November 2009
176 posts
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You Said You Wanted Hugs
Why Friendly AI research is critical: even if you give an AI nice sounding directives, it can be hard to know how far such an alien mind will take something. We take for granted all the other beliefs going around in our heads, such as that a hug shouldn’t be that strong, partly because we aren’t powerful enough to take things that far. The often discussed situation is that of just directing...
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“Your mind is huge, composed of many many parts. It is even composed of two...”
– Robin Hanson, Philosophy Kills
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Porn causes tsunamis and earthquakes
Powerful stuff, that porn. The Indonesian Minister of Communication and Information (who must be very smart to have a title like that) has determined that recent natural disasters in his country are a consequence of the ubiquity of pornographic DVDs. His logic is something like this: 1) it is a fact that one can easily buy porn in local markets, and 2) it is a fact that the Padang earthquake...
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“Our prehistoric ancestors spent much of their waking hours foraging for and...”
– How Concepts Affect Consumption by Dan Ariely and Michael I. Norton
(via wildcat2030)
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“We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able...”
– Brian Eno, “The death of uncool” Prospect Magazine (via buyhercandy, somethingchanged, poetbabble, wildcat2030)
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“Numerical arithmetic should look to children like a simpler and faster way of...”
– John Holt, How Children Fail, p. 101
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“Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them...”
– Arthur Schopenhauer
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“No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians...”
– Thomas Sowell
(via jamreilly)
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“When I was young, I thought the act of getting older meant, year by year,...”
– John C. Wright, Fugitives of Chaos
“On some pitch black mornings, hearing what I knew was a cold wind howling...”
– John Holt, Freedom and Beyond, p. 119
“…this is just words. If they upset you, go lie down in a dark room for...”
– Charlie Stross
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“All of the complexity and structure we see in the world around us will...”
– Dr Gordon McCabe, The future of the universe
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“There’s no scientific reason to believe that we have free will....”
– Mark Chu-Carroll
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“Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.”
– William Blake
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WatchDeception and Self-Deception, Robert Trivers at the University of Regina.
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“Humans are animals, so every hipster will try Cannibalism. Perhaps we’ll...”
– From a discussion of the future of in-vitro meat.
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“…you have to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what you...”
– Paul Graham, How to Do What You Love
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“Yes, I want to know,” said Brennan.
“Know what, exactly?”...”
– Eliezer Yudkowsky, Initiation ceremony
“A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put...”
– Existence and Its Contrary
Willard Van Orman Quine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(via wildcat2030)
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“Education is learning what you didn’t even know you didn’t know.”
– Daniel J. Boorstin, A Case of Hypochondria, Newsweek (1970-07-06) (via blogut, maxmorphing)