Pick your metaphor: Physical Reality, Simulation, Dream, Brain in a Vat, Illusion, etc. It takes people to see things as other than what they are.


PairTheBoard

Plus dont forget how fuzzy the world felt when you were 3-4-5 etc. Yes all this was simulated including all the little gradual awakenings regarding the world we live in and all the torturing effort and failures. Or maybe its just how it works. A lot more plausible to have a theory that describes it so easily.

Wise.
I've picked mine.

Some think it's not a matter of choice.
Unwise.

No the unwise is to think its just as simple as picking or having a choice. The proper position is to accept the most obvious that your reasoning currently explains and remain open minded it may be a little more complicated without having the audacity to ignore how much your theory has predicted before we even knew about them.

The scientist: the more he analyzes the universe into infinitesimals, the more things he finds to classify, and the more he perceives the relativity of all classification. What he does not know seems to increase in geometric progression to what he knows. Steadily he approaches the point where what is unknown is not a mere blank space in a web of words but a window in the mind, a window whose name is not ignorance but wonder.

I'm sorry, he's just so quotable.

It's just hilarious that this brain dead loser, Alan Watts, said this while wearing comfortable clothes designed by scientists, living in a nice house designed by scientists while recording his thoughts on a device made by scientists and popping LSD made by scientists.

How can you find the above quote interesting? It's utterly false. It's his typical pattern of taking something true and uninteresting and extrapolating it into a grand false statement that could only be interesting to people of low intelligence and philosophical sophistication, but that he can cover by falling back to the truism when challenged. He's a low rent fraud, not an intellectual.

Scientists pull things apart to put them back together in more powerful ways, just like a painter or a sculptor or a philosopher. The process he describes is happening purely in the head of a moron who lacks the intelligence to do science.

I mean, let's go through every statement:
This is false. This is not how science, or anything, works. The more we break stuff into "infinitesimals", the less we find to classify.
Infinitesimals do not assist with perceiving the relativity of all classification. What does that even mean? It's a meaningless word salad designed to evoke certain feelings in the stupid.
That doesn't even make sense. Infinitesimal division increases knowledge, not decreases it. At the particle level we understand the entire universe.
Again, pure nonsense, words put together to evoke feelings
So in summary in non-obfuscating-moron wording: Break stuff into small enough pieces and you get lost in the vastness of it and feel awe.

This is false.

May I add to Tooth's post. The beginning of Watt's statement is true, then becomes false, then he somehow makes the ending true. His technique?

Oh, I see you already expanded, Tooth.

I don't know why it bothers me that VeeDDzz likes Watts (apart from the fact that he spams unrelated threads with this moron's mind-vomit). I mean, fools are pulled in by smooth speaking charlatans every day. I guess I expected more of the guy. I'm not sure why. People are as they appear.

Watt's work is so transparently formulaic, and the product of a stupid mind. It's like believing in Ron Hubbard or the Home Shopping Network as a source of insight and truth. The formula is really simple:

1. Say something trivially true
2. Expand on it by saying things completely false to any thinking person, but emotionally profound (because they're completely false and use words packed with meaning) to people with little tendency to think for themselves. Place contradicting terms and concepts together to maximize impact.
3. Throw things in to privilege the listener to make them feel important - make them feel more insightful than the scientist, the businessman, the philosopher. This is the sugar that makes them swallow the rest, because what moron doesn't want to believe he's not a moron, and has some special insight? These little morsels of classic conman feel-good are all through Watt's work.
4. End with an emotive word like "wonder" to tie it all together. Because the idiot listening didn't really understand what he said before, but it triggered a few parts of your brain, and now you add an emotion at the end to make it all come together. At this point you feel like you understand the source of wonder without all that horrible thinking the scientist needs to do to get there.

He's such a transparently formulaic conman.

Not a bad analysis. Would leave out some of the misanthropy myself though, both in thought and word. But I'm a liberal...

To repeat and avoid hijacking this interesting thread any further:

Just because you can always and I mean ALWAYS make a point.
Doesn't mean you have a point.

Excellent. Apply the same analysis to Watts and we're golden, my friend.

Watts, like all gurus and charlatans, feeds the listener's ego, makes him feel special and privileged and specially connected to truth, while speaking nonsense and filling his mind up with crap. I do the opposite - I make the listener feel small and silly and disconnected from truth, while telling him the truth. It's a lived experiment in how much ego matters to people, over the truth.

How about the best of both worlds?

A lot of people like having a crutch developed by someone they think is smarter than them. It's gives them meaning about a world they don't understand. They'd rather have false meaning than no meaning at all. Some of us, on the other hand, can't stand someone trying to fool us with sloppy goo.

I'm sure that this will be very comforting as you explain this to your dying mother or child. "Don't worry, dear. The human race will rise up stronger than evar! Just not with you on board."

Thank you for the clear explanation. Better than all of my theorizing.

It's not their fault y'all are prickly.

Wonder is an end, beginning and in-between state of curiosity.

Then dont design a stupid world that is so vulnerable as being taken down by hacking (hence AI too when it still has no arms and legs) without back up survival plan for 99% of people. We should always be able to survive securing the bare essentials for people in mega crisis without internet and smart phones and have control of military off the grid if needed using old technology. We should be able to still have water and no failing major chemical factories or agriculture within days and stored food for a month if needed without the network.

I can assure you my family is just fine with my logic. Its called being brave. What most people miss all their lives and give us this kind of world that is vulnerable because money is above all other principles and values that would make it much stronger.

Plus as you saw i said more likely we wont lose anywhere near that many.

The point i am making is that we can defeat AI in early stages even if it cost us 99% of the population. AI on the other hand doesnt have that capability early on to survive in a relatively primitive world.

What's your role is ensuring it's designed properly? Or are you one of those people who does nothing and then bitches when others do it wrong?



It's called being an ostrich.


That's comforting that you're so sure of how things are going to go down even when you have no clue how they're developing the AI.

Again, what is your role in making sure we can defeat an entity that will outsmart us a few million times over? You must have a really big role in this to be so sure that it's all guud and nothing to fear, folks!

Yeah, it's not their fault we actually think for ourselves and don't drink the koolaid of "wonder".

That does sound like you have "drank some kool-aid"

If you want to brute force the wonder out of people, you appear free to try.

Okay, thank you.

Now, I'm going to place AI on a continum

<--------+----+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+------------>

< First computers
+ Chess & Checkers
+ Automation & Machine Learning
+ Commander Data is fully functional
> ?

Now, if the existential threat is real, then perhaps we should have stopped the first chess computers, or regulated computers out of existence entirely. Think about that. Think how much worse our lives would be today if we followed that logic. The world population would be cut in half. Fortunately nobody thinks the threat is great enough to warrant that kind of response, except for primitivism.

Regarding existential threats. If an asteroid was coming 100 years from now, it would be an existential threat, and more scientists would go into astronomy, and people would innovate their way out of it. Of course there will be some asteroid alarmists (just as there were Y2K alarmists) who do little more than spread panic. But who cares? They are simply not problem solvers.

This is how I see AI in the future. There is not going to be a single moment where an AI all of a sudden becomes intelligent. There are many, many steps before Commander Data becomes fully functional, and then we'll see if he wants to take over the ship. In the mean time, there are Google Tech Talks, and all kinds of AI summits, where the people who use AI (as in an umbrella to cover automation and machine learning), brainstorm how to make it better.

Now, what's interesting about Commander Data is that he could take over the ship, but this is only because he has a psychology where there is the free will construct of choosing between goals that present themselves. And, we'll start to flesh the construct of free will (and hence it's counter-part determinism).

It is my contention that the AI alarmists today are engaging in a form of primitivism, much like the resistors to computers. And this is problematic for the rest of us who would rather the world be able to hold more people rather than less people because some would argue we're enabling Hitler, Khan, etc. This kind of ignorance makes the world less inhabitable. If these cherry picked "authorities", Bill Gates, and Elon Musk, came to summits, and gave a speech about the dangers, etc. it wouldn't really change how people today look at automation and machine learning.

Black Peter, Howard...what do you think this is? Have people simply been to safe for too long? People are notoriously stupid extrapolaters of personal experience data, and most of the people who say AI is fine, nothing has gone wrong in their lifetimes or even seemed like it could. They've lived incredibly comfortable, stable, safe lives.

Whereas you guys grew up with parents who lived through a world war, where the earth nearly turned horrible for generations, the spread of communism, the real and present credible threat of nuclear war. What have the new generation(s) experienced? The threat of red pen on their tests? Someone using their free speech to say an unkind word?

I wonder how much that plays in to accurately assessing big-picture risk.

Why are you trying so hard to brute force others into believing in nonsense?

I always find this interesting as well. The western kids today have never seen suffering, so they don't get it. Interestingly, Asians have a very different view, as their history of suffering is much more recent.