From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Apr 1 03:37:28 2014 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 21:37:28 -0600 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 4:46 PM, Alfio Puglisi wrote: > > After all the news about BICEP2's (indirect) detection of gravitational > waves produced by inflation, I was pointed by someone to this paper by Alan > Guth, one of the fathers of inflationary theory: > > http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-th/pdf/0702/0702178v1.pdf > > it goes something like this: if the eternal inflation hypotesis is true, > the entire cosmos is undergoing continuous inflation, which gives birth to > "ordinary" universes here and there. But since this is inflation, every > second there is more room by a crazy factor like 10^37, and so each second > 10^37 more universes are produced than the second before. > > Now, consider one of those universes. At a certain point, a first > space-faring civilization may develop. As that universe gets a little > older, it might develop a second one. But, older universes are vastly > outnumbered by younger ones (by a factor of 10^37 for each second of > difference), so a civilization picked up at random will almost always find > itself in one of the youngest universes that permits its existance, and > with no second civilization in sight. > > I am not sure that I got all of that correctly :-) It does make sense in a > crazy way, with that biiiig assumption about the eternal inflation, which > of course is unobservable as far as I know. > I don't think this explains why no one is "out there." It does explain why there would be no one "out there" for the first civilization to pop up in each universe, but there is no reason to believe that we are that one in this universe. So I don't see how this explains anything for us other than giving us yet another reason to doubt that a creator was required to dial in specific numbers for our universe. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Tue Apr 1 04:54:34 2014 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2014 00:54:34 -0400 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 6:46 PM, Alfio Puglisi wrote: > > After all the news about BICEP2's (indirect) detection of gravitational > waves produced by inflation, I was pointed by someone to this paper by Alan > Guth, one of the fathers of inflationary theory: > > http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-th/pdf/0702/0702178v1.pdf > > it goes something like this: if the eternal inflation hypotesis is true, > the entire cosmos is undergoing continuous inflation, which gives birth to > "ordinary" universes here and there. But since this is inflation, every > second there is more room by a crazy factor like 10^37, and so each second > 10^37 more universes are produced than the second before. > > Now, consider one of those universes. At a certain point, a first > space-faring civilization may develop. As that universe gets a little > older, it might develop a second one. But, older universes are vastly > outnumbered by younger ones (by a factor of 10^37 for each second of > difference), so a civilization picked up at random will almost always find > itself in one of the youngest universes that permits its existance, and > with no second civilization in sight. > > I am not sure that I got all of that correctly :-) It does make sense in a > crazy way, with that biiiig assumption about the eternal inflation, which > of course is unobservable as far as I know. > ### A few years ago on this list I used this very argument against Nick Bostrom's anthropic argument in favor of us being in a simulation - although at that time inflation was more of a hypothesis rather than a theory slouching towards becoming a fact, as it is doing today. There are so may more young civilizations than older ones that no matter how popular ancestor simulations are, you are vanishingly unlikely to be in one of them. Also, inflation lifts the anthropic curse of doom - when young civilizations are so frequently generated, sentients in these young civilizations vastly outnumber sentients in old civilizations, even if each old civ has orders of magnitude more members. So, there is no need to invoke the great filter between us, a young civilization, and our Hubble-spanning descendants. And yes, it does seem to me that the Fermi paradox disappears as well in an inflationary universe. Interestingly, I came across an article where Baptists hail BICEP and inflation as yet another proof of their god's existence. This flummoxed me somewhat, I must admit. Long live inflation! Rafal -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Tue Apr 1 05:22:48 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 22:22:48 -0700 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <01c801cf4d6a$6c8dfaf0$45a9f0d0$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Rafal Smigrodzki ? ### A few years ago on this list I used this very argument against Nick Bostrom's anthropic argument in favor of us being in a simulation - although at that time inflation was more of a hypothesis rather than a theory slouching towards becoming a fact, as it is doing today. There are so may more young civilizations than older ones that no matter how popular ancestor simulations are, you are vanishingly unlikely to be in one of them? It is all such mind-boggling stuff, oy. >?Interestingly, I came across an article where Baptists hail BICEP and inflation as yet another proof of their god's existence. This flummoxed me somewhat, I must admit?Rafal Rafal, what we are seeing here is evolution of a religion. The successful modern religions are catching on to an important aspect for their survival: don?t fight science. Rather, spin it to an advantage, regardless of which way science takes us. Religions which fight science are always going to lose in the long run, because science has evidence on its side. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Apr 1 14:32:31 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2014 09:32:31 -0500 Subject: [ExI] enjoy your steaks! Message-ID: (and maybe don't worry about your cholesterol, and look at the data concerning cognitive decline and statins) Nutrition experts have egg on their faces. For years, public health policy has been to discourage consumption of saturated fat--or most any fat at all. The diet-heart hypothesis got its start in the 1950s. Ancel Keys, PhD, and his colleagues collected epidemiological data from around the world and decided that they showed a connection between saturated fat consumption and high blood cholesterol, and consequently, an elevated risk of heart disease. The National Cholesterol Education Program, the American Heart Associationand many other public health organizations promoted the idea that eating a low-fat high-carb diet would reduce heart disease. A meta-analysis involving 72 studies and over 600,000 participants now contradicts that traditional wisdom. The researchers found no link between saturated fat consumption and a higher risk of heart attacks and other cardiovascular complications (*Annals of Internal Medicine*, March 18, 2014 ). Dietitians had told people to use margarine instead of butterand polyunsaturated fats found in corn or safflower oil because they were supposed to lower cholesterol and be heart healthy. The new analysis found no cardiac benefit from such omega-6 rich fats. Trans-fatty acids like those found in shortening and margarine up until a few years ago were associated in the analysis with a higher incidence of heart disease. This is not the first study to suggest the conventional sat-fat wisdom might be wrong. The Sydney Diet Heart Study was conducted in Sydney, Australia, at the height of the diet-heart hypothesis, between 1966 and 1973. In this research, the scientists recruited 458 men who had recently had a heart attack and were therefore at high risk for a second cardiac event. The men were divided into two groups: half continued with their usual diet, while the other group was given safflower oil and margarine made from safflower oil and told to use it instead of butter or animal fats. The hypothesis, of course, was that the polyunsaturated safflower oil would protect the men from a second heart attack, but the scientists ran out of research money and the data were not fully analyzed until a research team resurrected them last year (*BMJ*, online, Feb. 5, 2013 ). The data showed that the men given safflower oil did have lower cholesterol, but they were also 60 percent more likely to die during the study, especially from heart disease. Of those getting the safflower-supplemented diets, 16.3 percent died of heart attacks compared to 10.1 percent of those eating their usual diets with butter and lard. Too many of the dietary recommendations of the past half century were based on belief rather than data. From the evils of eggs to the sins of sodium, simple public health messages have been shown time and again to be misleading. So what guidelines should you use to follow a healthful diet? We think the grandmothers got it right: real foods, lovingly prepared. It does take a little longer to cook from scratch rather than eating out of a package, but the taste and health benefits are big. To learn more about how to follow this type of healthy diet, you may be interested in our books, *Recipes & Remedies* and* Favorite Foods* (online at PeoplesPharmacy.com ). -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Tue Apr 1 16:56:13 2014 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2014 08:56:13 -0800 Subject: [ExI] Climate models Message-ID: On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 4:00 AM, John Clark wrote: (Keith) >> > It can't be carbon based because there isn't enough left that can be >> obtained at a low enough price. > > It probably can be for the next few decades. Gail Tverberg argues that the continuing economic malaise is largely due to energy cost. I think she is right. >> Here is a dumbed down version of my thoughts on how to solve the problem. >> >> https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5iotdmmTJQsSzVYQ2Q0YUtCMERRczdYSXMtUWphUl92aHFN/edit?usp=sharing >> > Interesting ideas and there is certainly nothing in them that would violate > the fundamental laws of physics, but it would seem to me that the > technological advancements needed to actualize this would be far far > greater than what would be required to make a Liquid Fluoride Thorium > Reactor (LFTR) practical. I have a high opinion of LFTR. And you may be correct, but the state of technology in high powered lasers is much further along than you might think. Back in the SDI days they solved the technical problems of pointing and tracking, at least that's what Dr. Jordin Kare says. (I know enough about this to know Jordin knows way more than I do.) The other big piece is the Skylon, and that's currently funded at around $350 million for building and flying a prototype engine. > And I think economic projections about how long > it would take to turn a profit and how much it would cost to build and > maintain a HUGE project like that with super advanced technology unlike > anything that has ever been built before are pretty useless. It's not the largest energy project around. It's not anywhere close to as difficult as the Manhattan project. The technology isn't that advanced either. It is really large, but the scope of solving the energy problems makes that a requirement for any project that will actually deal with the problems. > And that's > another advantage LFTR has, you don't have to start colossal, you can begin > the learning curve with a small pilot plant and then grow from there. I agree with you. But LFTRs have problems well beyond the technical ones. They *are* nuclear reactors and that's a problem to get people to understand how they differ from more conventional designs. In any case, Reaction Engines has funding. I don't know of any current funding for LFTR > And there is a problem that both LFTR's and your ideas have, > environmentalists won't like them; for them alternative energy sources are > fine but only if they remain strictly on paper. I think it's more complicated. Wind and solar have captured the memetic "market" in spite of their being economically unworkable. You might be interested in the comments for one of the early articles on power satellites I wrote. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5485 "Perhaps it is incorrect of me to assume they are in favor of a die off when they reject that there even could be a solution to the carbon/energy problems. Operationally though it's the same thing." Why is there a fascination for disaster futures? This isn't new, there must be reasons rooted in our evolutionary past. Keith From atymes at gmail.com Tue Apr 1 17:32:02 2014 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2014 10:32:02 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Climate models In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Apr 1, 2014 9:57 AM, "Keith Henson" wrote: > Why is there a fascination for disaster futures? This isn't new, > there must be reasons rooted in our evolutionary past. Because believing that it's hopeless, that there is nothing anyone can do, absolves them of all responsibility and guilt. If no one can save the world then it doesn't matter that they aren't. Other people trying presents the horrifying possibility that those others might succeed, which must not be allowed...or so goes the train of subconscious thought. One trick is to get them to imagine a world that has been saved - to think about the end state we want to reach. Once they accept that it is possible, then means of getting there can be discussed. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tara at taramayastales.com Tue Apr 1 17:48:53 2014 From: tara at taramayastales.com (Tara Maya) Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2014 10:48:53 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Climate models In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <8B5F0C76-C357-4831-9DB3-0558887F7783@taramayastales.com> On Apr 1, 2014, at 10:32 AM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Apr 1, 2014 9:57 AM, "Keith Henson" wrote: > > Why is there a fascination for disaster futures? This isn't new, > > there must be reasons rooted in our evolutionary past. > A Just So story?. 70,000 years ago there was one crazy guy and his family who split off from the sane people because he was convinced the world was going to be destroyed by invisible beings. No other humans at that time believed in invisible beings or was paranoid about he end of the world. Crazy guy went into a cave (or maybe it was a boat) and then a super volcano destroyed all of the human race except that dude and his descendants. This accounts for flood stories from around the world, and the fact that so many his descendants inherited his belief in invisible beings and the end of the world. Tara Maya Blog | Twitter | Facebook | Amazon | Goodreads -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Wed Apr 2 13:50:29 2014 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2014 14:50:29 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Basic Income - Basic Housing? Message-ID: We have discussed in the past that as robots cause mass unemployment, then governments might provide everyone with a basic income (or social security) to enable them to survive. I have just read about a new twist that benefits society. Quote: The best way to stop homelessness is mindbogglingly simple: Give them homes. Quote: Providing the homeless with a place to live may seem like a high cost for taxpayers. But the alternative, it turns out, is more costly, new research shows. Subsidized accommodation could actually be a bargain for the public, in purely economic terms. That's because living on the street exposes men and women to higher health risks, so they're more likely to use expensive hospital services. Moreover, the homeless tend to get arrested more often than the rest of the population, which generates additional expense in the criminal justice system. The research looked at Moore Place, an 85-apartment building that opened in Charlotte, North Carolina, in early 2012. The University of North Carolina Charlotte tracked a group of homeless a year before entering the facility, and then a year afterwards, and recorded a dramatic drop in health care use and jail time. Total hospital bills fell from $2.5 million before to $760,000 afterwards, while the number of E.R. visits dropped from 571 to 124. Likewise, there was a 78% reduction in arrests and a 84% fall in jail stays. ------------ BillK From bbenzai at yahoo.com Wed Apr 2 14:07:15 2014 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben) Date: Wed, 02 Apr 2014 15:07:15 +0100 Subject: [ExI] enjoy your steaks! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <533C1993.7040701@yahoo.com> I think we probably all know this already (it's quite possible that there is a higher proportion of palaeo types among transhumanists than among the population as a whole), but, just like so many other things (materialism and its consequences, logical fallacies, anti-deathism memes, why 'natural' is not synonymous with 'good', etc., etc.) it bears repeating. And repeating. And repeating. Ben Zaiboc From bbenzai at yahoo.com Wed Apr 2 14:25:24 2014 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben) Date: Wed, 02 Apr 2014 15:25:24 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Climate models In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <533C1DD4.2020001@yahoo.com> Adrian Tymes wrote: > "Keith Henson" wrote: >> Why is there a fascination for disaster futures? This isn't new, >> there must be reasons rooted in our evolutionary past. > Because believing that it's hopeless, that there is nothing anyone can do, > absolves them of all responsibility and guilt. I think there's more to it than that. Disasturbation has always been popular, and seems even moreso these days. I suspect that there's an element of delight in it. Especially if you think you're not going to personally experience it. I can't help thinking of mediaeval descriptions of the blessed souls in heaven getting their jollies by looking down on the damned in their eternal torture. Ben Zaiboc From spike66 at att.net Wed Apr 2 15:26:04 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2014 08:26:04 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Basic Income - Basic Housing? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <00c701cf4e87$dd5b1880$98114980$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of BillK ... Quote: The best way to stop homelessness is mindbogglingly simple: Give them homes. ...------------BillK _______________________________________________ BillK, it is done that way now: section 8 housing. It does postpone the problem. The solution as described in the link is one that has failed spectacularly in places like Detroit Michigan: the housing projects get too dangerous. You can go to some parts of Detroit today and have any house you want: plenty of them are abandoned. But the area itself is too dangerous for human habitation. There are no mindbogglingly simple solutions to homelessness. There are some simple failed solutions however, and I predict they will be used again. spike From spike66 at att.net Wed Apr 2 16:12:01 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2014 09:12:01 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Climate models In-Reply-To: <533C1DD4.2020001@yahoo.com> References: <533C1DD4.2020001@yahoo.com> Message-ID: <00fe01cf4e8e$489f5d80$d9de1880$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Ben ... >>Adrian Tymes wrote: > "Keith Henson" wrote: >>> Why is there a fascination for disaster futures? This isn't new, >> there must be reasons rooted in our evolutionary past. >> Because believing that it's hopeless, that there is nothing anyone can do, > absolves them of all responsibility and guilt. >...I think there's more to it than that. Disasturbation has always been popular, and seems even moreso these days. I suspect that there's an element of delight in it...Ben Zaiboc _______________________________________________ Somewhere in this discussion a theory needs to deal with the observation that most threats very suddenly disappeared. Just 5 or 6 generations ago, there were so many diseases we had no way to cure, so much danger all around us every day, so many different ways to die, some suddenly and violently. Look around us now: just in the past century, we have successfully made life in most places pretty safe. So we are a species which has evolved over thousands of generations to deal constantly with threats. Suddenly most of them disappear with a puff of vapor, in one awesome science-filled century, a flash. All those deal-with-danger instincts are still there. Where do they focus now? Do they express themselves in mostly imaginary risks? Are they poorly suited for dealing with the very real threats? Why is it we see all this energy spent on global warming and yet have what appears to be a huge societal blind spot to the more immediate and dire risk of increasing energy cost? That one is already upon us and getting steadily worse, while we worry over a different threat, the more dire consequences of which are likely more than a century away. Our threat reaction instincts need to be tuned somehow. spike From pharos at gmail.com Wed Apr 2 16:27:11 2014 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2014 17:27:11 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Basic Income - Basic Housing? In-Reply-To: <00c701cf4e87$dd5b1880$98114980$@att.net> References: <00c701cf4e87$dd5b1880$98114980$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 4:26 PM, spike wrote: > BillK, it is done that way now: section 8 housing. It does postpone the > problem. > > The solution as described in the link is one that has failed spectacularly > in places like Detroit Michigan: the housing projects get too dangerous. > You can go to some parts of Detroit today and have any house you want: > plenty of them are abandoned. But the area itself is too dangerous for > human habitation. > > There are no mindbogglingly simple solutions to homelessness. There are > some simple failed solutions however, and I predict they will be used again. > > After searching, there seem to be a lot of Housing Projects going on. Some failing, some reasonably successful. The Moore Place project has differences. It is single person accomodation for people who have been homeless for over a year (and usually have medical or disability problems). And it is Supportive Housing with on-site medical and social worker staff to help the residents. The residents are not left to fend for themselves, Because it is for single people, at a stroke that gets rid of all the family problems like domestic violence or child abuse. And the resident staff provide a protective environment. This seems to be rather different to handing out rent vouchers for people to give to cheap slum landlords in deprived, crime-ridden areas. Supportive Housing is more expensive, but the external cost savings pay for it, by reduced Medicare bills, police & jail costs, etc.). The full report is here: BillK From spike66 at att.net Wed Apr 2 16:20:28 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2014 09:20:28 -0700 Subject: [ExI] enjoy your steaks! In-Reply-To: <533C1993.7040701@yahoo.com> References: <533C1993.7040701@yahoo.com> Message-ID: <00ff01cf4e8f$7682d7d0$63888770$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Ben Subject: Re: [ExI] enjoy your steaks! >...I think we probably all know this already (it's quite possible that there is a higher proportion of palaeo types among transhumanists than among the population as a whole)...Ben Zaiboc _______________________________________________ Evolution is a powerful concept. If people really understand it, the results are better models and predictions in all areas, including health notions. Long ago I found that a high fat low calorie diet works extremely well for me, before it had a name and before I discovered I was a 3 sigma high on the Neanderthal gene content (3.2%, anyone higher? Wanna have a caveman contest?) I like the whole paleo diet name. I do suggest that people look into the concept, follow the line of reasoning, think long and hard about the conditions under which we evolved and our digestive systems adapted. Then eat the fat, but not too much of it, exercise, get out in the sun, swing that bumpy club. Oh we need to organize a Neanderthal picnic, that would be a kick. spike From natasha at natasha.cc Wed Apr 2 19:09:40 2014 From: natasha at natasha.cc (natasha at natasha.cc) Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2014 12:09:40 -0700 Subject: [ExI] 2014 MTA Conference - Friday April 4 Message-ID: <013b01cf4ea7$1a051780$4e0f4680$@natasha.cc> I am looking forward to this event and hope to see many of you there! http://news.transfigurism.org/2014/03/schedule-for-2014-conference-of-mormon .html If you don't have a ticket, here is the link: http://www.eventbrite.com/e/2014-conference-of-the-mormon-transhumanist-asso ciation-registration-10032323951 Natasha Natasha Vita-More, PhD Faculty, University of Advancing Technology Chair, Humanity+ _______________________________________ New Book at Amazon! cover email -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.png Type: image/png Size: 10577 bytes Desc: not available URL: From anders at aleph.se Wed Apr 2 20:10:33 2014 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2014 22:10:33 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Climate models In-Reply-To: <00fe01cf4e8e$489f5d80$d9de1880$@att.net> Message-ID: <604477236-19482@secure.ericade.net> spike , 2/4/2014 6:29 PM: All those deal-with-danger instincts are still there. ?Where do they focus now? ?Do they express themselves in mostly imaginary risks? ?Are they poorly suited for dealing with the very real threats? ?Why is it we see all this energy spent on global warming and yet have what appears to be a huge societal blind spot to the more immediate and dire risk of increasing energy cost? ?... Our threat reaction instincts need to be tuned somehow. Priorities in general need tuning. In almost any domain there are huge gains to be made if priorities were made better: the most important thing usually has value at least twice the second most important one. And hence spending effort on figuring out which one to go for is rational up to half of the cost difference. But we are extra bad at thinking about risks.?http://bigthink.com/risk-reason-and-reality/ebola-organic-food-and-fukushima-three-dopeslaps-about-how-we-get-risk-wrong Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Apr 3 04:57:39 2014 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2014 22:57:39 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Basic Income - Basic Housing? In-Reply-To: References: <00c701cf4e87$dd5b1880$98114980$@att.net> Message-ID: 2nd Portly Gentleman : What may we put you down for, sir? Scrooge : Nothing, sir. 1st Portly Gentleman : Ah, you wish to remain anonymous. Scrooge : I wish to be left alone, sir! That is what I wish! I don't make myself merry at Christmas and I cannot afford to make idle people merry. I have been forced to support the establishments I have mentioned through taxation and God knows they cost more than they're worth. Those who are badly off must go there. 2nd Portly Gentleman : Many would rather die than go there. Scrooge : If they'd rather die, then they had better do it and decrease the surplus population. Good night, gentlemen. [walks away, then turns back] Scrooge : Humbug! Maybe Scrooge had a point... ;-) -Kelly On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 10:27 AM, BillK wrote: > On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 4:26 PM, spike wrote: > > BillK, it is done that way now: section 8 housing. It does postpone the > > problem. > > > > The solution as described in the link is one that has failed > spectacularly > > in places like Detroit Michigan: the housing projects get too dangerous. > > You can go to some parts of Detroit today and have any house you want: > > plenty of them are abandoned. But the area itself is too dangerous for > > human habitation. > > > > There are no mindbogglingly simple solutions to homelessness. There are > > some simple failed solutions however, and I predict they will be used > again. > > > > > > After searching, there seem to be a lot of Housing Projects going on. > Some failing, some reasonably successful. > > The Moore Place project has differences. It is single person > accomodation for people who have been homeless for over a year (and > usually have medical or disability problems). And it is Supportive > Housing with on-site medical and social worker staff to help the > residents. The residents are not left to fend for themselves, Because > it is for single people, at a stroke that gets rid of all the family > problems like domestic violence or child abuse. And the resident staff > provide a protective environment. > > This seems to be rather different to handing out rent vouchers for > people to give to cheap slum landlords in deprived, crime-ridden > areas. > > Supportive Housing is more expensive, but the external cost savings > pay for it, by reduced Medicare bills, police & jail costs, etc.). > > The full report is here: > > > > 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 spike66 at att.net Thu Apr 3 05:42:54 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2014 22:42:54 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Basic Income - Basic Housing? In-Reply-To: References: <00c701cf4e87$dd5b1880$98114980$@att.net> Message-ID: <004501cf4eff$9036ef20$b0a4cd60$@att.net> After searching, there seem to be a lot of Housing Projects going on. Some failing, some reasonably successful.Supportive Housing is more expensive, but the external cost savings pay for it, by reduced Medicare bills, police & jail costs, etc.). The full report is here: BillK _______________________________________________ BillK, since you are British I wish to explain one point of view of a severe American problem: poverty in a rich nation. In some ways it comes down to the federal government vs state governments doing welfare (and medical care, but that is a discussion for another time.) Our constitution allows the fed to "promote the general welfare" but it is vaguely worded and often contested. Each state has its own constitution, and each state has its own welfare system. In general, US-ian welfare programs are administered at the state level. I would argue this needs to be the case, and that all welfare programs should be administered at the state level. Reason: the US federal government is already bankrupt by my definition anyway. It spends more than it takes in, and there is no clear path to a balanced budget. Sooner or later, lenders will stop lending. Then evolution help those who are dependent on the federal government. We see a huge crisis shaping up currently with the federal government taking on the burden of subsidizing health insurance for the poor. What happens when the fed is forced to announce that it can no longer pay? What happens when the fed is responsible for housing that it can no longer pay for? My notion is that all these programs should be administered at the state level, for the simple reason that states have a balanced budget requirement and the federal government does not. I hear so many advocates of a single payer health care system, but they persistently fail to acknowledge that the proposed single payer is bankrupt. Why do we never hear of a 50 payer system, where health care for the poor is paid by the states? If we had that, then they would bring costs in line, because they need to. Poverty in America is a problem which cannot be solved at a federal level: our federal government is bankrupt, with no clear path to solvency. So my suggestion is that we create a 50 payer system for the poor in housing, food and health care. Make each state decide what constitutes basic housing, basic food subsidies and basic health care. Then with 50 competing systems, we will find which way works best. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Thu Apr 3 06:08:26 2014 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2014 17:08:26 +1100 Subject: [ExI] Basic Income - Basic Housing? In-Reply-To: <00c701cf4e87$dd5b1880$98114980$@att.net> References: <00c701cf4e87$dd5b1880$98114980$@att.net> Message-ID: On 3 April 2014 02:26, spike wrote: > >... On Behalf Of BillK > ... > Quote: > The best way to stop homelessness is mindbogglingly simple: Give them > homes. > > < > http://www.fastcoexist.com/3028384/housing-the-homeless-saves-money-heres-t > he-research-that-proves-it>...------------BillK > _______________________________________________ > > BillK, it is done that way now: section 8 housing. It does postpone the > problem. > > The solution as described in the link is one that has failed spectacularly > in places like Detroit Michigan: the housing projects get too dangerous. > You can go to some parts of Detroit today and have any house you want: > plenty of them are abandoned. But the area itself is too dangerous for > human habitation. > > There are no mindbogglingly simple solutions to homelessness. There are > some simple failed solutions however, and I predict they will be used > again. One way to avoid creating ghettoes is for the public housing agency to make spot purchases in established areas. This has been tried to an extent in Australia and seems to work well, although there are still large public housing projects from the 50's and 60's. -- Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Apr 3 14:04:03 2014 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2014 08:04:03 -0600 Subject: [ExI] enjoy your steaks! In-Reply-To: <00ff01cf4e8f$7682d7d0$63888770$@att.net> References: <533C1993.7040701@yahoo.com> <00ff01cf4e8f$7682d7d0$63888770$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 10:20 AM, spike wrote: > > Oh we need to organize a Neanderthal picnic, that would be > a kick. > As soon as they bring back a mastodon I'll be right next to you skinning it with a chipped flint knife. :-) The challenge to the paleo diet will be finding cow meet if the United Nations gets its way. http://bit.ly/1kuYSgq "That's not a 75 percent reduction like they are talking about, but that's coming without government fiat or absolutely insane food prices." I disagree, the 4% drop in meat consumption has hit my house disproportionately, and is DEFINITELY driven by insane food prices coupled with the fact that I haven't been able to find a steady good paying job. I'm sure things would be different by now under a president Romney. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Apr 3 14:38:08 2014 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2014 08:38:08 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Basic Income - Basic Housing? In-Reply-To: References: <00c701cf4e87$dd5b1880$98114980$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 12:08 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > One way to avoid creating ghettoes is for the public housing agency to > make spot purchases in established areas. This has been tried to an extent > in Australia and seems to work well, although there are still large public > housing projects from the 50's and 60's. > Singapore has a fairly successful program because they created a path to apartment ownership. Prior to establishing potential ownership, the apartments were rented and trashed. After creating a path to ownership, things went a little better down there. One problem related to homelessness in the USA is mental health care. Many of the chronically homeless are mentally ill, and would not willingly choose to move into an apartment, no matter how nice. Though some will accept services, if offered by an attractive young woman in a large pink bunny suit. Once there, they would be incapable of taking care of the place. So you would also have to pay for daily maid service to keep it nice. Might not be such a huge problem with robot maids... but there are jobs Americans won't do, as you might recall. According to the gubment... http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/Mental_Illness.pdf "20 to 25% of the homeless population in the United States suffers from some form of severe mental illness." So in 2009, they spent a billion and a half dollars (that they borrowed from China) extra in TARP to address homelessness. I would argue that unemployment stayed artificially high because of those government run shenanigans, but the socialists would disagree. The mentally ill used to be housed in large institutions, often in barbaric conditions, but our friends at the American Civil Liberties Union made sure that those got shut down in the early 70s. This has left a bit of a hole in our system that still has not been filled, except by homeless mentally ill people. There are a lot of group homes for the mentally incompetent. These are just more expensive versions of the large institutions. My mentally challenged daughter lives in one of these, and I grant that it is nicer than my house, but she lacks freedom so I would not trade places with her. People who are not mentally ill or drug addicted tend to rotate in and out of homelessness as a temporary condition. Those who are mentally ill or drug addicted can be chronically homeless. Then there is the very small percentage of people who prefer homelessness as a life style. In a free nation, it would be hard to force them into housing. They enjoy the feeling of being free from NSA surveillance, and other things because homelessness equates to invisibility. I admit to a huge amount of ignorance on the subject. But I do know there are no simple solutions to this complex problem despite what some exuberant journalist has to say on the issue. He's been watching too many TED talks, where all the world's problems are solved in 18 minutes. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Thu Apr 3 15:12:53 2014 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2014 08:12:53 -0700 Subject: [ExI] enjoy your steaks! In-Reply-To: References: <533C1993.7040701@yahoo.com> <00ff01cf4e8f$7682d7d0$63888770$@att.net> Message-ID: On Apr 3, 2014 7:05 AM, "Kelly Anderson" wrote: > I'm sure things would be different by now under a president Romney. Yep. They'd be worse. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Apr 3 15:39:01 2014 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2014 09:39:01 -0600 Subject: [ExI] enjoy your steaks! In-Reply-To: References: <533C1993.7040701@yahoo.com> <00ff01cf4e8f$7682d7d0$63888770$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 9:12 AM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Apr 3, 2014 7:05 AM, "Kelly Anderson" wrote: > > I'm sure things would be different by now under a president Romney. > > Yep. They'd be worse. > In some ways, I'm sure you are right. Leadership choices are always a tradeoff. I was, however, referring to employment. Hard to imagine he could have done worse in that particular. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Thu Apr 3 16:22:12 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2014 11:22:12 -0500 Subject: [ExI] enjoy your steaks! In-Reply-To: References: <533C1993.7040701@yahoo.com> <00ff01cf4e8f$7682d7d0$63888770$@att.net> Message-ID: I think you may be attributing powers to the President that he does not have. Many blame him for the weather! bill On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 10:39 AM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 9:12 AM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > >> On Apr 3, 2014 7:05 AM, "Kelly Anderson" wrote: >> > I'm sure things would be different by now under a president Romney. >> >> Yep. They'd be worse. >> > In some ways, I'm sure you are right. Leadership choices are always a > tradeoff. I was, however, referring to employment. Hard to imagine he could > have done worse in that particular. > > -Kelly > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Thu Apr 3 16:35:02 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2014 11:35:02 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Basic Income - Basic Housing? In-Reply-To: References: <00c701cf4e87$dd5b1880$98114980$@att.net> Message-ID: I don't know either but I do know this: alcoholics and drug addicts and the mentally retarded and psychotic should not be homeless unless they simply will not stay put in some kind of housing. I have worked in mental institutions from the lowest level aide to professional psychologist (including Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa that filed the law suit that changed a lot of things in 1973) and think that after minorities such as blacks, women, animals, and children have all had many advocates and organization devoted to them, maybe we can have a civil rights movement for the above fathers, mothers, children, brothers and sisters of our citizens. I think we should be judged in part by how we treat the lowest and most helpless of us. bill wallace On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 9:38 AM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 12:08 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > >> One way to avoid creating ghettoes is for the public housing agency to >> make spot purchases in established areas. This has been tried to an extent >> in Australia and seems to work well, although there are still large public >> housing projects from the 50's and 60's. >> > > Singapore has a fairly successful program because they created a path to > apartment ownership. Prior to establishing potential ownership, the > apartments were rented and trashed. After creating a path to ownership, > things went a little better down there. > > One problem related to homelessness in the USA is mental health care. Many > of the chronically homeless are mentally ill, and would not willingly > choose to move into an apartment, no matter how nice. Though some will > accept services, if offered by an attractive young woman in a large pink > bunny suit. Once there, they would be incapable of taking care of the > place. So you would also have to pay for daily maid service to keep it > nice. Might not be such a huge problem with robot maids... but there are > jobs Americans won't do, as you might recall. > > According to the gubment... > http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/Mental_Illness.pdf > "20 to 25% of the homeless population in the United States suffers from > some form of severe mental illness." > > So in 2009, they spent a billion and a half dollars (that they borrowed > from China) extra in TARP to address homelessness. I would argue that > unemployment stayed artificially high because of those government run > shenanigans, but the socialists would disagree. > > The mentally ill used to be housed in large institutions, often in > barbaric conditions, but our friends at the American Civil Liberties Union > made sure that those got shut down in the early 70s. This has left a bit of > a hole in our system that still has not been filled, except by homeless > mentally ill people. There are a lot of group homes for the mentally > incompetent. These are just more expensive versions of the large > institutions. My mentally challenged daughter lives in one of these, and I > grant that it is nicer than my house, but she lacks freedom so I would not > trade places with her. > > People who are not mentally ill or drug addicted tend to rotate in and out > of homelessness as a temporary condition. Those who are mentally ill or > drug addicted can be chronically homeless. > > Then there is the very small percentage of people who prefer homelessness > as a life style. In a free nation, it would be hard to force them into > housing. They enjoy the feeling of being free from NSA surveillance, and > other things because homelessness equates to invisibility. > > I admit to a huge amount of ignorance on the subject. But I do know there > are no simple solutions to this complex problem despite what some exuberant > journalist has to say on the issue. He's been watching too many TED talks, > where all the world's problems are solved in 18 minutes. > > -Kelly > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sparge at gmail.com Thu Apr 3 16:39:50 2014 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2014 12:39:50 -0400 Subject: [ExI] enjoy your steaks! In-Reply-To: References: <533C1993.7040701@yahoo.com> <00ff01cf4e8f$7682d7d0$63888770$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 11:39 AM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > > In some ways, I'm sure you are right. Leadership choices are always a > tradeoff. I was, however, referring to employment. Hard to imagine he could > have done worse in that particular. > You really think it's the president's (or even the government's) job to create jobs? -Dave -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Thu Apr 3 16:47:51 2014 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2014 17:47:51 +0100 Subject: [ExI] enjoy your steaks! In-Reply-To: References: <533C1993.7040701@yahoo.com> <00ff01cf4e8f$7682d7d0$63888770$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 4:39 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > In some ways, I'm sure you are right. Leadership choices are always a > tradeoff. I was, however, referring to employment. Hard to imagine he could > have done worse in that particular. > > Surely it was corporations and Wall Street that caused unemployment? Once the corporations and bankers took over government the driving force was to increase profits at all cost. Manufacturing in the US stopped when it was vastly more profitable to buy in from abroad. At first, savings and borrowing and cheap prices enabled the consumer driven economy to continue. But now the money has run out. The jobs will never come back as robots and computers are now set to replace cheap foreign labour. BillK From iph1954 at msn.com Thu Apr 3 05:07:14 2014 From: iph1954 at msn.com (Mike) Date: Wed, 3 Apr 2014 06:07:14 +0100 Subject: [ExI] (no subject) Message-ID: <89a3d8454ff6$06a1c763$4021757b$@msn.com> http://www.metoliusriverplumbing.com/templates/system/aprilnews.php -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Thu Apr 3 19:24:19 2014 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2014 15:24:19 -0400 Subject: [ExI] enjoy your steaks! In-Reply-To: References: <533C1993.7040701@yahoo.com> <00ff01cf4e8f$7682d7d0$63888770$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 12:39 PM, Dave Sill wrote: > On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 11:39 AM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > >> >> >> In some ways, I'm sure you are right. Leadership choices are always a >> tradeoff. I was, however, referring to employment. Hard to imagine he could >> have done worse in that particular. >> > > You really think it's the president's (or even the government's) job to > create jobs? > ### No, just to refrain from maliciously destroying them. Rafal -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Thu Apr 3 21:06:38 2014 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2014 17:06:38 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Basic Income - Basic Housing? In-Reply-To: References: <00c701cf4e87$dd5b1880$98114980$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 2:08 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > > One way to avoid creating ghettoes is for the public housing agency to > make spot purchases in established areas. > ### A very effective method of transforming an established area into ghetto. Rafal -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Thu Apr 3 23:18:36 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2014 16:18:36 -0700 Subject: [ExI] enjoy your steaks! In-Reply-To: References: <533C1993.7040701@yahoo.com> <00ff01cf4e8f$7682d7d0$63888770$@att.net> Message-ID: <02b101cf4f93$0afe2b90$20fa82b0$@att.net> >?You really think it's the president's (or even the government's) job to create jobs? No, it?s just what they promise to do in order to get elected. Can anyone here think of a single exception? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Fri Apr 4 01:21:04 2014 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2014 12:21:04 +1100 Subject: [ExI] Basic Income - Basic Housing? In-Reply-To: References: <00c701cf4e87$dd5b1880$98114980$@att.net> Message-ID: On 4 April 2014 08:06, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > > > > On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 2:08 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: >> >> >> One way to avoid creating ghettoes is for the public housing agency to >> make spot purchases in established areas. >> > > ### A very effective method of transforming an established area into > ghetto. > One apartment in the block is owned by the housing authority, the others are privately owned. There is perhaps an increased risk of getting a bad neighbour but that can happen anyway. -- Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Apr 4 02:42:54 2014 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2014 22:42:54 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Basic Income - Basic Housing? In-Reply-To: References: <00c701cf4e87$dd5b1880$98114980$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 9:21 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > >> On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 2:08 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: >>> >>> >>> One way to avoid creating ghettoes is for the public housing agency to >>> make spot purchases in established areas. >>> >> >> ### A very effective method of transforming an established area into >> ghetto. >> > > One apartment in the block is owned by the housing authority, the others > are privately owned. There is perhaps an increased risk of getting a bad > neighbour but that can happen anyway. > ### There are tipping points. One deranged, depraved neighbor does not destroy a neighborhood but a few can markedly depress home values, and then a death spiral sometimes occurs - cheap housing attracts poor people, soon crime rises, and everything goes to hell. A long time ago, rigorous neighborhood associations could exclude undesirables, and quality of neighborhoods was thus maintained. No longer. Now only money, in the form of, of all things, high local taxes, is still legal as a proxy measure used to exclude undesirables. The less affluent can no longer protect themselves. Rafal -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dan_ust at yahoo.com Fri Apr 4 04:05:33 2014 From: dan_ust at yahoo.com (Dan Ust) Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2014 21:05:33 -0700 Subject: [ExI] From geology to biology Message-ID: <8F818EB4-B151-414A-ABBB-27EFE4827277@yahoo.com> http://schaechter.asmblog.org/schaechter/2014/03/from-geology-to-biology-a-serpentine-story-of-early-life.html Thought this might be of interest. Regards, Dan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Fri Apr 4 15:07:07 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2014 10:07:07 -0500 Subject: [ExI] enjoy your salt! Message-ID: Whatever made us think that medicine was a science? They ought to be as ashamed as Wall St. bankers. (I'd send this as a link but a prior link to People's Pharmacy failed, so I just copied it - bill). For decades public health officials have been preaching a low-salt diet. Ask the experts at the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) and they would probably say that you can't have too low a golf score or salt intake. They preach that anyone over 50 should keep sodium intake under 1,500 mg daily. The American Heart Association (AHA) also recommends that "all Americans reduce the amount of sodium in their diet to less than 1500 mg a day." What if these prestigious organizations were not just wrong, but dangerously so? A study published in the American Journal of Hypertension on April 2, 2014, analyzed data from 25 previous research papers. This meta-analysis concluded that a low-salt dietary strategy is associated with a higher risk of death. You read right. In observational studies, the preponderance of the data links the sodium recommendations of the CDC and the AHA to increased mortality. Ouch! This kind of evidence undermines the credibility of our most prestigious public health organizations. This isn't the first time we have heard that a low-sodium diet might be hazardous to your health. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) issued a report that was published in *JAMA Internal Medicine* (online, Oct. 28, 2013)that found there are no data demonstrating benefit from the CDC or AHA low-sodium guidelines. Even worse, the report noted that when people with diabetes, hypertension, kidney and cardiovascular disease achieve the goals set out by the CDC and AHA, they may actually experience harm. Studies have suggested that a low-sodium diet may stimulate a hormonally-induced stress reaction that could lead to an increased risk of type 2 diabetes, heart failure complilcations, worsening thyroid disease and death. Keep in mind that the health professionals who are nominated to the Institute of Medicine are among the smartest and most respected scientists in the world. But wait, it gets worse still. Another review of the low-sodium recommendations published in *The American Journal of Medicine*titled "Dietary Sodium Restriction: Take It with a Grain of Salt"came to the following conclusions: *"There is no conclusive evidence that a low sodium diet reduces cardiovascular events in normotensive and pre-hypertensive or hypertensive individuals. On the contrary, there is sound evidence that a low sodium diet leads to a worse cardiovascular prognosis in patients with systolic congestive heart failure or type 2 diabetes mellitus...Advising low sodium diets seems misguided and potentially dangerous and illustrates the problem of guidelines based on flawed studies using surrogate measures."* Despite the growing evidence that its low-salt guidelines are just plain wrong, neither the CDC nor the AHA seems likely to reverse gears any time soon. Perhaps they fear that their credibility will be damaged if they change direction after all this time. How very sad! Revising views on the basis of evidence seems only rational. Now, no one is saying that pigging out on salt is a good thing. Too much can be at least as dangerous as too little. The new research makes it clear that the sodium situation is a little like the story of Goldilocks and the porridge. It shouldn't be too hot *or* too cold. There is a sweet spot in the middle. The conclusion: *"Both low sodium and high sodium intakes are associated with increased mortality, consistent with a U-shaped association between sodium intake and health outcomes."* *BOTTOM LINE:* The new study suggests that the sweet spot for sodium is between 2,645 and 4,945 mg per day. That is substantially above the recommendations by the American Heart association and the CDC and probably is more in line with what your grandmother was consuming. We continue to believe that grandmothers the world over probably had more common sense about such matters than some of our prestigious public health organizations. We leave it to you and your health care professional to determine what would be optimal for you. In the meantime, here is a link to another People's Pharmacy Alert titled: "Is a Low Salt Diet Dangerous for Your Health"should you wish to read more. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bbenzai at yahoo.com Sat Apr 5 12:15:53 2014 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben) Date: Sat, 05 Apr 2014 13:15:53 +0100 Subject: [ExI] enjoy your salt! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <533FF3F9.6090908@yahoo.com> William Flynn Wallace wrote: > Revising views on the > basis of evidence seems only rational. Only /seems/? LOL. Ben Zaiboc From anders at aleph.se Sat Apr 5 16:48:13 2014 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sat, 5 Apr 2014 18:48:13 +0200 Subject: [ExI] enjoy your salt! In-Reply-To: <533FF3F9.6090908@yahoo.com> Message-ID: <852122543-23271@secure.ericade.net> Ben , 5/4/2014 2:34 PM: William Flynn Wallace wrote: > Revising views on the > basis of evidence seems only rational. Only /seems/? ?LOL. We should run a double blind study!? Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Sat Apr 5 16:53:48 2014 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sat, 5 Apr 2014 18:53:48 +0200 Subject: [ExI] World thinkers Message-ID: <852193258-26138@secure.ericade.net> Prospect magazine has a vote for world thinkers 2014, and I noted that both Nick Bostrom and Elon Musk are on the list. As well as my former landlord Derek Parfit.? http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/worldthinkers/ Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Apr 5 17:37:54 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 5 Apr 2014 12:37:54 -0500 Subject: [ExI] enjoy your salt! In-Reply-To: <852122543-23271@secure.ericade.net> References: <533FF3F9.6090908@yahoo.com> <852122543-23271@secure.ericade.net> Message-ID: And one thing they never told you: only 1/4 of the pop. is sensitive to salt (that is, affects their blood pressure - but now that must be wrong too) billw On Sat, Apr 5, 2014 at 11:48 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Ben , 5/4/2014 2:34 PM: > > William Flynn Wallace wrote: > > > Revising views on the > > basis of evidence seems only rational. > > Only /seems/? LOL. > > > > We should run a double blind study! > > > Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford > University > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Apr 5 17:40:32 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 5 Apr 2014 12:40:32 -0500 Subject: [ExI] World thinkers In-Reply-To: <852193258-26138@secure.ericade.net> References: <852193258-26138@secure.ericade.net> Message-ID: How in the world (literally) could they leave Stephen Pinker off? On Sat, Apr 5, 2014 at 11:53 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Prospect magazine has a vote for world thinkers 2014, and I noted that > both Nick Bostrom and Elon Musk are on the list. As well as my former > landlord Derek Parfit. > > http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/worldthinkers/ > > > Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford > University > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Sat Apr 5 17:57:26 2014 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 5 Apr 2014 18:57:26 +0100 Subject: [ExI] World thinkers In-Reply-To: References: <852193258-26138@secure.ericade.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Apr 5, 2014 at 6:40 PM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > How in the world (literally) could they leave Stephen Pinker off? > > They probably dropped him to make room for the Pope. ! ;) BillK From anders at aleph.se Sat Apr 5 21:02:59 2014 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sat, 5 Apr 2014 23:02:59 +0200 Subject: [ExI] World thinkers In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <866714574-8529@secure.ericade.net> William Flynn Wallace , 5/4/2014 7:49 PM: How in the world (literally) could they leave Stephen Pinker off? Lists like these always have a great deal of arbitrariness in them.? I like the approach of Murray in "Human Excellence": he scored importance by number of biographical encyclopaedias mentioning a person (and how much). That way the importance at least becomes distributed according to how a large group of dedicated writers from different backgrounds consider things. So maybe the real list should be something like the Science Hall of Fame, based on references in the literature. (http://fame.gonzolabs.org/) Of course, being widely referred to doesn't mean one is important. Critical-theory.com has an amusing competition between the most overrated philosophers; the site seems to be down right now, but at last cache has some interesting resultshttp://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:EZKz3uXwrgUJ:www.critical-theory.com/march-madness-the-16-most-overrated-philosophers-are-here/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sun Apr 6 01:04:05 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 5 Apr 2014 20:04:05 -0500 Subject: [ExI] World thinkers In-Reply-To: <866714574-8529@secure.ericade.net> References: <866714574-8529@secure.ericade.net> Message-ID: I would be remiss if I did not encourage all of you to read Pinker's The Blank Slate, where he just crushes that idea and a lot of political correctness that goes along with it, and The Better Angels of our Nature, where he documents the drastic reduction of violence of all kinds, from wars to animals, since the Enlightenment. The world, believe it or not, is becoming a more moral and safer place. Just amazing books, at times funny, shocking, and even folksy. No dreary academic writing from him. Best history writing since Barzun. billw On Sat, Apr 5, 2014 at 4:02 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > William Flynn Wallace , 5/4/2014 7:49 PM: > > How in the world (literally) could they leave Stephen Pinker off? > > > > Lists like these always have a great deal of arbitrariness in them. > > I like the approach of Murray in "Human Excellence": he scored importance > by number of biographical encyclopaedias mentioning a person (and how > much). That way the importance at least becomes distributed according to > how a large group of dedicated writers from different backgrounds consider > things. So maybe the real list should be something like the Science Hall of > Fame, based on references in the literature. (http://fame.gonzolabs.org/) > > Of course, being widely referred to doesn't mean one is important. > Critical-theory.com has an amusing competition between the most overrated > philosophers; the site seems to be down right now, but at last cache has > some interesting results > > http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:EZKz3uXwrgUJ:www.critical-theory.com/march-madness-the-16-most-overrated-philosophers-are-here/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk > > > > Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford > University > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Apr 8 05:45:33 2014 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2014 23:45:33 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Basic Income - Basic Housing? In-Reply-To: References: <00c701cf4e87$dd5b1880$98114980$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 10:35 AM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > I don't know either but I do know this: alcoholics and drug addicts and > the mentally retarded and psychotic should not be homeless unless they > simply will not stay put in some kind of housing. I have worked in mental > institutions from the lowest level aide to professional psychologist > (including Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa that filed the law suit that > changed a lot of things in 1973) and think that after minorities such as > blacks, women, animals, and children have all had many advocates and > organization devoted to them, maybe we can have a civil rights movement for > the above fathers, mothers, children, brothers and sisters of our citizens. > > I think we should be judged in part by how we treat the lowest and most > helpless of us. > Bill, When the courts prevent people from being incarcerated against their will when seriously mentally ill, it is a great victory for the personal freedom of the individual who is mentally ill. But with freedom comes responsibility. If the person is dangerous to others, and demonstrates that through aggressive behavior, they can be put away in a place where they won't hurt others. Also, they can then freeze to death, starve if they don't seek help, or get into all sorts of other trouble they might have avoided while in the care of the state or a private organization that cares for these sorts of people. So my liberty loving side says, let them go free unless they hurt someone. My compassionate side, however, (and I do have one) feels sorry for them because I believe that they might get better treatment in a facility that would help them manage medications, get them clean, help them have clean clothes and healthy food. So it's a serious conflict between caring for people (which I support, ESPECIALLY when it is a private organization caring for the people rather than the government) and letting people have the maximum freedom they can possibly enjoy. In the end, I agree with you. We should be judged by how we treat these people. But providing care to those who want it and forcing care on someone who just wants to be left alone are two very different things. It does get complicated when the person suffers from a paranoia. If I were homeless, for example, I might not want ANY kind of government help. It would be too easy for me to slip into that kind of paranoia. I'd probably walk to some place warm and just do my best on my own. I'm not terribly mentally ill. ;-) -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Tue Apr 8 06:56:41 2014 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2014 16:56:41 +1000 Subject: [ExI] Basic Income - Basic Housing? In-Reply-To: References: <00c701cf4e87$dd5b1880$98114980$@att.net> Message-ID: On 8 April 2014 15:45, Kelly Anderson wrote: > On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 10:35 AM, William Flynn Wallace < > foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote: > >> I don't know either but I do know this: alcoholics and drug addicts and >> the mentally retarded and psychotic should not be homeless unless they >> simply will not stay put in some kind of housing. I have worked in mental >> institutions from the lowest level aide to professional psychologist >> (including Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa that filed the law suit that >> changed a lot of things in 1973) and think that after minorities such as >> blacks, women, animals, and children have all had many advocates and >> organization devoted to them, maybe we can have a civil rights movement for >> the above fathers, mothers, children, brothers and sisters of our citizens. >> >> I think we should be judged in part by how we treat the lowest and most >> helpless of us. >> > > Bill, > > When the courts prevent people from being incarcerated against their > will when seriously mentally ill, it is a great victory for the personal > freedom of the individual who is mentally ill. But with freedom comes > responsibility. If the person is dangerous to others, and demonstrates that > through aggressive behavior, they can be put away in a place where they > won't hurt others. Also, they can then freeze to death, starve if they > don't seek help, or get into all sorts of other trouble they might have > avoided while in the care of the state or a private organization that cares > for these sorts of people. > > So my liberty loving side says, let them go free unless they hurt > someone. My compassionate side, however, (and I do have one) feels sorry > for them because I believe that they might get better treatment in a > facility that would help them manage medications, get them clean, help them > have clean clothes and healthy food. > > So it's a serious conflict between caring for people (which I support, > ESPECIALLY when it is a private organization caring for the people rather > than the government) and letting people have the maximum freedom they can > possibly enjoy. > > In the end, I agree with you. We should be judged by how we treat these > people. But providing care to those who want it and forcing care on someone > who just wants to be left alone are two very different things. It does get > complicated when the person suffers from a paranoia. If I were homeless, > for example, I might not want ANY kind of government help. It would be too > easy for me to slip into that kind of paranoia. I'd probably walk to some > place warm and just do my best on my own. I'm not terribly mentally ill. ;-) > If you developed a mental illness which would cause you to suffer frightening delusions and hallucinations which would lead you to become destitute and homeless, and there was a treatment for this which would return you to your normal self but which, in your psychotic state, you would refuse, would you want to be treated against your will? -- Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Apr 8 12:35:03 2014 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2014 06:35:03 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Basic Income - Basic Housing? In-Reply-To: References: <00c701cf4e87$dd5b1880$98114980$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 12:56 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > In the end, I agree with you. We should be judged by how we treat these >> people. But providing care to those who want it and forcing care on someone >> who just wants to be left alone are two very different things. It does get >> complicated when the person suffers from a paranoia. If I were homeless, >> for example, I might not want ANY kind of government help. It would be too >> easy for me to slip into that kind of paranoia. I'd probably walk to some >> place warm and just do my best on my own. I'm not terribly mentally ill. ;-) >> > > If you developed a mental illness which would cause you to suffer > frightening delusions and hallucinations which would lead you to become > destitute and homeless, and there was a treatment for this which would > return you to your normal self but which, in your psychotic state, you > would refuse, would you want to be treated against your will? > The short answer, and this is a tautology logically based upon your question, is no. Unless you are asking the me now, the sane me, if I would want to be treated in the future, the insane me. In that case, the personal answer is "I don't know." I suppose that is what a medical power of attorney is for. If my trusted partner thought I should be treated against my will, then she should be able to. If I can convince her at the time not to treat me, then she wouldn't. Is that a cop out? -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Tue Apr 8 13:32:17 2014 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2014 09:32:17 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Basic Income - Basic Housing? In-Reply-To: References: <00c701cf4e87$dd5b1880$98114980$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 8:35 AM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 12:56 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > >> In the end, I agree with you. We should be judged by how we treat these >>> people. But providing care to those who want it and forcing care on someone >>> who just wants to be left alone are two very different things. It does get >>> complicated when the person suffers from a paranoia. If I were homeless, >>> for example, I might not want ANY kind of government help. It would be too >>> easy for me to slip into that kind of paranoia. I'd probably walk to some >>> place warm and just do my best on my own. I'm not terribly mentally ill. ;-) >>> >> >> If you developed a mental illness which would cause you to suffer >> frightening delusions and hallucinations which would lead you to become >> destitute and homeless, and there was a treatment for this which would >> return you to your normal self but which, in your psychotic state, you >> would refuse, would you want to be treated against your will? >> > > The short answer, and this is a tautology logically based upon your > question, is no. > > Unless you are asking the me now, the sane me, if I would want to be > treated in the future, the insane me. In that case, the personal answer is > "I don't know." I suppose that is what a medical power of attorney is for. > If my trusted partner thought I should be treated against my will, then she > should be able to. If I can convince her at the time not to treat me, then > she wouldn't. Is that a cop out? > > I don't think it's a cop-out. It's a difficult problem. What if your proxy is similarly ... "off"? (Or at least close-enough to your delusion to be convinced not to treat you.) What if I want you 'adjusted' and I have proxy for your proxy? Can I medicate her until she sees _my_ point about you? Is the government everyone's proxy by default? Yeah you know where I'm going because we're both already the same kind of paranoid. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Apr 8 14:13:21 2014 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2014 10:13:21 -0400 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: <01c801cf4d6a$6c8dfaf0$45a9f0d0$@att.net> References: <01c801cf4d6a$6c8dfaf0$45a9f0d0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 1:22 AM, spike wrote: > A few years ago on this list I used this very argument against Nick > Bostrom's anthropic argument in favor of us being in a simulation - > although at that time inflation was more of a hypothesis rather than a > theory slouching towards becoming a fact, as it is doing today. There are > so may more young civilizations than older ones that no matter how popular > ancestor simulations are, you are vanishingly unlikely to be in one of them > And that was a very very good point! > what we are seeing here is evolution of a religion. The successful > modern religions are catching on to an important aspect for their survival: > don't fight science. Rather, spin it to an advantage, regardless of which > way science takes us. Religions which fight science are always going to > lose in the long run, because science has evidence on its side. > The trick that religion needs to do is what so many intellectuals have done when the God theory became untenable, abandon the idea of God but not the English word G-O-D. Just fuzz up the word so much it could mean anything and then religious people get to say all sorts of vacuous but pleasant sounding things like "I believe in God because there are things more powerful than myself". Of course that means that a bulldozer is God, but never mind. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Apr 8 15:07:23 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2014 10:07:23 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Basic Income - Basic Housing? In-Reply-To: References: <00c701cf4e87$dd5b1880$98114980$@att.net> Message-ID: The big problem in all of this are the paranoids. If they are schizophrenic too and strongly so, no problem. But even they are quite capable of seeming logical and sane most of the time. They are going to talk a judge out of involuntary commitment in a second. I have seen a person in a mental institution fool a whole staff of psychiatrists, who diagnosed him normal (I caught him). The borderline cases, which is most of the killers we see on the news, being paranoid but not schizophrenic, are much more likely to avoid detection. Furthermore, there is no treatment at all for them. billw On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 8:32 AM, Mike Dougherty wrote: > On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 8:35 AM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > >> On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 12:56 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: >> >>> In the end, I agree with you. We should be judged by how we treat >>>> these people. But providing care to those who want it and forcing care on >>>> someone who just wants to be left alone are two very different things. It >>>> does get complicated when the person suffers from a paranoia. If I were >>>> homeless, for example, I might not want ANY kind of government help. It >>>> would be too easy for me to slip into that kind of paranoia. I'd probably >>>> walk to some place warm and just do my best on my own. I'm not terribly >>>> mentally ill. ;-) >>>> >>> >>> If you developed a mental illness which would cause you to suffer >>> frightening delusions and hallucinations which would lead you to become >>> destitute and homeless, and there was a treatment for this which would >>> return you to your normal self but which, in your psychotic state, you >>> would refuse, would you want to be treated against your will? >>> >> >> The short answer, and this is a tautology logically based upon your >> question, is no. >> >> Unless you are asking the me now, the sane me, if I would want to be >> treated in the future, the insane me. In that case, the personal answer is >> "I don't know." I suppose that is what a medical power of attorney is for. >> If my trusted partner thought I should be treated against my will, then she >> should be able to. If I can convince her at the time not to treat me, then >> she wouldn't. Is that a cop out? >> >> > I don't think it's a cop-out. It's a difficult problem. What if your > proxy is similarly ... "off"? (Or at least close-enough to your delusion > to be convinced not to treat you.) What if I want you 'adjusted' and I > have proxy for your proxy? Can I medicate her until she sees _my_ point > about you? > > Is the government everyone's proxy by default? Yeah you know where I'm > going because we're both already the same kind of paranoid. > > > > _______________________________________________ > 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 Apr 8 15:10:46 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2014 10:10:46 -0500 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: <01c801cf4d6a$6c8dfaf0$45a9f0d0$@att.net> Message-ID: People in general and Congress in particular are extremely good at ignoring and denying facts. "Logic resistant compartments" is an old term but a goodie. We will never get rid of religion. Trite but true: people will believe what they want to believe. billw On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 9:13 AM, John Clark wrote: > On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 1:22 AM, spike wrote: > > > A few years ago on this list I used this very argument against Nick >> Bostrom's anthropic argument in favor of us being in a simulation - >> although at that time inflation was more of a hypothesis rather than a >> theory slouching towards becoming a fact, as it is doing today. There are >> so may more young civilizations than older ones that no matter how popular >> ancestor simulations are, you are vanishingly unlikely to be in one of them >> > > And that was a very very good point! > > > what we are seeing here is evolution of a religion. The successful >> modern religions are catching on to an important aspect for their survival: >> don't fight science. Rather, spin it to an advantage, regardless of which >> way science takes us. Religions which fight science are always going to >> lose in the long run, because science has evidence on its side. >> > > The trick that religion needs to do is what so many intellectuals have > done when the God theory became untenable, abandon the idea of God but not > the English word G-O-D. Just fuzz up the word so much it could mean > anything and then religious people get to say all sorts of vacuous but > pleasant sounding things like "I believe in God because there are things > more powerful than myself". Of course that means that a bulldozer is God, > but never mind. > > 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 spike66 at att.net Tue Apr 8 15:00:17 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2014 08:00:17 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Basic Income - Basic Housing? In-Reply-To: References: <00c701cf4e87$dd5b1880$98114980$@att.net> Message-ID: <012b01cf533b$41f40240$c5dc06c0$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson Sent: Monday, April 07, 2014 10:46 PM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] Basic Income - Basic Housing? >>.On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 10:35 AM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: I don't know either but I do know this: alcoholics and drug addicts and the mentally retarded and psychotic should not be homeless unless they simply will not stay put in some kind of housing. >.Bill, When the courts prevent people from being incarcerated against their will when seriously mentally ill, it is a great victory for the personal freedom of the individual who is mentally ill. But with freedom comes responsibility.-Kelly Ja. Russia killed the notion of helping the mentally ill against their will by incarcerating in mental institutions those who espoused politically unconventional notions. In our modern times in America, note how often we are now seeing comments about those who believe that global warming is not caused by humans. These people are increasingly being seen as crazy and dangerous. If we had a legal system which allowed them to be incarcerated against their will, the party in power could just incarcerate its political opponents, and oh how convenient that would be. Permanent supermajority in congress, things could get DONE! Just as in the case of the Affordable Care Act, actual debate on the floor of congress would be unnecessary. Insurance companies could just buy all the legislation they want on their own terms, the political opposition would be in mental institutions, or stifled under the threat of gong there, nooo problem. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Tue Apr 8 16:00:13 2014 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2014 17:00:13 +0100 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: <01c801cf4d6a$6c8dfaf0$45a9f0d0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 4:10 PM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > People in general and Congress in particular are extremely good at ignoring > and denying facts. "Logic resistant compartments" is an old term but a > goodie. We will never get rid of religion. Trite but true: people will > believe what they want to believe. billw > True. And people have every right to believe whatever nonsense they choose. And they often believe several contradictory things, which rationality says should not be possible. I would just institute a higher principle that says - No matter what you believe or how strongly you believe it, you are still not allowed to kill non-believers, using your belief as justification. You must use other reasons like, I want their goods or property, or I am really jealous of them. Then you have to face the real reason for your killing, not pretend that you are on a holy crusade. BillK From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Apr 8 16:11:57 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2014 11:11:57 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Basic Income - Basic Housing? In-Reply-To: <012b01cf533b$41f40240$c5dc06c0$@att.net> References: <00c701cf4e87$dd5b1880$98114980$@att.net> <012b01cf533b$41f40240$c5dc06c0$@att.net> Message-ID: For anyone: just when did it change? By definition, a person seriously mentally ill is not able to partake in any legal anything. His opinion does not matter. In my day you could get someone involuntarily committed with a judge and a psychiatrist. I even saw one guy admitted because he refused surgery on his appendix (got admitted, got the surgery - died). bill w On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 10:00 AM, spike wrote: > > > *From:* extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto: > extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] *On Behalf Of *Kelly Anderson > *Sent:* Monday, April 07, 2014 10:46 PM > *To:* ExI chat list > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] Basic Income - Basic Housing? > > > > >>...On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 10:35 AM, William Flynn Wallace < > foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote: > > I don't know either but I do know this: alcoholics and drug addicts and > the mentally retarded and psychotic should not be homeless unless they > simply will not stay put in some kind of housing... > > > > >...Bill, When the courts prevent people from being incarcerated against > their will when seriously mentally ill, it is a great victory for the > personal freedom of the individual who is mentally ill. But with freedom > comes responsibility...-Kelly > > > > > > > > Ja. Russia killed the notion of helping the mentally ill against their > will by incarcerating in mental institutions those who espoused politically > unconventional notions. In our modern times in America, note how often we > are now seeing comments about those who believe that global warming is not > caused by humans. These people are increasingly being seen as crazy and > dangerous. > > > > If we had a legal system which allowed them to be incarcerated against > their will, the party in power could just incarcerate its political > opponents, and oh how convenient that would be. Permanent supermajority in > congress, things could get DONE! Just as in the case of the Affordable > Care Act, actual debate on the floor of congress would be unnecessary. > Insurance companies could just buy all the legislation they want on their > own terms, the political opposition would be in mental institutions, or > stifled under the threat of gong there, nooo problem. > > > > 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 foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Apr 8 16:14:36 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2014 11:14:36 -0500 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: <01c801cf4d6a$6c8dfaf0$45a9f0d0$@att.net> Message-ID: The problem with that is that the Old Testament, which is common to Jews, Christians and Islam, specifically says to kill unbelievers. God killed millions, or so they wrote. bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From protokol2020 at gmail.com Tue Apr 8 16:54:21 2014 From: protokol2020 at gmail.com (Tomaz Kristan) Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2014 18:54:21 +0200 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: <01c801cf4d6a$6c8dfaf0$45a9f0d0$@att.net> Message-ID: The reason, I am not in an ancestral simulation may be the following: Since our civilization is a very early one, nobody is making them (those simulations) - yet. It's the question, will anyone ever make them, but nobody is making them now. On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 6:14 PM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > The problem with that is that the Old Testament, which is common to Jews, > Christians and Islam, specifically says to kill unbelievers. God killed > millions, or so they wrote. bill w > > _______________________________________________ > 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 spike66 at att.net Tue Apr 8 16:40:41 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2014 09:40:41 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Basic Income - Basic Housing? In-Reply-To: References: <00c701cf4e87$dd5b1880$98114980$@att.net> <012b01cf533b$41f40240$c5dc06c0$@att.net> Message-ID: <023a01cf5349$4847b250$d8d716f0$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace Sent: Tuesday, April 08, 2014 9:12 AM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] Basic Income - Basic Housing? >.For anyone: just when did it change? By definition, a person seriously mentally ill is not able to partake in any legal anything. His opinion does not matter. In my day you could get someone involuntarily committed with a judge and a psychiatrist. I even saw one guy admitted because he refused surgery on his appendix (got admitted, got the surgery - died). bill w It hasn't changed entirely. A person can still be committed against their will even if they haven't actually committed a crime. If a person is showing signs of Alzheimer's for instance, we know that it is intermittent for a long time. We know that AD patients can have a bad day and do terribly destructive things with their own finances for instance. So when can the family decide this person is no longer competent to handle their own money? What if the AD patient has an excellent head for business and made all the actual money, but the rest of the family is uniformly incompetent? At what point can that family step in, place the patient in a facility from which they are now incarcerated, and just take over the fortune? Put yourself into this situation. Imagine you have money and you recognize your own ability to manage it is declining. It is still your money. Imagine you have one child, married to someone you don't trust entirely perhaps, or your one offspring has known addictions. Create your own scenario. At what point do you lose legal authority over your own fortune, and at what point do you lose your freedom, all because you are growing forgetful? This is a legal gray area to this day. Someone offer moral guidance please. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Tue Apr 8 16:53:01 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2014 09:53:01 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Basic Income - Basic Housing? In-Reply-To: References: <00c701cf4e87$dd5b1880$98114980$@att.net> Message-ID: <024401cf534b$014363c0$03ca2b40$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson Subject: Re: [ExI] Basic Income - Basic Housing? . >.If you developed a mental illness which would cause you to suffer frightening delusions and hallucinations which would lead you to become destitute and homeless.-Kelly The context of this discussion trends toward paranoia and schizophrenia, mercifully uncommon conditions unlikely to impact most of his here directly. But Alzheimer's is frightfully common and is highly likely to impact in some way nearly everyone here, as a care giver or as a patient. I have been pondering this for some time now. What rights has the patient when the patient has amassed a fortune and finds himself at the mercy of decisions made by those who would profit from his being incarcerated against his will? Scenario: rich old geezer, no children, marries a much younger trophy wife, they have a few good years together, then he starts getting a bit forgetful, not so much fun anymore, but she has plenty of good years left in her middle-aged body and wants rid of him, but wants his money, all of it rather than the half she would get if she divorces him, or the almost nothing she would get if the prenuptial agreement goes into effect upon their divorce. At what point does society agree that this guy has AD and must go into a care facility? I don't see that our society provides adequate protection against this. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Tue Apr 8 16:58:09 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2014 09:58:09 -0700 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: <01c801cf4d6a$6c8dfaf0$45a9f0d0$@att.net> Message-ID: <024901cf534b$b9364d30$2ba2e790$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of John Clark >.then religious people get to say all sorts of vacuous but pleasant sounding things like "I believe in God because there are things more powerful than myself". Of course that means that a bulldozer is God, but never mind. John K Clark Indeed not sir. I am more powerful than the dozer, for I am its control system. I make all the choices of where it goes and what it does. We are now on the verge of dealing with a new question, as control systems become ever more sophisticated and autonomous. We can build a bulldozer with some autonomy already, and perhaps in the future, build one that has its own will. I still will not worship the thing, but I will stand in terrified awe. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Apr 8 17:25:19 2014 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2014 13:25:19 -0400 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: <01c801cf4d6a$6c8dfaf0$45a9f0d0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 12:14 PM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > The problem with that is that the Old Testament, which is common to Jews, > Christians and Islam, specifically says to kill unbelievers. God killed > millions, or so they wrote. > Yes but however bad the Old Testament's recommendations are in how to treat unbelievers the Koran's ideas on that subject are 10 times worse. And although in some ways the New Testament is kinder and gentler than the Old in other ways it is not. Yahweh may be the most unpleasant character in all of fiction but at least when you were dead he was through messing around with you; but when you kick the bucket Jesus is just getting warmed up and is determined to torturer you at a intensity level beyond human imagination and to keep doing it not for an astronomical number of years but for an INFINITE number of years. But never forget, He loves you! John K Clark > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Tue Apr 8 17:37:33 2014 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2014 18:37:33 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Basic Income - Basic Housing? In-Reply-To: <023a01cf5349$4847b250$d8d716f0$@att.net> References: <00c701cf4e87$dd5b1880$98114980$@att.net> <012b01cf533b$41f40240$c5dc06c0$@att.net> <023a01cf5349$4847b250$d8d716f0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 5:40 PM, spike wrote: > It hasn't changed entirely. A person can still be committed against their > will even if they haven't actually committed a crime. If a person is > showing signs of Alzheimer's for instance, we know that it is intermittent > for a long time. We know that AD patients can have a bad day and do > terribly destructive things with their own finances for instance. So when > can the family decide this person is no longer competent to handle their own > money? What if the AD patient has an excellent head for business and made > all the actual money, but the rest of the family is uniformly incompetent? > At what point can that family step in, place the patient in a facility from > which they are now incarcerated, and just take over the fortune? > > Put yourself into this situation. Imagine you have money and you recognize > your own ability to manage it is declining. It is still your money. > Imagine you have one child, married to someone you don't trust entirely > perhaps, or your one offspring has known addictions. Create your own > scenario. At what point do you lose legal authority over your own fortune, > and at what point do you lose your freedom, all because you are growing > forgetful? > > This is a legal gray area to this day. > > Someone offer moral guidance please. > > The relevant documents are: 1. Declaration to Physicians (Living Will) 2. Power of Attorney for Health Care 3. Power of Attorney for Finance and Property 4. Authorization for Final Disposition The law varies between states. The Wisconsin versions are here: 3) is the one for allowing a trusted person to manage your affairs. There are legal restrictions on what they are allowed to do. e.g. They must act in your best interests and they are not allowed to benefit themselves. They are legally liable for any damages they cause. However, this does not specify when someone is unable to manage their affairs. Presumably two doctors have to agree and probably convince a judge as well. BillK From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Apr 8 18:34:53 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2014 13:34:53 -0500 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: <01c801cf4d6a$6c8dfaf0$45a9f0d0$@att.net> Message-ID: For my money, all religious writings have no more status than Aesop's Fables - they are moral tales designed to coax humans into a functioning society, or threaten them - whatever works! Metaphors all and we know how poorly humans deal with those or any other abstractions. On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 12:25 PM, John Clark wrote: > On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 12:14 PM, William Flynn Wallace < > foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote: > > > The problem with that is that the Old Testament, which is common to >> Jews, Christians and Islam, specifically says to kill unbelievers. God >> killed millions, or so they wrote. >> > > Yes but however bad the Old Testament's recommendations are in how to > treat unbelievers the Koran's ideas on that subject are 10 times worse. And > although in some ways the New Testament is kinder and gentler than the Old > in other ways it is not. Yahweh may be the most unpleasant character in all > of fiction but at least when you were dead he was through messing around > with you; but when you kick the bucket Jesus is just getting warmed up and > is determined to torturer you at a intensity level beyond human imagination > and to keep doing it not for an astronomical number of years but for an > INFINITE number of years. But never forget, He loves you! > > 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 spike66 at att.net Tue Apr 8 19:21:04 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2014 12:21:04 -0700 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: <01c801cf4d6a$6c8dfaf0$45a9f0d0$@att.net> Message-ID: <033601cf535f$b06aedf0$1140c9d0$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace Subject: Re: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox >. And although in some ways the New Testament is kinder and gentler than the Old in other ways it is not. Yahweh may be the most unpleasant character in all of fiction but at least when you were dead he was through messing around with you; but when you kick the bucket Jesus is just getting warmed up and is determined to torturer you at a intensity level beyond human imagination and to keep doing it not for an astronomical number of years but for an INFINITE number of years. John K Clark John, I partially agree with what you say, however the notion of eternal suffering for the wicked is a more recent invention than the writings of the NT. It makes comments in there about the final fate of the wicked unbelievers, but it doesn't actually say anything about an immoral soul, or that the suffering of the damned is eternal. Their damnation is said to be eternal, but it doesn't say they are alive to suffer. The worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched (Mark ch.9) but that's the worm and the fire, not the damned humans. The notion of eternal suffering of an immortal being was invented centuries after the last word of the NT was written. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Apr 8 19:54:13 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2014 14:54:13 -0500 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: <033601cf535f$b06aedf0$1140c9d0$@att.net> References: <01c801cf4d6a$6c8dfaf0$45a9f0d0$@att.net> <033601cf535f$b06aedf0$1140c9d0$@att.net> Message-ID: Is there any one who doesn't think that Christianity (can't speak for the other ones) wasn't made up as time went on? It took 900 years for the church to decide that priests should not marry. It took 1400 years for the church to decide that marriage was a sacrament. And lots more. Now look at them: they are stuck with their own teachings - hoist on their own petard (do look that word up). So many things have challenged those teachings that it divides believers into those who believe it all literally and those who just pick and choose what to believe, and many of those are leaving the Catholic church and many others. Since conservatism/liberalism is somewhat genetic we are doomed to have some radical conservatives in the religious and political arenas (until we change humanity with eugenics like my book suggests). bill w On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 2:21 PM, spike wrote: > > > > > *>...* *On Behalf Of *William Flynn Wallace > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox > > > > >... And although in some ways the New Testament is kinder and gentler than > the Old in other ways it is not. Yahweh may be the most unpleasant > character in all of fiction but at least when you were dead he was through > messing around with you; but when you kick the bucket Jesus is just getting > warmed up and is determined to torturer you at a intensity level beyond > human imagination and to keep doing it not for an astronomical number of > years but for an INFINITE number of years. John K Clark > > > > John, I partially agree with what you say, however the notion of eternal > suffering for the wicked is a more recent invention than the writings of > the NT. It makes comments in there about the final fate of the wicked > unbelievers, but it doesn't actually say anything about an immoral soul, or > that the suffering of the damned is eternal. Their damnation is said to be > eternal, but it doesn't say they are alive to suffer. The worm dieth not > and the fire is not quenched (Mark ch.9) but that's the worm and the fire, > not the damned humans. > > The notion of eternal suffering of an immortal being was invented > centuries after the last word of the NT was written. > > 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 tara at taramayastales.com Tue Apr 8 21:46:04 2014 From: tara at taramayastales.com (Tara Maya) Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2014 14:46:04 -0700 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: <033601cf535f$b06aedf0$1140c9d0$@att.net> References: <01c801cf4d6a$6c8dfaf0$45a9f0d0$@att.net> <033601cf535f$b06aedf0$1140c9d0$@att.net> Message-ID: <7EE5C9C9-79E8-4016-95A6-8DDC6411D562@taramayastales.com> On Apr 8, 2014, at 12:21 PM, spike wrote: > The notion of eternal suffering of an immortal being was invented centuries after the last word of the NT was written. I'm working on an Urban Fantasy / Military Fantasy series in which I decided to take as my working premise that: (a) New souls are born on Earth (i.e. these souls are not eternal, but finite at least at one terminal, the "beginning" of life (b) Souls are either immortal or so extremely long lived after that as to be indistinguishable from immortal (c ) There are other realms/dimensions to which these immortal souls travel after the physical shell ceases functioning (d) Moral behavior determines the destination (e ) Souls who have already traveled to other destinations can continue to watch and interact with humans on earth, therefore travel between these realms is possible, if difficult Perfectly standard mythology based on the tenants of some well known religions. But I found that when I actually took this literally and thought about it for a while, some things jumped out at me: (a ) Any human ever born is still alive as a soul somewhere, but they are not all the same age; some mere decades old, some are thousands of years old, some are tens of thousands (b ) Even the longest lived human on this earth (about 100 years old) is a mere infant compared to how old souls can become and many souls already are (c ) To expect infants to live the rest of their immortal lives because of decisions made in ignorance of what comes after life on earth is silly (d ) There's no logical reason that souls who have already left earth for other dimensions shouldn't continue to make moral choices and change their behavior and travel to a destination Logically, no one should make up their minds about what the afterlife holds before living and learning at least a 1000 years? :) Tara Maya Blog | Twitter | Facebook | Amazon | Goodreads -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tara at taramayastales.com Tue Apr 8 21:26:47 2014 From: tara at taramayastales.com (Tara Maya) Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2014 14:26:47 -0700 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: <01c801cf4d6a$6c8dfaf0$45a9f0d0$@att.net> Message-ID: <94005B47-0E20-4843-9BAF-2EF5DE90B495@taramayastales.com> If we were in an ancestral simulation, we'd see a lot more historical inaccuracies. ;) Tara Maya Blog | Twitter | Facebook | Amazon | Goodreads On Apr 8, 2014, at 9:54 AM, Tomaz Kristan wrote: > The reason, I am not in an ancestral simulation may be the following: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Apr 8 23:14:37 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2014 18:14:37 -0500 Subject: [ExI] malevolent machines Message-ID: We all know that all of our machines are out to get us and frustrate us in various ways, but is it really possible? In scifi there are dozens of books about entire machine cultures which, of course, are the enemies of humans and maybe all living things. Unless there is something really important that I don't know about computers, it seems to me that having a machine 'wake up' like Mike in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, is just absurd. It does what it is programmed to do and cannot do anything else. Any other function is just some sort of mystical belief that is paradoxically held by hard scientists. Comments? billw -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Wed Apr 9 02:51:31 2014 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2014 12:51:31 +1000 Subject: [ExI] malevolent machines In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 9 April 2014 09:14, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > We all know that all of our machines are out to get us and frustrate us in > various ways, but is it really possible? In scifi there are dozens of > books about entire machine cultures which, of course, are the enemies of > humans and maybe all living things. > > Unless there is something really important that I don't know about > computers, it seems to me that having a machine 'wake up' like Mike in > Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, is just absurd. It does what it > is programmed to do and cannot do anything else. Any other function is > just some sort of mystical belief that is paradoxically held by hard > scientists. Comments? billw > A machine will only do what it is programmed to do but it may be impossible to predict what that will be, as is the case for humans, who also only do what they are programmed to do. -- Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Apr 9 03:07:34 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2014 20:07:34 -0700 Subject: [ExI] malevolent machines In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <005101cf53a0$dd6e2650$984a72f0$@att.net> >? On Behalf Of Stathis Papaioannou Subject: Re: [ExI] malevolent machines On 9 April 2014 09:14, William Flynn Wallace wrote: ? >?Unless there is something really important that I don't know about computers? Bill there might be something really important that no one knows about computers. Read on, sir. >?it seems to me that having a machine 'wake up' like Mike in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, is just absurd? Plenty of people share that view, but stop short of offering any actual evidence. We know that it hasn?t been done before, however? read on please. >?It does what it is programmed to do and cannot do anything else? We already know ways to program software to learn. Examples are learning checkers and chess programs. If one wants to use one?s background computing cycles in this way, one can set the computer to play itself using two different chess programs for instance, and learn by seeing the results how to set parameters. This would be an example of software that is programmed to learn. >? Any other function is just some sort of mystical belief that is paradoxically held by hard scientists. Comments? Billw Control software can be made to be self-modifying. It does an action, watches what happens, makes corrective action with a feedback mechanism of some sort, it experiments. Successful algorithms spawn offspring in a process analogous to biological evolution. What part of this seems impossible? I can think of no fundamental reason why a mechanical device could not in principle evolve a mind of its own. A mind is a mechanical device, and it has a mind of its own, or is a mind of its own. If you have some new insights on this question, do share please. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From gsantostasi at gmail.com Wed Apr 9 03:42:18 2014 From: gsantostasi at gmail.com (Giovanni Santostasi) Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2014 22:42:18 -0500 Subject: [ExI] malevolent machines In-Reply-To: <005101cf53a0$dd6e2650$984a72f0$@att.net> References: <005101cf53a0$dd6e2650$984a72f0$@att.net> Message-ID: The mystical belief is to think that we are not just another type of machine. Giovanni On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 10:07 PM, spike wrote: > > > > > *>...* *On Behalf Of *Stathis Papaioannou > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] malevolent machines > > > > > > > > On 9 April 2014 09:14, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > > ... > > >...Unless there is something really important that I don't know about > computers... > > > > Bill there might be something really important that no one knows about > computers. Read on, sir. > > > > >...it seems to me that having a machine 'wake up' like Mike in Heinlein's > The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, is just absurd... > > > > Plenty of people share that view, but stop short of offering any actual > evidence. We know that it hasn't been done before, however... read on > please. > > > > >...It does what it is programmed to do and cannot do anything else... > > > > We already know ways to program software to learn. Examples are learning > checkers and chess programs. If one wants to use one's background > computing cycles in this way, one can set the computer to play itself using > two different chess programs for instance, and learn by seeing the results > how to set parameters. This would be an example of software that is > programmed to learn. > > > > >... Any other function is just some sort of mystical belief that is > paradoxically held by hard scientists. Comments? Billw > > > > Control software can be made to be self-modifying. It does an action, > watches what happens, makes corrective action with a feedback mechanism of > some sort, it experiments. Successful algorithms spawn offspring in a > process analogous to biological evolution. What part of this seems > impossible? > > > > I can think of no fundamental reason why a mechanical device could not in > principle evolve a mind of its own. A mind is a mechanical device, and it > has a mind of its own, or is a mind of its own. If you have some new > insights on this question, do share please. > > > > 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 pharos at gmail.com Wed Apr 9 07:07:50 2014 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2014 08:07:50 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact Message-ID: Uncontacted Tribes Die Instantly After We Meet Them Written by Jason Koebler April 5, 2014 It's a story we all know--Christopher Columbus discovers America, his European buddies follow him, they meet the indigenous people living there, they indigenous people die from smallpox and guns and other unknown diseases, and the Europeans get gold, land, and so on. It's still happening today in Brazil, where 238 indigenous tribes have been contacted in the last several decades, and where between 23 and 70 uncontacted tribes are still living. A just-published report that takes a look at what happens after the modern world comes into contact with indigenous peoples isn't pretty: Of those contacted, three quarters went extinct. Those that survived saw mortality rates up over 80 percent. This is grim stuff. "Our analysis dramatically quantifies the devastating effects of European colonization on indigenous Amazonians. Not only did ~75 percent of indigenous societies in the Brazilian Amazon become extinct, but of the survivors, all show evidence of catastrophic population declines, the vast majority with mortality rates over 80 percent," writes Marcus Hamilton of the University of New Mexico in a paper published in Nature Scientific Reports. Those numbers shouldn't be surprising--like I said, this isn't much different from what has happened time and time again to the Native Americans, to the Incas, to the Mayans, and to hundreds of other small tribes throughout North and South America. --------------- I would add Easter Island to the list. The destruction isn't due to these tribes destroying themselves and their environment. BillK From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Wed Apr 9 14:48:35 2014 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2014 08:48:35 -0600 Subject: [ExI] malevolent machines In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 5:14 PM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > We all know that all of our machines are out to get us and frustrate us in > various ways, but is it really possible? > Yes. If it is designed with human-like intelligence, then it will have human-like potential, including the potential to compete with us, or prevent us from shutting it off, etc. I would recommend "The Corbin Project" (1972) as a good movie to get the idea of the sort of logic that could occur. > In scifi there are dozens of books about entire machine cultures which, of > course, are the enemies of humans and maybe all living things. > Unless we fail to put compassion into computer's training, they would have the potential to be more compassionate than we. Skipping mirror neurons and spindle cells would be a potentially fatal mistake on the part of scientists. > Unless there is something really important that I don't know about > computers, it seems to me that having a machine 'wake up' like Mike in > Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, is just absurd. It does what it > is programmed to do and cannot do anything else. Any other function is > just some sort of mystical belief that is paradoxically held by hard > scientists. Comments? billw > Bill, Most people who study consciousness believe that it is an emergent quality. Emergence is mysterious in some ways, but well understood in others. One thing that is required for emergence is a large number of component elements that are similar. Think ants in an ant colony. Not very interesting when there are 100 ants, but give me 10,000,000 ants, and I have a force to be reckoned with that can even bring down mid sized mammals. In artificial intelligence, there used to be a race going on between the rote programmers and the connectionists, the neural network folks, the learning folks. I think that war has been won by the learning machines. The google autonomous car is a learning machine. Watson is a learning machine (though perhaps slightly less so). The argument follows that obtaining human levels of functionality, including perhaps consciousness, is simply a function of getting enough elements together in a sufficiently emergent environment that allows learning. Then poof, you get consciousness. Maybe. Following this reasoning, there is nothing "mystical" about a machine with enough parts acting in a learning fashion "waking up". I think it would be something that would happen over a period of years, like a baby. Do you think babies are conscious? Or do you think consciousness happens as they learn and "wake up"? If that doesn't do it for you, go back to the embryo. It's obvious that at some point we "wake up" and get more and more awake from that time forward. Why should an intelligent learning machine be any different? Now, the idea that a machine would wake up all at once, in one day, is possible ONLY if the machine were so powerful that it can do all the computation that it takes a baby several months or years to accomplish within the time period in question. It seems unlikely that this would be our FIRST experience with machine consciousness. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Wed Apr 9 15:35:29 2014 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2014 11:35:29 -0400 Subject: [ExI] malevolent machines In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 7:14 PM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > > It does what it is programmed to do and cannot do anything else. > Then how can a computer behave in ways that the programer did not and could not expect? It would only take a few minutes to write a program to look for the first even number greater than 2 that is not the sum of two prime numbers and then stop. But will the machine ever stop? I don't know, you don't know, even the computer doesn't know. Maybe it will stop in the next 5 seconds, maybe it will stop in 50 billion years, and maybe it will never stop. If you want to know what the machine will actually do you just have to watch it and see. And just like us the machine doesn't know what it will do until it actually does it. > Any other function is just some sort of mystical belief > The only way you could be right is if 3 pounds of grey goo in a bone vat sitting on your shoulders contains some sort of mystical fuzzball thing that computers don't have and can never have. But I don't believe in mystical fuzzball things. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Wed Apr 9 15:47:03 2014 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2014 11:47:03 -0400 Subject: [ExI] malevolent machines In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, Apr 9, 2014 at 10:48 AM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > I would recommend "The Corbin Project" (1972) as a good movie to get the > idea of the sort of logic that could occur. > I think you mean "Colossus: The Forbin Project" from 1970, in my opinion the most underrated movie of all time. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177/combined John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Apr 9 15:38:41 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2014 08:38:41 -0700 Subject: [ExI] malevolent machines In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <014701cf5409$c93fbc70$5bbf3550$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson Subject: Re: [ExI] malevolent machines On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 5:14 PM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: >>.We all know that all of our machines are out to get us and frustrate us in various ways, but is it really possible? . Unless there is something really important that I don't know about computers, it seems to me that having a machine 'wake up' like Mike in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, is just absurd. It does what it is programmed to do and cannot do anything else. Any other function is just some sort of mystical belief that is paradoxically held by hard scientists. Comments? billw >.Bill, Most people who study consciousness believe that it is an emergent quality. Emergence is mysterious in some ways, but well understood in others. .-Kelly For war machinery, it wouldn't need to be emergent to be malevolent. Imagine for instance a quadruped robot like this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Ww The Big Dog is noisy, but we could easily make one that is silent, if we would accept that it moves slowly. It would be easy to mount a small caliber weapon on one of these, outfit it with an infrared detector and image recognition software, a fairly simple program that instructs it to walk up to within a couple hundred meters of the enemy encampment in the night and just shoot anything it recognizes as human or has a human IR signature. It could fire off a few dozen rounds, then walk away into the darkness. There is nothing in this scenario outside of current technological capability. Something like that would be difficult to defend against. Its own IR signature could be minimized, as well as its radar cross section. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Apr 9 16:02:15 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2014 09:02:15 -0700 Subject: [ExI] malevolent machines In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <018201cf540d$14042e00$3c0c8a00$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of John Clark Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2014 8:35 AM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] malevolent machines On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 7:14 PM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: >>. It does what it is programmed to do and cannot do anything else. >.Then how can a computer behave in ways that the programer did not and could not expect? . Most of us here have had the experience of writing a piece of code and having it behave in some way that completely blows our minds. In some cases when writing a simulation for instance, a pattern emerges which results in astonishing new insights. This is what causes me to be such a math geek, and write cellular automata scripts: they do things we didn't expect, behave in ways we didn't know we programmed it to do. >>. Any other function is just some sort of mystical belief >.The only way you could be right is if 3 pounds of grey goo in a bone vat sitting on your shoulders contains some sort of mystical fuzzball thing that computers don't have and can never have. But I don't believe in mystical fuzzball things. John K Clark I don't see in principle why a computer made of carbon is fundamentally different from one made of silicon. We could in theory simulate in the silicon computer the workings of the carbon computer. It is a difficult sim, but keep in mind, new and ever more sophisticated sims are coming along all the time. For instance, astronomy fans among us are well aware that there was a nearby supernova in January, but others who don't follow the field might not know there was a persistent mystery regarding type 1A: they seemed to detonate early, about 1% earlier than theory would suggest. A fairly recent sim discovered that there is far more turbulence near the core than we had previously thought, which causes plumes of hot ash (iron and nickel) at the core to shoot outward into the other layers which are still fusing, which catalyzes early detonation, if you will forgive my open-minded use of the term catalyzes. That sim also nicely explained another nagging mystery from way back: why supernova detonations are so asymmetrical. Astronomy fans, didn't that question keep you awake at night? It did that to me: if a star is made of layers like a huge onion, then the SN explosions should be almost perfectly spherical. Clearly they are not. Those sims were only made possible by the computing power recently available, and the answers were in place in time to be verified by SN 2014J in M82 in January. That sim should be worth a Nobel prize. Sims explain to us cool interesting things about stars, so why couldn't that apply to brains as well? If we can sim a neuron, a synapse and a dendrite, why could we not sim billions of them? Can we really say we know everything that will happen if we do? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Wed Apr 9 16:49:58 2014 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2014 12:49:58 -0400 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: <033601cf535f$b06aedf0$1140c9d0$@att.net> References: <01c801cf4d6a$6c8dfaf0$45a9f0d0$@att.net> <033601cf535f$b06aedf0$1140c9d0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 3:21 PM, spike wrote: > It [the New Testament] makes comments in there about the final fate of > the wicked unbelievers, but it doesn't actually say anything about an > immoral soul, or that the suffering of the damned is eternal. > I think the Bible is as clear as it is morally corrupt on this subject. Consider Revelation 20:10 " And the devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever." Or Mark 3:29: "he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation". Or this quotation from Jesus in Matthew 25:41: "Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels." Or Mark 9:43 "And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched" > The worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched (Mark ch.9) but that's > the worm and the fire, not the damned humans. > Spike, is it your position that when the Bible refers to a "worm" it is not referring to a human of somewhat low moral character but to an invertebrate in the phylum Nematoda? If that is true then the author of the Bible really needs to take a creative writing class to improve His clarity of expression. John K Clark > The notion of eternal suffering of an immortal being was invented > centuries after the last word of the NT was written. > > 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 spike66 at att.net Wed Apr 9 17:28:17 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2014 10:28:17 -0700 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: <01c801cf4d6a$6c8dfaf0$45a9f0d0$@att.net> <033601cf535f$b06aedf0$1140c9d0$@att.net> Message-ID: <022401cf5419$18a2c5f0$49e851d0$@att.net> >.On Behalf Of John Clark Subject: Re: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 3:21 PM, spike wrote: > It [the New Testament] makes comments in there about the final fate of the wicked unbelievers, but it doesn't actually say anything about an immoral soul, or that the suffering of the damned is eternal. >.I think the Bible is as clear as it is morally corrupt on this subject. Consider Revelation 20:10 " And the devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever." Ja, that's the devil, the beast and the false prophet, not the humans. It might be interpreted as humans I will grant, but it isn't specific. The devil is a supernatural being, the beast is apparently some member of the animal kingdom specifically not human and the false prophet I suppose is human. Or Mark 3:29: "he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation". Ja. Doesn't say the eternally damned are actually alive. Or this quotation from Jesus in Matthew 25:41: "Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels." Ja. Angels are not humans. The devil is superhuman. Or Mark 9:43 >."And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched". Ja. It sounds to me like going into hell is specifically differentiated and contrasted from the opposite, which is to enter into life. > The worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched (Mark ch.9) but that's the worm and the fire, not the damned humans. >.Spike, is it your position that when the Bible refers to a "worm" it is not referring to a human of somewhat low moral character but to an invertebrate in the phylum Nematoda? We don't know. I expect that some of the bible writers may have had the notion of eternal flames with living beings suffering, but in general this is a more recent theological invention, one that sold like hotcakes once it was introduced, and thus spawned successfully. >. If that is true then the author of the Bible really needs to take a creative writing class to improve His clarity of expression. John K Clark Ja granted. My notion in all this is that most of our traditional visions of eternally burning hell with former humans immortalized in order to suffer are from more recent times, and were defined by Dante's Inferno in the 14th century. The whole notion was popular as hell. When we claim Christianity is morally bankrupt because it carries the notion of a god who tortures unbelievers eternally, we inadvertently promote those segments of Christianity which specifically deny this feature of mainstream Christianity, such as Seventh Day Adventist. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From protokol2020 at gmail.com Wed Apr 9 17:51:19 2014 From: protokol2020 at gmail.com (Tomaz Kristan) Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2014 19:51:19 +0200 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: <022401cf5419$18a2c5f0$49e851d0$@att.net> References: <01c801cf4d6a$6c8dfaf0$45a9f0d0$@att.net> <033601cf535f$b06aedf0$1140c9d0$@att.net> <022401cf5419$18a2c5f0$49e851d0$@att.net> Message-ID: An eventual theologian reading this dialog between spike and John may learn a lot! :-D On Wed, Apr 9, 2014 at 7:28 PM, spike wrote: > > > > > *>?On Behalf Of *John Clark > > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox > > > > On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 3:21 PM, spike wrote: > > > > > It [the New Testament] makes comments in there about the final fate of > the wicked unbelievers, but it doesn?t actually say anything about an > immoral soul, or that the suffering of the damned is eternal. > > > > >?I think the Bible is as clear as it is morally corrupt on this subject. > Consider Revelation 20:10 > > " And the devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning > sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will > be tormented day and night for ever and ever." > > Ja, that?s the devil, the beast and the false prophet, not the humans. It > might be interpreted as humans I will grant, but it isn?t specific. The > devil is a supernatural being, the beast is apparently some member of the > animal kingdom specifically not human and the false prophet I suppose is > human. > > Or Mark 3:29: > > "he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, > but is in danger of eternal damnation". > > Ja. Doesn?t say the eternally damned are actually alive. > > Or this quotation from Jesus in Matthew 25:41: > > > "Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for > the devil and his angels." > > Ja. Angels are not humans. The devil is superhuman. > > Or Mark 9:43 > > > >?"And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to > enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the > fire that never shall be quenched"? > > Ja. It sounds to me like going into hell is specifically differentiated > and contrasted from the opposite, which is to enter into life. > > > The worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched (Mark ch.9) but that?s > the worm and the fire, not the damned humans. > > > > >?Spike, is it your position that when the Bible refers to a "worm" it is > not referring to a human of somewhat low moral character but to an > invertebrate in the phylum Nematoda? > > We don?t know. I expect that some of the bible writers may have had the > notion of eternal flames with living beings suffering, but in general this > is a more recent theological invention, one that sold like hotcakes once it > was introduced, and thus spawned successfully. > > >? If that is true then the author of the Bible really needs to take a > creative writing class to improve His clarity of expression. John K > Clark > > Ja granted. My notion in all this is that most of our traditional visions > of eternally burning hell with former humans immortalized in order to > suffer are from more recent times, and were defined by Dante?s Inferno in > the 14th century. The whole notion was popular as hell. > > When we claim Christianity is morally bankrupt because it carries the > notion of a god who tortures unbelievers eternally, we inadvertently > promote those segments of Christianity which specifically deny this feature > of mainstream Christianity, such as Seventh Day Adventist. > > spike > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > 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 tara at taramayastales.com Wed Apr 9 20:53:06 2014 From: tara at taramayastales.com (Tara Maya) Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2014 13:53:06 -0700 Subject: [ExI] malevolent machines In-Reply-To: <018201cf540d$14042e00$3c0c8a00$@att.net> References: <018201cf540d$14042e00$3c0c8a00$@att.net> Message-ID: <694C166A-59D2-42BD-976A-AF9AA2292BC0@taramayastales.com> On Apr 9, 2014, at 9:02 AM, spike wrote: > > >?Then how can a computer behave in ways that the programer did not and could not expect? ? > > Most of us here have had the experience of writing a piece of code and having it behave in some way that completely blows our minds. In some cases when writing a simulation for instance, a pattern emerges which results in astonishing new insights. This is what causes me to be such a math geek, and write cellular automata scripts: they do things we didn?t expect, behave in ways we didn?t know we programmed it to do. > I agree that it's possible for sufficiently advanced robots to behave unexpectedly. What I find interesting is how our fears are shaped by what we do expect. For instance, for those of us who think the most important metaphor for robots is as our slaves, the greatest danger is that they might rebel and kill or enslave us. Whereas, for those of us who think the the most important metaphor for robots is as our children, the greatest danger is that despite the huge amount of money we will waste educating them, they will just move back in with us to live in the basement playing video games. Tara Maya Blog | Twitter | Facebook | Amazon | Goodreads -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Apr 9 21:41:08 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2014 14:41:08 -0700 Subject: [ExI] malevolent machines In-Reply-To: <694C166A-59D2-42BD-976A-AF9AA2292BC0@taramayastales.com> References: <018201cf540d$14042e00$3c0c8a00$@att.net> <694C166A-59D2-42BD-976A-AF9AA2292BC0@taramayastales.com> Message-ID: <02e401cf543c$6b5afdd0$4210f970$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Tara Maya >.I agree that it's possible for sufficiently advanced robots to behave unexpectedly. What I find interesting is how our fears are shaped by what we do expect. For instance, for those of us who think the most important metaphor for robots is as our slaves, the greatest danger is that they might rebel and kill or enslave us. Whereas, for those of us who think the the most important metaphor for robots is as our children, the greatest danger is that despite the huge amount of money we will waste educating them, they will just move back in with us to live in the basement playing video games. Tara Maya Priceless! What an insight! {8^D Thanks Tara, you made my day pal. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Thu Apr 10 08:43:18 2014 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2014 10:43:18 +0200 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1254343886-18468@secure.ericade.net> Tomaz Kristan??, 9/4/2014 8:56 PM: The reason, I am not in an ancestral simulation may be the following: Since our civilization is a very early one, nobody is making them (those simulations) - yet. It's the question, will anyone ever make them, but nobody is making them now. But is now the true year 2014, or a simulation of 2014 run in the year 4,982,944? (where it is being run in a M-brain server together with a billion others) If it is the latter there are indeed ancestor sims being done now (externally chronologically speaking). Our own (as observed by us) civilizational age doesn't give much information about the real civilizational age of the outside. The earliness part is also problematic. Presumably there will be more simulations of interesting eras, so the far past is probably going to be simulated less than exciting times like the run-up to the singularity. I think one can make a good argument that our era is more consistently exciting than all known past eras, so given what we know we look like a likely simulation candidate compared to 10th century Europe or Africa 1300 BC. Maybe there are way more 400BC Athens than 21st century worlds, but that was a far smaller spatiotemporal domain than the current glorious, awful mess. Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Thu Apr 10 08:30:45 2014 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2014 10:30:45 +0200 Subject: [ExI] malevolent machines In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1249273921-23217@secure.ericade.net> William Flynn Wallace , 9/4/2014 8:56 PM: We all know that all of our machines are out to get us and frustrate us in various ways, but is it really possible?? In scifi there are dozens of books about entire machine cultures which, of course, are the enemies of humans and maybe all living things. Unless there is something really important that I don't know about computers, it seems to me that having a machine 'wake up' like Mike in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, is just absurd.? It does what it is programmed to do and cannot do anything else.? There is a difference between spontaneously waking up and being designed to become smart (and the latter is more likely). In both these cases the problem of making the machine behave well is tricky. But if the waking up or self-improvement is rapid, the behaviour/motivation design problem becomes crucial, since it leads to very powerful entities that may still have flawed goals. (And since flawed goals appear more likely than sensible goals, we have a problem:?http://www.nickbostrom.com/superintelligentwill.pdf ) The objection that machines only do what they are told is known as Lady Lovelace's Objection and has a venerable history, but Turing refuted it in his 1950 paper. He concludes the section: "The view that machines cannot give rise to surprises is due, I believe, to a fallacy to which philosophers and mathematicians are particularly subject. This is the assumption that as soon as a fact is presented to a mind all consequences of that fact spring into the mind simultaneously with it. It is a very useful assumption under many circumstances, but one too easily forgets that it is false. A natural consequence of doing so is that one then assumes that there is no virtue in the mere working out of consequences from data and general principles." Another way of seeing why machines can do new things not explicitly programmed into them is to recognize that a program with learning features will potentially change its behaviour based on environmental stimuli that the original programmer cannot know. Here the limit is not programmer prediction ability but the fact that the machine is part of a bigger, complex system.? The real problem is dealing with logical and environmental unpredictability to produce reliable behaviour. It *does* work in many restricted domains! But we do not know if it can work for intelligent systems, which are by definition a fairly open-ended domain. It might be that one can restrict/initialise the motivation subsystem in such a way that it remains trustworthy, but so far we have no good theory for it even in very restricted formal cases (just check out the papers at?http://intelligence.org/research/ ). Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From protokol2020 at gmail.com Thu Apr 10 09:14:07 2014 From: protokol2020 at gmail.com (Tomaz Kristan) Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2014 11:14:07 +0200 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: <1254343886-18468@secure.ericade.net> References: <1254343886-18468@secure.ericade.net> Message-ID: > But is now the true year 2014, or a simulation of 2014 run in the year 4,982,944? Is this the true year 4,982,944 with the simulation of 2014, or just a simulation of all that, run in the year 4,982,945? I am not saying this (infinite) regression kills the probability of ancestral simulation going on. It weakens it. On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 10:43 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Tomaz Kristan , 9/4/2014 8:56 PM: > > The reason, I am not in an ancestral simulation may be the following: > > Since our civilization is a very early one, nobody is making them (those > simulations) - yet. > > It's the question, will anyone ever make them, but nobody is making them > now. > > > But is now the true year 2014, or a simulation of 2014 run in the year > 4,982,944? (where it is being run in a M-brain server together with a > billion others) If it is the latter there are indeed ancestor sims being > done now (externally chronologically speaking). Our own (as observed by us) > civilizational age doesn't give much information about the real > civilizational age of the outside. > > The earliness part is also problematic. Presumably there will be more > simulations of interesting eras, so the far past is probably going to be > simulated less than exciting times like the run-up to the singularity. I > think one can make a good argument that our era is more consistently > exciting than all known past eras, so given what we know we look like a > likely simulation candidate compared to 10th century Europe or Africa 1300 > BC. Maybe there are way more 400BC Athens than 21st century worlds, but > that was a far smaller spatiotemporal domain than the current glorious, > awful mess. > > > > > > > Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford > University > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -- https://protokol2020.wordpress.com/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From painlord2k at libero.it Thu Apr 10 11:30:29 2014 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2014 13:30:29 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <534680D5.9040909@libero.it> Il 09/04/2014 09:07, BillK ha scritto: > Uncontacted Tribes Die Instantly After We Meet Them Written by > Jason Koebler April 5, 2014 > Those numbers shouldn't be surprising--like I said, this isn't > much different from what has happened time and time again to the > Native Americans, to the Incas, to the Mayans, and to hundreds of > other small tribes throughout North and South America. It should be "Unfit Tribes Die Instantly After Reality Meet Them" The same is happening or preparing in the Western World and in the MENA (Middle-East/North Africa). The same is happening or preparing in Europe/US and in other places, where people unable to fit to the present or future conditions will die off or never reproduce enough to maintain their inflated population levels. It is natural selection taking place. What change is the how and the when, not the end results. For example, in Russia (and some other ex-USSR republics) population is reducing fast because people die faster than they reproduce and the most productive individuals leave for greener pasture. What happen to tribes in South America via diseases will happen to a lot of people in Europe (and US, Japan, etc.) via the loss of welfare state, increasing taxation, absurd regulation, etc. Mirco From stathisp at gmail.com Thu Apr 10 12:10:17 2014 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2014 22:10:17 +1000 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact In-Reply-To: <534680D5.9040909@libero.it> References: <534680D5.9040909@libero.it> Message-ID: On 10 April 2014 21:30, Mirco Romanato wrote: > Il 09/04/2014 09:07, BillK ha scritto: > > Uncontacted Tribes Die Instantly After We Meet Them Written by > > Jason Koebler April 5, 2014 > > > Those numbers shouldn't be surprising--like I said, this isn't > > much different from what has happened time and time again to the > > Native Americans, to the Incas, to the Mayans, and to hundreds of > > other small tribes throughout North and South America. > > It should be > "Unfit Tribes Die Instantly After Reality Meet Them" > > The same is happening or preparing in the Western World and in the > MENA (Middle-East/North Africa). > The same is happening or preparing in Europe/US and in other places, > where people unable to fit to the present or future conditions will > die off or never reproduce enough to maintain their inflated > population levels. > > It is natural selection taking place. > > What change is the how and the when, not the end results. > > For example, in Russia (and some other ex-USSR republics) population > is reducing fast because people die faster than they reproduce and the > most productive individuals leave for greener pasture. > > What happen to tribes in South America via diseases will happen to a > lot of people in Europe (and US, Japan, etc.) via the loss of welfare > state, increasing taxation, absurd regulation, etc. So if I kill you that's just because you weren't fit enough to defend yourself, and in accordance with evolution, and therefore good. -- Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Thu Apr 10 14:08:27 2014 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2014 10:08:27 -0400 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: <022401cf5419$18a2c5f0$49e851d0$@att.net> References: <01c801cf4d6a$6c8dfaf0$45a9f0d0$@att.net> <033601cf535f$b06aedf0$1140c9d0$@att.net> <022401cf5419$18a2c5f0$49e851d0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Apr 9, 2014 at 1:28 PM, spike wrote: >>I think the Bible is as clear as it is morally corrupt on this subject. >> Consider Revelation 20:10 >> "And the devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning >> sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be >> tormented day and night for ever and ever." >> > > >Ja, that's the devil, the beast and the false prophet, not the humans. > Who is the false prophet? I don't know of any profit in the Bible, false or otherwise, that isn't a human. But it doesn't really matter, Lucifer is a sentient being and torturing him for eternity means God is astronomically, no INFINITELY more evil than the devil. Lucifer as depicted in the Bible may have had his faults but he never did anything nearly as wicked as that; I have even more faults but even I wouldn't torture anybody forever, not even a unrepentant Hitler. > Or this quotation from Jesus in Matthew 25:41: >> "Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for >> the devil and his angels." >> > > Ja. Angels are not humans. The devil is superhuman. > Yes God may have originally created hell for the devil and his angels but it clearly has lots of extra room for additional residents. And it's not meaningful to say the people won't be alive when they're burning, this is judgment day and everybody is already dead. When the Jews got off the trains Dr. Mengele a divided them into 2 groups, those on his right went to Nazi slave labor camps and those on his left when immediately to the gas chambers, and in the above Jesus is talking about something similar although far far more evil, judgment day. Those on God's right get into heaven but as for those on God's left, well let me give the entire quote: "Then He will say to those on his left hand "Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels"" > >> Or Mark 9:43 >> "And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter >> into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that >> never shall be quenched" >> > > > Ja. It sounds to me like going into hell is specifically differentiated > and contrasted from the opposite, which is to enter into life. > Bicep2 > If the fires of hell killed you immediately, though you're dead before you even enter it (yeah I know, but this is religion and its not supposed to make any sense) then who cares if the fires of hell ever go out? Why would it even be worth mentioning? > The whole notion was popular as hell. Indeed. > >When we claim Christianity is morally bankrupt because it carries the > notion of a god who tortures unbelievers eternally, we inadvertently > promote those segments of Christianity which specifically deny this feature > of mainstream Christianity, > That's OK, I think we should give the devil his due. The very core of Christianity is inherently illogical but Christian franchises that don't think their hero (God) would approve of torturing someone for eternity are morally superior to other franchises that think that the ultimate moral paragon would judge it to be a good idea to burn un-baptized children for a infinite number of years. John K Clark > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Thu Apr 10 14:44:13 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2014 07:44:13 -0700 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: <01c801cf4d6a$6c8dfaf0$45a9f0d0$@att.net> <033601cf535f$b06aedf0$1140c9d0$@att.net> <022401cf5419$18a2c5f0$49e851d0$@att.net> Message-ID: <012e01cf54cb$581466a0$083d33e0$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of John Clark >.That's OK, I think we should give the devil his due. The very core of Christianity is inherently illogical but Christian franchises that don't think their hero (God) would approve of torturing someone for eternity are morally superior to other franchises that think that the ultimate moral paragon would judge it to be a good idea to burn un-baptized children for a infinite number of years. John K Clark So they say. I can think of exactly one other socially redeeming quality of SDA and one for Mormons. The SDA people are very open minded to the notion of cryonics. In their system, the human is a machine; there is no separate or separable soul or spirit or anything that can exist apart from the physical matter that makes up human bodies. So the resurrection is a recreation of an exact copy of the present human body mad of atoms, running the exact program it ran while living, on a physical planet in a 1-G field. There is exactly nothing in any of that which has any problem with cryonics. (Almost. No SDA theologian has worked out what happens if a person gets frozen, uploaded, then the simulation apostatizes.) We can scarcely fail to notice transhumanism seems to play well in Mormon circles. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lubkin at unreasonable.com Thu Apr 10 15:55:19 2014 From: lubkin at unreasonable.com (David Lubkin) Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2014 11:55:19 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Tom Lehrer profile Message-ID: <201404101634.s3AGYU7l010758@andromeda.ziaspace.com> [ Ostensibly off-topic but so many extropians I know will be interested: ] Rejoice! And just in time for spring! When every Sunday you'll see? Looking For Tom Lehrer, Comedy's Mysterious Genius -- David. From johnkclark at gmail.com Thu Apr 10 17:22:00 2014 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2014 13:22:00 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Tom Lehrer profile In-Reply-To: <201404101634.s3AGYU7l010758@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <201404101634.s3AGYU7l010758@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 11:55 AM, David Lubkin wrote: > [Ostensibly off-topic but so many extropians I know will be interested: ] > > Rejoice! And just in time for spring! When every Sunday you'll see-- > > > Looking For Tom Lehrer, Comedy's Mysterious Genius > My favorite Tom Lehrer is "The Vatican Rag": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3f72CTDe4-0&feature=kp And "The Elements": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGM-wSKFBpo John K Clark > > > -- David. > > > _______________________________________________ > 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 Apr 10 19:16:31 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2014 12:16:31 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Tom Lehrer profile In-Reply-To: References: <201404101634.s3AGYU7l010758@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <005001cf54f1$61c95630$255c0290$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of John Clark . Looking For Tom Lehrer, Comedy's Mysterious Genius My favorite Tom Lehrer is "The Vatican Rag": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3f72CTDe4-0 &feature=kp And "The Elements": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGM-wSKFBpo John K Clark Clearly Lehrer had talent. How can a father explain to anyone born in this millennium 70s geek humor? Fun aside for you who know what I am talking about with that comment. In the mid 1990s, I was looking to buy a rebuilt engine for my truck. I was on the phone to a local shop and the guy made a Doctor Demento reference. I was able to finish the sentence in unison with him and recite the next line. Immediately we started talking about those things only geeks would know. I realized his voice sounded a bit familiar, so then he started into some of the songs: he was a regular on Dr. Demento back in the 1970s when it was a live radio show in the Los Angeles area. He wrote some of the songs. Needless to say, he got the job on my truck. Back then, that kind of humor had no commercial value: Weird Al Yankovic was the first one to really make it big from that era with that genre. So he and the others who were creating Demento-ish content never treated it as a job, just some offbeat hobby they were doing. So the guy learned auto mechanics and ended up owning a shop in Sunnyvale California twenty years after being a star on Doctor Demento. He was telling the truth: when I went to his shop he had a bunch of pictures on the wall of him and Weird Al together as teenagers on the Dr. Demento show. Of course when he even uttered the name Weird Al Yankovic, I removed my hat and spoke in low reverent tones. He told me something I didn't know: Weird Al is a monster brain. The guy with the auto shop was a couple years older, but they graduated high school together. He said Al Yankovic was the smartest guy he ever met, utterly without exception. Now is that cool or what? Now how to I explain that to a seven year old? Do I even bother trying? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Thu Apr 10 20:17:33 2014 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2014 16:17:33 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Tom Lehrer profile In-Reply-To: <005001cf54f1$61c95630$255c0290$@att.net> References: <201404101634.s3AGYU7l010758@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <005001cf54f1$61c95630$255c0290$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 3:16 PM, spike wrote: > He told me something I didn't know: Weird Al is a monster brain. The guy > with the auto shop was a couple years older, but they graduated high school > together. He said Al Yankovic was the smartest guy he ever met, utterly > without exception. Now is that cool or what? > Very cool but I'm not surprised that Weird Al is wicked smart. > > Now how to I explain that to a seven year old? > Show him this video, the best use of palindromes I've ever seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUQDzj6R3p4 John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Thu Apr 10 21:31:43 2014 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2014 14:31:43 -0700 Subject: [ExI] AI motivation, was malevolent machines Message-ID: I have talked about this for close to a decade now, first on the SL4 list. It's a really slow idea to catch on. I think programming AIs to seek status the way evolution has wired up humans is a relatively safe motivation. Even if we don't appreciate this as a drive (I think it is something we are wired *not* to understand) it is the motivation for most of what humans do, from playing well in WoW to the Nobel prize. I think a machine that was motivated to improve its status in the eyes of both humans and other machines would be relatively safe. Keith From anders at aleph.se Thu Apr 10 22:22:05 2014 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 00:22:05 +0200 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1303473881-6228@secure.ericade.net> Tomaz Kristan , 10/4/2014 11:18 AM: > But is now the true year 2014, or a simulation of 2014 run in the year 4,982,944? Is this the true year 4,982,944 with the simulation of 2014, or just a simulation of all that, run in the year 4,982,945? I am not saying this (infinite) regression kills the probability of ancestral simulation going on. It weakens it. Suppose the amount of available computing power grows exponentially as exp(t). To run a ancestor sim you need at least that much computing power, so in practice you will only run simulations that are a factor F smaller, that is, you have a choice of civilizations from the start of time T0 to T-ln(F) where T is the current real time. A sim of time t will potentially contain simulations earlier than t-ln(F), and so on.? So between T0 and T0+ln(F) there will be no ancestor sims. Between T0+ln(F) and T0+2ln(F) there will be simulations of the first interval. Between T0+2ln(F) and T0+3ln(F) there will be some simulations of the first interval (of which many more can be done, since they are so small), and some simulations of the second one (which may contain simulations of the first interval). In general, in interval N there can be X sims of interval N-1, FX simulations of N-1, F^2 X sims of N-2, or F^N X sims of interval 1. In addition, some of the late interval simulations contain simulations of earlier intervals. So in this model, it looks like we should expect an ever increasing number of simulations of the earlier intervals, and that the ratio between the early to the late is going up exponentially. So this predicts that a random observer should predict he is in a simulation of an early interval.? Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Thu Apr 10 22:23:09 2014 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 00:23:09 +0200 Subject: [ExI] AI motivation, was malevolent machines In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1304217824-10842@secure.ericade.net> Keith Henson , 10/4/2014 11:36 PM: I think a machine that was motivated to improve its status in the eyes of both humans and other machines would be relatively safe. Any way of doing a formal analysis of it? We know human status gaming can be pretty destructive.? Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From protokol2020 at gmail.com Thu Apr 10 22:41:26 2014 From: protokol2020 at gmail.com (Tomaz Kristan) Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 00:41:26 +0200 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: <1303473881-6228@secure.ericade.net> References: <1303473881-6228@secure.ericade.net> Message-ID: > So this predicts that a random observer should predict he is in a simulation of an early interval. Then, he must also predict, that his simulator is also simulated! And so on, through all the turtles/simulators? On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 12:22 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Tomaz Kristan , 10/4/2014 11:18 AM: > > > But is now the true year 2014, or a simulation of 2014 run in the year > 4,982,944? > > Is this the true year 4,982,944 with the simulation of 2014, or just a > simulation of all that, run in the year 4,982,945? > > I am not saying this (infinite) regression kills the probability of > ancestral simulation going on. It weakens it. > > > Suppose the amount of available computing power grows exponentially as > exp(t). To run a ancestor sim you need at least that much computing power, > so in practice you will only run simulations that are a factor F smaller, > that is, you have a choice of civilizations from the start of time T0 to > T-ln(F) where T is the current real time. A sim of time t will potentially > contain simulations earlier than t-ln(F), and so on. > > So between T0 and T0+ln(F) there will be no ancestor sims. Between > T0+ln(F) and T0+2ln(F) there will be simulations of the first interval. > Between T0+2ln(F) and T0+3ln(F) there will be some simulations of the first > interval (of which many more can be done, since they are so small), and > some simulations of the second one (which may contain simulations of the > first interval). In general, in interval N there can be X sims of interval > N-1, FX simulations of N-1, F^2 X sims of N-2, or F^N X sims of interval 1. > In addition, some of the late interval simulations contain simulations of > earlier intervals. > > So in this model, it looks like we should expect an ever increasing number > of simulations of the earlier intervals, and that the ratio between the > early to the late is going up exponentially. So this predicts that a random > observer should predict he is in a simulation of an early interval. > > > > > Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford > University > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -- https://protokol2020.wordpress.com/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mbb386 at main.nc.us Thu Apr 10 23:55:14 2014 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2014 19:55:14 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Tom Lehrer profile In-Reply-To: <201404101634.s3AGYU7l010758@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <201404101634.s3AGYU7l010758@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: Thank you for this! :) We taught our very young children the Irish Ballad, I Hold Your Hand in Mine, and the Hunting Song. As they got a bit older we taught them Be Prepared... and moved on from there. I am forwarding the link. :D Not that we were any good with guitar, but we did accompany the singing. And yes, they grew up not *too* twisted - they're able to be self-supporting and they laugh a lot. :) Warm regards, MB > [ Ostensibly off-topic but so many extropians I know will > be interested: ] > > Rejoice! And just in time for spring! When every Sunday > you'll see? > > > Looking For Tom Lehrer, Comedy's Mysterious Genius > > > -- David. > From spike66 at att.net Fri Apr 11 00:36:32 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2014 17:36:32 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Tom Lehrer profile In-Reply-To: References: <201404101634.s3AGYU7l010758@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <018401cf551e$16fddef0$44f99cd0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of MB Subject: Re: [ExI] Tom Lehrer profile >...Thank you for this! :) We taught our very young children the Irish Ballad, I Hold Your Hand in Mine, and the Hunting Song. As they got a bit older we taught them Be Prepared... and moved on from there. I am forwarding the link. :D...MB Many of the fun songs we teach the cub scouts are 1970s vintage Dr. Demento. spike From pjmanney at gmail.com Fri Apr 11 00:56:13 2014 From: pjmanney at gmail.com (PJ Manney) Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2014 17:56:13 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Tom Lehrer profile In-Reply-To: <005001cf54f1$61c95630$255c0290$@att.net> References: <201404101634.s3AGYU7l010758@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <005001cf54f1$61c95630$255c0290$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 12:16 PM, spike wrote: > Clearly Lehrer had talent. How can a father explain to anyone born in > this millennium 70s geek humor? > > > > > > > He told me something I didn?t know: Weird Al is a monster brain. The guy > with the auto shop was a couple years older, but they graduated high school > together. He said Al Yankovic was the smartest guy he ever met, utterly > without exception. Now is that cool or what? > > > > Now how to I explain that to a seven year old? Do I even bother trying? > > > Very easily and yes, you need to introduce him when you and he are ready. My kids adore Weird Al, even after many years. They discovered him way back with the "White and Nerdy" video in 2006 and embraced him as one of their own. That's because my husband grew up listening to Dr. Demento on KPPC in the San Fernando Valley. They listen to and appreciate music off all periods, because with Pandora, YouTube and iTunes, music no longer needs a chronological context, only an aesthetic one. Now I wish my son would get over his aversion to watching Black and White films. Luckily, my daughter has better taste. She turned to me after Casablanca, saying, "Wow. What a movie!" Smart girl. And it's obvious Al is terribly smart. You only have to listen to the music. Clever, clever man. Spike, did you take your moniker from listening to Dr. Demento's show? He certainly played a good deal of satirists like Spike Jones, among others. Take care, PJ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Fri Apr 11 01:04:14 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2014 18:04:14 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Tom Lehrer profile In-Reply-To: References: <201404101634.s3AGYU7l010758@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <005001cf54f1$61c95630$255c0290$@att.net> Message-ID: <01bd01cf5521$f5b03000$e1109000$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of PJ Manney ? >?Spike, did you take your moniker from listening to Dr. Demento's show? He certainly played a good deal of satirists like Spike Jones, among others. Take care, PJ I didn?t! Not long after I started my career, I had wrote a research proposal to my boss. Being the creative writer, I ended with a flourish seldom seen in business proposals: Think of it Mr. Tanner, this is our chance to boldly go where no one has gone before! He bought it, called to me across the lab ?OK Spock, let?s do it!? The others, not aware of the proposal, thought he had called me Spike. Spike Jones. As a little joke, I wrote the report and signed it GA Spike Jones. That paper won the top award for the best paper at an international engineering conference. Of course I wasn?t going to throw that away. So it has been Spike ever since. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Fri Apr 11 03:56:35 2014 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2014 20:56:35 -0700 Subject: [ExI] AI motivation, was malevolent machines (Anders Sandberg) Message-ID: On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 6:18 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Keith Henson , 10/4/2014 11:36 PM: >> I think a machine that was motivated to improve its status in the eyes >> of both humans and other machines would be relatively safe. > Any way of doing a formal analysis of it? We know human status gaming can be pretty destructive.? That's a really good question. I don't know. >From what I see of destructive, zero sum, or negative sum status games, they seem to stem from poor intelligence or poor understanding of the object of the game. Presumably an AI would be smart enough to play the game well. We should discuss this, either over Skype, or the next time I get to Oxford. Keith Oh, and to Spike, Tom Lehrer dates back into the early 50s. I ran into him in the pages of Mad Magazine around 1957. In those days a geek was a cheap circus sideshow act where a guy down in a pit, dressed as a caveman, bit the heads off live chickens. From spike66 at att.net Fri Apr 11 04:24:41 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2014 21:24:41 -0700 Subject: [ExI] AI motivation, was malevolent machines (Anders Sandberg) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <008401cf553d$f6003b10$e200b130$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Keith Henson ... >...Oh, and to Spike, Tom Lehrer dates back into the early 50s. I ran into him in the pages of Mad Magazine around 1957. In those days a geek was a cheap circus sideshow act where a guy down in a pit, dressed as a caveman, bit the heads off live chickens. _______________________________________________ Well now Keith, I do admit you have a few more years' experience than I. But I am old enough to have been a geek before geek was cool. We have Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to thank for turning that around. In some odd way, I almost miss the days when being a computer nerd and math geek caused one to be a social outcast. Being an outcast is freedom. You can do whatever you want, and you are already permanently outside the cool circles anyway, so there are no repercussions. You are free to be as smart as you can be. Now one can by brainy and still be cool. So now we have something to lose, which forces all these social graces on us, oy. spike From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Apr 11 13:09:49 2014 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 09:09:49 -0400 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: <1303473881-6228@secure.ericade.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 6:41 PM, Tomaz Kristan wrote: > > So this predicts that a random observer should predict he is in a > simulation of an early interval. > > Then, he must also predict, that his simulator is also simulated! And so > on, through all the turtles/simulators? > > If the universe is a simulation, is there a base hardware for computing the sims? I like the "turtles all the way down" to describe the recursion, but it doesn't satisfy the base condition (that's the point, right?) I wonder if this concept will actually survive serialization to words, though I'd be happy if anyone confirmed: Programmers/CS talk about arrays as 2 dimensional but the memory for a 2d array is really 1 dimension. It's pretty simple math for the mapping function to get the 1d address of a 2d array [j,k] : j * kmax + k (assumes 0-based indexes) This function generalizes for higher/more dimensions mapping down to 1d memory addresses. No doubt actual implementations of large (and sparsely populated) arrays use some internal representation that is a much more efficient use of space, but let's agree that space is cheaper than cleverness. I'm going to jump over the 2d, 3d mappings and go right to holographic principle. I'm also going to assume everyone here already knows what that's about (or can look it up). I'd like to propose that information density is a feature of any given volume of space. Is expansion is a result of increased information content or is entropy a result of expansion. While information is computed, new information is generated (ex: metadata,intermediate results, etc) I think it's obvious this becomes unwieldy in much the same way a base1 number system is unwieldy. So Intelligence (capitalization denoting requisite handwaving of definitions) applies some externalization of meaning into a computation protocol. A network router doesn't need to "understand" the entire payload of a packet of data; only the relevant headers. I wonder if the Intelligence(*) computing the sim(s) can defer meaning of various information densities in a layer-independent and application agnostic way. We may be looking at the information in our local region of spacetime and pondering the Fermi paradox simply because we're unaware of the correct protocol to understand the communication that is literally all around us. I imagine looking at any individual packet from among the trillions flowing over the Internet at any given moment would appear to be unintelligible noise without knowing the TCP/IP protocol. Even with that bit of information, encrypted content (SSL, etc.) is intentionally meaningless without prior knowledge of externalized context. I think the same information protocol problem exists in understanding the genome. Portions that were once referred to as "junk DNA" has been found to be functional/important. META: my experience with computer science and networking frames my thinking (about thinking/AI/etc) in these terms. Max Tegmark arrived at his Level IV universe through a cosmological experience/background. I suspect many other disciplines might lead to similar conception of these platonic forms. (including Greek philosophy from two millennia ago) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lubkin at unreasonable.com Fri Apr 11 14:44:16 2014 From: lubkin at unreasonable.com (David Lubkin) Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 10:44:16 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Astronaut twin experiment Message-ID: <201404111445.s3BEjKEx003763@andromeda.ziaspace.com> NASA to Conduct Unprecedented Twin Experiment This is an obvious (and good) idea. So why did it take them so long? Both were selected as astronaut candidates *18* years ago. And I'd think they'd get clearer data before Mark had had four spaceflights of his own. -- David. From lubkin at unreasonable.com Fri Apr 11 14:55:08 2014 From: lubkin at unreasonable.com (David Lubkin) Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 10:55:08 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Tom Lehrer profile In-Reply-To: References: <201404101634.s3AGYU7l010758@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <201404111455.s3BEtNQj024265@andromeda.ziaspace.com> MB wrote: >Thank you for this! :) We taught our very young children the Irish >Ballad, I Hold Your Hand in Mine, and the Hunting Song. As they got >a bit older we taught them Be Prepared... and moved on from there. I >am forwarding the link. :D...MB My parents discovered Lehrer when they were both in grad school in Cambridge in the Fifties. I grew up with the songs and then passed them on to my daughter. Who got in trouble for singing some of the lyrics at school. For some reason, my countless younger siblings didn't know the songs. Either my father had tired of imparting them or they listened to him less than I had. On a visit once, I sang The Irish Ballad for them. (They *loved* the idea of killing each other off.) My tribe is reasonably described as the set of people who can identify the lyric "Don't write naughty words on walls if you can't spell." Spike replied: >He bought it, called to me across the lab "OK Spock, let's do it!" > >The others, not aware of the proposal, thought he had called me Spike. I can't help thinking of the timeline where you'd signed the report as Spock Jones. -- David. From bbenzai at yahoo.com Fri Apr 11 16:57:21 2014 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben) Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 17:57:21 +0100 Subject: [ExI] malevolent machines In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <53481EF1.9070405@yahoo.com> William Flynn Wallace asked for comments, the mad fool!: > We all know that all of our machines are out to get us and frustrate us in > various ways, but is it really possible? In scifi there are dozens of > books about entire machine cultures which, of course, are the enemies of > humans and maybe all living things. For starters, while it makes good fiction, that idea is illogical. Any machine sophisiticated enough to display this kind of behaviour would count as 'living' as well. Living things increase local entropy at the expense of global entropy. Intelligent machines will do this, in spades. Viewing 'machines' as 'man-made systems' rather than energy/information processing systems is quite popular, but will become an invalid definition pretty soon, I'd think. Similarly, using 'living' as a synonym for 'biological' will no longer be useful or meaningful. When these hypothetical Berserker Machines are looking for 'living' systems to destroy, either they will be destroying each other, or will be overlooking our descendants. Or, more likely, they'll be terminally confused! > Unless there is something really important that I don't know about > computers, it seems to me that having a machine 'wake up' like Mike in > Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, is just absurd. It does what it > is programmed to do and cannot do anything else. Any other function is > just some sort of mystical belief that is paradoxically held by hard > scientists. I don't know about computers, but maybe there's something really important you don't know about emergent systems. A 'machine mind' probably won't be 'a computer program', any more than a biological mind is a protein molecule. Just like a program (even moreso, actually), an enzyme does what it is created to do and nothing else. Our minds are the product of the functioning of a complex virtual machine run in a physical machine made of things that are made of other things made of other things that are made of and by proteins (and other kinds of molecule). I expect machine minds will be something analogous. Ben Zaiboc -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Fri Apr 11 17:13:26 2014 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 10:13:26 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Astronaut twin experiment In-Reply-To: <201404111445.s3BEjKEx003763@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <201404111445.s3BEjKEx003763@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: It took them this long because there are that few astronauts. It's hard to get even a single data point, let alone the volumes of data we're used to with ground-based studies. On Apr 11, 2014 7:46 AM, "David Lubkin" wrote: > > NASA to Conduct Unprecedented Twin Experiment > > This is an obvious (and good) idea. So why did it take them so long? Both > were selected as astronaut candidates *18* years ago. And I'd think they'd > get clearer data before Mark had had four spaceflights of his own. > > > -- David. > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bbenzai at yahoo.com Fri Apr 11 17:01:53 2014 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben) Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 18:01:53 +0100 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <53482001.9010001@yahoo.com> William Flynn Wallace asked: > Is there any one who doesn't think that Christianity (can't speak for the > other ones) wasn't made up as time went on?" Sure, there are loads of people. Probably most Christians, for a start. If you meant "Is there any one *here* who doesn't think ...", then I should bloody well hope not! :D Ben Zaiboc From bbenzai at yahoo.com Fri Apr 11 17:06:49 2014 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben) Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 18:06:49 +0100 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <53482129.9020109@yahoo.com> Tara Maya commented: > Logically, no one should make up their minds about what the afterlife holds before living and > learning at least a 1000 years? :)" Ha! Logically, the concept of 'afterlife' is invalid. Where do tunes go when they finish? Is there an 'aftertune'? Silly question, isn't it. Ben Zaiboc From anders at aleph.se Fri Apr 11 18:39:28 2014 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 20:39:28 +0200 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1375148705-2646@secure.ericade.net> Tomaz Kristan , 11/4/2014 12:46 AM: > So this predicts that a random observer should predict he is in a simulation of an early interval.? Then, he must also predict, that his simulator is also simulated! And so on, through all the turtles/simulators? Hehe. In my basic model where the computing power just grows without limit this would make sense. If we assume the increase only lasts time T_omega, then the observer should expect to be between interval 1 (the earliest interval) and interval T_omega/ln(F) (the most recent). But the *average* nesting will be deep. Estimating how deep our world is given that we know we are not doing any real ancestor sims can be done this way: in interval N, there will be 1*X sims of N-1. FX of N-2, F^2X of N-3, and so on. The total number of sims from the level is around X(1-F^N)/(1-F). So if we try to calculate the number of level 1 sims S(N) instead, we will get S(2)=X from level 2, S(3)=FX+X^2 from level 3, and S(N)=X [ S(N-1)+F S(N-2) + F^2 S(N-3) + ...] in general. Plugging in S(N)=exp(lambda N) as an ansatz, we get exp(lambda N) = X [ exp(lambda N)/exp(lambda) + F exp(lambda N)/exp(2 lambda) +F^2 exp(lambda N)/exp(3 lambda)], which gives us 1=X [ exp(-lambda) + exp(-2 lambda) + exp(-3 lambda) + ...], or lambda=-ln(1-X). So basically, unsurprisingly, the number of level 1 simulations grows exponentially over time. So we can throw in Bayes theorem to try to estimate P(N levels | we are a level 1 sim) = P(We are level 1| N levels)P(N levels)/P(we are level 1). Now, given all the above, the first term is about constant (exponentially increasing sims, with level 1 sims forming an exponentially growing subset). The second term, the prior for N, seems to be doing most of the work here: it is fairly uninformative to know that you are a level 1 sim, since you could be the only sim in a level 2 world or one of quadrillions in a very nested world (and the final term is just normalization). So, thinking we are a sim, unless one believes computer power will grow beyond any bound, one doesn't know much about how nested it could be. That is pretty intriguing. I might have to run it past some of our anthropics wizards in the office to check my reasoning.? Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 12:22 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: Tomaz Kristan , 10/4/2014 11:18 AM: > But is now the true year 2014, or a simulation of 2014 run in the year 4,982,944? Is this the true year 4,982,944 with the simulation of 2014, or just a simulation of all that, run in the year 4,982,945? I am not saying this (infinite) regression kills the probability of ancestral simulation going on. It weakens it. Suppose the amount of available computing power grows exponentially as exp(t). To run a ancestor sim you need at least that much computing power, so in practice you will only run simulations that are a factor F smaller, that is, you have a choice of civilizations from the start of time T0 to T-ln(F) where T is the current real time. A sim of time t will potentially contain simulations earlier than t-ln(F), and so on.? So between T0 and T0+ln(F) there will be no ancestor sims. Between T0+ln(F) and T0+2ln(F) there will be simulations of the first interval. Between T0+2ln(F) and T0+3ln(F) there will be some simulations of the first interval (of which many more can be done, since they are so small), and some simulations of the second one (which may contain simulations of the first interval). In general, in interval N there can be X sims of interval N-1, FX simulations of N-1, F^2 X sims of N-2, or F^N X sims of interval 1. In addition, some of the late interval simulations contain simulations of earlier intervals. So in this model, it looks like we should expect an ever increasing number of simulations of the earlier intervals, and that the ratio between the early to the late is going up exponentially. So this predicts that a random observer should predict he is in a simulation of an early interval.? Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -- https://protokol2020.wordpress.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 anders at aleph.se Fri Apr 11 18:47:36 2014 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 20:47:36 +0200 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1377266134-2646@secure.ericade.net> Mike Dougherty , 11/4/2014 3:15 PM: On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 6:41 PM, Tomaz Kristan wrote: > So this predicts that a random observer should predict he is in a simulation of an early interval.? Then, he must also predict, that his simulator is also simulated! And so on, through all the turtles/simulators? If the universe is a simulation, is there a base hardware for computing the sims? Might depend on whether one buys what Greg Egan calls the 'dust theory' or Max Tegmark's level IV multiverse: there worlds might be implemented endlessly in each other. A paper taking this to its theological limit is Eric Steinhardt's Theological Implications of the Simulation Argumenthttp://www.arsdisputandi.org/publish/articles/000338/article.pdfIt argues (perhaps naively) that God would be the hyperturing true foundation of an endless tower of simulations, but it has some neat ideas of how to get an "aesthetic theodicy" that actually provides a meaning for the universe (the generation of interestingness).? I'd like to propose that information density is a feature of any given volume of space.? Is expansion is a result of increased information content or is entropy a result of expansion.? While information is computed, new information is generated (ex: metadata,intermediate results, etc)? I think it's obvious this becomes unwieldy in much the same way a base1 number system is unwieldy.? So Intelligence (capitalization denoting requisite handwaving of definitions) applies some externalization of meaning into a computation protocol. I think the information density of space is a pretty deep question. It is the counterpart to the entropy of spacetime and fields issue: our matter fields can have a fair bit of entropy, but spacetime seems to have started in a low entropy state, which allows it to drive lots of complexity-creating processes as matter clumps. However, spacetime expansion likely does not correspond to an information storage increase: it just adds more low-entropy flatness. Maybe it is more like a dropbox or gmail account, where available storage space is going up all the time whether you use it or not. Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Fri Apr 11 18:52:02 2014 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 20:52:02 +0200 Subject: [ExI] AI motivation, was malevolent machines (Anders Sandberg) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1377774553-2646@secure.ericade.net> Keith Henson , 11/4/2014 6:01 AM: On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 6:18 PM, ?Anders Sandberg wrote: > Any way of doing a formal analysis of it? We know human status gaming can be pretty destructive.? That's a really good question. ?I don't know. >From what I see of destructive, zero sum, or negative sum status games, they seem to stem from poor intelligence or poor understanding of the object of the game. ?Presumably an AI would be smart enough to play the game well. We should discuss this, either over Skype, or the next time I get to Oxford. Totally! My concern is that just like in the moral/value case most friendliness research has been thinking about, getting complex and fragile human social status concepts into the machine seems to be hard. And if we miss what we really mean by social status we might get powerful systems playing a zero-sum game with arbitrary markers that just *sound* like they are social status as we know it. In such a situation humans might be hopelessly outclassed and the desired integration of machine and human society never happens. So the issue to think about is how to make sure the concepts actually mesh. And that playing the game doesn't lead to pathologies even when you are smart: we know the moral game can get crazy for certain superintelligences.? Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Fri Apr 11 18:55:12 2014 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 20:55:12 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Nearly respirocytes Message-ID: <1378035776-10785@secure.ericade.net> Not there yet, even by a longshot. But still looks eminently useful: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/120627142512.htmhttp://stm.sciencemag.org/content/4/140/140ra88.full.pdf "We have developed an injectable foam suspension containing self-assembling, lipid-based microparticles encapsulatinga core of pure oxygen gas for intravenous injection. Prototype suspensions were manufactured tocontain between 50 and 90 ml of oxygen gas per deciliter of suspension. Particle size was polydisperse, with amean particle diameter between 2 and 4 mm. When mixed with human blood ex vivo, oxygen transfer from 70volume % microparticles was complete within 4 s. When the microparticles were infused by intravenousinjection into hypoxemic rabbits, arterial saturations increased within seconds to near-normal levels; thiswas followed by a decrease in oxygen tensions after stopping the infusions. The particles were also infusedinto rabbits undergoing 15 min of complete tracheal occlusion. Oxygen microparticles significantly decreasedthe degree of hypoxemia in these rabbits, and the incidence of cardiac arrest and organ injury was reducedcompared to controls. The ability to administer oxygen and other gases directly to the bloodstream may representa technique for short-term rescue of profoundly hypoxemic patients, to selectively augment oxygen deliveryto at-risk organs, or for novel diagnostic techniques. Furthermore, the ability to titrate gas infusions rapidlymay minimize oxygen-related toxicity." Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From painlord2k at libero.it Fri Apr 11 18:46:34 2014 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 20:46:34 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact In-Reply-To: References: <534680D5.9040909@libero.it> Message-ID: <5348388A.4020300@libero.it> Il 10/04/2014 14:10, Stathis Papaioannou ha scritto: > So if I kill you that's just because you weren't fit enough to > defend yourself, and in accordance with evolution, and therefore > good. The first part is right. The second part is inconsequential, because there is no good or bad in natural selection. It just is. I would more interested in researching if killing me would increase your reproductive fitness or not both long and short term. If you want a pacific society, just build a society where killing cost everyone too much to be able to afford it. If you want a free society, just build a society where taking freedom from others would cost too much to anyone and everyone. In these cases you would be selecting against killers and slavers. Would this be bad? Mirco From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Apr 11 20:28:19 2014 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 16:28:19 -0400 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: <1377266134-2646@secure.ericade.net> References: <1377266134-2646@secure.ericade.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 2:47 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > I think the information density of space is a pretty deep question. It is > the counterpart to the entropy of spacetime and fields issue: our matter > fields can have a fair bit of entropy, but spacetime seems to have started > in a low entropy state, which allows it to drive lots of > complexity-creating processes as matter clumps. However, spacetime > expansion likely does not correspond to an information storage increase: it > just adds more low-entropy flatness. Maybe it is more like a dropbox or > gmail account, where available storage space is going up all the time > whether you use it or not. > The way I understand the holographic universe, there's a 2d description of the information contained inside the 3d volume bounded by a sphere. If there is more information generated by any of the subspace, wouldn't the sphere necessarily increase in surface area to accommodate the increased complexity in the description of the bounded space? the boundary is large to describe multidimensional subspaces - and that causes regions of "low-entry flatness" to compensate. The more complex and ordered the simulations (of any level) the larger the surface and therefore the more emptiness around the information-dense core. Does that remind anyone else of a description of an atom? it would be nice to have some visualization software to share these ideas -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rtomek at ceti.pl Fri Apr 11 20:07:12 2014 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 22:07:12 +0200 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: <033601cf535f$b06aedf0$1140c9d0$@att.net> <022401cf5419$18a2c5f0$49e851d0$@att.net> Message-ID: <20140411200712.GA23048@tau1.ceti.pl> On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 10:08:27AM -0400, John Clark wrote: > On Wed, Apr 9, 2014 at 1:28 PM, spike wrote: > > >>I think the Bible is as clear as it is morally corrupt on this subject. > >> Consider Revelation 20:10 > >> "And the devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning > >> sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be > >> tormented day and night for ever and ever." > >> > > > > >Ja, that's the devil, the beast and the false prophet, not the humans. > > > > Who is the false prophet? I don't know of any profit in the Bible, false or > otherwise, that isn't a human. As a non-specialist, I'd reserve the term "false prophet" to humans who voluntarily deceive their fellows. Of course there is some gain involved (jokestering, fraudstering, whateverstering). > But it doesn't really matter, Lucifer is a sentient being and torturing > him for eternity means God is astronomically, no INFINITELY more evil than > the devil. But what if Lucifer likes this? We know (well, I know) there are submissives and dominatrixes. Perhaps God and Devil are just having fun. They may even have agreed upon a stop word. Otherwise, this sucks indeed. But, this sucks equally for God, too. Just think of it. Every damn day, go and torture the Devil. Sounds like a work. Like telemarketing. Awful. Bloody boring for superentity. How many times one can whip ass (pooping something that burns and smells of sulfur) before this becomes a torture for a torturer? [...] > That's OK, I think we should give the devil his due. The very core of > Christianity is inherently illogical but Christian franchises that don't > think their hero (God) would approve of torturing someone for eternity are > morally superior to other franchises that think that the ultimate moral > paragon would judge it to be a good idea to burn un-baptized children for a > infinite number of years. The problem I can see with religions is they have to explain something very complicated to the very popular minds. And this is hard to do if guy trying to explain happens to be a simpleton, too. Thus the whole talk we can have about religion (in this case, as given by the Bible) is on the level of "why Jews on the desert weren't given some vitamins, only manna and manna". Another problem I can see, from the almost very beginning religions were used to keep the mob in line (and running one mob against another). This probably started in times of city building, but maybe some time before. So while talking about religion, we also talk about politics, just refusing to aknowledge this. It may be cool to study where such refusal comes from. Millennia go, nothing changes. People don't get more rational, truths are created as needed and critics of religion have always something valid to say. :-) Just in case others forget to cut religions some slack, here goes. Modern sciences, in all their rationality, have begun in womb provided to them by religions. You can have your telescopes only thanks to some guy who wanted to explain what was this milky-like stain on the sky. And the other guy, who gave the first one herbal tea for a cold made by bad spirits (we call those bacteria and viruses nowadays, but a tea still does the job). Because a merchant didn't give a frak, being too interested in buying, selling and accounting. And warrior-king didn't give a frak either, being too involved in retaining power and expanding his domain. The peasant was too interested in following the plow, and hunter in following the deer. Even if their minds wandered far enough to ask a question, if it required systematic dedication, they lost their interest in finding the answer. Or so I think. As of modern religions, I truly wonder what, if any, future researchers will say about money worshiping, excessive spending in shopping centers and sinking in all kinds of so called content, which is mirrors and smoke. Perhaps they will have no idea why so many people preached to the imaginative heroes in cinemas, bought the lucky talismans of Supervibroman and Wonderbrawoman and so on (or maybe they will, afterall this looks like good old fertility cult). The Christianity may be on the losing side, but it has just been replaced with something that satisfies the same needs humans had thousands years ago and nowadays they have them too. It is a bit depressing to think about it - people just do the same they used to do, only calling it by another name and giving their surplus to another entity. So all you guys who think religions lost, you may think twice if you please. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From pharos at gmail.com Fri Apr 11 21:30:04 2014 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 22:30:04 +0100 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: <20140411200712.GA23048@tau1.ceti.pl> References: <033601cf535f$b06aedf0$1140c9d0$@att.net> <022401cf5419$18a2c5f0$49e851d0$@att.net> <20140411200712.GA23048@tau1.ceti.pl> Message-ID: On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 9:07 PM, Tomasz Rola wrote: > The problem I can see with religions is they have to explain something > very complicated to the very popular minds. And this is hard to do if > guy trying to explain happens to be a simpleton, too. Thus the whole > talk we can have about religion (in this case, as given by the Bible) > is on the level of "why Jews on the desert weren't given some > vitamins, only manna and manna". > > Another problem I can see, from the almost very beginning religions > were used to keep the mob in line (and running one mob against > another). This probably started in times of city building, but maybe > some time before. So while talking about religion, we also talk about > politics, just refusing to aknowledge this. It may be cool to study > where such refusal comes from. > > The New Testament was written by Greeks generations after the supposed time of the Jewish Messiah. Long after the Jewish temple and the original Jewish Jesus sect had been destroyed. The synoptic gospels were written because the early Greco-Roman Christians realised that they needed some documentation about the origins of their cult. All they had was a collection of 'wise sayings' and the Jewish Old Testament. So they wrote stories which made these elements fit together. There were many gospels written. Practically every local church had their own stories. That's why Jesus appears as a Jewish rabbi talking Greek mythology and dying and being reborn just like a Greek god. The Greek mythic religions were wildly popular and the new Christians fitted in well. After the bit about obeying the Romans was inserted, that got the Roman emperor to back them as the best mass religion to keep the populace quiet. It was the Roman emperor that founded Roman Catholicism and gave it political authority. There is no 'Hell' in the earlier, more primitive Old Testament theology. The concept was developed later, as Christian theology became more complex. BillK From anders at aleph.se Sat Apr 12 09:03:37 2014 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2014 11:03:37 +0200 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1427624975-29751@secure.ericade.net> Mike Dougherty , 11/4/2014 10:33 PM:The way I understand the holographic universe, there's a 2d description of the information contained inside the 3d volume bounded by a sphere.? If there is more information generated by any of the subspace, wouldn't the sphere necessarily increase in surface area to accommodate the increased complexity in the description of the bounded space? As far as I understand it, the boundary is arbitrary: it is a marker, not a thing. So if a bunch of extra information arrives inside, it corresponds to a change in the description on the boundary. But the location of boundary itself does not change.? ? The more complex and ordered the simulations (of any level) the larger the surface and therefore the more emptiness around the information-dense core.? The Bekenstein bound places a limit on the amount of information inside a volume by the encoding capacity of the boundary. But if there is too much information in a small region you cannot make it stable by having lots of emptiness outside, since there is another boundary just around the core that bumps into the bound. A matter distribution does not avoid becoming a black hole just because there is a lot of nothing outside: it has to keep its density within a limited range instead.? Does that remind anyone else of a description of an atom? No. :-) Atoms are rather different: the reason for their size scale is the relative strength of the forces. Electron clouds have a size determined by how the electromagnetic force falls off and how strong it is relative to the electron mass. The size of the atomic nucleus is determined by the ratio between the strong and electromagnetic force, and the nucleon masses. ? Note that there are nuclei as large as cities (neutron stars), and electron clouds you can hit with a car (metal objects) - as well as "naked" nucleons and electrons. This has nothing to do with fundamental physics.? (As you can tell, I am annoyed by people saying "but what is, man, our solar system/galaxy is like an atom... whoa" - I usually respond that planets/stars don't jump between orbitals and certainly doesn't follow the Schroedinger equation.) Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Sat Apr 12 09:07:45 2014 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2014 11:07:45 +0200 Subject: [ExI] malevolent machines In-Reply-To: <694C166A-59D2-42BD-976A-AF9AA2292BC0@taramayastales.com> Message-ID: <1429115705-20560@secure.ericade.net> Tara Maya , 9/4/2014 10:58 PM: I agree that it's possible for sufficiently advanced robots to behave unexpectedly. What I find interesting is how our fears are shaped by what we do expect. For instance, for those of us who think the most important metaphor for robots is as our slaves, the greatest danger is that they might rebel and kill or enslave us. Whereas, for those of us who think the?the most important metaphor for robots is as our children, the greatest danger is that despite the huge amount of money we will waste educating them, they will just move back in with us to live in the basement playing video games. :-) I think the deeper point is important: our ability to think well about some domains is hampered by our metaphors. In the case of powerful AI avoiding anthropomorphic metaphors is really hard; we do not have any intuition what optimization processes do. We tend to think of AI as agents with goals, but that limits our thinking to a particular subset. Google is not an agent and it does not have goals. Yet such abstract systems can still misbehave in complex ways. Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From nebathenemi at yahoo.co.uk Sat Apr 12 10:07:36 2014 From: nebathenemi at yahoo.co.uk (Tom Nowell) Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2014 11:07:36 +0100 (BST) Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1397297256.57287.YahooMailNeo@web172603.mail.ir2.yahoo.com> Spike and John Clark were discussing Hell and damnation in Christianity?midweek, and I'd like to point out there is more than one possible interpretation of Jesus' sayings about what happens to those who are not saved. If we take the parable of the weeds (Matthew 13 - below I will quote the explanation from verses 36-43) ?36?Then he left the crowd and went into the house. His disciples came to him and said, ?Explain to us the parable of the weeds in the field.? 37?He answered, ?The one who sowed the good seed is the Son of Man. 38?The field is the world, and the good seed stands for the people of the kingdom. The weeds are the people of the evil one, 39?and the enemy who sows them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvesters are angels. 40??As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. 41?The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. 42?They will throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. 43?Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Whoever has ears, let them hear. ? If we take the fate of those who will not be saved as destruction when they die, all the fiery metaphors can be seen as terms for total destruction. Resurrection for those who are judged and found good saves them from this. For those who like considering the simulation argument, it is interesting to note how simply this theology translates - there is a creator outside our existence which made this reality, it scans what is happening here, those who fail its spam filter will be deleted, those who meet certain criteria will be backed up and get to keep going. ? Tom From nebathenemi at yahoo.co.uk Sat Apr 12 10:17:27 2014 From: nebathenemi at yahoo.co.uk (Tom Nowell) Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2014 11:17:27 +0100 (BST) Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1397297847.61592.YahooMailNeo@web172602.mail.ir2.yahoo.com> William Flynn Wallace asked:? Is there any one who doesn't think that Christianity (can't speak for the? other ones) wasn't made up as time went on?" ? Christianity, like everything else humans do, changes with the people who practise it. Every human language changes over time, every law is enforced or interpreted differently, in fact just about everything our species does changes. What makes you think religion would be any different? ? We have lawyers and theologians simply because human language is imperfect, and no matter how clearly you may try to lay down guidance or a law, someone somewhere will find a loophole or pose a reductio ad absurdam or a strawman example that makes a mockery of it. ? ?As a thought experiment, imagine a perfect set of guidance was given to humanity - maybe an alien civilisation tells us this is what we need to do to join a galactic federation, or we are told by the guy running the simulation we're in these are the rules of his spam filter. How long would it be before the first arguments over meaning started, and how quickly would people start declaring a particular interpretation was the only true one? How quickly would people find loopholes to justify their own behaviour? ? Right, I'm off to find pictures of kittens on the internet before any more pondering on human fallibility makes me spend all day contemplating the futility of human endeavour. ? Tom From protokol2020 at gmail.com Sat Apr 12 11:53:02 2014 From: protokol2020 at gmail.com (Tomaz Kristan) Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2014 13:53:02 +0200 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: <1427624975-29751@secure.ericade.net> References: <1427624975-29751@secure.ericade.net> Message-ID: Anders Sanberg says: > one doesn't know much about how nested it could be If it's possible, that this deepness is say 10, then it is possible, that's it 0,also. That we are not in simulation right now. Even a bit more possible. On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 11:03 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Mike Dougherty , 11/4/2014 10:33 PM: > > The way I understand the holographic universe, there's a 2d description of > the information contained inside the 3d volume bounded by a sphere. If > there is more information generated by any of the subspace, wouldn't the > sphere necessarily increase in surface area to accommodate the increased > complexity in the description of the bounded space? > > > As far as I understand it, the boundary is arbitrary: it is a marker, not > a thing. So if a bunch of extra information arrives inside, it corresponds > to a change in the description on the boundary. But the location of > boundary itself does not change. > > > The more complex and ordered the simulations (of any level) the larger > the surface and therefore the more emptiness around the information-dense > core. > > > The Bekenstein bound places a limit on the amount of information inside a > volume by the encoding capacity of the boundary. But if there is too much > information in a small region you cannot make it stable by having lots of > emptiness outside, since there is another boundary just around the core > that bumps into the bound. A matter distribution does not avoid becoming a > black hole just because there is a lot of nothing outside: it has to keep > its density within a limited range instead. > > > Does that remind anyone else of a description of an atom? > > > No. :-) > > Atoms are rather different: the reason for their size scale is the > relative strength of the forces. Electron clouds have a size determined by > how the electromagnetic force falls off and how strong it is relative to > the electron mass. The size of the atomic nucleus is determined by the > ratio between the strong and electromagnetic force, and the nucleon masses. > > > Note that there are nuclei as large as cities (neutron stars), and > electron clouds you can hit with a car (metal objects) - as well as "naked" > nucleons and electrons. This has nothing to do with fundamental physics. > > (As you can tell, I am annoyed by people saying "but what is, man, our > solar system/galaxy is like an atom... whoa" - I usually respond that > planets/stars don't jump between orbitals and certainly doesn't follow the > Schroedinger equation.) > > > Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford > University > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -- https://protokol2020.wordpress.com/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From puglisi at arcetri.astro.it Sat Apr 12 14:12:56 2014 From: puglisi at arcetri.astro.it (Alfio Puglisi) Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2014 16:12:56 +0200 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: <1254343886-18468@secure.ericade.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 11:14 AM, Tomaz Kristan wrote: > > But is now the true year 2014, or a simulation of 2014 run in the year > 4,982,944? > > Is this the true year 4,982,944 with the simulation of 2014, or just a > simulation of all that, run in the year 4,982,945? > > I am reminded of this SF short story: http://qntm.org/responsibility A bit of handwaving on the technical details, but I found it very entertaining. Alfio > > > On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 10:43 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > >> Tomaz Kristan , 9/4/2014 8:56 PM: >> >> The reason, I am not in an ancestral simulation may be the following: >> >> Since our civilization is a very early one, nobody is making them (those >> simulations) - yet. >> >> It's the question, will anyone ever make them, but nobody is making them >> now. >> >> >> But is now the true year 2014, or a simulation of 2014 run in the year >> 4,982,944? (where it is being run in a M-brain server together with a >> billion others) If it is the latter there are indeed ancestor sims being >> done now (externally chronologically speaking). Our own (as observed by us) >> civilizational age doesn't give much information about the real >> civilizational age of the outside. >> >> The earliness part is also problematic. Presumably there will be more >> simulations of interesting eras, so the far past is probably going to be >> simulated less than exciting times like the run-up to the singularity. I >> think one can make a good argument that our era is more consistently >> exciting than all known past eras, so given what we know we look like a >> likely simulation candidate compared to 10th century Europe or Africa 1300 >> BC. Maybe there are way more 400BC Athens than 21st century worlds, but >> that was a far smaller spatiotemporal domain than the current glorious, >> awful mess. >> >> >> >> >> >> >> Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of >> Oxford University >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> >> > > > -- > https://protokol2020.wordpress.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 foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Apr 12 14:18:04 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2014 09:18:04 -0500 Subject: [ExI] malevolent machines In-Reply-To: <1429115705-20560@secure.ericade.net> References: <694C166A-59D2-42BD-976A-AF9AA2292BC0@taramayastales.com> <1429115705-20560@secure.ericade.net> Message-ID: Thank you Tara! If this group can use anything it is a bit of loosening up. As a psychologist I find it interesting that fear/paranoia/taking over from us, is the main thing that comes to mind when we think of advanced machines. Maybe they will want sex, hamburgers, a stock portfolio, to be downloaded into Russell Crowe or J Lo. (Heinlein thought of that first) Just how is it possible for a machine to think teleologically? Even people don't do it well (If it feels good do it and do it now - why wait?) When machines misbehave, we reprogram them, eh? If really bad we pull the plug (yes, that should remind you of people who misbehave - in the future we can turn some genes on or off to reprogram them). People - endlessly fascinating. bill w On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 4:07 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Tara Maya , 9/4/2014 10:58 PM: > > > I agree that it's possible for sufficiently advanced robots to behave > unexpectedly. What I find interesting is how our fears are shaped by what > we do expect. For instance, for those of us who think the most important > metaphor for robots is as our slaves, the greatest danger is that they > might rebel and kill or enslave us. Whereas, for those of us who think > the the most important metaphor for robots is as our children, the greatest > danger is that despite the huge amount of money we will waste educating > them, they will just move back in with us to live in the basement playing > video games. > > > :-) > > I think the deeper point is important: our ability to think well about > some domains is hampered by our metaphors. In the case of powerful AI > avoiding anthropomorphic metaphors is really hard; we do not have any > intuition what optimization processes do. We tend to think of AI as agents > with goals, but that limits our thinking to a particular subset. Google is > not an agent and it does not have goals. Yet such abstract systems can > still misbehave in complex ways. > > > Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford > University > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sat Apr 12 14:23:02 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2014 07:23:02 -0700 Subject: [ExI] thread name change please: theological musins: was RE: BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox Message-ID: <025001cf565a$b7102e10$25308a30$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Tom Nowell Subject: Re: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox >...Spike and John Clark were discussing Hell and damnation in Christianity midweek, and I'd like to point out there is more than one possible interpretation of Jesus' sayings about what happens to those who are not saved... For those who like considering the simulation argument, it is interesting to note how simply this theology translates - there is a creator outside our existence which made this reality, it scans what is happening here, those who fail its spam filter will be deleted, those who meet certain criteria will be backed up and get to keep going. Tom _______________________________________________ >From the point of view of memetic evolution, I predict that meme regarding the final fate of the wicked (eventually they are just gone, all suffering ended) will spread and morph among the remaining Christian faiths and become common. It's a hell of a good idea. spike From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Apr 12 15:23:48 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2014 10:23:48 -0500 Subject: [ExI] thread name change please: theological musins: was RE: BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: <025001cf565a$b7102e10$25308a30$@att.net> References: <025001cf565a$b7102e10$25308a30$@att.net> Message-ID: What would be an even better idea is to get rid of the idea that spawned the whole thing: original sin. billw On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 9:23 AM, spike wrote: > > > >... On Behalf Of Tom Nowell > Subject: Re: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox > > >...Spike and John Clark were discussing Hell and damnation in > Christianity midweek, and I'd like to point out there is more than one > possible interpretation of Jesus' sayings about what happens to those who > are not saved... For those who like considering the simulation argument, it > is interesting to note how simply this theology translates - there is a > creator outside our existence which made this reality, it scans what is > happening here, those who fail its spam filter will be deleted, those who > meet certain criteria will be backed up and get to keep going. Tom > > _______________________________________________ > > > From the point of view of memetic evolution, I predict that meme regarding > the final fate of the wicked (eventually they are just gone, all suffering > ended) will spread and morph among the remaining Christian faiths and > become common. It's a hell of a good idea. > > 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 bbenzai at yahoo.com Sat Apr 12 16:32:49 2014 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben) Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2014 17:32:49 +0100 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <53496AB1.3090004@yahoo.com> Mike Dougherty proposed that: > ... information density is a feature of any given > volume of space. Its expansion is a result of increased information content Ha! Like it! So the period of inflation just after the big bang... Ben Zaiboc From spike66 at att.net Sat Apr 12 16:33:57 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2014 09:33:57 -0700 Subject: [ExI] thread name change please: theological musins: was RE: BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: <025001cf565a$b7102e10$25308a30$@att.net> Message-ID: <02f201cf566d$00f9f940$02edebc0$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace Sent: Saturday, April 12, 2014 8:24 AM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] thread name change please: theological musins: was RE: BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox What would be an even better idea is to get rid of the idea that spawned the whole thing: original sin. billw Ja. I can see a huge problem with the whole concept. As soon as the topic of original sin arises, every yahoo starts claiming to have thought up a new one that no one else had ever committed before. Then they start arguing over whose novel sin is the most original. Pretty soon somebody suggests setting up sinful intellectual property, scandal royalties, a sin patent office, oy vey, chaos ensues. I say forget the whole thing, keep sin open source, or just stick with the old fashioned time-honored sins. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Apr 12 16:57:10 2014 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2014 12:57:10 -0400 Subject: [ExI] thread name change please: theological musins: was RE: BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: <025001cf565a$b7102e10$25308a30$@att.net> References: <025001cf565a$b7102e10$25308a30$@att.net> Message-ID: Tom Nowell > Spike and John Clark were discussing Hell and damnation in Christianity > midweek, and I'd like to point out there is more than one possible > interpretation of Jesus' sayings about what happens to those who are not > saved. > Jesus and Santa Klaus are similar in that what they were really like (if indeed they existed at all) has no effect on people's behavior today, only what people think they were like is important. In his book Summa Theologica that prototypical theologian, Saint Thomas Aquinas, speculated on what heaven would be like, Just as santaklausologians speculate on what Santa Klaus's workshop would be like. Aquinas said: "That the saints may enjoy their beatitude and the grace of God more abundantly they are permitted to see the punishment of the damned in hell." Apparently this self appointed expert on ethics was so deeply into bondage and S&M that he took it as a given that the saved in heaven would be turned on by seeing someone get tortured for a infinite number of years. The church liked what Aquinas had to say so much that less than 50 years after his death they turned this moral imbecile into a saint. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sat Apr 12 17:25:30 2014 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2014 10:25:30 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato) Message-ID: On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 2:08 AM, Mirco Romanato wrote: snip > > I would more interested in researching if killing me would increase > your reproductive fitness or not both long and short term. It depends on the situation. If times are good and you are not up against resource limits (such as food) then the risk of trying to kill others (who fight back) doesn't increase your reproductive fitness at all. In fact, it may get you killed for nothing. On the other hand, if your tribe faces a resource crisis, then taking a horrible risk to kill the neighbors and take their resources may be a good trade off. From the viewpoint of genes, even all the adults in the tribe being killed isn't a total disaster because humans usually consider the young women of a defeated tribe to be booty. The winners make wives or extra wives out of them and the genes march on. I have talked here about the consequences of an inconsistent environment for years > If you want a pacific society, just build a society where killing cost > everyone too much to be able to afford it. That's a society where the population is not pushing the resource limits. Low population growth and/or increasing the resource base will keep it that way. > If you want a free society, just build a society where taking freedom > from others would cost too much to anyone and everyone. > > In these cases you would be selecting against killers and slavers. These don't seem consistent. A free society may need to be full of people who are willing and genetically predisposed to killing others under enough provocation. Keith From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Apr 12 18:36:24 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2014 13:36:24 -0500 Subject: [ExI] thread name change please: theological musins: was RE: BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: <025001cf565a$b7102e10$25308a30$@att.net> Message-ID: Interesting fact about Aquinas: 70 volumes of moralizing and left no stone unturned. Ex. - he pondered whether nocturnal emissions (wet dreams) were sinful. He thought not. Well, he got one right anyhow. billw On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 11:57 AM, John Clark wrote: > Tom Nowell > > > Spike and John Clark were discussing Hell and damnation in Christianity >> midweek, and I'd like to point out there is more than one possible >> interpretation of Jesus' sayings about what happens to those who are not >> saved. >> > > Jesus and Santa Klaus are similar in that what they were really like (if > indeed they existed at all) has no effect on people's behavior today, only > what people think they were like is important. In his book Summa Theologica > that prototypical theologian, Saint Thomas Aquinas, speculated on what > heaven would be like, Just as santaklausologians speculate on what Santa > Klaus's workshop would be like. Aquinas said: > > "That the saints may enjoy their beatitude and the grace of God more > abundantly they are permitted to see the punishment of the damned in hell." > > Apparently this self appointed expert on ethics was so deeply into bondage > and S&M that he took it as a given that the saved in heaven would be turned > on by seeing someone get tortured for a infinite number of years. The > church liked what Aquinas had to say so much that less than 50 years after > his death they turned this moral imbecile into a saint. > > 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 Sat Apr 12 18:38:54 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2014 13:38:54 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: If you guys like this sort of pondering, try Pinker's 'The Better Angels of Our Nature', as masterful synthesis of evolution,morals and violence and why the latter has declined so much. billw On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 12:25 PM, Keith Henson wrote: > On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 2:08 AM, Mirco Romanato > wrote: > > snip > > > > I would more interested in researching if killing me would increase > > your reproductive fitness or not both long and short term. > > It depends on the situation. If times are good and you are not up > against resource limits (such as food) then the risk of trying to kill > others (who fight back) doesn't increase your reproductive fitness at > all. In fact, it may get you killed for nothing. > > On the other hand, if your tribe faces a resource crisis, then taking > a horrible risk to kill the neighbors and take their resources may be > a good trade off. From the viewpoint of genes, even all the adults in > the tribe being killed isn't a total disaster because humans usually > consider the young women of a defeated tribe to be booty. The winners > make wives or extra wives out of them and the genes march on. > > I have talked here about the consequences of an inconsistent > environment for years > > > If you want a pacific society, just build a society where killing cost > > everyone too much to be able to afford it. > > That's a society where the population is not pushing the resource > limits. Low population growth and/or increasing the resource base > will keep it that way. > > > If you want a free society, just build a society where taking freedom > > from others would cost too much to anyone and everyone. > > > > In these cases you would be selecting against killers and slavers. > > These don't seem consistent. A free society may need to be full of > people who are willing and genetically predisposed to killing others > under enough provocation. > > Keith > _______________________________________________ > 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 Apr 12 19:24:49 2014 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2014 21:24:49 +0200 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1465906333-32749@secure.ericade.net> Tomaz Kristan , 12/4/2014 1:59 PM: Anders Sanberg says: > one doesn't know much about how nested it could be If it's possible, that this deepness is say 10, then it is possible, that's it 0,also. That we are not in simulation right now. Even a bit more possible. Ok, how do you reach the conclusion that is a bit more possible? Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Sat Apr 12 20:34:58 2014 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2014 21:34:58 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 7:38 PM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > If you guys like this sort of pondering, try Pinker's 'The Better Angels of > Our Nature', as masterful synthesis of evolution,morals and violence and why > the latter has declined so much. billw > > By coincidence Next Big Future has just posted a critical review of Pinker's article. One scathing commentator described Pinker's article - This optimistic theme coincides with the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate's ongoing wars on at least four continents (Asia, Africa, Europe, and South America) and the US military's spread to more than eight hundred bases worldwide; the US-led NATO bloc's rapid post-Soviet growth and proclamation of "out-of-area" responsibilities; and the United States' declaration of a right to kill its "enemies" anywhere on the planet. Such a propaganda windfall for the imperial bloc could only be purchased with a denial of reality. Indeed, it is in the ideological and error-ridden narrative with which Pinker sustains this denial for more than eight hundred pages that the book's real appeal lies. ------------ BillK From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sat Apr 12 20:48:54 2014 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2014 13:48:54 -0700 Subject: [ExI] AI motivation, was malevolent machines Message-ID: On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 2:08 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: snip > My concern is that just like in the moral/value case most friendliness research has been thinking about, getting complex and fragile human social status concepts into the machine seems to be hard. It might not be as hard as it seems or it could be even harder. Humans seem to be mostly blind to their motivations. It may be that being blind to your motivations has been more effective in reproductive success in the past, though I really don't know. I do know that being aware of your own motivations can get you an awful lot of social flack at least if you talk about it. I didn't come to understanding my own motivations through introspection, I came to them by understanding the evolution of motives (such as seeking social status) in social primates. Being an unexceptional social primate, I wrote about this applied this to myself--with disastrous results. In the intervening 15 years, seeking social status as a human motivation has become relatively accepted, though it's probably still something you don't want to talk about self-referentially. It's a good question if understanding your own motives might make you more successful. Personally, I can't say it has, but then how can you make a rational judgment? > And if we miss what we really mean by social status we might get powerful systems playing a zero-sum game with arbitrary markers that just *sound* like they are social status as we know it. In such a situation humans might be hopelessly outclassed and the desired integration of machine and human society never happens. Playing a zero-sum game, arbitrary markers or not, is an overall loss. High social status is a fairly tricky concept today. It was originally selected due to reproductive success, especially in males. That seems unlikely in AIs, but then again, perhaps we should breed AIs based on their obtaining high social status. > So the issue to think about is how to make sure the concepts actually mesh. And that playing the game doesn't lead to pathologies even when you are smart: we know the moral game can get crazy for certain superintelligences.? An interesting point that might help understanding is *why* we are mostly not conscious of our motives. Even if I am aware that I must have this motivation for status seeking, it's an abstract intellectual awareness, not a reason to get up in the morning. There must be some reproductive success element in not being aware of our own motivations. Perhaps we need to hide them even from the rest of our minds to keep them from being too obvious to other social primates. It's going to complicate attempts to design AI "in our own image" when we are blind to some parts of that image. Keith From protokol2020 at gmail.com Sat Apr 12 21:35:51 2014 From: protokol2020 at gmail.com (Tomaz Kristan) Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2014 23:35:51 +0200 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: <1465906333-32749@secure.ericade.net> References: <1465906333-32749@secure.ericade.net> Message-ID: Anders Sanberg: > Ok, how do you reach the conclusion that is a bit more possible? Must be a probability distribution. First, they (probabilities) can't be equally likely. Most distributions are falling. See? On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 9:24 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Tomaz Kristan , 12/4/2014 1:59 PM: > > Anders Sanberg says: > > > one doesn't know much about how nested it could be > > If it's possible, that this deepness is say 10, then it is possible, > that's it 0,also. That we are not in simulation right now. Even a bit more > possible. > > > Ok, how do you reach the conclusion that is a bit more possible? > > > Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford > University > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -- https://protokol2020.wordpress.com/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Sun Apr 13 08:38:11 2014 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2014 10:38:11 +0200 Subject: [ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1513761623-13319@secure.ericade.net> Tomaz Kristan , 12/4/2014 11:40 PM: Anders Sanberg: > Ok, how do you reach the conclusion that is a bit more possible? Must be a probability distribution. First, they (probabilities) can't be equally likely. Most distributions are falling. Positive distributions have a nonzero expectation. The mean and median tends to be larger than zero. Power laws are generic stable distributions, exponentials are not.? Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Sun Apr 13 16:25:05 2014 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2014 12:25:05 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 4:34 PM, BillK wrote: > > > By coincidence Next Big Future has just posted a critical review of > Pinker's article. > < > http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/04/looking-at-pinker-thesis-of-historical.html > > > > One scathing commentator described Pinker's article - > > This optimistic theme coincides with the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize > laureate's ongoing wars on at least four continents (Asia, Africa, > Europe, and South America) and the US military's spread to more than > eight hundred bases worldwide; the US-led NATO bloc's rapid > post-Soviet growth and proclamation of "out-of-area" responsibilities; > and the United States' declaration of a right to kill its "enemies" > anywhere on the planet. > Such a propaganda windfall for the imperial bloc could only be > purchased with a denial of reality. Indeed, it is in the ideological > and error-ridden narrative with which Pinker sustains this denial for > more than eight hundred pages that the book's real appeal lies. > ------------ > ### Sounds like a scathing idiot. Did he even read the book? Did he notice the per capita statistics of slaughter, steadily trending down, as opposed to rhetoric which has its fluctuations? Looks like he missed them. Rafal -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Sun Apr 13 16:48:34 2014 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2014 12:48:34 -0400 Subject: [ExI] AI motivation, was malevolent machines In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 4:48 PM, Keith Henson wrote: > > > An interesting point that might help understanding is *why* we are > mostly not conscious of our motives. Even if I am aware that I must > have this motivation for status seeking, it's an abstract intellectual > awareness, not a reason to get up in the morning. There must be some > reproductive success element in not being aware of our own > motivations. Perhaps we need to hide them even from the rest of our > minds to keep them from being too obvious to other social primates. > > ### Self-awareness of the type you mention is a neurological function. As such, for it to evolve, there must be genes directing biological events, and usage of metabolic resources for it to function. But, if self-awareness does not increase fitness, genes for it will not be selected, and if it does sometimes appear, it will be selected against to conserve energy. Generally, unless it's evolutionarily useful or a side-effect of something useful, it doesn't evolve, and if it does, it does not stay long, whatever it is. I don't believe in the self-deception explanation, the idea that our true wicked self must be kept hidden from us to better lie to others. The truth does not *have* to be hidden, it just does not have a reason to be known to us. There is lack of selection for self-awareness about many levels of our motivations, rather than active selection against it. Rafal -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sun Apr 13 17:14:22 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2014 10:14:22 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <02d801cf573b$d0d041f0$7270c5d0$@att.net> One scathing commentator: >?This optimistic theme coincides with the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate's ongoing wars on at least four continents (Asia, Africa, Europe, and South America) and the US military's spread to more than eight hundred bases worldwide? When people write silliness like this, it is evidence they didn?t read Pinker?s book, or if so, didn?t get it. Perhaps this commentator read only the introduction or the cover flaps or even someone else?s commentary on the book and immediately took to promoting their own favorite ideology. Right or wrong, Pinker?s book brings up some really important questions, and sheds light on Keith Henson?s favorite topic, evolutionary psychology. Do we have sufficient critical mass to create a Better Angels discussion group? Or shall we just post it all here? How many Better Angel fans have we? Keith? Rafal? Others? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sun Apr 13 17:34:17 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2014 12:34:17 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato) In-Reply-To: <02d801cf573b$d0d041f0$7270c5d0$@att.net> References: <02d801cf573b$d0d041f0$7270c5d0$@att.net> Message-ID: Yes, read the book. It would take a roomful of historians, statisticians, psychologists and others to really critique this book. One person cannot do it justice. It is a massive synthesis and what if he did get a few things wrong? Or the people he quoted did? Read The Blank Slate too. He is one of the smartest people psychology ever had, IMO. If you want to talk about history and violence you have to read it! One thing he did miss: epigenetics, which allows genetic changes to take place rapidly. bill w On Sun, Apr 13, 2014 at 12:14 PM, spike wrote: > One scathing commentator: > > >...This optimistic theme coincides with the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize > > laureate's ongoing wars on at least four continents (Asia, Africa, > Europe, and South America) and the US military's spread to more than > eight hundred bases worldwide... > > > > > > When people write silliness like this, it is evidence they didn't read > Pinker's book, or if so, didn't get it. Perhaps this commentator read only > the introduction or the cover flaps or even someone else's commentary on > the book and immediately took to promoting their own favorite ideology. > > > > Right or wrong, Pinker's book brings up some really important questions, > and sheds light on Keith Henson's favorite topic, evolutionary psychology. > Do we have sufficient critical mass to create a Better Angels discussion > group? Or shall we just post it all here? How many Better Angel fans have > we? Keith? Rafal? Others? > > > > 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 bbenzai at yahoo.com Sun Apr 13 17:30:41 2014 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben) Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2014 18:30:41 +0100 Subject: [ExI] thread name change please: theological musins In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <534AC9C1.3070908@yahoo.com> William Flynn Wallace wrote: > What would be an even better idea is to get rid of the idea that spawned > the whole thing: original sin. Yes indeed. I'd known about this idea for a long time, but it was only after talking to a catholic about it* and learning that many people *literally* believe in it that I realised what a vile concept it really is. It was then that I started thinking of religion in general, and the catholic church in particular, as an active force for evil in the world. Ben Zaiboc * That was the first time I can remembering actually getting angry about how stupid someone was. Maybe because this wasn't just shake-your-head stupid, but /dangerous/ stupid. From pharos at gmail.com Sun Apr 13 18:09:30 2014 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2014 19:09:30 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato) In-Reply-To: <02d801cf573b$d0d041f0$7270c5d0$@att.net> References: <02d801cf573b$d0d041f0$7270c5d0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Apr 13, 2014 at 6:14 PM, spike wrote: > Right or wrong, Pinker's book brings up some really important questions, and > sheds light on Keith Henson's favorite topic, evolutionary psychology. Do > we have sufficient critical mass to create a Better Angels discussion group? > Or shall we just post it all here? How many Better Angel fans have we? > Keith? Rafal? Others? > > It seems obvious that since WW1 and WW2, nuclear weapons have stopped large nations fighting all-out wars against each other, thus leading to a reduction in wartime deaths. If nuclear weapons ever are used, then the death reduction graph line will reverse dramatically. What has replaced it is large nations picking fights with small nations with small fighting forces, thus leading to many small wars but with fewer deaths. Is permanent war against terrorism 'better'? Because the wars are fought over small foreign countries land with fewer military deaths and more foreign civilian deaths and millions of refugees? Is a military Pax Romana under the domination of an imperial superpower an objective to be desired? BillK From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sun Apr 13 18:13:19 2014 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2014 12:13:19 -0600 Subject: [ExI] AI motivation, was malevolent machines In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 2:48 PM, Keith Henson wrote: > On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 2:08 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > > Playing a zero-sum game, arbitrary markers or not, is an overall loss. > High social status is a fairly tricky concept today. It was > originally selected due to reproductive success, especially in males. > That seems unlikely in AIs, but then again, perhaps we should breed > AIs based on their obtaining high social status. > Unless AIs interbreed with humans, or at least marry each other, this is likely to lead to a two tier system similar to apartheid. If we are going to have AI's seek status, then we better not shame them by disallowing them to marry into human families. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tara at taramayastales.com Sun Apr 13 19:47:35 2014 From: tara at taramayastales.com (Tara Maya) Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2014 12:47:35 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato) In-Reply-To: <02d801cf573b$d0d041f0$7270c5d0$@att.net> References: <02d801cf573b$d0d041f0$7270c5d0$@att.net> Message-ID: <1A7EB9C3-5068-4771-90C6-8FE373FC785C@taramayastales.com> For what it's worth, my own research on original sources, conducted before I read his book, supports Pinker's argument. I'm a historian, and my research was on changes in European demographics and family structure over a thousand year period. The shift in violence was noticeable in those records. The decline in war and crime is paralleled by a rise in gentler child-rearing practices as well, though it's hard to say which was cause and which was effect, or if both occurred in response to some third factor. Even Foucault, postmodernist poster boy, noted quite frankly in his book Discipline and Punish that the rise of the modern prison came because ordinary people could no longer stand to watch public torture. Foucault didn't resort to statistics or even logic, so to him the fact that the ideal form of justice changed from torture for days as a festival of public ridicule to trying to awaken the inner conscience of criminals was a terrible step towards totalitarianism. His argument (it's quite possible I've misunderstood, since he strove at all costs to avoid clarity of argument) was that the modern system wanted to change your thinking not just your behavior, so it was worse, even if you were tortured. Frankly, I think this is factually wrong. Did the religious fanatics of the middle ages not want to convert as much as torture? Trying to change the mind was not what was new, only the reluctance to use brute force to change it. Anyway, yes, I'm a fan of Pinker's book. Tara Maya On Apr 13, 2014, at 10:14 AM, spike wrote: > One scathing commentator: > > >?This optimistic theme coincides with the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize > laureate's ongoing wars on at least four continents (Asia, Africa, > Europe, and South America) and the US military's spread to more than > eight hundred bases worldwide? > > > When people write silliness like this, it is evidence they didn?t read Pinker?s book, or if so, didn?t get it. Perhaps this commentator read only the introduction or the cover flaps or even someone else?s commentary on the book and immediately took to promoting their own favorite ideology. > > Right or wrong, Pinker?s book brings up some really important questions, and sheds light on Keith Henson?s favorite topic, evolutionary psychology. Do we have sufficient critical mass to create a Better Angels discussion group? Or shall we just post it all here? How many Better Angel fans have we? Keith? Rafal? Others? > > spike > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat Tara Maya Blog | Twitter | Facebook | Amazon | Goodreads -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From painlord2k at libero.it Sun Apr 13 20:19:13 2014 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2014 22:19:13 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <534AF141.40906@libero.it> Il 12/04/2014 19:25, Keith Henson ha scritto: >> In these cases you would be selecting against killers and >> slavers. > These don't seem consistent. A free society may need to be full > of people who are willing and genetically predisposed to killing > others under enough provocation. I consider "killers" as people killing for selfish reasons and not when sufficiently provoked. "sufficiently provoked" will be difficult to define. Mirco From painlord2k at libero.it Sun Apr 13 21:37:36 2014 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2014 23:37:36 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato) In-Reply-To: <1A7EB9C3-5068-4771-90C6-8FE373FC785C@taramayastales.com> References: <02d801cf573b$d0d041f0$7270c5d0$@att.net> <1A7EB9C3-5068-4771-90C6-8FE373FC785C@taramayastales.com> Message-ID: <534B03A0.8070601@libero.it> Il 13/04/2014 21:47, Tara Maya ha scritto: > Even Foucault, postmodernist poster boy, noted quite frankly in his > book Discipline and Punish that the rise of the modern prison came > because ordinary people could no longer stand to watch public > torture. Foucault didn't resort to statistics or even logic, so to > him the fact that the ideal form of justice changed from torture > for days as a festival of public ridicule to trying to awaken the > inner conscience of criminals was a terrible step towards > totalitarianism. His argument (it's quite possible I've > misunderstood, since he strove at all costs to avoid clarity of > argument) was that the modern system wanted to change your thinking > not just your behavior, so it was worse, even if you were > tortured. My opinion about jail is simply they substituted a fast and direct death sentence with a slow and indirect death sentence. The point of killing killers or highwaymen or other types of violent behavior like rape (real rape) was to make them disgenic. No need for the authorities to understand the real effect, just the effect must be there. Substituting a jail term to dead or torture (and making jail decent places), the authorities reduced the incentives to resist arrest and the reasons to help some of these individuals. But, from an natural selection point of view, an individual jailed for a substantial time (one year or more) have a substantial handicap compared to individuals not jailed in finding a wife and reproduce. And if already married with children, his family will suffer for the consequences of lack of financial support. And this give his children a comparative handicap too. Or would cause the wife to cuckold him with an available and supportive man. More in a period of time when people lives were much shorter than now. Jails continued to select out of the gene pool individuals lacking enough self restrain and empathy or not intelligent enough to cover their tracks. In fact, jail could be a more efficient selector than the death penalty or torture. Mirco From spike66 at att.net Sun Apr 13 22:22:00 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2014 15:22:00 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato) In-Reply-To: <534B03A0.8070601@libero.it> References: <02d801cf573b$d0d041f0$7270c5d0$@att.net> <1A7EB9C3-5068-4771-90C6-8FE373FC785C@taramayastales.com> <534B03A0.8070601@libero.it> Message-ID: <006d01cf5766$cac23680$6046a380$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Mirco Romanato ... >...Jails continued to select out of the gene pool individuals lacking enough self restrain and empathy or not intelligent enough to cover their tracks. In fact, jail could be a more efficient selector than the death penalty or torture. Mirco _______________________________________________ Well said, thanks Mirco. We have available now low cost motion triggered cameras which immediately send images to the internet, so the perp cannot get away with removing or disabling the cameras. These are down in the 100 dollar range. They aren't great cameras, but they wouldn't need to be high resolution images if we have enough of them. We get plenty of these, mounted on every house looking out. Perp pulls off a caper, images made and archived everywhere on the path of flight, so there is no possibility of escape, no need for high speed chase. The local constabulary calmly drives to her house, peacefully bags perp with the goods in her possesh. I have had two of these cameras for a couple years now. I am surprised at how slowly they are replicating in the hood. spike From rhanson at gmu.edu Sun Apr 13 16:57:01 2014 From: rhanson at gmu.edu (Robin D Hanson) Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2014 16:57:01 +0000 Subject: [ExI] AI motivation, was malevolent machines In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <2AAC168A-50DF-4876-AE60-07AE0F2D00D9@gmu.edu> On Apr 13, 2014, at 12:48 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki > wrote: On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 4:48 PM, Keith Henson > wrote: An interesting point that might help understanding is *why* we are mostly not conscious of our motives. Even if I am aware that I must have this motivation for status seeking, it's an abstract intellectual awareness, not a reason to get up in the morning. There must be some reproductive success element in not being aware of our own motivations. Perhaps we need to hide them even from the rest of our minds to keep them from being too obvious to other social primates. ### Self-awareness of the type you mention is a neurological function. As such, for it to evolve, there must be genes directing biological events, and usage of metabolic resources for it to function. But, if self-awareness does not increase fitness, genes for it will not be selected, and if it does sometimes appear, it will be selected against to conserve energy. Generally, unless it's evolutionarily useful or a side-effect of something useful, it doesn't evolve, and if it does, it does not stay long, whatever it is. I don't believe in the self-deception explanation, the idea that our true wicked self must be kept hidden from us to better lie to others. The truth does not *have* to be hidden, it just does not have a reason to be known to us. There is lack of selection for self-awareness about many levels of our motivations, rather than active selection against it. Your argument works too well, as it is just as good a reason for us not to be consciously aware of anything we think or do. Yet lots of kinds of reasoning can apparently benefit from your being conscious of them, because then your conscious mind can help to assist to overcome obstacles and complexities. Why wouldn't the same thing be true for status seeking? Robin Hanson http://hanson.gmu.edu Res. Assoc., Future of Humanity Inst., Oxford Univ. Assoc. Professor, George Mason University Chief Scientist, Consensus Point MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Apr 14 12:39:48 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2014 07:39:48 -0500 Subject: [ExI] AI motivation, was malevolent machines In-Reply-To: <2AAC168A-50DF-4876-AE60-07AE0F2D00D9@gmu.edu> References: <2AAC168A-50DF-4876-AE60-07AE0F2D00D9@gmu.edu> Message-ID: Yes, most motivation is unconscious and introspection is fairly useless (see lack of evidence for effectiveness of it for years of it on the psychoanalytic couch). Many psychologists (see Kahneman) believe that what we do is to give reasons post hoc for our behavior. One metaphor is that we are the elephant's mahout and have some guidance, but the elephant goes where it wants to, mostly - "I can't quit smoking, I can't lose weight..." If you want to know yourself, look at your behavior - we are what we do. bill w On Sun, Apr 13, 2014 at 11:57 AM, Robin D Hanson wrote: > > On Apr 13, 2014, at 12:48 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki < > rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote: > > On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 4:48 PM, Keith Henson wrote: > >> An interesting point that might help understanding is *why* we are >> mostly not conscious of our motives. Even if I am aware that I must >> have this motivation for status seeking, it's an abstract intellectual >> awareness, not a reason to get up in the morning. There must be some >> reproductive success element in not being aware of our own >> motivations. Perhaps we need to hide them even from the rest of our >> minds to keep them from being too obvious to other social primates. >> >> ### Self-awareness of the type you mention is a neurological function. > As such, for it to evolve, there must be genes directing biological events, > and usage of metabolic resources for it to function. But, if self-awareness > does not increase fitness, genes for it will not be selected, and if it > does sometimes appear, it will be selected against to conserve energy. > Generally, unless it's evolutionarily useful or a side-effect of something > useful, it doesn't evolve, and if it does, it does not stay long, whatever > it is. > > I don't believe in the self-deception explanation, the idea that our > true wicked self must be kept hidden from us to better lie to others. The > truth does not *have* to be hidden, it just does not have a reason to be > known to us. There is lack of selection for self-awareness about many > levels of our motivations, rather than active selection against it. > > > Your argument works too well, as it is just as good a reason for us not > to be consciously aware of anything we think or do. Yet lots of kinds of > reasoning can apparently benefit from your being conscious of them, because > then your conscious mind can help to assist to overcome obstacles and > complexities. Why wouldn't the same thing be true for status seeking? > > Robin Hanson http://hanson.gmu.edu > Res. Assoc., Future of Humanity Inst., Oxford Univ. > Assoc. Professor, George Mason University > Chief Scientist, Consensus Point > MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030 > 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323 > > > > > _______________________________________________ > 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 pharos at gmail.com Mon Apr 14 13:00:12 2014 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2014 14:00:12 +0100 Subject: [ExI] AI motivation, was malevolent machines In-Reply-To: References: <2AAC168A-50DF-4876-AE60-07AE0F2D00D9@gmu.edu> Message-ID: On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 1:39 PM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > Yes, most motivation is unconscious and introspection is fairly useless (see > lack of evidence for effectiveness of it for years of it on the > psychoanalytic couch). Many psychologists (see Kahneman) believe that what > we do is to give reasons post hoc for our behavior. One metaphor is that we > are the elephant's mahout and have some guidance, but the elephant goes > where it wants to, mostly - "I can't quit smoking, I can't lose weight..." > If you want to know yourself, look at your behavior - we are what we do. > bill w > > Agreed. 'Follow the money' as the saying goes. Look at what people do, don't listen to the PR that comes out of their mouths. That's mostly what the human brain is excellent at. Providing good-sounding reasons (excuses) for actions that your emotionally-driven desires caused. BillK From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Apr 14 15:35:52 2014 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2014 11:35:52 -0400 Subject: [ExI] AI motivation, was malevolent machines In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sun, Apr 13, 2014 at 12:48 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki < rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote: > Self-awareness of the type you mention is a neurological function. Yes. > As such, for it to evolve, there must be genes directing biological > events, and usage of metabolic resources for it to function. > Yes. > But, if self-awareness does not increase fitness, genes for it will not > be selected, and if it does sometimes appear it will be selected against to > conserve energy. > Self-awareness could still appear if it is a biological spandrel. In fact if Darwin was right then logically there is no other conclusion to make except that consciousness is a byproduct of intelligence. Evolution can no more directly detect consciousness in others than we can so it couldn't directly select for it, and yet I know for a fact that Evolution did manage to produce consciousness at least once (in me) and probably many billions of times (I have a hunch other people are conscious too, at least when they're not sleeping or under anesthesia or dead or otherwise acting unintelligently). This paradox can be resolved if we remember that just like us Evolution CAN detect intelligence in others so it can select for that and postulate that consciousness just comes along for the ride. I think consciousness must be fundamental, that is to say it sits at the end of a long string of "what caused that?" questions. If so then after saying that consciousness is the way data feels like when it is being processed there just isn't anything more to say on the subject of how matter can produce consciousness. John K Clark > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Apr 14 17:51:52 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2014 12:51:52 -0500 Subject: [ExI] AI motivation, was malevolent machines In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: It still seems like there is a bit of dualism here, just a whiff, as if consciousness were epiphenomenal. I exchanged a few emails with Kahneman and he of all people is a dualist who will not admit that anything of what he says happens in the brain. I am completely comfortable with the idea that consciousness is totally physical (in the claustrum, maybe?) - in fact, everything is. Physical monism. I don't think dualists will ever solve their conundrum. bill w On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 10:35 AM, John Clark wrote: > On Sun, Apr 13, 2014 at 12:48 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki < > rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote: > > > Self-awareness of the type you mention is a neurological function. > > > Yes. > > > As such, for it to evolve, there must be genes directing biological >> events, and usage of metabolic resources for it to function. >> > > Yes. > > > But, if self-awareness does not increase fitness, genes for it will not >> be selected, and if it does sometimes appear it will be selected against to >> conserve energy. >> > > Self-awareness could still appear if it is a biological spandrel. In fact > if Darwin was right then logically there is no other conclusion to make > except that consciousness is a byproduct of intelligence. Evolution can no > more directly detect consciousness in others than we can so it couldn't > directly select for it, and yet I know for a fact that Evolution did manage > to produce consciousness at least once (in me) and probably many billions > of times (I have a hunch other people are conscious too, at least when > they're not sleeping or under anesthesia or dead or otherwise acting > unintelligently). This paradox can be resolved if we remember that just > like us Evolution CAN detect intelligence in others so it can select for > that and postulate that consciousness just comes along for the ride. > > I think consciousness must be fundamental, that is to say it sits at the > end of a long string of "what caused that?" questions. If so then after > saying that consciousness is the way data feels like when it is being > processed there just isn't anything more to say on the subject of how > matter can produce consciousness. > > John K Clark > > > > > >> > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Mon Apr 14 21:22:13 2014 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2014 14:22:13 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Original sin Message-ID: On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 5:00 AM, Ben wrote: > William Flynn Wallace wrote: > > > What would be an even better idea is to get rid of the idea that spawned > > the whole thing: original sin. > > Yes indeed. I'd known about this idea for a long time, but it was only > after talking to a catholic about it* and learning that many people > *literally* believe in it that I realised what a vile concept it really > is. It was then that I started thinking of religion in general, and the > catholic church in particular, as an active force for evil in the world. > > Ben Zaiboc > > * That was the first time I can remembering actually getting angry about > how stupid someone was. Maybe because this wasn't just shake-your-head > stupid, but /dangerous/ stupid. What you say may be true, but the doctrine of original sin is brilliant. This is a snip from something I wrote in December, 1986. What Gazzaniga did is to present each side of the brain with a simple conceptual problem. The left side saw a picture of a claw, and the right side saw a picture of a snow scene. A variety of cards were placed in front of the patient, who was asked to pick the card which went with what he saw. The correct answer for the left hemisphere was a picture of a chicken. For the right half-brain, it was a snow shovel. "After the two pictures are flashed to each half-brain, the subjects are required to point to the answers. A typical response is that of P.S., who pointed to the chicken with his right hand, and the shovel with his left. After his response, I asked him, 'Paul, why did you do that? ' Paul looked up and without a moment's hesitation said from his left hemisphere, 'Oh, that's easy. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.'" "Here was the left half-brain having to explain why the left hand was pointing to a shovel when the only picture it saw was a claw. The left brain is not privy to what the right brain saw because of the brain's disconnection. Yet the patient's own body was doing something. Why was it doing that? Why was the left hand pointing to the shovel? The left brain's cognitive system needed a theory and instantly supplied one that made sense given the information it had on this particular task. . ." I think the concept of original sin was constructed by the same human mental mechanism that provided Paul's chicken shit theory. The inference engine was a milestone in our evolution. It works far more often than it fails. But as you can see from the example, our inference engines will wring blood from a stone; you can count on them finding causal relations whether they exist or not. Worse yet, the inference engine probably can't detect it when it doesn't have enough data. Even if it could, it has no way to tell the verbal (conscious) self. As a result, this piece of our mental hardware can get us into some awful tangles; liberal guilt and original sin, for example. A plausible origin for the concept of original sin comes from the engine being given two factors: the unavoidable observation of human suffering and death without just cause; and the logical unacceptability of an unjust or less than all-powerful God to our cultural forebears. The concept that the death of infants is a punishment for "wired in" original sin seems to have been the product of inference engine activity trying to find a cause for suffering and death. As an "explanation" it rates right up there with Paul's theory about the shovel. http://www.alcor.org/cryonics/cryonics8612.txt One of the really nice things about the net is that if you say something well once (and can find it again) you don't have to spend a lot of time constructing the argument again. :-) Keith From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Mon Apr 14 21:37:17 2014 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2014 14:37:17 -0700 Subject: [ExI] AI motivation, was malevolent machines Message-ID: On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 5:00 AM, Kelly Anderson wrote: snip > Unless AIs interbreed with humans, or at least marry each other, this is > likely to lead to a two tier system similar to apartheid. If we are going > to have AI's seek status, then we better not shame them by disallowing them > to marry into human families. That's not an entirely new idea. The protagonist in Heinlein's Friday was an artificial person who married into families twice, once being a disaster, once being long term stable. The individual who "crossed over" into a high speed virtual reality would not be different enough from an AI to prevent marriage. I think the apartheid split will be more between those who upload into a million fold faster world and those who stay behind at human thinking speeds. Keith From foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Apr 14 21:53:24 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2014 16:53:24 -0500 Subject: [ExI] AI motivation, was malevolent machines In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Ya know, I am extremely introverted (but not at all shy) and that results in a brain that just won't quit. Sometimes I just want to sit and look at the world pass by like some people do, and just quit thinking - no luck. So going far faster has no appeal for me. Let the AIs do that. bill w On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 4:37 PM, Keith Henson wrote: > On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 5:00 AM, Kelly Anderson > wrote: > > snip > > > Unless AIs interbreed with humans, or at least marry each other, this is > > likely to lead to a two tier system similar to apartheid. If we are going > > to have AI's seek status, then we better not shame them by disallowing > them > > to marry into human families. > > That's not an entirely new idea. The protagonist in Heinlein's Friday > was an artificial person who married into families twice, once being a > disaster, once being long term stable. > > The individual who "crossed over" into a high speed virtual reality > would not be different enough from an AI to prevent marriage. > > I think the apartheid split will be more between those who upload into > a million fold faster world and those who stay behind at human > thinking speeds. > > Keith > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Mon Apr 14 21:59:07 2014 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2014 14:59:07 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact Message-ID: On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 5:00 AM, Tara Maya wrote: > For what it's worth, my own research on original sources, conducted before I read his book, supports Pinker's argument. > > I'm a historian, and my research was on changes in European demographics and family structure over a thousand year period. The shift in violence was noticeable in those records. The decline in war and crime is paralleled by a rise in gentler child-rearing practices as well, though it's hard to say which was cause and which was effect, or if both occurred in response to some third factor. My bet is that you will find the decline in wars to be an effect of population growth smaller than economic growth. War as a stone age behavioral response to bleak future economic conditions just makes sense in EP terms. "All wars arise from population pressure." (Heinlein 1959 p. 145) Major Reid (Heinlein's character in Starship Troopers)was on the mark if you take "population pressure" to mean a falling ratio of resources to population (roughly income per capita in modern terms). There are sound evolutionary reasons why falling resources per capita (or the prospect of same) usually drives human populations into war. Wars and related social disruptions are here seen to be the outcome of a behavioral switch activated by particular environmental situations and mediated by xenophobic memes.[1] http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2006/4/17/194059/296 I have written about this before. http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2012-October/074303.html Keith From spike66 at att.net Mon Apr 14 22:10:23 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2014 15:10:23 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Original sin In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <007c01cf582e$55ddc190$019944b0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Keith Henson ... >...As a result, this piece of our mental hardware can get us into some awful tangles; liberal guilt and original sin, for example... Keith _______________________________________________ Ja. I don't have liberal guilt. Quite the opposite, I have libertarian righteousness. Some look at that and comment that it is actually self-righteousness. To that I reply, well SOMEONE has to do it and no one else will. So I need to. As for original sin, that's too easy; everybody has that. We need the opposite: original righteousness. That means we need to do good deeds that are so novel, no one has thought of it before. spike From tara at taramayastales.com Mon Apr 14 22:32:12 2014 From: tara at taramayastales.com (Tara Maya) Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2014 15:32:12 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Original sin In-Reply-To: <007c01cf582e$55ddc190$019944b0$@att.net> References: <007c01cf582e$55ddc190$019944b0$@att.net> Message-ID: LOL. There is actually a book of theology called Original Blessing which calls for a Christian rethinking of that theology. I don't think it went so far as saying we should all try to think of original ways to be righteous, but I kinda love that idea. Tara Maya Blog | Twitter | Facebook | Amazon | Goodreads On Apr 14, 2014, at 3:10 PM, "spike" wrote: > Ja. I don't have liberal guilt. Quite the opposite, I have libertarian > righteousness. Some look at that and comment that it is actually > self-righteousness. To that I reply, well SOMEONE has to do it and no one > else will. So I need to. > > As for original sin, that's too easy; everybody has that. We need the > opposite: original righteousness. That means we need to do good deeds that > are so novel, no one has thought of it before. From spike66 at att.net Mon Apr 14 22:36:39 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2014 15:36:39 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <008601cf5832$0152dad0$03f89070$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Keith Henson Subject: Re: [ExI] Death follows European contact On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 5:00 AM, Tara Maya wrote: >>... For what it's worth, my own research on original sources, conducted before I read his book, supports Pinker's argument. >... There are sound evolutionary reasons why falling resources per capita (or the prospect of same) usually drives human populations into war. ...Keith _______________________________________________ Ok think about these two sentences, how you would answer them. Do offer a continuation please: We all know how things are today. Things are going to get even worse because _____________ . We all know how things are today. Things are going to get even better because _____________ . I have answers for both of these, but which sentence is easier to answer and why? spike From foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Apr 14 23:05:48 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2014 18:05:48 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact In-Reply-To: <008601cf5832$0152dad0$03f89070$@att.net> References: <008601cf5832$0152dad0$03f89070$@att.net> Message-ID: If Pinker is right about that one, things will get better because of the spread of democracy. Evan Afghanistan, backwards and corrupt as it is, is trying. (tangent question: why does the Taliban think that people will want them to govern them with all the terrible things they are doing and did when they were in power? "We're going to bomb you into righteousness!") billw On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 5:36 PM, spike wrote: > > >... On Behalf Of Keith Henson > Subject: Re: [ExI] Death follows European contact > > On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 5:00 AM, Tara Maya > wrote: > > >>... For what it's worth, my own research on original sources, conducted > before I read his book, supports Pinker's argument. > > >... There are sound evolutionary reasons why falling resources per capita > (or the prospect of same) usually drives human populations into war. > ...Keith > > _______________________________________________ > > > Ok think about these two sentences, how you would answer them. Do offer a > continuation please: > > > We all know how things are today. Things are going to get even worse > because _____________ . > > We all know how things are today. Things are going to get even better > because _____________ . > > > I have answers for both of these, but which sentence is easier to answer > and > why? > > 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 atymes at gmail.com Mon Apr 14 23:28:07 2014 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2014 16:28:07 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact In-Reply-To: References: <008601cf5832$0152dad0$03f89070$@att.net> Message-ID: On Apr 14, 2014 4:07 PM, "William Flynn Wallace" wrote: > tangent question: why does the Taliban think that people will want them to govern them with all the terrible things they are doing and did when they were in power? "We're going to bomb you into righteousness!" Because the Taliban is not used to the people as a whole being able and willing to stand up to them. They ruled by terror before; they think they can do it again. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lubkin at unreasonable.com Tue Apr 15 00:59:43 2014 From: lubkin at unreasonable.com (David Lubkin) Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2014 20:59:43 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Cryonics on "Bones" Message-ID: <201404150133.s3F1XjjK028949@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Tonight's episode of the crime drama Bones (on Fox at 8 PM), "The Cold in the Case," is about cryonics, and more technically accurate than any other show I've seen that dealt with it. -- David. From painlord2k at libero.it Tue Apr 15 13:27:28 2014 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2014 15:27:28 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato) In-Reply-To: <006d01cf5766$cac23680$6046a380$@att.net> References: <02d801cf573b$d0d041f0$7270c5d0$@att.net> <1A7EB9C3-5068-4771-90C6-8FE373FC785C@taramayastales.com> <534B03A0.8070601@libero.it> <006d01cf5766$cac23680$6046a380$@att.net> Message-ID: <534D33C0.5060701@libero.it> Il 14/04/2014 00:22, spike ha scritto: > >> ... On Behalf Of Mirco Romanato > ... > >> ...Jails continued to select out of the gene pool individuals >> lacking > enough self restrain and empathy or not intelligent enough to cover > their tracks. In fact, jail could be a more efficient selector > than the death penalty or torture. Mirco > _______________________________________________ > > > Well said, thanks Mirco. > > We have available now low cost motion triggered cameras which > immediately send images to the internet, so the perp cannot get > away with removing or disabling the cameras. These are down in the > 100 dollar range. They aren't great cameras, but they wouldn't > need to be high resolution images if we have enough of them. We > get plenty of these, mounted on every house looking out. Perp > pulls off a caper, images made and archived everywhere on the path > of flight, so there is no possibility of escape, no need for high > speed chase. The local constabulary calmly drives to her house, > peacefully bags perp with the goods in her possesh. > > I have had two of these cameras for a couple years now. I am > surprised at how slowly they are replicating in the hood. It is not just criminality being selected against by introducing video recording and Internet distribution, but a lot of other behaviors: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=382096351928670&set=o.104118635809&type=2&theater Mirco From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Tue Apr 15 15:42:33 2014 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2014 08:42:33 -0700 Subject: [ExI] extropy-chat Digest, Vol 127, Issue 18 Message-ID: On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 5:00 AM, "spike" wrote: snip > Ok think about these two sentences, how you would answer them. Do offer a > continuation please: > > We all know how things are today. Things are going to get even worse > because _____________ . > > We all know how things are today. Things are going to get even better > because _____________ . It depends on where you are. Are there prospects of the economy getting better? Has the region run into resource limits and more population than can be sustained at the current technology level? China is one of the places where things are getting better and likely to get even better. Egypt is one where things are likely to get worse. Syria descended into its current mess starting with a drought. World wide, the situation would look a lot brighter if we can solve the energy problem. As you know, I work on this. http://htyp.org/design_to_cost Keith > I have answers for both of these, but which sentence is easier to answer and > why? > > spike From sparge at gmail.com Tue Apr 15 17:32:16 2014 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2014 13:32:16 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Biomarkers and ageing: The clock-watcher Message-ID: http://www.nature.com/news/biomarkers-and-ageing-the-clock-watcher-1.15014 As a teenager in Germany, Steve Horvath, his identical twin Markus and their friend J?rg Zimmermann formed 'the Gilgamesh project', which involved regular meetings where the three discussed mathematics, physics and philosophy. The inspiration for the name, Horvath says, was the ancient Sumerian epic in which a king of Uruk searches for a plant that can restore youth. Fittingly, talk at the meetings often turned to ideas for how science might extend lifespan. At their final meeting in 1989, the trio made a solemn pact: to dedicate their careers to pursuing science that could prolong healthy human life. J?rg set his eye on computer science and artificial intelligence, Markus on biochemistry and genetics, and Steve says that he ?planned to use mathematical modelling and gene networks to understand how to extend life?. J?rg did end up working in artificial intelligence, as a computer scientist at the University of Bonn in Germany, but ?Markus fell off the wagon?, his brother says, ?and became a psychiatrist?. Steve, now a human geneticist and biostatistician at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), says that he finally feels poised to make good on the promise. Through a hard-fought project that involved years of solo work, multiple rejections by editors and reviewers and battling through the loss of a child, he has gathered and analysed data on more than 13,000 human tissue samples1. The result is a cellular biological clock that has impressed researchers with its accuracy, how easy it is to read and the fact that it ticks at the same rate in many parts of the body ? with some intriguing exceptions that might provide clues to the nature of ageing and its maladies. Horvath's clock emerges from epigenetics, the study of chemical and structural modifications made to the genome that do not alter the DNA sequence but that are passed along as cells divide and can influence how genes are expressed. As cells age, the pattern of epigenetic alterations shifts, and some of the changes seem to mark time. To determine a person's age, Horvath explores data for hundreds of far-flung positions on DNA from a sample of cells and notes how often those positions are methylated ? that is, have a methyl group attached. He has discovered an algorithm, based on the methylation status of a set of these genomic positions, that provides a remarkably accurate age estimate ? not of the cells, but of the person the cells inhabit. White blood cells, for example, which may be just a few days or weeks old, will carry the signature of the 50-year-old donor they came from, plus or minus a few years. The same is true for DNA extracted from a cheek swab, the brain, the colon and numerous other organs. This sets the method apart from tests that rely on biomarkers of age that work in only one or two tissues, including the gold-standard dating procedure, aspartic acid racemization, which analyses proteins that are locked away for a lifetime in tooth or bone. ?I wanted to develop a method that would work in many or most tissues. It was a very risky project,? Horvath says. But now the gamble seems to be paying off. By the time his findings were finally published last year1, the clock's median error was 3.6 years, meaning that it could guess the age of half the donors to within 43 months for a broad selection of tissues. That accuracy improves to 2.7 years for saliva alone, 1.9 years for certain types of white blood cell and 1.5 years for the brain cortex. The clock shows stem cells removed from embryos to be extremely young and the brains of centenarians to be about 100. ?Such tight correlations suggest there is something seemingly immutable going on in cells,? says Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco, who won a Nobel prize for her research on telomeres ? caps on the ends of chromosomes that shorten with age. It could be a clue to undiscovered biology, she suggests. And there may be medical implications in cases in which epigenetic estimates do not match a person's birth certificate. In the months since Horvath's paper appeared, other researchers have replicated and extended the results. The study has stirred up excitement about potential applications, but also debate about the underlying biology at work. ?It's something new,? says Peter Visscher, chair of quantitative genetics at the University of Queensland in Australia. ?If he's right that there is something like an inherently epigenetic clock at work in ageing, that is very interesting. It must be important.? Clocking on Horvath kept his vow to the Gilgamesh project by supplementing his PhD in mathematics with a doctorate in biostatistics, which led to a position in the genetics department at UCLA in 2000. After receiving tenure in 2006, he began to focus on ageing by searching for shifts that occur in gene activity over the course of life. A doctoral student took the lead, feeding gene-transcription data through statistical filters in the hope of turning up a robust biomarker for age. But after more than a year, Horvath and the student had found no strong clues. If any such signal exists in gene-transcript data, they concluded, it is hopelessly swamped by the noisy variations from organ to organ and person to person. With little to show for their work, ?I decided to keep quixotic projects like this away from students and postdocs,? Horvath says. ?It didn't seem fair to risk their careers.? ?The big question is whether the clock measures a biochemical process that serves a purpose.? Things began to look up in 2011, however. As part of a team led by his UCLA colleague Eric Vilain, Horvath had analysed methylation patterns in DNA extracted from the saliva of 68 adults. The researchers were looking for an epigenetic pattern that correlated with sexual orientation. None turned up, but with the data in hand Horvath and his colleagues decided to see whether they could use it to predict age. In human DNA, methyl groups most often attach at 'CpG sites' ? places where a cytosine precedes a guanine in the DNA. A typical human genome contains more than 28 million such sites. But the microarray technology used to detect methylation samples finds only a fraction of them: older machines pin down just 27,000 sites and newer ones around 485,000. Horvath got lucky. He found success with a simple statistical model, which looked at how many cells in a drop of saliva have DNA methylated at just two particular CpG sites. The index roughly paralleled participants' ages with a correlation of 0.85, or 85%, and an average accuracy of about five years2. While working on a subsequent study, Horvath identified methylation patterns that hewed even more closely to age in very different cell types, such as brain and blood. Suddenly, a goal that he had thought impossible ? finding a biomarker for the age of almost every part of the body ? seemed attainable. But it would not be easy. He would have to pull together myriad data sets that included both peoples' ages and their DNA methylation information. Methylation profiles are used for many kinds of medical research ? usually in areas other than ageing (see Nature 508, 22; 2014). And because of variations in the way they are collected and processed, they can be tricky to compare. Horvath worried: ?How do you make data sets comparable if they were generated by different labs using different protocols?? Building on work by Andrew Teschendorff at University College London, Horvath devised a way to normalize methylation profiles and put them all on the same footing. Beyond that, his audacious strategy for dealing with some of the uncertainty was to ignore it ? and hope that it didn't clobber the accuracy of his model. It didn't. By early 2012, his algorithm was using 16 CpG sites in the genome, and was returning correlations with chronological age of 96% in nine kinds of tissue. The accuracy was astonishing: median errors were within three years for blood samples and just 18 months for cheek swabs. But the editors of two journals rejected Horvath's paper. The ?tenor of the reviewers was that it was just too good to be true,? he says. They suspected that the clock model fit the training data used to build it but that Horvath had insufficient test data to validate it thoroughly. Humbled but undaunted, Horvath continued collecting data sets and expanding the algorithm. By December 2012, his methylation database spanned 51 types of non-cancerous tissue and cells, plus 20 kinds of cancer. The age estimator had grown to include 353 CpG sites. He had completed his analyses and was preparing to rewrite his paper from scratch when his pregnant wife's waters broke ? more than three months ahead of her due date. For the next 20 days, he barely left the chair beside her hospital bed while she and the medical staff tried to stave off infection and premature delivery. The stress focused him. ?I wrote every hour as if it was the last hour I had for finishing the article,? he says. He made good progress, as did his wife and their baby. Towards the end of the third week, with Christmas approaching, ?I started to feel really hopeful,? he says. But suddenly the baby's heart rate shot up. After an emergency Caesarean section, the baby struggled to breathe. ?The doctors made a heroic effort,? Horvath says, ?but she died in my hands on the day of her delivery. It wasn't until 10 days later that I found enough strength to upload the paper to Genome Biology.? The reviews came back in the spring: more disbelief, and another rejection. Horvath didn't blame the reviewers for being sceptical. ?Everyone who develops biomarkers knows what to expect: a very strong biomarker gives you a correlation of, say, 0.6 or 0.7.? For example, the correlation between age and the length of telomeres is less than 0.5. For Horvath's clock algorithm, that figure is 0.96. He confesses that he had trouble believing it himself until other researchers independently confirmed the tight association. This time, Horvath refused to take no for an answer. ?After reading the reviewers' comments, I spent the next 10 minutes doing three things that one should never do,? he says. ?First, I went to the fridge and drank three bottles of beer as fast as I could. Second, I went back to the computer and drafted a letter to the editor. Third, I sent it off.? About time The appeal worked, and after his article1 was featured in the October 2013 issue of Genome Biology, others began downloading the epigenetic-clock program from Horvath's website to test it on their own data. Marco Boks at the University Medical Centre Utrecht in the Netherlands applied it to blood samples collected from 96 Dutch veterans of the war in Afghanistan aged between 18 and 53. The correlation between predicted and actual ages was 99.7%, with a median error measured in months. At Zymo Research, a biotechnology company in Irvine, California, Wei Guo and Kevin Bryant wondered whether the program would work on a set of urine samples Zymo had collected from 11 men and women aged between 28 and 72. The correlation was 98%, with a standard error of just 2.7 years. ?That's amazingly good,? Bryant says. ?Urine samples weren't even part of the data that Steve used to develop this algorithm.? Horvath's method has many potential applications. Criminal investigators, for example, might find an epigenetic clock handy for establishing the age of a victim or an assailant by analysing any biological residues left behind. Trey Ideker, chief of the medical-genetics division at the University of California, San Diego, says that his group is working with a forensics lab to test an epigenetic clock that he and his collaborators designed to work specifically on blood, using mathematical methods very similar to Horvath's3. Although Ideker's clock is tissue-specific and not quite as accurate, it could be cheaper to use because it is based on fewer CpG sites ? 71 rather than 353. Both Ideker and Horvath expect that the most interesting use of the clock will be to detect 'age acceleration': discrepancies between a person's epigenetic and chronological ages, either overall or in one particular part of their body. Such discrepancies could be signs that something is awry. In work due to be presented at the November meeting of the Gerontological Society of America, Brian Chen of the US National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) in Framingham, Massachusetts, teamed up with Horvath and others to analyse methylation data collected on more than 2,100 men and women aged 40 to 92 as part of the Framingham Heart Study. The researchers concluded that for every five-year increase in age acceleration, the risk of dying from any cause during the study jumped by 15%. Horvath says that unpublished work from two other large studies also finds epigenetic age acceleration to be a substantial risk factor for mortality, even after controlling for chronological age and other well-known risk factors. Researchers are also comparing the ages of different tissues from the same individual, in the hope of identifying more accurate, less invasive ways to diagnose disease or gauge the risk of future illness. Last year, Ideker and his collaborators reported that the epigenetic ages of breast, kidney, lung and skin cancers were 40% older, on average, than the patients from which they were removed3. The picture from Horvath's method is less clear. Some cancers, such as brain tumours, seemed to be decades older, in terms of their methylation, than they should be. But the effect was reversed for some other cancers, such as certain types of endometrial and breast tumours. Distortions in epigenetic age seem to parallel other diseases more closely. Horvath says that recent work has found that people with HIV who have detectable viral loads appear older, epigenetically, than healthy people or those with HIV who have suppressed the virus. Another study, not yet published, observes that some tissues show significant age acceleration in morbidly obese people, he reports. In the coming months, he will be mining the vast Women's Health Initiative database ? which includes thousands of methylation profiles gathered as part of this 20-year, 160,000-person study spearheaded by the NHLBI ? for more links. An age-old question Medical researchers might be able to use the epigenetic clock to better diagnose and classify illnesses even without really understanding how the biology works. But Horvath hopes that the science won't stop there. ?The big question is whether the clock measures a biochemical process that serves a purpose,? he says. His best guess is that the clock corresponds to the function of an epigenomic housekeeping system, which helps to stabilize the genome by maintaining methylation patterns. The more active this mechanism, he proposes, the faster the epigenetic clock ticks. Because methylation is usually reversible, Wei says, it might be possible to grab the minute hand of the epigenetic clock and retard its incessant progress ? an idea that makes Horvath's solemn adolescent vow sound almost attainable. ?The greatest hope is that this clock measures the output of a process that really does relate to ageing ? even causes ageing,? Horvath says. But some are sceptical. Teschendorff's research has shown that genome-wide patterns of methylation drift gradually as the years slip past4. He suspects that some passive process is behind the shift and that it leads to ageing and disease mainly by interfering with the ability of stem cells to differentiate. Ideker agrees that the epigenetic transition from young to old could be mostly random, in which case there may be nothing especially informative about the 353 cogs of Horvath's clock. Horvath acknowledges that it will take more work to find out whether epigenetic age predicts the onset of disease and decrepitude better than a calendar does. ?But the epigenetic clock gives us a new start and a new hope of something that will affect ageing,? he says. In that way, Gilgamesh's ancient quest for a way to delay the inevitable lives on. From max at maxmore.com Tue Apr 15 18:27:07 2014 From: max at maxmore.com (Max More) Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2014 11:27:07 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Cryonics on "Bones" In-Reply-To: <201404150133.s3F1XjjK028949@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <201404150133.s3F1XjjK028949@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: The producers asked for input from Alcor, and we gave it. Too bad I missed the episode. Perhaps it will be available online? --Max On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 5:59 PM, David Lubkin wrote: > Tonight's episode of the crime drama Bones (on Fox at 8 PM), "The Cold in > the Case," is about cryonics, and more technically accurate than any other > show I've seen that dealt with it. > > > -- David. > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -- Max More, PhD Strategic Philosopher Co-editor, *The Transhumanist Reader* http://www.amazon.com/Transhumanist-Reader-Contemporary-Technology-Philosophy/dp/1118334310/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372225570&sr=1-1&keywords=the+transhumanist+reader President & CEO, Alcor Life Extension Foundation -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Tue Apr 15 18:26:22 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2014 11:26:22 -0700 Subject: [ExI] we know how things are today... Message-ID: <02ed01cf58d8$35f7b480$a1e71d80$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Keith Henson Subject: Re: [ExI] extropy-chat Digest, Vol 127, Issue 18 On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 5:00 AM, "spike" wrote: snip >>... Ok think about these two sentences, how you would answer them. Do > offer a continuation please: > > We all know how things are today. Things are going to get even worse > because _____________ . > > We all know how things are today. Things are going to get even better > because _____________ . >...It depends on where you are. Are there prospects of the economy getting better? Has the region run into resource limits and more population than can be sustained at the current technology level?...World wide, the situation would look a lot brighter if we can solve the energy problem. As you know, I work on this. http://htyp.org/design_to_cost Keith > I have answers for both of these, but which sentence is easier to answer and why? > > spike _______________________________________________ OK thanks Keith. The reason I posted these two questions is that I have a hard time answering the first one and in a way a hard time answering the second one in a form that is short enough to make it thru the 500k limit for the ExI-chat moderator box. I will try. > We all know how things are today. Things are going to get even worse > because ... ...increasing awareness of how the energy hogs of the world live (that would be us) cause the overpopulated regions of the world to want our lifestyle. Imagine that. We energy hogs will be forced to get a bit smarter in how we produce and how we consume energy. In those areas where the people are learning of our lifestyle, emulation costs a lot of money, and causes unrest in those regions. There is a bright side to this, but the question I am struggling to answer here is how things are going to get worse. > We all know how things are today. Things are going to get even better > because ... ...oh boy, it is hard to figure out even where to begin on that vast topic. We have today at least a theoretical solution to pretty much all the world's most fundamental problems. But instead of going there, for now just let us look close to home, shall we? It is a glorious time indeed to be into astronomy, especially if one is old enough to know what was going on in astronomy in Feb 1987, and those who were paying attention to astronomy news in September 2011. The reason this Jan 2014 typa 1a is so special to us is the contrast between the two type 1a supernovae between the 2011 event and this one: we had computer sims in place to explain that which was driving us nuts after the 2011 event. That one confirmed what had been observed: type 1a SNs were detonating about 1% earlier than theory would predict. Now we get glorious confirmation of the insights that sim gave us: that turbulence in the core sends a hot plume of ash upward thru the fusible elements above, catalyzing the runaway fusion process. COOL! OK sure spike, but why is it such a great time if one doesn't care much about that esoteric interest? Well, if a sim can explain how a supernovae works, could not a sim explain other things that are completely mysterious at this time? I think so; I consider the whole notion a completely reasonable extrapolation. To get a sim to demonstrate turbulence given only fundamental characteristics of plasma required astonishing heaps of computing power, but it worked: it explained two baffling phenomena: both the early detonation problem and the unsymmetrical remnants problem. You know the guys are going to get a Nobel Prize: whacked both vexing mysteries with just a buttload of repetitive calcs. Kewalllll! So if that, why not theorize that we can get ever closer to simulating a brain? Sure we know brains are vastly more complicated than stars, but turbulence wasn't at all obvious to me and the theory was not widely accepted until it was demonstrated. Is a star's core less complex than a fly's brain? And if we ever manage a fly's brain, could not we extrapolate to theorizing a sim of a mouse brain? Perhaps we would discover things about the workings of a brain analogous to how we discovered why type 1a supernovae do what they do, just from first principles. Mice pretty stupid, but if we could sim a mouse brain, then why not add pile of processors in parallel and do a cat and a chimp and why not a generic human? And if we simulated a human brain, could not we figure out why certain patterns emerge in there, and why some forms of what we call mental illness occur, and perhaps how to fix it? And if we simulate a generic human brain, could not we select the ones which (who?) like to program and let them do what they like to do? And with the help of a bunch of smart generic human brain sims, could not we simulate a particular human brain from reading the configuration of a deep-frozen brain? Perhaps we could etch away a frozen brain a few molecules at a time with a laser fly-cut, read the surface after each etching with a scanning electron microscope and create a map of the neurons, dendrites, synapses and things in there, then put all that data into the sim, and maybe the whole exercise would result in a reasonable sim of the person who had perished and was frozen. We all know how things are today. Things are going to get even better. Is this a glorious time to be alive, or what? spike From sparge at gmail.com Wed Apr 16 20:38:40 2014 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2014 16:38:40 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Biomarkers and ageing: The clock-watcher In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: No comments on this? Seems pretty significant. On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 1:32 PM, Dave Sill wrote: > He has discovered an algorithm, based on the methylation status of a > set of these genomic positions, that provides a remarkably accurate > age estimate ? not of the cells, but of the person the cells inhabit. > White blood cells, for example, which may be just a few days or weeks > old, will carry the signature of the 50-year-old donor they came from, > plus or minus a few years. The same is true for DNA extracted from a > cheek swab, the brain, the colon and numerous other organs. This sets > the method apart from tests that rely on biomarkers of age that work > in only one or two tissues, including the gold-standard dating > procedure, aspartic acid racemization, which analyses proteins that > are locked away for a lifetime in tooth or bone. From painlord2k at libero.it Wed Apr 16 22:56:13 2014 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2014 00:56:13 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Cryonics on "Bones" In-Reply-To: References: <201404150133.s3F1XjjK028949@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <534F0A8D.5040306@libero.it> Il 15/04/2014 20:27, Max More ha scritto: > The producers asked for input from Alcor, and we gave it. Too bad > I missed the episode. Perhaps it will be available online? I would say "near everything is available online" tinyurl . com / o7pu27t Mirco From spike66 at att.net Sat Apr 19 14:29:49 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2014 07:29:49 -0700 Subject: [ExI] singularity has gone mainstream Message-ID: <00dc01cf5bdb$d2c205d0$78461170$@att.net> Well, they don't need us anymore. This stuff we were talking about in the 1990s is now on CNN: http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/showbiz/2014/04/17/inside-man-futuri sm-orig-cfb.cnn.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Apr 19 15:06:58 2014 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2014 11:06:58 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato) In-Reply-To: References: <02d801cf573b$d0d041f0$7270c5d0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Apr 13, 2014 at 2:09 PM, BillK wrote: > It seems obvious that since WW1 and WW2, nuclear weapons have stopped > large nations fighting all-out wars against each other > Yes. > thus leading to a reduction in wartime deaths. Yes. > What has replaced it is large nations picking fights with small nations > with small fighting forces, thus leading to many small wars but with fewer > deaths. Yes. > Is permanent war against terrorism 'better'? > Do you really need to ask that question? The answer is not just yes but HELL YES! The bloodiest day in the terrorism war (911) killed 2977 people. The non nuclear firebombing of Tokyo on March 9 1945 during a non-terrorist war killed at least 125,000 people, probably the bloodiest 6 hours in human history. I know it's very unfashionable nowadays but I am a member of that small minority of people who believes that when the stakes are particularly high, like in matters of life and death, logic becomes more important not less; and there is nothing more logical than arithmetic. Consequently all other things being equal I believe that killing 2 people is twice as bad as killing 1 and killing 4 is twice as bad as killing 2. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Apr 19 15:12:33 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2014 10:12:33 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato) In-Reply-To: References: <02d801cf573b$d0d041f0$7270c5d0$@att.net> Message-ID: Look at the big picture. Pinker cites dozens of books and studies etc. and maybe some of the them are not reliable but he does cite several references for each conclusion. It would be quite odd if all of those facts about reduced violence were right, but also extremely odd if all were wrong. Give me page numbers where the data err in your opinion or someone else's. Just which data is in question? You can't paint the whole book with one color. bill w On Sat, Apr 19, 2014 at 10:06 AM, John Clark wrote: > On Sun, Apr 13, 2014 at 2:09 PM, BillK wrote: > > > It seems obvious that since WW1 and WW2, nuclear weapons have stopped >> large nations fighting all-out wars against each other >> > > Yes. > > > thus leading to a reduction in wartime deaths. > > > Yes. > > > What has replaced it is large nations picking fights with small nations >> with small fighting forces, thus leading to many small wars but with fewer >> deaths. > > > Yes. > > > Is permanent war against terrorism 'better'? >> > > Do you really need to ask that question? The answer is not just yes but > HELL YES! The bloodiest day in the terrorism war (911) killed 2977 people. > The non nuclear firebombing of Tokyo on March 9 1945 during a non-terrorist > war killed at least 125,000 people, probably the bloodiest 6 hours in human > history. > > I know it's very unfashionable nowadays but I am a member of that small > minority of people who believes that when the stakes are particularly high, > like in matters of life and death, logic becomes more important not less; > and there is nothing more logical than arithmetic. Consequently all other > things being equal I believe that killing 2 people is twice as bad as > killing 1 and killing 4 is twice as bad as killing 2. > > 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 spike66 at att.net Sat Apr 19 16:01:27 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2014 09:01:27 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato) In-Reply-To: References: <02d801cf573b$d0d041f0$7270c5d0$@att.net> Message-ID: <006001cf5be8$9f94e7b0$debeb710$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of John Clark >?all other things being equal I believe that killing 2 people is twice as bad as killing 1 and killing 4 is twice as bad as killing 2. John K Clark I don?t know how else to count it besides numbers perished. I have stayed out of this discussion, but the premise implied in the subject line vaguely implies that dead does not precede European contact. We are accustomed to modern western cities where population is mostly stable for long periods. We have occasional mass exodus from places like Detroit, but the people there didn?t actually die; most of them just moved elsewhere. I have a notion that mass death and mass exodus often precedes the coming of the Europeans, but isn?t well documented. There are plenty of American legends about native tribes perishing in unison after the Europeans brought in diseases for which they had no natural immunity. I have no doubt this occurred, but may be an incomplete picture. I can imagine some of the tribes just packed up and left when the sick time came. They might have blamed it on the mother earth for instance. We can?t know for sure because of poor record keeping on the part of the natives. In all that time the native Americans were on the continent, they had nothing analogous to the European and American decadal census, or if so, none of the records have survived. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Apr 19 16:58:48 2014 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2014 12:58:48 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato) In-Reply-To: References: <02d801cf573b$d0d041f0$7270c5d0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Apr 19, 2014 at 11:12 AM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > Look at the big picture. Pinker cites dozens of books and studies etc. > and maybe some of the them are not reliable but he does cite several > references for each conclusion. It would be quite odd if all of those > facts about reduced violence were right, but also extremely odd if all were > wrong. Give me page numbers where the data err in your opinion or someone > else's. Just which data is in question? You can't paint the whole book > with one color. > You misunderstand, my intent was to praise Pinker not to bury him. The fact that the second half of the 20th century was far less bloody than the first half is entirely consistent with Pinker's views. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Apr 19 17:14:40 2014 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2014 13:14:40 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato) In-Reply-To: <006001cf5be8$9f94e7b0$debeb710$@att.net> References: <02d801cf573b$d0d041f0$7270c5d0$@att.net> <006001cf5be8$9f94e7b0$debeb710$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Apr 19, 2014 at 12:01 PM, spike wrote: > I have stayed out of this discussion, but the premise implied in the > subject line vaguely implies that dead does not precede European contact. > Another myth is that the native Americans lived in ecological harmony with the land, but just a few thousand years ago the megafauna in the Americas was more spectacular than even what could be found in Africa, but it all vanished almost immediately when humans moved in for the first time. The native Australians and New Zealanders did the same thing with their megafauna. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Sat Apr 19 18:25:42 2014 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2014 11:25:42 -0700 Subject: [ExI] singularity has gone mainstream In-Reply-To: <00dc01cf5bdb$d2c205d0$78461170$@att.net> References: <00dc01cf5bdb$d2c205d0$78461170$@att.net> Message-ID: So we should be working on what's next after that, right? Or maybe, how to actually pull it off? On Sat, Apr 19, 2014 at 7:29 AM, spike wrote: > > > Well, they don?t need us anymore. This stuff we were talking about in the > 1990s is now on CNN: > > > > > http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/showbiz/2014/04/17/inside-man-futurism-orig-cfb.cnn.html > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > 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 Apr 19 19:43:39 2014 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2014 21:43:39 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato) In-Reply-To: <534B03A0.8070601@libero.it> Message-ID: <2045493168-18504@secure.ericade.net> Mirco Romanato , 13/4/2014 11:43 PM: Il 13/04/2014 21:47, Tara Maya ha scritto: > Even Foucault, postmodernist poster boy, noted quite frankly in his > book Discipline and Punish that the rise of the modern prison came > because ordinary people could no longer stand to watch public > torture. Another relevant though of his (?) is that all societies punish, but they motivate *why* very differently and can implement the punishments in very different ways. Punishment works to some extent for somewhat rational social beings that can be operant conditioned (hence the universality), but the means and ends can be amazingly odd.? His argument (it's quite possible I've > misunderstood, since he strove at all costs to avoid clarity of > argument) was that the modern system wanted to change your thinking > not just your behavior, so it was worse, even if you were > tortured. My opinion about jail is simply they substituted a fast and direct death sentence with a slow and indirect death sentence. The point of killing killers or highwaymen or other types of violent behavior like rape (real rape) was to make them disgenic. No need for the authorities to understand the real effect, just the effect must be there. No it wasn't. The motivations for killing severe criminals were clearly based on theories of retribution (certain crimes *deserve* certain punishments), deterrence (scare people into behaving), and occasionally incapacitation (make recurrence less likely). Insofar there was a real dysgenic pressure against murderers it was relatively weak, given the low resolution frequency of violent crimes in the past (if you are more likely of dying from being a murder victim than from being killed as a murderer, the selection pressure will largely make people less likely to be murder victims).? No doubt some government actions and cultural norms do promote selection pressures. But that is rarely a proper explanation for why the policies came about: evolutionary psychology explanations tend to work when the pressures are unchanging for enough generations, but legal systems typically do not last that many human generations and then shift around. Yes, societies that deal with internal violence better will have somewhat higher fitness, but given that the major determinants of region-averaged fitness were agriculture and coordination ability, it seems likely that any broad selection pressure would be acting through them. Assuming there is even any relevant effects here: group selection is pretty weak. Substituting a jail term to dead or torture (and making jail decent? places), the authorities reduced the incentives to resist arrest and? the reasons to help some of these individuals. Nope. if you look at the use of prison historically you will see that their rise correlates very strongly with richer economies that can afford them. Running a prison requires significant amount of state resources, and poorer countries cannot afford as much prisons as richer ones (yes, there are other factors too, like general oppressiveness or crazy places like the US:?http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2006/02/the_best_prisons_money_can_buy.html ) Prisons no doubt lower fitness a bit. But if there is an allele correlated with criminality (say bad impulse control), the fact that the fraction of people who have it *and* are in jail have lower fitness may not outweigh fitness benefits in the fraction who has it and are not in jail.? Imagine an allele which gives 200% higher risk of going to jail and 50% more children if you don't go to jail. Let the incarceration rate be a median 100 per 100,000. So the total fitness will be 0*(200/100,000)+1.5*(1-200/100,000)=1.49. So the gene will have an essentially unchanged fitness improvement. If we use a US 716 per 100,000 incarceration rate the fitness will be 1.47. In fact, in order to drive it down to 1 you need an incarceration rate of 17,000 per 100,000, which even North Korea would find a bit excessive. A weaker fitness advantage of 10% still needs a crazy level of 4,500. And this is assuming zero fitness in jail: in reality people in prison do have families outside.? Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From max at maxmore.com Sat Apr 19 21:17:28 2014 From: max at maxmore.com (Max More) Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2014 14:17:28 -0700 Subject: [ExI] singularity has gone mainstream In-Reply-To: <00dc01cf5bdb$d2c205d0$78461170$@att.net> References: <00dc01cf5bdb$d2c205d0$78461170$@att.net> Message-ID: Sure they need us. Watch the actual episode rather than the trailer and you will see a bunch of us being interviewed. That's how Spurlock got his material. --Max On Sat, Apr 19, 2014 at 7:29 AM, spike wrote: > > > Well, they don?t need us anymore. This stuff we were talking about in the > 1990s is now on CNN: > > > > > http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/showbiz/2014/04/17/inside-man-futurism-orig-cfb.cnn.html > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -- Max More, PhD Strategic Philosopher Co-editor, *The Transhumanist Reader* http://www.amazon.com/Transhumanist-Reader-Contemporary-Technology-Philosophy/dp/1118334310/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372225570&sr=1-1&keywords=the+transhumanist+reader President & CEO, Alcor Life Extension Foundation -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ilia.stambler at gmail.com Sun Apr 20 05:58:38 2014 From: ilia.stambler at gmail.com (Ilia Stambler) Date: Sun, 20 Apr 2014 06:58:38 +0100 Subject: [ExI] singularity has gone mainstream In-Reply-To: References: <00dc01cf5bdb$d2c205d0$78461170$@att.net> Message-ID: >"Or maybe, how to actually pull it off?" Yes. Assistance in the actual emergence and universal distribution of life-extending technologies, in addition to just raising universal awareness about this possibility, can be the next big frontier, that should keep us all (and many more) busy for a very long time. On Sat, Apr 19, 2014 at 10:17 PM, Max More wrote: > Sure they need us. Watch the actual episode rather than the trailer and > you will see a bunch of us being interviewed. That's how Spurlock got his > material. > > --Max > > > On Sat, Apr 19, 2014 at 7:29 AM, spike wrote: > >> >> >> Well, they don?t need us anymore. This stuff we were talking about in >> the 1990s is now on CNN: >> >> >> >> >> http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/showbiz/2014/04/17/inside-man-futurism-orig-cfb.cnn.html >> >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> >> > > > -- > Max More, PhD > Strategic Philosopher > Co-editor, *The Transhumanist Reader* > > http://www.amazon.com/Transhumanist-Reader-Contemporary-Technology-Philosophy/dp/1118334310/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372225570&sr=1-1&keywords=the+transhumanist+reader > President & CEO, Alcor Life Extension Foundation > > _______________________________________________ > 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 andymck35 at gmail.com Sun Apr 20 10:37:07 2014 From: andymck35 at gmail.com (Andrew Mckee) Date: Sun, 20 Apr 2014 22:37:07 +1200 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato) In-Reply-To: References: <02d801cf573b$d0d041f0$7270c5d0$@att.net> <006001cf5be8$9f94e7b0$debeb710$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, 20 Apr 2014 05:14:40 +1200, John Clark wrote: > Another myth is that the native Americans lived in ecological harmony > with > the land, but just a few thousand years ago the megafauna in the Americas > was more spectacular than even what could be found in Africa, but it all > vanished almost immediately when humans moved in for the first time. The > native Australians and New Zealanders did the same thing with their > megafauna. Bzzzttt!, there was never any mega-fauna on the New Zealand islands to begin with, it's geologically too young to have developed any. The fauna and creatures that did arrive are largely still here, early saw happy European colonists not withstanding. But you're being dis-ingenious to begin with surely? Since I'd always thought that the age of warm, wet and sky high co2 levels that enabled megafauna was well and truly over long before any humans walked the earth, no? From johnkclark at gmail.com Sun Apr 20 15:06:41 2014 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sun, 20 Apr 2014 11:06:41 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato) In-Reply-To: References: <02d801cf573b$d0d041f0$7270c5d0$@att.net> <006001cf5be8$9f94e7b0$debeb710$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Apr 20, 2014 at 6:37 AM, Andrew Mckee wrote: >> Another myth is that the native Americans lived in ecological harmony >> with the land, but just a few thousand years ago the megafauna in the >> Americas was more spectacular than even what could be found in Africa, but >> it all vanished almost immediately when humans moved in for the first time. >> The native Australians and New Zealanders did the same thing with their >> megafauna. >> > > >Bzzzttt!, there was never any mega-fauna on the New Zealand islands to > begin with, > I was thinking of the 9 species of New Zealand Moa, a bird that dwarfed the largest living bird the ostrich; it stood 12 feet tall and weighed well over 500 pounds. I was also thinking of the Haast Eagle, the largest eagle that ever lived; it had a 10 foot wingspread and weighed between 33 and 36 pounds. It went extinct in 1400, about a century after the Maori people first settled in New Zealand when their principle food supply, young Moas, were hunted to extinction. > it's geologically too young to have developed any. It doesn't take long for new species to develop, the Galapagos Islands are made of some of the youngest land on this planet and yet they contain animals found nowhere else. > But you're being dis-ingenious to begin with surely? > Why bother to ask me that? If you think I'm a liar you won't believe me when I say I'm not a liar. > Since I'd always thought that the age of warm, wet and sky high co2 > levels that enabled megafauna was well and truly over long before any > humans walked the earth, no? No. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sun Apr 20 15:36:07 2014 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sun, 20 Apr 2014 11:36:07 -0400 Subject: [ExI] AI motivation, was malevolent machines In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 1:51 PM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > It still seems like there is a bit of dualism here, just a whiff, > That's probably because I am indeed a dualist, that is to say I think that nouns and adjectives are NOT the same. Your body is a thing made of atoms and thus is a noun, but you are not a thing or even a noun; you are an adjective, you are the way that atoms behave when they are organized in a Williamflynnwallaceian way. There are lots of green things but there are far fewer Williamflynnwallaceian things, in fact at the present time there is only one, but there is no law of physics that demands that always be the case. > I am completely comfortable with the idea that consciousness is totally > physical > I am too, and I am comfortable with the idea that adjectives are the way that physical things like nouns behave. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From andymck35 at gmail.com Mon Apr 21 07:38:19 2014 From: andymck35 at gmail.com (Andrew Mckee) Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2014 19:38:19 +1200 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato) In-Reply-To: References: <02d801cf573b$d0d041f0$7270c5d0$@att.net> <006001cf5be8$9f94e7b0$debeb710$@att.net> Message-ID: On Mon, 21 Apr 2014 03:06:41 +1200, John Clark wrote: > I was thinking of the 9 species of New Zealand Moa, a bird that dwarfed > the > largest living bird the ostrich; it stood 12 feet tall and weighed well > over 500 pounds. I was also thinking of the Haast Eagle, the largest > eagle > that ever lived; it had a 10 foot wingspread and weighed between 33 and > 36 > pounds. It went extinct in 1400, about a century after the Maori people > first settled in New Zealand when their principle food supply, young > Moas, > were hunted to extinction. Oh yeah, the poor Moa, forgot about them, sorry, you say megafauna and I think really big dinosaurs, not flightless birds somewhat bigger than an Emu or Ostrich, my bad. From pharos at gmail.com Mon Apr 21 08:41:09 2014 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2014 09:41:09 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato) In-Reply-To: <2045493168-18504@secure.ericade.net> References: <534B03A0.8070601@libero.it> <2045493168-18504@secure.ericade.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Apr 19, 2014 at 8:43 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Another relevant thought of his (?) is that all societies punish, but they > motivate *why* very differently and can implement the punishments in very > different ways. Punishment works to some extent for somewhat rational social > beings that can be operant conditioned (hence the universality), but the > means and ends can be amazingly odd. > The BBC has an article up showing that in recent years removing lead from petrol leads 20 years later to a big reduction in violent crime. Prison and social policies make no difference - it's a medical problem. Quotes: Then, about 20 years ago, the trend reversed - and all the broad measures of key crimes have been falling ever since. Offending has fallen in nations whose governments have implemented completely different policies to their neighbours. If your nation locks up more criminals than the average, crime has fallen. If it locks up fewer... crime has fallen. Nobody seems to know for sure why. But there are some people that believe the removal of lead from petrol was a key factor. Wolpaw-Reyes gathered lead data from each state, including figures for gasoline sales. She plotted the crime rates in each area and then used common statistical techniques to exclude other factors that could cause crime. Her results backed the lead-crime hypothesis. "There is a substantial causal relationship," she says. "I can see it in the state-to-state variations. States that experienced particularly early or particularly sharp declines in lead experienced particularly early or particularly sharp declines in violent crime 20 years later." She says her research also established different levels of crime in states with high and low lead rates. Lead theorists say that data they've collated and calculated from each nation shows the same 20-year trend - the sooner lead is removed from the environment, the sooner crime will begin to fall. Dr Bernard Gesch says the data now suggests that lead could account for as much as 90% of the changing crime rate during the 20th Century across all of the world. ---------------- BillK From foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Apr 21 14:45:38 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2014 09:45:38 -0500 Subject: [ExI] AI motivation, was malevolent machines In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I rather think that I am a verb, doing something, rather than an adjective, just descriptive of something else. billw On Sun, Apr 20, 2014 at 10:36 AM, John Clark wrote: > On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 1:51 PM, William Flynn Wallace < > foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote: > > > It still seems like there is a bit of dualism here, just a whiff, >> > > That's probably because I am indeed a dualist, that is to say I think that > nouns and adjectives are NOT the same. Your body is a thing made of atoms > and thus is a noun, but you are not a thing or even a noun; you are an > adjective, you are the way that atoms behave when they are organized in a > Williamflynnwallaceian way. There are lots of green things but there are > far fewer Williamflynnwallaceian things, in fact at the present time there > is only one, but there is no law of physics that demands that always be the > case. > > > I am completely comfortable with the idea that consciousness is totally >> physical >> > > I am too, and I am comfortable with the idea that adjectives are the way > that physical things like nouns behave. > > 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 johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Apr 21 16:07:47 2014 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2014 12:07:47 -0400 Subject: [ExI] AI motivation, was malevolent machines In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 10:45 AM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > I rather think that I am a verb, doing something, rather than an > adjective, just descriptive of something else. > An adverb perhaps because a verb like "ran" is just a scalar, in the real world that would tell you little; you need a vector so you say "I ran swiftly northeasterly". I associate adjectives and adverbs with information but verbs with just energy, so I certainly hope you're wrong because if so it would be impossible to be uploaded. But I don't think you're right because if a correct description of how atoms are arranged is provided there is no need to say what it's doing, the laws of physics will take care of that. And even if I know what you're doing now I still won't know what you're going to do a minute from now or were doing a minute ago; but if I know how all your atoms are arranged right now I would have a pretty good idea of what you were doing in the past and could make a duplicate of you that will do the same thing you are going to do a minute from now. So the key thing that makes you you is not matter (nouns) or energy (verbs) its information (adjectives and adverbs). John K Clark John K Clark > > > On Sun, Apr 20, 2014 at 10:36 AM, John Clark wrote: > >> On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 1:51 PM, William Flynn Wallace < >> foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote: >> >> > It still seems like there is a bit of dualism here, just a whiff, >>> >> >> That's probably because I am indeed a dualist, that is to say I think >> that nouns and adjectives are NOT the same. Your body is a thing made of >> atoms and thus is a noun, but you are not a thing or even a noun; you are >> an adjective, you are the way that atoms behave when they are organized in >> a Williamflynnwallaceian way. There are lots of green things but there are >> far fewer Williamflynnwallaceian things, in fact at the present time there >> is only one, but there is no law of physics that demands that always be the >> case. >> >> > I am completely comfortable with the idea that consciousness is totally >>> physical >>> >> >> I am too, and I am comfortable with the idea that adjectives are the way >> that physical things like nouns behave. >> >> 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 foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Apr 21 16:49:54 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2014 11:49:54 -0500 Subject: [ExI] AI motivation, was malevolent machines In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Thanks, I think. You do know that I last had physics in 1959 and think a vector is something related to disease spread? On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 11:07 AM, John Clark wrote: > > On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 10:45 AM, William Flynn Wallace < > foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote: > > > I rather think that I am a verb, doing something, rather than an >> adjective, just descriptive of something else. >> > > An adverb perhaps because a verb like "ran" is just a scalar, in the real > world that would tell you little; you need a vector so you say "I ran > swiftly northeasterly". I associate adjectives and adverbs with information > but verbs with just energy, so I certainly hope you're wrong because if so > it would be impossible to be uploaded. But I don't think you're right > because if a correct description of how atoms are arranged is provided > there is no need to say what it's doing, the laws of physics will take care > of that. And even if I know what you're doing now I still won't know what > you're going to do a minute from now or were doing a minute ago; but if I > know how all your atoms are arranged right now I would have a pretty good > idea of what you were doing in the past and could make a duplicate of you > that will do the same thing you are going to do a minute from now. > > So the key thing that makes you you is not matter (nouns) or energy > (verbs) its information (adjectives and adverbs). > > John K Clark > > > > John K Clark > > > > > > > > > >> >> >> On Sun, Apr 20, 2014 at 10:36 AM, John Clark wrote: >> >>> On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 1:51 PM, William Flynn Wallace < >>> foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote: >>> >>> > It still seems like there is a bit of dualism here, just a whiff, >>>> >>> >>> That's probably because I am indeed a dualist, that is to say I think >>> that nouns and adjectives are NOT the same. Your body is a thing made of >>> atoms and thus is a noun, but you are not a thing or even a noun; you are >>> an adjective, you are the way that atoms behave when they are organized in >>> a Williamflynnwallaceian way. There are lots of green things but there are >>> far fewer Williamflynnwallaceian things, in fact at the present time there >>> is only one, but there is no law of physics that demands that always be the >>> case. >>> >>> > I am completely comfortable with the idea that consciousness is >>>> totally physical >>>> >>> >>> I am too, and I am comfortable with the idea that adjectives are the way >>> that physical things like nouns behave. >>> >>> 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 >> >> > > _______________________________________________ > 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 Apr 21 17:31:33 2014 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2014 13:31:33 -0400 Subject: [ExI] AI motivation, was malevolent machines In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 12:49 PM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: Thanks, I think. You do know that I last had physics in 1959 and think a > vector is something related to disease spread? > Yes biologists use that word but they stole it from mathematicians and I meant it in the mathematical sense. A scalar just has a magnitude, so a real number is a scalar and so is speed (10 mph); but a vector has a magnitude and a direction, so velocity is a vector (10 mph in a northeast direction). Think of an arrow with it's length being it's magnitude and the way it's pointing the direction. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Apr 22 07:27:15 2014 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2014 01:27:15 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato) In-Reply-To: <02d801cf573b$d0d041f0$7270c5d0$@att.net> References: <02d801cf573b$d0d041f0$7270c5d0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Apr 13, 2014 at 11:14 AM, spike wrote: > Right or wrong, Pinker?s book brings up some really important questions, > and sheds light on Keith Henson?s favorite topic, evolutionary psychology. > Do we have sufficient critical mass to create a Better Angels discussion > group? Or shall we just post it all here? How many Better Angel fans have > we? Keith? Rafal? Others? > I've read at least half of the recent book. I am impressed with Pinker's thoroughness. I particularly like discussing it with my Jehovah's Witness friends who think the world is going to hell rather rapidly in preparation for the second coming of some well digger. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Apr 22 07:34:59 2014 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2014 01:34:59 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato) In-Reply-To: References: <02d801cf573b$d0d041f0$7270c5d0$@att.net> <006001cf5be8$9f94e7b0$debeb710$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Apr 20, 2014 at 4:37 AM, Andrew Mckee wrote: > On Sun, 20 Apr 2014 05:14:40 +1200, John Clark > wrote: > > Another myth is that the native Americans lived in ecological harmony with >> the land, but just a few thousand years ago the megafauna in the Americas >> was more spectacular than even what could be found in Africa, but it all >> vanished almost immediately when humans moved in for the first time. The >> native Australians and New Zealanders did the same thing with their >> megafauna. >> > > > Bzzzttt!, there was never any mega-fauna on the New Zealand islands to > begin with, it's geologically too young to have developed any. > Sorry. Bzzzttt back at ya! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moa -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Tue Apr 22 17:58:11 2014 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2014 19:58:11 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <2324043233-25192@secure.ericade.net> BillK , 21/4/2014 10:46 AM: The BBC has an article up showing that in recent years removing lead from petrol leads 20 years later to a big reduction in violent crime. Prison and social policies make no difference - it's a medical problem. Effect size? Causality testing? The theory is nice, but one needs to check for how much is explained by the lead hypothesis.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935107000503?np=ygives some data, and it definitely looks like something is going on - but lead is just a small (<20% of variance) part of the decline. What evidence does Gesch have to claim it explains 90%?https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412012000566?np=yhas a claim that *sounds* as strong (but the 90% is the model as a whole), but inside the model lead is still just one factor. No doubt neurotoxicity is a relevant problem and might contribute to violence (and indirectly, via lower IQs, to a more shortsighted society). But one should not start to assume it is the major explanation for a complex social activity like violence just because it would be neat, exculpate a lot of people and a model claims it is the explanation. Extraordinary claims (the social stuff does not matter for this social outcome) require extraordinary evidence.? Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Tue Apr 22 18:40:29 2014 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2014 19:40:29 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato) In-Reply-To: <2324043233-25192@secure.ericade.net> References: <2324043233-25192@secure.ericade.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 6:58 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Effect size? Causality testing? The theory is nice, but one needs to check > for how much is explained by the lead hypothesis. > https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935107000503?np=y > gives some data, and it definitely looks like something is going on - but > lead is just a small (<20% of variance) part of the decline. What evidence > does Gesch have to claim it explains 90%? > https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412012000566?np=y > has a claim that *sounds* as strong (but the 90% is the model as a whole), > but inside the model lead is still just one factor. > > Just one factor that is found in *all* the different states and countries worldwide that removed lead from petrol. Agreed there are other factors causing criminal violence, but when two graph lines follow each other so closely, it has to be a very significant factor. When different countries have completely different social policies and cultures you have to look for a common factor that could cause the reduction in criminal violence. The UN and WHO have no doubts about the benefits of removing lead from petrol. Quote: 27 October 2011 - Ridding the world of leaded petrol, with the United Nations leading the effort in developing countries, has resulted in $2.4 trillion in annual benefits, 1.2 million fewer premature deaths, higher overall intelligence and 58 million fewer crimes, according to a new study released today. ------- I think it would be virtually impossible to find an alternative hypothesis that you could apply worldwide to all countries and cultures at 20 years after removing lead from petrol. Especially as different countries removed petrol at different times. You don't always need complex sociological reasons for criminal violence. BillK From rex at nosyntax.net Tue Apr 22 18:39:30 2014 From: rex at nosyntax.net (rex) Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2014 11:39:30 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato) In-Reply-To: <2324043233-25192@secure.ericade.net> References: <2324043233-25192@secure.ericade.net> Message-ID: <20140422183930.GB13437@ninja.nosyntax.net> Anders Sandberg [2014-04-22 11:00]: > BillK , 21/4/2014 10:46 AM: > >> The BBC has an article up showing that in recent years removing lead >> from petrol leads 20 years later to a big reduction in violent crime. >> Prison and social policies make no difference - it's a medical >> problem. > > Effect size? Causality testing? The theory is nice, but one needs to check > for how much is explained by the lead hypothesis. > https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935107000503?np=y > gives some data, and it definitely looks like something is going on - but > lead is just a small (<20% of variance) part of the decline. What evidence > does Gesch have to claim it explains 90%? > https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412012000566?np=y > has a claim that *sounds* as strong (but the 90% is the model as a whole), > but inside the model lead is still just one factor. > No doubt neurotoxicity is a relevant problem and might contribute to > violence (and indirectly, via lower IQs, to a more shortsighted society). > But one should not start to assume it is the major explanation for a > complex social activity like violence just because it would be neat, > exculpate a lot of people and a model claims it is the explanation. > Extraordinary claims (the social stuff does not matter for this social > outcome) require extraordinary evidence.? +1 -rex -- As she lay there dozing beside me, a voice inside my head kept saying "Relax... you're not the first doctor who's ever slept with one of his patients," but another voice kept reminding me, "Howard, you're a veterinarian." From spike66 at att.net Tue Apr 22 19:24:39 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2014 12:24:39 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato) In-Reply-To: <2324043233-25192@secure.ericade.net> References: <2324043233-25192@secure.ericade.net> Message-ID: <023201cf5e60$823beb30$86b3c190$@att.net> >? On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg Subject: Re: [ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato) BillK , 21/4/2014 10:46 AM: The BBC has an article up showing that in recent years removing lead from petrol leads 20 years later to a big reduction in violent crime. Prison and social policies make no difference - it's a medical problem. Effect size? Causality testing? The theory is nice, but one needs to check for how much is explained by the lead hypothesis. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935107000503?np=y gives some data, and it definitely looks like something is going on - but lead is just a small (<20% of variance) part of the decline. What evidence does Gesch have to claim it explains 90%?... Extraordinary claims (the social stuff does not matter for this social outcome) require extraordinary evidence. Anders Sandberg? Ja. Lead was only one of many neurotoxins extant in the years in question. In the 1960s and 70s, there were so many recreational pharmaceuticals in popular circulation that it would be difficult to extract a single culprit chemical. In previous discussions here, we noted that food evolves to become ever more irresistible. I have the notion that recreational drugs evolve as well, which explains the enduring popularity of marijuana: the users of that particular substance are less likely to commit violent or otherwise illegal acts, opting more often for utterly passive inane discussions and harmless activities in the home. In the 60s and 70s, we suffered plenty of drugs which induced their hosts into all manner of self-destructive and others-destructive behaviors. I think lead in gasoline was a contributor, but only one of several, perhaps less so than good old-fashioned testosterone, so abundant in young men. (Visualize a dope-addled mugger. How old is he?) Most western cultures were younger in those benighted times than they are now. Age alone might explain most of the Pinker Effect. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Apr 22 22:24:46 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2014 17:24:46 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato) In-Reply-To: <023201cf5e60$823beb30$86b3c190$@att.net> References: <2324043233-25192@secure.ericade.net> <023201cf5e60$823beb30$86b3c190$@att.net> Message-ID: Problem: the Pinker effect, as you call it, has been going on now for a few hundred years, most of which was lead-free. Still, 20% of the variance is no small thing. A Pearson r of .40 often is quite satisfactory in psychological studies. I suspect that as people get safer, they commit less violence and that may turn off some genes, which can be passed on to their offspring a la the epigenetic effect. Pinker mentions epigenetics but not much, and most of what we know about it (as far as I know) has been gathered in the last few years. bill w On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 2:24 PM, spike wrote: > > > > > *>?* *On Behalf Of *Anders Sandberg > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato) > > > > BillK , 21/4/2014 10:46 AM: > > The BBC has an article up showing that in recent years removing lead > from petrol leads 20 years later to a big reduction in violent crime. > Prison and social policies make no difference - it's a medical > problem. > > > > Effect size? Causality testing? The theory is nice, but one needs to check > for how much is explained by the lead hypothesis. > > https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935107000503?np=y > > gives some data, and it definitely looks like something is going on - but > lead is just a small (<20% of variance) part of the decline. What evidence > does Gesch have to claim it explains 90%?... Extraordinary claims (the > social stuff does not matter for this social outcome) require extraordinary > evidence. Anders Sandberg? > > > > > > > > Ja. Lead was only one of many neurotoxins extant in the years in > question. In the 1960s and 70s, there were so many recreational > pharmaceuticals in popular circulation that it would be difficult to > extract a single culprit chemical. > > > > In previous discussions here, we noted that food evolves to become ever > more irresistible. I have the notion that recreational drugs evolve as > well, which explains the enduring popularity of marijuana: the users of > that particular substance are less likely to commit violent or otherwise > illegal acts, opting more often for utterly passive inane discussions and > harmless activities in the home. > > > > In the 60s and 70s, we suffered plenty of drugs which induced their hosts > into all manner of self-destructive and others-destructive behaviors. I > think lead in gasoline was a contributor, but only one of several, perhaps > less so than good old-fashioned testosterone, so abundant in young men. > (Visualize a dope-addled mugger. How old is he?) Most western cultures > were younger in those benighted times than they are now. Age alone might > explain most of the Pinker Effect. > > > > 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 foozler83 at gmail.com Wed Apr 23 14:08:27 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2014 09:08:27 -0500 Subject: [ExI] a little fun Message-ID: Here are some of my wife's mangled sayings: It can't help but hurt. She's as short as she is tall. It's six of one and one another. It's either famine or drought. bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Wed Apr 23 15:34:01 2014 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2014 09:34:01 -0600 Subject: [ExI] a little fun In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Tell her not to yell those through the screen door. She might strain her voice. -Kelly On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 8:08 AM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > Here are some of my wife's mangled sayings: > > It can't help but hurt. > She's as short as she is tall. > It's six of one and one another. > It's either famine or drought. 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 Wed Apr 23 16:04:27 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2014 09:04:27 -0700 Subject: [ExI] a little fun In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <004801cf5f0d$b4d9cd20$1e8d6760$@att.net> On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 8:08 AM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: >?Here are some of my wife's mangled sayings: No sir, nothing mangled about any of these BillW. It?s all in how they are interpreted. For instance: It can't help but hurt? Such a comment makes perfect sense if one corrects spelling. It might be uttered if one tries a suppository for hemorrhoids and discovers the medication to be ineffective. Or if one is vacationing at the Grand Canyon and returns from a day of riding a mule, then that evening a helpful friend suggests a headache remedy. She's as short as she is tall? As is everyone and everything. Universal truth. It's either famine or drought. In theory, one could be presented such a choice. For instance, if one lived next to a salmon-rich stream and sustenance was removed on a regular basis by means of fly fishing. The person has no other means of gathering nutrients. Salmon will not strike at flies during a rain, leaving the fisherman to go hungry during the wet season but feasting during the dry. It's six of one and one another. Well sir, I will leave it to your imagination, but this is a reference to an amorous couple engaging in the act of mutual oral stimulation of the genitals, only instead of the usual simultaneous variety, this is the sequential version of that particular activity. _______________________________________________ Do suggest all these interpretations to your bride please sir. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Thu Apr 24 01:46:17 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2014 20:46:17 -0500 Subject: [ExI] a little fun In-Reply-To: <004801cf5f0d$b4d9cd20$1e8d6760$@att.net> References: <004801cf5f0d$b4d9cd20$1e8d6760$@att.net> Message-ID: She loved this - laughed her ass off, making you the cause of a dis-assedher. bill w On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 11:04 AM, spike wrote: > > > > > On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 8:08 AM, William Flynn Wallace < > foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote: > > >?Here are some of my wife's mangled sayings: > > No sir, nothing mangled about any of these BillW. It?s all in how they > are interpreted. For instance: > > It can't help but hurt? > > > > Such a comment makes perfect sense if one corrects spelling. It might be > uttered if one tries a suppository for hemorrhoids and discovers the > medication to be ineffective. Or if one is vacationing at the Grand Canyon > and returns from a day of riding a mule, then that evening a helpful friend > suggests a headache remedy. > > > > She's as short as she is tall? > > > > As is everyone and everything. Universal truth. > > > > It's either famine or drought. > > > > In theory, one could be presented such a choice. For instance, if one > lived next to a salmon-rich stream and sustenance was removed on a regular > basis by means of fly fishing. The person has no other means of gathering > nutrients. Salmon will not strike at flies during a rain, leaving the > fisherman to go hungry during the wet season but feasting during the dry. > > > > > > It's six of one and one another. > > > > Well sir, I will leave it to your imagination, but this is a reference to > an amorous couple engaging in the act of mutual oral stimulation of the > genitals, only instead of the usual simultaneous variety, this is the > sequential version of that particular activity. > _______________________________________________ > > Do suggest all these interpretations to your bride please sir. > > > > 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 spike66 at att.net Thu Apr 24 01:51:09 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2014 18:51:09 -0700 Subject: [ExI] a little fun In-Reply-To: References: <004801cf5f0d$b4d9cd20$1e8d6760$@att.net> Message-ID: <012401cf5f5f$aacbab80$00630280$@att.net> >? On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace Subject: Re: [ExI] a little fun She loved this - laughed her ass off, making you the cause of a dis-assedher. bill w BillW, do comfort your bride with assurances that she can always go to a retailer. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Thu Apr 24 12:53:12 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2014 07:53:12 -0500 Subject: [ExI] a little fun In-Reply-To: <012401cf5f5f$aacbab80$00630280$@att.net> References: <004801cf5f0d$b4d9cd20$1e8d6760$@att.net> <012401cf5f5f$aacbab80$00630280$@att.net> Message-ID: And something to go with the new butt too. Perhaps the retailer will have a hole sale. On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 8:51 PM, spike wrote: > > > > > *>?* *On Behalf Of *William Flynn Wallace > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] a little fun > > > > She loved this - laughed her ass off, making you the cause of a > dis-assedher. > > bill w > > > > > > BillW, do comfort your bride with assurances that she can always go to a > retailer. > > > > 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 johnkclark at gmail.com Thu Apr 24 18:14:27 2014 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2014 14:14:27 -0400 Subject: [ExI] a little fun In-Reply-To: References: <004801cf5f0d$b4d9cd20$1e8d6760$@att.net> <012401cf5f5f$aacbab80$00630280$@att.net> Message-ID: Not many people realize just how well known I am. I was born in Australia because my mother wanted to be near me. My brother was an only child. The great thing about Entropy is that it requires no maintenance. God is real... unless declared an integer. If Jesus was Jewish, how come he has a Mexican name? To define recursion, we must first define recursion. All generalizations are false. Life is like an analogy. I could not fail to disagree with you less. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Thu Apr 24 19:00:22 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2014 14:00:22 -0500 Subject: [ExI] a little fun In-Reply-To: References: <004801cf5f0d$b4d9cd20$1e8d6760$@att.net> <012401cf5f5f$aacbab80$00630280$@att.net> Message-ID: What's the difference between a duck? One of his legs is alike. On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 1:14 PM, John Clark wrote: > Not many people realize just how well known I am. > I was born in Australia because my mother wanted to be near me. > My brother was an only child. > The great thing about Entropy is that it requires no maintenance. > God is real... unless declared an integer. > If Jesus was Jewish, how come he has a Mexican name? > To define recursion, we must first define recursion. > All generalizations are false. > Life is like an analogy. > I could not fail to disagree with you less. > > 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 spike66 at att.net Thu Apr 24 21:15:11 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2014 14:15:11 -0700 Subject: [ExI] a little fun In-Reply-To: References: <004801cf5f0d$b4d9cd20$1e8d6760$@att.net> <012401cf5f5f$aacbab80$00630280$@att.net> Message-ID: <01e001cf6002$47af0fd0$d70d2f70$@att.net> >? On Behalf Of John Clark ? Subject: Re: [ExI] a little fun ? >?If Jesus was Jewish, how come he has a Mexican name? John K Clark Not only does he have a Mexican name, his mates were apparently mostly British. How did he manage to find a bunch of locals named Peter, James, John, etc? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Apr 25 05:11:31 2014 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2014 01:11:31 -0400 Subject: [ExI] AI motivation, was malevolent machines In-Reply-To: <2AAC168A-50DF-4876-AE60-07AE0F2D00D9@gmu.edu> References: <2AAC168A-50DF-4876-AE60-07AE0F2D00D9@gmu.edu> Message-ID: On Sun, Apr 13, 2014 at 12:57 PM, Robin D Hanson wrote: > > On Apr 13, 2014, at 12:48 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki < > rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote: > > On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 4:48 PM, Keith Henson wrote: > >> An interesting point that might help understanding is *why* we are >> mostly not conscious of our motives. Even if I am aware that I must >> have this motivation for status seeking, it's an abstract intellectual >> awareness, not a reason to get up in the morning. There must be some >> reproductive success element in not being aware of our own >> motivations. Perhaps we need to hide them even from the rest of our >> minds to keep them from being too obvious to other social primates. >> >> ### Self-awareness of the type you mention is a neurological function. > As such, for it to evolve, there must be genes directing biological events, > and usage of metabolic resources for it to function. But, if self-awareness > does not increase fitness, genes for it will not be selected, and if it > does sometimes appear, it will be selected against to conserve energy. > Generally, unless it's evolutionarily useful or a side-effect of something > useful, it doesn't evolve, and if it does, it does not stay long, whatever > it is. > > I don't believe in the self-deception explanation, the idea that our > true wicked self must be kept hidden from us to better lie to others. The > truth does not *have* to be hidden, it just does not have a reason to be > known to us. There is lack of selection for self-awareness about many > levels of our motivations, rather than active selection against it. > > > Your argument works too well, as it is just as good a reason for us not > to be consciously aware of anything we think or do. Yet lots of kinds of > reasoning can apparently benefit from your being conscious of them, because > then your conscious mind can help to assist to overcome obstacles and > complexities. Why wouldn't the same thing be true for status seeking? > ### Indeed, this is an argument from biological principles applicable to conscious awareness of any motivations. Before we go on let me mention what I mean by "conscious" here: To be conscious of something means to pay attention to it, hold a mental image of it, manipulate that mental image, compare it to other images, and (usually) be able to assign a symbol to it to differentiate it from other images. Consciousness is highly theory-laden: There is a lot of assumptions (theory) inherent in any conscious processing, even more than in simple perceptions (which are not that simple either, once you analyze them in detail). Most of our body processes run under the radar of consciousness most of the time but many are accessible to consciousness. You may choose to pay conscious attention to the workings of your belly. With appropriate medical training, that is with acquisition of additional theories, you can even mentally dissect some of the otherwise opaque signals: For a surgeon, a colicky pain in the right hypochondriac region occurring after fatty meals warns of gallstones but a similar pain the right illiac region with rebound warns of appendicitis, potentially much more dangerous. We are evolved with the neural hardware we can use to make advantageous decisions under natural conditions but not much more. Untrained, we can feel a bellyache, and we don't need to know all the details to take the hint and avoid fights and hunting until it goes away. The finer signal analysis options accessible to a surgeon were useless until the invention of surgery, and therefore we have not evolved to make them. The belly does not tell us the truth, yet we don't say it deceives us. Now, motivation is a body process as well, although its moving parts are inside our brain, not in our bellies. Are we evolutionarily incentivized to be fully conscious of the minutiae of motivations in general? Do we need to know the evolutionary influence behind our motivations?I would say not, at least not under conditions of evolutionary adaptiveness. We are motivated to e.g. seek fatty food, healthy-appearing mates and to seek social status. These are valid, effective proxies (signal sources) for evolutionary success - directly or indirectly leading to the survival of our individual genes. To be successful in the ancestral veldt we needed to consciously analyze the ways of achieving these goals but we did not need to understand their evolutionary roots or their neural underpinnings. Nowadays, the situation is different - to avoid the evolutionary traps of e.g. female careerism, pornography or obesity, it pays in fitness terms to be able to analyze the situation consciously and make fitness-enhancing choices. But, judging from falling birthrates and ballooning waistlines, this sort of self-awareness is not too common. To say that there is a species-wide mechanism of self-deception that actively hides status seeking from our inner eye would be to posit the following: - the ability to consciously analyze status evolved, possibly 150 000 years ago (implying there is a fitness premium for conscious analysis of status, over and above of what get from instinctive following of status signals/proxies) - subsequently there was massive evolutionary pressure to hide this ability - an effective pan-species neural mechanism evolved to maintain the fitness-enhancing effect of conscious analysis while hiding it effectively from introspection I find this scenario implausible. Humans are clearly involved in an evolutionary arms race between liars and liar-spotters, between dominance-seekers and the envious or fearful puller-downs. But did we evolve to detect status seeking in general or just the dangerous, machiavellian, back-stabbing type? There is research showing that most humans can subliminally detect psychopaths. But most of allow status achieved through licit means. We do not automatically turn on all high-status individuals, we seek to affiliate with some of them. We try to detect and isolate cheats but we revere heroes. There is also interesting research on high-status liars: High status people apparently lie much better to low-status ones, while low-status ones have difficulties lying to high-status ones. Being embarrassed about lying helps avoid lying dangerously, e.g. when talking to a chief who can kill you. But why self-deceive when deceiving a weak person? There is space here for various secondary and tertiary effects, and complex evolutionary equilibria. The simple idea that it pays to be unaware of status-enhancing effects of your actions can neither be derived from first principles nor is it to the best of my knowledge directly proven observationally. The self-deception hypothesis can be an inspiration for a research program which might first have to delve into more basic questions, like "What is the evolutionary mechanism of status differences in primate groups?", "What specific neural mechanisms underlie status detection and how do they differ between humans and lower primates?", "Do other species self-deceive?" There is woefully too little data to accept the self-deception hypothesis at this time. Rafal -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Fri Apr 25 18:56:41 2014 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2014 14:56:41 -0400 Subject: [ExI] a little fun In-Reply-To: <01e001cf6002$47af0fd0$d70d2f70$@att.net> References: <004801cf5f0d$b4d9cd20$1e8d6760$@att.net> <012401cf5f5f$aacbab80$00630280$@att.net> <01e001cf6002$47af0fd0$d70d2f70$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 5:15 PM, spike wrote: >>If Jesus was Jewish, how come he has a Mexican name? >> > > Not only does he have a Mexican name, his mates were apparently mostly > British. How did he manage to find a bunch of locals named Peter, James, > John, etc? > And I don't like Shakespeare because he uses too many cliches (to be or not to be etc). And the moon is far more useful than the sun because the moon sometimes comes out at night but the sun never does, and night is when we really need the light. Or maybe I'm confusing cause and effect. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Fri Apr 25 18:59:15 2014 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2014 19:59:15 +0100 Subject: [ExI] a little fun In-Reply-To: <01e001cf6002$47af0fd0$d70d2f70$@att.net> References: <004801cf5f0d$b4d9cd20$1e8d6760$@att.net> <012401cf5f5f$aacbab80$00630280$@att.net> <01e001cf6002$47af0fd0$d70d2f70$@att.net> Message-ID: <535AB083.3050104@aleph.se> On 2014-04-24 22:15, spike wrote: > > >...If Jesus was Jewish, how come he has a Mexican name? > > John K Clark > > Not only does he have a Mexican name, his mates were apparently mostly > British. How did he manage to find a bunch of locals named Peter, > James, John, etc? > Time travellers! -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Fri Apr 25 19:33:39 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2014 14:33:39 -0500 Subject: [ExI] a little fun In-Reply-To: <535AB083.3050104@aleph.se> References: <004801cf5f0d$b4d9cd20$1e8d6760$@att.net> <012401cf5f5f$aacbab80$00630280$@att.net> <01e001cf6002$47af0fd0$d70d2f70$@att.net> <535AB083.3050104@aleph.se> Message-ID: ACcording the to ancient Egyptians, the phases of the moon are explained this way: once a month a pig eats it. Since it comes back, it's either indigestible or it's (rhymes with bighit). bill On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 1:59 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2014-04-24 22:15, spike wrote: > > > > >?If Jesus was Jewish, how come he has a Mexican name? > > John K Clark > > > > Not only does he have a Mexican name, his mates were apparently mostly > British. How did he manage to find a bunch of locals named Peter, James, > John, etc? > > > Time travellers! > > -- > Dr Anders Sandberg > Future of Humanity Institute > Oxford Martin School > Oxford University > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Fri Apr 25 20:09:40 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2014 13:09:40 -0700 Subject: [ExI] a little fun In-Reply-To: References: <004801cf5f0d$b4d9cd20$1e8d6760$@att.net> <012401cf5f5f$aacbab80$00630280$@att.net> <01e001cf6002$47af0fd0$d70d2f70$@att.net> Message-ID: <014d01cf60c2$4b09d050$e11d70f0$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of John Clark >? >?And I don't like Shakespeare because he uses too many cliches (to be or not to be etc). ? John K Clark What I like best about Shakespeare is his amazing talent in stringing together a bunch of famous quotes and make an actual story out of them. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Apr 26 15:22:12 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2014 10:22:12 -0500 Subject: [ExI] language Message-ID: In my far future book the people use two languages: one is extremely objective - no synonyms, no homonyms, nothing to confuse - designed for conveying strictly factual information with little to no room for misunderstanding. The second language is meant for nuance: prose and poetry, puns and word play, rich in adjectives and adverbs, etc. Aside from mathematics and computer languages, what more is needed? bill wallace -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tara at taramayastales.com Sat Apr 26 15:38:36 2014 From: tara at taramayastales.com (Tara Maya) Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2014 08:38:36 -0700 Subject: [ExI] language In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <7B1F113A-ABC6-4F3C-ABB3-37711ED7A905@taramayastales.com> You forgot the language of politicians and lawyers, used to obfuscate, intimidate and mislead. Tara Maya Blog | Twitter | Facebook | Amazon | Goodreads On Apr 26, 2014, at 8:22 AM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > In my far future book the people use two languages: one is extremely objective - no synonyms, no homonyms, nothing to confuse - designed for conveying strictly factual information with little to no room for misunderstanding. The second language is meant for nuance: prose and poetry, puns and word play, rich in adjectives and adverbs, etc. > > Aside from mathematics and computer languages, what more is needed? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Sat Apr 26 17:52:57 2014 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2014 10:52:57 -0700 Subject: [ExI] language In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Doesn't the second fundamentally stem from the first? Separating the two would seem to lead to a decline in practical use of the second, as people coopt and adopt the first to the second's ostensible purpose. The street don't care for ideals that get in the way of day to day use. On Sat, Apr 26, 2014 at 8:22 AM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > In my far future book the people use two languages: one is extremely > objective - no synonyms, no homonyms, nothing to confuse - designed for > conveying strictly factual information with little to no room for > misunderstanding. The second language is meant for nuance: prose and > poetry, puns and word play, rich in adjectives and adverbs, etc. > > Aside from mathematics and computer languages, what more is needed? > > bill wallace > > _______________________________________________ > 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 Sat Apr 26 17:57:05 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2014 12:57:05 -0500 Subject: [ExI] language In-Reply-To: <7B1F113A-ABC6-4F3C-ABB3-37711ED7A905@taramayastales.com> References: <7B1F113A-ABC6-4F3C-ABB3-37711ED7A905@taramayastales.com> Message-ID: Curiously, my future humans cannot lie, and there are no politicians, no government, no hierarchy - everyone has one vote. This is also no personal property, so nothing to steal. On Sat, Apr 26, 2014 at 10:38 AM, Tara Maya wrote: > You forgot the language of politicians and lawyers, used to obfuscate, > intimidate and mislead. > > Tara Maya > Blog | Twitter | > Facebook | > Amazon | > Goodreads > > > > On Apr 26, 2014, at 8:22 AM, William Flynn Wallace > wrote: > > In my far future book the people use two languages: one is extremely > objective - no synonyms, no homonyms, nothing to confuse - designed for > conveying strictly factual information with little to no room for > misunderstanding. The second language is meant for nuance: prose and > poetry, puns and word play, rich in adjectives and adverbs, etc. > > Aside from mathematics and computer languages, what more is needed? > > > > _______________________________________________ > 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 Sat Apr 26 18:11:49 2014 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2014 11:11:49 -0700 Subject: [ExI] language In-Reply-To: References: <7B1F113A-ABC6-4F3C-ABB3-37711ED7A905@taramayastales.com> Message-ID: If everyone has one vote, there is a government by definition. While there may not be personal property, there is property that some people are allowed to use more than others - by law, or just the fact that they do use it more. Some people might see this allocation as unfair. This leads directly to politicians, who make a living out of manipulating opinion. (Not being able to lie just makes it harder.) On Sat, Apr 26, 2014 at 10:57 AM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > Curiously, my future humans cannot lie, and there are no politicians, no > government, no hierarchy - everyone has one vote. This is also no personal > property, so nothing to steal. > > > On Sat, Apr 26, 2014 at 10:38 AM, Tara Maya wrote: > >> You forgot the language of politicians and lawyers, used to obfuscate, >> intimidate and mislead. >> >> Tara Maya >> Blog | Twitter | >> Facebook | >> Amazon | >> Goodreads >> >> >> >> On Apr 26, 2014, at 8:22 AM, William Flynn Wallace >> wrote: >> >> In my far future book the people use two languages: one is extremely >> objective - no synonyms, no homonyms, nothing to confuse - designed for >> conveying strictly factual information with little to no room for >> misunderstanding. The second language is meant for nuance: prose and >> poetry, puns and word play, rich in adjectives and adverbs, etc. >> >> Aside from mathematics and computer languages, what more is needed? >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> 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 pharos at gmail.com Sat Apr 26 19:42:33 2014 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2014 20:42:33 +0100 Subject: [ExI] language In-Reply-To: References: <7B1F113A-ABC6-4F3C-ABB3-37711ED7A905@taramayastales.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Apr 26, 2014 at 7:11 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > This leads directly to politicians, who make a living out of manipulating > opinion. (Not being able to lie just makes it harder.) > > I think you will find it a bit tricky to define 'lie'. Truth is often a matter of opinion, especially in social contexts, as opposed to scientific laws (which are also subject to being redefined). That's why spin works so well. In social context we constantly use 'white lies' to avoid giving unnecessary offence. The claim is that future people cannot lie, but nobody likes to face their 'real' image. 'Does my bum look fat in this dress?'. I doubt that people will ever stop trying to project a better than real image to others around them. To lie is to be human. BillK From kryonica at gmail.com Sun Apr 27 09:38:28 2014 From: kryonica at gmail.com (Cryonica) Date: Sun, 27 Apr 2014 10:38:28 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Transhumanist book Message-ID: <93AC1671-8B7B-4298-9092-F1E5F03DB372@gmail.com> Stefano Vaj's book on Biopolitics is now available in English on Amazon UK and US. Stefano is the Secretary of the Italian Transhumanist Assiociation and this book is his perspective on the new technologies, on their impact and a response their critics. As we are trudging along towards the Singularity, this book is for anyone with an interest in H+ philosophy and cutting edge technology. This is the Amazon UK link: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Biopolitics-Transhumanist-Paradigm-Stefano-Vaj-ebook/dp/B00JYAJFRQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1398591275&sr=8-1&keywords=biopolitics+vaj And US: http://www.amazon.com/Biopolitics-Transhumanist-Paradigm-Stefano-Vaj-ebook/dp/B00JYAJFRQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1398591398&sr=8-1&keywords=stefano+vaj Cryonica kryonica at gmail.com From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Mon Apr 28 08:10:14 2014 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2014 01:10:14 -0700 Subject: [ExI] a little fun In-Reply-To: <014d01cf60c2$4b09d050$e11d70f0$@att.net> References: <004801cf5f0d$b4d9cd20$1e8d6760$@att.net> <012401cf5f5f$aacbab80$00630280$@att.net> <01e001cf6002$47af0fd0$d70d2f70$@att.net> <014d01cf60c2$4b09d050$e11d70f0$@att.net> Message-ID: "You can't get there from here!" "That'll kill ya, deader than dead!" "He thinks he's hot shit, when he is actually cold crap on a stick!" "He was born to hang!" "I can always lose weight, but you're stuck bein' ugly!" They don't all apply, but are all things I heard when living in the South... John On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 1:09 PM, spike wrote: > > > > > *From:* extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto: > extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] *On Behalf Of *John Clark > *>?* > > > > >?And I don't like Shakespeare because he uses too many cliches (to be or > not to be etc). ? John K Clark > > What I like best about Shakespeare is his amazing talent in stringing > together a bunch of famous quotes and make an actual story out of them. > > 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 stefano.vaj at gmail.com Mon Apr 28 10:34:19 2014 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2014 12:34:19 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Transhumanist book In-Reply-To: <93AC1671-8B7B-4298-9092-F1E5F03DB372@gmail.com> References: <93AC1671-8B7B-4298-9092-F1E5F03DB372@gmail.com> Message-ID: On 27 April 2014 11:38, Cryonica wrote: > Stefano Vaj's book on Biopolitics is now available in English on Amazon UK > and US. Stefano is the Secretary of the Italian Transhumanist Assiociation > and this book is his perspective on the new technologies, on their impact > and a response their critics. As we are trudging along towards the > Singularity, this book is for anyone with an interest in H+ philosophy and > cutting edge technology. > > This is the Amazon UK link: > > > http://www.amazon.co.uk/Biopolitics-Transhumanist-Paradigm-Stefano-Vaj-ebook/dp/B00JYAJFRQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1398591275&sr=8-1&keywords=biopolitics+vaj > > And US: > > > http://www.amazon.com/Biopolitics-Transhumanist-Paradigm-Stefano-Vaj-ebook/dp/B00JYAJFRQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1398591398&sr=8-1&keywords=stefano+vaj It is impossible for me to express all the gratitude I owe to Catarina for her efforts and patience, without which this project would have never been completed. And it is nice to see for once a continental book on transhumanism getting translated and published in English, rather than the other way around. :-) -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Mon Apr 28 10:34:11 2014 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2014 12:34:11 +0200 Subject: [ExI] language In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <2816298286-8234@secure.ericade.net> William Flynn Wallace , 26/4/2014 5:27 PM: In my far future book the people use two languages:? one is extremely objective - no synonyms, no homonyms, nothing to confuse - designed for conveying strictly factual information with little to no room for misunderstanding.? The second language is meant for nuance:? prose and poetry, puns and word play, rich in adjectives and adverbs, etc. Aside from mathematics and computer languages, what more is needed? ? Language is used not just for conveying information, but also socially (signalling that you are around, creating certain moods, conveying status or opinions) and as an action: when I promise to do X, I perform a speech act that creates a moral obligation for me to do X. Speech acts are pretty important for a society. I wonder if your people behave according to the Aumann agreement theorem. If they are rational and tell each other what they believe, they will immediately come to reach the same conclusion: they *cannot* agree to disagree.?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann's_agreement_theorem Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From natasha at natasha.cc Mon Apr 28 15:56:40 2014 From: natasha at natasha.cc (natasha at natasha.cc) Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2014 08:56:40 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Speakers Needed! International Space Development Conference Track on Transhumanism Message-ID: <005001cf62fa$72b38f30$581aad90$@natasha.cc> Hello all! We need to fill two slots for the "Transhumanism Track" at the International Space Development Conference to be held in Los Angeles on May 17th. This track is a lot of fun! Last year we had David Brin, Vernor Vinge, David Orban and myself. This year we have Max More, Peter Voss, John Spencer and yours truly. But we did have a cancellation (David Orban due to a last minute conflict) and I would love to have another transhumanist as well to make it as rich and fluid as possible. Please contact me to let me know if you would like to be a speaker at this cosmologically transhuman event! natasha at natasha.cc Cheers! Natasha Natasha Vita-More, PhD Faculty, University of Advancing Technology Chair, Humanity+ _______________________________________ New Book at Amazon! cover email -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.png Type: image/png Size: 10577 bytes Desc: not available URL: From giulio at gmail.com Mon Apr 28 16:25:35 2014 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2014 18:25:35 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Speakers Needed! International Space Development Conference Track on Transhumanism In-Reply-To: <005001cf62fa$72b38f30$581aad90$@natasha.cc> References: <005001cf62fa$72b38f30$581aad90$@natasha.cc> Message-ID: Hi Natasha, I would love to come (and I am a former public sector space exec), but I am unable to afford it of they don't pay the travel costs. Let me know. Huge - G. On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 5:56 PM, wrote: > Hello all! > > > > We need to fill two slots for the ?Transhumanism Track? at the > International Space Development Conference to be held in Los Angeles on May > 17th. This track is a lot of fun! Last year we had David Brin, Vernor > Vinge, David Orban and myself. This year we have Max More, Peter Voss, > John Spencer and yours truly. > > > > But we did have a cancellation (David Orban due to a last minute conflict) > and I would love to have another transhumanist as well to make it as rich > and fluid as possible. > > > > Please contact me to let me know if you would like to be a speaker at this > cosmologically transhuman event! > > > > natasha at natasha.cc > > > > Cheers! > > Natasha > > > > Natasha Vita-More, PhD > > > > *Faculty, University of Advancing Technology* > > *Chair, Humanity+* > > _______________________________________ > > New Book at Amazon > ! > > [image: cover email] > > > > _______________________________________________ > 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: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.png Type: image/png Size: 10577 bytes Desc: not available URL: From giulio at gmail.com Mon Apr 28 16:27:11 2014 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2014 18:27:11 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Speakers Needed! International Space Development Conference Track on Transhumanism In-Reply-To: References: <005001cf62fa$72b38f30$581aad90$@natasha.cc> Message-ID: oops that was private for Natasha. Resending to Natasha with two typos corrected. Hi Natasha, I would love to come (and I am a former public sector space exec), but I am unable to afford it if they don't pay the travel costs. Let me know. Hugs - G. On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 6:25 PM, Giulio Prisco wrote: > Hi Natasha, I would love to come (and I am a former public sector space > exec), but I am unable to afford it of they don't pay the travel costs. Let > me know. Huge - G. > > > On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 5:56 PM, wrote: > >> Hello all! >> >> >> >> We need to fill two slots for the ?Transhumanism Track? at the >> International Space Development Conference to be held in Los Angeles on May >> 17th. This track is a lot of fun! Last year we had David Brin, Vernor >> Vinge, David Orban and myself. This year we have Max More, Peter Voss, >> John Spencer and yours truly. >> >> >> >> But we did have a cancellation (David Orban due to a last minute >> conflict) and I would love to have another transhumanist as well to make it >> as rich and fluid as possible. >> >> >> >> Please contact me to let me know if you would like to be a speaker at >> this cosmologically transhuman event! >> >> >> >> natasha at natasha.cc >> >> >> >> Cheers! >> >> Natasha >> >> >> >> Natasha Vita-More, PhD >> >> >> >> *Faculty, University of Advancing Technology* >> >> *Chair, Humanity+* >> >> _______________________________________ >> >> New Book at Amazon >> ! >> >> [image: cover email] >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> 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: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.png Type: image/png Size: 10577 bytes Desc: not available URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Mon Apr 28 22:54:47 2014 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2014 17:54:47 -0500 Subject: [ExI] a little fun In-Reply-To: References: <004801cf5f0d$b4d9cd20$1e8d6760$@att.net> <012401cf5f5f$aacbab80$00630280$@att.net> <01e001cf6002$47af0fd0$d70d2f70$@att.net> <014d01cf60c2$4b09d050$e11d70f0$@att.net> Message-ID: "Killed and left for dead." "He made himself into a self-made man." (followed by an unprecedented 30 seconds of silence on TV - baseball announcer) "They've won ten consecutive games in a row without a loss." On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 3:10 AM, John Grigg wrote: > "You can't get there from here!" > > "That'll kill ya, deader than dead!" > > "He thinks he's hot shit, when he is actually cold crap on a stick!" > > "He was born to hang!" > > "I can always lose weight, but you're stuck bein' ugly!" > > > They don't all apply, but are all things I heard when living in the > South... > > > John > > > On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 1:09 PM, spike wrote: > >> >> >> >> >> *From:* extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto: >> extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] *On Behalf Of *John Clark >> *>?* >> >> >> >> >?And I don't like Shakespeare because he uses too many cliches (to be >> or not to be etc). ? John K Clark >> >> What I like best about Shakespeare is his amazing talent in stringing >> together a bunch of famous quotes and make an actual story out of them. >> >> spike >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> >> > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ginakathleenmiller at gmail.com Tue Apr 29 03:44:40 2014 From: ginakathleenmiller at gmail.com (Gina Miller) Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2014 21:44:40 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Please help! Word/Open office document Message-ID: I need a little help. I have Open office, basically a free version of Word that can be saved in .doc format. I have a large background picture that I want locked so that you can type over it without being moved. I can't seem to figure it out, I set it up so it looks great but then I close the file and open it up again and it isn't there, or it's crooked. Can I send some one the background picture to help me out? I'd really appreciate it. Thanks Gina "Nanogirl" Miller -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Tue Apr 29 14:47:05 2014 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2014 07:47:05 -0700 Subject: [ExI] cool! locals create circuit board modeled on the human brain Message-ID: <009001cf63b9$e46752f0$ad35f8d0$@att.net> I don't know how much of this is the usual hype that sticks to this topic like moss on an oak, but if I find more info I will post it here. I hope we can create some kind of standard specialized device such as the Neurogrid which would allow the geek masses to experiment. spike http://news.stanford.edu/pr/2014/pr-neurogrid-boahen-engineering-042814.html April 28, 2014 Stanford bioengineers create circuit board modeled on the human brain Stanford bioengineers have developed faster, more energy-efficient microchips based on the human brain ? 9,000 times faster and using significantly less power than a typical PC. This offers greater possibilities for advances in robotics and a new way of understanding the brain. For instance, a chip as fast and efficient as the human brain could drive prosthetic limbs with the speed and complexity of our own actions. BY TOM ABATE The Neurogrid circuit board can simulate orders of magnitude more neurons and synapses than other brain mimics on the power it takes to run a tablet computer. Stanford bioengineers have developed a new circuit board modeled on the human brain, possibly opening up new frontiers in robotics and computing. For all their sophistication, computers pale in comparison to the brain. The modest cortex of the mouse, for instance, operates 9,000 times faster than a personal computer simulation of its functions. Not only is the PC slower, it takes 40,000 times more power to run, writes Kwabena Boahen, associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford, in an article for the Proceedings of the IEEE. "From a pure energy perspective, the brain is hard to match," says Boahen, whose article surveys how "neuromorphic" researchers in the United States and Europe are using silicon and software to build electronic systems that mimic neurons and synapses. Boahen and his team have developed Neurogrid, a circuit board consisting of 16 custom-designed "Neurocore" chips. Together these 16 chips can simulate 1 million neurons and billions of synaptic connections. The team designed these chips with power efficiency in mind. Their strategy was to enable certain synapses to share hardware circuits. The result was Neurogrid ? a device about the size of an iPad that can simulate orders of magnitude more neurons and synapses than other brain mimics on the power it takes to run a tablet computer. The National Institutes of Health funded development of this million-neuron prototype with a five-year Pioneer Award. Now Boahen stands ready for the next steps ? lowering costs and creating compiler software that would enable engineers and computer scientists with no knowledge of neuroscience to solve problems ? such as controlling a humanoid robot ? using Neurogrid. Its speed and low power characteristics make Neurogrid ideal for more than just modeling the human brain. Boahen is working with other Stanford scientists to develop prosthetic limbs for paralyzed people that would be controlled by a Neurocore-like chip. "Right now, you have to know how the brain works to program one of these," said Boahen, gesturing at the $40,000 prototype board on the desk of his Stanford office. "We want to create a neurocompiler so that you would not need to know anything about synapses and neurons to able to use one of these." Brain ferment In his article, Boahen notes the larger context of neuromorphic research, including the European Union's Human Brain Project, which aims to simulate a human brain on a supercomputer. By contrast, the U.S. BRAIN Project ? short for Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies ? has taken a tool-building approach by challenging scientists, including many at Stanford, to develop new kinds of tools that can read out the activity of thousands or even millions of neurons in the brain as well as write in complex patterns of activity. Zooming from the big picture, Boahen's article focuses on two projects comparable to Neurogrid that attempt to model brain functions in silicon and/or software. One of these efforts is IBM's SyNAPSE Project ? short for Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics. As the name implies, SyNAPSE involves a bid to redesign chips, code-named Golden Gate, to emulate the ability of neurons to make a great many synaptic connections ? a feature that helps the brain solve problems on the fly. At present a Golden Gate chip consists of 256 digital neurons each equipped with 1,024 digital synaptic circuits, with IBM on track to greatly increase the numbers of neurons in the system. Heidelberg University's BrainScales project has the ambitious goal of developing analog chips to mimic the behaviors of neurons and synapses. Their HICANN chip ? short for High Input Count Analog Neural Network ? would be the core of a system designed to accelerate brain simulations, to enable researchers to model drug interactions that might take months to play out in a compressed time frame. At present, the HICANN system can emulate 512 neurons each equipped with 224 synaptic circuits, with a roadmap to greatly expand that hardware base. Each of these research teams has made different technical choices, such as whether to dedicate each hardware circuit to modeling a single neural element (e.g., a single synapse) or several (e.g., by activating the hardware circuit twice to model the effect of two active synapses). These choices have resulted in different trade-offs in terms of capability and performance. In his analysis, Boahen creates a single metric to account for total system cost ? including the size of the chip, how many neurons it simulates and the power it consumes. Neurogrid was by far the most cost-effective way to simulate neurons, in keeping with Boahen's goal of creating a system affordable enough to be widely used in research. Speed and efficiency But much work lies ahead. Each of the current million-neuron Neurogrid circuit boards cost about $40,000. Boahen believes dramatic cost reductions are possible. Neurogrid is based on 16 Neurocores, each of which supports 65,536 neurons. Those chips were made using 15-year-old fabrication technologies. By switching to modern manufacturing processes and fabricating the chips in large volumes, he could cut a Neurocore's cost 100-fold ? suggesting a million-neuron board for $400 a copy. With that cheaper hardware and compiler software to make it easy to configure, these neuromorphic systems could find numerous applications. For instance, a chip as fast and efficient as the human brain could drive prosthetic limbs with the speed and complexity of our own actions ? but without being tethered to a power source. Krishna Shenoy, an electrical engineering professor at Stanford and Boahen's neighbor at the interdisciplinary Bio-X center, is developing ways of reading brain signals to understand movement. Boahen envisions a Neurocore-like chip that could be implanted in a paralyzed person's brain, interpreting those intended movements and translating them to commands for prosthetic limbs without overheating the brain. A small prosthetic arm in Boahen's lab is currently controlled by Neurogrid to execute movement commands in real time. For now it doesn't look like much, but its simple levers and joints hold hope for robotic limbs of the future. Of course, all of these neuromorphic efforts are beggared by the complexity and efficiency of the human brain. In his article, Boahen notes that Neurogrid is about 100,000 times more energy efficient than a personal computer simulation of 1 million neurons. Yet it is an energy hog compared to our biological CPU. "The human brain, with 80,000 times more neurons than Neurogrid, consumes only three times as much power," Boahen writes. "Achieving this level of energy efficiency while offering greater configurability and scale is the ultimate challenge neuromorphic engineers face." Tom Abate writes about the students, faculty and research of the School of Engineering. Amy Adams of Stanford University Communications contributed to this report. For more Stanford experts in bioengineering and other topics, visit Stanford Experts. From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Apr 29 15:31:17 2014 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2014 11:31:17 -0400 Subject: [ExI] a little fun In-Reply-To: References: <004801cf5f0d$b4d9cd20$1e8d6760$@att.net> <012401cf5f5f$aacbab80$00630280$@att.net> <01e001cf6002$47af0fd0$d70d2f70$@att.net> <014d01cf60c2$4b09d050$e11d70f0$@att.net> Message-ID: two plus eleven = one plus twelve a decimal point = I'm a dot in place astronomer = moon starer circumstantial evidence = can ruin a selected victim desperation = a rope ends it dormitory = dirty room President Clinton of the USA = to copulate he finds interns Princess Diana = end is a car spin Ronald Wilson Reagan = Insane Anglo Warlord Victoria, England's Queen = governs a nice quiet land mother-in-law = woman Hitler parishioners = I hire parsons schoolmaster = the classroom funeral = real fun the Morse code = here come dots the earthquakes = that queer shake Alec Guinness = genuine class John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rtomek at ceti.pl Tue Apr 29 20:32:41 2014 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2014 22:32:41 +0200 Subject: [ExI] [GRG] Biomarkers and ageing: The clock-watcher (fwd) Message-ID: <20140429203241.GA2686@tau1.ceti.pl> ----- Forwarded message from Pedro Fernandes ----- Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2014 10:00:15 +0100 From: Pedro Fernandes To: Gerontology Research Group , Paul Wakfer Cc: grg at lists.ucla.edu Subject: Re: [GRG] Biomarkers and ageing: The clock-watcher Very much so. As you rightfully point out, blood samples do exist already, that can enable a wide range assessment of the value of the biomarker-based ageing rate estimates for a relatively low cost. Carefully chosen cohorts will allow for statistical differences to emerge from the data. Grouping data by Haplotype, lifestyle, diets, etc. can reveal important hidden differences. Pedro -- Pedro Fernandes Instituto Gulbenkian de Ci?ncia Apartado 14 2781-901 OEIRAS PORTUGAL Tel +351 21 4407912 http://gtpb.igc.gulbenkian.pt Quoting Paul Wakfer : > This paper from Steve Horvath is *enormously* important! > > There is now a reliable biomarker for human aging rate and all > human aging interventions from now on should employ it to ascertain > the effectiveness of the intervention. In effect, many of the mouse > lifespan studies can now be repeated for humans (at least the ones > that were safe and showed positive results). With the accuracy of > this biomarker, given reasonable size human control and > intervention cohorts, 5-10 years should be sufficient to see a > significant difference, if one exists. A start can be made by using > the saved blood from the many longitudinal studies of various > groups that have been done worldwide to see if there are some > correlations between various lifestyle parameters and aging > *deceleration* as measured by the Horvath biomarker test. > > I can hardly wait to see these new results appearing! > > --Paul Wakfer > http://Live120Plus.com > > On 04/25/2014 10:02 AM, Pedro Fernandes wrote: >> >> Interesting paper >> >> http://www.nature.com/news/biomarkers-and-ageing-the-clock-watcher-1.15014?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews >> P. Fernandes >> > > _______________________________________________ > To UNSUBSCRIBE or for ADMINISTRATIVE REQUESTS send an E-mail to > jadams at grg.org or scoles at grg.org, or call (949) 922-9786 USA. > > *** Do NOT send an UNSUBSCRIBE message to the entire list. *** > > GRG mailing list > GRG at lists.ucla.edu > http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/grg > _______________________________________________ To UNSUBSCRIBE or for ADMINISTRATIVE REQUESTS send an E-mail to jadams at grg.org or scoles at grg.org, or call (949) 922-9786 USA. *** Do NOT send an UNSUBSCRIBE message to the entire list. *** GRG mailing list GRG at lists.ucla.edu http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/grg ----- End forwarded message ----- From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Wed Apr 30 00:01:30 2014 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2014 17:01:30 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Slow Tuesday Night Message-ID: http://web.archive.org/web/20071012204844/www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/lafferty5/lafferty51.html Read this decades ago. It's still a hoot. Keith From tara at taramayastales.com Wed Apr 30 16:58:14 2014 From: tara at taramayastales.com (Tara Maya) Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2014 09:58:14 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Slow Tuesday Night In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: The world of 2014 predicted in 1963. :) Tara Maya Blog | Twitter | Facebook | Amazon | Goodreads On Apr 29, 2014, at 5:01 PM, Keith Henson wrote: > http://web.archive.org/web/20071012204844/www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/lafferty5/lafferty51.html > > Read this decades ago. It's still a hoot. > > Keith > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From outlawpoet at gmail.com Wed Apr 30 00:49:34 2014 From: outlawpoet at gmail.com (justin corwin) Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2014 17:49:34 -0700 Subject: [ExI] cool! locals create circuit board modeled on the human brain In-Reply-To: <009001cf63b9$e46752f0$ad35f8d0$@att.net> References: <009001cf63b9$e46752f0$ad35f8d0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 7:47 AM, spike wrote: > I don't know how much of this is the usual hype that sticks to this topic > like moss on an oak, but if I find more info I will post it here. I hope > we can create some kind of standard specialized device such as the > Neurogrid which would allow the geek masses to experiment. spike > We talked about this at the last Neuroscience Group meeting at Crashspace, consensus was that if you've got interesting neurology to simulate, these FPAAs, and the ASICs that are likely coming to support them are going to be very important if you expect to get anything done on a reasonable timescale. In related news, some local folks are trying to get together the wherewithal to launch an open source compiler for quantum computing, now that the hardware is available to people, in part to establish just what the various devices are actually good at. D-wave has had a devil of a time establishing that their "quantum optimizer" systems are actually superior to just piling on classical processors. -- Justin Corwin outlawpoet at gmail.com http://programmaticconquest.tumblr.com http://outlawpoet.tumblr.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: