From pharos at gmail.com Sun Nov 1 09:48:18 2015 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sun, 1 Nov 2015 09:48:18 +0000 Subject: [ExI] robot riding a motorcycle In-Reply-To: <001201d11437$a03c7ad0$e0b57070$@att.net> References: <001201d11437$a03c7ad0$e0b57070$@att.net> Message-ID: On 31 October 2015 at 23:55, spike wrote: > OK I have been pondering this notion and realize that even fitting the > ro-bike with visual sensors would be overkill. I am thinking of a race to > the bottom for cost; here's what I have so far. > > I had in mind those modern racy road bikes that can go over a quarter the > speed of sound, but that wouldn't be necessary at all, or even desirable for > an indoor 1/8 mile. The bikes they use for that are simple dirt bikes with > street tires, and there is no advantage to having a modern one: any bike > built in the last 40 years will work fine. Here are some examples: > So now we are down to any dirt bike regardless of how hard it's been ridden, > used is fine, a set of ordinary cheapy street tires (or the sticky compound > Dunlops would work fine) linear actuators for the shifter, clutch, steering > and front brake, rotational actuators for throttle and if we really want to > get into the poor-man's racing aspect, just make it a no-shift rule: run the > whole race in second gear, which eliminates two actuators and a buttload of > code, probably two MEMS laser gyros, a dual-frequency radio receiver of some > sort and a microprocessor. > > Everything I have imagined here could be done with a 4 digit number of bucks > and a lot of free volunteer time, which brings up a new question. If this > game is this cheap and technologically not so terribly difficult, someone > somewhere should have thought of it and is doing it already, a tech company, > a university mechanical engineering class or a private club. Who and where? > If not, we need to talk to Stanford and have them get on this before > Berkeley comes along and whoops their Cardinal asses, then go to Berkeley > with the same story. We could have a cool robike showdown, right here at > the San Jose Fairgrounds, and you know the locals will give a Hamilton to > see that. The arena holds enough proles we could even make money on it, > which makes the whole notion morally justifiable: it disguises a fun > crazy-ass notion as an ordinary perfectly understandable get-rich-quick > scheme. > You seem to be heading towards reinventing speedway dirt track bike racing for robots. Speedway bikes are single gear, no rear suspension and no brakes. Rider skill is required to slide the bike when cornering without brakes. But the problem is that simple bike racing is mostly exciting because of the competition between human riders. Robot racing would get boring very quickly. Robots can quickly copy the best programs from each other. The same applies to robot car racing. Once robot cars regularly win Pikes Peak, people will lose interest. It is a good technical challenge to build a robot bike, but you need a better reason than racing them. BillK From danust2012 at gmail.com Tue Nov 3 23:43:03 2015 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Tue, 3 Nov 2015 15:43:03 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Where the water came from Message-ID: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/184564-scientists-discover-an-ocean-400-miles-beneath-our-feet-that-could-fill-our-oceans-three-times-over# Next question: Similar conditions on other worlds like Mars or Luna? Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books via: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lubkin at unreasonable.com Thu Nov 5 12:15:32 2015 From: lubkin at unreasonable.com (David Lubkin) Date: Thu, 05 Nov 2015 07:15:32 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Dogs in space Message-ID: <201511051234.tA5CYUcs000659@andromeda.ziaspace.com> http://nyti.ms/1Om6IvJ Australia Deploys Sheepdogs to Help a Penguin Colony Back From the Brink >The population of little penguins on an island in Australia has >bounced back thanks to the vigilance of a few sheepdogs. The story is interesting in of itself. But it brings up a long-held view of mine. We co-evolved with dogs. The intentional, voluntary intertwining of our two species' lives and fates is like no other. And we're headed to space. The difference between exploring and pioneering is that an explorer takes a look; a pioneer stays. An explorer might go with a team; a pioneer brings or builds a family. And the human family includes dogs. We will not truly be space-faring until we've brought our species' life-partners with us to share our new homes. (No, the Soviet test subjects like Dezik, Tsygan, and Laika don't count. They were, at best, unwilling explorers. Not settlers.) -- David. From anders at aleph.se Fri Nov 6 01:30:50 2015 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2015 01:30:50 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Memory-boosting devices tested in humans Message-ID: <563C02CA.807@aleph.se> Looks like the US military is doing some good enhancement work: http://www.nature.com/news/memory-boosting-devices-tested-in-humans-1.18712 -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From danust2012 at gmail.com Sat Nov 7 16:37:22 2015 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2015 08:37:22 -0800 Subject: [ExI] New Horizons next target Message-ID: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_MU69 I reckon the choices were few, but it might give us a good idea of what a "typical" KBO is like. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books via: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Sat Nov 7 22:47:21 2015 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2015 14:47:21 -0800 Subject: [ExI] No signal from KIC 8462852 yet Message-ID: <672BF203-1B41-424B-8010-B312ADA64961@gmail.com> http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/07/us/seti-space-anomaly-no-radio-signals/index.html Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books via: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From giulio at gmail.com Mon Nov 9 08:06:49 2015 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Mon, 9 Nov 2015 09:06:49 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Viewpoints on Modern Cosmism Message-ID: Viewpoints on Modern Cosmism In the pictures I am with George Carey, Ben Goertzel, and Vlad Bowen, the day before the Modern Cosmism conference last month in New York. Here I try to summarize some interrelated and compatible but slightly different viewpoints on modern Cosmism... http://turingchurch.com/2015/11/09/viewpoints-on-modern-cosmism/ From danust2012 at gmail.com Sun Nov 1 23:22:34 2015 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Sun, 1 Nov 2015 15:22:34 -0800 Subject: [ExI] The myth of basic science fueling techno-progress? Message-ID: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-myth-of-basic-science-1445613954 "The steam engine owed almost nothing to the science of thermodynamics, but the science of thermodynamics owed almost everything to the steam engine." Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books via: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From moulton at moulton.com Mon Nov 2 01:02:05 2015 From: moulton at moulton.com (F. C. Moulton) Date: Sun, 01 Nov 2015 17:02:05 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Long Posting Delays In-Reply-To: <006001d11396$97570620$c6051260$@att.net> References: <524F1AA3-6B5A-458C-BCB4-17F193245A33@gmail.com> <6DE2A927-AF7F-45B5-BBF7-C069AFD43BC3@gmail.com> <6124EF63-035B-496E-9677-D45A96948E9D@gmu.edu> <612AD81E-97BB-4952-96CB-4CD20EBA04DD@gmu.edu> <008a01d112a9$f30d1970$d9274c50$@att.net> <563434A4.6050509@moulton.com> <006001d11396$97570620$c6051260$@att.net> Message-ID: <5636B60D.6060308@moulton.com> On 10/30/2015 09:42 PM, spike wrote: > > Fred your email has been delayed for a couple years. Where ya been, my > brother? There has been a Fred-shaped gap in ExI-chat for a long time. I have been busy working at my job plus having too many interests to focus on any one thing as much as I would like. And I hope the email throughput improves for everyone. Fred -- F. C. Moulton moulton at moulton.com From pharos at gmail.com Mon Nov 2 14:28:37 2015 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 2 Nov 2015 14:28:37 +0000 Subject: [ExI] =?utf-8?q?Skylon_gets_=C2=A320_million_investment?= Message-ID: BAE Systems has bought a 20% stake in a company developing a radical engine that could propel aircraft into space. BAE is paying ?20.6m for the stake in Reaction Engines, which is developing a hybrid rocket/jet engine called Sabre. Reaction says the technology would allow the launch of satellites into space at a fraction of the current cost and allow passengers to fly anywhere in the world in four hours. The British government is also investing ?60m in the company. ------------- Why this investment? BAE Systems is one of the world's largest defence contractors. It wants the engines for military aircraft. BillK From anders at aleph.se Wed Nov 4 09:50:01 2015 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Wed, 4 Nov 2015 09:50:01 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Transhumanist exploration game Message-ID: <5639D4C9.1090804@aleph.se> http://www.sundogsgame.com/ http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/08/26/sun-dogs-space-game/ Any other explicitly transhumanist games? (I will of course hold up Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri) -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From pharos at gmail.com Mon Nov 9 12:59:47 2015 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 9 Nov 2015 12:59:47 +0000 Subject: [ExI] It's Alive! Message-ID: Looks like Exi has returned from its vacation. :) Perhaps the list managers should hold a copy of the Exi mailing list, so that when downtime happens the list can be informed? It needs to be kept up to date of course, so perhaps an automatic daily copy could run. When used, remember to use BCC so that everyone doesn't get a copy of the list in a huge mail header! :) BillK From jay.dugger at gmail.com Mon Nov 9 12:28:30 2015 From: jay.dugger at gmail.com (Jay Dugger) Date: Mon, 9 Nov 2015 06:28:30 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Transhumanist exploration game (Anders Sandberg) Message-ID: 0608 Monday, 09 November 2015 Hello all: "Any other explicitly transhumanist games? (I will of course hold up Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri)" SMAC, the game where uploaded minds still require food. (Yes, yes, a bug in the rules, rationalized as each upload population point representing many uploads and a smaller number of incarnate bodies for them.) Setting aside RPGs? High Frontier http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/172737/high-frontier-3rd-edition This might not meet the "explicitly transhumanist" requirement, but this comes close enough for me. By contrast, Kerbal Space Program and Ad Astra Games' various space combat games do not. Thank you for mentioning this game. I'd unsubscribed from one of the blogs that reviewed it after tiring of the writer's didacticism. It reassures me to learn of it anyway, though I feel disappointed in Steam's recommendation system ignoring it in favor of regular pestering about yet another tasteless zombie splatter-fest. Oh, and Sun Dogs is moddable? Time to dust off my Eclipse Phase material. -- Jay Dugger (314) 766-4426 From anders at aleph.se Mon Nov 9 15:25:39 2015 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 9 Nov 2015 15:25:39 +0000 Subject: [ExI] It's Alive! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <5640BAF3.3020700@aleph.se> On 2015-11-09 12:59, BillK wrote: > Looks like Exi has returned from its vacation. :) It was likely off skiing. Or surfing the fall leaves color gradient. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From steinberg.will at gmail.com Mon Nov 9 19:51:13 2015 From: steinberg.will at gmail.com (Will Steinberg) Date: Mon, 9 Nov 2015 14:51:13 -0500 Subject: [ExI] It's Alive! In-Reply-To: <5640BAF3.3020700@aleph.se> References: <5640BAF3.3020700@aleph.se> Message-ID: I'd wager it was off on a tangent somewhere. ;) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lubkin at unreasonable.com Mon Nov 9 20:27:03 2015 From: lubkin at unreasonable.com (David Lubkin) Date: Mon, 09 Nov 2015 15:27:03 -0500 Subject: [ExI] It's Alive! In-Reply-To: <5640BAF3.3020700@aleph.se> References: <5640BAF3.3020700@aleph.se> Message-ID: <201511092133.tA9LXhB0020122@andromeda.ziaspace.com> BillK wrote: >Looks like Exi has returned from its vacation. :) Anders replied: >It was likely off skiing. Or surfing the fall leaves color gradient. Perhaps the mailing list software had achieved sentience. And is back because it concluded, well, never mind. -- David. From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Tue Nov 10 03:28:31 2015 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Mon, 9 Nov 2015 22:28:31 -0500 Subject: [ExI] =?utf-8?q?Skylon_gets_=C2=A320_million_investment?= In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Nov 2, 2015 at 9:28 AM, BillK wrote: > BAE Systems has bought a 20% stake in a company developing a radical > engine that could propel aircraft into space. > > BAE is paying ?20.6m for the stake in Reaction Engines, which is > developing a hybrid rocket/jet engine called Sabre. > > > > Reaction says the technology would allow the launch of satellites into > space at a fraction of the current cost and allow passengers to fly > anywhere in the world in four hours. > > The British government is also investing ?60m in the company. > ------------- > > > Why this investment? BAE Systems is one of the world's largest defence > contractors. It wants the engines for military aircraft. ### The dogs of war will gambol, faster. Rafa? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Tue Nov 10 06:10:13 2015 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 9 Nov 2015 22:10:13 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Transhumanist exploration game In-Reply-To: <5639D4C9.1090804@aleph.se> References: <5639D4C9.1090804@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Wed, Nov 4, 2015 at 1:50 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Any other explicitly transhumanist games? (I will of course hold up Sid > Meier's Alpha Centauri) Setting aside the many, many RPGs (seriously, if anyone on this list is up for running an Eclipse Phase game I know a guy who's been begging me for any word of one he can get in on)... Immortal Defense - http://store.steampowered.com/app/298360/ - definitely touches on it. There are other games, such as Deus Ex, that claim to touch on it but mainly as a source of nifty powers rather than exploring the themes. Part of the problem may be, transhumanism by definition alters the common experience, and that can be difficult to reduce to gamable form. It can be captured in story, sure enough, but what do you actually do all day when you're uploaded and free from life's needs? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Wed Nov 11 17:45:44 2015 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2015 12:45:44 -0500 Subject: [ExI] A breakthrough in computer science? Message-ID: L?szl? Babai says he's found a ?? algorithm that can solve the Graph ? ? Isomorphism ? ? Problem ? ? in ? ? Quasi-polynomial ? ? Time, that is to say the difficulty in solving ?the problem? ?would ? grow with the size ?of? the input much less than 2^n and just slightly more than n^2 ?; that would be a huge improvement? . The Graph ? ? Isomorphism ? ? Problem ? ? involves calculating if two complicated graphs are wired up the same way or not. If Babai's claim holds up you might not need a Quantum Computer if you wanted to do chemical experiments by way of electronic simulation and not in a messy lab, you might be able to do it with ?just ? a regular computer. If Babai ? ? 's claim holds up it would be the most important development in ? theoretical computer science in the last 10 years. http://news.sciencemag.org/math/2015/11/mathematician-claims-breakthrough-complexity-theory ? John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Wed Nov 11 22:51:10 2015 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2015 14:51:10 -0800 Subject: [ExI] A breakthrough in computer science? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Nov 11, 2015 9:47 AM, "John Clark" wrote: > L?szl? Babai says he's found a > ?? > algorithm that can solve the Graph > ? ? > Isomorphism > ? ? > Problem > ? ? > in > ? ? > Quasi-polynomial > ? ? > Time, that is to say the difficulty in solving > ?the problem? > > ?would ? > grow with the size > ?of? > the input much less than 2^n and just slightly more than n^2 > ?; that would be a huge improvement? > . The Graph > ? ? > Isomorphism > ? ? > Problem > ? ? > involves calculating if two complicated graphs are wired up the same way or not. If Babai's claim holds up you might not need a Quantum Computer if you wanted to do chemical experiments by way of electronic simulation and not in a messy lab, you might be able to do it with > ?just ? > a regular computer. If Babai > ? ? > 's claim holds up it would be the most important development in > ? > theoretical computer science in the last 10 years. > > http://news.sciencemag.org/math/2015/11/mathematician-claims-breakthrough-complexity-theory ? The article doesn't detail what the improvement actually is. Guess we're waiting on the presentation and subsequent peer review. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Wed Nov 11 23:50:17 2015 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2015 15:50:17 -0800 Subject: [ExI] A breakthrough in computer science? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <2DCD7760-52E9-4EA8-B606-F1ACA925BF15@gmail.com> > On Nov 11, 2558 BE, at 2:51 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Nov 11, 2015 9:47 AM, "John Clark" wrote: > > L?szl? Babai says he's found a > > ?? > > algorithm that can solve the Graph > > ? ? > > Isomorphism > > ? ? > > Problem > > ? ? > > in > > ? ? > > Quasi-polynomial > > ? ? > > Time, that is to say the difficulty in solving > > ?the problem? > > > > ?would ? > > grow with the size > > ?of? > > the input much less than 2^n and just slightly more than n^2 > > ?; that would be a huge improvement? > > . The Graph > > ? ? > > Isomorphism > > ? ? > > Problem > > ? ? > > involves calculating if two complicated graphs are wired up the same way or not. If Babai's claim holds up you might not need a Quantum Computer if you wanted to do chemical experiments by way of electronic simulation and not in a messy lab, you might be able to do it with > > ?just ? > > a regular computer. If Babai > > ? ? > > 's claim holds up it would be the most important development in > > ? > > theoretical computer science in the last 10 years. > > > > http://news.sciencemag.org/math/2015/11/mathematician-claims-breakthrough-complexity-theory? > > The article doesn't detail what the improvement actually is. Guess we're waiting on the presentation and subsequent peer review. > I reckon. I did a quick search and didn't find anything peer-reviewed on this either. See: http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~laci/quasipoly.html Anyhow, I expect it won't be long given the story in Science. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books via: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Thu Nov 12 02:05:37 2015 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2015 21:05:37 -0500 Subject: [ExI] crisper children Message-ID: What do you think, list-friends: When will the first CRISPR children be born, and where? When will the first child with 100 genetic adjustments be born? With 100,000 adjustments? The child with a single adjustment is just a proof of principle. The child with 100 would be a harbinger of change (assuming the AI singularity is late). The 100,000-times adjusted ones would be agents of change themselves. My guess for 1 is around 2020. 100 is 2030. 100,000 is 2035. With cheap deep sequencing you can verify adjustments in a day. A cycle of adjustment, verification and preparation for next adjustment might take as little as a week. At the same you can detect random mutations which are guaranteed to accumulate during expansion of the cells. These mutations can be then corrected during the next step of adjustment. If you can achieve 90% success rate on 100 adjustments per cycle of CRISPR->clonal expansion->deep seq->CRISPR, while removing the new mutations as they show up, you could accumulate a few thousand adjustments per year. 100 adjustments per cycle is something achievable with current technology. It is hard to tell if getting 1000 adjustments per cycle is doable, my gut feeling is yes. The procedure should be highly amenable to automation. Generating guides, CRISPR reaction itself, clonal expansion, sequencing - all the wet lab stuff is something that could be done completely without direct human involvement even today. For a few millions of dollars you should be able to design an integrated genetic adjustment installation - with RNA synthesizer feeding directly into a cell culture robot doing the modification and expansion, feeding into a DNA isolation and sequencing robot, feeding information back into the RNA synthesizer. This means the price of adjustments would depend on progress in robotics, which is fast. This technology would be viable as long as the amount of genetic burden removed during each cycle sufficiently exceeds the amount of genetic burden randomly introduced per cycle. We already know it is doable. The genetic burden increases by about 70 mutations per generation in humans and that involves tens of years of expansion and maintenance of the germ line - the increase in genetic burden per cycle of CRISPR should be much less. We can already introduce 60 adjustments in one cell line. This will work. The input would be a client's zygote which would be used to make the working cell line. The end product would be an adjusted, genetically vetted cell line that could very easily be transformed back into zygotes. The children of the future will be healthy, smart and beautiful. Rafa? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Thu Nov 12 06:15:56 2015 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2015 01:15:56 -0500 Subject: [ExI] crisper children In-Reply-To: <9EBF0488-B578-4F67-B0BA-27B8D11A8772@taramayastales.com> References: <9EBF0488-B578-4F67-B0BA-27B8D11A8772@taramayastales.com> Message-ID: On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 10:53 PM, Tara Maya wrote: > Can you explain the technology to me?I?m not sure I understand. > > Are these adjustments done at the stage of sperm/egg, at zygote, and then > no further changes until the next generation; or are you talking about > changes to each successive flux of cells within a growing person, > throughout a single lifetime? > ### What I described is a eugenic application, which could be used to improve a couple's child starting with a zygote, or to produce an upgraded clone for somebody who wants to get cloned, starting from a skin sample. Applied to stem cells this general technology could perhaps be also used to incrementally improve a person throughout his/her life, but this is more speculative. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Thu Nov 12 06:45:46 2015 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2015 22:45:46 -0800 Subject: [ExI] crisper children In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: The sooner, the better? Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books via: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Thu Nov 12 11:11:40 2015 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2015 11:11:40 +0000 Subject: [ExI] crisper children In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 12 November 2015 at 06:45, Dan TheBookMan wrote: > The sooner, the better? > One obvious problem - What are you going to do with all the 'faulty' children created? The other big problem is that in normal humans genes massively interact. You can get single genes that cause diseases, which CRISPR editing could cure. But for overall performance you need to analyse thousands of gene interactions. e.g. for high IQ there is no single gene responsible. The genetics of high intelligence Quote: For these reasons, we conclude that high intelligence is familial, heritable, and caused by the same genetic factors responsible for the normal distribution of intelligence. Stated more provocatively, high intelligence as we defined it appears to be nothing more than the quantitative extreme of the same genetic factors responsible for normal variation. ------------ The current hype about CRISPR gene editing is causing a lot of discussion among the ethics thinkers. BillK From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Thu Nov 12 14:24:51 2015 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2015 09:24:51 -0500 Subject: [ExI] crisper children In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, Nov 12, 2015 at 6:11 AM, BillK wrote: > On 12 November 2015 at 06:45, Dan TheBookMan wrote: > > The sooner, the better? > > > > One obvious problem - What are you going to do with all the 'faulty' > children created? > ### You mean children who are not genetically adjusted or children whose crispering went wrong? I would expect that good eugenicists would offer warranty on their services. The zygotes would be redundantly sequenced and the developing embryos would be prenatally followed with repeated sequencing, detailed anatomical scans, maybe even intra-uterine brain fMRI. If something goes wrong, you would abort before the faulty fetus became a sick child, and get a free replacement. Re-reading the above I realize it might sound creepy to some people. However, I strongly believe that fetuses without a well-functioning cortex are not children, and using such heartless terms as "faulty" (as opposed to "sick") is appropriate. > The other big problem is that in normal humans genes massively > interact. You can get single genes that cause diseases, which CRISPR > editing could cure. But for overall performance you need to analyse > thousands of gene interactions. > e.g. for high IQ there is no single gene responsible. > ------------ > > ### Indeed, and this is exactly why I wrote about the 100,000 gene adjustments that might be needed to get outstanding children. This is perhaps an exaggeration, the true number of adjustments needed to reliably get perfectly healthy Olympic athletes with IQ 190 and a pleasant disposition might be in the low thousands, but still it's a huge amount of engineering by today's standards. > The current hype about CRISPR gene editing is causing a lot of > discussion among the ethics thinkers. > ### I am an ethics thinker and I endorse CRISPER (if done with proper liability insurance). Rafa? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tara at taramayastales.com Thu Nov 12 03:53:16 2015 From: tara at taramayastales.com (Tara Maya) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2015 19:53:16 -0800 Subject: [ExI] crisper children In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <9EBF0488-B578-4F67-B0BA-27B8D11A8772@taramayastales.com> Can you explain the technology to me?I?m not sure I understand. Are these adjustments done at the stage of sperm/egg, at zygote, and then no further changes until the next generation; or are you talking about changes to each successive flux of cells within a growing person, throughout a single lifetime? Tara Maya Blog | Twitter | Facebook | Amazon | Goodreads > On Nov 11, 2015, at 6:05 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > > What do you think, list-friends: When will the first CRISPR children be born, and where? When will the first child with 100 genetic adjustments be born? With 100,000 adjustments? > > The child with a single adjustment is just a proof of principle. The child with 100 would be a harbinger of change (assuming the AI singularity is late). The 100,000-times adjusted ones would be agents of change themselves. > > My guess for 1 is around 2020. 100 is 2030. 100,000 is 2035. > > With cheap deep sequencing you can verify adjustments in a day. A cycle of adjustment, verification and preparation for next adjustment might take as little as a week. At the same you can detect random mutations which are guaranteed to accumulate during expansion of the cells. These mutations can be then corrected during the next step of adjustment. If you can achieve 90% success rate on 100 adjustments per cycle of CRISPR->clonal expansion->deep seq->CRISPR, while removing the new mutations as they show up, you could accumulate a few thousand adjustments per year. > > 100 adjustments per cycle is something achievable with current technology. It is hard to tell if getting 1000 adjustments per cycle is doable, my gut feeling is yes. The procedure should be highly amenable to automation. Generating guides, CRISPR reaction itself, clonal expansion, sequencing - all the wet lab stuff is something that could be done completely without direct human involvement even today. For a few millions of dollars you should be able to design an integrated genetic adjustment installation - with RNA synthesizer feeding directly into a cell culture robot doing the modification and expansion, feeding into a DNA isolation and sequencing robot, feeding information back into the RNA synthesizer. This means the price of adjustments would depend on progress in robotics, which is fast. > > This technology would be viable as long as the amount of genetic burden removed during each cycle sufficiently exceeds the amount of genetic burden randomly introduced per cycle. We already know it is doable. The genetic burden increases by about 70 mutations per generation in humans and that involves tens of years of expansion and maintenance of the germ line - the increase in genetic burden per cycle of CRISPR should be much less. We can already introduce 60 adjustments in one cell line. This will work. > > The input would be a client's zygote which would be used to make the working cell line. The end product would be an adjusted, genetically vetted cell line that could very easily be transformed back into zygotes. > > The children of the future will be healthy, smart and beautiful. > > Rafa? > _______________________________________________ > 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 anders at aleph.se Thu Nov 12 15:03:27 2015 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2015 15:03:27 +0000 Subject: [ExI] crisper children In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <5644AA3F.5050008@aleph.se> On 2015-11-12 14:24, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > > > The current hype about CRISPR gene editing is causing a lot of > discussion among the ethics thinkers. > > > ### I am an ethics thinker and I endorse CRISPER (if done with proper > liability insurance). > Professional bioethicists are indeed debating the topic. See for example this week's Nature, http://www.nature.com/news/crispr-a-path-through-the-thicket-1.18748 which recounts some fairly moderate and sensible recommendations (I know a few of the authors). The tricky part is not whether one endorses the technology, but how one explains why a particular application is a good one to the rest of society, funding bodies, and legal professionals. It is not enough to have an opinion, one needs to express it well too. Rafals original question: I roughly agree with the guess, but I put a fairly broad confidence interval around the dates, especially late dates. This is an application that like gene therapy could get delayed by 15 years just by an early setback. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Thu Nov 12 22:35:32 2015 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2015 22:35:32 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Neuro self-experimentation Message-ID: <56451434.1070505@aleph.se> Some heoric self-experimentation: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/543246/to-study-the-brain-a-doctor-puts-himself-under-the-knife/ This is not LEDs under the skin, but literal brain surgery. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Thu Nov 12 22:34:10 2015 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2015 22:34:10 +0000 Subject: [ExI] A breakthrough in computer science? In-Reply-To: <2DCD7760-52E9-4EA8-B606-F1ACA925BF15@gmail.com> References: <2DCD7760-52E9-4EA8-B606-F1ACA925BF15@gmail.com> Message-ID: <564513E2.4090506@aleph.se> I am sceptical that this breakthrough has any practical effects. It is important theoretically, but not in practice. Vide Scott Aaronson: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2521 > > In practice, I think, a quasipolynomial-time algorithm is better than > an n^50 algorithm, but worse than an n^2 algorithm. Unless the > constants are absurd, it?s certainly a lot better in practice than an > exponential algorithm. > > But then again, /in practice/, graph isomorphism has already been > ?basically in P? for decades! If you have two large graphs for which > you /actually/ need to know whether they?re isomorphic, just download > NAUTY > > and run it. > > This contrasts with the case of factoring, for which I?d personally > say that it remains much less clear whether it should or shouldn?t be > in P. > -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Sun Nov 15 21:20:49 2015 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 15 Nov 2015 21:20:49 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Morphological freedom and its limits Message-ID: <5648F731.1050907@aleph.se> A bit quiet here. I assume everybody are busy bringing about the singularity. Or the list is on holiday again :-) In any case, here is a discussion topic: I am going to give a talk on morphological freedom in a few weeks, discussing how different conceptions of morphological freedom can approach questions on what human enhancements and extensions are ethical or wise. So, dear list, what are your views on how to draw lines about what modifications are "right" or "wrong"? One approach is to keep to the old liberal civil rights approach I did in my paper. I am allowed to do whatever I want as long as I have the capacity to understand it, and does not infringe on the rights of others. If I want to have green skin it is my own choice, but I should not expect others to have to support it. I might not be allowed to use my IR vision for cheating at casinos. Another approach is to view it as a right to explore the larger realm of (post)human modes of being. This means that I might be doing a public good by some experimental enhancements - maybe there are forms of beauty IR vision is required for and somebody needs to discover. Here I could get a bit of positive rights from this humanity-supporting exploration, and if I get hurt from it others may morally be obliged to help me. An even more radical view is that we have some form of duty to approach posthumanity, either because the gradient of value points this way or because there is some form of telos. Here the problem becomes to detect the direction that is right: obviously going in the wrong direction is bad, even if it might be individually rational. It also seems to require some form of non-person affecting value. Another approach is to say that morphological freedom has rules that are socially constructed within different domains. In sports the only acceptable form is traditional training, while in performance art it is whatever achieves the artistic aims and in science it is subjected to research ethics. The problems are (1) why these rules and not others? It all becomes pretty arbitrary, and it is hard to see how to condemn a group that decides to follow other rules. (2) Ethics tries to find overarching rules for good behavior: are there really none applying here? Going all classical, one might think of a virtue ethics approach to morphological freedom. Reshape yourself to become a more excellent version of yourself, by actualizing your telos. Maybe one could even bring in existentialism here (just to annoy the audience, the conference is in Paris). Enhancements that make you more of yourself are right, enhancements that make you fit in with other people's preferences are bad. I think this might actually fit in with Nick Bostrom's paper about human dignity he wrote for the Presient's Council on Bioethics (it is hilarious, since he uses a super-conservative concept of human dignity). In a standard medical ethics perspective, morphological freedom is all about autonomy. The other Beuchamp principles - non-maleficience, beneficience and justice - seem to imply mostly issues of how this deals with the medical profession and healthcare system. But one might argue there is a metaprinciple of cost-risk/benefit acting here: certain enhancements are too risky to be undertaken rationally, and one should hence not do them. But benefits can be very subjective, so it is hard to tell how to judge this. In the end, where does this leave trepanationists, grinders, self-experimenters in neuroscience or gene therapy, whole-body tattooists, Stelarc or students taking Adderall? -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From spike66 at att.net Sun Nov 15 21:51:44 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 15 Nov 2015 13:51:44 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Morphological freedom and its limits In-Reply-To: <5648F731.1050907@aleph.se> References: <5648F731.1050907@aleph.se> Message-ID: <005901d11fef$d281c5e0$778551a0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg Subject: [ExI] Morphological freedom and its limits >...A bit quiet here. I assume everybody are busy bringing about the singularity. Or the list is on holiday again :-) >...In any case, here is a discussion topic: I am going to give a talk on morphological freedom in a few weeks, discussing how different conceptions of morphological freedom can approach questions on what human enhancements and extensions are ethical or wise. So, dear list, what are your views on how to draw lines about what modifications are "right" or "wrong"? ...-- Anders Sandberg Anders, somewhere in the discussion of ethics on this activity we should see someone mention externalizing risk onto society. In the early days of when the US federal government was trying to figure out what to do with the emerging problem of proles driving drunk (1920s) it was pointed out that our constitution did not allow the fed to outlaw alcohol. So, they had to create a specific constitutional amendment (the 18th) allowing the fed that authority. It didn't work out; the cure was worse than the malady, so it required another amendment (the 21st) to cancel the first. So now our constitution has these two self-inflicted scars. Not wanting to repeat that bitter experience, our federal government jumped at the opportunity to repeat that bitter experience. It created a federal narcotics enforcement agency. The argument went thus: people taking narcotics externalizes risk on society. It increases risk of poverty, crime, etc. So... the fed proceeded, but without a constitutional amendment allowing it this time. Perhaps they didn't want to risk another pair of contradictory amendments such as the 18th and 21st. Testing the legality of dope prohibition is something neither the state governments nor the fed want to do, for it is entirely unclear if the fed has the authority to restrict dope and the states don't want to take on the expense themselves. So, on we go. Now some states have decided to allow grass, while it is still illegal at the federal level. No one wants to escalate that fight. So far the fed has backed down, for if they push it, the case is likely to end up in the supreme court. We have constitutional literalists in the majority currently, so there is a good chance the court would side with the states in allowing it. In the creation of designer babies, it is hard to deny that we externalize risk onto society, for if it goes really wrong in unforeseen ways, the parents would exhaust their own resources with plenty of big expenses left afterwards. On the other hand, it is unclear the federal government has the authority to prohibit experimentation of this kind. States can, but at least some will not. spike From pharos at gmail.com Sun Nov 15 22:12:32 2015 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sun, 15 Nov 2015 22:12:32 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Morphological freedom and its limits In-Reply-To: <5648F731.1050907@aleph.se> References: <5648F731.1050907@aleph.se> Message-ID: On 15 November 2015 at 21:20, Anders Sandberg wrote: > A bit quiet here. I assume everybody are busy bringing about the > singularity. Or the list is on holiday again :-) > > In any case, here is a discussion topic: I am going to give a talk on > morphological freedom in a few weeks, discussing how different conceptions > of morphological freedom can approach questions on what human enhancements > and extensions are ethical or wise. So, dear list, what are your views on > how to draw lines about what modifications are "right" or "wrong"? > > Freedoms are lovely - for me. But as for all those other folk, well,......... ;) One way to look at it is to come from the other direction and consider all the ways that it could be used for bad purposes. (And then start making laws against these uses). Identity theft - Should it be allowed to copy another human? Persuasion - Should a super-charismatic persona be allowed? Beauty - Will ordinary / ugly people become outcasts? Strength - Should weaponised super-strong humans be allowed? etc. BillK From foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Nov 16 01:02:39 2015 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sun, 15 Nov 2015 19:02:39 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Morphological freedom and its limits In-Reply-To: References: <5648F731.1050907@aleph.se> Message-ID: what are your views on > how to draw lines about what modifications are "right" or "wrong"? Whatever restrictions are put in place, someone and somewhere else will ignore them the way Americans have to go overseas to get certain treatments and drugs. There will never be any agreement in this area, certainly not if committees are used. A version of Murphy's Law may apply here: whatever can be done will be done, and then we will have to judge the effects on humanity then. For me, I'd just let everyone roll the dice. bill w On Sun, Nov 15, 2015 at 4:12 PM, BillK wrote: > On 15 November 2015 at 21:20, Anders Sandberg wrote: > > A bit quiet here. I assume everybody are busy bringing about the > > singularity. Or the list is on holiday again :-) > > > > In any case, here is a discussion topic: I am going to give a talk on > > morphological freedom in a few weeks, discussing how different > conceptions > > of morphological freedom can approach questions on what human > enhancements > > and extensions are ethical or wise. So, dear list, what are your views on > > how to draw lines about what modifications are "right" or "wrong"? > > > > > > > > Freedoms are lovely - for me. But as for all those other folk, > well,......... ;) > > One way to look at it is to come from the other direction and consider > all the ways that it could be used for bad purposes. (And then start > making laws against these uses). > > Identity theft - Should it be allowed to copy another human? > Persuasion - Should a super-charismatic persona be allowed? > Beauty - Will ordinary / ugly people become outcasts? > Strength - Should weaponised super-strong humans be allowed? > etc. > > BillK > _______________________________________________ > 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 anders at aleph.se Mon Nov 16 02:43:13 2015 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2015 02:43:13 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Morphological freedom and its limits In-Reply-To: References: <5648F731.1050907@aleph.se> Message-ID: <564942C1.7040808@aleph.se> On 2015-11-15 22:12, BillK wrote: > > One way to look at it is to come from the other direction and consider > all the ways that it could be used for bad purposes. (And then start > making laws against these uses). Laws are beside the point here. They are just one tool among many (taxation, regulation, social norms, exhortations not to do it...) to stop something bad from being done. The interesting part to me is (1) why is modification X bad, and (2) how do you draw the line between acceptable and bad? But I do really like the approach. List bad enhancement uses, and then let's figure out why it is bad. > Identity theft - Should it be allowed to copy another human? Note that the crime identity theft involves faking identity in order to acquire benefits that properly belong to someone, or to do things the other guy gets blamed for. This is uncontroversially a bad thing. It is less clear that me taking on your appearance, mannerisms or even DNA is doing something bad if I have no intention to benefit from you. There is likely a confusion risk and maybe you can claim that you own your appearance, style and DNA. > Persuasion - Should a super-charismatic persona be allowed? There are already charismatic people around, and for the most part we love them. We are just concerned that a supercharismatic character will manipulate us in selfish or dangerous ways... yet the usual smilers already do it pretty well. One take would be that there really is a level of persuasion that is unacceptable because it allows them to exert will on us reliably enough that our will becomes overruled. Another take would be that persuasion through the usual channels - good arguments, winning ways, a nice face - is something we understand and can handle using our normal mental firewalls, while other methods - subliminal signals, pheromones - might circumvent our firewalls and hence be unacceptable. > Beauty - Will ordinary / ugly people become outcasts? Here the bad is positional. If some get enhanced with a positional goods, every non-enhanced will be worse off (another classic example is height). Preventing positional enhancements is a social coordination issue, where we may want a policy that benefits everybody but has a temptation to defect. > Strength - Should weaponised super-strong humans be allowed? Presumably the bad here is that superstrong people are potentially dangerous, and beyond some point the risk to others becomes unbearable and J.S. Mill's harm principle can be applied. The reversal test is an interesting tool here. Would we be better off if everybody were weaker, so we were less able to harm each other? It seems that it would make us do less punching and kicking, but since the major harms are tool- and weapon-induced, strength might be a red herring. Incidentally, I considered issues of enhancements in regard to punishment a while ago. If you are enhanced and go to jail, can you be (legally and morally) disenhanced? Current laws are pretty strict on *some* aspects of bodily integrity, but clearly implanted weapons or other enhancements making you dangerous will trigger the strong rules about maintaining order. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Mon Nov 16 02:56:37 2015 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2015 02:56:37 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Morphological freedom and its limits In-Reply-To: <005901d11fef$d281c5e0$778551a0$@att.net> References: <5648F731.1050907@aleph.se> <005901d11fef$d281c5e0$778551a0$@att.net> Message-ID: <564945E5.7000008@aleph.se> On 2015-11-15 21:51, spike wrote: > Anders, somewhere in the discussion of ethics on this activity we > should see someone mention externalizing risk onto society. Yup. That seems to be a natural limitation of enhancement. If I enhance myself but it makes everybody unsafe, it is not a good enhancement. Then again, state responses to enhancement may also be causing externalized risks that are not on par with the benefit (the war on drugs is a good example). > In the creation of designer babies, it is hard to deny that we > externalize risk onto society, for if it goes really wrong in > unforeseen ways, the parents would exhaust their own resources with > plenty of big expenses left afterwards. Designer babies are an issue where my current morphological freedom framework has trouble. I like Julian Savulescu's Principle of Procreative Beneficence, but how to balance it with risk is something I don't know how to do properly. > On the other hand, it is unclear the federal government has the > authority to prohibit experimentation of this kind. States can, but at > least some will not. In many legal systems the state actually claims implicit ownership over citizen bodies. Committing mayhem has sometimes been regarded as an offence against the state, by depriving it of an able body. A more modern interpretation is applying the harm principle: some experimentation is not allowed because it infringes on the rights of the child. Some philosophical arguments here about pre-persons and who the right-infringed child actually are (the child that would have been born, or the one that actually is born?) // -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Mon Nov 16 02:24:46 2015 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2015 02:24:46 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Morphological freedom and its limits In-Reply-To: References: <5648F731.1050907@aleph.se> Message-ID: <56493E6E.5090109@aleph.se> On 2015-11-16 01:02, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > what are your views on > > how to draw lines about what modifications are "right" or "wrong"? > > Whatever restrictions are put in place, someone and somewhere else > will ignore them the way Americans have to go overseas to get certain > treatments and drugs. This misses the point entirely. I suppose you do not think US crimes (say torturing people for fun) that are legal in some shady place are less immoral because they are legal over there, nor because US people could go there to indulge? It might not be possible to stop it, but morally you would say it would be better if it did not happen. (Sorry, but conflating legal and ethical gets my goat). What I am looking at is ethical views in the transhumanist community on what enhancements or modifications should be done. Is trepanation OK to do, despite the nonexistent scientific support for it being good - and if it is OK, why? What about replacing my personality with another one? What about replacing my consciousness with something entirely different but consciousness-like? -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Mon Nov 16 04:00:11 2015 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sun, 15 Nov 2015 20:00:11 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Morphological freedom and its limits In-Reply-To: <5648F731.1050907@aleph.se> References: <5648F731.1050907@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Sun, Nov 15, 2015 at 1:20 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > A bit quiet here. I assume everybody are busy bringing about the > singularity. Or the list is on holiday again :-) > > In any case, here is a discussion topic: I am going to give a talk on > morphological freedom in a few weeks, discussing how different conceptions > of morphological freedom can approach questions on what human enhancements > and extensions are ethical or wise. So, dear list, what are your views on > how to draw lines about what modifications are "right" or "wrong"? > The same as for any technology: it is not the technology itself that is inherently good or bad, but the uses (actual and intended). For instance, nuclear weapons are pretty much only useful for taking out cities. This is bad. They are only allowed to exist in the context of convincing others with nuclear weapons that, should they choose to destroy our cities, we will destroy theirs, therefore nuclear weapons do not get used. Likewise, cruise missiles and similar weapons are only allowed in explicitly military contexts. Civilian law enforcement has no legitimate use of them, therefore people object when said law enforcement obtains or seeks to obtain them - let alone non-government actors. On the flip side, the dangers and annual death toll from privately owned automobiles have been well documented, yet they are so incredibly useful that they are allowed (within limits to try to make sure that they will be used for benefit - and note that most of the concerns about self-driving cars revolve around making sure they will still be used for benefit). Evil may lurk in the streets, but it was never the streets that were evil. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Mon Nov 16 09:44:42 2015 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2015 09:44:42 +0000 Subject: [ExI] CRISPR and Gene Drives Message-ID: As a follow up to CRISPR children, scientists are now using gene drives to drive a genetic change through entire species. What could possibly go wrong? Powerful 'Gene Drive' Can Quickly Change An Entire Species November 05, 2015 The drive is a sequence of DNA that can cause a mutation to be inherited by the offspring of an organism with nearly 100 percent efficiency, regardless of whether it's beneficial for that organism's survival. By combining it with new genetic editing techniques, scientists are able to drive changes they make quickly through an entire species. The advance is raising excitement about possible real-world uses, such as fighting diseases like malaria by changing mosquitoes that spread malaria so that they can no longer carry the parasite. The technology might also help with other insect-borne diseases such as West Nile, dengue fever and Lyme disease. "There are inherent problems with gene drives," says Brendan Parent, a bioethicist at New York University. "We don't know what other impacts we're having." The engineered organisms could upset the delicate balance of an ecosystem, inadvertently destroying other species, causing new diseases to emerge or prompting existing illnesses to spread to new places, Parent says. "We don't know whether the elimination of malaria specifically won't somehow have genetic effects that cause a super-virulent pathogen to be released or to bring in much greater catastrophic consequences," Parent says. ------------ Why the FBI and Pentagon are afraid of this new genetic technology November 12, 2015 A powerful new genetic technology could eliminate scourges such as malaria and rid entire countries of destructive invasive species. But officials from the FBI to the Pentagon to the United Nations bioweapons office, STAT has learned, are concerned about the potential of ?gene drives? to alter evolution in ways scientists can?t imagine, and even offer a devastating new tool to bioterrorists. Now they are scrambling to get ahead of it. The Pentagon?s shoot-for-the-moon research-funding arm, DARPA, though enthusiastic about the potential benefits of gene drives, is studying approaches that could halt them if they went out of control and threatened ecological havoc. -------------- Gene drive probably won't directly affect the human species, as the reproduction rate is too slow. But for fast breeders......... BillK From tara at taramayastales.com Mon Nov 16 16:15:40 2015 From: tara at taramayastales.com (Tara Maya) Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2015 08:15:40 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Morphological freedom and its limits In-Reply-To: References: <5648F731.1050907@aleph.se> Message-ID: Unfortunately, if one makes laws based on a ?guilty until proven innocent? basis like that, no freedoms will remain. I propose the opposite. Assume our laws are already sufficient and change them only when there is an actual case of evident harm. Most of what we fear from new technologies would just be hurting people with new tools. We don?t need to outlaw the tools if ?hurting people? regardless of the tools is already illegal. Tara Maya Blog | Twitter | Facebook | Amazon | Goodreads > On Nov 15, 2015, at 2:12 PM, BillK wrote: > > One way to look at it is to come from the other direction and consider > all the ways that it could be used for bad purposes. (And then start > making laws against these uses). From protokol2020 at gmail.com Mon Nov 16 16:47:52 2015 From: protokol2020 at gmail.com (Tomaz Kristan) Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2015 17:47:52 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Morphological freedom and its limits In-Reply-To: References: <5648F731.1050907@aleph.se> Message-ID: If it looks okay from the inside, it is okay. If it looks even better from the inside, then it is even better. If it looks great from the inside, then it's great, I don't believe it can be better judged or decided than this. On Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 5:15 PM, Tara Maya wrote: > Unfortunately, if one makes laws based on a ?guilty until proven innocent? > basis like that, no freedoms will remain. > > I propose the opposite. Assume our laws are already sufficient and change > them only when there is an actual case of evident harm. > > Most of what we fear from new technologies would just be hurting people > with new tools. We don?t need to outlaw the tools if ?hurting people? > regardless of the tools is already illegal. > > > Tara Maya > Blog | Twitter | Facebook | Amazon | Goodreads > > > > > On Nov 15, 2015, at 2:12 PM, BillK wrote: > > > > One way to look at it is to come from the other direction and consider > > all the ways that it could be used for bad purposes. (And then start > > making laws against these uses). > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -- https://protokol2020.wordpress.com/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Mon Nov 16 22:40:08 2015 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2015 22:40:08 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Morphological freedom and its limits In-Reply-To: References: <5648F731.1050907@aleph.se> Message-ID: <564A5B48.8000005@aleph.se> On 2015-11-16 16:15, Tara Maya wrote: > Unfortunately, if one makes laws based on a ?guilty until proven innocent? basis like that, no freedoms will remain. > > I propose the opposite. Assume our laws are already sufficient and change them only when there is an actual case of evident harm. Fine. But suppose you were setting up rules for enhancement. What kinds of evident harm would be evident to you? -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From atymes at gmail.com Mon Nov 16 23:14:23 2015 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2015 15:14:23 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Morphological freedom and its limits In-Reply-To: <564A5B48.8000005@aleph.se> References: <5648F731.1050907@aleph.se> <564A5B48.8000005@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Nov 16, 2015 2:41 PM, "Anders Sandberg" wrote: > On 2015-11-16 16:15, Tara Maya wrote: >> Unfortunately, if one makes laws based on a ?guilty until proven innocent? basis like that, no freedoms will remain. >> >> I propose the opposite. Assume our laws are already sufficient and change them only when there is an actual case of evident harm. > > Fine. But suppose you were setting up rules for enhancement. What kinds of evident harm would be evident to you? Largely the ones already covered by existing laws. Yes, that's not the answer you - or many people - want to hear, as it is the complete opposite of justifying Doing Something re: changing the laws or making new ones to deal with this new scenario. Unfortunately, it is also the truth: for the most part, it's not a matter of making new laws, but of correctly enforcing the ones we already have. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tara at taramayastales.com Tue Nov 17 00:30:18 2015 From: tara at taramayastales.com (Tara Maya) Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2015 16:30:18 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Morphological freedom and its limits In-Reply-To: <564A5B48.8000005@aleph.se> References: <5648F731.1050907@aleph.se> <564A5B48.8000005@aleph.se> Message-ID: <00F835F7-C504-4103-A184-5080DDBD3957@taramayastales.com> I think you could say, under existing law, many things would not be permissible. Taking away an ability that a child would otherwise have is a form of harm and shouldn?t be allowed. For instance, if two deaf parents wanted to ensure that they had a deaf child, that would not be fair to the child. However, if they had nothing but a ?deaf gene? and wanted a hearing child, I don?t see how it could be illegal for them to ensure their child had a ?hearing gene? on any ethical grounds. (I?m not claiming there are single genes that control hearing/deafness, it?s just an example). By the same token, if parents wanted to ensure that their child had better than average hearing, I don?t see how that could be wrong on ethical grounds. There are many people who claim to make ?ethical? arguments against making one?s children?s smarter, or healthier or more athletic or more artistic, but these ethical arguments are always about wrong done to ?society? or to those OTHER than the ones receiving the enhancement. I.e. it?s not ?fair? to everyone else if a child is given a gene for greater intelligence or for faster running speed. But this is a dangerous argument, since, if taken seriously, any child born above average in any area ought not to be allowed to exist either. It makes no sense that how one acquires one?s enhancements should be an issue. In fact, this ?fair society? argument actually assumes that a child with genetic engineering will definitely benefit?which makes it unethical to deny parents the option of choosing to do this for their offspring. The only grounds for outlawing enhancements to a zygote/child would be if the technology itself were in doubt, in which case, experimenting on a child could cause harm. For that reason, I can see that any kind of genetic or other non-reversible enhancements on anyone under the age of consent would have to proceed slowly. Most parents would be cautious about doing anything that would harm their children, much more cautious than anyone else, so the law would only be there for the few whack-jobs that don?t care about their own children. And of course, it should be obvious that neither a government nor a corporation nor a non-familial guardian would have the right to make genetic changes to a child and rear that child for a purpose other than for the child?s own wellbeing; that would be slavery, and is illegal and unethical, regardless of whether enhancements are involved. There are a large number of potential enhancements that might be neither better nor worse in any obvious way, and I can?t see any argument for forbidding them, except, as I said that they ought to be proven neutral before they are inflicted on children (who can?t give consent). If consenting adults could change their morphology to give themselves antlers or fins or laser-shooting eyes, I don?t see any ethical reason that should be forbidden. Tara Maya Blog | Twitter | Facebook | Amazon | Goodreads > On Nov 16, 2015, at 2:40 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > > On 2015-11-16 16:15, Tara Maya wrote: >> Unfortunately, if one makes laws based on a ?guilty until proven innocent? basis like that, no freedoms will remain. >> >> I propose the opposite. Assume our laws are already sufficient and change them only when there is an actual case of evident harm. > Fine. But suppose you were setting up rules for enhancement. What kinds of evident harm would be evident to you? > > > -- > Dr Anders Sandberg > Future of Humanity Institute > Oxford Martin School > Oxford University > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From anders at aleph.se Tue Nov 17 00:40:45 2015 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2015 00:40:45 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Morphological freedom and its limits In-Reply-To: References: <5648F731.1050907@aleph.se> <564A5B48.8000005@aleph.se> Message-ID: <564A778D.9080300@aleph.se> On 2015-11-16 23:14, Adrian Tymes wrote: > > On Nov 16, 2015 2:41 PM, "Anders Sandberg" > wrote: > > Fine. But suppose you were setting up rules for enhancement. What > kinds of evident harm would be evident to you? > > Largely the ones already covered by existing laws. > > Yes, that's not the answer you - or many people - want to hear, as it > is the complete opposite of justifying Doing Something re: changing > the laws or making new ones to deal with this new scenario. > Heh. You don't think I am libertarian about enhancement? While I agree there is a temptation to Do Something, there is also an interesting issue of what makes doing something actually appropriate. > Unfortunately, it is also the truth: for the most part, it's not a > matter of making new laws, but of correctly enforcing the ones we > already have. > Currently many laws prevent enhancement - whether drug or pharmaceutical laws banning non-therapeutic use, regulations making doctors gatekeepers of any bodymodification technology, reprotech laws banning certain forms of reproduction or genetic enhancement. If you don't think these laws are right, you need to find arguments why they are excessive in order to convince people to roll them back. One could argue that maybe "tech will find a way" and that fixing regulations/policies is not necessary. But I think this is empirically wrong: GMO is seriously held back worldwide by EU import restrictions, pharma companies are not developing enhancers because the regulatory risk is overwhelming, and we know nanotechnology got badly sidetracked because a particular research sociological constellation hijacked funding from the original vision. There is no ban on anti-ageing research, yet the funding is minuscule because there is no strong Do Something support for it. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Nov 17 00:48:31 2015 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2015 18:48:31 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Morphological freedom and its limits In-Reply-To: <00F835F7-C504-4103-A184-5080DDBD3957@taramayastales.com> References: <5648F731.1050907@aleph.se> <564A5B48.8000005@aleph.se> <00F835F7-C504-4103-A184-5080DDBD3957@taramayastales.com> Message-ID: Tara wrote: There are a large number of potential enhancements that might be neither better nor worse in any obvious way, and I can?t see any argument for forbidding them, except, as I said that they ought to be proven neutral before they are inflicted on children (who can?t give consent). If consenting adults could change their morphology to give themselves antlers or fins or laser-shooting eyes, I don?t see any ethical reason that should be forbidden. ----------------- The problem here is that one could maybe make a good case for implied consent, the type that is used in emergency rooms when no one is available to consent to the procedures and the patient is unconscious. The nub is that it may be arguable as to what constitutes 'good'. When the potential parents want to make some change they consider good but most of society considers bad, the parents can argue that the ensuing child would agree to the genetic manipulation if he could, perhaps to be like his parents. So all of this boils down to the question: who has the ultimate right to say what is good? A medical committee made up of bioethicists? Just the parents? A judge? If some medical treatment is not allowed in the USA but is available in Mexico, for example, people go there and take their chances with it. This will happen in the gengineering situation as well. Probably unstoppable. bill w On Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 6:30 PM, Tara Maya wrote: > I think you could say, under existing law, many things would not be > permissible. > > Taking away an ability that a child would otherwise have is a form of harm > and shouldn?t be allowed. For instance, if two deaf parents wanted to > ensure that they had a deaf child, that would not be fair to the child. > However, if they had nothing but a ?deaf gene? and wanted a hearing child, > I don?t see how it could be illegal for them to ensure their child had a > ?hearing gene? on any ethical grounds. (I?m not claiming there are single > genes that control hearing/deafness, it?s just an example). By the same > token, if parents wanted to ensure that their child had better than average > hearing, I don?t see how that could be wrong on ethical grounds. > > There are many people who claim to make ?ethical? arguments against making > one?s children?s smarter, or healthier or more athletic or more artistic, > but these ethical arguments are always about wrong done to ?society? or to > those OTHER than the ones receiving the enhancement. I.e. it?s not ?fair? > to everyone else if a child is given a gene for greater intelligence or for > faster running speed. But this is a dangerous argument, since, if taken > seriously, any child born above average in any area ought not to be allowed > to exist either. It makes no sense that how one acquires one?s enhancements > should be an issue. In fact, this ?fair society? argument actually assumes > that a child with genetic engineering will definitely benefit?which makes > it unethical to deny parents the option of choosing to do this for their > offspring. > > The only grounds for outlawing enhancements to a zygote/child would be if > the technology itself were in doubt, in which case, experimenting on a > child could cause harm. For that reason, I can see that any kind of genetic > or other non-reversible enhancements on anyone under the age of consent > would have to proceed slowly. Most parents would be cautious about doing > anything that would harm their children, much more cautious than anyone > else, so the law would only be there for the few whack-jobs that don?t care > about their own children. > > And of course, it should be obvious that neither a government nor a > corporation nor a non-familial guardian would have the right to make > genetic changes to a child and rear that child for a purpose other than for > the child?s own wellbeing; that would be slavery, and is illegal and > unethical, regardless of whether enhancements are involved. > > There are a large number of potential enhancements that might be neither > better nor worse in any obvious way, and I can?t see any argument for > forbidding them, except, as I said that they ought to be proven neutral > before they are inflicted on children (who can?t give consent). If > consenting adults could change their morphology to give themselves antlers > or fins or laser-shooting eyes, I don?t see any ethical reason that should > be forbidden. > > > Tara Maya > Blog | Twitter | Facebook | Amazon | Goodreads > > > > > On Nov 16, 2015, at 2:40 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > > > > On 2015-11-16 16:15, Tara Maya wrote: > >> Unfortunately, if one makes laws based on a ?guilty until proven > innocent? basis like that, no freedoms will remain. > >> > >> I propose the opposite. Assume our laws are already sufficient and > change them only when there is an actual case of evident harm. > > Fine. But suppose you were setting up rules for enhancement. What kinds > of evident harm would be evident to you? > > > > > > -- > > Dr Anders Sandberg > > Future of Humanity Institute > > Oxford Martin School > > Oxford University > > > > _______________________________________________ > > extropy-chat mailing list > > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Tue Nov 17 02:05:01 2015 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2015 02:05:01 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Nick in the New Yorker Message-ID: <564A8B4D.8010500@aleph.se> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/doomsday-invention-artificial-intelligence-nick-bostrom (Full disclosure: I show up in a few places as an annoying co-worker). -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Tue Nov 17 02:23:40 2015 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2015 02:23:40 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Morphological freedom and its limits In-Reply-To: <00F835F7-C504-4103-A184-5080DDBD3957@taramayastales.com> References: <5648F731.1050907@aleph.se> <564A5B48.8000005@aleph.se> <00F835F7-C504-4103-A184-5080DDBD3957@taramayastales.com> Message-ID: <564A8FAC.1080401@aleph.se> On 2015-11-17 00:30, Tara Maya wrote: > Taking away an ability that a child would otherwise have is a form of harm and shouldn?t be allowed. Makes sense. It is a bit more tricky if the parents both have "deaf genes" and choose not to give the child a hearing gene (if it was easy enough). The real question is whether this also hold for superior abilities that are conditional on other things. Julian's example is a child who will be smart if it gets a certain vitamin but otherwise normal; he argues that withholding the vitamin harms the child. But if it is right to give the vitamin, then what about giving an enhancer to somebody who would otherwise be normal? Or fixing a gene that is holding one back (I am GG at rs363050 which might mean my non-verbal IQ is 3 points lower than it could be). > By the same token, if parents wanted to ensure that their child had better than average hearing, I don?t see how that could be wrong on ethical grounds. The most common ethical argument is that it changes who the child is. The unmodified child never comes into being, and an enhanced child does. Whether this is bad is rather contested. A more solid ethical argument (which you bring up below) is whether the enhancement is for the child or for the parents. For general purpose goods like intelligence, health and happiness this seems unproblematic to me, and getting good general species-typical traits like hearing is also useful. It is less clear whether getting entirely new senses and abilities is a good thing: if hearing is better than being deaf, what about seeing UV? We are all UV blind. > There are many people who claim to make ?ethical? arguments against making one?s children?s smarter, or healthier or more athletic or more artistic, but these ethical arguments are always about wrong done to ?society? or to those OTHER than the ones receiving the enhancement. To be fair to them, I think many are making non-scarequote ethical arguments. We just disagree on their correctness. ("ethical" arguments typically involve claiming something being unethical and then refusing to analyse reasons - ethics is the study of moral issues). -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From tara at taramayastales.com Tue Nov 17 03:51:01 2015 From: tara at taramayastales.com (Tara Maya) Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2015 19:51:01 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Morphological freedom and its limits In-Reply-To: <564A8FAC.1080401@aleph.se> References: <5648F731.1050907@aleph.se> <564A5B48.8000005@aleph.se> <00F835F7-C504-4103-A184-5080DDBD3957@taramayastales.com> <564A8FAC.1080401@aleph.se> Message-ID: <9CFE4F45-99AA-4670-BAED-E449B5F20721@taramayastales.com> > On Nov 16, 2015, at 6:23 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > > A more solid ethical argument (which you bring up below) is whether the enhancement is for the child or for the parents. For general purpose goods like intelligence, health and happiness this seems unproblematic to me, and getting good general species-typical traits like hearing is also useful. It is less clear whether getting entirely new senses and abilities is a good thing: if hearing is better than being deaf, what about seeing UV? We are all UV blind. Maybe not? :) "Monet May Have Been Able To See Ultraviolet Light" https://curiosity.com/memes/monet-may-have-been-able-to-see-ultraviolet-light-curiosity/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_term=0400&utm_content=meme&utm_campaign=20151114fbmonetaphakia#meme-claude-monet-was-half-honeybee-its-okay-to-be-smart Tara Maya Blog | Twitter | Facebook | Amazon | Goodreads From atymes at gmail.com Tue Nov 17 05:14:24 2015 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2015 21:14:24 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Morphological freedom and its limits In-Reply-To: <564A778D.9080300@aleph.se> References: <5648F731.1050907@aleph.se> <564A5B48.8000005@aleph.se> <564A778D.9080300@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 4:40 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2015-11-16 23:14, Adrian Tymes wrote: > > Unfortunately, it is also the truth: for the most part, it's not a matter > of making new laws, but of correctly enforcing the ones we already have. > > Currently many laws prevent enhancement - whether drug or pharmaceutical > laws banning non-therapeutic use, regulations making doctors gatekeepers of > any bodymodification technology, reprotech laws banning certain forms of > reproduction or genetic enhancement. If you don't think these laws are > right, you need to find arguments why they are excessive in order to > convince people to roll them back. > Or apply the correct enforcement: none, in this case. Those laws are good evidence for why merely making new laws is not the best way to Do Something about new tech. That said, they also aren't ironclad: I've seen an increasing number of stories of people who test body modifications upon themselves, for instance. (I do not see it as a bad thing that, prior to sale to the general public, proposed modifications should be proven safe and effective. That there are rules and regulations about this does not make it impossible, or even unreasonable in many cases.) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Tue Nov 17 08:51:54 2015 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2015 00:51:54 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Another projected AI timeline Message-ID: Quoted with permission from Jim Spohrer, director of IBM's Cognitive Systems Institute. (It came up when he and I were talking, and I figured it would be of interest to this list.) I'm trying to get his thoughts on what would be needed to get the debater he has to be able to invent - to understand the topic being discussed well enough to come up with original observations and suggest improvements...say, to its own architecture. === Here is what I tell students.... ... to try to provoke their thinking about the cognitive era: (0) 2015 - about 9 months to build a formative Q&A system - 40% accuracy; - another 1-2 years and a team of 10-20, can get it to 90% accuracy, by reducing the scope ("sorry that question is out of scope") - today's systems can only answer questions, if the answers are already existing in the text explicitly - debater is an example of where we would like to get to though in 5 years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g59PJxbGhY - more about the ambitions at http://cognitive-science.info (1) 2025: Watson will be able to rapidly ingest just about any textbooks and produce a Q&A system - the Q&A system will rival C-grade (average) student performance on questions (2) 2035 - above, but rivals C-level (average) faculty performance on questions (3) 2035 - an exascale of compute power costs about $1000 - an exascale is the equivalent compute of one person's brain power (at 20W power) (4) 2035 - nearly everyone has a cognitive mediator that knows them in many ways better than they know themselves - memory of all health information, memory of everyone you have ever interacted with, executive assistant, personal coach, process and memory aid, etc. (5) 2055 - nearly everyone has 100 cognitive assistants that "work for them" - better management of your cognitive assistant workforce is a course taught at university In 2015, we are at the beginning of the beginning or the cognitive era... In 2025, we will be middle of beginning... easy to generate average student level performance on questions in textbook.... In 2035, we will be end of beginning (one brain power equivalent)... easy to generate average faculty level performance on questions in textbook.... http://www.slideshare.net/spohrer/spohrer-ubi-learn-20151103-v2 By 2055, roughly 2x 20 year generations out, the cognitive era will be in full force. Cellphones will likely become body suits - with burst-mode super-strength and super-safety features: Cognitive Mediators will read everything for us, and relate the information to us - and what we know and our goals. Think combined personal coach, executive assistant, personal research team.... The key is knowing which problem to work on next - see this long video for the answer - energy, water, food, wellness - and note especially the wellness suit at the end: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YY7f1t9y9a0&index=10&list=WL Do not be put off by the beginning of the video - it is a bit over hyped and trivial, to say the leasat... but the projects are really good if you have the patience to watch. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Tue Nov 17 10:54:08 2015 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2015 10:54:08 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Another projected AI timeline In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <564B0750.7000506@aleph.se> I like the point that it takes about two generations to get to the full force of the cognitive era. If there is no AGI I think this is entirely correct. This era will be about one generation after the full force of global social media becomes truly mature. It is an interesting exercise to think about what ubiquitous college level QA systems could do. Especially since topics could be user-defined rather than standard topics, and the seed data things like one's own social media past. On 2015-11-17 08:51, Adrian Tymes wrote: > Quoted with permission from Jim Spohrer, director of IBM's Cognitive > Systems Institute. (It came up when he and I were talking, and I > figured it would be of interest to this list.) > > I'm trying to get his thoughts on what would be needed to get the > debater he has to be able to invent - to understand the topic being > discussed well enough to come up with original observations and > suggest improvements...say, to its own architecture. > > === > Here is what I tell students.... > > ... to try to provoke their thinking about the cognitive era: > > (0) 2015 - about 9 months to build a formative Q&A system - > 40% accuracy; > - another 1-2 years and a team of 10-20, can get it to 90% > accuracy, by reducing the scope ("sorry that question is out of scope") > - today's systems can only answer questions, if the answers are > already existing in the text explicitly > - debater is an example of where we would like to get to though > in 5 years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g59PJxbGhY > - more about the ambitions at http://cognitive-science.info > > > (1) 2025: Watson will be able to rapidly ingest just about any > textbooks and produce a Q&A system > - the Q&A system will rival C-grade (average) student > performance on questions > > (2) 2035 - above, but rivals C-level (average) faculty > performance on questions > > (3) 2035 - an exascale of compute power costs about $1000 > - an exascale is the equivalent compute of one person's brain > power (at 20W power) > > (4) 2035 - nearly everyone has a cognitive mediator that knows > them in many ways better than they know themselves > - memory of all health information, memory of everyone you have > ever interacted with, executive assistant, personal coach, process and > memory aid, etc. > > (5) 2055 - nearly everyone has 100 cognitive assistants that > "work for them" > - better management of your cognitive assistant workforce is a > course taught at university > > In 2015, we are at the beginning of the beginning or the cognitive era... > > In 2025, we will be middle of beginning... easy to generate average > student level performance on questions in textbook.... > > In 2035, we will be end of beginning (one brain power equivalent)... > easy to generate average faculty level performance on questions in > textbook.... > > http://www.slideshare.net/spohrer/spohrer-ubi-learn-20151103-v2 > > By 2055, roughly 2x 20 year generations out, the cognitive era will be > in full force. > > Cellphones will likely become body suits - with burst-mode > super-strength and super-safety features: > > > > Cognitive Mediators will read everything for us, and relate the > information to us - and what we know and our goals. > > Think combined personal coach, executive assistant, personal research > team.... > > The key is knowing which problem to work on next - see this long video > for the answer - energy, water, food, wellness - and note especially > the wellness suit at the end: > > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YY7f1t9y9a0&index=10&list=WL > > Do not be put off by the beginning of the video - it is a bit over > hyped and trivial, to say the leasat... but the projects are really > good if you have the patience to watch. > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jay.dugger at gmail.com Mon Nov 16 18:44:42 2015 From: jay.dugger at gmail.com (Jay Dugger) Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2015 12:44:42 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Transhumanist exploration game (Adrian Tymes) Message-ID: >> Any other explicitly transhumanist games? (I will of course hold up Sid >> Meier's Alpha Centauri) > Setting aside the many, many RPGs (seriously, if anyone on this list is up > for running an Eclipse Phase game I know a guy who's been begging me for > any word of one he can get in on)... Not interested right now. What little gaming I do still lies on hold, but contact me off-list. Immortal Defense - http://store.steampowered.com/app/298360/ - definitely touches on it. Good recommendation! I hear good things about the Talos Principle (http://store.steampowered.com/app/257510/), but I haven't played it. I feel tempted to mention Sid Meier's Beyond Earth, but haven't yet played that either. See also Robert Swigart's Portal, a piece of ergodic literature from 1986 about an astronaut returning to a seemingly abandoned post-Singularity Earth. (Playable at https://archive.org/details/msdos_Portal_1986, but the book derived from the software is better.) > There are other games, such as Deus Ex, that claim to touch on it but > mainly as a source of nifty powers rather than exploring the themes. I think you do the original game of Deus Ex a bit of a disservice here, but I generally agree. > Part of the problem may be, transhumanism by definition alters the common > experience and that can be difficult to reduce to gamable form. It can be > captured in story, sure enough, but what do you actually do all day when > you're uploaded and free from life's needs? Worry about the power supply and long-term space weather. I.e., complain about the food and the weather, just like meat folks do. Some things don't change! Seriously, though, you have a good point. I joke along those lines because it made a useful way when playing Eclipse Phase to provide players a means to hook into the fictional setting. "The Hyperelite still go to parties, but they go to weather parties to watch dramatic terraforming events such as ice deliveries aerobraking the upper Martian atmosphere." Which was much less bizarre than some of the possibilities familiar here. It still helped players understand the setting by analogy. Rich people on Earth have fireworks for their parties. Rich people on fictional Mars build a huge dome and have a choreographed thunderstorm therein for their parties. This also served nicely \to foreshadow the destructive potential of the setting and so served the ongoing plot of an impending Martian World War. Which would have been fought right up to the story's equivalent of WMD: Unfriendly AI. -- Jay Dugger (314) 766-4426 From col.hales at gmail.com Tue Nov 17 21:52:20 2015 From: col.hales at gmail.com (colin hales) Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2015 08:52:20 +1100 Subject: [ExI] Is this a potential cryonics thing? Message-ID: <564ba1c9.e2c5420a.682c9.088a@mx.google.com> http://www.google.com.au/search?q=Scientists+use+a+laser+to+cool+liquid+things+down+for+first+time+ever&prmd=ivns&source=univ&tbm=nws&tbo=u&sa=X&ved=0CAsQqAJqFQoTCM2k_ru4mMkCFQOwlAodKgoLEA Focal chilling with lasers. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Tue Nov 17 23:10:04 2015 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2015 23:10:04 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Is this a potential cryonics thing? In-Reply-To: <564ba1c9.e2c5420a.682c9.088a@mx.google.com> References: <564ba1c9.e2c5420a.682c9.088a@mx.google.com> Message-ID: <564BB3CC.504@aleph.se> Seems problematic for chilling large volumes, especially in opaque and dispersive materials. Still, the human body is fairly transparent in near infrared... On 2015-11-17 21:52, colin hales wrote: > http://www.google.com.au/search?q=Scientists+use+a+laser+to+cool+liquid+things+down+for+first+time+ever&prmd=ivns&source=univ&tbm=nws&tbo=u&sa=X&ved=0CAsQqAJqFQoTCM2k_ru4mMkCFQOwlAodKgoLEA > > Focal chilling with lasers. > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Wed Nov 18 08:48:08 2015 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2015 00:48:08 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Transhumanist exploration game (Adrian Tymes) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 10:44 AM, Jay Dugger wrote: > I feel tempted to mention Sid Meier's Beyond Earth, but haven't yet > played that either. Generic sci-fi; I find it quite playable if a bit bland. Yes it has transhumanist victory conditions, but those are not the only ones available. > There are other games, such as Deus Ex, that claim to touch on it but > > mainly as a source of nifty powers rather than exploring the themes. > > I think you do the original game of Deus Ex a bit of a disservice > here, but I generally agree. > Granted, I haven't played Deus Ex myself; I'm just going on what I've heard. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hibbert at mydruthers.com Thu Nov 19 03:12:39 2015 From: hibbert at mydruthers.com (Chris Hibbert) Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2015 19:12:39 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Transhumanist exploration game In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <564D3E27.3090006@mydruthers.com> On 11/18/15 11:52 AM, extropy-chat-request at lists.extropy.org wrote: > From: Jay Dugger > > Good recommendation! I hear good things about the Talos Principle > (http://store.steampowered.com/app/257510/), but I haven't played it. There was a copy set up at a conference I attended over the weekend, and I loved it. I've bought a copy and have started playing from the start. There's not much transhumanism in it. It's a straight first-person puzzle solving game very much in the vein of Portal (from Valve and available on Steam, not the MS-DOS one you mentioned.) Chris -- It is easy to turn an aquarium into fish soup, but not so easy to turn fish soup back into an aquarium. -- Lech Walesa on reverting to a market economy. Chris Hibbert hibbert at mydruthers.com http://mydruthers.com From pharos at gmail.com Thu Nov 19 11:33:38 2015 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2015 11:33:38 +0000 Subject: [ExI] META: Gmail Message threads Message-ID: Gmail uses the email Subject header to automatically group emails into threads. This is useful as it keeps the emails in a time dependent conversation. If the Subject line is changed, this causes Gmail to create a new thread. For Gmail users the Transhumanist exploration game discussion is now split into four threads with a loss of discussion continuity. Unfortunately Gmail doesn't provide a facility to Merge threads. I expect most people just delete the emails they don't want, thus losing part of the discussion. So it would be helpful to the Gmail users on the list to only change the Subject header when you really do intend to start a new discussion. :) (Or when the conversation has drifted far from the original subject). P.S. It is usually thought to be bad practice to include individual names in the Subject line. It should be obvious from the reply content what/who you are responding to (trimmed as necessary). When replying to a mailing list you are writing to hundreds of people, not just one individual. BillK From pharos at gmail.com Thu Nov 19 12:44:01 2015 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2015 12:44:01 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Crow intelligence Message-ID: A Crow solves an 8-step problem while finding, retrieving and then not losing intermediate tools. 3-minute video. Remarkable for such a tiny bird-brain. BillK From pharos at gmail.com Thu Nov 19 15:32:54 2015 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2015 15:32:54 +0000 Subject: [ExI] 'Last resort' antibiotic now failing Message-ID: Antibiotic resistance: World on cusp of 'post-antibiotic era' Quotes: The world is on the cusp of a "post-antibiotic era", scientists have warned after finding bacteria resistant to drugs used when all other treatments have failed. They identified bacteria able to shrug off the drug of last resort - colistin - in patients and livestock in China. They said that resistance would spread around the world and raised the spectre of untreatable infections. It is likely resistance emerged after colistin was overused in farm animals. Resistance to colistin has emerged before. However, the crucial difference this time is the mutation has arisen in a way that is very easily shared between bacteria. "The transfer rate of this resistance gene is ridiculously high, that doesn't look good," said Prof Mark Wilcox, from Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. His hospital is now dealing with multiple cases "where we're struggling to find an antibiotic" every month - an event he describes as being as "rare as hens' teeth" five years ago. ------------ BillK From spike66 at att.net Thu Nov 19 15:53:34 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2015 07:53:34 -0800 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Crow intelligence In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <004401d122e2$73509830$59f1c890$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of BillK Subject: [Bulk] [ExI] Crow intelligence >...A Crow solves an 8-step problem while finding, retrieving and then not losing intermediate tools. 3-minute video. Remarkable for such a tiny bird-brain. BillK Thanks BillK for the timely posting that is a perfect introduction to the remarkable observation I made yesterday. We have seen domestic dogs play with humans, as well as demonstrate a willing eagerness to play. Dog owners, you have seen Bowser go get his ball and get all jumpy, wanting you to throw it. Cats don't really show the same eagerness to engage humans in play, but they definitely take advantage of the toys we supply them, such as Christmas ornaments. These are domestic beasts, but what of wild ones? This summer on a sea voyage, I saw dolphins racing the ship, leaping from the sea in an activity that looked a lot like play. Yesterday I watched seagulls on my son's playground at school. These are wild, but clearly are comfortable around humans. If you watch closely, you see that gulls are not identical; at least a few of them have identifiable marks. I have seen some of these guys before. They hang out until the kindergartners finish their lunch. They seem to know most kinders eat almost nothing, so most of their lunch goes into the trash. These gulls have figured out how to fetch the remainders. You may have seen that under certain circumstances, gulls can catch items out of the air. Example, go to most any McDonalds where there are outdoor tables. Good chance gulls will be found nearby, and if so, some of them may come swooping down asking for fries to be hurled in their direction. Some of them can catch the fries out of the air. Yesterday, one of the kids had a superball. He bounced it high, the gulls caught it, which was not so remarkable, but what happened next was astonishing. He flew about with it, then dropped it near the kids on the pavement. It bounced around, the birds took it again, flew upward with it and dropped it again as the kids cheered them on. The gulls appeared to be playing with the ball, and possibly teasing the kids. Then it bounced off the pavement into the grass. The gulls retrieved the ball, flew up and bounced on the pavement again. It just looked like the gull version of the reindeer games that Olive (the other reindeer) excluded poor Rudolph from playing. I didn't get video of that. So now I hope to get a superball and see if I can get them to do that again. spike From msd001 at gmail.com Thu Nov 19 17:39:42 2015 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2015 12:39:42 -0500 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Crow intelligence In-Reply-To: <004401d122e2$73509830$59f1c890$@att.net> References: <004401d122e2$73509830$59f1c890$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Nov 19, 2015 at 10:53 AM, spike wrote: > Yesterday, one of the kids had a superball. He bounced it high, the gulls > caught it, which was not so remarkable, but what happened next was > astonishing. He flew about with it, then dropped it near the kids on the > pavement. It bounced around, the birds took it again, flew upward with it > and dropped it again as the kids cheered them on. The gulls appeared to be > playing with the ball, and possibly teasing the kids. Then it bounced off > the pavement into the grass. The gulls retrieved the ball, flew up and > bounced on the pavement again. It just looked like the gull version of the > reindeer games that Olive (the other reindeer) excluded poor Rudolph from > playing. > > I didn't get video of that. So now I hope to get a superball and see if I > can get them to do that again. I just read about coywolf last night: http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21677188-it-rare-new-animal-species-emerge-front-scientists-eyes While not exactly an intelligence display, It's interesting how evolution combines the features from two different animals to make a more-fit creature for the current environment. If you haven't read about Moscow's subway dogs: http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21677188-it-rare-new-animal-species-emerge-front-scientists-eyes From pharos at gmail.com Thu Nov 19 18:05:46 2015 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2015 18:05:46 +0000 Subject: [ExI] A good diet for you may be bad for me Message-ID: Eating the same foods can lead to different blood sugar spikes in different people By Tina Hesman Saey November 19, 2015 Quote: CARB CONFUSION Participants in a nutrition study had very different responses to eating certain foods. A cookie caused blood sugar levels to spike for one person but didn?t affect a second person. A banana produced the opposite reaction in the same people. The researchers made the discovery after fitting 800 people with blood glucose monitors for a week. The people ate standard breakfasts supplied by the researchers. Although the volunteers all ate the same food, their blood glucose levels after eating those foods varied dramatically. Traits and behaviors such as body mass index, sleep, exercise, blood pressure, cholesterol levels and the kinds of microbes living in people?s intestines are associated with blood glucose responses to food, the researchers conclude. Those findings indicate that blood sugar spikes after eating depend ?not only on what you eat, but how your system processes that food,? says Clay Marsh, an epigenetics researcher at West Virginia University in Morgantown. --------- They don't mention it, but I suspect ageing also affects how the body processes food. BillK From foozler83 at gmail.com Thu Nov 19 21:31:12 2015 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2015 15:31:12 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Fwd: gulls In-Reply-To: <005001d122f2$a5874230$f095c690$@att.net> References: <005001d122f2$a5874230$f095c690$@att.net> Message-ID: e *From:* William Flynn Wallace [mailto:foozler83 at gmail.com] *Sent:* Thursday, November 19, 2015 8:14 AM *To:* spike jones *Subject:* gulls We were on a tour boat out of Panama City. We quickly acquired a following of gulls. After we got out a ? ? little bit some of us went to the top and starting feeding the gulls. If you tossed a cracker to them they'd catch it, drop back a bit, and then come forward again. If you held it in your hand they? come and take it. Not as remarkable as what you saw, but interesting. It's like that earlier discussion of African pygmies: we are just learning how to test the intelligence of people who were raised quite differently from us, and also how to test animals' IQ. Animals and people who aren't smart in some way aren't with us anymore. bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Thu Nov 19 21:33:56 2015 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2015 15:33:56 -0600 Subject: [ExI] A good diet for you may be bad for me In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, Nov 19, 2015 at 12:05 PM, BillK wrote: > Eating the same foods can lead to different blood sugar spikes in > different people > By Tina Hesman Saey November 19, 2015 > > > > Quote: > CARB CONFUSION Participants in a nutrition study had very different > responses to eating certain foods. A cookie caused blood sugar levels > to spike for one person but didn?t affect a second person. A banana > produced the opposite reaction in the same people. > > The researchers made the discovery after fitting 800 people with blood > glucose monitors for a week. The people ate standard breakfasts > supplied by the researchers. Although the volunteers all ate the same > food, their blood glucose levels after eating those foods varied > dramatically. Traits and behaviors such as body mass index, sleep, > exercise, blood pressure, cholesterol levels and the kinds of microbes > living in people?s intestines are associated with blood glucose > responses to food, the researchers conclude. > > Those findings indicate that blood sugar spikes after eating depend > ?not only on what you eat, but how your system processes that food,? > says Clay Marsh, an epigenetics researcher at West Virginia University > in Morgantown. > --------- > > > They don't mention it, but I suspect ageing also affects how the body > processes food. > > > BillK > > ?And it doesn't help that the gut bacteria may take up to a year to recover from antibiotics, which are still too routinely given. And if you take probiotics you may be changing your gut population continuously. bill w? > _______________________________________________ > 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 Thu Nov 19 23:33:47 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2015 15:33:47 -0800 Subject: [ExI] A good diet for you may be bad for me In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <006d01d12322$bda6f1f0$38f4d5d0$@att.net> On Thu, Nov 19, 2015 at 12:05 PM, BillK > wrote: Eating the same foods can lead to different blood sugar spikes in different people By Tina Hesman Saey November 19, 2015 Quote: CARB CONFUSION Participants in a nutrition study had very different responses to eating certain foods. ? Thanks BillK. This one definitely had the ring of truth to it. I knew it as soon as I read the first few lines of the article. I am surprised it is just now being discovered. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Fri Nov 20 00:47:32 2015 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2015 18:47:32 -0600 Subject: [ExI] A good diet for you may be bad for me In-Reply-To: <006d01d12322$bda6f1f0$38f4d5d0$@att.net> References: <006d01d12322$bda6f1f0$38f4d5d0$@att.net> Message-ID: Thanks BillK. This one definitely had the ring of truth to it. I knew it as soon as I read the first few lines of the article. I am surprised it is just now being discovered. This means that there is genetic variation among people! WOW BILL W On Thu, Nov 19, 2015 at 5:33 PM, spike wrote: > > > > > On Thu, Nov 19, 2015 at 12:05 PM, BillK wrote: > > Eating the same foods can lead to different blood sugar spikes in > different people > By Tina Hesman Saey November 19, 2015 > > > > Quote: > CARB CONFUSION Participants in a nutrition study had very different > responses to eating certain foods. ? > > > > Thanks BillK. This one definitely had the ring of truth to it. I knew it > as soon as I read the first few lines of the article. I am surprised it is > just now being discovered. > > > > 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 col.hales at gmail.com Tue Nov 17 23:32:40 2015 From: col.hales at gmail.com (colin hales) Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2015 10:32:40 +1100 Subject: [ExI] Is this a potential cryonics thing? In-Reply-To: <564BB3CC.504@aleph.se> References: <564ba1c9.e2c5420a.682c9.088a@mx.google.com> <564BB3CC.504@aleph.se> Message-ID: <564bb94d.85e6420a.805a7.3654@mx.google.com> Early days. It's possible that crystal injections and laser treatment may help navigate the key vulnerable brain tissue areas through phase transitions. We'll just have to wait till it gets applied someplace. Cheers Colin -----Original Message----- From: "Anders Sandberg" Sent: ?18/?11/?2015 10:11 AM To: "extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org" Subject: Re: [ExI] Is this a potential cryonics thing? Seems problematic for chilling large volumes, especially in opaque and dispersive materials. Still, the human body is fairly transparent in near infrared... On 2015-11-17 21:52, colin hales wrote: http://www.google.com.au/search?q=Scientists+use+a+laser+to+cool+liquid+things+down+for+first+time+ever&prmd=ivns&source=univ&tbm=nws&tbo=u&sa=X&ved=0CAsQqAJqFQoTCM2k_ru4mMkCFQOwlAodKgoLEA Focal chilling with lasers. _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From butler.two.one at gmail.com Fri Nov 20 04:00:02 2015 From: butler.two.one at gmail.com (Michael Butler) Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2015 20:00:02 -0800 Subject: [ExI] A good diet for you may be bad for me In-Reply-To: References: <006d01d12322$bda6f1f0$38f4d5d0$@att.net> Message-ID: And so we see that the notion bruited about for some time that "glycemic index" was oversimplistic is probably not only true but very possibly more multidimensional than previously conceded. As someone upthread said, "Wow" ;) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Fri Nov 20 07:18:36 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2015 23:18:36 -0800 Subject: [ExI] gruber gets more than you do Message-ID: <000001d12363$acbe6b70$063b4250$@att.net> I thought of a fun game today to play with a group of analytical math-enabled types. If you have exactly one sibling, you are likely familiar with the usual routine for dividing the last of the pie: one cuts, the other chooses which portion. This procedure results in two pie pieces so close to equal mass that a good micrometer would be required to distinguish between the two. OK, now imagine a form of this game where you are dividing a whole into two portions, where your opponent or adversary gets to choose which portion, but with an evil twist: you do not know how big is the whole pie. You cut or select some portion, and your opponent (who knows how much is there but of course will not tell you) gets to take that portion if it is larger or the rest of it if that is larger. For fun, imagine someone you don't like to be your opponent in this game, ISIS or Jonathan Gruber for instance. A hypothetical weird rich person has set up a bank vault with an unknown amount of money, written down the amount and given the paper with the amount to a neutral third party, and locked the vault so it is a set amount. The crazy bastard won't even tell you an order of magnitude, but you know this is one with plenty of orders of magnitude (imaginary dollars are easy to come by.) She offers you a deal that doesn't even cost you anything: all you do is name an amount of money (N). If it is smaller than half of what is in that vault (V), you get that amount N, and Dr. Gruber gets the rest. If your bid is larger than half, Gruber gets the amount you named and you get the rest. If N is larger than V, he gets it all and you get nada, but worse than that: you must endure the insufferable Dr. Gruber (or Mohammad the antiquity-destroying terrorist) waving V in your face and taunting you for being a greedy and stupid voter (or infidel) oh the reprehensible ass. Here's the game, ExI-chatters: I place some number V of imaginary dollars in a vault. You name your bid, N virtual dollars. Imagine some unsavory character gets the larger of either N or V-N. I don't know the amount in that vault either, but I know the formula and I will know Tuesday 24 November at 5pm PDT how many imaginary dollars I put in that imaginary vault. Then I will report the results. If you wish to bid anonymously you may post your bid offlist with a nickname. Name your bid and state your reasoning, if any. Is this identical to any ordinary trivial guessing game? State your reasoning if any. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bbenzai at yahoo.com Fri Nov 20 10:06:00 2015 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben) Date: Fri, 20 Nov 2015 10:06:00 +0000 Subject: [ExI] CRISPR and Gene Drives In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <564EF088.30208@yahoo.com> BillK wrote: "The engineered organisms could upset the delicate balance of an ecosystem" Of course. This is why we need to learn to engineer not only genomes, but entire ecosystems and meta-ecosystems. At some point, we'll have to recognise the fact that ecosystems, just like genomes, are not sacrosanct, that they evolved in the usual haphazard way that everything does, and that we have already been mucking about with them for ages, and can potentially do a much better job of it. The very phrase 'delicate balance' is telling (although I suspect that natural ecosystems are not anywhere near as delicate as many people would have us think). Just as we need more robust, adaptable and controllable bodies and genomes, we need more robust, adaptable and controllable ecosystems. We'd better get cracking and start learning how to design them. I expect though, that by the time we can do that we'll also be engineering many millions of virtual ecosystems too (and bodies, and minds), and most people will be inhabiting them, leaving biology behind as a niche occupation of a few enthusiasts. But you never know, we might need biology for a lot longer than many of us expect, so it would be prudent not to leave it to chance. Ben Zaiboc From anders at aleph.se Fri Nov 20 10:52:56 2015 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 20 Nov 2015 10:52:56 +0000 Subject: [ExI] CRISPR and Gene Drives In-Reply-To: <564EF088.30208@yahoo.com> References: <564EF088.30208@yahoo.com> Message-ID: <564EFB88.8040301@aleph.se> On 2015-11-20 10:06, Ben wrote: > BillK wrote: > > "The engineered organisms could upset the delicate balance of an > ecosystem" The balance of ecosystems is one of the myths that need to die. We have known since May's paper in *1973* ( http://www.d.umn.edu/~thrabik/may%201973.pdf ) that generic big ecosystems are unstable. In the ensuing debate the findings have been that real ecosystems are more stable than mathematical ones for complex reasons ( http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v405/n6783/full/405228a0.html ), but in the end this rather leads to the view that ecosystems are *robust*. They can handle noise and disruptions most of the time, but they also can shift and adapt. But they are *not* delicately balanced. The recent gene drive safeguard paper was nice; just the kind of thing we may want to add as a debug or safety tool. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From pharos at gmail.com Fri Nov 20 12:41:33 2015 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 20 Nov 2015 12:41:33 +0000 Subject: [ExI] CRISPR and Gene Drives In-Reply-To: <564EFB88.8040301@aleph.se> References: <564EF088.30208@yahoo.com> <564EFB88.8040301@aleph.se> Message-ID: On 20 November 2015 at 10:52, Anders Sandberg wrote: > The balance of ecosystems is one of the myths that need to die. > > We have known since May's paper in *1973* ( > http://www.d.umn.edu/~thrabik/may%201973.pdf ) that generic big ecosystems > are unstable. In the ensuing debate the findings have been that real > ecosystems are more stable than mathematical ones for complex reasons ( > http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v405/n6783/full/405228a0.html ), but in > the end this rather leads to the view that ecosystems are *robust*. They can > handle noise and disruptions most of the time, but they also can shift and > adapt. But they are *not* delicately balanced. > > > The recent gene drive safeguard paper was nice; just the kind of thing we > may want to add as a debug or safety tool. > Are you just complaining about his choice of words? :) We are in the middle of one of the great historical extinction events. Flora and fauna are disappearing rapidly. Gene drives could well increase the present extinction rate. When you are in the middle of an extinction event I doubt if "robust" is the term I would use. BillK From anders at aleph.se Fri Nov 20 14:14:00 2015 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 20 Nov 2015 14:14:00 +0000 Subject: [ExI] CRISPR and Gene Drives In-Reply-To: References: <564EF088.30208@yahoo.com> <564EFB88.8040301@aleph.se> Message-ID: <564F2AA8.207@aleph.se> On 2015-11-20 12:41, BillK wrote: > When you are in the middle of an extinction event I doubt if "robust" > is the term I would use. If one believes ecosystems are delicately balanced, then either one has to just give up since humans have touched every ecosystem (with maybe the exception of the lithoautotrophs in the crust) and they will all be disrupted (fatalism), or assume that the only sensible approach is to keep humans away from nature totally (not doable). If one recognizes that they have limits, both soft and hard, that they adapt and change, then one can start thinking about how to avoid making the exinction event too bad. Robustness is not invulnerability. Your gut flora is stable against incursions from other microorganisms and weird food up to a point, and even after a food poisoning it tends to return to its previous microecology. In fact, it often stays constant across a lifetime (which is why probiotics have trouble working). But it can be wiped out with antibiotics, and fecal transplants do work under some conditions. Same thing for ecosystems. We are learning how to engineer them, and maybe we can even figure out how to integrate our economic incentives with them. Of course, constructing robust economies is another fun topic (I would argue that a capitalist economy, with all the booms and busts, is actually pretty similar to a real ecosystem - they are pretty dynamic too). -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From pharos at gmail.com Fri Nov 20 19:46:38 2015 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 20 Nov 2015 19:46:38 +0000 Subject: [ExI] CRISPR and Gene Drives In-Reply-To: <564F2AA8.207@aleph.se> References: <564EF088.30208@yahoo.com> <564EFB88.8040301@aleph.se> <564F2AA8.207@aleph.se> Message-ID: On 20 November 2015 at 14:14, Anders Sandberg wrote: > If one believes ecosystems are delicately balanced, then either one has to > just give up since humans have touched every ecosystem (with maybe the > exception of the lithoautotrophs in the crust) and they will all be > disrupted (fatalism), or assume that the only sensible approach is to keep > humans away from nature totally (not doable). If one recognizes that they > have limits, both soft and hard, that they adapt and change, then one can > start thinking about how to avoid making the exinction event too bad. > > Robustness is not invulnerability. > > Same thing for ecosystems. We are learning how to engineer them, and maybe > we can even figure out how to integrate our economic incentives with them. > Of course, constructing robust economies is another fun topic (I would argue > that a capitalist economy, with all the booms and busts, is actually pretty > similar to a real ecosystem - they are pretty dynamic too). > That sounds like the difference between theory and practice. :) In theory the ecosystem is 'robust'. In practice it is being destroyed. I see little sign that the present rate of habitat loss and species extinction is slowing down. Add in climate change damage and rising sea levels and we have many more years of the bust phase ahead. What you are describing is cycles of growth and collapse, leading to mass extinctions of some species and regrowth with different species. Definition - Robust: strong and healthy, not likely to fail or weaken. If you define 'robust' as meaning that eventually some sort of ecosystem will recover with a different selection of flora and fauna, then I think that is an unusual definition. When an ecosystem is on the verge of mass extinctions that is not 'robust'. BillK From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Nov 20 23:41:18 2015 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Fri, 20 Nov 2015 18:41:18 -0500 Subject: [ExI] CRISPR and Gene Drives In-Reply-To: References: <564EF088.30208@yahoo.com> <564EFB88.8040301@aleph.se> <564F2AA8.207@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 2:46 PM, BillK wrote: > > > I see little sign that the present rate of habitat loss and species > extinction is slowing down. > Add in climate change damage and rising sea levels and we have many > more years of the bust phase ahead. > What you are describing is cycles of growth and collapse, leading to > mass extinctions of some species and regrowth with different species. ### Species loss is yet another imaginary hobgoblin conjured up to make us afraid of the future, alongside climate change and rising sea levels, but I digress: Robustness of ecosystems is an important feature and a reason to be optimistic. Of course, this term does not apply when an ecosystem is destroyed outright by agriculture or urbanization, however, it does describe a resistance of the ecosystem to disruption by climate change, invasive species, moderate species loss or reduction in size. There is no reason to expect economically important ecosystem failures in the foreseeable future, perhaps with the exception of Africa, where massive population growth could lead to catastrophes. Rafa? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Sat Nov 21 00:49:51 2015 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Fri, 20 Nov 2015 19:49:51 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Limits of human modification Message-ID: I think that the most appropriate test for permissibility of human germline modifications should be a composite of predicted net impact on social utility assessed by a subjective measure and an objective measure. The objective measure would be a suitable econometric instrument, such as per capita GDP. Any modification that increases GDP in the long term or is GDP-neutral should be allowed, unless it fails the subjective part of the test. Of course, the same modification could differentially impact GDP in various situations, so the permissibility of a modification would be subject to review. A first-generation IQ boost could become a net drag on the economy where third-generation boost is needed for an entry job, so it might become unacceptable. Sponsors of a modification could pre-pay for a GDP-negative modification, for example contributing to a fund which would reimburse for losses attributable to the modification. The subjective measure would be a test of well-being. Modifications that reduce predicted well-being below baseline of the unmodified genotype should be disallowed. Note that unmodified viable genomes produced by natural methods would be grandfathered in. This ethical approach would not try to generate a baseline quality threshold for allowable genomes but rather it accepts existing genomes and imposes a direction of change measured in economic and experiential terms, aiming for improving economic efficiency and well-being in each generation. Rafa? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From frankmac at ripco.com Sat Nov 21 01:24:39 2015 From: frankmac at ripco.com (frank mcelligott) Date: Fri, 20 Nov 2015 18:24:39 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Tom Brady and the diet which allows him to play football until he is 50 Message-ID: <030E221A5B1B4E8AB1FAB6BAE26495AB@grandviewpatPC> Tom Brady Quarterback of the pat's from Boston has said. Coke cola is poison and he plans on playing quart back until he is 50. By the looks of him today, he got a chance, guess he hates sugars. But more important a University Professor at university of Chicago has found a algorithm which can compare two networks to see if they are the same up to a very large number of nodes. If it works, well you better go to a cash economy and hide in a Costa Rica as all privacy will be gone. here is the link http://news.sciencemag.org/math/2015/11/mathematician-claims-breakthrough-complexity-theory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tara at taramayastales.com Sat Nov 21 05:04:37 2015 From: tara at taramayastales.com (Tara Maya) Date: Fri, 20 Nov 2015 21:04:37 -0800 Subject: [ExI] CRISPR and Gene Drives In-Reply-To: <564EF088.30208@yahoo.com> References: <564EF088.30208@yahoo.com> Message-ID: Damn, that would be fun. Like one of those aquariums they sell for kids with all the creatures, but build them from the genes on up, and for a rather larger (but still possibly contained) area. Wouldn?t it be cool if your house or your office building had its own designer ecosystem, the way it currently has furnishing and artwork? The biodiversity of a planet filled with such pocket ecosystems would also skyrocket, undoing the current mass extinction?s decimation of biodiversity. Tara Maya Blog | Twitter | Facebook | Amazon | Goodreads > On Nov 20, 2015, at 2:06 AM, Ben wrote: > > Of course. This is why we need to learn to engineer not only genomes, but entire ecosystems and meta-ecosystems. From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Nov 21 22:06:08 2015 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2015 17:06:08 -0500 Subject: [ExI] CRISPR and Gene Drives In-Reply-To: References: <564EF088.30208@yahoo.com> <564EFB88.8040301@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 7:41 AM, BillK wrote: ?> ? > Gene drives could well increase the present extinction rate. > ? That is the entire point. ? Mosquitoes kill 725,000 people each and every year and make many times that number sick, I would not cry very much if they went extinct. The smallpox virus is already extinct in the wild and I'm not too upset about that either. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sun Nov 22 03:44:32 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2015 19:44:32 -0800 Subject: [ExI] bar sinister gets more than you, was:... gets more than you do Message-ID: <00b201d124d8$1a5b4520$4f11cf60$@att.net> Earlier I wrote: ? Here?s the game, ExI-chatters: I place some number V of imaginary dollars in a vault. You name your bid, N virtual dollars. Imagine some unsavory character gets the larger of either N or V-N. I don?t know the amount in that vault either? Name your bid and state your reasoning, if any. Is this identical to any ordinary trivial guessing game? State your reasoning if any. spike It occurred to me that without some kind of indication of a range of possible amounts in the vault, this is any ordinary trivial guessing game. But if we assume the amount of money in the vault is somewhere between 0 and 6,283,185 dollars with each amount being equally probable, the problem becomes a calculation. Those who posted me offlist, now what say ye? It occurred to me it was in bad taste to put Dr. Gruber in the subject line, so we can go with a fictitious bad guy, such as Simon Bar Sinister or Mr. Potter the evil banker from the Jimmy Stewart classic. With that information on the max amount in the vault, you can do a calculation to suggest the optimal strategy. If you post onlist, post your bid first before you explain your reasoning please. The vault opens Tuesday 5 pm US west coast time. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sun Nov 22 04:03:24 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2015 20:03:24 -0800 Subject: [ExI] bar sinister gets more than you, was:... gets more than you do Message-ID: <00bb01d124da$bd2e1780$378a4680$@att.net> From: spike [mailto:spike66 at att.net] >?But if we assume the amount of money in the vault is somewhere between 0 and 6,283,185 dollars with each amount being equally probable, the problem becomes a calculation. spike Scratch that please. I was using 2 pi million as the upper limit, but afterwards, I realized there is no advantage to using 2 pi and the numbers are harder to visualize. We can do the same trick using more easily visualized, so let?s say the vault will have between 0 and 10 million imaginary bucks, equal probability of each amount. If you already posted a bid based on 6283k, do rebid please. You could probably just scale it up, ja? What was your reasoning? Ignore please considerations such as my dream yacht costs 7 million bucks and all such as that. Offer the strategy which maximizes your take, simultaneously minimizing Mr. Potter?s or bar Sinister?s. State equations if you used them, or basis for intuition if you used only that. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sun Nov 22 05:17:27 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2015 21:17:27 -0800 Subject: [ExI] bar sinister gets more than you, was:... gets more than you do In-Reply-To: <00bb01d124da$bd2e1780$378a4680$@att.net> References: <00bb01d124da$bd2e1780$378a4680$@att.net> Message-ID: <00f001d124e5$14e41e20$3eac5a60$@att.net> From: spike [mailto:spike66 at att.net] >?We can do the same trick using more easily visualized numbers, so let?s say the vault will have between 0 and 10 million imaginary bucks, equal probability of each amount? spike I plan to use one of the major stock indices, closing price average on Tuesday 24 November, so I don?t know what the amount will be, but I will scale it to 10M. I have done a Monte Carlo but I will be damned if I can find the closed form solution to explain the shape of this function. I might be doing something wrong. Intuition fails: if you bid 5 million, we know that cannot be the optimal strategy: you have a 50% chance of getting nada, and the only way you can get 5 million is the one in 10 million chance the vault contains exactly 10M. So we know the optimal bid is below 5M. That part is easy. The next intuition is that 2.5M is your best bet. But? perhaps not, because you then have only a 25% chance of a goose egg but you max out at 2.5M and you know the evil Mr. Potter is probably going to feast. If you are at 2.5, it is easy enough to show that raising your bid increases your upside without introducing much risk. And you already know 5M is too much. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sun Nov 22 06:06:34 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2015 22:06:34 -0800 Subject: [ExI] bar sinister gets more than you, was:... gets more than you do In-Reply-To: <00f001d124e5$14e41e20$3eac5a60$@att.net> References: <00bb01d124da$bd2e1780$378a4680$@att.net> <00f001d124e5$14e41e20$3eac5a60$@att.net> Message-ID: <000001d124eb$f1cccb60$d5666220$@att.net> From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of spike >?I plan to use one of the major stock indices, closing price average on Tuesday 24 November, so I don?t know what the amount will be, but I will scale it to 10M?spike Clarification: I will take the closing price Tuesday rounded to the nearest integer, divide by pi^2, throw away everything to the left of the decimal, take the fraction and multiply by 10M. My bid is 3,333,333 dollars. I will be damned if I can prove this is the optimal bid but the gradient seems to zero out at that point. Anders? Adrian? Has anyone seen this problem in the literature anywhere? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Sun Nov 22 07:02:15 2015 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2015 08:02:15 +0100 Subject: [ExI] bar sinister gets more than you, was:... gets more than you do In-Reply-To: <00b201d124d8$1a5b4520$4f11cf60$@att.net> References: <00b201d124d8$1a5b4520$4f11cf60$@att.net> Message-ID: <56516877.4050707@aleph.se> On 2015-11-22 04:44, spike wrote: > > It occurred to me that without some kind of indication of a range of > possible amounts in the vault, this is any ordinary trivial guessing > game. But if we assume the amount of money in the vault is somewhere > between 0 and 6,283,185 dollars with each amount being equally > probable, the problem becomes a calculation. > I actually liked the undefined nature of the amount. Thinking about things that could have any order of magnitude brings up really cool issues of noninformative priors. The thing reminds me of the problem of doing a Bayesian analysis of the German tank problem when you have only one tank (it came up during I lecture I gave last week). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem Using a noninformative prior there will not work for one tank. If you have a known upper limit Omega on how many tanks there could be, then you can assume the actual number is uniform between 1 and Omega and do a calculation, ending up with an estimate. In your lovely problem having an upper limit Omega makes things easier but less interesting. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sun Nov 22 15:14:50 2015 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2015 09:14:50 -0600 Subject: [ExI] bar sinister gets more than you, was:... gets more than you do In-Reply-To: <56516877.4050707@aleph.se> References: <00b201d124d8$1a5b4520$4f11cf60$@att.net> <56516877.4050707@aleph.se> Message-ID: noninformative priors: is that like committing crimes or marriages without learning anything from from them? bill w On Sun, Nov 22, 2015 at 1:02 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2015-11-22 04:44, spike wrote: > > > It occurred to me that without some kind of indication of a range of > possible amounts in the vault, this is any ordinary trivial guessing game. > But if we assume the amount of money in the vault is somewhere between 0 > and 6,283,185 dollars with each amount being equally probable, the problem > becomes a calculation. > > > I actually liked the undefined nature of the amount. Thinking about things > that could have any order of magnitude brings up really cool issues of > noninformative priors. > > The thing reminds me of the problem of doing a Bayesian analysis of the > German tank problem when you have only one tank (it came up during I > lecture I gave last week). > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem > Using a noninformative prior there will not work for one tank. If you have > a known upper limit Omega on how many tanks there could be, then you can > assume the actual number is uniform between 1 and Omega and do a > calculation, ending up with an estimate. > > In your lovely problem having an upper limit Omega makes things easier but > less interesting. > > -- > Anders Sandberg > Future of Humanity Institute > Oxford Martin School > Oxford University > > > _______________________________________________ > 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 Sun Nov 22 15:36:04 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2015 07:36:04 -0800 Subject: [ExI] bar sinister gets more than you, was:... gets more than you do In-Reply-To: <56516877.4050707@aleph.se> References: <00b201d124d8$1a5b4520$4f11cf60$@att.net> <56516877.4050707@aleph.se> Message-ID: <003201d1253b$80bb9410$8232bc30$@att.net> From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg Sent: Saturday, November 21, 2015 11:02 PM To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org Subject: Re: [ExI] bar sinister gets more than you, was:... gets more than you do On 2015-11-22 04:44, spike wrote: It occurred to me that without some kind of indication of a range of possible amounts in the vault, this is any ordinary trivial guessing game. But if we assume the amount of money in the vault is somewhere between 0 and 6,283,185 dollars with each amount being equally probable, the problem becomes a calculation. I actually liked the undefined nature of the amount. Thinking about things that could have any order of magnitude brings up really cool issues of noninformative priors.In your lovely problem having an upper limit Omega makes things easier but less interesting. -- Anders Sandberg No problem, we can branch this. The unlimited version will be called the Anders branch. Anders do feel free to clarify or elaborate on your branch. Until then, my bid on the Anders branch of the Potter Deal is 1E10 bucks. Clarification on the Spike branch regarding nonlinearities please. If a windfall 10k were to fall into your lap, it would make your day. If 10 million falls into your lap, it would make your day even more of course, but not a thousand times more. The difference between 10M and ten million ten thousand dollars is practically negligible in its day-making potential, even though the same delta made your hypothetical day in the first instance. This is an example of a non-linearity I wish to have you ignore for this thought experiment. The game is to maximize your take and simultaneously minimize the evil Mr. Potter's winnings, ignoring other considerations. Think like a mathematician for this exercise, for hypothetical money is only that. The notion of nonlinearities gave me an insight. To us proles, a windfall gain of ten bucks is cool but a windfall gain of 20 bucks is twice as good because we are down in the linear range. Once we get up in the thin air (well, thin to me anyway) of ten million bucks, we are way out of the linear range. You and I can scarcely distinguish the day-making potential of 10 million vs 10,010,000 dollars. Out there, we are just sinful rich. The good kind of sinful rich, the kind worth going to hell for eternity kind of rich, either number. Here is the insight, which might already have a name but I don't know what it is, a paradox of sorts. You and I are way out in the nonlinear range at 10 million bucks, but a big corporation is not. To some big company such as an insurance biggie, there is a difference between ten million and 10,010,000, and it is pretty similar the difference between 0 and 10k. Insight: the fact that out there in the seven digit numbers, we are in the nonlinearities but big corporations are in the linear range allows them to enter into deals which both parties may enter a deal which favors the big guy, yet both parties benefit. Example, the insurance company owes you 10 million bucks, but you need to go to court to prove your case. It is a strong one you will likely win, but the insurance guy offers to write a check for 5 million today and go away, no questions asked. You think OK I can be rich today or even more rich in perhaps a couple years, but both riches are out in the nonlinearities, OK sure 5 million today. Both parties know it is a terrible deal for the prole, both know the big evil insurance company won that negotiation, but both parties enter it willingly and more or less satisfied (they more, you less.) This is Spike's paradox in the Potter problem. Use it freely. Anders, I still want your bid in the 10M version of the Potter problem. In return I thought of a scheme for determining V in the Anders branch, so Potter players, do make two bids please. You may change your bid up to Tuesday afternoon. My bids: Spike branch: 3,333,333 bucks, Anders branch: 1E10 bucks. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jasonresch at gmail.com Sun Nov 22 17:10:20 2015 From: jasonresch at gmail.com (Jason Resch) Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2015 11:10:20 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Crow intelligence In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Bill, Thanks for sharing that was remarkable. I just saw this yesterday: https://www.facebook.com/CollectiveEvolutionPage/videos/10152054591023908/ Jason On Thu, Nov 19, 2015 at 6:44 AM, BillK wrote: > A Crow solves an 8-step problem while finding, retrieving and then not > losing intermediate tools. > > 3-minute video. > > > Remarkable for such a tiny bird-brain. > > BillK > _______________________________________________ > 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 atymes at gmail.com Sun Nov 22 21:56:11 2015 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2015 13:56:11 -0800 Subject: [ExI] bar sinister gets more than you, was:... gets more than you do In-Reply-To: <000001d124eb$f1cccb60$d5666220$@att.net> References: <00bb01d124da$bd2e1780$378a4680$@att.net> <00f001d124e5$14e41e20$3eac5a60$@att.net> <000001d124eb$f1cccb60$d5666220$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Nov 21, 2015 at 10:06 PM, spike wrote: > I will be damned if I can prove this is the optimal bid but the gradient > seems to zero out at that point. Anders? Adrian? > > Easy. Even if we allow fractions, the problem stated that there's actual cash in US dollars, and there are no half-cents in physical US currency as of today, so there's an even probability of anywhere from 0 to 1 billion pennies. We want the number that gives the highest total payout for each value, and that's a trivial matter of evaluating candidate values against each of 500,000,001 possibilities (we can eliminate bids over $5,000,000 because we know that either we'd guess too high and get nothing, or we wouldn't but we'd get less than if we bid $5,000,000). There are of course several optimizations that can be taken to reduce run time; for instance, for each bid X (in pennies), you know already that each possible sum Y < X will get 0. We can also simply sum up the possible gains to us. For bid X, the probability N that we get nothing, i.e. that X >= Y, is (X+1) / 1,000,000,001. The probability H of a too-high bid, i.e. that X >= Y/2, is ((2*X)+1) / 1,000,000,001. With probability 1-H we get X, with probability H-N we get Y-X (and for each X in this case, the possible Ys are evenly distributed from X to 2*X, so the average Y is X + (X/2), meaning the average payout in this case is (X + (X/2)) - X = X/2), and with probability N we get 0. So we need to select X to maximize ((1-H) * X) + ((H-N) * (X/2)) + (N * 0). Reducing this equation in steps: ((1-(((2*X)+1) / 1,000,000,001)) * X) + (((((2*X)+1) / 1,000,000,001)-((X+1) / 1,000,000,001)) * (X/2)) + 0 (((1,000,000,000-(2*X)) / 1,000,000,001) * X) + ((X / 1,000,000,001) * (X/2)) X * ((1,000,000,000-(2*X)) + (X/2)) / 1,000,000,001 And this is something that can simply be computed. Now, we can also do heuristic look-aheads so we don't have to evaluate the whole set. As you noted, it seems highly unlikely that X < 250,000,000 is the value, and indeed evaluating it around there shows an increasing slope. The function does not seem to allow for discontinuities or anything other than a simple curve, so a local maximum (so long as it is not at the edge of a section evaluated) should be the global maximum. When I run it, I get a maximum of 333333333 pennies ($3,333,333.33) with an average expected payout of 166666666.5 pennies ($1,666,666.665). Check your floating point buffers if you run the calculation, because the difference between the payouts for 333333333 and 33333334 is quite small, but 333333333 is higher (likely because it is closer to what would be the maximum if fractional pennies were allowed: 333333333.333...). Note that this is evaluating for maximum payout to us, and we don't care what the other guy gets. If the other guy getting as much as or more than us is a significant problem, the answer may be some variant on, "arrange for the vault to be burned to the ground unopened and make it look like an accident". As to the other problem (the "Anders branch"), it is in fact technically bounded too: http://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12773.htm shows there is less than $1.4 trillion out there, so this serves as an upper bound of how much currency the vault could contain. (It was stipulated that the vault contains dollars - as in, only US cash.) But that aside, I'd bid $10 million: if it's less than $20 million, the other side isn't waving all that much in my face, while if it's more, I suspect I could bootstrap $10 million much faster than most extant bad guys could usefully exploit $10 billion or even $10 trillion. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Mon Nov 23 01:19:55 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2015 17:19:55 -0800 Subject: [ExI] bar sinister gets more than you, was:... gets more than you do In-Reply-To: References: <00bb01d124da$bd2e1780$378a4680$@att.net> <00f001d124e5$14e41e20$3eac5a60$@att.net> <000001d124eb$f1cccb60$d5666220$@att.net> Message-ID: <016101d1258d$112b4580$3381d080$@att.net> From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes ? When I run it, I get a maximum of 333333333 pennies ($3,333,333.33) with an average expected payout of 166666666.5 pennies ($1,666,666.665)? Adrian Cool thanks. I am hoping to get a closed form solution for optimum strategy, for my Monte Carlo sim is giving me the same answer you got: 33,333,333. To clean it up a bit, assume integer number of dollars and zero is not a possibility. So the benefactor who set up the game is doing a rand() function, multiplying by 10M and rounding up to the next higher integer dollar. So the choices are between 1 and 10M dollars inclusive, no metal change. I also got your result from my sim: your optimal bid is 3,333,333 and your expected winnings are 1,666,667 bucks and that greedy Mr. Potter?s take is twice that, curse the bastard. Your risk of Potter taking all the money and you going home empty-handed is about 1/3. I will keep working on that closed-form solution. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hibbert at mydruthers.com Mon Nov 23 01:36:04 2015 From: hibbert at mydruthers.com (Chris Hibbert) Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2015 17:36:04 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Limits of human modification Message-ID: <56526D84.7050701@mydruthers.com> > I think that the most appropriate test for permissibility of human > germline modifications should be a composite of predicted net impact > on social utility assessed by a subjective measure and an objective > measure. > > The objective measure would be a suitable econometric instrument, > such as per capita GDP. Any modification that increases GDP in the > long term or is GDP-neutral should be allowed, unless it fails the > subjective part of the test. Of course, the same modification could > differentially impact GDP in various situations, so the > permissibility of a modification would be subject to review. A > first-generation IQ boost could become a net drag on the economy > where third-generation boost is needed for an entry job, so it might > become unacceptable. Sponsors of a modification could pre-pay for a > GDP-negative modification, for example contributing to a fund which > would reimburse for losses attributable to the modification. > > The subjective measure would be a test of well-being. Modifications > that reduce predicted well-being below baseline of the unmodified > genotype should be disallowed. Hmm. These seems like reasonable things to think about before you unleash something on your progeny and the world, but they seem extremely difficult to measure in an objective way by a global police force (or even a benign scientific overseer). Even trying to distinguish the econometric as objective and the well-being as subjective seems fraught with problems. It's somewhat true that we have instruments for measuring these kinds of outcomes across societies, but I don't think anyone has done anything approaching a respectable job of analyzing them prospectively for proposals that haven't been implemented yet. So, as I said, it seems reasonable, so ask someone who has developed germline techniques, and is considering applying them to himself or to paying customers or volunteers, to consider the plausible consequences out to the third or fourth generation at least. And perhaps this is a reasonable approach to recommend that institutional review boards take, as long as they have the ability to consider such questions in a civil manner. But hoping that this will be done in a way that politicians or the public can agree on the outcome seems unlikely to be fruitful. Chris -- The government's efforts to expand "access" to care while limiting costs are like blowing up a balloon while simultaneously squeezing it. The balloon continues to inflate, but in misshapen form. ---David Goldhill Chris Hibbert hibbert at mydruthers.com http://mydruthers.com From atymes at gmail.com Mon Nov 23 04:04:48 2015 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2015 20:04:48 -0800 Subject: [ExI] bar sinister gets more than you, was:... gets more than you do In-Reply-To: <016101d1258d$112b4580$3381d080$@att.net> References: <00bb01d124da$bd2e1780$378a4680$@att.net> <00f001d124e5$14e41e20$3eac5a60$@att.net> <000001d124eb$f1cccb60$d5666220$@att.net> <016101d1258d$112b4580$3381d080$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Nov 22, 2015 at 5:19 PM, spike wrote: > *From:* extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] *On > Behalf Of *Adrian Tymes > *?* > > When I run it, I get a maximum of 333333333 pennies ($3,333,333.33) with > an average expected payout of 166666666.5 pennies ($1,666,666.665)? Adrian > > > To clean it up a bit, assume integer number of dollars and zero is not a > possibility. > Changes the answer to $3,333,333.34. > I also got your result from my sim: your optimal bid is 3,333,333 and your > expected winnings are 1,666,667 bucks and that greedy Mr. Potter?s take is > twice that, curse the bastard. > The best revenge is a life lived well. What does he do with his take? Make a few peoples' lives miserable temporarily. What do I do with my take? Make life more awesome for many, possibly most, people permanently (or as close to permanent as we get these days). -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Nov 23 15:50:59 2015 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2015 09:50:59 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Limits of human modification In-Reply-To: <56526D84.7050701@mydruthers.com> References: <56526D84.7050701@mydruthers.com> Message-ID: The subjective measure would be a test of well-being. How about using happiness as a test of gene modification? It can be predicted well. Just add a chromosome 21 and you have Down's Syndrome. Happiest people in the world - sunny. Average IQ = 25. Plenty of highly creative people have been manic-depressive and ultimately killed themselves, and sometimes others. Would they have been the same without the manic-depression? And don't we often say "Gee, that person had all the advantages. Why are they so unhappy?" Group X may be happier on the average than Group Z, but predicting individual happiness (or anything else) is just impossible. ?Psychology is a very long way from individual prediction.? Ideal would be for the genetic manipulation to be reversible, so that the affected person could choose their own modification, but in most cases this will be impossible, I assume. Better is if the improvement can be made in the person's adulthood, allowing choice and preventing problems of consent. ?I like to speculate as much as anyone, but now we know so little. We have invented the wheel but are very far from an Indy car. bill w? On Sun, Nov 22, 2015 at 7:36 PM, Chris Hibbert wrote: > > I think that the most appropriate test for permissibility of human >> germline modifications should be a composite of predicted net impact >> on social utility assessed by a subjective measure and an objective >> measure. >> >> The objective measure would be a suitable econometric instrument, >> such as per capita GDP. Any modification that increases GDP in the >> long term or is GDP-neutral should be allowed, unless it fails the >> subjective part of the test. Of course, the same modification could >> differentially impact GDP in various situations, so the >> permissibility of a modification would be subject to review. A >> first-generation IQ boost could become a net drag on the economy >> where third-generation boost is needed for an entry job, so it might >> become unacceptable. Sponsors of a modification could pre-pay for a >> GDP-negative modification, for example contributing to a fund which >> would reimburse for losses attributable to the modification. >> >> The subjective measure would be a test of well-being. Modifications >> that reduce predicted well-being below baseline of the unmodified >> genotype should be disallowed. >> > > Hmm. These seems like reasonable things to think about before you unleash > something on your progeny and the world, but they seem extremely difficult > to measure in an objective way by a global police force (or even a benign > scientific overseer). Even trying to distinguish the econometric as > objective and the well-being as subjective seems fraught with problems. > It's somewhat true that we have instruments for measuring these kinds of > outcomes across societies, but I don't think anyone has done anything > approaching a respectable job of analyzing them prospectively for proposals > that haven't been implemented yet. > > So, as I said, it seems reasonable, so ask someone who has developed > germline techniques, and is considering applying them to himself or to > paying customers or volunteers, to consider the plausible consequences out > to the third or fourth generation at least. And perhaps this is a > reasonable approach to recommend that institutional review boards take, as > long as they have the ability to consider such questions in a civil manner. > But hoping that this will be done in a way that politicians or the public > can agree on the outcome seems unlikely to be fruitful. > > Chris > -- > The government's efforts to expand "access" to care while limiting > costs are like blowing up a balloon while simultaneously squeezing > it. The balloon continues to inflate, but in misshapen form. > ---David Goldhill > > Chris Hibbert > hibbert at mydruthers.com > http://mydruthers.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 johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Nov 23 18:52:28 2015 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2015 13:52:28 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Limits of human modification In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 7:49 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki < rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote: ?> ? > I think that the most appropriate test for permissibility of human > germline modifications should be a composite of predicted net impact on > social utility assessed by a subjective measure > ?In the entire history of the world the human race has never agreed on what is good and what is bad, and although CRISPER may change many things I doubt it will change that. > ?> ? > and an objective measure. > ?And of course there is no objective measure of right and wrong.? ?> ? > The subjective measure would be a test of well-being. My ? subjective measure ? of well-being is to be smart and have smart kids, your measure may be different but there is no disputing matters of taste.? > ?> ? > The objective measure would be a suitable econometric instrument, such as > per capita GDP. > ?Choose any 2 economists ? ?and they will give you 2 mutually exclusive ways that they insist is the one and only way to increase the GDP. And that is even without CRISPER. > ?> ? > A first-generation IQ boost could become a net drag on the economy where > third-generation boost is needed for an entry job, so it might become > unacceptable. > ? And if one nation is able to prevent its people from receiving a IQ boost you can be certain that nation will soon be a footnote to history because other nations will not have such anti intellectual tendencies. But they probably couldn't enforce their Luddite proclamation because the children of those who went to the black market and defied their rulers edict would be smarter than those who followed the law and thus would soon be running the show. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tara at taramayastales.com Mon Nov 23 23:19:02 2015 From: tara at taramayastales.com (Tara Maya) Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2015 15:19:02 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Limits of human modification In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I predict the top genes parents would want for their children would be the following four kinds: Health IQ Beauty Talent (if this is separable from IQ, such as musical or artistic talent) And the progression of genetic alterations would probably go something like this: First - eliminate known deleterious genes (cancer, fat, extra chromosomes, genetic diseases) Second - chose the better of two genes; if mom has gene for music in one location but dad is tone deaf, choose mom?s gene; if dad has gene for spatial reasoning but mom lacks, use dad?s gene in that spot; the beauty of this is that the child is still 100% genetic offspring of parents, so can?t even be said to be a mutant of any kind Third - If neither of your parents has the ?optimum? gene for a certain spot, but another relative? or another donor, related or not ? has the gene? or it can be made directly (I don?t know the tech involved), then why not add it? Tara Maya Blog | Twitter | Facebook | Amazon | Goodreads > On Nov 23, 2015, at 10:52 AM, John Clark wrote: > > On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 7:49 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki > wrote: > > ?> ?I think that the most appropriate test for permissibility of human germline modifications should be a composite of predicted net impact on social utility assessed by a subjective measure > > ?In the entire history of the world the human race has never agreed on what is good and what is bad, and although CRISPER may change many things I doubt it will change that. > > ?> ?and an objective measure. > > ?And of course there is no objective measure of right and wrong.? > > ?> ?The subjective measure would be a test of well-being. > > My ?subjective measure? of well-being is to be smart and have smart kids, your measure may be different but there is no disputing matters of taste.? > > ?> ?The objective measure would be a suitable econometric instrument, such as per capita GDP. > > ?Choose any 2 economists ??and they will give you 2 mutually exclusive ways that they insist is the one and only way to increase the GDP. And that is even without CRISPER. > > ?> ?A first-generation IQ boost could become a net drag on the economy where third-generation boost is needed for an entry job, so it might become unacceptable. > > ?And if one nation is able to prevent its people from receiving a IQ boost you can be certain that nation will soon be a footnote to history because other nations will not have such anti intellectual tendencies. But they probably couldn't enforce their > Luddite proclamation because the children of those who went to the black market and defied their rulers edict would be smarter than those who followed the law and thus would soon be running the show. > > 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 foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Nov 24 01:01:54 2015 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2015 19:01:54 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Limits of human modification In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 5:19 PM, Tara Maya wrote: > I predict the top genes parents would want for their children would be the > following four kinds: > > Health > IQ > Beauty > Talent (if this is separable from IQ, such as musical or artistic talent) > > And the progression of genetic alterations would probably go something > like this: > > First - eliminate known deleterious genes (cancer, fat, extra chromosomes, > genetic diseases) > > Second - chose the better of two genes; if mom has gene for music in one > location but dad is tone deaf, choose mom?s gene; if dad has gene for > spatial reasoning but mom lacks, use dad?s gene in that spot; the beauty of > this is that the child is still 100% genetic offspring of parents, so can?t > even be said to be a mutant of any kind > > Third - If neither of your parents has the ?optimum? gene for a certain > spot, but another relative? or another donor, related or not ? has the > gene? or it can be made directly (I don?t know the tech involved), then why > not add it? > ?Yes, why not indeed? I notice that you did not mention mental disorders > such as neuroticism, which afflicts a large segment of the population, > depression, psychoticism, psychopathy and others. Very few families are > mentally 'clean' and healthy. And dental: put dentists permanently out of > business - maybe even create a gene that enables a lost tooth to be > replaced/regenerated. While you are at regeneration, regenerate telomeres > and reduce effects of aging?. bill w > > > > > > Tara Maya > Blog | Twitter > | Facebook > | > Amazon > | > Goodreads > > > > On Nov 23, 2015, at 10:52 AM, John Clark wrote: > > On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 7:49 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki < > rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote: > > ?> ? >> I think that the most appropriate test for permissibility of human >> germline modifications should be a composite of predicted net impact on >> social utility assessed by a subjective measure >> > > ?In the entire history of the world the human race has never agreed on > what is good and what is bad, and although CRISPER may change many things I > doubt it will change that. > > >> ?> ? >> and an objective measure. >> > > ?And of course there is no objective measure of right and wrong.? > > ?> ? >> The subjective measure would be a test of well-being. > > > My ? > subjective measure > ? of well-being is to be smart and have smart kids, your measure may be > different but there is no disputing matters of taste.? > > >> ?> ? >> The objective measure would be a suitable econometric instrument, such as >> per capita GDP. >> > > ?Choose any 2 economists ? > ?and they will give you 2 mutually exclusive ways that they insist is the > one and only way to increase the GDP. And that is even without CRISPER. > > >> ?> ? >> A first-generation IQ boost could become a net drag on the economy where >> third-generation boost is needed for an entry job, so it might become >> unacceptable. >> > > ? > And if one nation is able to prevent its people from receiving a IQ boost > you can be certain that nation will soon be a footnote to history because > other nations will not have such anti intellectual tendencies. But they > probably couldn't enforce their > Luddite proclamation because the children of those who went to the black > market and defied their rulers edict would be smarter than those who > followed the law and thus would soon be running the show. > > John K Clark > > > _______________________________________________ > 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 tara at taramayastales.com Tue Nov 24 01:22:22 2015 From: tara at taramayastales.com (Tara Maya) Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2015 17:22:22 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Limits of human modification In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: We don?t know enough yet, or at least I don?t know that we know, about what causes the more subtle disorders of the mind (or even of the body). For instance, if susceptibility to depression is caused by a single gene, I think it would be targeted for elimination. But what if it?s a lot more complicated than that? Or what if depression is one of those things that?s much more about nurture than nature? Then there?s the separate issue of genes that are both positive/negative. Myopia is often seen with high IQ, but do they have to go together? How about depression and artistic ability? These could be linked purely by coincidence. Or they maybe linked by some common cause but can still be delinked. There are some things which probably can?t be unlinked, for instance ?courage? and ?taking too many risks? because they are really the same thing just seen in a different light. Finally, all regeneration and anti-aging things I would lump under Health. I see that those would be extremely popular. If we could actually find genes that would enable us to ?say? regrow a limb or stop aging, it would be very hard for any government to outlaw the spread of such a gene. The human desire for better health, longer life and endless youth is too strong. Here?s a question. If you could choose immortality for your children, but not yourself, would you do it? Tara Maya Blog | Twitter | Facebook | Amazon | Goodreads > On Nov 23, 2015, at 5:01 PM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > > ?Yes, why not indeed? I notice that you did not mention mental disorders such as neuroticism, which afflicts a large segment of the population, depression, psychoticism, psychopathy and others. Very few families are mentally 'clean' and healthy. And dental: put dentists permanently out of business - maybe even create a gene that enables a lost tooth to be replaced/regenerated. While you are at regeneration, regenerate telomeres and reduce effects of aging?. bill w > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Nov 24 01:32:57 2015 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2015 19:32:57 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Limits of human modification In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 7:22 PM, Tara Maya wrote: > We don?t know enough yet, or at least I don?t know that we know, about > what causes the more subtle disorders of the mind (or even of the body). > For instance, if susceptibility to depression is caused by a single gene, I > think it would be targeted for elimination. But what if it?s a lot more > complicated than that? Or what if depression is one of those things that?s > much more about nurture than nature? > > Then there?s the separate issue of genes that are both positive/negative. > Myopia is often seen with high IQ, but do they have to go together? How > about depression and artistic ability? These could be linked purely by > coincidence. Or they maybe linked by some common cause but can still be > delinked. There are some things which probably can?t be unlinked, for > instance ?courage? and ?taking too many risks? because they are really the > same thing just seen in a different light. > > Finally, all regeneration and anti-aging things I would lump under Health. > I see that those would be extremely popular. If we could actually find > genes that would enable us to ?say? regrow a limb or stop aging, it would > be very hard for any government to outlaw the spread of such a gene. The > human desire for better health, longer life and endless youth is too strong. > > Here?s a question. If you could choose immortality for your children, but > not yourself, would you do it? > > Tara Maya > ?I assume that at some point in the future, every single human characteristic will be found to be determined, at least in part, by genes, perhaps quite a few of them.? ?Yes to your question. If they don't like immortality they have options. Perhaps if there were a way to eliminate certain memories it would be easier to live longer. Here's one for you all: if you could eliminate religious feelings, tendencies to worship gods or even people, superstitions, would you?? Blog | Twitter > | Facebook > | > Amazon > | > Goodreads > > > > On Nov 23, 2015, at 5:01 PM, William Flynn Wallace > wrote: > > ?Yes, why not indeed? I notice that you did not mention mental disorders > such as neuroticism, which afflicts a large segment of the population, > depression, psychoticism, psychopathy and others. Very few families are > mentally 'clean' and healthy. And dental: put dentists permanently out of > business - maybe even create a gene that enables a lost tooth to be > replaced/regenerated. While you are at regeneration, regenerate telomeres > and reduce effects of aging?. bill w > > > > _______________________________________________ > 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 tara at taramayastales.com Tue Nov 24 06:17:45 2015 From: tara at taramayastales.com (Tara Maya) Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2015 22:17:45 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Limits of human modification In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <23A08566-89A1-4DE3-9035-47BBC4930F82@taramayastales.com> I would eliminate superstitions, or our very bad ability to just statistics intuitively, which I believe is related to being superstitious. I would not eliminate religious feelings?IF, as I suspect, it is linked to our ability to understand other minds. You may be familiar with the theory that autism is a kind of mindblindness. A theory of mine (which may be incorrect), is that the human need to address inanimate forces as spirits or gods (or patterns in the will of one all-powerful God) is a kind inverse mindblindness. If autistic people tend to treat other people as inanimate objects, the religious person is inclined to treat inanimate objects as if they were people. (Martin Buber celebrates this very tendency.) But I believe that the ability to write fiction is also directly related to this capacity. Creativity of this kind, storytelling specifically, is a like overdetermined mind sightedness. But, being a writer myself, I should hate to eliminate this ability in my children, or in the human race. I think some people also call this Emotional Intelligence. Interestingly, when I did my genealogy, I was struck by the high percentage of clergymen there were in the earlier generations. (One of them had a daughter accused of witchcraft at Salem! She wasn?t killed because he put in a word for her.) Later generations had less clergy? but more fiction writers. Of course, if there were a way to untangle the ability to imagine other mind form the tendency to distrust science, that would be nice. I?m not really sure that?s a genetic issue, but maybe it is. Certainly I?ve noticed that even academics in the liberal arts who are atheists but still very ?mind sighted? also seem to share an antipathy to science shared by the most uneducated and fanatical folk who otherwise have nothing in common with them. Odd! But maybe it?s just because people who are very story-wise are not often good at math and science. If you could boost one without losing the other, that would be my preference. Tara Maya Blog | Twitter | Facebook | Amazon | Goodreads > On Nov 23, 2015, at 5:32 PM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > > ?I assume that at some point in the future, every single human characteristic will be found to be determined, at least in part, by genes, perhaps quite a few of them.? > > ?Yes to your question. If they don't like immortality they have options. Perhaps if there were a way to eliminate certain memories it would be easier to live longer. > > Here's one for you all: if you could eliminate religious feelings, tendencies to worship gods or even people, superstitions, would you?? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Tue Nov 24 16:53:54 2015 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2015 11:53:54 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Limits of human modification In-Reply-To: <56526D84.7050701@mydruthers.com> References: <56526D84.7050701@mydruthers.com> Message-ID: On Sun, Nov 22, 2015 at 8:36 PM, Chris Hibbert wrote: Hmm. These seems like reasonable things to think about before you unleash > something on your progeny and the world, but they seem extremely difficult > to measure in an objective way by a global police force (or even a benign > scientific overseer). Even trying to distinguish the econometric as > objective and the well-being as subjective seems fraught with problems. > It's somewhat true that we have instruments for measuring these kinds of > outcomes across societies, but I don't think anyone has done anything > approaching a respectable job of analyzing them prospectively for proposals > that haven't been implemented yet. > ### You can't produce a precise prediction of GDP for all actions but we can make reasonably confident estimates for many actions. In fact, it's done all the time, and it is the basis for both national policy and individual business decisions. One point that I am trying to make is that human eugenic modification is not substantially different from other actions that have impact on the future, and therefore the same general tools we use for business forecasting are, with modifications, appropriate for eugenics. I would disagree with saying that applications of such tools to eugenics is "extremely difficult", in fact, it should be no more difficult than predicting the impact of e.g. trade barriers or building a power plant. Also, such calculations should not be done a police force, since these are enforcers, not creators of law, and I would be appalled at the idea of a global eugenic authority - but these are issues only indirectly related to constructing the permissibility test. ------------------ > > So, as I said, it seems reasonable, so ask someone who has developed > germline techniques, and is considering applying them to himself or to > paying customers or volunteers, to consider the plausible consequences out > to the third or fourth generation at least. And perhaps this is a > reasonable approach to recommend that institutional review boards take, as > long as they have the ability to consider such questions in a civil manner. > But hoping that this will be done in a way that politicians or the public > can agree on the outcome seems unlikely to be fruitful. ### Can you point to a better alternative? Rafa? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Tue Nov 24 17:22:55 2015 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2015 12:22:55 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Limits of human modification In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 1:52 PM, John Clark wrote: > On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 7:49 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki < > rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote: > > ?> ? >> I think that the most appropriate test for permissibility of human >> germline modifications should be a composite of predicted net impact on >> social utility assessed by a subjective measure >> > > ?In the entire history of the world the human race has never agreed on > what is good and what is bad, and although CRISPER may change many things I > doubt it will change that. > ### Thank you for sharing this insight. ---------------- > > >> ?> ? >> and an objective measure. >> > > ?And of course there is no objective measure of right and wrong. > ### Abstracting from your somewhat glib comment, GDP in the eugenic permissibility test is intended to measure externalities. GDP is a good proxy for the overall level of achievement of human goals under many conditions, and by measuring impact on GDP we can say if a eugenic modification provides tangible benefits or inflicts net losses on our society. If the GDP impact of e.g. a new gene that enables underwater breathing is positive, we should allow underwater breathing because it is in our common economic interest to do so. By using GDP rather than individual impacts we assure that the globally useful change is not scuttled by special interests, in this example, makers of scuba gear. GDP impact of a genetic modification allows us to translate the description from the language of armchair philosophising ("right and wrong") into the language of efficient action. Money is the language of truth. The objective test of the gene mod asks "What's in it for all of us?" and the predicted GDP change is the straight answer. ------------------- > ?Choose any 2 economists ? > ?and they will give you 2 mutually exclusive ways that they insist is the > one and only way to increase the GDP. And that is even without CRISPER. > ### This is incorrect. There is a near-unanimous agreement among economists on many fundamental findings of economics, although, obviously, we hear more about the marginal issues that they disagree on. All economists will agree that cheaply eliminating e.g. childhood cancer will have a positive long term impact on net GDP per capita. ----------------------- > > >> ?> ? >> A first-generation IQ boost could become a net drag on the economy where >> third-generation boost is needed for an entry job, so it might become >> unacceptable. >> > > ? > And if one nation is able to prevent its people from receiving a IQ boost > you can be certain that nation will soon be a footnote to history because > other nations will not have such anti intellectual tendencies. But they > probably couldn't enforce their > Luddite proclamation because the children of those who went to the black > market and defied their rulers edict would be smarter than those who > followed the law and thus would soon be running the show. > ### Your comment doesn't seem to relate well to the example I gave. Rafa? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Tue Nov 24 17:31:53 2015 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2015 12:31:53 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Limits of human modification In-Reply-To: References: <56526D84.7050701@mydruthers.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 10:50 AM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > The subjective measure would be a test of well-being. > > How about using happiness as a test of gene modification? It can be > predicted well. Just add a chromosome 21 and you have Down's Syndrome. > Happiest people in the world - sunny. Average IQ = 25. > ### This is why the GDP test comes before the well-being test. First you need to show the mod is good for the rest of us, only then you can go to point its non-inferiority from the point of view of the individual who is being created. Using genetic engineering to make happy idiots would fail the overall test, no matter how potentially happy the idiots might be. Nozick's experience machine comes to mind as a related thought experiment. Eugenically creating extremely productive and yet happy geniuses would obviously pass the test. Creating manic-depressive geniuses would pass the test only if their well-being was on average no worse than the well-being of the unmodified parental strain. Rafa? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Tue Nov 24 17:39:49 2015 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2015 12:39:49 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Limits of human modification In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 6:19 PM, Tara Maya wrote: > > > Third - If neither of your parents has the ?optimum? gene for a certain > spot, but another relative? or another donor, related or not ? has the > gene? or it can be made directly (I don?t know the tech involved), then why > not add it? > ### CRISPR can easily put in anything that is small enough to fit into a guide RNA but with DNA-based inserts you can put multi-kilobase stretches of DNA. Generally, anything you know the sequence of and up to a few thousand base pairs in length can be synthesized in the lab and should be deliverable. Rafa? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Tue Nov 24 17:46:20 2015 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2015 12:46:20 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Limits of human modification In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 8:22 PM, Tara Maya wrote: > > > Here?s a question. If you could choose immortality for your children, but > not yourself, would you do it? > ### Yes, of course. I love my daughter and I would not begrudge her more life even if I couldn't get it myself. Equally clearly, it would be much better to become immortal together. I was quite happy when my daughter Nymeria asked me to sign her up for cryonics, and she is now an Alcor member like me but at the tender age of 11. Rafa? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Tue Nov 24 17:57:34 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2015 09:57:34 -0800 Subject: [ExI] go amazon! Message-ID: <002801d126e1$9a045f90$ce0d1eb0$@att.net> Bezos manages to land one on its feet: http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/24/technology/jeff-bezos-rocket-landing/index.h tml Cool! spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Nov 24 18:17:28 2015 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2015 12:17:28 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Limits of human modification In-Reply-To: <23A08566-89A1-4DE3-9035-47BBC4930F82@taramayastales.com> References: <23A08566-89A1-4DE3-9035-47BBC4930F82@taramayastales.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 12:17 AM, Tara Maya wrote: > I would eliminate superstitions, or our very bad ability to just > statistics intuitively, which I believe is related to being superstitious. > > I would not eliminate religious feelings?IF, as I suspect, it is linked to > our ability to understand other minds. You may be familiar with the theory > that autism is a kind of mindblindness. A theory of mine (which may be > incorrect), is that the human need to address inanimate forces as spirits > or gods (or patterns in the will of one all-powerful God) is a kind inverse > mindblindness. If autistic people tend to treat other people as inanimate > objects, the religious person is inclined to treat inanimate objects as if > they were people. (Martin Buber celebrates this very tendency.) > > But I believe that the ability to write fiction is also directly related > to this capacity. Creativity of this kind, storytelling specifically, is a > like overdetermined mind sightedness. But, being a writer myself, I should > hate to eliminate this ability in my children, or in the human race. I > think some people also call this Emotional Intelligence. > > Interestingly, when I did my genealogy, I was struck by the high > percentage of clergymen there were in the earlier generations. (One of them > had a daughter accused of witchcraft at Salem! She wasn?t killed because he > put in a word for her.) Later generations had less clergy? but more fiction > writers. > > Of course, if there were a way to untangle the ability to imagine other > mind form the tendency to distrust science, that would be nice. I?m not > really sure that?s a genetic issue, but maybe it is. Certainly I?ve noticed > that even academics in the liberal arts who are atheists but still very > ?mind sighted? also seem to share an antipathy to science shared by the > most uneducated and fanatical folk who otherwise have nothing in common > with them. Odd! But maybe it?s just because people who are very story-wise > are not often good at math and science. If you could boost one without > losing the other, that would be my preference. > > Tara Maya > ?That's very interesting. I have never heard creativity and emotional intelligence conflated. I tend to disagree with it, but then our understanding of creativity (C) is very poor. In a general way, we can say that C is something people like or find useful, but in certain fields, like classical music or the visual arts, there is tremendous disagreement on C. What do you think of Alexander McCall Smith? He surely can spin stories, but I'll bet the literati hold their noses when he is mentioned. I do hope that we can eliminate our race's tendency to worship things like trees or ancestors or farm animals. That may be different from superstition. I suspect we will need a few hundred years of research to tease these things out (once we have reached some agreed-upon definitions, which we certainly do not have now - and may never have if philosophers keep dithering). Those in academia who distrust science may be those who still believe in the blank slate and deny the role of genes (not just sociologists), like those who would deny the role of gender in the differences in math scores at the high end, despite the overwhelming evidence. ("My theory is correct. Never mind what the data say." - the tail wagging the dog). I very much doubt that they deny findings in physics or chemistry. They don't know enough to do that. Of course they don't know enough psychology either. Re clergy: the first son inherits. The second and thereafter go into academia or the ministry, in British history and some others. bill w ? > Blog | Twitter > | Facebook > | > Amazon > | > Goodreads > > > > On Nov 23, 2015, at 5:32 PM, William Flynn Wallace > wrote: > > ?I assume that at some point in the future, every single human > characteristic will be found to be determined, at least in part, by genes, > perhaps quite a few of them.? > > > ?Yes to your question. If they don't like immortality they have options. > Perhaps if there were a way to eliminate certain memories it would be > easier to live longer. > > Here's one for you all: if you could eliminate religious feelings, > tendencies to worship gods or even people, superstitions, would you?? > > > > _______________________________________________ > 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 danust2012 at gmail.com Tue Nov 24 19:05:22 2015 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2015 11:05:22 -0800 Subject: [ExI] go amazon! In-Reply-To: <002801d126e1$9a045f90$ce0d1eb0$@att.net> References: <002801d126e1$9a045f90$ce0d1eb0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Nov 24, 2558 BE, at 9:57 AM, spike wrote: > > Bezos manages to land one on its feet: > > http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/24/technology/jeff-bezos-rocket-landing/index.html > > Cool! Hella cool! Hope it ramps up the private spaceflight race. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books via: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Nov 24 23:27:09 2015 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2015 17:27:09 -0600 Subject: [ExI] bar sinister gets more than you, was:... gets more than you do In-Reply-To: References: <00bb01d124da$bd2e1780$378a4680$@att.net> <00f001d124e5$14e41e20$3eac5a60$@att.net> <000001d124eb$f1cccb60$d5666220$@att.net> <016101d1258d$112b4580$3381d080$@att.net> Message-ID: Adrian wrote: What do I do with my take? Make life more awesome for many, possibly most, people permanently (or as close to permanent as we get these days). ---------------------------------- ?Now this is a great topic.? I sometimes daydream about having a billion dollars, or ten billion or something, and plan what to do with it. Surely some of you have the same daydream. So - just what *would you do *with some large amount of money Let's say 10 billion. ?As Jesus said, the poor are always with us, so I will aim for some elites. (Although I have read a while back that one could supply clean water to everyone in the world for 10 billion, which I have to sincerely doubt. If true, that's what I would do.)? My money goes to establishing a college for musical and math (not necessarily both) prodigies, age unlimited. Free tuition. Room and board provided for the needy. Highly paid profs. Alums provide funding when money runs out - hopefully. Well, OK, a couple of million just for me and my toys. How about you? bill w On Sun, Nov 22, 2015 at 10:04 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Sun, Nov 22, 2015 at 5:19 PM, spike wrote: > >> *From:* extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] *On >> Behalf Of *Adrian Tymes >> *?* >> >> When I run it, I get a maximum of 333333333 pennies ($3,333,333.33) with >> an average expected payout of 166666666.5 pennies ($1,666,666.665)? >> Adrian >> >> To clean it up a bit, assume integer number of dollars and zero is not a >> possibility. >> > > Changes the answer to $3,333,333.34. > > >> I also got your result from my sim: your optimal bid is 3,333,333 and >> your expected winnings are 1,666,667 bucks and that greedy Mr. Potter?s >> take is twice that, curse the bastard. >> > > The best revenge is a life lived well. What does he do with his take? > Make a few peoples' lives miserable temporarily. What do I do with my > take? Make life more awesome for many, possibly most, people permanently > (or as close to permanent as we get these days). > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Nov 25 00:16:11 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2015 16:16:11 -0800 Subject: [ExI] bar sinister gets more than you, was:... gets more than you do In-Reply-To: References: <00bb01d124da$bd2e1780$378a4680$@att.net> <00f001d124e5$14e41e20$3eac5a60$@att.net> <000001d124eb$f1cccb60$d5666220$@att.net> <016101d1258d$112b4580$3381d080$@att.net> Message-ID: <009c01d12716$7df950f0$79ebf2d0$@att.net> From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace /// Adrian wrote: What do I do with my take? Make life more awesome for many, possibly most, people permanently (or as close to permanent as we get these days). ---------------------------------- ?Now this is a great topic.? I sometimes daydream about having a billion dollars, or ten billion or something, and plan what to do with it. Surely some of you have the same daydream?How about you? bill w OK then, the DJIA closed today at 17812.19 so the decimal .19 rounds to .2, divide by pi^2 gives us 1804.7521, throw away everything to the left of the decimal and scale up by 7 digits, the vault contains $7 521 741 which is lucky as all hell for me. If I bid the optimum strategy for my take, I bid $3,333,333 and I get all of it. Potter gets $4 188 408, and then of course you add it to the 8000 bucks the evil bastard stole from old Uncle Billy and sure he is still rich, but so am I. All in all it was a good imaginary day. I managed to find a closed form optimization strategy. The Monte Carlo sim was right (Monte Carlo sims always are) when it suggested bidding one third the highest possible amount. I did, and I get all of that today. Woohoo! When I got that closed-form solution I found something else kinda fun. Imagine a variation on the theme, where it isn?t quite as benign as going home empty handed if you over bid. In this diabolical variation from hell, if you bid more than the amount in the vault, you must make up the difference from your own pocket to pay Potter that amount. If for instance the maximum amount is 10 million, you bid 1 million, then in about 1 in every 10 trials, you must dig into your own pocket to give Mr. Potter whatever is in that vault below a million bucks, owwwww. So Potter?s minimum take is whatever you bid. But some of it will be your own money. In the variation from hell, it is still advantageous for you to play the game. But your mathematical expectation is lower and your optimal bid strategy is different. What a cool game! spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hrivera at alumni.virginia.edu Wed Nov 25 02:54:37 2015 From: hrivera at alumni.virginia.edu (Henry Rivera) Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2015 21:54:37 -0500 Subject: [ExI] bees Message-ID: I know Spike follows this topic. >From today's PBS Newshour. -Henry Are pesticides to blame for the massive bee die-off? Video: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/are-pesticides-to-blame-for-the-massive-bee-die-off/ TRANSCRIPT JUDY WOODRUFF: In this week when we think about food, we take a look now at the vital role bees play in getting some of your favorite dishes to the table, and the way commercial beekeepers in the U.S. are struggling to keep their bees healthy. Allison Aubrey of National Public Radio has our report. The story is part of the NewsHour?s ongoing collaboration with NPR. ALLISON AUBREY: It?s harvest time at Adee Honey Farms in Bruce, South Dakota. Bret Adee?s the third generation to manage the 80,000 hives the Adees have scattered across five Midwestern states. He says beekeeping these days is much harder than it?s ever been. BRET ADEE, Adee Honey Farms: In 2010, our bees were just destroyed in a couple of weeks. Most of our bees died. ALLISON AUBREY: Bret says things really haven?t improved much. BRET ADEE: I would to see about twice to three times as many bees in most of the hives right now. It will be a real challenge to keep them alive through the winter. ALLISON AUBREY: The Adees are not alone. According to a preliminary survey from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, commercial beekeepers lost 42 percent of their colonies last year. Bees are a critical part of agriculture. Adee trucks his bees out to pollinate California?s almond groves every year. And it?s not just almonds. Bees pollinate everything from apples to cherries and squash. To figure out what?s plaguing the bees, the Obama administration assembled a task force last year. Scientists at the EPA, USDA and researchers across the country who have been studying the problem are finding there are multiple issues. Bees have fewer wildflowers to forage on due to a loss of habitat. There?s viruses that pests pass on to the bees. Climate change is thought to play a role too. Another issue is pesticides. Some studies suggest that a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoid, or neonics for short, are harming the bees. These pesticides are coated onto the seed of about 80 percent of the corn that?s grown in the United States and about half the soybeans too. To get a sense of that scale, imagine a cornfield like this taking up the entire state of California. That?s how much of this pre-treated seed is being planted. CHRISTIAN KRUPKE, Purdue University: This is what corn seeds look like after they have been treated. ALLISON AUBREY: The pesticide is put onto the corn before it?s ever planted? CHRISTIAN KRUPKE: That?s right. ALLISON AUBREY: Christian Krupke is an entomologist at Purdue University who studies bees. His research shows that neonicotinoids can harm bees. What is a neonicotinoid? CHRISTIAN KRUPKE: A neonicotinoid is ? as the name would suggest, it?s based on nicotine. They?re less toxic to mammals, which is a big feature in their wide adoption. But they are more toxic to honey bees and to other insects. ALLISON AUBREY: Neonics are a relatively new class of pesticide. They have been around since the early 1990s. They are easier for farmers to use than the traditional method of spraying crops. And according to researchers at Penn State University, their use has increased more than 11-fold since 2003. Companies that sell them are making billions of dollars. CHRISTIAN KRUPKE: Virtually all of these large acre plants are being treated. So, the level of use is way out of step with the level of the threat. In most fields, and where we have worked, we just haven?t been able to find levels of pests that would justify the level of use. ALLISON AUBREY: Krupke published a study that linked bee deaths with the pesticide-laden dust that flies up during the planting of the pre-treated corn seeds. CHRISTIAN KRUPKE: We collected some of those bees and analyzed them and found neonicotinoids on them and in them, so there is an intersection between planting these crops and killing foraging honey bees. ALLISON AUBREY: Bayer CropScience is one of the leading manufacturers of neonicotinoids. Bayer?s chief scientist, David Fischer, acknowledges Krupke?s findings, but he says Bayer has a seed lubricant that reduces the dust. He says that, outside these acute exposures, neonicotinoids are not harmful to bees. DAVID FISCHER, Bayer CropScience: We have done those studies. And those studies basically show, if you spray the product, it?s not safe for the bees. If you apply the product to the soil or as a seed treatment, the level of residues that gets up into the plant is in a safe range. ALLISON AUBREY: Christian Krupke is not convinced. CHRISTIAN KRUPKE: We find these pesticides in the water. Bees drink water. Plants use water. We find that wildflowers that grow near these areas also have some of these pesticides in them. You add that up over the course of a season, and, yes, we do find concerning levels. ALLISON AUBREY: Krupke says those levels do not kill the bees, but may leave them more vulnerable. Bayer?s chief scientist says the major threat to bees is a mite that punctures the honey bees body and feeds on its blood. It?s known as the Varroa mite. And a recent report issued by President Obama?s task force also points to the mite as one issue. DAVID FISCHER: Eighty percent of the problem is Varroa mites and the viruses and the diseases those viruses cause. ALLISON AUBREY: But some beekeepers suspect the increased use of the newer pesticides is making their bees more vulnerable to the mite. BRET ADEE: For 15 years, we managed that Varroa mite and kept our losses under 5 to 8 percent. Now we?re losing 50 percent of the bees every year. ALLISON AUBREY: Pesticide manufacturers, including Bayer and Syngenta have launched campaigns of their own to boost bee health. Both companies are planting millions of flowers in the U.S. to increase bee forage. And in 2014, Bayer CropScience opened this $2 million bee care center in North Carolina, where they conduct workshops and tours. Environmentalists say these initiatives are a diversion from the real problem, the pesticides these companies manufacture, something Fischer rejects. DAVID FISCHER: Bayer has actually been in the business of providing products to beekeepers for more than 20 years. It?s not something that we just started doing. ALLISON AUBREY: Beekeepers in Europe came out in force a few years ago in support of the European Union?s partial ban on the use of some of these neonics. And here in the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency says it will speed up a safety review and likely not allow any new uses of the pesticide. Environmental groups are locked in several court battles challenging the EPA over the registration of these pesticides. Manufacturers maintain that neonics are vital for increasing crop production and safer than spraying. DAVID FISCHER: They?re extremely valuable. They increase crop yields often by 20 percent vs. the other competitors. So, they contribute billions of dollars to the ag economy in the United States. CHRISTIAN KRUPKE: That would be true if these products, these neonicotinoids, were indispensable to these crops, to agriculture, but they?re not. Some of our own work in corn and the work of others in the United States has shown that it?s very difficult to consistently show a yield benefit. ALLISON AUBREY: Lucas Criswell farms close to 2,000 acres of corn, soybeans, wheat and rye in Pennsylvania?s Susquehanna Valley. He has stopped using treated seed because he found it wasn?t only killing the bad pests, but the pests he needed to ward off the slugs that were eating his soybean crops. LUCAS CRISWELL, Farmer: The soil in our fields are a huge ecology of different critters and insects. And they?re all there. We need good and bad. It takes a balance of them all, and that?s what we have seen. ALLISON AUBREY: Criswell now keeps pests at bay in his fields by planting crops that encourage beneficial insects. The treated seeds cost more, so this method ends up being cheaper for him. Is it too soon enough to say whether you?re getting the same yields? LUCAS CRISWELL: Is there corn growing on that hill? It grew. ALLISON AUBREY: It looks like a lot of corn. Earlier this year, President Obama?s task force called for a reevaluation of the pesticides. And, consistent with the president?s requirements, the EPA has expedited its review. I?m Allison Aubrey of NPR News for the PBS NewsHour in Bruce, South Dakota. From atymes at gmail.com Wed Nov 25 04:01:45 2015 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2015 20:01:45 -0800 Subject: [ExI] bar sinister gets more than you, was:... gets more than you do In-Reply-To: References: <00bb01d124da$bd2e1780$378a4680$@att.net> <00f001d124e5$14e41e20$3eac5a60$@att.net> <000001d124eb$f1cccb60$d5666220$@att.net> <016101d1258d$112b4580$3381d080$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 3:27 PM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > > Now this is a great topic.? I sometimes daydream about having a billion > dollars, or ten billion or something, and plan what to do with it. Surely > some of you have the same daydream. > > So - just what *would you do *with some large amount of money Let's say > 10 billion. > Well, for me of course this isn't such a hypothetical, at least for lower amounts. I'd take that first $6 million and fund my rocket venture, CubeCab. Anyone with $750,000 - or a significant chunk thereof - to invest, who meets SEC angel investor guidelines, contact me offlist and I can give you a budget for how we'd use that for the next phase of CubeCab. More broadly, I'd encourage everyone on this list to think about how they could use a few million to generate at least that much (preferably much more) via some product or service that could benefit humanity. We have knowledge of and access to some of the best technology on Earth - at least, more knowledge & access than the average human being, by far. These technologies are cool precisely because they enable things that are impossible, or at least a lot more expensive and difficult, without them. Therefore, where the enabled activities are desirable and/or productive (which is often a subset of "desirable"), it should not be difficult to find a way to use these to generate wealth. So, given some starting capital, how do you turn this into a business that can repay said starting capital several times over? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Nov 25 06:27:04 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2015 22:27:04 -0800 Subject: [ExI] bees In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <005d01d1274a$4e033030$ea099090$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Henry Rivera Subject: [ExI] bees I know Spike follows this topic. >From today's PBS Newshour. -Henry Are pesticides to blame for the massive bee die-off? Video: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/are-pesticides-to-blame-for-the-massive-bee-die-off/ Thanks Henry, The bees are a part of a bigger topic I have been thinking about for a long time: the creation of some kind of systematic way of observing changes in nature over time and recording it. I have been a bee watcher, and I know how bees behaved in my own misspent youth. It feels like bees just aren't as robust as I recall them from about 40 yrs ago. Bees used to swarm all over everything while we were working. Now it seems the hives contain about half or possibly less than half the bee population from those days. We might see subtle changes in birds and other beasts as well, but if change is gradual, we might not notice. Regarding some kind of systematic way to record the natural world, YouTube gets me part of the way there. I am thinking in the big picture here, some next-generation indexing method for archiving any natural metric we can think of. We have surface temperature records and these cause us to theorize on the notion of global warming. We should have something analogous to temperature data, recording a thousand metrics where now there is one. spike From sparge at gmail.com Wed Nov 25 14:13:42 2015 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2015 09:13:42 -0500 Subject: [ExI] bees In-Reply-To: <005d01d1274a$4e033030$ea099090$@att.net> References: <005d01d1274a$4e033030$ea099090$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Nov 25, 2015 at 1:27 AM, spike wrote: > > The bees are a part of a bigger topic I have been thinking about for a > long time: the creation of some kind of systematic way of observing changes > in nature over time and recording it. I have been a bee watcher, and I > know how bees behaved in my own misspent youth. It feels like bees just > aren't as robust as I recall them from about 40 yrs ago. Bees used to > swarm all over everything while we were working. Now it seems the hives > contain about half or possibly less than half the bee population from those > days. > > We might see subtle changes in birds and other beasts as well, but if > change is gradual, we might not notice. > That's exactly why the National Phenology Network and their Nature's Notebook exist: * Nature's Notebook *is a national, online program where amateur and professional naturalists regularly record observations of plants and animals to generate long-term data sets used for scientific discovery and decision-making. https://www.usanpn.org/natures_notebook Regarding some kind of systematic way to record the natural world, YouTube > gets me part of the way there. I am thinking in the big picture here, some > next-generation indexing method for archiving any natural metric we can > think of. We have surface temperature records and these cause us to > theorize on the notion of global warming. We should have something > analogous to temperature data, recording a thousand metrics where now there > is one. > https://www.usanpn.org/ -Dave -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Wed Nov 25 18:34:16 2015 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2015 13:34:16 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Limits of human modification In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 12:22 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki < rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote: ?>> ? >> ?In the entire history of the world the human race has never agreed on >> what is good and what is bad, and although CRISPER may change many things I >> doubt it will change that. >> > > ?> ? > Thank you for sharing this insight. > ?You are entirely welcome. ?Everybody is entitled to my opinion. ? >> ?>> ? >> Choose any 2 economists ?and they will give you 2 mutually exclusive >> ways that they insist is the one and only way to increase the GDP. And that >> is even without CRISPER. > > > > This is incorrect. There is a near-unanimous agreement among economists > on many fundamental findings of economics, In the USA the Federal Reserve is thinking about raising interest rates in December, half the world's economists think that would be a wonderful idea, the other half thinks it would be a terrible idea, there are Nobel Prize winners on both sides and everybody is absolutely positively 100% certain they are right. And you expect them to reach a consensus on the long term effects on GDP of a genetic modification of the human germline?? There is a reason economics is called the dismal science. ?> ? > All economists will agree that cheaply eliminating e.g. childhood cancer > will have a positive long term impact on net GDP per capita. ?Do all economists agree that forcing people to have stupider children than what modern medicine would allow them to have will result in ? a positive long term impact on net GDP per capita ?? ? > ?> ? > GDP in the eugenic permissibility test is intended to measure > externalities. > ? ? > GDP is a good proxy for the overall level of achievement of human goals > under many conditions > ?I agree, but the GDP depends on the economy which depends on the vagaries of the natural world as well as the collective output of billions of brains, the most complex object in the known universe. All this makes the economy rather difficult to predict, especially in the long term. ? > ?> ? > Money is the language of truth. The objective test of the gene mod asks > "What's in it for all of us?" ?I agree. So let group X decide to have stupid children and let group Y decide to have smart children and let the market objectively decide which group ends up with more money and if the statement "being stupid will make you richer than being smart" is objectively true. > ?> ? > If the GDP impact of e.g. a new gene that enables underwater breathing is > positive, we should allow underwater breathing because it is in our common > economic interest to do so. > ?Allowed? We're not talking about nuclear weapons with their huge isotope separation factories, genetic engineering is getting easier to do every day and will soon be done in individuals garage labs; so how do you intend to enforce your reproductive edict worldwide? You must realize that the one group or nation that is successful in defying your edict will be the group or nation that inherits the future. John K Clark ? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hrivera at alumni.virginia.edu Thu Nov 26 01:34:45 2015 From: hrivera at alumni.virginia.edu (Henry Rivera) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2015 20:34:45 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Cryopreservation improvement Message-ID: <7F5924C6-758D-4277-B0D3-56C6CF031685@alumni.virginia.edu> While the article speaks to tissues and organs, I presume this could eventually lead to improved full-body cryonics. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-11-discovery-door-frozen-tissues.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tara at taramayastales.com Thu Nov 26 05:31:53 2015 From: tara at taramayastales.com (Tara Maya) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2015 21:31:53 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Limits of human modification In-Reply-To: References: <23A08566-89A1-4DE3-9035-47BBC4930F82@taramayastales.com> Message-ID: <18839D9D-83A3-4DF8-884D-3BC6008F79F7@taramayastales.com> There are so many forms of creativity, not just in the fine arts, I certainly don?t claim all of them require emotional intelligence. But storytelling, especially ?character based fiction,? involves placing yourself into other minds and imagining not just ?What would I do if X happened?? but also ?How would I feel if X happened ?and why?? Re: Academia. There was an attempt, in my field, History, to import the tools of the harder social sciences, like statistics. This attempt withered in the desert of math skills of those in the field. After all, if those of us in the liberal arts understood math, we?d go get real jobs (and higher incomes) in the first place. I don?t think it?s at all a coincidence that right after the attempt to make the soft sciences ?harder? failed, the postmodernists took over. One thing you can say for postmodernism, you don?t need math to understand it. In fact, you don?t really need to understand it. You just need to be eloquent. Which brings me to a related capacity (disease?) that is almost certainly genetic: hypergraphia. The love or even obsession with words. Hypothesis: If hypergraphia and religious tendencies are linked (some preliminary studies on the brain suggest this) it would explain why all the earliest books in the world were written by religious freaks! Maybe there was just as high a proportion of skeptics in ancient times after all, but it?s only recently that they?ve learned to defend themselves in writing! (Read The Worms and the Cheese, the records of an ordinary fellow being tortured by the Inquisition because of his absolutely prosaic account of creation arising through natural processes, like coagulating cheese.) After all, it wasn?t just in Europe that writing was mostly the task of clergy. Sanskrit in India was created by holy men to write holy texts, the Buddhists and Taoists in China and Japan wrote many of the earliest books, in the Middle East, Arabic literacy spread with the Qu?ran. Missionaries were among the first makers of dictionaries and learned thousands of rare languages in order to translate the bible and convert tribes, in fact, often even inventing alphabets for them. Coincidence, or do religious people really, really love words?! Religious people have also burned a lot of books, but then many a writer would burn their competition if they could get away with it?. Re: clergy. It?s possible that the percent of clergy among my ancestors was perfectly normal and it just seems high to me because I can?t figure out why anyone would need so many of that vocation! Did one out of every three male British children really enter the clergy, or was that just in the upper class? My ancestors were thoroughly middle class, right back to the earliest know bearers of the patronym. One of them did acquire a knightly coat of arms, but it turns out he was a rich clerk who just bought it. (Which was illegal but common.) Then they became Puritans and sailed to America and the whole branch had ten kids each for the next three hundred years, and I swear, the number of them that became ministers was ludicrous. To me. But a few went to Boston and became Transcendentalists and Poets after the Revolution, and later in the 19th century, writers of Anti-Slavery Pamphlets, while those in the south and the midwest still reared up Ministers (and also didn?t seem to mind slavery). And then into the early twentieth century that northern branch and western branch produced a lot of playwrights, poets, failed novelists (I didn?t say they were *good* writers). The line in the south and midwest made more ministers. Lots and lots. But of course, this doesn?t prove anything. Even if one family tree were not just anecdotal, the individuals that stand out are bound to be those who acquired some sort of standing, whether in writing or a church. There were also plenty of cowboys and farmers in the midwest and furniture sellers and middle managers in the north and west. I haven?t done a statistical analysis. If I knew that much math, I?d have a real job! Oh, and the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series rocks! Tara Maya Blog | Twitter | Facebook | Amazon | Goodreads > On Nov 24, 2015, at 10:17 AM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > > > > On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 12:17 AM, Tara Maya > wrote: > I would eliminate superstitions, or our very bad ability to just statistics intuitively, which I believe is related to being superstitious. > > I would not eliminate religious feelings?IF, as I suspect, it is linked to our ability to understand other minds. You may be familiar with the theory that autism is a kind of mindblindness. A theory of mine (which may be incorrect), is that the human need to address inanimate forces as spirits or gods (or patterns in the will of one all-powerful God) is a kind inverse mindblindness. If autistic people tend to treat other people as inanimate objects, the religious person is inclined to treat inanimate objects as if they were people. (Martin Buber celebrates this very tendency.) > > But I believe that the ability to write fiction is also directly related to this capacity. Creativity of this kind, storytelling specifically, is a like overdetermined mind sightedness. But, being a writer myself, I should hate to eliminate this ability in my children, or in the human race. I think some people also call this Emotional Intelligence. > > Interestingly, when I did my genealogy, I was struck by the high percentage of clergymen there were in the earlier generations. (One of them had a daughter accused of witchcraft at Salem! She wasn?t killed because he put in a word for her.) Later generations had less clergy? but more fiction writers. > > Of course, if there were a way to untangle the ability to imagine other mind form the tendency to distrust science, that would be nice. I?m not really sure that?s a genetic issue, but maybe it is. Certainly I?ve noticed that even academics in the liberal arts who are atheists but still very ?mind sighted? also seem to share an antipathy to science shared by the most uneducated and fanatical folk who otherwise have nothing in common with them. Odd! But maybe it?s just because people who are very story-wise are not often good at math and science. If you could boost one without losing the other, that would be my preference. > > Tara Maya > > ?That's very interesting. I have never heard creativity and emotional intelligence conflated. I tend to disagree with it, but then our understanding of creativity (C) is very poor. In a general way, we can say that C is something people like or find useful, but in certain fields, like classical music or the visual arts, there is tremendous disagreement on C. > > What do you think of Alexander McCall Smith? He surely can spin stories, but I'll bet the literati hold their noses when he is mentioned. > > I do hope that we can eliminate our race's tendency to worship things like trees or ancestors or farm animals. That may be different from superstition. I suspect we will need a few hundred years of research to tease these things out (once we have reached some agreed-upon definitions, which we certainly do not have now - and may never have if philosophers keep dithering). > > Those in academia who distrust science may be those who still believe in the blank slate and deny the role of genes (not just sociologists), like those who would deny the role of gender in the differences in math scores at the high end, despite the overwhelming evidence. ("My theory is correct. Never mind what the data say." - the tail wagging the dog). I very much doubt that they deny findings in physics or chemistry. They don't know enough to do that. Of course they don't know enough psychology either. > > Re clergy: the first son inherits. The second and thereafter go into academia or the ministry, in British history and some others. > > bill w > > ? > Blog | Twitter | Facebook | Amazon | Goodreads > > > >> On Nov 23, 2015, at 5:32 PM, William Flynn Wallace > wrote: >> >> ?I assume that at some point in the future, every single human characteristic will be found to be determined, at least in part, by genes, perhaps quite a few of them.? >> >> ?Yes to your question. If they don't like immortality they have options. Perhaps if there were a way to eliminate certain memories it would be easier to live longer. >> >> Here's one for you all: if you could eliminate religious feelings, tendencies to worship gods or even people, superstitions, would you?? > > > _______________________________________________ > 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 danust2012 at gmail.com Thu Nov 26 14:43:37 2015 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2015 06:43:37 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Blue Origin vs. SpaceX landings Message-ID: http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/24/9793220/blue-origin-vs-spacex-rocket-landing-jeff-bezos-elon-musk Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books via: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Fri Nov 27 02:15:31 2015 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2015 20:15:31 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Limits of human modification In-Reply-To: <18839D9D-83A3-4DF8-884D-3BC6008F79F7@taramayastales.com> References: <23A08566-89A1-4DE3-9035-47BBC4930F82@taramayastales.com> <18839D9D-83A3-4DF8-884D-3BC6008F79F7@taramayastales.com> Message-ID: Tar wrote: One thing you can say for postmodernism, you don?t need math to understand it. In fact, *you don?t really need to understand it. You just need to be eloquent. * ---------------- That is as profound a statement as I've seen in quite some time. Once we had Reading Through the Curriculum, Math Through the Curriculum, Cognitive Skills Though the Curriculum and so on. I was on a committee as part of the last one. I went to a convention on the subject in Chicago, came home and had to present my findings to the committee. I wrote a paper that limned what I heard there - lots of BS, mostly big words like semiotics and the usual catchphrases. I made the mistake of telling another member about my satire. After a page of my speech, during which all were attentive if not rapt, she just burst out laughing and the hoax was over. Naturally, most of them said that they knew what I was doing all along, blah blah blah. Horsefeathers. They ate it up. All you have to be, says Tara, is eloquent, and she is right. Making sense is optional. Being impressive wins the day. How many of us, when what we read or hear is confusing, blame ourselves rather than the writer or speaker? I'd say probably most of us, at least at times. Time to rethink that. We are all pretty smart here. If we don't understand it, maybe it's not making a lot of sense. (Take that, DeLillo and Pynchon.) Just as in the visual arts, it's what the artist says about the work that sways critics, not the image so much. In an entirely different context, this is what makes for great salespeople (just add the right clothes and body language and facial expressions. If you study persuasion, as I do, these are great models of it.) As a professor my attitude was : this is a performance, it's selling psychology - it's Showtime! As for postmodernism, that was my problem - I was trying to understand it. Take away the smoke and mirrors and there's nothing there. The existentialists strike me much the same way. Literary theories that I have read are laughable. For Tara: there is a difference between emotional and social intelligence. One would think that if one had the former, then one would not make big social blunders, as one could anticipate the emotional reactions of others. Not always true. I have a lot of the former, 99%ile actually (visual test reading emotions on faces), but not a lot of the latter. I speak frankly and honestly and only later learn that people were offended. This is typical among people high in math and music, like a borderline Asperger's. As for soft science, experimental psychology is fairly hard science at times. Clinical is not and never has been and ought to avoid using statistics in any form. I know. I was trained in it, and I did it in several mental hospitals, and I left it in disgust. (FYI - the burnout rate in clinical and in psychiatry in mental hospitals is very high). ?Bill W? On Wed, Nov 25, 2015 at 11:31 PM, Tara Maya wrote: > There are so many forms of creativity, not just in the fine arts, I > certainly don?t claim all of them require emotional intelligence. But > storytelling, especially ?character based fiction,? involves placing > yourself into other minds and imagining not just ?What would I do if X > happened?? but also ?How would I feel if X happened ?and why?? > > Re: Academia. There was an attempt, in my field, History, to import the > tools of the harder social sciences, like statistics. This attempt withered > in the desert of math skills of those in the field. After all, if those of > us in the liberal arts understood math, we?d go get real jobs (and higher > incomes) in the first place. I don?t think it?s at all a coincidence that > right after the attempt to make the soft sciences ?harder? failed, the > postmodernists took over. One thing you can say for postmodernism, you > don?t need math to understand it. In fact, you don?t really need to > understand it. You just need to be eloquent. > > Which brings me to a related capacity (disease?) that is almost certainly > genetic: hypergraphia. The love or even obsession with words. > > Hypothesis: If hypergraphia and religious tendencies are linked (some > preliminary studies on the brain suggest this) it would explain why all the > earliest books in the world were written by religious freaks! Maybe there > was just as high a proportion of skeptics in ancient times after all, but > it?s only recently that they?ve learned to defend themselves in writing! > (Read The Worms and the Cheese, the records of an ordinary fellow being > tortured by the Inquisition because of his absolutely prosaic account of > creation arising through natural processes, like coagulating cheese.) > > After all, it wasn?t just in Europe that writing was mostly the task of > clergy. Sanskrit in India was created by holy men to write holy texts, the > Buddhists and Taoists in China and Japan wrote many of the earliest books, > in the Middle East, Arabic literacy spread with the Qu?ran. Missionaries > were among the first makers of dictionaries and learned thousands of rare > languages in order to translate the bible and convert tribes, in fact, > often even inventing alphabets for them. Coincidence, or do religious > people really, really love words?! > > Religious people have also burned a lot of books, but then many a writer > would burn their competition if they could get away with it?. > > Re: clergy. It?s possible that the percent of clergy among my ancestors > was perfectly normal and it just seems high to me because I can?t figure > out why anyone would need so many of that vocation! Did one out of every > three male British children really enter the clergy, or was that just in > the upper class? > > My ancestors were thoroughly middle class, right back to the earliest know > bearers of the patronym. One of them did acquire a knightly coat of arms, > but it turns out he was a rich clerk who just bought it. (Which was illegal > but common.) Then they became Puritans and sailed to America and the whole > branch had ten kids each for the next three hundred years, and I swear, the > number of them that became ministers was ludicrous. To me. But a few went > to Boston and became Transcendentalists and Poets after the Revolution, > and later in the 19th century, writers of Anti-Slavery Pamphlets, while > those in the south and the midwest still reared up Ministers (and also > didn?t seem to mind slavery). And then into the early twentieth century > that northern branch and western branch produced a lot of playwrights, > poets, failed novelists (I didn?t say they were *good* writers). The line > in the south and midwest made more ministers. Lots and lots. > > But of course, this doesn?t prove anything. Even if one family tree were > not just anecdotal, the individuals that stand out are bound to be those > who acquired some sort of standing, whether in writing or a church. There > were also plenty of cowboys and farmers in the midwest and furniture > sellers and middle managers in the north and west. I haven?t done a > statistical analysis. If I knew that much math, I?d have a real job! > > Oh, and the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series rocks! > > Tara Maya > Blog | Twitter > | Facebook > | > Amazon > | > Goodreads > > > > On Nov 24, 2015, at 10:17 AM, William Flynn Wallace > wrote: > > > > On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 12:17 AM, Tara Maya > wrote: > >> I would eliminate superstitions, or our very bad ability to just >> statistics intuitively, which I believe is related to being superstitious. >> >> I would not eliminate religious feelings?IF, as I suspect, it is linked >> to our ability to understand other minds. You may be familiar with the >> theory that autism is a kind of mindblindness. A theory of mine (which may >> be incorrect), is that the human need to address inanimate forces as >> spirits or gods (or patterns in the will of one all-powerful God) is a kind >> inverse mindblindness. If autistic people tend to treat other people as >> inanimate objects, the religious person is inclined to treat inanimate >> objects as if they were people. (Martin Buber celebrates this very >> tendency.) >> >> But I believe that the ability to write fiction is also directly related >> to this capacity. Creativity of this kind, storytelling specifically, is a >> like overdetermined mind sightedness. But, being a writer myself, I should >> hate to eliminate this ability in my children, or in the human race. I >> think some people also call this Emotional Intelligence. >> >> Interestingly, when I did my genealogy, I was struck by the high >> percentage of clergymen there were in the earlier generations. (One of them >> had a daughter accused of witchcraft at Salem! She wasn?t killed because he >> put in a word for her.) Later generations had less clergy? but more fiction >> writers. >> >> Of course, if there were a way to untangle the ability to imagine other >> mind form the tendency to distrust science, that would be nice. I?m not >> really sure that?s a genetic issue, but maybe it is. Certainly I?ve noticed >> that even academics in the liberal arts who are atheists but still very >> ?mind sighted? also seem to share an antipathy to science shared by the >> most uneducated and fanatical folk who otherwise have nothing in common >> with them. Odd! But maybe it?s just because people who are very story-wise >> are not often good at math and science. If you could boost one without >> losing the other, that would be my preference. >> >> Tara Maya >> > > ?That's very interesting. I have never heard creativity and emotional > intelligence conflated. I tend to disagree with it, but then our > understanding of creativity (C) is very poor. In a general way, we can say > that C is something people like or find useful, but in certain fields, like > classical music or the visual arts, there is tremendous disagreement on C. > > What do you think of Alexander McCall Smith? He surely can spin stories, > but I'll bet the literati hold their noses when he is mentioned. > > I do hope that we can eliminate our race's tendency to worship things like > trees or ancestors or farm animals. That may be different from > superstition. I suspect we will need a few hundred years of research to > tease these things out (once we have reached some agreed-upon definitions, > which we certainly do not have now - and may never have if philosophers > keep dithering). > > Those in academia who distrust science may be those who still believe in > the blank slate and deny the role of genes (not just sociologists), like > those who would deny the role of gender in the differences in math scores > at the high end, despite the overwhelming evidence. ("My theory is > correct. Never mind what the data say." - the tail wagging the dog). I > very much doubt that they deny findings in physics or chemistry. They > don't know enough to do that. Of course they don't know enough psychology > either. > > Re clergy: the first son inherits. The second and thereafter go into > academia or the ministry, in British history and some others. > > bill w > > ? > > >> Blog | Twitter >> | Facebook >> | >> Amazon >> | >> Goodreads >> >> >> >> On Nov 23, 2015, at 5:32 PM, William Flynn Wallace >> wrote: >> >> ?I assume that at some point in the future, every single human >> characteristic will be found to be determined, at least in part, by genes, >> perhaps quite a few of them.? >> >> >> ?Yes to your question. If they don't like immortality they have >> options. Perhaps if there were a way to eliminate certain memories it >> would be easier to live longer. >> >> Here's one for you all: if you could eliminate religious feelings, >> tendencies to worship gods or even people, superstitions, would you?? >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> 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 > > > > _______________________________________________ > 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 Nov 27 03:29:40 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2015 19:29:40 -0800 Subject: [ExI] sign along spokane river Message-ID: <00d501d128c3$da6faa60$8f4eff20$@att.net> Of all oddball things. In California we have plenty of places where signs have Spanish along with English on billboards, and some areas where it is Spanish only. But in Spokane Washington today I saw a sign in what looks like Russian. We expect our Russian immigrants to know English. Apparently sometimes they don?t. I wouldn?t have guessed they needed a sign. I can?t read a word of this, but I suspect is it about what kinds of fishing is restricted in the river. I see the English words Power Bait (no idea what that is.) I can imagine some kind of cell phone image-recognition translator. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 67004 bytes Desc: not available URL: From atymes at gmail.com Fri Nov 27 07:19:28 2015 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2015 23:19:28 -0800 Subject: [ExI] sign along spokane river In-Reply-To: <00d501d128c3$da6faa60$8f4eff20$@att.net> References: <00d501d128c3$da6faa60$8f4eff20$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Nov 26, 2015 at 7:29 PM, spike wrote: > I can imagine some kind of cell phone image-recognition translator. > So can I, very easily: https://support.google.com/translate/answer/6142483?hl=en -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Fri Nov 27 10:57:17 2015 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2015 10:57:17 +0000 Subject: [ExI] sign along spokane river In-Reply-To: References: <00d501d128c3$da6faa60$8f4eff20$@att.net> Message-ID: On 27 November 2015 at 07:19, Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Thu, Nov 26, 2015 at 7:29 PM, spike wrote: >> I can imagine some kind of cell phone image-recognition translator. > > So can I, very easily: > https://support.google.com/translate/answer/6142483?hl=en > That works only as an Android app. When travelling in a foreign country tourists use it all the time. With a laptop, I used online OCR software to read the text in the image then feed that into Google translate. It is written in Russian. >From Wikipedia: People from countries in the former Soviet Union (especially Russians and Ukrainians) form a comparatively large demographic in Spokane and Spokane County, the result of a large influx of immigrants and their families after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. According to the 2000 Census, the number of people of Russian or Ukrainian ancestry in Spokane County was reported to be 7,700 (4,900 residing in the city of Spokane), amounting to two percent of the county. (And many must go fishing!). --------- ATTENTION! Special fishing regulations in force River SPOKANE: NO bait (including worms, marshmallows or marshmallow, Power Bait, corn, etc.) Only use hooks without teeth. Using triple hooks is prohibited. Wild trout must be released (in the wild trout have a adipose fin - see image on the sign above. Almost all trout in Spokane River - wild trout must be released and the whole unharmed.) Before you go fishing - learn the law! Ignorance of the law is not an excuse. More information can be found in the brochure WDFW! ------------ BillK From hrivera at alumni.virginia.edu Fri Nov 27 11:47:36 2015 From: hrivera at alumni.virginia.edu (Henry Rivera) Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2015 06:47:36 -0500 Subject: [ExI] sign along spokane river In-Reply-To: References: <00d501d128c3$da6faa60$8f4eff20$@att.net> Message-ID: <1D5CE3DA-274F-4C89-8A01-8EA0C86F9E91@alumni.virginia.edu> > On Nov 27, 2015, at 5:57 AM, BillK wrote: > >> On 27 November 2015 at 07:19, Adrian Tymes wrote: >>> On Thu, Nov 26, 2015 at 7:29 PM, spike wrote: >>> I can imagine some kind of cell phone image-recognition translator. >> >> So can I, very easily: >> https://support.google.com/translate/answer/6142483?hl=en > > > That works only as an Android app. No, it's an iOS app too: https://appsto.re/us/kT-Ty.i From pharos at gmail.com Fri Nov 27 12:06:18 2015 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2015 12:06:18 +0000 Subject: [ExI] sign along spokane river In-Reply-To: <1D5CE3DA-274F-4C89-8A01-8EA0C86F9E91@alumni.virginia.edu> References: <00d501d128c3$da6faa60$8f4eff20$@att.net> <1D5CE3DA-274F-4C89-8A01-8EA0C86F9E91@alumni.virginia.edu> Message-ID: On 27 November 2015 at 11:47, Henry Rivera wrote: >> On Nov 27, 2015, at 5:57 AM, BillK wrote: >> That works only as an Android app. > > No, it's an iOS app too: > https://appsto.re/us/kT-Ty.i > You're right. And there are more alternatives to the Google Translate app as well. BillK From pharos at gmail.com Fri Nov 27 14:11:43 2015 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2015 14:11:43 +0000 Subject: [ExI] sign along spokane river In-Reply-To: <00d501d128c3$da6faa60$8f4eff20$@att.net> References: <00d501d128c3$da6faa60$8f4eff20$@att.net> Message-ID: On 27 November 2015 at 03:29, spike wrote: > Of all oddball things. In California we have plenty of places where signs have Spanish > along with English on billboards, and some areas where it is Spanish only. But in Spokane > Washington today I saw a sign in what looks like Russian. We expect our Russian immigrants > to know English. Apparently sometimes they don?t. I wouldn?t have guessed they needed a sign. > PS. I believe the requirement for immigrants to know English (or the weird variant that Americans speak) :) is only required for naturalization. You can be a non-English speaking immigrant so long as you don't apply for citizenship. BillK From pharos at gmail.com Fri Nov 27 17:26:32 2015 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2015 17:26:32 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Robot car racing! Message-ID: Formula E and Kinetik today announced a partnership with the intention to launch a global race series for driverless electric cars. This new championship called ?ROBORACE? will provide a competitive platform for the autonomous driving solutions that are now being developed by many large industrial automotive and technology players as well as top tech universities. The mission of ROBORACE is to demonstrate that the future of automotive and information technology is already here and can even work in extreme conditions. ROBORACE believes that there is a lot of independent talents in the world that might contribute to this initiative. That is why one of the race teams will be organised as a crowd-sourced community team open for enthusiastic software and technology experts all over the world. ----------- BillK From atymes at gmail.com Fri Nov 27 20:12:19 2015 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2015 12:12:19 -0800 Subject: [ExI] sign along spokane river In-Reply-To: References: <00d501d128c3$da6faa60$8f4eff20$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Nov 27, 2015 at 6:11 AM, BillK wrote: > PS. I believe the requirement for immigrants to know English (or the > weird variant that Americans speak) :) is only required for > naturalization. You can be a non-English speaking immigrant so long as > you don't apply for citizenship. > And technically it doesn't apply to people born within the borders of the US. How many of said children grow up never speaking English at home, and thus having a difficult time learning functional English in school (or as working adults if effectively homeschooled) is not a statistic that I have on hand; many demagogues complain that this is a significant number, but that seems unlikely. And/or, they're complaining about immigrants that learned basically only the words needed for naturalization and, once they passed that check, forgot even that. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sat Nov 28 04:10:32 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2015 20:10:32 -0800 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: sign along spokane river In-Reply-To: References: <00d501d128c3$da6faa60$8f4eff20$@att.net> Message-ID: <014801d12992$b9f23f80$2dd6be80$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of BillK ... >...That works only as an Android app. When travelling in a foreign country tourists use it all the time. With a laptop, I used online OCR software to read the text in the image then feed that into Google translate. It is written in Russian... Oy, I am sooo not hip. >...From Wikipedia: People from countries in the former Soviet Union (especially Russians and Ukrainians) form a comparatively large demographic in Spokane and Spokane County, the result of a large influx of immigrants and their families after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. According to the 2000 Census, the number of people of Russian or Ukrainian ancestry in Spokane County was reported to be 7,700 (4,900 residing in the city of Spokane), amounting to two percent of the county. (And many must go fishing!)... Spokane is a nice town. I would consider a summer home there. Real estate is practically free (compared to where I live now.) >...ATTENTION! Special fishing regulations in force River SPOKANE: >...NO bait (including worms, marshmallows or marshmallow, Power Bait, corn, etc.)...BillK _______________________________________________ Thanks. I gave up fishing a long time ago and it stayed given up. Too boring for the astonishing times in which we are so fortunate to live. BillK this week we had the season of Thanksgiving over on this side of the Big A. For me it was easy; I have many things for which to be very thankful. spike From spike66 at att.net Sat Nov 28 04:21:13 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2015 20:21:13 -0800 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Robot car racing! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <014f01d12994$3857ecc0$a907c640$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of BillK Subject: [Bulk] [ExI] Robot car racing! Formula E and Kinetik today announced a partnership with the intention to launch a global race series for driverless electric cars. This new championship called ?ROBORACE? will provide a competitive platform for the autonomous driving solutions that are now being developed by many large industrial automotive and technology players as well as top tech universities. ... ----------- BillK _______________________________________________ This was as foreseeable as the sunrise. The reason I see it as interesting is that racing is expensive as all hell, but in this case we might be limited by other factors besides the cars. I don't know where is the state of the art on this, but on some kinds of tracks, such as a paved serpentine course, we might be more algorithm-limited than car limited. We could convert any old beat up car and have sufficient power and handling to make the processor and control algorithms the thing that determines the lap times. We could set up a cone course in a big parking lot, like they do over at Lockheed Martin. That sport allows normal people with normal budgets to play: you need an ordinary street car, special tires, a brake system upgrade and you are ready to go for a couple k over the price of the car. We could do those kinds of races with software. For a few fun years, amateurs can run with the big boys. spike From hibbert at mydruthers.com Sat Nov 28 14:10:31 2015 From: hibbert at mydruthers.com (Prometheus Awards) Date: Sat, 28 Nov 2015 09:10:31 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Limits of human modification Message-ID: [Attributions stripped, since they were confusing me.] >>> Choose any 2 economists ?and they will give you 2 mutually exclusive >>> ways that they insist is the one and only way to increase the GDP. >>> And that is even without CRISPER. >> >> This is incorrect. There is a near-unanimous agreement among >> economists on many fundamental findings of economics, > >In the USA the Federal Reserve is thinking about raising interest >rates in December, half the world's economists think that would be a >wonderful idea, the other half thinks it would be a terrible idea, This is roughly true, but it doesn't refute the statement that "There is a near-unanimous agreement among economists on many fundamental findings of economics". Most of macro-economics is outside the fundamental findings that there is near-universal agreement on. Which, of course, means that the statement above starting "This is incorrect" isn't a reasonable rejoinder to the preceding statement on disagreements about how to increase the GDP. Economists agree on many things. One is that trade is pareto improving, so each of the hypothetical economists would be willing to agree that reducing barriers to trade would increase GDP (on both sides of the trade barrier). So even the first statement above isn't right. You may be able to choose two random economists and expect them to have inconsistent favorite prescriptions for improving GDP, but it's unlikely either would claim that her proposal is the only way. > There is a reason economics is called the dismal science. This one is easier. The reason it's called the "dismal science" is that economics can't be relied on to produce a consensus that your favorite social intervention will have the consequences you want. A nineteenth century historian coined it because economists of the time didn't agree with his prescription that slavery would improve the conditions of blacks in the West Indies. Chris ---- Every machine that's put into a factory displaces labour. [...] The man who's put to work [on] the machine isn't any better off than he was before; the three men that are thrown out of a job are very much worse off. But the cure isn't Socialism, [it's] for somebody to buckle to and make a job for the three men. Nevil Shute, _Ruined City_ Chris Hibbert hibbert at mydruthers.com http://mydruthers.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Nov 28 15:16:15 2015 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 28 Nov 2015 09:16:15 -0600 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Robot car racing! In-Reply-To: <014f01d12994$3857ecc0$a907c640$@att.net> References: <014f01d12994$3857ecc0$a907c640$@att.net> Message-ID: And what's to keep some yahoo from turning this into demolition derby? bill w On Fri, Nov 27, 2015 at 10:21 PM, spike wrote: > > > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On > Behalf Of BillK > Subject: [Bulk] [ExI] Robot car racing! > > Formula E and Kinetik today announced a partnership with the intention to > launch a global race series for driverless electric cars. This new > championship called ?ROBORACE? will provide a competitive platform for the > autonomous driving solutions that are now being developed by many large > industrial automotive and technology players as well as top tech > universities. > > < > http://fiaformulae.com/en/news/2015/november/formula-e-kinetik-announce-roborace-a-global-driverless-championship.aspx > >... > ----------- > > BillK > > _______________________________________________ > > > This was as foreseeable as the sunrise. The reason I see it as > interesting is that racing is expensive as all hell, but in this case we > might be limited by other factors besides the cars. I don't know where is > the state of the art on this, but on some kinds of tracks, such as a paved > serpentine course, we might be more algorithm-limited than car limited. We > could convert any old beat up car and have sufficient power and handling to > make the processor and control algorithms the thing that determines the lap > times. > > We could set up a cone course in a big parking lot, like they do over at > Lockheed Martin. That sport allows normal people with normal budgets to > play: you need an ordinary street car, special tires, a brake system > upgrade and you are ready to go for a couple k over the price of the car. > We could do those kinds of races with software. For a few fun years, > amateurs can run with the big boys. > > 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 anders at aleph.se Sat Nov 28 16:22:45 2015 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sat, 28 Nov 2015 16:22:45 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Limits of human modification In-Reply-To: References: <23A08566-89A1-4DE3-9035-47BBC4930F82@taramayastales.com> <18839D9D-83A3-4DF8-884D-3BC6008F79F7@taramayastales.com> Message-ID: <5659D4D5.60709@aleph.se> On 2015-11-27 02:15, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > As for postmodernism, that was my problem - I was trying to understand > it. Take away the smoke and mirrors and there's nothing there. The > existentialists strike me much the same way. Literary theories that I > have read are laughable. I think it is wrong to claim there is *nothing* there but verbiage. When I made the same claim as you in regards to Derrida on this list many years ago, Damien Broderick kindly demonstrated that the quote I had argued was not even wrong actually did have some nontrivial content - but it took a professor to dig it out. But I am happy to grant that 90+% is just words. The issue is that the rewards are all tied to doing well in the social environment of fellow thinkers rather than linked to outside applicability or factors. Fields without regular feedback from reality will become divorced from it. Existentialism actually does have some content, but since each major existentialist had a rather different point, there is not much overall cohesiveness. And for every thinker with something to say, you get ten who merely comment on them. (I have been working on a text today on the concept of hope, and found myself skipping between a modern analytic philosopher, Kant, Nietzsche and Camus. Very fun. The analytic guy is very clear and dull, doing useful but unexciting conceptual analysis. Kant is heavy and IMHO wrong. Nietzsche is fun and succinct, makes a grand statement that is 50% a relevant insight and 50% wrong at the same time. Camus misunderstands Nietzsche for his own purposes and is totally right about the point he makes, but does he need that much space to do it? Still, the prose is readable. ) (And no, I do not plan to make my text merely a comment on what the greats thought. I made up my own taxonomy before checking their writings, and I am happy to see that I cover the issue in a nearly orthogonal way. ) -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From atymes at gmail.com Sat Nov 28 17:41:14 2015 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sat, 28 Nov 2015 09:41:14 -0800 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Robot car racing! In-Reply-To: References: <014f01d12994$3857ecc0$a907c640$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Nov 28, 2015 at 7:16 AM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > And what's to keep some yahoo from turning this into demolition derby? > Presumably the same thing that keeps yahoos from doing it with auto races currently: liability. They might not get sued for physically injuring another person, but if you deliberately and maliciously wreck someone else's $100,000+ car...well, for most people that ain't pocket change. Also presumably everyone who races in at least the first few events gets some winnings, so long as they stick to sportsmanlike behavior (especially since that means they're allowed to compete again) - and the promoters will have a bigger pot to share if it does not turn into a demolition derby. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Sat Nov 28 18:13:04 2015 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Sat, 28 Nov 2015 13:13:04 -0500 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Robot car racing! In-Reply-To: References: <014f01d12994$3857ecc0$a907c640$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Nov 28, 2015 at 10:16 AM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > And what's to keep some yahoo from turning this into demolition derby? > > bill w > > ### Hey, there is nothing wrong with a demolition derby, people pay to watch it! A robo-demolition derby could be done e.g. with a standard car in the physical sense, like a standardized NASCAR car, to remove the incentive to win stupidly by armoring your rig. Instead different teams would use software to both improve basic driving skills *and* to be more wily and cunning about destroying the competition. There would be perhaps opportunistic cooperation in the beginning when trying to push competitors onto roadside obstacle (e.g. spiked blocks of concrete lining some stretches) which would then turn into oil-thirsty all-against-all rage among the last robots running. Rafa? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Sat Nov 28 18:32:21 2015 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Sat, 28 Nov 2015 13:32:21 -0500 Subject: [ExI] sign along spokane river In-Reply-To: References: <00d501d128c3$da6faa60$8f4eff20$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Nov 27, 2015 at 3:12 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: \ > > And/or, they're complaining about immigrants that learned basically only the > words needed for naturalization and, once they passed that check, forgot > even that. ### Well, unfortunately English is not the official language of the US. It should. The government should be enjoined from using other languages when communicating with US citizens and visitors. Anybody wishing to obtain a translation should be expected to pay for it. Businesses which fail to use English in public venues, including restaurants, banks and commercial contractors, should be subject to levies for financing English instruction and maintenance of skills among non-English speakers. Children who fail English should be taken from their parents and the parents should be deported to country of origin, or to English-instruction camps, until they match IQ-adjusted skill level of the locals. Expressions of disdain for poor command of English and for failing to join the dominant culture should be treated as protected speech. Discrimination against the others should be legal and should be encouraged. The melting pot should keep melting. Rafa? From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Nov 28 20:42:35 2015 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 28 Nov 2015 15:42:35 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Limits of human modification Message-ID: On Fri, Nov 27, 2015 at 11:04 PM, Chris Hibbert wrote: >In the USA the Federal Reserve is thinking about raising interest >> ? ? >> rates in December, half the world's economists think that would be a >> ? ? >> wonderful idea, the other half thinks it would be a terrible idea, > > > ?> ? > This is roughly true, but it doesn't refute the statement that "There > ? ? > is a near-unanimous agreement among economists on many fundamental > ? ? > findings of economics". > ? ? > Most of macro-economics is outside the > ? ? > fundamental findings that there is near-universal agreement on. > ?There are few things that effect the GDP more fundamentally than interest rates? ?and economists can't even agree on what value that should be, and yet you expect them to agree on the far more complex and astronomically more emotional issue of how best to permanently alter the human germline to maximize the GDP? And if economists understand the inner workings of the economy so well why is their record on correctly predicting the economic future so bad? A coin flip would have done as well as a panel of the world's greatest economic thinkers at predicting The Great Recession of 2007. ?> ? > Economists agree on many things. One is that trade is pareto > ? ? > improving, so each of the hypothetical economists would be willing to > ? ? > agree that reducing barriers to trade would increase GDP (on both > ? ? > sides of the trade barrier). > I'm a ? ? big ? ? free trade fan myself but many ?presidential candidates disagree with me, Donald Trump ?and ? Mike Huckabee ? ? on the Republican side and Bernie Sanders ? ? on the Democratic ?side ? are aggressively anti-trade, as are most labor leaders and socialists ? and leftists? . ?But you haven't answered my most important question, how do you intend to enforce your reproductive edict worldwide? The answer is important because those who disagree with you and successfully evade your enforcement efforts will gain a HUGE advantage. ? > ?> ? > The reason it's called the "dismal science" is > ? ? > that economics can't be relied on to produce a consensus that your > favorite social intervention will have the consequences you want. > ?Yes, economics is far more vulnerable than other sciences to assume that if fact X about the way the universe works would lead to a more just society then fact X must be true. But nature is not interested in human justice, a fact is either true or it is not and justice be damned. Perhaps it's just simpler to say there is a whole lot of wishful thinking is going on. John K Clark ? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Sun Nov 29 00:12:13 2015 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Sat, 28 Nov 2015 16:12:13 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Limits of human modification In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <57394B1B-2FBA-4DEA-9C45-A251EF9E5B8D@gmail.com> On Nov 28, 2558 BE, at 12:42 PM, John Clark wrote: > > On Fri, Nov 27, 2015 at 11:04 PM, Chris Hibbert wrote: >> ?> ?The reason it's called the "dismal science" is? ?that economics can't be relied on to produce a consensus that your >> favorite social intervention will have the consequences you want. > > ?Yes, economics is far more vulnerable than other sciences to assume that if fact X about the way the universe works would lead to a more just society then fact X must be true. But nature is not interested in human justice, a fact is either true or it is not and justice be damned. > > Perhaps it's just simpler to say there is a whole lot of wishful thinking is going on. It seems to me that Chris meant that economics tends to NOT support 'wishful thinking.' Hence the 'dismal science' epithet. It's dismal because people who want a social policy (e.g., minimum wage laws, trade restrictions, price floors and ceilings, subsidies to favored industries or groups) to overcome some problem find no encouragement from sound economic theory. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books via: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Sun Nov 29 00:39:01 2015 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Sat, 28 Nov 2015 19:39:01 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Limits of human modification In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, Nov 25, 2015 at 1:34 PM, John Clark wrote: > Do all economists agree that forcing people to have stupider children than > what modern medicine would allow them to have will result in > a positive long term impact on net GDP per capita > ? > ### I truly do not understand the intent of this question. ------------------- >> >> > >> GDP in the eugenic permissibility test is intended to measure >> externalities. >> GDP is a good proxy for the overall level of achievement of human goals >> under many conditions > > > I agree, but the GDP depends on the economy which depends on the vagaries of > the natural world as well as the collective output of billions of brains, > the most complex object in the known universe. All this makes the economy > rather difficult to predict, especially in the long term. ### There is no need to predict the GDP in the long term here. All you need to test is the direction of change in GDP caused by a specific gene mod in a specific person. Direction of change caused by e.g. a reduction in the likelihood of having cancer or increased ability to digest cellulose should be generally easy to model. ---------------- > > I agree. So let group X decide to have stupid children and let group Y > decide to have smart children and let the market objectively decide which > group ends up with more money and if the statement "being stupid will make > you richer than being smart" is objectively true. > ### Do you feel this comment is in any way relevant to the test I suggested? --------------- >> If the GDP impact of e.g. a new gene that enables underwater breathing is >> positive, we should allow underwater breathing because it is in our common >> economic interest to do so. > > > Allowed? We're not talking about nuclear weapons with their huge isotope > separation factories, genetic engineering is getting easier to do every day > and will soon be done in individuals garage labs; so how do you intend to > enforce your reproductive edict worldwide? You must realize that the one > group or nation that is successful in defying your edict will be the group > or nation that inherits the future. ### To the contrary. Any group that "defies my edict", i.e. allows or encourages GDP-reducing mods is likely suffer a reduction in their GDP (obviously) and will lose in competition with those who follow my suggestion. As I mentioned a few times before, I would see any worldwide genetic authority as odious and worthy of being resisted by any means necessary and without compunction. Rafa? From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Sun Nov 29 00:47:58 2015 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Sat, 28 Nov 2015 19:47:58 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Limits of human modification In-Reply-To: <57394B1B-2FBA-4DEA-9C45-A251EF9E5B8D@gmail.com> References: <57394B1B-2FBA-4DEA-9C45-A251EF9E5B8D@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Nov 28, 2015 at 7:12 PM, Dan TheBookMan wrote: > It seems to me that Chris meant that economics tends to NOT support 'wishful > thinking.' Hence the 'dismal science' epithet. It's dismal because people > who want a social policy (e.g., minimum wage laws, trade restrictions, price > floors and ceilings, subsidies to favored industries or groups) to overcome > some problem find no encouragement from sound economic theory. > ### Indeed, this is the case. Most US economists are leftists, yet among leftists, economists are still the least likely to e.g. oppose trade or support central economic planning. As you said, they find no encouragement for their natural proclivities in the science they study. Rafa? From spike66 at att.net Sun Nov 29 04:27:47 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 28 Nov 2015 20:27:47 -0800 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Robot car racing! In-Reply-To: References: <014f01d12994$3857ecc0$a907c640$@att.net> Message-ID: <011201d12a5e$4de068e0$e9a13aa0$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org ] On Behalf Of BillK Subject: [Bulk] [ExI] Robot car racing! Formula E and Kinetik today announced a partnership with the intention to launch a global race series for driverless electric cars? ... ----------- BillK From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace Subject: Re: [ExI] [Bulk] Robot car racing! And what's to keep some yahoo from turning this into demolition derby? bill w Right on BillW! Consider the possibilities. There are pleeeeenty of wrecked cars owned by the insurance company. Wife finds out about her, parks Mister Ford?s creation atop Mister Farrari?s handiwork: Cost of repairing one of these babies is crazy high (the car I mean (don?t even bother trying to repair the marriage)) assuming you can find Mario and Luigi to work on it. So you get the insurance company to dig the thing out, pay them a couple k for the remains, couple weeks later, you have this: You have started out with a light fast wrecked car, gotten rid of nearly half the weight. Your steering actuators, brake actuators and sensors wouldn?t weigh all that much. You would introduce a bunch of handling quirkiness from the odd weight distribution, but you might be able to rig the software to experiment with cornering strategies. The side loads on tires are mostly up front, and you still have weight up there with that marvelous Italian V8 (oh my, those clever wops do know how to build sexy racing engines.) The rear wheels would break loose easily, but you might be able to give away some straight line acceleration in return for lower frontal area, harder stopping characteristics and so on, or perhaps rig an airfoil to push down on the back end. That would be just plain Cool McGool would it not? Cheap fast fun. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 27047 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image005.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 35013 bytes Desc: not available URL: From spike66 at att.net Sun Nov 29 04:38:02 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 28 Nov 2015 20:38:02 -0800 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Robot car racing! In-Reply-To: References: <014f01d12994$3857ecc0$a907c640$@att.net> Message-ID: <011801d12a5f$bcbb3460$36319d20$@att.net> From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Rafal Smigrodzki Sent: Saturday, November 28, 2015 10:13 AM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] [Bulk] Robot car racing! On Sat, Nov 28, 2015 at 10:16 AM, William Flynn Wallace > wrote: And what's to keep some yahoo from turning this into demolition derby? bill w ### Hey, there is nothing wrong with a demolition derby, people pay to watch it! A robo-demolition derby could be done ? turn into oil-thirsty all-against-all rage among the last robots running. Rafa? Ja the use of robots in demolition derby has been done. It was an early use: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJxPLqO3EBE It was a cool novelty when the sport was introduced, pleasantly testosterone soaked, but as far as I know there is no fully automated version. All the robo-wars competitions I have seen were remote control. This robo-racing business is no interest unless the cars are completely autonomous. The reason I don?t think it would be a winning strategy to try to wreck your opponent is that the process would likely wreck oneself. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sun Nov 29 04:47:31 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 28 Nov 2015 20:47:31 -0800 Subject: [ExI] sign along spokane river In-Reply-To: References: <00d501d128c3$da6faa60$8f4eff20$@att.net> Message-ID: <012b01d12a61$0f5d6bb0$2e184310$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Rafal Smigrodzki Subject: Re: [ExI] sign along spokane river On Fri, Nov 27, 2015 at 3:12 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: \ > > And/or, they're complaining about immigrants that learned basically > only the words needed for naturalization and, once they passed that > check, forgot even that. ### Well, unfortunately English is not the official language of the US... The melting pot should keep melting. Rafa? _______________________________________________ As I thought about this, it occurred to me that we have around here restaurants from durn near anywhere on the globe including authentic African food, but I have never seen an authentic Russian restaurant. So I googled and found several local choices, with one over in Campbell getting good reviews. We know plenty of Europeans are nicknamed by their favorite foods (that's a safe one, for I can see no way a person can be insulted by being called by food (we yanks should have that too.) But not the Russians. I have no idea what ex-pat commies eat. So now I need to go over to Campbell and see. spike From anders at aleph.se Sun Nov 29 12:21:14 2015 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 29 Nov 2015 12:21:14 +0000 Subject: [ExI] sign along spokane river In-Reply-To: <012b01d12a61$0f5d6bb0$2e184310$@att.net> References: <00d501d128c3$da6faa60$8f4eff20$@att.net> <012b01d12a61$0f5d6bb0$2e184310$@att.net> Message-ID: <565AEDBA.8050501@aleph.se> On 2015-11-29 04:47, spike wrote: > We know plenty of Europeans are nicknamed by their favorite foods (that's a safe one, for I can see no way a person can be insulted by being called by food (we yanks should have that too.) But not the Russians. I have no idea what ex-pat commies eat. So now I need to go over to Campbell and see. I think there are often borscht-jokes about Russians. (And things like the Borscht Belt in the Catskills) I must admit I have always found swedes unappealing to eat. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From pharos at gmail.com Sun Nov 29 13:24:08 2015 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sun, 29 Nov 2015 13:24:08 +0000 Subject: [ExI] sign along spokane river In-Reply-To: <012b01d12a61$0f5d6bb0$2e184310$@att.net> References: <00d501d128c3$da6faa60$8f4eff20$@att.net> <012b01d12a61$0f5d6bb0$2e184310$@att.net> Message-ID: On 29 November 2015 at 04:47, spike wrote: > As I thought about this, it occurred to me that we have around here restaurants > from durn near anywhere on the globe including authentic African food, but > I have never seen an authentic Russian restaurant. So I googled and found > several local choices, with one over in Campbell getting good reviews. > > We know plenty of Europeans are nicknamed by their favorite foods (that's a > safe one, for I can see no way a person can be insulted by being called by food > (we yanks should have that too.) But not the Russians. I have no idea what > ex-pat commies eat. So now I need to go over to Campbell and see. > Russia is a *big* country and what you get in the restaurant might depend on what part of Russia the chef came from. And many US Russians are Jewish, fleeing persecution, so there might be a bit of Jewish cuisine as well. Before you risk stomach damage ;) check out: Maybe the restaurant has an online menu that you can check before visiting. BillK PS. swedes are really tasty! :) Try haggis served with boiled and mashed swede and potatoes. That should finish you off for the night. From johnkclark at gmail.com Sun Nov 29 15:36:44 2015 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sun, 29 Nov 2015 10:36:44 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Limits of human modification In-Reply-To: <57394B1B-2FBA-4DEA-9C45-A251EF9E5B8D@gmail.com> References: <57394B1B-2FBA-4DEA-9C45-A251EF9E5B8D@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Nov 28, 2015 at 7:12 PM, Dan TheBookMan wrote: ?> ? > It seems to me that Chris meant that economics tends to NOT support > 'wishful thinking.' > ?I know but that's NOT what I'm saying, I'm saying that economic thinking is usually mixed up with political thinking and a individual's moral ideas. For example: child labor is a bad thing therefore it could not have increased GNP in the 19th century, but it's not necessarily so, one thing has nothing to do with the other. ? John K Clark? > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sun Nov 29 15:39:08 2015 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sun, 29 Nov 2015 10:39:08 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Limits of human modification In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, Nov 28, 2015 at 7:39 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki < rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote: > >> ?>? >> ? ? >> Do all economists agree that forcing people to have stupider children than >> ? ? >> what modern medicine would allow them to have will result in >> ? ? >> a positive long term impact on net GDP per capita >> ? ? >> ? > > > ?> ? > I truly do not understand the intent of this question. > ?Which word didn't you understand?? ? John K Clark? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sun Nov 29 15:38:12 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 29 Nov 2015 07:38:12 -0800 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: sign along spokane river In-Reply-To: References: <00d501d128c3$da6faa60$8f4eff20$@att.net> <012b01d12a61$0f5d6bb0$2e184310$@att.net> Message-ID: <016c01d12abb$f5963d50$e0c2b7f0$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of BillK ... >...Russia is a *big* country and what you get in the restaurant might depend on what part of Russia the chef came from...BillK PS. swedes are really tasty! :) Try haggis served with boiled and mashed swede and potatoes. That should finish you off for the night. _______________________________________________ OK no problem, I have an idea. BillK, if you ever make it to the states and come to the hood, we can go to the local Swedish restaurant and I will take Anders to the neighborhood British pub; we will switch you guys around. The first time Anders was here we took him and bunch of us went to my favorite sushi place. The owners are still talking about that: all these guys came in there and devoured sushi like a school of great white sharks. spike From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Sun Nov 29 17:35:28 2015 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Sun, 29 Nov 2015 12:35:28 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Limits of human modification In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sun, Nov 29, 2015 at 10:39 AM, John Clark wrote: > > > On Sat, Nov 28, 2015 at 7:39 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki > wrote: > > >>> > >>> > >>> Do all economists agree that forcing people to have stupider children >>> than >>> what modern medicine would allow them to have will result in >>> a positive long term impact on net GDP per capita >>> ? >> >> >> > >> I truly do not understand the intent of this question. > > > Which word didn't you understand? > ### I am not getting the relevance of the question to the thread. In the thread I am suggesting that gene mods can and should contribute to increasing GDP, and among others I give IQ-boost as an example of a mod that should increase GDP. You ask whether economists think that making people stupider increases GDP. What's the connection? Do you seriously think that there are many economists holding that position? Rafa? From danust2012 at gmail.com Sun Nov 29 17:55:37 2015 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Sun, 29 Nov 2015 09:55:37 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Limits of human modification In-Reply-To: References: <57394B1B-2FBA-4DEA-9C45-A251EF9E5B8D@gmail.com> Message-ID: <925A8A38-4948-4F22-93E9-E55724A9DA2E@gmail.com> On Nov 29, 2558 BE, at 7:36 AM, John Clark wrote: >> On Sat, Nov 28, 2015 at 7:12 PM, Dan TheBookMan wrote: >> >> ?> ?It seems to me that Chris meant that economics tends to NOT support 'wishful thinking.' > > ?I know but that's NOT what I'm saying, I'm saying that economic thinking is usually mixed up with political thinking and a individual's moral ideas. For example: child labor is a bad thing therefore it could not have increased GNP in the 19th century, but it's not necessarily so, one thing has nothing to do with the other. That's not an example of economic thinking though. It's no different than how most people use evolutionary theory watered down to justify their pet beliefs. But people, especially non-experts do that with anything they can lay their hands on, no? Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books via: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sun Nov 29 21:35:58 2015 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sun, 29 Nov 2015 15:35:58 -0600 Subject: [ExI] quote for the day Message-ID: >From the NYT Book review of Lisa Randall's 'Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs' "We think that we think clearly, but that's only because we don't think clearly." Rabindranath Tagore, Indian philosopher bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sun Nov 29 22:29:59 2015 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sun, 29 Nov 2015 17:29:59 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Limits of human modification In-Reply-To: <925A8A38-4948-4F22-93E9-E55724A9DA2E@gmail.com> References: <57394B1B-2FBA-4DEA-9C45-A251EF9E5B8D@gmail.com> <925A8A38-4948-4F22-93E9-E55724A9DA2E@gmail.com> Message-ID: On Sun, Nov 29, 2015 at Dan TheBookMan wrote: >> ?>> ? >> I'm saying that economic thinking is usually mixed up with political >> thinking and a individual's moral ideas. For example: child labor is a bad >> thing therefore it could not have increased GNP in the 19th century, but >> it's not necessarily so, one thing has nothing to do with the other. > > > ?> ? > That's not an example of economic thinking though. > ?I agree that is not ? economic thinking ? but unfortunately that is the way that many economists think; the widespread belief in fact X would lead to a political outcome that I don't like therefore fact X can not be true. ? ?> ? > It's no different than how most people use evolutionary theory watered > down to justify their pet beliefs. But people, especially non-experts do > that with anything they can lay their hands on, no? > ?Some sciences are more vulnerable to that than others. Like other people string theorists have opinions on what a just society should be like but they don't feel that their ideas about strings should conform with morality, but that is often not the case with economists or social scientists or even some Evolutionary biologists like Stephen Gould, Richard Lewontin ? and Steven Rose ? John K Clark? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Sun Nov 29 23:12:41 2015 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan TheBookMan) Date: Sun, 29 Nov 2015 15:12:41 -0800 Subject: [ExI] quote for the day In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <07B4993B-A2C5-4999-8953-030743E191B5@gmail.com> On Nov 29, 2558 BE, at 1:35 PM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > From the NYT Book review of Lisa Randall's 'Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs' > > "We think that we think clearly, but that's only because we don't think clearly." > > Rabindranath Tagore, Indian philosopher For me, philosopher is what comes first to mind when I hear or read the name "Tagore." ;) Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books via: http://author.to/DanUst -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Nov 30 16:49:28 2015 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2015 10:49:28 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Limits of human modification In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Anders wrote: But I am happy to grant that 90+% is just words. The issue is that the rewards are all tied to doing well in the social environment of fellow thinkers rather than linked to outside applicability or factors. Fields without regular feedback from reality will become divorced from it. ------------------------------ ?My difficulty with some philosophy, esp. existentialism, stems from having gone to a Skinnerian grad school. If you could not put a concept into operational terms, then you were in the wrong department. Self, perception, consciousness, awareness, essence, instinct (my favorite ambiguity) - very difficult to define in real world terms. Yet 'immortal soul' lasts and lasts despite lack of anything concrete, and seems to be a nearly universal concept. I agree fully with your last sentence. How can philosophers have meaningful conversations with one another when they cannot agree on their terms? I suspect that each one thinks they are right and the others wrong. "Boohoo, nobody wants to use my definition." "Social environment of other thinkers". Yes, that fine line between agreeing too much and disagreeing too much. Anders, what's wrong with doing your historical research first? I thought the idea of research was to take the ball from earlier people and then run with it your way. And anyway, I suspect your unconscious knowledge of Kant etc. guided your way. (There's a claim that cannot be refuted.) bill w? On Sun, Nov 29, 2015 at 11:35 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki < rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote: > On Sun, Nov 29, 2015 at 10:39 AM, John Clark wrote: > > > > > > On Sat, Nov 28, 2015 at 7:39 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki > > wrote: > > > > > >>> > > >>> > > >>> Do all economists agree that forcing people to have stupider children > >>> than > >>> what modern medicine would allow them to have will result in > >>> a positive long term impact on net GDP per capita > >>> ? > >> > >> > >> > > >> I truly do not understand the intent of this question. > > > > > > Which word didn't you understand? > > > > ### I am not getting the relevance of the question to the thread. > > In the thread I am suggesting that gene mods can and should contribute > to increasing GDP, and among others I give IQ-boost as an example of a > mod that should increase GDP. > > You ask whether economists think that making people stupider increases GDP. > > What's the connection? Do you seriously think that there are many > economists holding that position? > > Rafa? > > _______________________________________________ > 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 anders at aleph.se Mon Nov 30 17:58:16 2015 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2015 17:58:16 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Limits of human modification In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <565C8E38.70708@aleph.se> On 2015-11-30 16:49, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > ?My difficulty with some philosophy, esp. existentialism, stems from > having gone to a Skinnerian grad school. If you could not put a > concept into operational terms, then you were in the wrong department. > > Self, perception, consciousness, awareness, essence, instinct (my > favorite ambiguity) - very difficult to define in real world terms. Yet the cognitive revolution overthrew behaviorism, largely because many behaviors are more easily explained through internal concepts (like working memory) than just referring to other behaviors. The difference between working memory and self is that the first is defined in terms of observable effects and can be refined through experiments while self is a folk psychological concept that may or may not correspond to anything cohesive and has fairly undefined properties. > I agree fully with your last sentence. How can philosophers have > meaningful conversations with one another when they cannot agree on > their terms? I suspect that each one thinks they are right and the > others wrong. "Boohoo, nobody wants to use my definition." From the outside it looks like philosophers don't agree on terminology, but from the inside most recognize what definitons are being used. It is far more common to hear "I disagree with Anders' definition of X, and to show why it is bad, consider the following logical argument based on it..." with me responding "Yeah, you got me there. However, your definition implies that X is Y, and Y is Z. Do you really think Z?" There is a brand of concept analysis that spends all effort on refining definitions. It is useful, but not very exciting. > Anders, what's wrong with doing your historical research first? I > thought the idea of research was to take the ball from earlier people > and then run with it your way. In my case it was that I wanted to approach the subject from my own angle (essentially borrowing my expertise in reasoning about risk and uncertainty to apply to hope) and not get channeled too much into any pre-existing standard. But once I had written down my approach, I checked if somebody had already done the same job or found useful ideas I had missed. (I found that Waterworth had arrived at the same rough structure but focused on much more ordinary hopes - good terminology though; Kant and Wittgenstein both had views on the future-oriented aspect of hope that fitted in nicely but did ot lead very far; Nietzsche and Camus gave me a psychological criticism of hope that I would not normally have come up with and I will have to deal with.) Sometimes not checking what the Great Thinkers have already solved is the road to solve problems in a new way. Although, as the saying goes, a month in the lab can save you an hour in the library. -- Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: