[ExI] Progress

[Anders Sandberg]

On 01/03/2013 02:04, spike wrote:
> WHOA! Anders, you have been in the presence of GOD! I am in awe! Wow, 
> that makes me a friend of a guy who has talked with GOD! Definitely, 
> Kasparov would have made a great extropian. Of course had he shown up 
> here, I would swoon like a civil war era maiden, and then nobody would 
> be doing the moderation tasks. But still.

But still. He is a fun guy, very smart. (No, chess grandmasters do not 
have to be supersmart. As I earlier mentioned, studies show that at 
first among kids chess performance correlates with intelligence, but 
then the smartest kids get other interests leaving only the merely smart 
to go on and dedicate themselves to the game) Pro-technology, 
pro-freedom, smart, what is there not to like?

His current project is a book with Peter Thiel and Max Levchin about the 
need to get back the spirit of innovation. His (their?) analysis of the 
difference between horizontal innovation and vertical innovation was 
pretty astute.

Earlier this week we had a big debate on the causes of obesity ( 
http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2013/02/28/balaji-ravichandran-are-all-calories-equal-or-are-some-more-equal-than-others 
<http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2013/02/28/balaji-ravichandran-are-all-calories-equal-or-are-some-more-equal-than-others/> 
) and I think my main take-home surprise was that obesity suddenly 
started to grow worldwide (with some lags) in the late 70s. Yet the 
causes seems to be fairly complex - I was not too convinced by the 
explanations given. In the same way, I think Gary's (and Tyler Cowen's) 
analysis of a dearth of innovation post ~1970-1980 is roughly right, but 
there doesn't seem to be a really good single explanation. We have 
complex systems that seem to shift in a fairly thourough way fairly 
quickly. Maybe this is just nonlinear responses or bifurcations, in 
which case it might be surprisingly tricky to fix them other than just 
keeping trying to change the rules profoundly and hoping that sooner or 
later we hit the right combination.

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University

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