[extropy-chat] The Proactionary Principle: comments encouragedon almost-final version

Tue Nov 15 06:41:46 UTC 2005

>If I had wanted someone else to read what I had composed then I would have 
>sent it to them but I sent to it to you to get your direct response.  I 
>wanted your opinion, not anybody else's. If >you think that you are  that 
>important that you need not reply, then maybe what you wrote >about 
>regarding "trying to accomplish good when the matters occurs, levels of 
>organization in G.I >and ETHICAL cognitive enhancement must be based upon 
>popularity report! And in response to:

I think it would help clarify your thinking if you used more formal
language.  One of the reasons formal language is, in fact, widely used
for these types of things is because it helps people clarify complex
thoughts - both for their own benefit, and to help communicate those
thoughts to other people.  (Having great ideas is of little use if no
one else understands them.  It is a fact of life, fair or unfair, that
the burden of getting others to understand your thoughts falls more on
you than on anyone else, because only you truly control how you express
your thoughts.)  For example: by mr. whatever

>I don't know about "formal language", but I didn't write my post..they 
>where written quotes
>by very intelligent people..so for Mr. whatever to tell me that I need to 
>use formal language is like >slapping Albert Eistein(or Tesla, Newton, or 
>ect (Based on my copied info) in the face.
>I understood that if what I posted  people can't understand  well maybe i'm
>not posting the right information..or i'm not being clear but I still 
>wouldn't regard it as using "Formal language". If Mr. Whatever doesn't 
>understand what I copied, well too bad for him,
I understood it, that's why I copied it! I was hoping you did!

Thank you for educating me.next time i'll post with people that are more 
interested in
intellectual ideas and not so much as being formal!

>From: "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience at pobox.com>
>Reply-To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
>To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
>Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] The Proactionary Principle: comments 
>encouragedon	almost-final version
>Date: Tue, 08 Nov 2005 13:24:46 -0800
>
>Hal Finney wrote:
>>
>>Nevertheless I couldn't help recalling our discussion last month
>>initiated by Robin Hanson, on the utility of scenario-based forecasting.
>>(Thread title was "Inside Vs. Outside Forecasts".)  Some of the advice
>>in the proposed document amounts to creating inside-type forecasts,
>>i.e. setting up scenarios, looking at probable outcomes, and making
>>decisions on that basis.  The paper we discussed last month shows that
>>this forecasting methodology is not very good, unfortunately.  It is
>>prone to cognitive biases of many kinds.
>
>Correct.  I name also an additional cognitive bias: defensibility. 
>Cost-benefit analyses aim at warding off anxiety about catastrophe, or 
>blame in the event of catastrophe.  Warding off actual catastrophe is a 
>great deal harder.  You do not realize this until you have written a 
>careful, elaborate analysis of risks and benefits (such as appears in 
>http://singinst.org/CFAI/policy.html) and then it turns out that Nature 
>would have gone ahead and killed you anyway, even though you'd conducted a 
>cost-benefit analysis.  How unreasonable of Nature!  What more does She 
>want from us?  At that point I first realized the incredible difficulty gap 
>between fulfilling a deontological obligation to perform a risk analysis, 
>and actually avoiding risk.  You can always perform a risk analysis - it 
>requires merely that you quantify your ignorance. There's no guarantee that 
>survival is even possible - this requires nonignorance, and nonignorance 
>can be arbitrarily difficult to obtain. It is in the nature of 
>deontological social obligations that they tend to be fulfillable, which 
>tells you something about their distance from the real world.
>
>George Orwell wrote:  "In our time, political speech and writing are 
>largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of 
>British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of 
>the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments 
>which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with 
>the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to 
>consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness."
>
>Humanity can survive the loss of a thousand people, or a million people; it 
>survives fifty-five million deaths every year.  It is therefore appropriate 
>to trade off the risk of fatal side effects against probable benefits of 
>life-saving pharmaceuticals, to minimize net casualties. This is the 
>argument which is too brutal for most people to face: it requires accepting 
>that every now and then, even after performing a cost-benefit analysis, the 
>Proactionary Principle will kill a few thousand people - loudly, visibly, 
>in full public view.  The Precautionary Principle kills many more people, 
>but silently.
>
>If human beings did not age, but still suffered accidents, we would in no 
>sense be immortal; we would live only until one of life's many dangers cut 
>us down.  The human species is like an unaging individual human; it has 
>survived this far only because there has not been *any* significant, 
>recurring danger of extinction.  Once we enter the realm where existential 
>risk becomes *possible*, it imposes a death sentence on humankind, unless 
>the window of vulnerability is bounded, and small.  No existential risk can 
>ever be realized, even once.  It is as if you did not age, but you were 
>still vulnerable to all ordinary accidents, and you absolutely had to 
>survive at all costs.  The Proactionary Principle does not inculcate a 
>mindset appropriate to such a task.  It is the creed of someone who can 
>never really be hurt, as humankind can never really be hurt by a 
>pharmaceutical mistakenly approved.
>
>--
>Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
>Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
>_______________________________________________
>extropy-chat mailing list
>extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
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