AndHisHorse
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Perhaps, in a parallel to the kings earlier mentioned, this could be interpreted as Orion having seen the fortunes of continents rise and fall. Orion has seen the prominence of Africa as the source of humanity, and its subjugation by Europe; it has seen the isolation and the global power of the Americas; it has seen the mercantile empires of the West and its dark ages.
While, if successful, such an epistemic technology would be incredibly valuable, I think that the possibility of failure should give us pause. In the worst case, this effectively has the same properties as arbitrary censorship: one side "wins" and gets to decide what is legitimate, and what counts towards changing the consensus, afterwards, perhaps by manipulating the definitions of success or testability. Unlike in sports, where the thing being evaluated and the thing doing the evaluating are generally separate (the success or failure of athletes doesn't impede the abilities of statisticians, and vice versa), there is a risk that the system is both its subject and its controller.
I do think "[a]bility to contribute to the thought process seems under-valued" is very relevant here. A prediction-tracking system captures one...layer[^1], I suppose, of intellectuals; the layer that is concerned with making frequent, specific, testable predictions about imminent events. Those who make theories that are more vague, or with more complex outcomes, or even less frequent[^2][^3], while perhaps instrumental to the frequent, specific, testable predictors, would not be recognized, unless there were some sort of complex system compelling the assignment of credit to the vague contributors (and presumably to their vague contributors, et cetera, across the entire intellectual lineage or at least some maximum feasible depth).
This would be useful to help the... (read more)
Why _haven't_ they already switched? Presumably, these companies are full of people with some vague incentives that point at maximizing efficacy, but they're leaving a "clearly superior" product on the table. It may be that the answer is that this is some sort of systemic, widespread failure of decision-making, or a decision-making success under different criteria (lower tolerance for the risk of change, perhaps, than these same systems have now) rather than a reflection of some inadequacy of RT-LAMP, but "the folks with the expertise and incentive to get it right are all getting it wrong and leaving money on the table" sounds like a more complex explanation than "there are shortcomings to RT-LAMP that I haven't considered", and I'd like to see some further evidence in favor of it.
You may be familiar with the term "Technological Singularity" as used to describe what happens in the wake of the development of superintelligent AGI; this term is not merely impressive but refers to the belief that what follows such a development would be incredibly and unpredictably transformative, subject to new phenomena and patterns of which we may not yet be able to conceive.
I don't believe it would be smart to invest with such a scenario in mind; we have little reason to believe that how much pre-Singularity wealth one has would matter post-Singularity in such a way that it would be wise to include such a term in one's expected value and... (read more)
The example of the pile of sand sounds a lot like the Chinese Room thought experiment, because at some point, the function for translating between states of the "computer" and the mental states which it represents must begin to (subjectively, at least, but also with some sort of information-theoretic similarity) resemble a giant look-up table. Perhaps it would be accurate to say that a pile of sand with an associated translation function is somewhere on a continuum between an unambiguously conscious (if anything can be said to be conscious) mind (such as a natural human mind) and a Chinese Room. In such a case, the issue raised by this post is an extension of the Chinese Room problem, and may not require a separate answer, but does do the notable service of illustrating a continuum along which the Chinese Room lies, rather than a binary.
I'm not sure if this is a brilliantly ironic example of the lack of absolute applicability of these guidelines or just a happy accident.
Not entirely true; low sperm counts are associated with low male fertility in part because sperm carry enzymes which clear the way for other sperm - so a single sperm isn't going to get very far.
In addition to enjoying the content, I liked the illustrations, which I did not find necessary for understanding but which did break up the text nicely. I encourage you to continue using them.
This seems quite similar to the "Gish gallop" rhetorical technique.