retired_urologist

Isn't there already a good deal of experience regarding the attitudes/actions of the most intelligent entity known (in current times, humans) towards cryonically suspended potential sentient beings (frozen embryos)?

Eliezer: So if you say that I'm revealing insufficient virtue by walking this path instead of the path of a firefighter

I did not say that, nor did I intend that. Your post was about the etiology of your altruistic attitude, and I said it seemed to be hard-wired self-preservation.

@Eliezer:

None of the scenarios in Superhero Bias involve the hero saving his own life by saving the lives of the others. They instead involve the hero putting himself at risk for them. I don't see the analogy with FAI.

To what degree is this amenability to help others actually hard-wired self-preservation? I mean, if you (Eliezer) hold that superhuman AI inevitably is coming, and that most forms of it will destroy mankind, isn't the desire to save others from that fate the same as the desire to save yourself? Rewrite the scenario such that you save mankind with FAI but die in the process. That sounds more like altruism.

Main post: Everything I am, is surely my brain.

It would seem that, as far as causes go, everything about any of us is contained in the zygote, long preceding any sort of "brain". Indeed, it would seem to go far more basic than that, as discussed in the Quantum Mechanics series. These recent discussions about ethics, morality, concept of self, etc. seem to be effects, rather than causes, the results of external forces interacting with the original selection and sequence of a relative few chemicals. Who can say that the eventual outcome and expres... (read more)

I came across this post only today, because of the current comment in the "recent comments" column. Clearly, it was an exercise that drew an unusual amount of response. It further reinforces

my impression of much of the OB blog, posted in August, and denied by email.

@"Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive," said Shakespeare.

Hopefully, the FAI will know that the author was Sir Walter Scott.

Supporting Ben Goertzel's comment:

Michael Shermer revised his book, Why People Believe Weird Things, to contain a chapter called “Why Smart People Believe Weird Things”. In it, he quotes studies by Hudson, Getzels, and Jackson showing that “creativity and intelligence are relatively orthogonal (i.e., unrelated statistically) at high levels of intelligence. Intuitively, it seems like the more intelligent people are the more creative they will be. In fact, in almost any profession significantly affected by intelligence, once you are at a certain level ... (read more)

Aleksei:

Indeed, I did misunderstand that! No wonder I was so impressed that the actor's refined position in the debate. My gullibility is showing. However, the underlying reason for the question was the many, many references to SF over the past posts and comments, and I think I have a better understanding now. Vassar, I think, put it best for me.

@MV: Thanks, Michael.

@scott clark: George Lucas wasn't trying to teach anything more important than that Luke was a whiny brat, who was reckless, implusive, and lazy. That's the point of my question, scott. Why is George Lucas (or the other authors whose novels he adapted in the series) to be considered an appropriate (valuable?) teacher/observer?

Not having grown up on science fiction, but being an avid reader of this blog: what is it with the reverence shown to science fiction stories and movies among OB's readers? From whence does the authority to give insight on important ideas emanate? I understand that many readers were motivated toward their current important interests by early exposure to SF. I also realize that some of the authors were/are scientists in their own right, but are they on the level of those scientific greats who are quoted (and frequently dispatched) here regularly? If so, why... (read more)

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?

@Dynamically Linked: Eliezer did reevaluate, and this blog is his human enhancement project!

I suggested a similar opinion of the blog's role here 6 weeks ago, but EY subsequently denied it. Time will tell.

Does the unusual tenor of this post have anything to do with the upcoming Singularity Summit and its potential for fund-raising?

@EY: We are the cards we are dealt, and intelligence is the unfairest of all those cards. More unfair than wealth or health or home country, unfairer than your happiness set-point. People have difficulty accepting that life can be that unfair, it's not a happy thought. "Intelligence isn't as important as X" is one way of turning away from the unfairness, refusing to deal with it, thinking a happier thought instead. It's a temptation, both to those dealt poor cards, and to those dealt good ones. Just as downplaying the importance of money is ... (read more)

Bertrand Russell felt that such thought processes are native to humans:

What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires -- desires of which he himself is often unconscious. If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is expla... (read more)

@Carl Shulman:

Thanks Carl. Now I understand. See Teacher's Password.

Thank you, Carl Shulman, for correcting my misinformation. It's difficult for one to know which references are reliable, when one is not in the field.

@Carl Shulman: The largest hypothesized effects of the disease alleles would be only a small fraction of the Ashkenazim advantage: they just aren't frequent enough.

Dr. Bostrom cites this paper (so I considered it might be reliable) in his treatise on cognitive enhancement: "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" by Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, Henry Harpending. Speaking of the incidence of of t... (read more)

... if everyone was given the ability of todays top 2% regarding IQ. What would happen, implications, economic output, happiness and so on.

This doesn't seem outlandish. In my former field, advances in gene therapy have been able (in animal models) to improve the function of tissues. Observations such as: the association of autosomal recessive and low-penetrance dominant mutations in Ashkenazim with high intelligence. Without at least heterozygosity for the health disorders associated with the mutations, Ashkenazim are no more intelligent, in the aggregate,... (read more)

"I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs." -- Jonathan I. Katz

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. --Ernest Hemingway