“Miksi jonkun pitäisi saada käyttää kenkiä?”
Yksi surkeimpia tapoja vastustaa jotakin on kysyä, “miksi kenenkään pitäisi saada tehdä noin”. Miksi ihmisten pitäisi saada kopioida kulttuuriteoksia toisilleen? Miksi homojen pitäisi saada mennä naimisiin? Miksi ihmisten pitäisi saada sanoa loukkaavia asioita julkisesti? Miksi kenenkään pitäisi saada käyttää tajuntaan vaikuttavia aineita? Miksi jonkun pitäisi saada...
Read More14 objections against AI/Friendly AI/The Singularity answered
What it says. Not really an essay, but I didn't want to create a new category just for this.
Read More18-month follow-up on my self-concept work
About eighteen months ago, I found Steve Andreas’s book Transforming Your Self, and applied its techniques to fixing a number of issues in my self-concepts which had contributed to my depression and anxiety. Six weeks after those changes, I posted a report called “How I found & fixed the root problem behind my depression and anxiety after 20+ years”. I figured that by now it would be...
Read MoreAdult children make mistakes, too
There’s a lot of blame and guilt in many people’s lives. We often think of people in terms of good or bad, and feel unworthy or miserable if we fail at things we think we should be able to do. When we don’t do quite as well as we could, because we’re tired or unwell or distracted, we blame and belittle ourselves. Let’s take a different approach. Think of a young...
Read MoreAI risk model: single or multiple AIs?
EDIT April 20th: Replaced original graph with a clearer one. My previous posts have basically been discussing a scenario where a single AI becomes powerful enough to threaten humanity. However, there is no reason to only focus on the scenario with a single AI. Depending on our assumptions, a number of AIs could also emerge at the same time. Here are some considerations. A single AI The classic...
Read MoreAI thought process visualization
I started thinking about all the original computer science CGI stuff you could do in a sci-fi movie or TV series.
Read MoreAn appreciation of the Less Wrong Sequences
Ruby Bloom recently posted about the significance of Eliezer Yudkowsky‘s Less Wrong Sequences on his thinking. I felt compelled to do the same. Before reading the Sequences, I was what the Sequences would call “a clever arguer” – someone who was good at coming up with arguments for their own favored position, and didn’t really feel all that compelled to care...
Read MoreApplied cognitive science: learning from a faux pas
Yesterday evening, I pasted to two IRC channels an excerpt of what someone had written. In the context of the original text, that excerpt had seemed to me like harmless if somewhat raunchy humor. What I didn’t realize at the time was that by removing the context, the person writing it came off looking like a jerk, and by laughing at it I came off looking as something of a jerk as well. Two...
Read MoreDecisive Strategic Advantage without a Hard Takeoff (part 1)
A common question when discussing the social implications of AI is the question of whether to expect a soft takeoff or a hard takeoff. In a hard takeoff, an AI will, within a relatively short time, grow to superhuman levels of intelligence and become impossible for mere humans to control anymore. Essentially, a hard takeoff will allow the AI to achieve what’s a so-called decisive strategic...
Read MoreDeepDream: Today psychedelic images, tomorrow unemployed artists
One interesting thing that I noticed about Google’s DeepDream algorithm (which you might also know as “that thing making all pictures look like psychedelic trips“) is that it seems to increase the image quality. For instance, my current Facebook profile picture was ran through DD and looks sharper than the original, which was relatively fuzzy and grainy. If you know how DD...
Read MoreDepressed due to a lack of accomplishments?
Don't be. You still have plenty of time.
Read MoreDissecting edugames: iCivics.org
The Serious Games Market blog showcases a number of interesting edugames, and I thought that I should try some. One of the posts linked to an interesting-sounding site called iCivics.org, which has a number of educational games that are designed to teach kids about the way the US government works. Some of the games were relatively good. Others were dreadful enough that even with a designed...
Read MoreDoing Good in the Addiction Economy
The world is becoming ever-more addictive and distracting, showering us with short-term rewards. But we can still take control of those mechanisms in order to do good in the world, and make ourselves into better people.
Read MoreDon’t trust people, trust their components
I used to think that people were either trustworthy, semi-trustworthy, or unreliable. Basically, there was a single scale, and if you were high enough on that scale, you could be counted on when it came to anything important. My model wasn’t quite this simplistic – for instance, I did acknowledge that someone like my mother could be trustworthy for me but less motivated in helping out...
Read MoreEmpowering the growth of others: an underutilized desire for game design?
There’s a human desire which is very emotionally powerful, and which I’m a little surprised to realize that very few video games seem to have tapped into. (That I know of? Please let me know about any counter-examples!) The desire is for a specific way of helping others and seeing the consequences of that help. It’s when you help someone acquire a new skill or ability, see them...
Read MoreEn tarkoittanut loukata, olen vain eri planeetalta
Kolme tosielämän esimerkkiä tapauksista, jotka ovat saaneet jonkun loukkaantumaan, mutta jotka ovat johtuneet lähinnä väärinkäsityksistä. Väärinkäsitykset ovat juontaneet juurensa siihen, että ihmiset ovat pohjimmiltaan olleet eri kulttuureista – vaikka olisivatkin kaikki saman maan asukkaita. 1. Kysyjät ja arvaajat. Kysyjien ja arvaajien käsite popularisoitiin Guardianissa...
Read MoreHomot ja heterot ovat mielikuvitusolentoja
Mitä jos harrastaa kerran seksiä saman sukupuolen edustajan kanssa? Onko silloin bi tai homo? Entä jos on muuten hetero, mutta yksi tietty saman sukupuolen edustaja himottaisi? Onko tässä tiukassa rajanvedossa ylipäätään järkeä? Homon, heteron ja biseksuaalin käsitteet ovat monessa mielessä käteviä työkaluja. Ei silti kannata unohtaa, että ne ovat yliyksinkertaistuksia. Tilanne...
Read MoreHow feeling more secure feels different than I expected
This year, I’ve been feeling more emotionally secure, thanks to various kinds of internal and external work (the stuff at https://attachmentrepair.com/ being one notable example). The effect of this doesn’t always feel like I expected it to feel. I once thought that in order to not worry so much about whether people like me, I would need to become convinced that they do like me. Or at...
Read MoreHow I found & fixed a major cause of my depression and anxiety
EDIT Dec 18, 2018: For a followup of how the changes in this post have lasted, see “18-month followup on my self-concept work“. EDIT Aug 7th, 2022: As a five-year follow-up: the above followup is still roughly correct, in that this did represent a major and significant change for the better, and at the same time there were also other causes of depression and anxiety that would...
Read MoreIncorrect hypotheses point to correct observations
1. The Consciousness Researcher and Out-Of-Body Experiences In his book Consciousness and the Brain, cognitive neuroscientist Stansilas Dehaene writes about scientifically investigating people’s reports of their out-of-body experiences: … the Swiss neurologist Olaf Blanke[ did a] beautiful series of experiments on out-of-body experiences. Surgery patients occasionally report leaving...
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This work by Kaj Sotala is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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