[ExI] Simulation

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2012-12-21 21:27, ablainey at aol.com wrote:

>   I thinktimelessness  plays a big part.

It might be a spell check failure, but I love how it came together. 
Thinktimelessness is a nice word.

> Still its not a new problem. Everyone thinksthe  Wright brothers were first.  Obviously no ill will for Nick, a good man doing a good job. It is our own fault if we fail to write our ideas down. Sadly one of my biggestflaws.

I often feel like a thief when I write my papers, since I know many good 
ideas emerged on this list or in diffuse conversations elsewhere. So 
many people who ought to get credit, so hard to properly give it to 
them!* This is of course true for many of the great thinkers we admire: 
often when we read their papers carefully they say outright that the 
idea they deal with was mentioned to them - but they polish it into 
something standalone and citable.

[ * Sometimes one can at least thank the person responsible, or even 
invite them to be a co-author. Or the person could step forward later, 
slightly annoyed. But many, many ideas are like emergent patterns that 
take shape across a dozen discussions, with no clear memory of who 
created what. ]

Part of this is of course our current obsession with intellectual 
property, which is poisoning much of our creative discourse by seeing it 
as things that must be owned (or reactively seeing it as things that 
must *not* be owned - just as constraining!) But we do care about being 
credited properly since reputations matter (witness the tricky methods 
used by Galileo and others in the early modern era to get primacy).

But from the bigger perspective of advancing human thinking, the most 
important thing is to get those ideas down on "paper". They need to be 
refined and clarified, quite often in several iterations. The simple 
simulation argument idea turned into several pages, since actually 
showing that it was waterproof takes some work (Nick even had to publish 
a follow up paper dealing with a particular bug that was discovered a 
while ago). But this process cannot be done if the idea is just hanging 
in the air: somebody needs to take charge of it and make it public, 
clear and useful.



-- 
Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford University