"Alas, for those who turn their eyes from dragons and dream of zebras! If we cannot take joy in the merely fantasy, our lives shall be empty indeed." - Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, in a parallel universe.

I never expected a post from Overcoming Bias as informal as a picture with commentary from flickr.com. (But I suppose that's a fact about my own state of poor calibration).

Well, a picture of a zebra is real.

And you'll probably agree that the merely real is, in some ways, in need of improvement, which is the whole point of transhumanism.

No time for love, we've got a world to save!

...or so the theory runs.

Can we expect another permutation of the superior genes that brought us so much awesomeness in the form of Eli?

No.

Can one make scientific breakthroughs without dedicating all of one's waking hours to it? Newton: Science: Best Sans Booty.

In medicine, the concept "zebra" represents a strange, unlikely condition or diagnosis, usually to be avoided or considered on a lower tier, iterated thus: When one hears hoofbeats, one should think of horses rather than zebras. Spending too much time chasing zebras detracts from making the diagnosis of "horse". Coincidence? Or just another example of the medical field's poor thought process?

Her: "Pass me the laptop, I want to see if there were any comments on that post."

Me: "No, you don't. They're pretty awful."

(Girlfriend looks.)

Her: "That's awful."

Me: "Yep."

l, Aww, Ben_Wraith:

While I appreciate the effort toward optimal decision-making, surely there is some way to contribute without invading Eliezer's personal life?

Can you picture anyone doing peak creative work while trying to justify every ounce of their resource use? To others or to themselves? Eliezer presumably knows he doesn't need to do that, but... threads like this can't help his or others' morale. And morale is a precious resource.

Group efforts in general, and particularly philanthropic efforts, devolve too easily into shows of self-sacrifice. After all, sacrifice takes less effort in many ways, and it looks like trying . If we want to create a positive singularity, we'll need to make our project fun, we'll need to make the actual useful work attractive, we'll need to get people aim for achievement (not for an appearance of "using all their resources"), and we'll to make it something that real people want to join and don't burn out at.

It isn't only Eliezer who can help, by the way. If nothing else, you can help the effort get money; some of those willing and able able to do FAI research are spending their time raising money, right now, for lack of other ways to get money. If you find a way to gather money for the effort, more research will be done and the chances of a positive singularity will improve. There are other possibilities for helping, too. If you're concerned about the future, perhaps take a look at what you have, who you know, and what you might do? Creating a positive singularity can be a lot of fun.

Interestingly, I've read that young Chinese do treat zebras as near-mythical creatures: they're referred to as "cǎo ní mǎ" (i.e. "grass-mud horses") and there's a lot of fantasy literature about them, much of it with political overtones. In contrast, dragons are little more than cultural and decorative symbols--although conversely, Chinese dragons do appear in some Western fantasy stories.

If there is a better way to see a merely real zebra than to have the photons strike a surface, their patterns be stored, and transmitted to my brain, which cross-relates it to every fact about zebras, their behavior, habitat, physiology, and personality on my internal map of a zebra, then I don't know it and can't experience it, since that's what happens when I am in fact actually there, as well as what happens when I look at a picture that someone who was actually there shares with me.