I recently did two interviews with Nikola Danaylov, aka “Socrates”, who has so far done ~90 Singularity 1 on 1 video podcast interviews. Danaylov says he disagreed with me the most: My second interview with economist Robin Hanson was by far the most vigorous debate ever on Singularity 1 on 1. I have to say that I have rarely disagreed more with any of my podcast guests before. … I believe that it is ideas like Robin’s that may, and often do, have a direct impact on our future. … On the one hand, I really like Robin a lot: He is that most likeable fellow … who like me, would like to live forever and is in support of cryonics. In addition, Hanson is also clearly a very intelligent person with a diverse background and education in physics, philosophy, computer programming, artificial intelligence and economics. He’s got a great smile and, as you will see throughout the interview, is apparently very gracious to my verbal attacks on his ideas.
People used to be considered adults, competent to marry and own property and so on, at 16 years or less. The age of majority has been drifting upward as advancing technology requires more specialized skills; that it might continue to do so should not be shocking.
I'd love to post appropriately, but the software won't let me.
Your level of detail has been consistently far too low for me to tell what you are actually getting at. Good luck communicating with anybody else.I am done explaining every thought in such detail
@2f38900f331b0065d7d9cb4653aff0ec:disqus Negative externalities? You sure headed me off at the pass. I was assuming it was all about the welfare of the children, and all set to point out that placing them in orphanages entails considerably more suffering for them than having a welfare system that stops anybody starving in the first place.
Yes, punishing people has the externality of breaking up families and landing kids in orphanages. Criminalising things creates criminals. I don't see why you want MORE of that. I don't see why YOU would want more of that.And what are these externalities? I suppose someone has the bother of clearing way their little corpses, once they have starved. Once you have removed the welfare state.
It took me a while to get to the two interviews. Robin was amazingly polite and helpful, the questioner thought he was making objections, but were in fact complete non-sequiters. If I were interviewing Robin, I'd ask him this:
In our culture, nobody has to justify their existence. Their mere humanity is justification enough. But in a world of EMs, every EM *will* have to justify his/her/its existence. Even their coming to exist in the first place is something that happened for some sufficient reason. There will be limited (great, but still finite) capacity to run EMs, and the question will always be "why do you deserve CPU cycles over some other EM?" And if your answer is inadequate, you won't get those cycles! You will be competing for those cycles not only with the actual EMs, but with any possible clones/hybrids of those EMs. When cycles become available, it would be crazy to allocate them to the less deserving, because that's the same as withholding them from the more deserving. You will have to argue: What I will do with those cycles, if allocated to me, will be more valuable (on some future notion of value, which includes strictly moral notions) than any other EM. And that will be a hard argument to win, given that you will be competing with EM-Einstein-clones, EM-Shakespeare-clones, EM-sushi-workaholic-artist-clones and probably worse. People like the readers of this blog have no hope of winning such arguments, which is to say, there is no room in the future for people like us. Since we like people like us, and we root for people like us, this helps explain why a future like the one Robin outlines seems so demoralizing. In fact, we may find it demoralizing while acknowledging that objectively, it's a better place than the present.
"So you are saving children from the fire of starvation to put them in the frying pan of state orphanages?"
Incentive: have children only when you can afford it.
Purpose: prevent negative externalities from people having children they can't afford.
How many children are in orphanages or foster homes because their parents were targetted for drug possession?
It doesn't have to be the state either.
In theory you could give full citizenship status to kids age 8+ or so. They could get jobs, have their own apartments, freely associate, buy cheap euthanasia drugs...
It's all very utopian and politically infeasible.
The sad truth is, if parents harm their kids, and it can be framed as passive rather than active, the suffering is mandatory and people just don't give a shit.
The very nature of childhood is incompatible with liberty, and none of it is voluntary.
Then again, it's not like they can defend themselves or anything, so I guess it's natural.
In The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism there is a chapter on progressive millennialists. A subset of these progressive millennialists are technological millennialists, which Nikola Danaylov appears to a member of. Danaylov's own criticisms amount to emotionalist "yay blue team, boo red team." Danaylov states, "no social science could ever give justification for issues which are profoundly ethical and political in nature". But we all know what ethics and politics Danaylov wants to engage in; after all he has just listed what he expects of Robin's "dangerous" and "extremist" thoughts. Exactly how does Danaylov expect to do analysis of these ethical and political issues, if his mind is already captured by the blue flag? Another question: Why is progressive millennialism considered ok, but Robin Hanson's views considered "dangerous"? Shouldn't the bloodbath of the 20th century be strong evidence that we should be extremely skeptical of Danaylov's ideas, as well as Robin's?
"I say that there is no social science that, in between the lines of its economic reasoning, can logically or reasonably suggest details such as [...] that some should be run 1,000 times faster than others, while at the same time giving them 1,000 times more voting power; that emulations who can’t pay for their storage fees should be either restored from previous back-ups or be outright deleted (isn’t this like saying that if you fail to pay your rent you should be shot dead?!)
Sounds more like he's saying that we should try and avoid such a scenario. Not that it's unethical and therefore impossible. That it's unethical, full stop.
EDIT: I haven't heard the full interview, mind, just this post.
In a previous post discussing Yudkowsky's disagreement with Hanson, Hanson wrote: " ...concepts and maps which have not been vetted or honed in dealing with real problems, seems to me a mistake."
Cool, so give up on the idea of mind uploading and many-worlds? I bet not.
Just to be clear, he does say, " I argue for preferring to rely on abstractions, including categories and similarity maps, that have been found useful by a substantial intellectual community working on related problems." Ok, so how is many-worlds and Em's not anything other than an abstraction of an abstraction, totally useless other than as intellectual masturbation?
Did you read what I actually wrote? Robin's "fantasy world" is completely irrelevant to the issue at hand, which concerns Danaylov's reasons for rejecting Robin's proposal rather than the plausibility of the proposal itself.
During the interview, Danaylov repeatedly mentions that he finds Robin's predictions "pessimistic" and "depressing". He also claims that he's rarely disagreed more with any of his past guests to his podcast. Given what we know about wishful thinking, self-deception and other biases, it would be surprising if Danaylov's skepticism wasn't at least partly rooted in the (evidentially irrelevant) fact that he dislikes Robin's predictions so much.
I think it is best not to enter into Robin's fantasy world - where brain emulations beat engineered intelligence. Much follows from that premise, but the main thing to do with it is to point out that it's a pretty tall story.
You haven't even tried to engage with Robin's main point, which is that Danaylov's skepticism about social science is motivated by a strong desire to resist its predictions, only when such predictions are in tension with the ethical principles Danaylov holds dear.
Oh, of course, sorry. I thought you were saying people under 70 used to be considered children, which seemed ... improbable. Thanks for explaining!
People used to be considered adults, competent to marry and own property and so on, at 16 years or less. The age of majority has been drifting upward as advancing technology requires more specialized skills; that it might continue to do so should not be shocking.
@2f38900f331b0065d7d9cb4653aff0ec:disqus
I'd love to post appropriately, but the software won't let me.
Your level of detail has been consistently far too low for me to tell what you are actually getting at. Good luck communicating with anybody else.I am done explaining every thought in such detail
If you make someone else suffer, that's a negative externality.
This is true if that person is your child.
This is my last response to you; I am done explaining every thought in such detail and you're thoughtlessly posting all over the place.
Goodbye.
@2f38900f331b0065d7d9cb4653aff0ec:disqus Negative externalities? You sure headed me off at the pass. I was assuming it was all about the welfare of the children, and all set to point out that placing them in orphanages entails considerably more suffering for them than having a welfare system that stops anybody starving in the first place.
Yes, punishing people has the externality of breaking up families and landing kids in orphanages. Criminalising things creates criminals. I don't see why you want MORE of that. I don't see why YOU would want more of that.And what are these externalities? I suppose someone has the bother of clearing way their little corpses, once they have starved. Once you have removed the welfare state.
It took me a while to get to the two interviews. Robin was amazingly polite and helpful, the questioner thought he was making objections, but were in fact complete non-sequiters. If I were interviewing Robin, I'd ask him this:
In our culture, nobody has to justify their existence. Their mere humanity is justification enough. But in a world of EMs, every EM *will* have to justify his/her/its existence. Even their coming to exist in the first place is something that happened for some sufficient reason. There will be limited (great, but still finite) capacity to run EMs, and the question will always be "why do you deserve CPU cycles over some other EM?" And if your answer is inadequate, you won't get those cycles! You will be competing for those cycles not only with the actual EMs, but with any possible clones/hybrids of those EMs. When cycles become available, it would be crazy to allocate them to the less deserving, because that's the same as withholding them from the more deserving. You will have to argue: What I will do with those cycles, if allocated to me, will be more valuable (on some future notion of value, which includes strictly moral notions) than any other EM. And that will be a hard argument to win, given that you will be competing with EM-Einstein-clones, EM-Shakespeare-clones, EM-sushi-workaholic-artist-clones and probably worse. People like the readers of this blog have no hope of winning such arguments, which is to say, there is no room in the future for people like us. Since we like people like us, and we root for people like us, this helps explain why a future like the one Robin outlines seems so demoralizing. In fact, we may find it demoralizing while acknowledging that objectively, it's a better place than the present.
"So you are saving children from the fire of starvation to put them in the frying pan of state orphanages?"
Incentive: have children only when you can afford it.
Purpose: prevent negative externalities from people having children they can't afford.
How many children are in orphanages or foster homes because their parents were targetted for drug possession?
It doesn't have to be the state either.
In theory you could give full citizenship status to kids age 8+ or so. They could get jobs, have their own apartments, freely associate, buy cheap euthanasia drugs...
It's all very utopian and politically infeasible.
The sad truth is, if parents harm their kids, and it can be framed as passive rather than active, the suffering is mandatory and people just don't give a shit.
The very nature of childhood is incompatible with liberty, and none of it is voluntary.
Then again, it's not like they can defend themselves or anything, so I guess it's natural.
@2f38900f331b0065d7d9cb4653aff0ec:disqus So you are saving children from the fire of starvation to put them in the frying pan of state orphanages?
In The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism there is a chapter on progressive millennialists. A subset of these progressive millennialists are technological millennialists, which Nikola Danaylov appears to a member of. Danaylov's own criticisms amount to emotionalist "yay blue team, boo red team." Danaylov states, "no social science could ever give justification for issues which are profoundly ethical and political in nature". But we all know what ethics and politics Danaylov wants to engage in; after all he has just listed what he expects of Robin's "dangerous" and "extremist" thoughts. Exactly how does Danaylov expect to do analysis of these ethical and political issues, if his mind is already captured by the blue flag? Another question: Why is progressive millennialism considered ok, but Robin Hanson's views considered "dangerous"? Shouldn't the bloodbath of the 20th century be strong evidence that we should be extremely skeptical of Danaylov's ideas, as well as Robin's?
"Organic human childhood will probably extend (as it did in the past) from 18 years to 72 years."
Sorry, when in the past was this true?
I was under the impression that Robin considered it desirable as well as probable?
"I say that there is no social science that, in between the lines of its economic reasoning, can logically or reasonably suggest details such as [...] that some should be run 1,000 times faster than others, while at the same time giving them 1,000 times more voting power; that emulations who can’t pay for their storage fees should be either restored from previous back-ups or be outright deleted (isn’t this like saying that if you fail to pay your rent you should be shot dead?!)
Sounds more like he's saying that we should try and avoid such a scenario. Not that it's unethical and therefore impossible. That it's unethical, full stop.
EDIT: I haven't heard the full interview, mind, just this post.
In a previous post discussing Yudkowsky's disagreement with Hanson, Hanson wrote: " ...concepts and maps which have not been vetted or honed in dealing with real problems, seems to me a mistake."
Cool, so give up on the idea of mind uploading and many-worlds? I bet not.
Just to be clear, he does say, " I argue for preferring to rely on abstractions, including categories and similarity maps, that have been found useful by a substantial intellectual community working on related problems." Ok, so how is many-worlds and Em's not anything other than an abstraction of an abstraction, totally useless other than as intellectual masturbation?
Did you read what I actually wrote? Robin's "fantasy world" is completely irrelevant to the issue at hand, which concerns Danaylov's reasons for rejecting Robin's proposal rather than the plausibility of the proposal itself.
During the interview, Danaylov repeatedly mentions that he finds Robin's predictions "pessimistic" and "depressing". He also claims that he's rarely disagreed more with any of his past guests to his podcast. Given what we know about wishful thinking, self-deception and other biases, it would be surprising if Danaylov's skepticism wasn't at least partly rooted in the (evidentially irrelevant) fact that he dislikes Robin's predictions so much.
I think it is best not to enter into Robin's fantasy world - where brain emulations beat engineered intelligence. Much follows from that premise, but the main thing to do with it is to point out that it's a pretty tall story.
You haven't even tried to engage with Robin's main point, which is that Danaylov's skepticism about social science is motivated by a strong desire to resist its predictions, only when such predictions are in tension with the ethical principles Danaylov holds dear.