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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • QUIZ

    You administer IQ tests to 10K individuals, then give them a "performance test" for anything, any task.

    2000 of them are dead. Dead people score 0 on IQ and 0 on performance. The rest have the IQ uncorrelated to the performance.

    What is the spurious correlation IQ/performance?

    SOLUTION

    37.5%

    EUGENICISTS DESTROYED with FACTS and LOGIC









  • Actually I might have done goofed with that one; now that I think of it, if you assume some jackoff amount of computing power then a human brain (assuming nothing uncomputable happens there, so sad Penrose noises) could be simulated from first principles for a limited amount of time, no actual proof of possible future outcomes needed. This still leaves the problem of how exactly do you get all the data for that (and I think any uncertainity would require an exponential increase in paths you have to simulate), especially without killing the human in question.





  • Greg Egan was lampooning them in Zendegi and Schild’s Ladder for what is worth, and also Crystal Nights contains the following banger:

    You know what they say the modern version of Pascal’s Wager is? Sucking up to as many Transhumanists as possible, just in case one of them turns into God. Perhaps your motto should be ‘Treat every chatterbot kindly, it might turn out to be the deity’s uncle.'

    Interestingly, the posthuman worlds in some of Egan's books do resemble longtermist wet dreams somewhat, the crucial difference being the lack of superintelligence.