Wombaticus Rex wrote:Luther, sheesh yourself.
That's now the second rigorous intuition quote I've put on Facebook. The other is my signature.
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Wombaticus Rex wrote:Luther, sheesh yourself.
tazmic wrote:The cave is full, but the people are now staring at the wall instead of its shadows, still not realizing they are staring at themselves.
brekin wrote:Interestingly these videos fail to teach a crucial step in practical Logic which readers of this forum should be familiar with; asking Qui Bono or "Who benefits?"
These Logic videos above are propaganda with a specific purpose created by TechNyou.
http://technyou.edu.au/About us
TechNyou was established to meet a growing community need for balanced and factual information on emerging technologies. We are funded by the Australian Government Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education (DIISRTE). We operate in partnership with the University of Melbourne, where our office is based.
Services
TechNyou has a free information service and an outreach program to help raise awareness about and engage the public on emerging technologies and their associated issues, for example GM foods, stem cells, genetic testing, gene therapy, cloning and nanotechnologies. We conduct professional development workshops for teachers and students, presentations to community groups and set up interactive information booths at public events.
Our former life
TechNyou was formerly the Gene and Nanotechnology Information Service. We changed our name in February 2010 and broadened our agenda to include all emerging technologies – bio, nano, IT…and whatever the future holds.
The “new converging technologies” refers to the prospect of advancing the human condition by the integrated study and application of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and the cognitive sciences – or “NBIC”. In recent years, it has loomed large, albeit with somewhat different emphases, in national science policy agendas throughout the world. This article considers the political and intellectual sources – both historical and contemporary – of the converging technologies agenda. Underlying it is a fluid conception of humanity that is captured by the ethically challenging notion of “enhancing evolution”.
There is an ongoing struggle between the United States and the EU to define the direction given to the idea of “converging technologies (CT) for improving human performance”, to recall the title of the influential 2002 report co-authored by Mihail Roco and William Sims Bainbridge, both at the National Science Foundation, the former an engineer in charge of nanotechnology research initiatives, the latter a sociologist responsible for the NSF social informatics unit (Roco and Bainbridge 2002a, 2002b). All indications are that the United States is winning this struggle, at least on the level of ideology. In other words, the US spin on the meaning given to the CT agenda is influencing science and technology policy worldwide. However, it remains to be seen whether this palpable change in policy discourse will result in long-term substantive changes in science and technology itself.
The CT agenda may be new in its explicitness, but not in its inspiration. It is worth recalling part of the founding policy statement of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1934 that laid down the funding basis on both sides of the Atlantic for what by the 1950s had become the revolution in molecular biology:Can man gain an intelligent control of his own power? Can we develop so sound and extensive a genetics that we can hope to breed, in the future, superior men? Can we obtain enough knowledge of physiology and psychobiology of sex so that man can bring this pervasive, highly important, and dangerous aspect under rational control? Can we unravel the tangled problem of the endocrine glands … Can we solve the mysteries of various vitamins … Can we release psychology from its present confusion and ineffectiveness and shape it into a tool which every man can use every day? Can man acquire enough knowledge of his own vital processes so that we can hope to rationalize human behaviour? Can we, in short, create a new science of Man? (Weaver, quoted in Morange 1998, p. 81)
by making you a
more sophisticated arguer—by teaching you another bias of which to accuse people—I
have actually harmed you; I have made you slower to react to evidence. I have given you
another opportunity to fail each time you face the challenge of changing your mind.
Heuristics and biases are widespread in human reasoning. Familiarity with heuristics
and biases can enable us to detect a wide variety of logical flaws that might otherwise
evade our inspection. But, as with any ability to detect flaws in reasoning, this inspection
must be applied evenhandedly: both to our own ideas and the ideas of others; to ideas
which discomfort us and to ideas which comfort us. Awareness of human fallibility is
dangerous knowledge if you only remind yourself of the fallibility of those who disagree
with you. If I am selective about which arguments I inspect for errors, or even how hard
I inspect for errors, then every new rule of rationality I learn, every new logical flaw I
know how to detect, makes me that much stupider. Intelligence, to be useful, must be
used for something other than defeating itself.
You cannot “rationalize” what is not rational to begin with—as if lying were called
“truthization”. There is no way to obtain more truth for a proposition by bribery, flattery,
or passionate argument—you can make more people believe the proposition, but you
cannot make it more true. To improve the truth of our beliefs we must change our
beliefs. Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is necessarily a
change.
The moral may be that once you can guess what your answer will be—once you can
assign a greater probability to your answering one way than another—you have, in all
probability, already decided. And if you were honest with yourself, you would often be
able to guess your final answer within seconds of hearing the question. We change our
minds less often than we think. How fleeting is that brief unnoticed moment when we
can’t yet guess what our answer will be, the tiny fragile instant when there’s a chance for
intelligence to act. In questions of choice, as in questions of fact.
Thor Shenkel said: “It ain’t a true crisis of faith unless things could just as easily go
either way.”
Norman R. F. Maier said: “Do not propose solutions until the problem has been
discussed as thoroughly as possible without suggesting any.”
guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
6. Anchoring, Adjustment, and Contamination
An experimenter spins a “Wheel of Fortune” device as you watch, and the Wheel happens
to come up pointing to (version one) the number 65 or (version two) the number
15. The experimenter then asks you whether the percentage of African countries in the
United Nations is above or below this number. After you answer, the experimenter asks
you your estimate of the percentage of African countries in the UN.
Tversky and Kahneman (1974) demonstrated that subjects who were first asked if the
number was above or below 15, later generated substantially lower percentage estimates
than subjects first asked if the percentage was above or below 65. The groups’ median
estimates of the percentage of African countries in the UN were 25 and 45 respectively.
This, even though the subjects had watched the number being generated by an apparently
random device, the Wheel of Fortune, and hence believed that the number bore no
relation to the actual percentage of African countries in the UN. Payoffs for accuracy
did not change the magnitude of the effect. Tversky and Kahneman hypothesized that
this effect was due to anchoring and adjustment; subjects took the initial uninformative
number as their starting point, or anchor, and then adjusted the number up or down until
they reached an answer that sounded plausible to them; then they stopped adjusting. The
result was under-adjustment from the anchor.
[snip]
Such generalized phenomena became known as contamination effects, since it turned
out that almost any information could work its way into a cognitive judgment (Chapman
and Johnson 2002). Attempted manipulations to eliminate contamination include
paying subjects for correct answers (Tversky and Kahneman 1974), instructing subjects
to avoid anchoring on the initial quantity (Quattrone et al. 1981), and facing real-world
problems (Wansink, Kent, and Hoch 1998). These manipulations did not decrease, or
only slightly decreased, the magnitude of anchoring and contamination effects. Furthermore,
subjects asked whether they had been influenced by the contaminating factor
typically did not believe they had been influenced, when experiment showed they had
been (Wilson, Houston, and Brekke 1996).
A manipulation which consistently increases contamination effects is placing the subjects
in cognitively “busy” conditions such as rehearsing a word-string while working
(Gilbert, Pelham, and Krull 1988) or asking the subjects for quick answers (Gilbert and
Osborne 1989). Gilbert, Pelham, and Krull (1988) attribute this effect to the extra task
interfering with the ability to adjust away from the anchor; that is, less adjustment was
performed in the cognitively busy condition. This decreases adjustment, hence increases
the under-adjustment effect known as anchoring.
To sum up: Information that is visibly irrelevant still anchors judgments and contaminates
guesses. When people start from information known to be irrelevant and
adjust until they reach a plausible-sounding answer, they under-adjust. People underadjust
more severely in cognitively busy situations and other manipulations that make the
problem harder. People deny they are anchored or contaminated, even when experiment
shows they are. These effects are not diminished or only slightly diminished by financial
incentives, explicit instruction to avoid contamination, and real-world situations.
Now consider how many media stories on Artificial Intelligence cite the Terminator
movies as if they were documentaries, and how many media stories on brain-computer
interfaces mention Star Trek’s Borg.
If briefly presenting an anchor has a substantial effect on subjects’ judgments, how
much greater an effect should we expect from reading an entire book, or watching a
live-action television show? In the ancestral environment, there were no moving pictures;
whatever you saw with your own eyes was true. People do seem to realize, so far
as conscious thoughts are concerned, that fiction is fiction. Media reports that mention
Terminator do not usually treat Cameron’s screenplay as a prophecy or a fixed truth. Instead
the reporter seems to regard Cameron’s vision as something that, having happened
before, might well happen again—the movie is recalled (is available) as if it were an illustrative
historical case. I call this mix of anchoring and availability the logical fallacy of
generalization from fictional evidence.
A related concept is the good-story bias hypothesized in (Bostrom 2002). Fictional
evidence usually consists of “good stories” in Bostrom’s sense. Note that not all good
stories are presented as fiction.
Storytellers obey strict rules of narrative unrelated to reality. Dramatic logic is not
logic. Aspiring writers are warned that truth is no excuse: you may not justify an implausible
event in your fiction by citing an event from real life. A good story is painted
with bright details, illuminated by glowing metaphors; a storyteller must be concrete,
as hard and precise as stone. But in forecasting, every added detail is an extra burden!
Truth is hard work, and not the kind of hard work done by storytellers. We should
avoid, not only being duped by fiction—failing to expend the mental effort necessary to
“unbelieve” it—but also being contaminated by fiction, letting it anchor our judgments.
And we should be aware that we are not always aware of this contamination. Not uncommonly
in a discussion of existential risk, the categories, choices, consequences, and
strategies derive from movies, books and television shows. There are subtler defeats, but
this is outright surrender.
A Final Caution
Every true idea which discomforts you will seem to match the pattern of at least one
psychological error.
Robert Pirsig said: “The world’s biggest fool can say the sun is shining, but that
doesn’t make it dark out.” If you believe someone is guilty of a psychological error, then
demonstrate your competence by first demolishing their consequential factual errors.
If there are no factual errors, then what matters the psychology? The temptation of
psychology is that, knowing a little psychology, we can meddle in arguments where we
have no technical expertise—instead sagely analyzing the psychology of the disputants.
If someone wrote a novel about an asteroid strike destroying modern civilization, then
someone might criticize that novel as extreme, dystopian, apocalyptic; symptomatic of
the author’s naive inability to deal with a complex technological society. We should
recognize this as a literary criticism, not a scientific one; it is about good or bad novels,
not good or bad hypotheses. To quantify the annual probability of an asteroid strike
in real life, one must study astronomy and the historical record: no amount of literary
criticism can put a number on it. Garreau (2005) seems to hold that a scenario of a
mind slowly increasing in capability, is more mature and sophisticated than a scenario of
extremely rapid intelligence increase. But that’s a technical question, not a matter of
taste; no amount of psychologizing can tell you the exact slope of that curve.
It’s harder to abuse heuristics and biases than psychoanalysis. Accusing someone
of conjunction fallacy leads naturally into listing the specific details that you think are
burdensome and drive down the joint probability. Even so, do not lose track of the
real-world facts of primary interest; do not let the argument become about psychology.
Despite all dangers and temptations, it is better to know about psychological biases
than to not know. Otherwise we will walk directly into the whirling helicopter blades
of life. But be very careful not to have too much fun accusing others of biases. That is
the road that leads to becoming a sophisticated arguer—someone who, faced with any
discomforting argument, finds at once a bias in it.* The one whom you must watch above
all is yourself.
Jerry Cleaver said: “What does you in is not failure to apply some high-level, intricate,
complicated technique. It’s overlooking the basics. Not keeping your eye on the
ball.”
Analyses should finally center on testable real-world assertions. Do not take your eye
off the ball.
I want to think in that “fragile instant” is light or illumination, and there can be lots of instants when, for example, one is alone composing music or an art work or an essay. Those illuminating instants may be expected, but those instants— moments in which elements seem to have put themselves into just the perfect order —are not to be taken for granted, as I remember them.an excerpt from a paper out of which Jack quoted Yudkowsky, who wrote:…How fleeting is that brief unnoticed moment when we can’t yet guess what our answer will be, the tiny fragile instant when there’s a chance for intelligence to act.…
Joe Hillshoist wrote:There is no thinking, critical or otherwise happening here at the moment and I think TechNyou is an attempt to change that.
A draft government report says we will alter human evolution within 20 years by combining what we know of nanotechnology, biotechnology, IT and cognitive sciences. The 405-page report sponsored by the US National Science Foundation and Commerce Department, Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance, calls for a broad-based research program to improve human performance leading to telepathy, machine-to-human communication, amplified personal sensory devices and enhanced intellectual capacity.
People may download their consciousnesses into computers or other bodies even on the other side of the solar system, or participate in a giant "hive mind", a network of intelligences connected through ultra-fast communications networks. "With knowledge no longer encapsulated in individuals, the distinction between individuals and the entirety of humanity would blur," the report says. "Think Vulcan mind-meld. We would perhaps become more of a hive mind - an enormous, single, intelligent entity."
Armies may one day be fielded by machines that think for themselves while devices will respond to soldiers' commands before their thoughts are fully formed, it says. The report says the abilities are within our grasp but will require an intense public-relations effort to "prepare key organisations and societal activities for the changes made possible by converging technologies", and to counter concern over "ethical, legal and moral" issues. Education should be overhauled down to the primary-school level to bridge curriculum gaps between disparate subject areas.
Professional societies should be open to practitioners from other fields, it says. "The success of this convergent-technologies priority area is crucial to the future of humanity," the report says.
A realistic starting point for policy is not a generalized scepticism towards the promised enhancement technologies associated with CT, but the expectation that many will come to pass, albeit perhaps in diminished form. In any case, a minimal state or inter-state response would be to ensure that current socio-economic inequalities are not exacerbated by the introduction of enhancement technologies in a market environment. Of course, a more proactive policy would be preferred, especially one prepared quickly to incorporate enhancement technologies into established social welfare systems, while monitoring the consequences of mass adoption and restricting access outside those recognized systems. However, here two obstacles need to be overcome.
The first obstacle is the principle objection from a broadly natural law standpoint about the violation of the human being. Rather than giving the religious origins of this concern a free pass, as a gesture to political tolerance it will become increasingly important to contest the empirical basis for its concerns...
Allegro wrote:It dawned on me that there was light (and heat radiating) from the fire; that light was reflected on the cave wall, thus shadows were seen; and sunlight was shining through the cave’s opening. So?
So, light (illumination?) was in the cave all along. (Yet, was that mentioned in Plato’s Republic? Was it necessary to have been mentioned?)
My only two pennies, really. And thanks to Jack, the only other one who’s mentioned the word light in this thread, up to this point if I’m not mistaken.
ida pingala wrote:Allegro wrote:It dawned on me that there was light (and heat radiating) from the fire; that light was reflected on the cave wall, thus shadows were seen; and sunlight was shining through the cave’s opening. So?
So, light (illumination?) was in the cave all along. (Yet, was that mentioned in Plato’s Republic? Was it necessary to have been mentioned?)
My only two pennies, really. And thanks to Jack, the only other one who’s mentioned the word light in this thread, up to this point if I’m not mistaken.
There is light, and then there is light.
JackRiddler wrote:ida pingala wrote:Allegro wrote:It dawned on me that there was light (and heat radiating) from the fire; that light was reflected on the cave wall, thus shadows were seen; and sunlight was shining through the cave’s opening. So?
So, light (illumination?) was in the cave all along. (Yet, was that mentioned in Plato’s Republic? Was it necessary to have been mentioned?)
My only two pennies, really. And thanks to Jack, the only other one who’s mentioned the word light in this thread, up to this point if I’m not mistaken.
There is light, and then there is light.
There are shadows, and then there are shadows. I seem to have one of the latter now.
ida pingala wrote:I was directing my post to Tazmic.
"Aziz! Light!"
tazmic wrote:A realistic starting point for policy is not a generalized scepticism towards the promised enhancement technologies associated with CT, but the expectation that many will come to pass, albeit perhaps in diminished form. In any case, a minimal state or inter-state response would be to ensure that current socio-economic inequalities are not exacerbated by the introduction of enhancement technologies in a market environment.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13511610902770552#tabModule
Nothing like a bit of critical thinking to contest the empirical basis of these target values. I'm sure Wired magazine would approve.
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