Human choice: why it exists, despite being inside of physics. Intelligence is the decision-making process. This is how our actions are determined. The experience of this decision-making process is called alternately "choice" and "free will". The causal relationship of our environments to our actions extends from observation, through our mental state and decision-making process, to our actions. If I use a different decision-making process, I make different decisions. This is still entirely inside of physics, but it hasn't been explained away. It can even be absolutely deterministic, when viewed from a third-person perspective. Saying we don't have "choice" is about as helpful as anything in the debate about free will

You can predict experiences quite reliably in aggregate. You can determine the percentages of you which will have experience A or B. The only uncertainty is which aspect of the amplitude flow you'll feel like you're in.

The lookup algorithms in question are not processing the meaning of the inputs and generating a response as needed. The lookup algorithms simply string-match the conversational history to the list of inputs and output the next line in the conversation.

An algorithmic reasoning system, on the other hand, would seem to be something that actually reasons about the meaning of what's been said, in the sense of logically processing the input as opposed to string-matching it.

Am I the only one who hears Eliezer's "Never ever never for ever" voiced roughly like HJPEV?

There's a character in Worm that has this power. People don't think of her as dead, but her power allows her to be immediately forgotten, and exude a SEP field while it's active. Some people are immune to it, but it's kinda awesome.

First off, that book looks wonderful. It looks, just from the description, like it goes deeper into Math, rather than covering the math of other fields. As delightful as Math can be, I'd be much more interested in having a primer on the math of all sorts of other things.

So Skilling picked a bad incentive structure. Does everyone who picks a bad incentive structure fancy himself an evolution conjurer?

If one thinks of evolution as the process of deriving "better" results through a selection criteria and a change process, then yes, Skilling was conjuring evolution, though he did not realize it. He established a selection criteria (individual performance numbers) and the employees themselves provided the change process. As he repeatedly selected against the weakest performers (according to his insufficiently rational criteria), the employees changed through what they found the easiest way to achieve "better performance". The company evolved as the employees changed their behavior.