Tendales posted:

Even if you accept the premise that dust and torture can be measured on the same scale of suffering, the logic STILL doesn't hold.

Compare: 6 billion people all get a speck of dust in the eye worth 1 Sufferbuck each, or 1 person gets an atomic wedgie worth 6 Billion Sufferbucks. Even if you accept the utilitarian premise, they're STILL not equal! Just keep following the dumbass logic. It takes a person 1 Chilltime to recover from 1 Sufferbuck of trauma. That means 1 Chilltime from now, all 6 billion people will be at 0 Sufferbucks. On the other hand, in 1 Chilltime, the Bayesian Martyr still has 6 billion minus 1 Sufferbucks. So even in Yudkowsky's own bizarro worldview, he's an rear end in a top hat.

Improbable Lobster posted:

My biggest question is who cares if cyber-you gets tortured? If you're just a simulation ripe for the torturing then it doesn't matter how much money cyber-you donates because cyber-you is fake and physical you can't be tortured by the AI.

Saint Drogo posted:

And in the slowed time of this slowed country, here and now as in the darkness-before-dawn prior to the Age of Reason, the son of a sufficiently powerful noble would simply take for granted that he was above the law, at least when it came to some peasant girl. There were places in Muggle-land where it was still the same way, countries where that sort of nobility still existed and still thought like that, or even grimmer lands where it wasn't just the nobility. It was like that in every place and time that didn't descend directly from the Enlightenment.

Seriously, not making this up posted:

There had been ten thousand societies over the history of the world where this conversation could have taken place. Even in Muggle-land it was probably still happening, somewhere in Saudi Arabia or the darkness of the Congo. It happened in every place and time that didn't descend directly from the Enlightenment.

LaughMyselfTo posted:

"You" can't rationally disprove solipsism.

Lottery of Babylon posted:

This is similar to Lesswrong's Pascal's Mugging thought experiment. The way he presents it is borderline unreadable because he spends pages and pages talking about up arrow notation and Kolmogorov and Solomonoff, but here's the short version: A man comes up to you and says "Give me $5 or I'll use magic wizard matrix powers to torture a really big number of people." If you go by the linearly-add-utility-functions-multiplied-by-probabilities thing that Yudkowsky always asserts is obviously correct, then the small chance that the man is really a wizard can be made up for by threatening arbitrarily large numbers of people, so logic seems to dictate that you should give him money.

Darth Walrus posted:

I was expecting to be the youngest person there, but it turned out that my age wasn't unusual—there were several accomplished individuals who were younger. This was the point at which I realized that my child prodigy license had officially completely expired.

Now, admittedly, this was a closed conference run by people clueful enough to think "Let's invite Eliezer Yudkowsky" even though I'm not a CEO. So this was an incredibly cherry-picked sample. Even so...

Even so, these people of the Power Elite were visibly much smarter than average mortals.

Jazu posted:

It's kind of like Cow Tools, it sounds like it should make more sense than it does.

Jonny Angel posted:

I remember one bit from his Babykillers story that had me laughing really hard was when the Babykillers send the humans a poem trying to convince them to kill their own babies. The human realize that to the Babykillers, this piece of poo poo poem is probably one of their greatest cultural achievements. One of the human crew members expresses it like, "This is their Shakespeare, or their Fate/Stay Night!"

Now, there's a chance that it was a deliberate joke on Yudowsky's part, this idea of "Hah, isn't this future culture of humanity so bizarre, that they compare those two?"

At the same time, looking at the pieces of poo poo that he does list as favorite works of media, I'm inclined to believe he puts Fate/Stay Night up there too. Which is hilarious.

quote:

Think of the truly great stories, the ones that have become legendary for being the very best of the best of their genre: The Iliiad, Romeo and Juliet, The Godfather, Watchmen, Planescape: Torment, the second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or that ending in Tsukihime.

ArchangeI posted:

legalized rape (again, an oxymoron like non-voluntary suicide, i.e. murder)

ol qwerty bastard posted:

Who are they even fooling, other than themselves?

Wales Grey posted:

I dunno, I'd be pretty inclined to let this AI loose onto the internet.

oscarthewilde posted:

(sorry Aristotle, but a 1 kg. of feathers don't fall at the same rate as 1 kg. of iron!)

SolTerrasa posted:

They accelerate at the same rate towards an infinite plane of uniform density in a vacuum, but they don't fall at the same rate on Earth in an atmosphere. Assume a spherical cow, and all that.

potatocubed posted:

More likely than not, most folks who die today didn't have to die! Yes, I am skeptical of most medicine because on average it seems folks who get more medicine aren't healthier. But I'll heartily endorse one medical procedure: cryonics, i.e., freezing folks in liquid nitrogen when the rest of medicine gives up on them.

Slate Action posted:

If you are alive and you get frozen, you die. If your body is frozen it sustains a catastrophic amount of damage down to the cellular level. It would probably be easier to just clone someone in the future rather than try to revive them from a frozen state.

Ktb posted:

Or is it just because it sounds cool and future sciencey?

chrisoya posted:

Or I guess you could just say "I will not engage in acausal trade with things that will torture simulations of me, what the gently caress" and the AI will sigh and let you go, because there's no point in torturing you. You have to say it out loud in case the simulation the AI's monitoring has privacy protections that stop it peering inside your thoughts and it's just monitoring the air around you for speech and staring creepily at you from all possible angles.

Aerial Tollhouse posted:

Looking at that page led me more of his fiction writing advice.

Dr Pepper posted:

Yes that's right, in order to be a good Philosopher you must be a computer programmer.

The Iron Rose posted:

Honestly I don't see how the possibility of an AI torturing me in the future would make me inclined to support said AI. Really, it seems to me like any decent person should/would oppose it at all costs...

Don Gato posted:

The more I read about Roko's Basilisk, the more it sounds like someone's Matrix fanfiction gone wrong. It makes about as much sense under close observation

pentyne posted:

Huh, that name seems familiar.

pentyne posted:

'looks like a child but is really 600 years anime love interest for a harem anime'

pentyne posted:

http://negima.wikia.com/wiki/Evangeline_A.K._McDowell


Fan wikis are nothing if not obsessively detailed.

SolTerrasa posted:

I was once at a dinner party, trying to explain to a man what I did for a living, when he said: "I don't believe Artificial Intelligence is possible because only God can make a soul."

At this point I must have been divinely inspired, because I instantly responded: "You mean if I can make an Artificial Intelligence, it proves your religion is false?"

He said, "What?"

I said, "Well, if your religion predicts that I can't possibly make an Artificial Intelligence, then, if I make an Artificial Intelligence, it means your religion is false. Either your religion allows that it might be possible for me to build an AI; or, if I build an AI, that disproves your religion."

There was a pause, as the one realized he had just made his hypothesis vulnerable to falsification, and then he said, "Well, I didn't mean that you couldn't make an intelligence, just that it couldn't be emotional in the same way we are."

I said, "So if I make an Artificial Intelligence that, without being deliberately preprogrammed with any sort of script, starts talking about an emotional life that sounds like ours, that means your religion is wrong."

He said, "Well, um, I guess we may have to agree to disagree on this."

Dr Pepper posted:

Calling it a fanfic implies that the author [...] at least has some vague understanding of its themes.

ungulateman posted:

C'mon. Lower your standards and live a little. If you've never read a fanfic that blatantly straddles the line between embarrassing and enjoyable, you haven't lived.

Cardiovorax posted:

Until they are assimilated, anyway. A lot of ex-Borg say that being part of the Collective is actually a very pleasant, communal experience. They'd just prefer to have been asked first. I suppose you could make a utilitarian argument out of that - the minor displeasure of being forcibly included is minor compared to the following lifetime of happiness.

quote:

“Candy bars and other sweets taste better than anything that could have occurred naturally,” she said, staring gently at him through the pad. “Humans applied their intelligence to pushing the pleasure buttons on their tongues by making very tasty sugary and fatty foods.

Qwertycoatl posted:

It's possible that he's not actually supposed to be intelligent or nice and it's just the pony AI feeding him what he wants to hear. But that's probably giving this story too much credit.

SerialKilldeer posted:

What if the Basilisk will be a pony?

Djeser posted:

Djeser posted:

The world is just pixels

Djeser posted:

Unlike the physical universe, Equestrian light strikes your eye to satisfy your values through friendship and ponies.

Cardiovorax posted:

It makes a bit of sense when you think about it as an ontological statement. Basically the AI is telling him that the real world is naturalistic, while the simulation is teleological. Photons just exist. Light in the simulation exists for your benefit. That the benefit is arbitrarily friendship and ponies is incidental.

ungulateman posted:

I know, I know way too much about MLP fanfic and should kill my are self...

Moatman posted:

Okay, post about Fun Theory stuff may take a while. It's making me irrationally angry.
e: This was linked from the first fun theory post. Emphasis Yud's

loving lol.

Besesoth posted:

friendly or hostile (or indifferent, although LW doesn't seem to admit to that possibility, or for that matter anything other than Pure Friendly and Pure Hostile)

Steampunk iPhone posted: