You may have heard this idea that some people are worried a machine would gain the capacity to understand intelligence, and in doing so, make itself more and more intelligent. This machine would rapidly augment its own capacities, until it became so powerful that humans had no way of stopping it.  If this machine didn’t […]

Please watch while I butcher this sacred cow. After I’ve cooked up one of its steaks, and you’ve tasted its juicy flesh, you will realize – more to your amusement than your horror, that you’ve been eating it all along, and enjoying it, too. Here goes: The only rational reason to believe anything is because […]

Scientific Rationality can tell us how the world works – it’s predictive – but it hasn’t given us a model of what kind of choices we should make – it’s not prescriptive.  What would it look like if it were? What would happen if all people who believed the scientific method can tell us how […]

Historically, cities were places of knowledge, learning, and information. From a computational perspective, this makes perfect sense. Historically, computation and communication were very expensive. It made sense to do as much of those as possible in small, dense areas. For most of the last 10,000 years, if you wanted to be exposed to the latest […]

The world is a sea of energyAnd I, a current through which it flows.The world is a tree of knowledge And I, a branch through which it grows. I am not a thing which walks about the world on two legs.I am a song which sings itself. Everyday I write one page. I am not an […]

It isn’t too hard to imagine someone writing something like this, in the distant future: “The rationalists were often popularly lampooned for their concerns about the dangers of artificial intelligence. Many of them did sincerely worry about this outcome. And yet modern scholars generally agree that the idea of a rapidly self-improving artificial intelligence was […]

Would you like to be better at accomplishing your goals and getting what you want from life? Perhaps what you need is some good old fashioned corporate propaganda! Every big company uses a mythology to convince people to do their part and contribute to the operation of the company. When I worked at Facebook, the […]

Or: Why Javascript Developers are Often Marxists We’ve all heard the idea of the tragedy of the commons: the idea that when nobody has an incentive to maintain a shared resource, everyone following their own incentives causes the demise of the shared resource. A typical example given here is a pasture in which sheep graze. […]

Utilitarianism (selecting actions based upon how they are likely to impact the people of the world) sounds like a great idea. At first glance, this sounds like the correct way to make ethical choices; so long as you can accurately tell what will harm or help people in general, of course you should take likely […]

Is there an objective notion of right and wrong, good and bad? People have spent a lot of time arguing over this question.  Whenever an argument goes on for a long time without a conclusion, I find it useful to ask the question, “What would any possible answer to this question look like?”    In computing […]