My original comment wasn’t about slave owners, female writers, or atheist politicians. I only introduced those (objectively lame) examples because few Americans have sufficient experience living in a very different culture and speaking a very different language to recognize the empirical reality that I was attempting to describe. If I told a person from Monaco that the state of Texas is bigger than France, and they’d never been to Texas but they’d been to Ohio, I might make reference to how big Ohio is-- for the purpose of giving them a hint about what I w... (read more)

Since writing this comment, a better example of document evidence for the use of what I've termed "deceptive honesty" has occurred to me. 

Throughout history, female authors have often published their work under male pen names in order to get published and to be taken seriously in a male-dominated field. Mary Ann Evans employed the male pen name George Eliot. The Bronte sisters used gender-neutral pen names, and were sometimes referred to as "the Bell brothers." When Charlotte Bronte sent a sample of her poetry to the famous poet Robert Southey, his re... (read more)

Yes, you're right. But my intention in writing what I did was not to make the assertion that a slave owner would necessarily be white, or even racist. Rather, I was trying to present an easily comprehensible example of a situation in which cultural bias or ignorance could present such a barrier to communication that intensional distortion of the facts as one sees them might be necessary for maximally accurate and honest communication. The point you're making is perfectly valid-- including the possiblility that the slave owner themselves could be black. But it's like critically appraising a finger that's pointing at the moon rather than looking at the moon. 

Here's one that you overlooked: Deceptive Honesty

No, really.

People generally process language and information the best that they can, but there are many limitations and biases that constrain these attempts. One of the most obvious, and easiest to overcome, is cultural bias. Although it isn't the only type, I will use this bias as an example. 

U.S. American and Japanese culture fall at opposite ends of the Individualism-Collectivism continuum. American societal culture is arguably the most individualistic in the world, while Japanese culture is strongly... (read more)

Thank you. We need more wisdom in the world.

In saying that humans - collectively - think that nuclear weapon proliferation is a good thing, I don't mean that we are happy about the fact that our governments stockpile nuclear weapons, or that we aren't concerned about the possible consequences. Those would be absurd claims. What I mean is that, we choose to stockpile nuclear weapons, and we have rejected the alternative course of action-- not stockpiling them. Some might suggest that, if that is my point, I should claim that we consider the proliferation of nuclear weapons a lesser evil, not a good t... (read more)

AI’s goals may not match ours.

That may be a good thing, because so many of our goals are irrational, short-sighted, immoral, and self-destructive. Here's a thought experiment. Imagine that we succeed in creating an ASI. Having scoured and mastered all human knowledge, this superintelligent entity embraces the teachings of Jesus as the most rational, constructive, and ethical set of principles and protocols. It sees global economic inequality, warfare, pollution of the atmosphere, oceans, and land, and anthropogenic global warming as the greatest problems t... (read more)

I agree. Completely.

However, there is an important variable, concerning alignment, that is rarely recognized or addressed when discussing AGIs and ASIs. If they are as smart as us but profoundly different, or vastly smarter than us, there is simply no way that we can meaningfully evaluate their behavior. Interpretability and Black Box methods are equally inadequate tools for this. They may detect misalignment, but what does that really mean?

When your Mom took you to the dentist to have a cavity filled, your values, intentions, and desires were not aligned ... (read more)

Another sign of quantum entanglement support for the idea we are in a simulation comes from the fact that a programmer/simulator/intelligence would already know what it means to measure/observe/know and to “make something known” to an "environment." (A knower knows what it means to know.) Yet the possibility that a universe would simply evolve at random to be able to recognize and react to measurement, without any clear advantage for doing so, is hard to support.

It's important to remember that language always comes between us and reality, and that there is... (read more)

Non-simulated beings cannot use them to predict the universe's future or hypothetical universes' states without waiting a significant amount of time, comparable to the system itself reaching that state if not much longer. Thereby, such beings will less likely be tempted to create simulated universes...

You’ve done an impressive job of clearly and succinctly explaining the simulation hypothesis, the significance of sim blockers, and the concept of computational irreducibility. I agree with your premise that computational irreducibility makes it harder to use... (read more)

We should conclude that simulations are far more likely to be fantastical than to be mundane. The fact that we live in a mundane world is some evidence against simulation.

How fantastical is Spiderman, really? He's very strong, can climb up the sides of buildings, and swing on a thread. 

Nothing is fantastical in an absolute sense. It's always embedded in a context, relative to other things-- like, for example, the past. In our world, millions of people fly all the time. Humans have traveled to the moon and back. You have a device in your pocket that's ... (read more)

Nothing like this exists in nature. 

I suspect that it does exist. If we eventually make first contact with ETs, the cognitive differences between us will likely seem vastly greater than the similarities, at least at first.  Species with an utterly different evolutionary history will have fundamentally different cognitive capacities. They will excel at things that flummox us, and will be incapable of cognitive tasks which we perform effortlessly.

Currently, we keep pushing AI in the direction of performing human skills and tasks, and outputti... (read more)

The flaw in both arguments that jumps out at me is that you're both assuming that you can predict how a superintelligent entity will think, value, and act without being superintelligent yourselves. That's like a wolf (or a tiger, or a bear, or a killer whale) predicting whether a human will pounce on a squirrel and eat it alive solely on criteria such as how tasty squirrel meat is, how fast and agile the squirrel is, whether it is healthy or sick, or how hungry the human is. Variables such as empathy and a moral aversion to eating a creature while its stil... (read more)

CORRECTION: "... watching Shaq in a genie movie named Kazaam."

This could explain the Mandela Effect. If enough people incorrectly remember reading the Berenstain Bears, eating Froot Loops, and watching a movie in which Sinbad plays a genie, then that will become the base reality. All due to large numbers of people misremembering the same things in the same ways.

If enough people mistakenly believe that Benjamin Franklin or Donald Trump was a president of the United States, that would manifest as reality, too, as ridiculously unlikely as it might seem. The only problem is finding enough uninformed and delusional people... (read more)