.yahoo.com> I seem to recall reading somewhere that high heels were originally worn mainly by men who rode horses; they help keep the feet in the stirrups. ________________________________ From: MB To: ExI chat list Sent: Tuesday, December 27, 2011 3:12 PM Subject: Re: [ExI] how did high heels happen? > Has > anyone any speculations or theories that could explain why a little girl > would be inclined to wear something that is uncomfortable, impractical and > discouraged by her own parents? You said it: "discouraged by her parents". Better look out, she's starting young! :)))? /teasing Seriously: When our DD wanted high heels (at about that age) we went to the local thrift shop and bought her a pair of silver heels. She was delighted. *I* was disgusted as the heels were missing their little rubber caps and poked some holes in our new shinyl-vinyl flooring. :( Of course the things didn't fit right so she didn't wear them much. Dressups was the name of the game, and even my dear son dressed up in a bridesmaid dress and big floppy hat! All the kids loved dressing up, and there's no doubt about it, women's clothing is more colorful and exotic since our menfolk don't wear great robes, skirts, feathers, jewelry, etc. We even found a couple of thrift shop wigs, a long blonde and a short brown. It's the power of imagination. Regards, MB _______________________________________________ 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 bbenzai at yahoo.com Tue Dec 27 22:52:18 2011 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 14:52:18 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] how did high heels happen? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1325026338.54236.YahooMailClassic@web114404.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> "spike" mused: > My previous theory on high heel shoes has been destroyed. I had assumed > that women thought that men found high heel shoes sexy (we don't) and so > wearing such a contraption would attract men. Umm, speak for yourself, Spike, but many men do find high heels sexy. I believe it's because they change the curvature of the spine, making the buttocks more prominent. So it's not the heels themselves, but what they do that attracts men (maybe engineers fixate on the peculiar footwear and don't notice the rump-enhancing effects). A bit like corsets, I suppose. Ghastly and confounding contraptions (even worse than deckchairs), but they change the waist-to-hip ratio, in the sexy direction. Not that this has any bearing on your actual question. I think the Barbie doll idea has some merit. Ben Zaiboc From natasha at natasha.cc Tue Dec 27 23:35:16 2011 From: natasha at natasha.cc (natasha at natasha.cc) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 18:35:16 -0500 Subject: [ExI] how did high heels happen? In-Reply-To: <1325024525.62969.YahooMailNeo@web36503.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <01a901ccc4d4$54c79aa0$fe56cfe0$@att.net> <659530c568ef8b95bed3390f079ad21a.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <1325024525.62969.YahooMailNeo@web36503.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20111227183516.t62z5v7y0wo4wg8o@webmail.natasha.cc> Looking at high heels is like looking at sculpture --? Blanco Manolo, Jimmy Cho, Prada YSL !! Looking at a leg in high heels is aesthetically pleasing.? Wearing high heels feels sexy. Not all high heels are uncomfortable. I have a pair of Softt 3" heels that are more comfortable than my gym shoes. Stop worrying about this.? Be glad that she isn't asking for a set of jock straps. Natasha -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From gts_2000 at yahoo.com Wed Dec 28 00:08:15 2011 From: gts_2000 at yahoo.com (Gordon) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 16:08:15 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] how did high heels happen? In-Reply-To: <1325026338.54236.YahooMailClassic@web114404.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <1325026338.54236.YahooMailClassic@web114404.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1325030895.44603.YahooMailNeo@web36503.mail.mud.yahoo.com> "Heels grew in popularity during the 1500s to keep riders, both male and female, from slipping from the stirrups.... The simple riding heel soon gave way to more stylized heels that were higher and thinner in the mid 1500s after Catherine de Medici made them more fashionable than functional... In the early 1700s, France's King Louis XIV (The Sun King) would often wear intricate heels decorated with miniature battle scenes. Called 'Louis heels,' they were often as tall as five inches. The king decreed that only nobility could wear heels that were colored red (les talons rogue) and that no one's heels could be higher than his own... During the course of the century, a cultural kind of foot fetishism manifested itself in various media..." Dangerous Elegance A History of High-Heeled Shoes http://www.randomhistory.com/1-50/036heels.html ________________________________ From: Ben Zaiboc To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org Sent: Tuesday, December 27, 2011 3:52 PM Subject: Re: [ExI] how did high heels happen? "spike" mused: > My previous theory on high heel shoes has been destroyed.? I had assumed > that women thought that men found high heel shoes sexy (we don't) and so > wearing such a contraption would attract men. Umm, speak for yourself, Spike, but many men do find high heels sexy. I believe it's because they change the curvature of the spine, making the buttocks more prominent. So it's not the heels themselves, but what they do that attracts men (maybe engineers fixate on the peculiar footwear and don't notice the rump-enhancing effects). A bit like corsets, I suppose.? Ghastly and confounding contraptions (even worse than deckchairs), but they change the waist-to-hip ratio, in the sexy direction. Not that this has any bearing on your actual question.? I think the Barbie doll idea has some merit. Ben Zaiboc _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From rtomek at ceti.pl Wed Dec 28 00:31:40 2011 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2011 01:31:40 +0100 (CET) Subject: [ExI] Homeless in Hell- A Christmas Story, by Orson Scott Card In-Reply-To: <1325023159.55946.YahooMailClassic@web114418.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <1325023159.55946.YahooMailClassic@web114418.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 27 Dec 2011, Ben Zaiboc wrote: > Adrian Tymes wrote: > > >On Sun, Dec 25, 2011 at 2:14 PM, John Grigg wrote: > >> I could not get a response from the server either, and so here is the > >> Christmas story by Orson Scott Card... > > > >Thanks for the repost. 'Twas worth reading. > > > I beg to differ. > > This is little different, the main difference being that the disguise is > much thinner. > Well, Ben. No offence felt on my side and no offence to you, but I don't think asking people to do something positive while they can is religious propaganda. OTOH, if they are more willing to help because of their religion, kudos to them anyway, because what really counts is helping. At least, this is what I have read in between the lines. And since OSC is a writer, he simply had to dress one line in a whole story (this is what writers do for a living). And if he really is religious (I'm not sure, don't remember this smell in few of his stories that I have read) - it would've been a difficult thing for him, putting himself in a different point of view. If you think it is easy, you should try to write s-f story putting your narrator in the shoes of catholic bishop or cardinal, make it acceptable and credible to different readers and so on. BTW, religions that I have learned about are quite easy on one thing - there is enough place in hell for all sinners. No homeless sinners, so you better watch out etc. Or else they will boil you in same pot with Hitler, Stalin and who knows who. Allow me to remark, perphaps you are a bit too afraid of religion - maybe too many encounters with aggressive preachers. They can be funny when seen from some distance, when one grows enough to recognize this. OTOH, it may be the fact that I have grown in a place where people - both religious (mostly catholic) and not (mostly atheists) still can agree on something because it is a bit more constructive to have things done rather than drooling over issues (and knowing no agreement can be achieved on them). So I perceive one's religion as some kind of mental "facial feature" - if a guy has long nose, you don't argue about him having long nose, it is pointless, it would be weak of him to change his nose just because people talk. It is also a bit idiotic to claim that all noses should be of specified length. Ditto for seeing a nose of thy neighbor but not yours. Believe it or not, all people have a nose - now, can you tell what the nose is? Hint: atheists have a nose, too. No, I was only joking. Atheists don't have noses :-). You don't need to think about this anymore... Anyway, I tend to downplay religious differences, simply because I am not going to allow them to rule my judgement of other people's worthiness. That way of thinking comes from time when I have learned about thing described above (doing things is more important than not doing them and the rest is meaningless long term). > Ben Zaiboc > Sorry to be a Grinch, but, well, just speaking my mind. If you are Grinch, I should have felt robbed but I cannot see of what. Tell me the truth, Ben, you downloaded a copy of Christmas, did you? You are digital Grinch, then. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Wed Dec 28 01:23:31 2011 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 18:23:31 -0700 Subject: [ExI] how did high heels happen? Message-ID: On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 3:12 PM, Kryonica wrote: snip >?Why it should be so is hard to say, since tall people are no better (smarter, stronger or more long lived) than shorter people but it is manifestly something that peoples all over the world appear to value. There is an association with tall people being stronger since they are just bigger. There are a lot of studies that show tall people don't live a long. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2393304/?tool=pubmed There is a lot of material on the net looking at height vs reproductive success. http://www.springerlink.com/content/k45351223q403p42 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_discrimination As to why some women are attracted to high heals, that's harder. You could argue that men are attracted to taller women (who are still shorter than they are) because that will on average give them taller sons, but there really isn't evidence that I know about to support this theory. Keith From spike66 at att.net Wed Dec 28 01:10:57 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 17:10:57 -0800 Subject: [ExI] how did high heels happen? In-Reply-To: <20111227183516.t62z5v7y0wo4wg8o@webmail.natasha.cc> References: <01a901ccc4d4$54c79aa0$fe56cfe0$@att.net> <659530c568ef8b95bed3390f079ad21a.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <1325024525.62969.YahooMailNeo@web36503.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <20111227183516.t62z5v7y0wo4wg8o@webmail.natasha.cc> Message-ID: <004601ccc4fd$8e9a7940$abcf6bc0$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of natasha at natasha.cc Subject: Re: [ExI] how did high heels happen? >.Looking at high heels is like looking at sculpture -- Blanco Manolo, Jimmy Cho, Prada YSL !!.. OK. Natasha, I am glad you responded to this. You have that aesthetic art thing going. To me, high heels look like a sculpture of a torture device. >. Looking at a leg in high heels is aesthetically pleasing. It just looks painful to me. Perhaps I am overthinking it. >. Wearing high heels feels sexy. This is exactly where I was going. I have long had a notion that those kinds of shoes are auto-erotic somehow. I am trying to figure out what is the hetero male counterpart. All I can come up with is good sturdy work boots. They feel manly as all get out. I wouldn't expect women to find them sexy, or seeing a man in those shoes sexy, but when I wear them, it speaks to the reptilian core of my brain. Understanding that we have a reptilian cortex does not mean we stop having one. >.Not all high heels are uncomfortable. I have a pair of Softt 3" heels that are more comfortable than my gym shoes. OK again. I am not claiming any expertise in this area. My bride doesn't wear them, never has. But watching old movies this week, I noted that Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did, except backwards in high heels. Ja. We know this child isn't doing this for height. She is taller than average, but would prefer to be petite. Looking at her genetic makeup, it is unlikely she will be less than about 5 ft 9 inches (Europeans and others who use a sensible system of measure, this is nearly 2 sigma tall for women. >.Stop worrying about this. Be glad that she isn't asking for a set of jock straps. Natasha Oddly enough, if she were a jock, this particular family would likely have been more comfortable than if she has displayed these girly girl tendencies this young. They are sports types, not fashion types. We don't know where these particular genes came from. But I can assure you, this child has an eye for fashion. She knows way more about it at age 6 than I do at 51. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ismirth at gmail.com Wed Dec 28 01:37:17 2011 From: ismirth at gmail.com (Isabelle Hakala) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 17:37:17 -0800 Subject: [ExI] how did high heels happen? In-Reply-To: <01a901ccc4d4$54c79aa0$fe56cfe0$@att.net> References: <01a901ccc4d4$54c79aa0$fe56cfe0$@att.net> Message-ID: I have a few thoughts on this topic... The first one that came to mind is that when I was a child I was VERY interested in ballet slippers, they looked gorgeous to me and when I saw high heeled shoes they gave me the same exact feeling. The higher the better! They just felt fun and pretty to me. Kind of how skis were to my step-brother. He justed wanted to slide around on them, and I wanted to teeter-totter around on heels! They made walking FUN! That being said, I have TONS of high heeled shoes that are exceedingly comfortable. I would wear them everyday if they were appropriate. I have 2 pairs of platformed high heels that the heel is 5 inches. I have always loved high heels. And I am not tiny. I am 5'8" so these shoes make me 6'1" and it is annoying to be towering over most people, but they are super fun to walk in and super comfy:) I don't wear them to try to be more sexy. I wear them because they are fun:) and I am 41 so it isn't a 'young' thing either:) The next thing that popped to mind is that some kids are more comfortable walking on the balls of their feet and it might be that she already knows that high heels will be comfy on her. The women that find them to be torturous often prefer to walk flat footed, when barefoot. I walk on the balls of my feet when I am barefoot. So you can look at your neice and see how she walks without shoes and she what she does:) But all in all, odds are, it just seems like a fun thing to do:) it is for me:) I don't think it is cultural, because I really don't care what other people think (other than what is appropraite for *work*). Hopes this helps to sooth your mind:) -Isabelle On Dec 27, 2011 12:30 PM, "spike" wrote: ** ** I am a long-time veteran of observing wild beasts, noting odd characteristics and behaviors, but I have observed a behavior of the most inscrutable of beasts, the wildly complicated homo sapiens, which has me stumped completely.**** ** ** My six year old niece is visiting. She has one sibling, an eight year old brother. She is the exact opposite of a tomboy, a real frilly-laced girly girl. Her mother is not that way, but the daughter sure is. She has few external influences in that direction that we know of: Disney movies perhaps.**** ** ** In any case, she has been wanting high heel shoes. So for Christmas her parents gave her some toy glass slippers like Cinderella wore to the ball, which have heels, but it really wasn?t what she was shooting for. We googled on women?s shoes, and she was wildly excited by stiletto heel pumps. We tried to explain that little girls don?t wear such devices, but she would have none of that. She wants these high heels, so now this presents some puzzling questions.**** ** ** Why would a pre-adolescent child be so fervently attracted to such a garment?**** ** ** My previous theory on high heel shoes has been destroyed. I had assumed that women thought that men found high heel shoes sexy (we don?t) and so wearing such a contraption would attract men. But that doesn?t apply to my first grader niece, who has shown no particular attraction for boys and as far as we know has no foggy clue of the concept of sexual attraction or copulation. But she is attracted to those shoes like bees to honey.**** ** ** Question: could this behavior be somehow hard wired into human brains? Has anyone any speculations or theories that could explain why a little girl would be inclined to wear something that is uncomfortable, impractical and discouraged by her own parents?**** ** ** 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 gts_2000 at yahoo.com Wed Dec 28 06:28:16 2011 From: gts_2000 at yahoo.com (Gordon) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 22:28:16 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] evolutionary psychology In-Reply-To: References: <01a901ccc4d4$54c79aa0$fe56cfe0$@att.net> Message-ID: <1325053696.38287.YahooMailNeo@web36501.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Does this list still accept attachments? I've attached one in any case. -gts -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: twins.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 45510 bytes Desc: not available URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Wed Dec 28 11:56:13 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2011 12:56:13 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals) In-Reply-To: <4EFA2DD6.1090902@libero.it> References: <20111214093908.GY31847@leitl.org> <1248989643.34877.1323883574147.JavaMail.root@md03.insight.synacor.com> <4EEDB77E.1050401@libero.it> <4EF19D66.4070907@aleph.se> <4EF1FD4D.1090600@libero.it> <4EF24ACA.3030400@aleph.se> <4EF3003E.7060803@aleph.se> <4EF43EC6.8030108@aleph.se> <4EF76B3F.6030706@libero.it> <4EF7CE41.1050801@libero.it> <4EFA2DD6.1090902@libero.it> Message-ID: On 27 December 2011 21:43, Mirco Romanato wrote: > This is disingenuous, because the slave trade was a feature of the > place. This is true, and makes for an even closer comparison with contemporary puppet-governments of the emigrants' countries of origin, who by allowing and actively encouraging human meat trade gets at the same time a solution to several problems: - how to go on with colonialistic, stagnant and feodal economies unable to generate local development; - how to deal with a youth obviously dissatisfied with their rule, and potentially rebellious and/or unemployed. - how to get an inward influx of hard currency absolutely for "free". African "kings" used to sell their subjects in exchange for political support, weapons and imported goods. Italian rulers in the Belle Epoque did more or less the same. Is really contemporary emigration any different? What OTOH can easily prophesised is that those profiting at the other end from the "opportunity" invariably end up, now as then, with more problems than they had before. > It is remarkable there are only small traces of African genes in the > Middle East and Arabia (AKA they used their (mainly black) slaves like > the Nazis used the Jews - they were forced to work until they died and > often they were castrated). The treatment of the slaves in North > American was paternal compared to the treatment in South America and > loving compared to the treatment of Muslims. Yes and no. Slaves and eunuchs in the Arab and Ottoman Middle East have more than occasionally ascended to positions of power and influence and living standards that would have been unimaginable in societies essentially ruled by free men, as in spite of everything Europe always managed to remain. This is simply a matter-of-fact remark, and does not imply any opposed-and-symmetrical value judgment with about eastern vs western slavery sociology. -- Stefano Vaj From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Wed Dec 28 12:01:31 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2011 13:01:31 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Subject: Re: free will. In-Reply-To: <1325023700.74847.YahooMailClassic@web114402.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <1325023700.74847.YahooMailClassic@web114402.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 27 December 2011 23:08, Ben Zaiboc wrote: > Let's just accept that all living thinking feeling beings are zombies. I beg to differ. Personally, I am a zimbo. :-D -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Wed Dec 28 13:01:41 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2011 14:01:41 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Book- "It's OK to Die" In-Reply-To: <1325024466.48737.YahooMailClassic@web114410.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <1325024466.48737.YahooMailClassic@web114410.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 27 December 2011 23:21, Ben Zaiboc wrote: > What is definitely, and non-negotiably, NOT ok, is to be forced to die if > you don't want to. > Yes, but while we are working at it, it is also NOT ok to be forced to live if you don't want do (and this basic freedom would of course become even more fundamental if and when we were to enjoy undefinite lifespans...). As to the requirements for being allowed assisted suicide, to go on with this ending the year on a merry note :-) , I maintain that the only justification for any such requirement should be an obvious concern for the verification as reliable and accurate as possible of the actual party's will, given the obvious finality of the procedure (the argument is more or less the same as that regarding the difficulty of satisfactorily correcting judicial mistakes when the execution of the wrongly convicted defendant has been carried out...). -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mbb386 at main.nc.us Wed Dec 28 15:02:42 2011 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2011 10:02:42 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Book- "It's OK to Die" In-Reply-To: References: <1325024466.48737.YahooMailClassic@web114410.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Stefano writes: > Yes, but while we are working at it, it is also NOT ok to be forced to live > if you don't want do (and this basic freedom would of course become even > more fundamental if and when we were to enjoy undefinite lifespans...). > > As to the requirements for being allowed assisted suicide, to go on with > this ending the year on a merry note :-) , I maintain that the only > justification for any such requirement should be an obvious concern for the > verification as reliable and accurate as possible of the actual party's > will, given the obvious finality of the procedure (the argument is more or > less the same as that regarding the difficulty of satisfactorily correcting > judicial mistakes when the execution of the wrongly convicted defendant has > been carried out...). Yes! We agree. Even though it sorta seemed maybe we didn't at the start of this conversation. :) Thank you. And a Happy New Year (of the dragon, no less!) Best regards, MB From clementlawyer at gmail.com Wed Dec 28 14:02:07 2011 From: clementlawyer at gmail.com (James Clement) Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2011 15:02:07 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Fwd: Book- "It's OK to Die" In-Reply-To: <8AF98F36-650B-4598-9BAB-869AB5C829E8@gmail.com> References: <315F7578-DD04-47BF-852D-102C4A516073@gmail.com> <8AF98F36-650B-4598-9BAB-869AB5C829E8@gmail.com> Message-ID: 2011/12/27 Kryonica > Which state/s would that be? And what are the requirements for being > allowed assisted suicide? Is beginning senility f i an acceptable cause? > Or must it be Alzheimers? > > On 27 Dec 2011, at 13:50, James Clement wrote: > > move me to a state that allows assisted suicide > > According to Wikipedia (and to the best of my personal knowledge): assisted suicide is legal in three states: Oregon, Washington and Montana. The criteria varies, but generally requires a psych evaluation, a very strong medical reason (alzheimer's, pain, etc.), and the assistance of a doctor. If I were going to die from an incurable disease in a very short period (e.g., weeks), or was looking at massive brain damage from a disease, then I'd go this route with cryonics in mind. James -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Dec 28 15:23:27 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2011 07:23:27 -0800 Subject: [ExI] evolutionary psychology In-Reply-To: <1325053696.38287.YahooMailNeo@web36501.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <01a901ccc4d4$54c79aa0$fe56cfe0$@att.net> <1325053696.38287.YahooMailNeo@web36501.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <004001ccc574$a631c6e0$f29554a0$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Gordon Subject: [ExI] evolutionary psychology Does this list still accept attachments? I've attached one in any case. -gts Thanks Gordon. We didn't in the old days, but as memory became cheap and plentiful, no one could think of a good reason why not. My own experience with patents is that if you have a good idea, get going on it. For reasons I have never understood, it seems like whatever you invent, someone somewhere is working on the same thing at the same time. Seize the day. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Wed Dec 28 17:24:23 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2011 18:24:23 +0100 Subject: [ExI] how did high heels happen? In-Reply-To: <20111227183516.t62z5v7y0wo4wg8o@webmail.natasha.cc> References: <01a901ccc4d4$54c79aa0$fe56cfe0$@att.net> <659530c568ef8b95bed3390f079ad21a.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <1325024525.62969.YahooMailNeo@web36503.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <20111227183516.t62z5v7y0wo4wg8o@webmail.natasha.cc> Message-ID: 2011/12/28 > Looking at high heels is like looking at sculpture -- Blanco Manolo, > Jimmy Cho, Prada YSL !! Looking at a leg in high heels is aesthetically > pleasing. Wearing high heels feels sexy. > > Not all high heels are uncomfortable. I have a pair of Softt 3" heels that > are more comfortable than my gym shoes. > While extremely high heels may be uncomfortable, one wonders whether the postural effects of reasonable heels are so bad as many claim. Personally I never tried going around in stiletto pumps -), but wearing a pair of cow-boy boots with 2.5 cm heels I am even more at ease, especially if I am standing rather than walking or running, than wearing perfectly flat soles. After all, we have been standing on the balls of our feet for most of our evolutionary history... :-) -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Dec 28 18:24:23 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2011 10:24:23 -0800 Subject: [ExI] how did high heels happen? In-Reply-To: References: <01a901ccc4d4$54c79aa0$fe56cfe0$@att.net> <659530c568ef8b95bed3390f079ad21a.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <1325024525.62969.YahooMailNeo@web36503.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <20111227183516.t62z5v7y0wo4wg8o@webmail.natasha.cc> Message-ID: <008001ccc58d$ed6e4830$c84ad890$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of Stefano Vaj Subject: Re: [ExI] how did high heels happen? 2011/12/28 >>Looking at high heels is like looking at sculpture. Wearing high heels feels sexy. .Not all high heels are uncomfortable. >.After all, we have been standing on the balls of our feet for most of our evolutionary history... :-) -- Stefano Vaj Ja, almost all mammals do that. Humans and the great apes are (I think) the only beasts walking around bearing load on the heels. Anyone know a counter example? This is easily seen if you have a pet dog or cat. They are more analogous to humans than we realize, although they are proportioned a bit differently. For instance, look at their hind leg. I almost seems like their knee is backwards, but that isn't a knee, it is an ankle. The knee is the same as ours, but it his higher up, so that the femur is shorter. Mammal skeletons are all pretty similar in structure. Stefano's point is well made: if you look at the balls of the feet, it is clear those things are structurally capable of bearing a load. Perhaps relevant is the fact that our toes can bend nearly perpendicular to the metatarsals but our fingers cannot bend that far off the axis of the metacarpals. The way I would interpret that is that perhaps the feet bore the load differently a few tens of millions of years ago than they do now. In the old days, humans walked similarly to the way other mammals did. So then, consider my observation that in some cases, pre-adolescent girls are attracted to shoes that cause that kind of walking. It appears to be completely unrelated to attracting attention (she likes the shoes even when alone), apparently unrelated to auto-eroticism (she's six), unrelated to peer pressure (her peers do not have those), apparently unrelated to fashion (she doesn't get the other aspects of fashion), but clearly she gets wildly excited by the shoes themselves in a most puzzling way. Evolutionary psychology encourages me to make a big reach, loosely based on Stefano's observation, just to see it ridiculed: the appeal of the high-fashion shoe is somehow hardwired into the structure of our brains, a faint echo from long forgotten ancestors who walked on the balls of the feet. This faint urge is immune from reason, it flatly defies analysis. This and the puzzling "sport" of bullfighting for instance are two examples of what I will call the Reprehensible Principle: Just because we understand that we human brains have a reptilian core does not cause us to cease having one. No, scratch, I can do better than that. Bullfighting is reptilian. Fashion shoe attraction is mammalian. Writing internet posts puzzling about it is pure higher primate. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Dec 28 19:05:22 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2011 11:05:22 -0800 Subject: [ExI] how did high heels happen? In-Reply-To: <008001ccc58d$ed6e4830$c84ad890$@att.net> References: <01a901ccc4d4$54c79aa0$fe56cfe0$@att.net> <659530c568ef8b95bed3390f079ad21a.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <1325024525.62969.YahooMailNeo@web36503.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <20111227183516.t62z5v7y0wo4wg8o@webmail.natasha.cc> <008001ccc58d$ed6e4830$c84ad890$@att.net> Message-ID: <009601ccc593$a7303300$f5909900$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of spike >.This and the puzzling "sport" of bullfighting for instance are two examples of what I will call the Reprehensible Principle: >.Just because we understand that we human brains have a reptilian core does not cause us to cease having one. >.No, scratch, I can do better than that. Bullfighting is reptilian. Fashion shoe attraction is mammalian. Writing internet posts puzzling about it is pure higher primate.. Spike Oy, I retract this enthusiastically. I regretted posting it almost immediately after I hit send, for it comes too close to equating fashion shoes with the utterly reprehensible notion of bullfighting, even after I differentiated one as reptilian and the other as mammalian. I am carefully avoiding henceforth even discussing the distasteful bullfighting business, for it is a particularly sore spot with me. I am a big fan of mammals, warm and fuzzy things are we, cuddly, soft. But saying the other is reptilian comes too close to excusing it, too much like, oh well, we evolved that way, heh heh. I have argued my way into a most uncomfortable corner. I will not go there, and will stay not there. I insist, I demand, that we examine every human behavior, and carefully differentiate between the mostly harmless mammalian, such as fashion shoes, and the definitely harmful, such as sport killing, and the mostly beneficial primate behaviors, such as empathy with other beasts. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From natasha at natasha.cc Wed Dec 28 15:16:25 2011 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2011 09:16:25 -0600 Subject: [ExI] International Space Development Conference - Needs Speakers on Transhumanism Message-ID: <9B.16.23543.CC23BFE4@hrndva-omtalb.mail.rr.com> Is anyone interested in speaking at the International Space Development Conference (ISDC), Washington, DC www.isdc2012.org . The track will be on transhumanism. The date for this track is Sunday, May 27. Please let me know soonest, Thanks, Natasha Natasha Vita-More PhD Researcher, Univ. of Plymouth, UK Chair, Humanity+ Co-Editor, The Transhumanist Reader -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Wed Dec 28 23:04:07 2011 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2011 18:04:07 -0500 Subject: [ExI] evolutionary psychology In-Reply-To: <004001ccc574$a631c6e0$f29554a0$@att.net> References: <01a901ccc4d4$54c79aa0$fe56cfe0$@att.net> <1325053696.38287.YahooMailNeo@web36501.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <004001ccc574$a631c6e0$f29554a0$@att.net> Message-ID: 2011/12/28 spike : > My own experience with patents is that if you have a good idea, get going on > it.? For reasons I have never understood, it seems like whatever you invent, > someone somewhere is working on the same thing at the same time.? Seize the > day. Damn, I was gonna write that. :p From natasha at natasha.cc Wed Dec 28 23:22:46 2011 From: natasha at natasha.cc (natasha at natasha.cc) Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2011 18:22:46 -0500 Subject: [ExI] International Space Development Conference - Needs Speakers on Transhumanism In-Reply-To: <9B.16.23543.CC23BFE4@hrndva-omtalb.mail.rr.com> References: <9B.16.23543.CC23BFE4@hrndva-omtalb.mail.rr.com> Message-ID: <20111228182246.zzl7a7l2scscgk4k@webmail.natasha.cc> Here is a working link: https://www.nss.org/cgi-bin/register/tdregister?$Origin=ISDC12[1] Quoting Natasha Vita-More : > Is anyone interested in speaking at the International Space Development > Conference (ISDC), Washington, DC? www.isdc2012.org > ? . The track will be on transhumanism. The date > for this track is Sunday, May 27. > > Please let me know soonest, > > Thanks, > Natasha > > ? Natasha Vita-More > PhD Researcher, Univ. of Plymouth, UK > Chair, Humanity+ > Co-Editor, The Transhumanist Reader > > Links: ------ [1] https://www.nss.org/cgi-bin/register/tdregister?$Origin=ISDC12 [2] http://www.isdc2012.org/ [3] http://www.natasha.cc/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Dec 28 23:27:31 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2011 15:27:31 -0800 Subject: [ExI] International Space Development Conference - Needs Speakers on Transhumanism In-Reply-To: <20111228182246.zzl7a7l2scscgk4k@webmail.natasha.cc> References: <9B.16.23543.CC23BFE4@hrndva-omtalb.mail.rr.com> <20111228182246.zzl7a7l2scscgk4k@webmail.natasha.cc> Message-ID: <00ec01ccc5b8$46270b40$d27521c0$@att.net> Found it by googling on ISDC. Thanks! spike From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of natasha at natasha.cc Sent: Wednesday, December 28, 2011 3:23 PM To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org Subject: Re: [ExI] International Space Development Conference - Needs Speakers on Transhumanism Here is a working link: https://www.nss.org/cgi-bin/register/tdregister?$Origin=ISDC12 Quoting Natasha Vita-More : > Is anyone interested in speaking at the International Space Development > Conference (ISDC), Washington, DC www.isdc2012.org > . The track will be on transhumanism. The date > for this track is Sunday, May 27. > > Please let me know soonest, > > Thanks, > Natasha > > Natasha Vita-More > PhD Researcher, Univ. of Plymouth, UK > Chair, Humanity+ > Co-Editor, The Transhumanist Reader > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Wed Dec 28 23:53:14 2011 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2011 10:53:14 +1100 Subject: [ExI] free will In-Reply-To: <1324788339.81404.YahooMailNeo@web36507.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <028501ccc278$629e5730$27db0590$@att.net> <1324788339.81404.YahooMailNeo@web36507.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Sun, Dec 25, 2011 at 3:45 PM, Gordon wrote: > > > This wandering online philosopher and sometimes extropian thinks he might finally see the light at the end of the tunnel in the seemingly intractable philosophical problem of free will vs determinism. I think Thomas Reid had it right: > > "This natural conviction of our acting freely, which is acknowledged by many who hold the doctrine of necessity, ought to throw *the whole burden of proof* upon that side; for, by this, the side of liberty has what lawyers call a *jus quaesitum*, or a right of ancient possession, which ought to stand good till it be overturned. If it cannot be proved that we always act from necessity, there is no need of arguments on the other side to convince us that we are free agents." > > -Thomas Reid (1710-1796) Whether our actions are in fact random or determined is as much a scientific as a philosophical question. Much of the free will debate is really about semantics: whether the term "free will" should be applied to actions that are random, determined, neither or both. -- Stathis Papaioannou From gts_2000 at yahoo.com Thu Dec 29 04:35:15 2011 From: gts_2000 at yahoo.com (Gordon) Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2011 20:35:15 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] free will In-Reply-To: References: <028501ccc278$629e5730$27db0590$@att.net> <1324788339.81404.YahooMailNeo@web36507.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1325133315.73107.YahooMailNeo@web36501.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Hi Stathis. Did you read the article I cited? Here it is again: The 'evolutionary argument' and the metaphilosophy of commonsense http://www.springerlink.com/content/b54405n81v378551/fulltext.pdf The author Stephen Boulter also wrote a textbook titled _The Rediscovery of Common Sense Philosophy_ available on Amazon for $90. I'm thinking it might be worth it! -gts ________________________________ From: Stathis Papaioannou To: Gordon ; ExI chat list Sent: Wednesday, December 28, 2011 4:53 PM Subject: Re: [ExI] free will On Sun, Dec 25, 2011 at 3:45 PM, Gordon wrote: > > > This wandering online philosopher and sometimes extropian thinks he might finally see the light at the end of the tunnel in the seemingly intractable philosophical problem of free will vs determinism. I think Thomas Reid had it right: > > "This natural conviction of our acting freely, which is acknowledged by many who hold the doctrine of necessity, ought to throw *the whole burden of proof* upon that side; for, by this, the side of liberty has what lawyers call a *jus quaesitum*, or a right of ancient possession, which ought to stand good till it be overturned. If it cannot be proved that we always act from necessity, there is no need of arguments on the other side to convince us that we are free agents." > > -Thomas Reid (1710-1796) Whether our actions are in fact random or determined is as much a scientific as a philosophical question. Much of the free will debate is really about semantics: whether the term "free will" should be applied to actions that are random, determined, neither or both. -- Stathis Papaioannou From giulio at gmail.com Thu Dec 29 05:48:15 2011 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2011 06:48:15 +0100 Subject: [ExI] International Space Development Conference - Needs Speakers on Transhumanism In-Reply-To: <00ec01ccc5b8$46270b40$d27521c0$@att.net> References: <9B.16.23543.CC23BFE4@hrndva-omtalb.mail.rr.com> <20111228182246.zzl7a7l2scscgk4k@webmail.natasha.cc> <00ec01ccc5b8$46270b40$d27521c0$@att.net> Message-ID: Natasha, I would love to give a talk at this conference. This is a synopsis of the talk that I would like to give: http://giulioprisco.blogspot.com/2009/12/thoughts-on-space-on-40th-anniversary.html 2011/12/29 spike : > Found it by googling on ISDC.? Thanks!? spike > > > > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org > [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of > natasha at natasha.cc > Sent: Wednesday, December 28, 2011 3:23 PM > To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > Subject: Re: [ExI] International Space Development Conference - Needs > Speakers on Transhumanism > > > > Here is a working link: > https://www.nss.org/cgi-bin/register/tdregister?$Origin=ISDC12 > > Quoting Natasha Vita-More : > >> Is anyone interested in speaking at the International Space Development >> Conference (ISDC), Washington, DC? www.isdc2012.org >> ? . The track will be on transhumanism. The date >> for this track is Sunday, May 27. >> >> Please let me know soonest, >> >> Thanks, >> Natasha >> >>? Natasha Vita-More >> PhD Researcher, Univ. of Plymouth, UK >> Chair, Humanity+ >> Co-Editor, The Transhumanist Reader >> >> > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Thu Dec 29 08:50:20 2011 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2011 01:50:20 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Game Changer- Free Online Education for All Message-ID: What do you think? I hope this does shake things up for the for-profit online schools... http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2011/12/21/m-i-t-game-changer-free-online-education-for-all/ John From bbenzai at yahoo.com Thu Dec 29 10:18:39 2011 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2011 02:18:39 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] evolutionary psychology In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1325153919.44008.YahooMailClassic@web114403.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Gordon asked: > Does this list still accept attachments? I've attached one in any case. Yes, it does, however you might want to consider that people who get email digests may not see them: "An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: A non-text attachment was scrubbed... > Name: twins.jpg" etc. I see the URL, but others may not (? not sure about that). It might be better to give direct links to the material. Ben Zaiboc From anders at aleph.se Thu Dec 29 11:59:09 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2011 12:59:09 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Game Changer- Free Online Education for All In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4EFC560D.9080902@aleph.se> On 2011-12-29 09:50, John Grigg wrote: > What do you think? I hope this does shake things up for the > for-profit online schools... > > > http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2011/12/21/m-i-t-game-changer-free-online-education-for-all/ Education is - ideally - a training process where you 1) get exposed to information in a structured form (since just random exposure is going to be very inefficient with your time), 2) you work with the information to solve problems (that generalize outside the education setting), and 3) you learn skills and knowledge through this process. In addition, there might be elements of validation (did you learn X well enough to prove it?), social networking, growth of critical thinking and other desirable socio-mental abilities, exposure to new things and ideas, status signalling, and so on. Information exposure is easy, properly structured information exposure slightly harder: we often do not know ourselves what we ought to know (how many people would voluntarily do linear algebra early?) This is where course designers can do a lot of useful design. Free education means that the threshold of joining *and* dropping out are low, so people are likely to flee less delectable topics unless there are incentive structures in place that make them pursue the boring but useful parts. Getting people work on solving problems (and again, not just the fun problems but the useful ones too) requires not just incentives but ways of testing their answers so they can get feedback, performance evaluated and incentives gated. That is easy in some domains, but pretty tough in others - especially since it has to be automated for free education, since teacher assistant time costs too much. The wrong kind of testing produces mis-incentives (I shudder at the use of multiple-choice questions), but designing good tests does require teaching skill and brainpower - which has a cost. Free education will always have some cost, and it is important to consider who will bear it and how. The third aspect, gaining skills, is the trickiest even in normal education. A lot of education systems are bad at achieving it in general or particular, for a variety of reasons. It might simply be that we are not good in general at education. This might be where the new free education is most important: it allows us to experiment with new approaches (since it is not too beholden to existing institutional systems), and we might be able to use new forms of monitoring and data mining on the students (follow up surveys, built-in longitudinal studies?) But we should not expect it to automatically be extremely good. In fact, a lot of free education might just be social signalling from institutions that they want to do good for society rather than actual doing good. So we better start early on to critique, measure and formulate incentives in order to reward institutions that actually achieve good things. It is all about sufficiently correct feedback: to students, to teachers and to universities. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From bbenzai at yahoo.com Thu Dec 29 12:21:18 2011 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2011 04:21:18 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] Homeless in Hell- A Christmas Story, by Orson Scott Card In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1325161278.67263.YahooMailClassic@web114402.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Tomasz Rola wrote: > > I don't >think asking people to do something positive while they can is religious >propaganda. Agreed. > OTOH, if they are more willing to help because of their >religion, kudos to them anyway, because what really counts is helping. Agreed that religion can accidentally or incidentally cause people to do good things. >And if he really is religious (I'm not sure, >don't remember this smell in few of his stories that I have read) Really? They reek of religion to me. I've read the first 3 or 4 'Ender' stories, mainly because of other people's enthusiastic recommendations, but found them rather unsatisfying. It seems evident that the author is not just writing about people with religious beliefs of one sort or another, but that he has them himself, and that colours the writing, to its detriment, imo. There is the same bad taste in the mouth as I got right at the end of Arthur C. Clarke's 'Rama' books (although not the same sense of surprise and disappointment. I was SO disappointed at that, it was almost as though he'd lost interest and just wanted to end the story quickly. "Uh, yeah, Goddiddit. That'll do.") And yes, OSC is religious (mormon, homophobic: http://www.nauvoo.com/library/card-hypocrites.html). > - it >would've been a difficult thing for him, putting himself in a different >point of view. Well, this is kind of my point, he's not. > If you think it is easy, you should try to write s-f story >putting your narrator in the shoes of catholic bishop or cardinal, make it >acceptable and credible to different readers and so on. I'm not saying that it's easy, I'm sure I would find this almost impossible to do convincingly. And besides, I'd find it very distasteful to do, and probably would abandon the attempt. >Allow me to remark, perphaps you are a bit too afraid of religion I don't think that's possible. Can you be 'too afraid' of being lobotomised, or tortured or raped, if those things were about to happen to you? Religion has been happening all over the world, for a long time, and it has had some very bad consequences. It remains a serious threat to the physical and mental health of huge numbers of people, and is one of the main things holding back our progress. > - maybe >too many encounters with aggressive preachers. They can be funny when seen >from some distance, when one grows enough to recognize this. Believe me, I know how funny religion can be. Funny like clowns. You know, the ones that scare the crap out of you. Seriously, if religion doesn't scare you, you're not thinking about it deeply enough. >OTOH, it may be the fact that I have grown in a place where people - both >religious (mostly catholic) and not (mostly atheists) still can agree on >something because it is a bit more constructive to have things done rather >than drooling over issues (and knowing no agreement can be achieved on >them). And that's fine. I don't really care what somebody believes, as long as they don't try to make my actions conform to those beliefs. Unfortunately, there are very few religious people willing to respect the principle of 'live and let live'. Let's talk about abortion, shall we? (no, let's not. We all know where that goes). Just because nobody burns witches anymore (oh, except for in parts of africa) doesn't mean that there aren't people who hanker after the good old days, and given half a chance, would take us back there. Even the watered-down english variety of protestantism has a problem with Harry Potter. It's a demonic influence upon our young people, you see. Mediaeval superstitious beliefs still have a firm hold on the minds of hundreds of millions of people. Don't you find that scary? > So I perceive one's religion as some kind of mental "facial >feature" More a kind of mental disease, I think. >Anyway, I tend to downplay religious differences, simply because I am not >going to allow them to rule my judgement of other people's worthiness. >That way of thinking comes from time when I have learned about thing >described above (doing things is more important than not doing them and >the rest is meaningless long term). Yes, and religion leads people to do the most dreadful, evil things. Try being a gay woman who's just been raped and wants an abortion. In Iran. What does such a person deserve: A) sympathy, support, counseling and medical help? or B) condemnation, estrangement and punishment, up to and including a barbaric and agonising death (after being forced to bring the unwanted baby to term)? As an evangelist once shouted at me in a public square after discovering that I didn't believe in his (or any) god: ENJOY THE FLAMES!!1! (accompanied by enough spittle to put the flames out!) Ben Zaiboc From anders at aleph.se Thu Dec 29 13:03:51 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2011 14:03:51 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Forking In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4EFC6537.3000207@aleph.se> On 2011-12-27 17:51, Keith Henson wrote: > Don't forget that I practically invented forking as a way to crew star > ships for the Far Edge Party. I have never forgotten it. In fact, I learned about the idea from reading your text when I was a wee kid. > " People have talked about making a copy of themselves and having the copy do > the unpleasant chores. That's silly. A good copy would be indistinguishable > from the original right down to desires. You could neither make a copy to go > visit the stars nor one to stay on Earth that would be happy unless you didn't > care which you did (unlikely) or someone messed with their personalities > (unethical). In fact, I think it would be unethical to distinguish between > copies (a case where the Golden Rule applies in its strongest form). The only > case I can see where copies are justified is a situation where a person really > has no preference between two mutually exclusive choices." Agreed. As one of my friends puts it, "Treat your fork as you would treat yourself". > (Rereading it made me realize just how old the ideas we have been > talking about are. Scary) Which makes me wonder where the *new* ideas are. I suspect they are right under our noses, but we do not recognize that they are really new. (Incidentally, have you read Alastair Reynold's novel "The House of Suns"? It involves clades of people cruising the galaxy and holding Far Edge Parties at certain intervals.) >> If I fork myself, there will now be twice as much me-experience, twice >> the amount of human capital and twice as many entities sharing my goals. > > You will also have half the resources per capita. Widespread, > uncontrolled forking is isomorphic to gray goo. It is the overpopulation debate again. My FHI colleague Toby Ord gave a good talk on the question a few weeks back: http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/videos/view/128 He suggested that it might beneficial to have more population for a number of reasons. For example, in an information economy more minds produce goods that are useful for all others. We also need larger groups to produce very complex goods, and we should not be convinced that we have somehow reached the limit here. Then of course there are the ethical reasons to want people to exist, although these ones are more complex to argue from. > I suppose forking should be added to excessive population growth rate > as a reason we don't see the works of aliens. Well, if forking is a road to grinding poverty and forks can get a temporary benefit by colonizing, then it would lead to a version of Robin Hanson's "burning the cosmic commons" scenario of very rapidly expanding technospheres using all material to grow. They would be fairly visible if they cannot spread at a significant fraction of light-speed. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From spike66 at att.net Thu Dec 29 15:41:21 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2011 07:41:21 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Forking In-Reply-To: <4EFC6537.3000207@aleph.se> References: <4EFC6537.3000207@aleph.se> Message-ID: <019d01ccc640$5112b990$f3382cb0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg Subject: Re: [ExI] Forking On 2011-12-27 17:51, Keith Henson wrote: >> ...Don't forget that I practically invented forking as a way to crew star ships for the Far Edge Party. >...I have never forgotten it. In fact, I learned about the idea from reading your text when I was a wee kid...--Anders Sandberg Oy. I dread the notion of reading any time now some PhD who posts something like, "Spike your comments inspired me to study science. I read them on Exi-chat when I was in second grade..." {8-[ spike From natasha at natasha.cc Thu Dec 29 21:42:51 2011 From: natasha at natasha.cc (natasha at natasha.cc) Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2011 16:42:51 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Is anyone an expert on Aristotle and Life? Message-ID: <20111229164251.4sc1g46meco0kk0g@webmail.natasha.cc> I'm a bit confused.? Aristotle's views on life in _De Anima_ are clear enough ("the psyche (not soul) is the cause or the source of the living body ...it is (a) the movement, it is (b) the end, it is (c) the essence of?the whoel living body".? And that that there are four causes (conditions): its matter is its mater in which it exists; its from is the arrangement of matter; it is moves/changes; and it has an aim/purpose (telos).? ? Is the absolutely teleological in the sense that it is religous and determined by a God?? Why is not the telos of human consciousness or aim to evolve (self-directed evolution), as in transhumanism? If someone can help me with this, I'd appreciate it. Thanks, Natasha -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rtomek at ceti.pl Thu Dec 29 22:07:00 2011 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2011 23:07:00 +0100 (CET) Subject: [ExI] Homeless in Hell- A Christmas Story, by Orson Scott Card In-Reply-To: <1325161278.67263.YahooMailClassic@web114402.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <1325161278.67263.YahooMailClassic@web114402.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 29 Dec 2011, Ben Zaiboc wrote: > Tomasz Rola wrote: > > > > >And if he really is religious (I'm not sure, don't remember this smell > >in few of his stories that I have read) > > > Really? > They reek of religion to me. I've read the first 3 or 4 'Ender' > stories, mainly because of other people's enthusiastic recommendations, > but found them rather unsatisfying. It seems evident that the author is > not just writing about people with religious beliefs of one sort or > another, but that he has them himself, and that colours the writing, to > its detriment, imo. Interesting. I have read few (probably the same) Enders, but it was many years ago - I have paid attention to space tactics thing, the rest was mostly a painting on the wall to me and I was still learning things, so I might have missed their meaning. Maybe it's high time to revisit these books. > There is the same bad taste in the mouth as I got > right at the end of Arthur C. Clarke's 'Rama' books (although not the > same sense of surprise and disappointment. I was SO disappointed at > that, it was almost as though he'd lost interest and just wanted to end > the story quickly. "Uh, yeah, Goddiddit. That'll do.") Pity you don't have access to more Lem in English. He doesn't use God so much, does the job mostly with maths and physics. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that not all of his books have been translated. > And yes, OSC is religious (mormon, homophobic: > http://www.nauvoo.com/library/card-hypocrites.html). Huh, interesting essay. "I predicted toward the beginning of the preceding essay that those who have already accepted the dogmas of the homosexual community as a source of truth superior to the words of the prophets would be incapable of reading what I had actually written here and would instead interpret my words as intolerance, oppression, gay-bashing, or, an epithet used now without a shred of its original meaning, "homophobia." My prediction was exactly fulfilled, and I have had ample opportunity to observe that some supposed proponents of liberty for homosexuals do not believe in freedom of speech for anyone who disagrees with them." I understand that some people don't like homosexualism and I think they may create a community whose rules are incompatible with it, yet say openly that "every sinner should be kindly treated". I understand that "kindness" in this case will not lead to hurting or sinner's death - but most likely, a farewell so he can go away from them. As long as they are capable of doing this, they may live according to whatever rules they agree among themselves. I mean, if you asked me for opinion. "Sinners" are, in this case, homos. Not murderes nor robbers. For the other kind of sinners they might have other set of rules. I would. Next citation: "This is true even within the Mormon community. For instance, Signature Books responded to publication of "Hypocrites of Homosexuality" by suggesting to Sunstone magazine, where the essay appeared, that Signature might not be able to continue distributing that magazine if they continued to publish essays by me -- a thinly veiled attempt to suppress my ability to get my writings published, even while Signature was still profiting from publication of my book Saintspeak, which I had sold to them while under previous management. When I called Gary Bergera, editor of Signature Books, about his letter, he was apparently incapable of seeing that his attempt to get Sunstone to cease publishing my writings had anything to do with oppression. In his view, the cause of freedom requires Signature to make every effort to stop me from having a chance to speak a single word that might persuade someone that being a Latter-day Saint means trying to live by the gospel as taught by the prophets, while they insist on their own freedom to continue with their clear and relentless crusade to persuade Mormons to take currently fashionable worldly wisdom as a better source of truth than the teachings of the prophets." Here we have some Mormons trying to censor another one (at least this is how he seems it). Strange. "Oddly enough, even as I am attacked by some as a homophobe, I am attacked by others as being too supportive of homosexuality, simply because I cannot see individual homosexuals, in or out of my books, as anything other than human beings with as complex a combination of good and evil in them as I find within myself." Interesting. He then goes on, discussing how genetic predisposition is not equal to having no choice. Like, "schizophrenia genes" do not always manifest themselves (and when they do, they may do to some degree only). I find his argument about violence very good - indeed we all are inclined toward violence and at the same time we are not expected to fall every time we'd like to. "Civilization depends on people being able to master those of their predispositions that are regarded as unacceptable by the community they live in. There are communities within American culture that regard homosexuality as just another viable lifestyle, absolutely harmless and therefore no more to be shunned or censured than an inability to carry a tune [...]. There are other communities within American culture that regard homosexual acts as sins, so that good people try to control any such desires and not act them out. And there are communities that regard homosexuality as an evil which must be violently expunged. The violent ones are themselves engaging in a far more serious anti-civilized pattern of behavior, of course, and I think there is no room in America for violence directed against any group (or any individual) for any reason short of immediate defense against physical attack -- which doesn't often come up with homosexuals. [Here, OSC is not politically-correct, because in PC worldview homosexuals are only victims of violence, but never originators of it, which is, I'm afraid, too idealistic to be true - TR]. But apart from the violent ones, I do think there is room within our society for people with many views of homosexuality, as well as of other non-majority behaviors. (Race and gender are not behaviors, and so what I am saying about attitudes toward homosexual behavior does not necessarily extend to attitudes toward race or gender.) As long as we can freely leave one community and enter another, either geographically or socially, then doesn't reasonable tolerance of others' beliefs and practices allow communities that voluntarily agree to regard certain behaviors as sins as much right to their beliefs as communities that voluntarily agree to regard those same behaviors as acceptable? I find that those who plead for tolerance are far too often prone to wanting to hunt down and wipe out the last vestige of what they call intolerance -- and are incapable of realizing that this behavior is, in itself, exactly as intolerant and usually as unjust as the behavior they so rigorously oppose." There is more of this and I admit, when I started reading the essay I was opposing to the ideas expressed there but after I finished, I find myself sympathetic with the author's words. Even thou I am neither a Mormon nor a homosexual and I don't expect to become any of those anytime soon. I understand you have some problem with this text but I fail to see what kind of problem and where it is. > >Allow me to remark, perphaps you are a bit too afraid of religion > > > I don't think that's possible. > Can you be 'too afraid' of being lobotomised, or tortured or raped, if > those things were about to happen to you? First objective is survival. "Afraid" is not helpful in this. I would do my best to suppress it. > Religion has been happening > all over the world, for a long time, and it has had some very bad > consequences. It remains a serious threat to the physical and mental > health of huge numbers of people, and is one of the main things holding > back our progress. Some time ago, it was the only thing on this planet supporting any progress at all. The rest of humans were just opportunistic scavangers, trying to grab as much as they could bite. This situation persisted up to about 300 years ago. In other words, since religion is so long lasting, it would be very optimistic to dismiss it as obsolete after just 300 years of bad performance. Wait until alternative proves itself - say, if there is any chance that humans can construct sustainable economy without pushing it under the guise of religion. So far, I am in doubt about it. > > - maybe > >too many encounters with aggressive preachers. They can be funny when seen > >from some distance, when one grows enough to recognize this. > > > Believe me, I know how funny religion can be. Funny like clowns. You > know, the ones that scare the crap out of you. > > Seriously, if religion doesn't scare you, you're not thinking about it > deeply enough. Seriously, I try hard to be not much scared of anything. This makes learning so difficult. However, I understand that humans have tendency to irrationality and other strange behaviours. This doesn't have much to do with religion, since areligious people commit same amount of human stuff. In other words, renouncing religion doesn't make one free of being stupid. Adopting religion neither. Consider this anecdote - we observe bunch of cannibals eating heart of their victim. You insist that guys are bad because they eat hearts. Unfortunately, I have heard stories of same arguments being said by some other guys, who somehow failed to observe that while they themselves weren't eating hearts, they were eating livers at the same time. So, for me a cannibal is a cannibal. For some other guys, a cannibal is he who eats heart but not he who eats a liver. I don't know you, so I cannot tell if you are more like me or more like the other guys. So far your talk smells of cannibalish. > >OTOH, it may be the fact that I have grown in a place where people - > >both religious (mostly catholic) and not (mostly atheists) still can > >agree on something because it is a bit more constructive to have things > >done rather than drooling over issues (and knowing no agreement can be > >achieved on them). > > > And that's fine. I don't really care what somebody believes, as long as > they don't try to make my actions conform to those beliefs. Good! You sound like human here! > Unfortunately, there are very few religious people willing to respect > the principle of 'live and let live'. Let's talk about abortion, shall > we? (no, let's not. We all know where that goes). Where? I am not going to have an abortion but not for religious reasons. I am a guy, you know. But I think it should be up to woman to decide. If someone wants her to bear a child, he should also want to raise it by himself. > Just because nobody burns witches anymore (oh, except for in parts of > africa) doesn't mean that there aren't people who hanker after the good > old days, and given half a chance, would take us back there. Even the > watered-down english variety of protestantism has a problem with Harry > Potter. It's a demonic influence upon our young people, you see. Those people are, I believe, idiots. They may be willing to go back in time, but hold on to telephones, newspapers, cars, farming machines (horse manure is not parfumes, I tell you) maybe even tvs. And medicines. Idiots, I believe, tend to eliminate themselves from The Big Equation. They are still valuable as voters, though. How about political forces that are all happy to have idiots voting for them? > Mediaeval superstitious beliefs still have a firm hold on the minds of > hundreds of millions of people. Don't you find that scary? They are as medieval as antique or contemporary. They may be older than you can dream of. They might outlive us all. This is interesting phenomenon. What does it have to do with religion or scare? I already wrote what I think - above. > > So I perceive one's religion as some kind of mental "facial feature" > > More a kind of mental disease, I think. The disease is called human mind. You are free to fight it. If you show me a good, acceptable plan, maybe I will even help you. Pay attention not to eliminating all humans but what to do afterwards and maybe you can make it. > >Anyway, I tend to downplay religious differences, simply because I am not > >going to allow them to rule my judgement of other people's worthiness. > >That way of thinking comes from time when I have learned about thing > >described above (doing things is more important than not doing them and > >the rest is meaningless long term). > > Yes, and religion leads people to do the most dreadful, evil things. Yes and other philosophies are no better. Am I expected to criticise only religion? >From time to time, religion also makes people do most human, beautiful things I can think of. Sacrificing one's time and other resources to other people well being. Learning about Universe. I think religions (those surviving longer than 1000 years, AFAIK) actually insist on their followers doing this, for the grace of God for example. It works like it works, but sometimes it does. And there was no danger of Digital Rights, because all music and mathematics belonged to God anyway. I learned a lot of dreadful things done in the name of bigger income. I'm afraid I will learn even more. > Try being a gay woman who's just been raped and wants an abortion. > In Iran. I would rather not try this. Probably not very different to being gay woman, raped etc in Saudi Arabia. > As an evangelist once shouted at me in a public square after discovering > that I didn't believe in his (or any) god: ENJOY THE FLAMES!!1! > (accompanied by enough spittle to put the flames out!) Cool. Evangelists are pitiful but as long as they are willing to wait until you are put in hell by God's hand rather than their own... You should insist on them to wait. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Thu Dec 29 23:18:55 2011 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2011 16:18:55 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Forking In-Reply-To: <019d01ccc640$5112b990$f3382cb0$@att.net> References: <4EFC6537.3000207@aleph.se> <019d01ccc640$5112b990$f3382cb0$@att.net> Message-ID: Spike wrote: Oy. I dread the notion of reading any time now some PhD who posts something like, "Spike your comments inspired me to study science. I read them on Exi-chat when I was in second grade..." {8-[ >>> The day will surely come, but just take it as a compliment, and as something you earned, along with any grey hairs or wrinkles you might have by that time. You're 51? Wow! I was thinking you were my age (not saying what my age is...). lol Well, you look very good considering your number of years as a mere mortal. John : ) From alfio.puglisi at gmail.com Thu Dec 29 23:45:30 2011 From: alfio.puglisi at gmail.com (Alfio Puglisi) Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 00:45:30 +0100 Subject: [ExI] how did high heels happen? In-Reply-To: <008001ccc58d$ed6e4830$c84ad890$@att.net> References: <01a901ccc4d4$54c79aa0$fe56cfe0$@att.net> <659530c568ef8b95bed3390f079ad21a.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <1325024525.62969.YahooMailNeo@web36503.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <20111227183516.t62z5v7y0wo4wg8o@webmail.natasha.cc> <008001ccc58d$ed6e4830$c84ad890$@att.net> Message-ID: 2011/12/28 spike > ** ** > > ** ** > > *>?* *On Behalf Of *Stefano Vaj > > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] how did high heels happen?**** > > ** ** > > 2011/12/28 **** > > >>Looking at high heels is like looking at sculpture? Wearing high heels > feels sexy. ?Not all high heels are uncomfortable?**** > > > >?After all, we have been standing on the balls of our feet for most of > our evolutionary history... :-) -- Stefano Vaj**** > > ** ** > > Ja, almost all mammals do that. Humans and the great apes are (I think) > the only beasts walking around bearing load on the heels. Anyone know a > counter example? > Humans are plantigrades (walking with the feet more or less flat on the ground). Other plantigrades examples, courtesy of wikipedia: > raccoons , opossums , bears , rabbits , kangaroos , mice , pandas , rats , hyraxes , skunks and hedgehogs Alfio -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Fri Dec 30 00:11:21 2011 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 00:11:21 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Is anyone an expert on Aristotle and Life? In-Reply-To: <20111229164251.4sc1g46meco0kk0g@webmail.natasha.cc> References: <20111229164251.4sc1g46meco0kk0g@webmail.natasha.cc> Message-ID: 2011/12/29 natasha wrote: > I'm a bit confused.? Aristotle's views on life in _De Anima_ are clear > enough ("the psyche (not soul) is the cause or the source of the living body > ...it is (a) the movement, it is (b) the end, it is (c) the essence of?the > whoel living body".? And that that there are four causes (conditions): its > matter is its mater in which it exists; its from is the arrangement of > matter; it is moves/changes; and it has an aim/purpose (telos). > > Is the absolutely teleological in the sense that it is religous and > determined by a God?? Why is not the telos of human consciousness or aim to > evolve (self-directed evolution), as in transhumanism? > > If someone can help me with this, I'd appreciate it. > > The basic problem is that the Greek word 'psyche' is commonly translated as 'soul' in English writings. :) But try this article for further explanation: THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL IN ARISTOTLE?S De anima Quote (from the end of the article) Summary 1. The Aristotelian concept of the soul does not correspond to any religious tradition, perhaps with the exception of the Hebrew tradition. The religious concept is fundamentally dualistic, though it may be camouflaged by the assumption of temporary psychosomatic unity with the body in the living organism. 2. Aristotle's concept of the soul fits into his larger onto logical scheme of reality as composed of matter and form, potentiality and actuality. 3. The soul is described as the actuality or form of a living organism (living body) with all its faculties corresponding to the characteristics of life. As there is a gradualness in the degree of complexity of life, so there is a corresponding gradualness in the complexity of the soul. Man is at the top of the scale with the intellectual faculty of syllogism. However, we know today that the difference between the chimpanzee and man is of degree only. 4. The soul, being a form of the living body, perishes with the organism at death. etc..... -------------------------------- BillK From spike66 at att.net Fri Dec 30 00:00:06 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2011 16:00:06 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Forking In-Reply-To: References: <4EFC6537.3000207@aleph.se> <019d01ccc640$5112b990$f3382cb0$@att.net> Message-ID: <022b01ccc685$fe134ed0$fa39ec70$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of John Grigg Subject: Re: [ExI] Forking Spike wrote: >>>Oy. I dread the notion of reading any time now some PhD who posts something like, "Spike your comments inspired me to study science. I read them on Exi-chat when I was in second grade..." {8-[ >...The day will surely come, but just take it as a compliment, and as something you earned, along with any grey hairs or wrinkles you might have by that time... Ha! The wrinkle boat sailed some time ago. >...You're 51? Yesssss Johnny, I aaaaaaammmmm... >...Wow! No, not wow. A more appropriate comment would be: 51? Callow youth, a mere child, practically an embryo. That sort of thing. Not wow. Wow goes after 101. >... I was thinking you were my age (not saying what my age is...)... Ummmm, well John, you sure appear youthful to me, so I think I may have a few years on you at least. >... lol Well, you look very good considering your number of years as a mere mortal... Too kind are you, me lad. It's the caloric restriction. Today with Spokeo and its clones, we can look up on the internet anyone's age. It gets it pretty close to right most of the time. spike John : ) _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From natasha at natasha.cc Fri Dec 30 01:31:33 2011 From: natasha at natasha.cc (natasha at natasha.cc) Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2011 20:31:33 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Is anyone an expert on Aristotle and Life? In-Reply-To: References: <20111229164251.4sc1g46meco0kk0g@webmail.natasha.cc> Message-ID: <20111229203133.9u5xvrpjqcg08g0o@webmail.natasha.cc> If the psyche* perishes with bodily death?but the transhumanist perspective?proposes the transmutation of matter toward a??posthuman state of existence, then body could be assumed to be nonbiological and therefore the psyche could continue on in the posthuman or upload state. Right? *I don't subscribe to psyche being "soul". That is a Western world interpretation and I am not convinced it is what Aristotle intended. Natasha Quoting BillK : > 2011/12/29? natasha wrote: >> I'm a bit confused.? Aristotle's views on life in _De Anima_ are clear >> enough ("the psyche (not soul) is the cause or the source of the living body >> ...it is (a) the movement, it is (b) the end, it is (c) the essence of?the >> whoel living body".? And that that there are four causes (conditions): its >> matter is its mater in which it exists; its from is the arrangement of >> matter; it is moves/changes; and it has an aim/purpose (telos). >> >> Is the absolutely teleological in the sense that it is religous and >> determined by a God?? Why is not the telos of human consciousness or aim to >> evolve (self-directed evolution), as in transhumanism? >> >> If someone can help me with this, I'd appreciate it. >> >> > > > The basic problem is that the Greek word 'psyche' is commonly > translated as 'soul' in English writings. :) > > But try this article for further explanation: > > > THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL IN ARISTOTLE?S De anima > > Quote (from the end of the article) > > Summary > > 1. The Aristotelian concept of the soul does not correspond to any > religious tradition, perhaps with the exception of the Hebrew > tradition. The religious concept is fundamentally dualistic, though it > may be camouflaged by the assumption of temporary psychosomatic unity > with the body in the living organism. > > 2. Aristotle's concept of the soul fits into his larger onto logical > scheme of reality as composed of matter and form, potentiality and > actuality. > > 3. The soul is described as the actuality or form of a living organism > (living body) with all its faculties corresponding to the > characteristics of life. As there is a gradualness in the degree of > complexity of life, so there is a corresponding gradualness in the > complexity of the soul. Man is at the top of the scale with the > intellectual faculty of syllogism. However, we know today that the > difference between the chimpanzee and man is of degree only. > > 4. The soul, being a form of the living body, perishes with the > organism at death. > etc..... > -------------------------------- > > > BillK > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat[2] > Links: ------ [1] http://www.socinian.org/aristotles_de_anima2.html [2] http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Fri Dec 30 09:10:08 2011 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 09:10:08 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Is anyone an expert on Aristotle and Life? In-Reply-To: <20111229203133.9u5xvrpjqcg08g0o@webmail.natasha.cc> References: <20111229164251.4sc1g46meco0kk0g@webmail.natasha.cc> <20111229203133.9u5xvrpjqcg08g0o@webmail.natasha.cc> Message-ID: 2011/12/30 natasha wrote: > If the psyche* perishes with bodily death?but the transhumanist > perspective?proposes the transmutation of matter toward a??posthuman state > of existence, then body could be assumed to be nonbiological and therefore > the psyche could continue on in the posthuman or upload state. Right? > > *I don't subscribe to psyche being "soul". That is a Western world > interpretation and I am not convinced it is what Aristotle intended. > > I don't think you can force an ancient philosopher like Aristotle into the transhumanist frame. He didn't know about evolution, for example. For him, 'psyche' was a feature of living creatures. That is why the article commented that it could possibly be similar to the Hebrew (Old Testament) tradition where 'soul' is the breath of life. For Aristotle all living creatures have degrees of 'psyche', including plants and animals. But a dead animal has no 'psyche'. What he thought might be eternal was 'nous' (mind, or intellectual soul) that humans have. But he is a bit unclear on how this could be. BillK From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Fri Dec 30 10:37:56 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 11:37:56 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Forking In-Reply-To: <019d01ccc640$5112b990$f3382cb0$@att.net> References: <4EFC6537.3000207@aleph.se> <019d01ccc640$5112b990$f3382cb0$@att.net> Message-ID: On 29 December 2011 16:41, spike wrote: > Oy. I dread the notion of reading any time now some PhD who posts > something > like, "Spike your comments inspired me to study science. I read them on > Exi-chat when I was in second grade..." > "... and I cannot help but resent you about that. When a kid, I was smart, and with a little more effort I could have easily ended up working in creative finance and Ponzi schemes". :-D -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Fri Dec 30 11:32:34 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 12:32:34 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Is anyone an expert on Aristotle and Life? In-Reply-To: References: <20111229164251.4sc1g46meco0kk0g@webmail.natasha.cc> Message-ID: On 30 December 2011 01:11, BillK wrote: > The basic problem is that the Greek word 'psyche' is commonly > translated as 'soul' in English writings. :) > Interesting issue, that I have considered myself a number of time, because I suspect that all such vocabulary has been dramatically polluted by the psychological, semantical and philosophical consequences of some 1500 of monotheistic cultural egemony, Yes, it is true that the current translation of psyche is soul ("anima" with some variants in Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, etc.). OTOH, what does "psyche" literally means for a Greek? The Indo-european root of the word is the same as that of "spirit" , and both onomatopoeically refer to the puff, the breath emanating from a living body (as in the English inspire, expire, siffle...), which is of course the most obvious indication that the body is alive and functioning rather than dead (as in "his spirit has left him"). Moreover, the (possibly distinctive) "breath" of somebody indicated the current or recent presence of an individual in given room (as in "his spirit was still permeating the place"). The "land of the spirits" or "of the shadows" is therefore simply where our memory hallucinates that the breaths or the shadows of bygone people who have been important in one's life are still behind one's shoulder - a common enough experience for many of us, with goes along with our inclination of "speaking with the dead" by asking our memory to simulate the comfort, the advice, the guidance, the emotional satisfaction we derived by somebody's actual presence and interaction (interestingly, in the Japanese tradition one can be haunted also by the spirit/ghost/phantom of a living, but absent, individual). See the visits of Ulysses and Aeneas to the "Ades" in Homer's and Virgil's poems. But are we really on different ground with the Latin "anima" that has been translated with "soul" (firstly attested in the Beowulf, if I am not mistaken, and likely to mean itself originally "the thing binding things together")? An "anima" is again "what animates a body", that makes it move and directs its behaviour as long as it does not become finally inanimated - a corpse that the anima has deserted. This, in turn, has of course to do with the body's "form" in an Aristotelian sense (its structure, pattern, model, functional principle) and with its "psychological" states in the modern sense. Has all of it something to do with the dualistic, metaphysical view that permeates the judaeo-christian tradition (world/God, body/soul, life/afterlife, etc.)? Not much, but for the fact that the vocabulary and the philosophical categories of ancient Europe came in handy for a translating and formalising, in a drastically reinterpreted sense, the new "anti-world" concepts. Hope this is of help to Natasha. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Fri Dec 30 11:57:38 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 12:57:38 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Is anyone an expert on Aristotle and Life? In-Reply-To: References: <20111229164251.4sc1g46meco0kk0g@webmail.natasha.cc> <20111229203133.9u5xvrpjqcg08g0o@webmail.natasha.cc> Message-ID: On 30 December 2011 10:10, BillK wrote: > I don't think you can force an ancient philosopher like Aristotle into > the transhumanist frame. He didn't know about evolution, for example. > Sure. And pagan philosophers had all kind of wrong ideas about natural facts, such as the approximate distance between the earth and the sun, something which for that matter identically affected or XIX century scientists. Moreover, no matter how little one can be sympathetic with the judaeo-christian tradition and how much one would like to overcome its legacy, this tradition is now and will forever be a part of our history, opening new questions, changing our perspectives, etc. At the same time, however, the memory of our pre-christian past remains exemplary of how one could, and can, well think out of that particular box and how a consistent worldview could. and can, be established that was not based on escapist fantasies or contempt of reality, but on the joyous acceptance of all that. So, if religious and secular humanists have made a large use throughout history of Aristotles or Plato by reinterpreting and exploiting in the light of their values whatever could be still of interest, at least in archetipical terms, in their works, I think it is equally legitimate for posthumanists to do just the same. Even though I expect the latter to be more aware of what is philologically, and what is only "inspirationally", plausible. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From natasha at natasha.cc Fri Dec 30 15:00:37 2011 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 09:00:37 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Is anyone an expert on Aristotle and Life? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Thank you Stefano. I know about psyche and the Western world's interpretation of it as soul and Aristotle's meaning of it in de Anima. Your explanation of it is well said to be sure. I like the idea of breath and the land of the spirits. This is an excellent way to contextualize it. What animates the body? Energy - metabolism - etc. I agree with you that it has more to do with the processes of the body than dualism. Aristotle was concerned with "live" and the "living". My concern is how he understanding of "life" and the "living" links to life extension/expansion in how the psyche is necessary for personal identity / mind. Natasha Vita-More PhD Researcher, Univ. of Plymouth, UK Chair, Humanity+ Co-Editor, The Transhumanist Reader _____ From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Stefano Vaj Sent: Friday, December 30, 2011 5:33 AM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] Is anyone an expert on Aristotle and Life? On 30 December 2011 01:11, BillK wrote: The basic problem is that the Greek word 'psyche' is commonly translated as 'soul' in English writings. :) Interesting issue, that I have considered myself a number of time, because I suspect that all such vocabulary has been dramatically polluted by the psychological, semantical and philosophical consequences of some 1500 of monotheistic cultural egemony, Yes, it is true that the current translation of psyche is soul ("anima" with some variants in Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, etc.). OTOH, what does "psyche" literally means for a Greek? The Indo-european root of the word is the same as that of "spirit" , and both onomatopoeically refer to the puff, the breath emanating from a living body (as in the English inspire, expire, siffle...), which is of course the most obvious indication that the body is alive and functioning rather than dead (as in "his spirit has left him"). Moreover, the (possibly distinctive) "breath" of somebody indicated the current or recent presence of an individual in given room (as in "his spirit was still permeating the place"). The "land of the spirits" or "of the shadows" is therefore simply where our memory hallucinates that the breaths or the shadows of bygone people who have been important in one's life are still behind one's shoulder - a common enough experience for many of us, with goes along with our inclination of "speaking with the dead" by asking our memory to simulate the comfort, the advice, the guidance, the emotional satisfaction we derived by somebody's actual presence and interaction (interestingly, in the Japanese tradition one can be haunted also by the spirit/ghost/phantom of a living, but absent, individual). See the visits of Ulysses and Aeneas to the "Ades" in Homer's and Virgil's poems. But are we really on different ground with the Latin "anima" that has been translated with "soul" (firstly attested in the Beowulf, if I am not mistaken, and likely to mean itself originally "the thing binding things together")? An "anima" is again "what animates a body", that makes it move and directs its behaviour as long as it does not become finally inanimated - a corpse that the anima has deserted. This, in turn, has of course to do with the body's "form" in an Aristotelian sense (its structure, pattern, model, functional principle) and with its "psychological" states in the modern sense. Has all of it something to do with the dualistic, metaphysical view that permeates the judaeo-christian tradition (world/God, body/soul, life/afterlife, etc.)? Not much, but for the fact that the vocabulary and the philosophical categories of ancient Europe came in handy for a translating and formalising, in a drastically reinterpreted sense, the new "anti-world" concepts. Hope this is of help to Natasha. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From natasha at natasha.cc Fri Dec 30 15:06:02 2011 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 09:06:02 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Is anyone an expert on Aristotle and Life? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <82.D8.03083.063DDFE4@hrndva-omtalb.mail.rr.com> Bill wrote: 2011/12/30 natasha wrote: > If the psyche* perishes with bodily death?but the transhumanist > perspective?proposes the transmutation of matter toward a??posthuman state > of existence, then body could be assumed to be nonbiological and therefore > the psyche could continue on in the posthuman or upload state. Right? > > *I don't subscribe to psyche being "soul". That is a Western world > interpretation and I am not convinced it is what Aristotle intended. "I don't think you can force an ancient philosopher like Aristotle into the transhumanist frame. He didn't know about evolution, for example. For him, 'psyche' was a feature of living creatures. That is why the article commented that it could possibly be similar to the Hebrew (Old Testament) tradition where 'soul' is the breath of life. For Aristotle all living creatures have degrees of 'psyche', including plants and animals. But a dead animal has no 'psyche'. What he thought might be eternal was 'nous' (mind, or intellectual soul) that humans have. But he is a bit unclear on how this could be." I am not sure it is necessary to know about evolution to form a link between Aristotle's concept of psyche and "life" and the "living" and transhumanism. Yes, you are correct that psyche is a feature of all living matter. Yes, you are correct that psyche is largely the breath of life, but Aristotle considered it more than a breath, it was also the process of life and the living. I think you are spot on about nous, and it is very unclear. Eugene Thacker tackles this in _After Life_. I am looking for a link, however small and seemingly inconsequential. I am confident there is one and I appreciate your insights. Natasha From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Dec 30 15:21:30 2011 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 10:21:30 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Is anyone an expert on Aristotle and Life? In-Reply-To: <20111229164251.4sc1g46meco0kk0g@webmail.natasha.cc> References: <20111229164251.4sc1g46meco0kk0g@webmail.natasha.cc> Message-ID: 2011/12/29 : > I'm a bit confused.? Aristotle's views on life in _De Anima_ are clear > enough ("the psyche (not soul) is the cause or the source of the living body > ...it is (a) the movement, it is (b) the end, it is (c) the essence of?the > whoel living body".? And that that there are four causes (conditions): its > matter is its mater in which it exists; its from is the arrangement of > matter; it is moves/changes; and it has an aim/purpose (telos). > > Is the absolutely teleological in the sense that it is religous and > determined by a God?? Why is not the telos of human consciousness or aim to > evolve (self-directed evolution), as in transhumanism? > > If someone can help me with this, I'd appreciate it. re: the subject line "Is anyone an expert on Aristotle and Life" I'm no more an expert on Aristotle than an expert on anything else. If anyone claims to be an expert on Life they are trying to sell you something. :) From lubkin at unreasonable.com Fri Dec 30 14:45:00 2011 From: lubkin at unreasonable.com (David Lubkin) Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 09:45:00 -0500 Subject: [ExI] how did high heels happen? In-Reply-To: References: <01a901ccc4d4$54c79aa0$fe56cfe0$@att.net> <659530c568ef8b95bed3390f079ad21a.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <1325024525.62969.YahooMailNeo@web36503.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <20111227183516.t62z5v7y0wo4wg8o@webmail.natasha.cc> <008001ccc58d$ed6e4830$c84ad890$@att.net> Message-ID: <201112301534.pBUFYl3M029875@andromeda.ziaspace.com> No one has mentioned the feminist take on high heels. That they're of a kind with the many other fashions across history and the world that appear designed to -- metaphorically or literally -- hobble women. Although many women's fashions seem to be for the sake of impressing other women, I recognize that some men like the look of heels. I personally don't find them attractive at all, perhaps because I have that feminist analysis in the back of my head and find the concept repellant. I'm happy that my daughter, while she played dress-up and Barbies, never went full girly-girl. Out of daughter, two mothers, aunts, and eight sisters, the most girly anyone gets is lipstick and jewelry. The women in my family become mathematicians, Annapolis ring-knockers, rabbis, physicists, structural engineers, etc. Spike, I'd agreed with you about mammals vs. reptiles until I had a leopard gecko, who reminded me a great deal of a cat. You need to step past class distinctions to embrace the full diversity of phylum sentience :-). -- David. From natasha at natasha.cc Fri Dec 30 15:54:15 2011 From: natasha at natasha.cc (natasha at natasha.cc) Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 10:54:15 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Is anyone an expert on Aristotle and Life? In-Reply-To: References: <20111229164251.4sc1g46meco0kk0g@webmail.natasha.cc> Message-ID: <20111230105415.x29mrssnk8wwccos@webmail.natasha.cc> Quoting Mike Dougherty msd001 at gmail.com[1]: > If anyone claims to be an expert on Life they are trying to sell you > something.? :) Come on.???Asking for an?expert?is a gracious way of asking for?a skill or scholarship in an area while complimenting in the same tone. Bty, BillK and Stefano most likely have a prolonged experience?with life, a quantifier for being experts at life. :-) Natasha? Links: ------ [1] mailto:msd001 at gmail.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From natasha at natasha.cc Fri Dec 30 16:30:23 2011 From: natasha at natasha.cc (natasha at natasha.cc) Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 11:30:23 -0500 Subject: [ExI] how did high heels happen? In-Reply-To: <201112301534.pBUFYl3M029875@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <01a901ccc4d4$54c79aa0$fe56cfe0$@att.net> <659530c568ef8b95bed3390f079ad21a.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <1325024525.62969.YahooMailNeo@web36503.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <20111227183516.t62z5v7y0wo4wg8o@webmail.natasha.cc> <008001ccc58d$ed6e4830$c84ad890$@att.net> <201112301534.pBUFYl3M029875@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <20111230113023.sk9j2jkbkg4o8ww8@webmail.natasha.cc> Quoting David Lubkin : > No one has mentioned the feminist take on high heels. That they're > of a kind with the many other fashions across history and the world > that appear designed to -- metaphorically or literally -- hobble women. Feminists are not all mathematicians, scientists, and engineers.? Many feminists are designers, authors, actors, and other types of artists.? Many feminists are mothers. Many feminists are lovers. High heels do not hobble women. Not all women are the same. Some women walk better in heels, others not.? The feminists approach would not emphasize what a woman's job, her skill-set, or what type of shoe she wears.? She would emphasize the level of clarity a woman has in her thinking and in the choices she makes for her life based on your beliefs. Natasha -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Dec 30 16:46:31 2011 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 11:46:31 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Is anyone an expert on Aristotle and Life? In-Reply-To: <20111230105415.x29mrssnk8wwccos@webmail.natasha.cc> References: <20111229164251.4sc1g46meco0kk0g@webmail.natasha.cc> <20111230105415.x29mrssnk8wwccos@webmail.natasha.cc> Message-ID: 2011/12/30 : > Quoting Mike Dougherty msd001 at gmail.com: >> If anyone claims to be an expert on Life they are trying to sell you >> something.? :) > > Come on.???Asking for an?expert?is a gracious way of asking for?a skill or > scholarship in an area while complimenting in the same tone. Bty, BillK and > Stefano most likely have a prolonged experience?with life, a quantifier for > being experts at life. :-) So is "a prolonged experience with life" also a gracious way of calling someone "old" ? It's a nice euphemism. I am intrigued by the original question. I feel like I have some sense of its direction but not its destination. Can you elaborate? 2011/12/29 : >Is the absolutely teleological in the sense that it is religous and determined by a God? Why is not the telos of human >consciousness or aim to evolve (self-directed evolution), as in transhumanism? If the context is Aristotle, how do you define "religious" and "God"? "It is absurd to suppose that ends are not present [in nature] because we do not see an agent deliberating." ?Aristotle, Physics 2.8, 199b27-9; (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleology#Aristotelian) 'seems like Aristotle has already dispensed with "a god" that drives the universe. I imagine this kind of thinking to be analogous to pointing a video camera at the monitor displaying the camera's output. The recursion of image-in-image is very sensitive to the orientation of the camera. Thinking about thinking (or awareness of awareness) tends to have the same sensitivity to being toppled by the next "ah-ha" moment. From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Dec 30 17:01:44 2011 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 12:01:44 -0500 Subject: [ExI] how did high heels happen? In-Reply-To: <20111230113023.sk9j2jkbkg4o8ww8@webmail.natasha.cc> References: <01a901ccc4d4$54c79aa0$fe56cfe0$@att.net> <659530c568ef8b95bed3390f079ad21a.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <1325024525.62969.YahooMailNeo@web36503.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <20111227183516.t62z5v7y0wo4wg8o@webmail.natasha.cc> <008001ccc58d$ed6e4830$c84ad890$@att.net> <201112301534.pBUFYl3M029875@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <20111230113023.sk9j2jkbkg4o8ww8@webmail.natasha.cc> Message-ID: 2011/12/30 : > The feminists approach would not emphasize what a woman's job, her > skill-set, or what type of shoe she wears.? She would emphasize the level of > clarity a woman has in her thinking and in the choices she makes for her > life based on your beliefs. It's disappointing that there's an -ism for that. I forget that humanity is generally still very-much concerned with differences and tries to exaggerate them and assign capabilities based on macroscopic features as gender, race, nationality, ...whatever. Despite all the "progress" technology has granted, we still have so much opportunity for improvement. From natasha at natasha.cc Fri Dec 30 17:30:50 2011 From: natasha at natasha.cc (natasha at natasha.cc) Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 12:30:50 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Is anyone an expert on Aristotle and Life? In-Reply-To: References: <20111229164251.4sc1g46meco0kk0g@webmail.natasha.cc> <20111230105415.x29mrssnk8wwccos@webmail.natasha.cc> Message-ID: <20111230123050.cql9ldq7swgw880c@webmail.natasha.cc> Quoting Mike Dougherty : > 2011/12/30? : >> Quoting Mike Dougherty msd001 at gmail.com: >>> If anyone claims to be an expert on Life they are trying to sell you >>> something.? :) >> >> Come on.???Asking for an?expert?is a gracious way of asking for?a skill or >> scholarship in an area while complimenting in the same tone. Bty, BillK and >> Stefano most likely have a prolonged experience?with life, a quantifier for >> being experts at life. :-) > > So is "a prolonged experience with life" also a gracious way of > calling someone "old" ?? ?It's a nice euphemism. Mature and wise would be more precise. > I am intrigued by the original question.? I feel like I have some > sense of its direction but not its destination.? Can you elaborate? I am looking at "what is life" from a few perspectives. Aristotle is the key and often compared as a distinct to Darwin. Aristotle saw order and a plan, Darwin chaos and chance (actually this not true in either case). Anyway, I am only concerend with "life" and the "living" because that is what transhumanism is all about.? That we have a mind is clear. that is its located in the brain is theory that I use. My question is how does the psyche relate to the mind?? Probably doesn't if psyche is the movement, metabolishm, aim of life and mind is what the brain does.? Many people confuse spirit with mind (Decarte, etc.). Aristotle was not Cartesian. > 2011/12/29? : >> Is the absolutely teleological in the sense that it is religous >> and? determined by a God?? Why is not the telos of human >> >consciousness? or aim to evolve (self-directed evolution), as in >> transhumanism? > > If the context is Aristotle, how do you define "religious" and "God"? I don't. I have no idea what he thought about God.? He was Greek. > "It is absurd to suppose that ends are not present [in nature] because > we do not see an agent deliberating." > ?Aristotle, Physics 2.8, 199b27-9; (see: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleology#Aristotelian[1]) > > 'seems like Aristotle has already dispensed with "a god" that drives > the universe. Maybe in this instance, but not in all the intrepretatinos of his writing on teleology. > I imagine this kind of thinking to be analogous to pointing a video > camera at the monitor displaying the camera's output.? The recursion > of image-in-image is very sensitive to the orientation of the camera. > Thinking about thinking (or awareness of awareness) tends to have the > same sensitivity to being toppled by the next "ah-ha" moment. Nice visual. Natasha Links: ------ [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleology#Aristotelian -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Fri Dec 30 17:18:59 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 09:18:59 -0800 Subject: [ExI] how did high heels happen? In-Reply-To: <201112301534.pBUFYl3M029875@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <01a901ccc4d4$54c79aa0$fe56cfe0$@att.net> <659530c568ef8b95bed3390f079ad21a.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <1325024525.62969.YahooMailNeo@web36503.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <20111227183516.t62z5v7y0wo4wg8o@webmail.natasha.cc> <008001ccc58d$ed6e4830$c84ad890$@att.net> <201112301534.pBUFYl3M029875@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <037101ccc717$1f04b840$5d0e28c0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of David Lubkin Subject: Re: [ExI] how did high heels happen? >...No one has mentioned the feminist take on high heels. That they're of a kind with the many other fashions across history and the world that appear designed to -- metaphorically or literally -- hobble women... A week ago I would have found that notion compelling. Now I reject it as irrelevant at least in some cases. >...Although many women's fashions seem to be for the sake of impressing other women, I recognize that some men like the look of heels... Possibly so, but irrelevant at least in one case. Read on please. >...I personally don't find them attractive at all... -- David. Ja, my current notion is that we have somehow added a layer of complexity that I will now try to explain and remove if possible. I have struggled and failed over the notion that women wear impractical shoes in order to attract men. I might be more tempted to argue that for some women, wearing those shoes somehow causes men to be more attractive to the woman. (Ponder that one for a while.) But even that paradoxical notion might be unnecessary complication in light of the observation which sent me into a philosophical tailspin: my six year old niece has no concept of sexual attraction, no clear concept of fashion pressures, no example of peers or an admired adult woman wearing those kinds of shoes. She is very directly (and quite inexplicably) attracted to the shoes themselves. We cannot even untangle any possibly symbolism or fetishism, or if so, it is most puzzling in this case. This has apparently little or nothing to do with how she would appear wearing the shoes, but rather more about how she would feel when wearing the shoes, and even how she would feel owning a pair that do not even fit her. Since we cannot find that kind of shoes that would fit a six year old child, we learn that she wants the shoes even if they are not the right size. All this has me back to pondering human nature and determinism. Perhaps we really are driven by urges over which we have little control and no choice. spike From tara at taramayastales.com Fri Dec 30 17:58:43 2011 From: tara at taramayastales.com (Tara Maya) Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 09:58:43 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Is anyone an expert on Aristotle and Life? In-Reply-To: References: <20111229164251.4sc1g46meco0kk0g@webmail.natasha.cc> <20111229203133.9u5xvrpjqcg08g0o@webmail.natasha.cc> Message-ID: <98C9E7E3-025C-4F49-B806-D1FAA3168C73@taramayastales.com> > > So, if religious and secular humanists have made a large use throughout history of Aristotles or Plato by reinterpreting and exploiting in the light of their values whatever could be still of interest, at least in archetipical terms, in their works, I think it is equally legitimate for posthumanists to do just the same. Even though I expect the latter to be more aware of what is philologically, and what is only "inspirationally", plausible. > > -- > Stefano Vaj There seems to be folk psychology, shared by all humans, that distinguishes body from soul. Different cultures, of course, talk about the soul in different ways, some have more than one level, some link it to breath, others to blood or possession by a totem animal or god, etc. but nonetheless, all human cultures agree that there is some additional component to a human being than just a body...and often this component is seen as being uniquely human. When it is seen as belonging to animals or trees as well, it is because those animals or trees are also anthropomorphized. (As in cultures where bears or jaguars are viewed as ancestors who were once human, to take just one of many examples.) It is striking that this belief in a soul is so pervasive. Twentieth century science discovered how the soul can be real without being anything besides brain matter. Brain matter is the substrate, personality is the program. But some materialists have taken this to mean that the soul (or psyche or personality or memes) cannot be separated from the body. This is where most transhumanists disagree. Why could the program not be run on a different substrate? I actually think one would have an easier time interesting Aristotle or Plato in the transhumanist project than extreme materialists. In fact, I think to most pre-modern peoples, the idea that one could, with the right tool, take the soul out of one kind of body and put it into another kind of body would be self-evident. Tara Maya Conmergence (speculative fiction anthology) - Free for the holidays Burst (science fiction short story) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Fri Dec 30 18:10:52 2011 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 11:10:52 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Cost/reliability tradeoff in long-term storage Message-ID: This showed up on a closed list I read. I asked the author if I could repost it on this list. He said yes and would appreciate feedback because the economic model in an early stage. Lots of meat here as well as in the links. Keith Date: 28 Dec 2011 08:38:59 +0100 From: "David S. H. Rosenthal" Subject: Cost/reliability tradeoff in long-term storage > Subject: Cost analysis of archiving methods > > I was thinking about trying to do a cost analysis on archiving methods... The tradeoff between reliability and cost of long-term digital storage is a difficult and important problem. I've been working on it for some time. > First, longevity of information is a "negative" feature: longevity is an > absence of loss. There are no guarantees, only probabilities. > Using multiple methods adds redundancy, lowering the probability of loss, > raising the cost (sum of cost of each method plus overhead of setting up and > deciding between them). > > Can costs and probabilities be quantified? > As regards the probability of loss, there are three problems: - - You need to predict the probability. - - The probability needs to be extremely low. - - The probabilities of loss events, especially rare "black swan" events that lose large amounts of data, are highly correlated. These mean that you will not have adequate data to make a viable prediction. Here is a talk I gave at the Netherlands B&G: http://blog.dshr.org/2011/03/how-few-copies.html based on this ACM Queue article: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1866298 making essentially this argument. Here is a paper by Kevin Wylie et al proposing a better metric than mine for data loss: http://www.usenix.org/events/hotstorage10/tech/full_papers/Greenan.pdf So the loss probability side of the equation is hard. How about the cost side? It turns out that this is hard too. > pvscost(M, K, Y) be the present value of the cost of setting up storage of K > bits of storage using method M, and pvrcost(M, K, Y) be the (present value) > of the cost of retrieving the data X years. Only consider M for which the > minimum time to store K bits is insignificant compared to Y; moving stars > around doesn't apply. Can we assume pvrcost(M, K, Y) decreases as Y > increases? Maybe it's insignificant, although some of the methods discussed > it isn't. The problem here is that it has recently become clear that the discounted cash flow method used to assign present values to future costs works neither in practice nor in theory: - - Here is work from the Bank of England showing that in practice investors use unrealistically high discount rates: http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/speeches/2011/speech495.pdf - - Here is work from the Santa Fe Institute & Yale showing that in theory the method depends on unrealistic assumptions: http://cowles.econ.yale.edu/P/cd/d17a/d1719.pdf Here is a talk I gave at the Library of Congress at the start of the work I'm currently doing to build an economic model of long-term storage: http://blog.dshr.org/2011/09/modeling-economics-of-long-term-storage.html Here is a blog post on the current (primitive) state of this model: http://blog.dshr.org/2011/12/cni-talk-on-economic-model.html > The certainty of the probabilities decreases as X gets larger, to the point > where it seemed impractical to do this work for longer than 100 years. > Reliable data archiving for 100 years is a practical necessity, though, for > contracts, life insurance policies, building blueprints, and other current > data storage methods. These are documents and information sources that we > are using now, and conversion from physical to digital media for some of > them requires more assurances of longevity. Indeed. Alas, the assumption seems to be that society can happily convert everything to digital form and all will be well because: Kryder's Law (exponential drop in disk price) will continue and disks are remarkably reliable (which they are). In the short term the Thai floods disprove this. In the not-so-longer term this paper: http://www.dssc.ece.cmu.edu/research/pdfs/After_Hard_Drives.pdf casts considerable doubt. Note that one major problem is because long-term data archiving is a very small part of the overall data storage market, and because most people believe that the problem is trivial, the premium they are willing to pay for a perceived high probability of long-term survival of data over the cost of regular storage is small. Thus building products specifically for archival use is unrewarding. Long-term storage systems have to be built from consumer or enterprise storage components to be economic. The search for ultra-reliable storage media is futile, because you're never going to be sure enough of the medium's persistence, you're never going to be able to afford it, and the reliability of the medium is only a small part of the overall reliability of the storage system. David. From eugen at leitl.org Fri Dec 30 18:15:46 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 19:15:46 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Is anyone an expert on Aristotle and Life? In-Reply-To: <98C9E7E3-025C-4F49-B806-D1FAA3168C73@taramayastales.com> References: <20111229164251.4sc1g46meco0kk0g@webmail.natasha.cc> <20111229203133.9u5xvrpjqcg08g0o@webmail.natasha.cc> <98C9E7E3-025C-4F49-B806-D1FAA3168C73@taramayastales.com> Message-ID: <20111230181546.GP6508@leitl.org> On Fri, Dec 30, 2011 at 09:58:43AM -0800, Tara Maya wrote: > This is where most transhumanists disagree. Why could the program not be run on a different substrate? The word program is a poor description for what is going on in the space between our ears. But, yes, the idea that there are substrate-invariant activity patterns which are extractable and transferable is one of the core idea behind migrating cognition to a new substrate. Which is a staple of transhumanism. It is interesting that the awareness is slowly keeping in into the mainstream, driven by virtual environments of games and virtualization technology in IT (where background snapshots and live migration to different hardware is daily routine). It no longer is a leap of faith, or something outlandish. The normative power of the factual is rapidly rendering objections coming from armchair philosophy as immaterial as animism and phlogiston of yore -- and good riddance. The only fly in the ointment is that innovation proceeds by way of the graveyard. What an awful waste of human life. From natasha at natasha.cc Fri Dec 30 18:30:54 2011 From: natasha at natasha.cc (natasha at natasha.cc) Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 13:30:54 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Is anyone an expert on Aristotle and Life? In-Reply-To: <20111230181546.GP6508@leitl.org> References: <20111229164251.4sc1g46meco0kk0g@webmail.natasha.cc> <20111229203133.9u5xvrpjqcg08g0o@webmail.natasha.cc> <98C9E7E3-025C-4F49-B806-D1FAA3168C73@taramayastales.com> <20111230181546.GP6508@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20111230133054.guec7mhko4oo804o@webmail.natasha.cc> Quoting Eugen Leitl eugen at leitl.org[1]: > But, yes, the idea that there are substrate-invariant activity > patterns which are extractable and transferable is one of the > core idea behind migrating cognition to a new substrate. > Which is a staple of transhumanism. Beautiful 'gene! > The normative power of the factual is rapidly rendering > objections coming from armchair philosophy as immaterial as > animism and phlogiston of yore -- and good riddance. Aristotle?wore the hat of biologist when we wrote de Anima.? I'd?definitely not say good riddance to biology or philosophy for that matter since transhumanism is a philosophy ... > The only fly in the ointment I'll tell that to Micheal Rose. :-) >is that innovation proceeds by > way of the graveyard. Damn nasty thing. Natasha Links: ------ [1] mailto:eugen at leitl.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From natasha at natasha.cc Fri Dec 30 18:34:04 2011 From: natasha at natasha.cc (natasha at natasha.cc) Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 13:34:04 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Is anyone an expert on Aristotle and Life? In-Reply-To: <98C9E7E3-025C-4F49-B806-D1FAA3168C73@taramayastales.com> References: <20111229164251.4sc1g46meco0kk0g@webmail.natasha.cc> <20111229203133.9u5xvrpjqcg08g0o@webmail.natasha.cc> <98C9E7E3-025C-4F49-B806-D1FAA3168C73@taramayastales.com> Message-ID: <20111230133404.n37f6vj8q8swc0cc@webmail.natasha.cc> Quoting Tara Maya : > There seems to be folk psychology, shared by all humans, that? > distinguishes body from soul. Different cultures, of course, talk? > about the soul in different ways, some have more than one level,? > some link it to breath, others to blood or possession by a totem? > animal or god, etc. but nonetheless, all human cultures agree that? > there is some additional component to a human being than just a? > body...and often this component is seen as being uniquely human.? > When it is seen as belonging to animals or trees as well, it is? > because those animals or trees are also anthropomorphized. (As in? > cultures where bears or jaguars are viewed as ancestors who were? > once human, to take just one of many examples.) Yes. > It is striking that this belief in a soul is so pervasive. Well said. >Twentieth? > century science discovered how the soul can be real without being? > anything besides brain matter. Brain matter is the substrate,? > personality is the program. But some materialists have taken this > to? mean that the soul (or psyche or personality or memes) cannot > be? separated from the body. > > This is where most transhumanists disagree. Why could the program? > not be run on a different substrate? That's the point.? > I actually think one would have an easier time interesting > Aristotle? or Plato? in the transhumanist project than extreme > materialists. In? fact, I think to most pre-modern peoples, the idea > that one could,? with the right tool, take the soul out of one kind > of body and put? it into another kind of body would be self-evident. The diachronic self. Natasha -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Fri Dec 30 20:00:37 2011 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 13:00:37 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Forking Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 30, 2011 at 5:00 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: snip > Which makes me wonder where the *new* ideas are. I suspect they are > right under our noses, but we do not recognize that they are really new. > > (Incidentally, have you read Alastair Reynold's novel "The House of > Suns"? It involves clades of people cruising the galaxy and holding Far > Edge Parties at certain intervals.) I will have to look it up. It's weird to find old Extropy list discussions (like the one between me and Hans Moravec) becoming plot elements in SF stories. Far Edge Party is one of those memes that took off (in a small way). >>> If I fork myself, there will now be twice as much me-experience, twice >>> the amount of human capital and twice as many entities sharing my goals. >> >> You will also have half the resources per capita. ?Widespread, >> uncontrolled forking is isomorphic to gray goo. > > It is the overpopulation debate again. My FHI colleague Toby Ord gave a > good talk on the question a few weeks back: > http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/videos/view/128 > He suggested that it might beneficial to have more population for a > number of reasons. For example, in an information economy more minds > produce goods that are useful for all others. We also need larger groups > to produce very complex goods, and we should not be convinced that we > have somehow reached the limit here. I have no problem with a population larger even vastly larger than the current one, provided the economy stays ahead of the population growth. If it fails to do so, falling income per capita is what turns on the psychological mechanisms leading to wars. (Google "evolutionary psychology memes and the origin of war") Unless forking (and regular biological reproduction) is limited to a figure below the economic growth, I suspect the practice would cause a nearly immediate war because an economic bleak future would rapidly become obvious to all (driving meme, Kill the Forkers!). At some point even the entire material resources of the solar system will in use, like in Accelerado. Speed of light considerations (which we are already seeing) may limit us to the earth in which case materials limits will hit much sooner. I also have no problem with "If you want to fork, leave the solar system." > Then of course there are the > ethical reasons to want people to exist, although these ones are more > complex to argue from. Hmm. Does that apply even stronger to super intelligent AIs? >> I suppose forking should be added to excessive population growth rate >> as a reason we don't see the works of aliens. > > Well, if forking is a road to grinding poverty and forks can get a > temporary benefit by colonizing, Forking to grinding poverty would probably preclude having the resources to colonize--which have to be serious. We could colonize space, (O'Neill colonies) but have not and one cited reason is that we are too poor. > then it would lead to a version of > Robin Hanson's "burning the cosmic commons" scenario of very rapidly > expanding technospheres using all material to grow. They would be fairly > visible if they cannot spread at a significant fraction of light-speed. We don't see them, so either we are the first in our light cone, or something keeps them all from making a visible impact on the universe. This logic dates back to the late 70s when Eric Drexler went looking. The unresolved situation as I understand it makes me very uneasy, not that there is much I can do about it. I think the negative consequences of forking need to be considered every bit as seriously as those of AI. Keith From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Fri Dec 30 21:08:00 2011 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 13:08:00 -0800 (PST) Subject: [ExI] how did high heels happen? In-Reply-To: <201112301534.pBUFYl3M029875@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <01a901ccc4d4$54c79aa0$fe56cfe0$@att.net> <659530c568ef8b95bed3390f079ad21a.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <1325024525.62969.YahooMailNeo@web36503.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <20111227183516.t62z5v7y0wo4wg8o@webmail.natasha.cc> <008001ccc58d$ed6e4830$c84ad890$@att.net> <201112301534.pBUFYl3M029875@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <1325279280.30077.YahooMailNeo@web164505.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> ----- Original Message ----- > From: David Lubkin > To: ExI chat list > Cc: > Sent: Friday, December 30, 2011 6:45 AM > Subject: Re: [ExI] how did high heels happen? > > No one has mentioned the feminist take on high heels. That they're > of a kind with the many other fashions across history and the world > that appear designed to -- metaphorically or literally -- hobble women. ? They *are* designed to look pretty and hobble women. But?this is not due to some chauvanist agenda anymore than a peacock's tail feathers are. Instead it is an example of the evolutionary handicap principle. But unlike in conspicuous consumption, another human example of the handicap principle, high heel shoes don't show off a woman's resources but rather her physical traits like agility, balance, grace, and endurance of pain. When a man sees a woman in 4 inch high heels dancing, running, dodging traffic, and walking in the snow all with a smile on her face,?our gut tells us, if she kicked off those shoes, she could probably outrun or otherwise evade a predator.?? ? > > Spike, I'd agreed with you about mammals vs. reptiles until I had a > leopard gecko, who reminded me a great deal of a cat. You need > to step past class distinctions to embrace the full diversity of > phylum sentience :-). I agree. Even the simplest organisms have millions of years selective "education" hard-wired into their genes. Therefore you can even count on cockroaches to do intelligent rational things with regard to its own?basic drives. ? Stuart LaForge ?Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." -Clay Shirky From spike66 at att.net Fri Dec 30 21:44:24 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 13:44:24 -0800 Subject: [ExI] future of warfare again, was: RE: Forking Message-ID: <03df01ccc73c$32ecb2c0$98c61840$@att.net> >...] On Behalf Of Keith Henson ... >...I have no problem with a population larger even vastly larger than the current one, provided the economy stays ahead of the population growth. If it fails to do so, falling income per capita is what turns on the psychological mechanisms leading to wars. (Google "evolutionary psychology memes and the origin of war")...Keith Keith how does it work in evolutionary psychology as warfare evolves to the point where it involves fewer and fewer people, and far fewer actual injuries or death? We are seeing what amounts to warfare between Iran and the US/Britain/Israel axis. Drones are flying over and being apparently commandeered and captured, viruses are wrecking their nuclear separation facilities, plenty of computerized struggle is reportedly ongoing, but most of the population is unaware and unconcerned. So different is this from every previous war in every previous century of human existence. Are the old rules still applicable? What if military aerospace professionals and politicians worry about their own personal fortunes? Can that subset go off and wage warfare without harming everyone else for instance? spike From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Fri Dec 30 23:59:48 2011 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 16:59:48 -0700 Subject: [ExI] future of warfare again, was: RE: Forking Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 30, 2011 at 2:57 PM, "spike" wrote: >>...] On Behalf Of Keith Henson > ... >>...I have no problem with a population larger even vastly larger than the > current one, provided the economy stays ahead of the population growth. ?If > it fails to do so, falling income per capita is what turns on the > psychological mechanisms leading to wars. ?(Google "evolutionary psychology > memes and the origin of war")...Keith > > Keith how does it work in evolutionary psychology as warfare evolves to the > point where it involves fewer and fewer people, and far fewer actual > injuries or death? While the US lost relatively small numbers of people in the jihad war to date, there were an awful lot of people killed. > We are seeing what amounts to warfare between Iran and > the US/Britain/Israel axis. ?Drones are flying over and being apparently > commandeered and captured, viruses are wrecking their nuclear separation > facilities, plenty of computerized struggle is reportedly ongoing, but most > of the population is unaware and unconcerned. ?So different is this from > every previous war in every previous century of human existence. ?Are the > old rules still applicable? I see no reason human nature would have changed. > What if military aerospace professionals and > politicians worry about their own personal fortunes? ?Can that subset go off > and wage warfare without harming everyone else for instance? How much damage was caused to the US economy by spending a trillion dollars on the recent wars? How many people will die because of the economic collapse that engendered? The big problem is that war expenses make the future bleaker for just about everybody on both sides, leading in a many cases to additional spread of xenophobic memes that lend support to more war. And the other factor is that the memes leading up to wars divert leaders from rational thinking. Certainly you can make a strong case that starting the war with Iraq was a widely supported irrational act. One of the many things that I worry about is an irrational government commissioning an AGI with the intent for it to help them win the current war. Such people are not going to be considering "friendly" as a desirable trait. Keith From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sat Dec 31 08:29:37 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2011 01:29:37 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Is anyone an expert on Aristotle and Life? In-Reply-To: <98C9E7E3-025C-4F49-B806-D1FAA3168C73@taramayastales.com> References: <20111229164251.4sc1g46meco0kk0g@webmail.natasha.cc> <20111229203133.9u5xvrpjqcg08g0o@webmail.natasha.cc> <98C9E7E3-025C-4F49-B806-D1FAA3168C73@taramayastales.com> Message-ID: 2011/12/30 Tara Maya : > It is striking that this belief in a soul is so pervasive. I don't find it so striking. Even with all our modern science, we cannot really explain consciousness very well at all... just some kind of emergent behavior of neurons... so making something up that separates consciousness (which is admittedly mysterious) from the body (which isn't quite so mysterious) seems like a natural thing for our pattern recognition engines to do. This separated thing from our body gets picked up by the local shaman, and used to his advantage, and we're all trapped for millennia in a false pattern of thought. -Kelly From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sat Dec 31 08:24:21 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2011 01:24:21 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Brands, Prosthetic Identities and the Batman Message-ID: There is a blog entitled Brands, Prosthetic Identities and the Batman about half way down this page: http://grinding.be/category/prosthetics/ I found this blog to be very interesting as he is investigating the very beginning stages of agents acting on our behalf, and how the patterning of personality is in some actual way "us"... Would sure like to get other's opinions on this blog... it talks about Kanye West some too, and I don't have a lot of the context there, but it sounds like he's doing interesting things with his online personality. -Kelly From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sat Dec 31 08:41:36 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2011 01:41:36 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question In-Reply-To: References: <1324741535.8004.YahooMailClassic@web114404.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 4:17 AM, BillK wrote: > On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 9:53 AM, Kelly Anderson ?wrote: >> In this video from 18 to 20 seconds, you can see some lights on the >> earth that appear to be city lights, but it's hard to tell at the >> YouTube resolution. >> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VdSFT8Ouqg&feature=player_embedded >> > That video is from the EchoStar 11 Satellite, 22,300 miles up. About > 1/10 the distance to the moon. > The ?eyes? of the DISH Earth camera observes objects in the visible > spectrum, similar to the human eye, with a resolution of about 20 km > per pixel. I am perfectly willing to accept that you can't see man made structures from space without a lot of magnification even from low earth orbit. My question has shifted to whether or not you can see the city lights from the moon, because you can CLEARLY, EASILY see them from LEO... One exception might be the palm islands in Dubai... apparently, they can be seen from LEO, and advertise that they can be seen from the moon, but I rather doubt that unless you had a pretty big telescope. http://www.esa.int/esaEO/SEM32W59CLE_index_0.html -Kelly From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sat Dec 31 09:54:38 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2011 02:54:38 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Forking In-Reply-To: <4EF995FC.8070100@aleph.se> References: <4EF995FC.8070100@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 2:55 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: >> The inverse of forking is merging. ?That could just as well become a >> competing process or maybe even the dominate one for people who get >> bored but don't want to exactly die. > > Assuming merging is doable. You cannot just add together two neural > networks. It works in a few special cases like the Hopfield attractor > network since it has perfectly additive learning, but given that that kind > of network also has a total crash in performance when it gets overloaded > because of its additiveness, it is not a good model for an upload mind. If > you have a typical neural network, copy it, train them separately to learn > maps A and B on domain X and Y, and then try to merge the copies together > there doesn't seem to be any general method to produce a network that has > the output A on domain X and B on Y. > > I would love to see some results here. Anders, I don't think it would be possible to merge an "Anders" neural network with a "Kelly" network, at least for a VERY long time. However, if I take two copies of "Kelly" and run them for a day or two of subjective time, then it seems a much easier job to merge those two nearly identical networks back together again. Even easier if both are uploads, but potentially possible even if the main one is still meat, through the application of neural stimulation through some kind of (as yet to be invented) nanotechnology. All you have to do is spend some dream/sleep time constructing the new connections that differ between the two "Kelly"s... Of course, the more time they diverge, the harder the merging would become. Loved the rest of your post too. -Kelly From anders at aleph.se Sat Dec 31 09:47:39 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2011 10:47:39 +0100 Subject: [ExI] future of warfare again, was: RE: Forking In-Reply-To: <03df01ccc73c$32ecb2c0$98c61840$@att.net> References: <03df01ccc73c$32ecb2c0$98c61840$@att.net> Message-ID: <4EFEDA3B.3000605@aleph.se> On 2011-12-30 22:44, spike wrote: > Keith how does it work in evolutionary psychology as warfare evolves to the > point where it involves fewer and fewer people, and far fewer actual > injuries or death? We are seeing what amounts to warfare between Iran and > the US/Britain/Israel axis. Drones are flying over and being apparently > commandeered and captured, viruses are wrecking their nuclear separation > facilities, plenty of computerized struggle is reportedly ongoing, but most > of the population is unaware and unconcerned. So different is this from > every previous war in every previous century of human existence. This is not necessarily a good thing from an evolutionary psychology perspective. Military psychology has been struggling to train away normal (likely evolved) inhibitions against hurting other people for a long time. But doing warfare remotely and automated likely gets rid of a lot of inhibitions directly - no direct personal connection to the target, various framing effects, biases in moral cognition (consider the switch vs. the footbridge cases of the trolley problem), plenty of room for diffusion of responsibility and Milgram-experiment-like phenomena. Like nonlethal weapons it might lower the threshold for engaging in deadly violence. The actual deadliness of wars doesn't have a strong trend in the data I have seen (e.g. http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2008/07/the_graphs_of_war.html ) but there might be a difference in recent high-tech wars. I suspect it is not in the increased direction. In fact, even bloody and genocidal conflicts are surprisingly "safe" on an individual basis - the risk per year is typically about a percent or so. The real threat from hightech wars is 1) they can be global in scope, 2) they can occur very quickly, and 3) they can potentially become very lethal. 1 means that dispersion is not easy, that everybody is everybody else's neighbor, and that there is no cut-off in the size distribution due to their local nature. 2 means that escalation and accidents can happen fast, possibly circumventing safety and de-escalation processes. And 3 means that if there is a shift from the normal focus on limiting the opponent's ability to wage war to killing a lot of people for some reason (side-effects, tactics, strategy), they could become extremely bad. (On the hopeful side, I recently got a personal communication from researchers investigating nuclear winters who thought that the probability of total human extinction due to a full-scale northern hemisphere nuclear exchange and ensuing climate disaster was just one in 100,000 to 10,000. That is cheering! ) -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sat Dec 31 10:03:47 2011 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2011 03:03:47 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Forking In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, Dec 30, 2011 at 1:00 PM, Keith Henson wrote: > Unless forking (and regular biological reproduction) is limited to a > figure below the economic growth, I suspect the practice would cause a > nearly immediate war because an economic bleak future would rapidly > become obvious to all (driving meme, Kill the Forkers!). ?At some > point even the entire material resources of the solar system will in > use, like in Accelerado. ?Speed of light considerations (which we are > already seeing) may limit us to the earth in which case materials > limits will hit much sooner. I suspect that those with the economic ability to fork will do so, and that this will lead to an even greater divide between the haves and have nots. If the gulf is too wide for the occupy wall street crowd now, I can't imagine how they'll feel in 100 years. Funny thing happened this morning... I was looking for a way to watch a football game on the Internet, and one of the first hits was this: http://occupywallst.org/forum/byu-vs-tulsa-live-stream-watch-byu-vs-tulsa-online/ I guess even the occupy crowd likes their football... even if they have to engage in a little capitalism to get it... LOL! -Kelly From anders at aleph.se Sat Dec 31 09:14:29 2011 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2011 10:14:29 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Forking In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4EFED275.3020509@aleph.se> On 2011-12-30 21:00, Keith Henson wrote: > On Fri, Dec 30, 2011 at 5:00 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: >> Then of course there are the >> ethical reasons to want people to exist, although these ones are more >> complex to argue from. > > Hmm. Does that apply even stronger to super intelligent AIs? Could be. I am working a bit on a paper with a colleague (who isn't transhumanist) about ethical arguments against making superintelligent AI. One of the more intriguing possibilities might be that they embody so much value (by being super-conscious, having super-emotions or being super-moral) that it might be either 1) impermissible for humans to make them since once in existence more or less the only relevant moral actions we could take are the ones serving or protecting them (even if they don't need or care) or 2) too dangerous in the moral sense to try to develop them because we might accidentally produce super-disvalue (imagine an entity that suffers so much that all the positive things humanity ever done is insignificant in comparison). I don't think these cases are good arguments to refrain from AI, but they certainly suggest that there might be problems with succeeding too well even if the AI itself is friendly. >>> I suppose forking should be added to excessive population growth rate >>> as a reason we don't see the works of aliens. >> >> Well, if forking is a road to grinding poverty and forks can get a >> temporary benefit by colonizing, > > Forking to grinding poverty would probably preclude having the > resources to colonize--which have to be serious. We could colonize > space, (O'Neill colonies) but have not and one cited reason is that we > are too poor. Uploads are pretty ideal for space colonization and would probably be the cheap way of getting space resources. Poverty traps limits your range of actions because you cannot afford actions that bring you out of them. But if certain actions at least temporarily reduce your poverty, then they are likely to be taken. So unless you presuppose that all of transhumanity is in a very tight poverty trap where no coalition can get a better situation by pooling resources for getting more resources, it seems likely that it will do colonizing for more resources. These resources might get over-shared again, producing a "mobile" poverty trap, but that just means that you get an expanding poor civilization, not a non-expanding civilization. > I think the negative consequences of forking need to be considered > every bit as seriously as those of AI. Completely agree. Will work on it when we are finished with AI. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford University From spike66 at att.net Sat Dec 31 11:16:00 2011 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2011 03:16:00 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Is anyone an expert on Aristotle and Life? In-Reply-To: References: <20111229164251.4sc1g46meco0kk0g@webmail.natasha.cc> <20111229203133.9u5xvrpjqcg08g0o@webmail.natasha.cc> <98C9E7E3-025C-4F49-B806-D1FAA3168C73@taramayastales.com> Message-ID: <000301ccc7ad$939ea8a0$badbf9e0$@att.net> On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson Subject: Re: [ExI] Is anyone an expert on Aristotle and Life? 2011/12/30 Tara Maya : >> It is striking that this belief in a soul is so pervasive. ... >...This separated thing from our body gets picked up by the local shaman, and used to his advantage, and we're all trapped for millennia in a false pattern of thought. -Kelly Do not despair, but rather adopt a cryonicists' view of the soul. Imagine an experimental car, built, tested, then determined that the design is insufficiently intelligent, so the car is ground up and recycled. The car is gone but the design is preserved and still exists in some form, so that another one like the original, or arbitrarily many like the original, could theoretically be built from that design. Think of the soul as the design for us. spike From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sat Dec 31 12:41:54 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2011 13:41:54 +0100 Subject: [ExI] how did high heels happen? In-Reply-To: <1325279280.30077.YahooMailNeo@web164505.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <01a901ccc4d4$54c79aa0$fe56cfe0$@att.net> <659530c568ef8b95bed3390f079ad21a.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <1325024525.62969.YahooMailNeo@web36503.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <20111227183516.t62z5v7y0wo4wg8o@webmail.natasha.cc> <008001ccc58d$ed6e4830$c84ad890$@att.net> <201112301534.pBUFYl3M029875@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <1325279280.30077.YahooMailNeo@web164505.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On 30 December 2011 22:08, The Avantguardian wrote: > But this is not due to some chauvanist agenda anymore than a peacock's > tail feathers are. Instead it is an example of the evolutionary handicap > principle. > The traditional, say, Lorenz's, peacock's feathers explanation is that it is simply an evolutionary vicious circle (if I am a peacock female liking short feathers, I am less likely to get chicks from my mate able to seduce a lot of other females, so the success of my genes at replication is decreased). But I suspect that an evolutionary handicap principle might in fact exist. See for instance the exhibition of obviously uselessly dangerous behaviour ("Look, possible sexual mate, if I am ethologically inclined to embark in such futile daring, and yet my genes are still around, they must otherwise be really, really good"). This, of course, need not go away in a posthuman-but-still-biological context. Things would of course be made more complicate by the fact at each generation our genetic endowment can be modified. Yet, the direction in which it is will in turn depend on one's "nature" and preferences, something which is in turn at least to some extent programmed by our existing genetic endowment. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sat Dec 31 13:07:26 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2011 14:07:26 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Is anyone an expert on Aristotle and Life? In-Reply-To: <20111230105415.x29mrssnk8wwccos@webmail.natasha.cc> References: <20111229164251.4sc1g46meco0kk0g@webmail.natasha.cc> <20111230105415.x29mrssnk8wwccos@webmail.natasha.cc> Message-ID: 2011/12/30 > Bty, BillK and Stefano most likely have a prolonged experience with life, > a quantifier for being experts at life. :-) > No, I am actually very young. Or at least try to look as if I were... :-) -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sat Dec 31 13:21:03 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2011 14:21:03 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Is anyone an expert on Aristotle and Life? In-Reply-To: <98C9E7E3-025C-4F49-B806-D1FAA3168C73@taramayastales.com> References: <20111229164251.4sc1g46meco0kk0g@webmail.natasha.cc> <20111229203133.9u5xvrpjqcg08g0o@webmail.natasha.cc> <98C9E7E3-025C-4F49-B806-D1FAA3168C73@taramayastales.com> Message-ID: 2011/12/30 Tara Maya > There seems to be folk psychology, shared by all humans, that > distinguishes body from soul. Different cultures, of course, talk about the > soul in different ways, some have more than one level, some link it to > breath, others to blood or possession by a totem animal or god, etc. but > nonetheless, all human cultures agree that there is some additional > component to a human being than just a body...and often this component is > seen as being uniquely human. When it is seen as belonging to animals or > trees as well, it is because those animals or trees are also > anthropomorphized. (As in cultures where bears or jaguars are viewed as > ancestors who were once human, to take just one of many examples.) > > It is striking that this belief in a soul is so pervasive. Twentieth > century science discovered how the soul can be real without being anything > besides brain matter. Brain matter is the substrate, personality is the > program. But some materialists have taken this to mean that the soul (or > psyche or personality or memes) cannot be separated from the body. > > This is where most transhumanists disagree. Why could the program not be > run on a different substrate? > Yes, the real point is that if a belief in the existence of a "soul" is generalised to the point where it actually recovers all the relevant concepts throughout cultures and history, I think that even transhumanists can be comfortable with it, even though obviously not with some specific versions thereof. As Kurzweil himself clearly, albeit somewhat implicitely, remarks in Are We Spiritual Machines?"materialism" itself falls within the dualist mentality and philosophy. Who actually does or should care whether my atoms in a seven years time are entirely replaced? I actually think one would have an easier time interesting Aristotle or > Plato in the transhumanist project than extreme materialists. In fact, I > think to most pre-modern peoples, the idea that one could, with the right > tool, take the soul out of one kind of body and put it into another kind of > body would be self-evident. > Absolutely. Yet, I am not sure that extension of "soul" to all animals, or living things, or even things tout court, was just the product of anthropomorfism. Hindous themselves, who are certainly closer than we are to the original indo-european worldview, still have no problem with that. And neither do I, albeit obviously in a "perspectivist" rather than "objectivist" sense (of course a river does not exhibit any actual "consciousness", but there is nothing wrong that my psychology is inclined to grant him an "identity" of sort, and to organise my perception and comprehension of the world around some implicit panpsychism). -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sat Dec 31 13:39:23 2011 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2011 14:39:23 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Is anyone an expert on Aristotle and Life? In-Reply-To: References: <20111229164251.4sc1g46meco0kk0g@webmail.natasha.cc> <20111229203133.9u5xvrpjqcg08g0o@webmail.natasha.cc> <98C9E7E3-025C-4F49-B806-D1FAA3168C73@taramayastales.com> Message-ID: On 31 December 2011 09:29, Kelly Anderson wrote: > I don't find it so striking. Even with all our modern science, we > cannot really explain consciousness very well at all... just some kind > of emergent behavior of neurons... so making something up that > separates consciousness (which is admittedly mysterious) from the body > (which isn't quite so mysterious) seems like a natural thing for our > pattern recognition engines to do. > Personally, I think that lest we risk to fall again in metaphysical traps and in the related paradoxes (philosophical zombies, etc.) it is best to consider consciouness and identity in strictly phenomenical, ethological and sociological terms, more or less as we do for "collective identities" - something which, btw, goes hand in hand with Minsky's intuitions about the Society of the Mind . Accordingly, I never found persuasive the black-and-white views of consciousness, with the related narratives of computers suddenly "awakening", as in The Difference Engineor The Escapist. Not only is consciousness basically an evolutionary artifact (a "spandrel" in the Gould's sense), unrelated to plausible definitions of the "intelligence" of a given system in more general terms, but its emergence is gradual: from an asleep or drugged status to an alert one, from infancy to childhood, and of course from simpler ethologies to "higher" organisms. -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Sat Dec 31 15:22:02 2011 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2011 16:22:02 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Is anyone an expert on Aristotle and Life? In-Reply-To: References: <20111229164251.4sc1g46meco0kk0g@webmail.natasha.cc> <20111229203133.9u5xvrpjqcg08g0o@webmail.natasha.cc> <98C9E7E3-025C-4F49-B806-D1FAA3168C73@taramayastales.com> Message-ID: <20111231152202.GG6508@leitl.org> On Sat, Dec 31, 2011 at 01:29:37AM -0700, Kelly Anderson wrote: > 2011/12/30 Tara Maya : > > It is striking that this belief in a soul is so pervasive. > > I don't find it so striking. Even with all our modern science, we > cannot really explain consciousness very well at all... just some kind The word consciousness is completely meaningless. In order to explain something you should define it first. If you can't define it, then http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57PWqFowq-4 > of emergent behavior of neurons... so making something up that > separates consciousness (which is admittedly mysterious) from the body > (which isn't quite so mysterious) seems like a natural thing for our > pattern recognition engines to do. Depends on the amount of bullshit you've ingested over your total lifetime. Intuition is not destiny. It can be recalibrated. > This separated thing from our body gets picked up by the local shaman, > and used to his advantage, and we're all trapped for millennia in a > false pattern of thought. From pharos at gmail.com Sat Dec 31 21:32:43 2011 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2011 21:32:43 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question In-Reply-To: References: <1324741535.8004.YahooMailClassic@web114404.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 31, 2011 at 8:41 AM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > I am perfectly willing to accept that you can't see man made > structures from space without a lot of magnification even from low > earth orbit. My question has shifted to whether or not you can see the > city lights from the moon, because you can CLEARLY, EASILY see them > from LEO... > > I think this might be a case of 'in theory, maybe - but in practice, no'. The Apollo moon mission astronauts never reported seeing city lights and the famous photos don't show any city lights. See: The reason for this is glare from the sun. The astronauts were standing in bright sunlight, so their sun visors were probably down and their eyes adjusted to the glare. So they couldn't see the possible specks of light from cities. And you have to be on the sun-side of the moon in order to see the earth. Note that the photo above doesn't show any lights on the dark part of the earth. But the photo doesn't show any stars either, so the camera probably also had to have a dark filter over the lens to produce a reasonable picture. So the jury is still out on whether you could arrange the circumstances just right so as to see the specks of light from earth cities. You'll have to go there and try it for yourself. :) BillK From pharos at gmail.com Sat Dec 31 21:53:16 2011 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2011 21:53:16 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Fermi question In-Reply-To: References: <1324741535.8004.YahooMailClassic@web114404.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Dec 31, 2011 at 9:32 PM, BillK wrote: > And you have to be on the > sun-side of the moon in order to see the earth. > > That's not correct, is it? The moon always has the same face towards earth, but it goes through phases of the moon, as seen from earth. Apollo went to the sunny part so they could see what they were doing. So you could go to a shaded part of the moon's face and look for earth city lights from there. BillK