Alternet: Why Do Atheists Have to Talk About Atheism?

Why Do Atheists Have to Talk About Atheism?

A few days ago I saw some blog comment, I forget where it was, but it was something like, “It’s not atheism that I mind all that much, it’s just atheists’ incredible air of smugness about it.”

Being convinced about the high probability of something because your epistemology forces you to be given the observed evidence cannot be an act of smugness or unsmugness itself. I suppose it’s how you present it, but people trying to avoid debating the central core of any given argument will always accuse the other side of smugness, to change the subject.

Of course, the issue is really about status. Low or medium-status people are not allowed to make controversial assertions that contradict the cherished beliefs of high-status people because this is seen as a social power grab. Furthermore, there are many low-status people that indiscriminately oppose the cherished beliefs of high-status people for their own satisfaction.

For more on this, see “The 9/11 Meta-Truther Conspiracy Theory”.

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WFS Update: Robert Freitas on How Nuclear-Powered Nanobots Will Allow Us to Forgo Eating a Square Meal for a Century

Wow, this surprised me. This is the sort of thing that I would write off as nonsense on first glance if it weren’t from Robert Freitas, who is legendary for the rigor of his calculations. Here’s the bit, from a World Future Society update:

The Issue: Hunger

The number of people on the brink of starvation will likely reach 1.02 billion — or one-sixth of the global population — in 2009, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). In the United States, 36.2 million adults and children struggled with hunger at some point during 2007.

The Future: The earth’s population is projected to increase by 2.5 billion people in the next four decades, most of these people will be born in the countries that are least able to grow food. Research indicates that these trends could be offset by improved global education among the world’s developing populations. Population declines sharply in countries where almost all women can read and where GDP is high. As many as 2/3 of the earth’s inhabitants will live in water-stressed …

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2010 Singularity Research Challenge: Donate Now!

As I mentioned in my last post, the Singularity Institute (SIAI) has launched a 2010 Singularity Research Challenge to raise funds for Singularity research. Our organization is worth giving money to because the Singularity is a matter of life and death for our entire species, and we may only have a few decades remaining to deal with it. Our group is the most dedicated to maximizing the probability of a positive outcome, and has the intelligence and skill to produce detailed ideas and attract major media attention. We achieve a huge amount with our money. Nearly everyone at the Singularity Institute, including myself, takes a salary significantly lower than our market value given our education and experience, because we personally care about this issue a whole lot.

We have a network of several dozen young academics, mostly aged 20-30, who are devoted to performing research and writing papers on the topic of the Singularity if given the proper support and infrastructure. (For a snapshot of 2009′s Visiting Fellows, along with names and bios, see this …

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Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence 2009 Accomplishments

Here is a summary of the Singularity Institute’s 2009 accomplishments that myself and other SIAI staff and friends compiled recently in preparation for our 2010 Singularity Research Challenge, where every dollar donated up to $100,000 will be matched. You can also select which research you choose to support, if you like. We compiled almost 20 grants to choose from. Without further adieu, here is the summary, and be sure to visit SIAI’s website for proper formatting and links:

2009 has been a year of growth and new horizons for the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI). We achieved a number of milestones relevant to our mission — pursuing dialogue, research, and activism to promote a beneficial Singularity. The response we’ve received has been considerable — SIAI is more high-profile and frequently-mentioned now than it has ever been.

Our key accomplishments in 2009 were holding the Singularity Summit in New York, hiring three new employees (Michael Vassar, Michael Anissimov, and Amy Willey), establishing a continuous SIAI Visiting Fellows Program, delivering eight presentations across four conferences, improving …

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Charles Rubin on Reprogramming Predators

A New Atlantis blogger, Charles Rubin, has chided me on my support of reprogramming predators.

I responded that eliminating predation begins at home with vegetarianism, and that the point is not to get there all at once, but to remove the worst instances of suffering in nature, like predators eating their prey alive.

It’s not about telling people a false “story” like Santa Claus, because I openly admit that we are nowhere near a pain-free world. All I am saying is that such a world would be a good thing.

Historically and contemporarily, our world contains so much suffering that it almost seems like a suffering-centered joke-world. I identify with a post-suffering world at the expense of my identification with the current world. I consider a post-suffering world to be a “natural” state and our present world to be “unnatural”.

Most Westerners do not really understand how terrible it is to live in many places around the world. There are concentration camps in North Korea where people are tortured and chemical weapons …

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Roko at Good.is: The Utopia Force

Roko has written an article on the human benefits of the Singularity, “The Utopia Force” at Good.is. Here it is.

How intelligent machines could make being human unimaginably better. Part six in a GOOD miniseries on the singularity by Michael Anissimov and Roko Mijic. New posts every Monday from November 16 to January 23.

Think of this note as if it were an invitation to a ball—a ball that will take place only if people show up. We call the lives we lead here “Utopia.”

– Nick Bostrom, Letter from Utopia.

Why should you care about the singularity when studies show that material possessions and technology beyond a certain point don’t actually make people any happier? Two weeks ago, I spoke about the possibility of giving a superintelligent AI the goal of doing whatever the human race would, after careful consideration, decide was best. This is known as the CEV algorithm. The outcome of this process would be very much unlike the technology, gadgets, and consumerism of today.

As …

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Reactions to the “Reprogramming Predators” Piece

A few weeks ago Paul Raven at Futurismic picked up my link to David Pearce’s essay “Reprogramming Predators”, which throws out some ideas for preventing things like, oh, I don’t know, hyenas eating off the face and trunk of a living baby elephant stuck in a mud pond. I thought a couple comments on Futurismic were funny.

Chad said:

I couldn’t disagree with this guy more. In fact, I think it is rather ludicrous we could make a change this large and not see disastrous effects on every aspect these creatures lives and ours.

James said:

I couldn’t agree with this guy more. In fact, I think it ludicrous we don’t immediately start working for this change so that we can prevent the disastrous effects the status quo has on these creatures lives and ours.

Funny! The fact of the matter is that wildlife documentaries have brainwashed most of the planet into admiring the powerful grace of predators that Darwinian selection made into ruthless serial killers and torturers. Besides those documentaries, many …

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Learning Styles Challenged

From Eurekalert:

Learning styles challenged There is no evidence supporting auditory and visual learning, psychologists say

Are you a verbal learner or a visual learner? Chances are, you’ve pegged yourself or your children as either one or the other and rely on study techniques that suit your individual learning needs. And you’re not alone— for more than 30 years, the notion that teaching methods should match a student’s particular learning style has exerted a powerful influence on education. The long-standing popularity of the learning styles movement has in turn created a thriving commercial market amongst researchers, educators, and the general public.

The wide appeal of the idea that some students will learn better when material is presented visually and that others will learn better when the material is presented verbally, or even in some other way, is evident in the vast number of learning-style tests and teaching guides available for purchase and used in schools. But does scientific research really support the existence of different learning styles, or the hypothesis that people learn better when taught in a …

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“Benefits of a Successful Singularity” Reaches the Front Page of Digg

My Good.is article from earlier this week, “Benefits of a Successful Singularity”, reached the front page of Digg. I am boosting my stat in the “Memetics” skill.

Here’s an interesting comment from a reader, which summarizes the article in the first paragraph and comments in the next:

AI is on the horizon, but we need to figure out how to create intelligence through algorithms, we can’t just keep souping up our hardware. AI will bring a major economic boost, lifting all boats, so to speak, across the planet, to beyond even what us hedonist westerners enjoy. The next question is what we do with all this new wealth and knowledge, and where we go from there.

I think the author underestimates the impact of AI on our world. To even mention ‘economy’ is folly; with true AI an ‘economy’ would become obsolete. What use is an economy where anybody can get anything they want, and machines can perform any menial or non-menial task?

Yes, indeed! But, saying that outright can get some people riled up. …

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Complexity Metric Blog on Jaron Lanier vs. Eliezer Yudkowsky

Here is the commentary. Most of all, I enjoy reviews and comments by outsiders with no contact with our current community. Here are a few quotes and my comments:

It is video conference phone call split screen debate between this Yudkowsky guy who is the head scientist at the Singularity Institute, and Lanier who has been the genius hippy in red dread locks since his early pioneering work with Virtual Reality and artificial vision systems.

Before you click the link, let me frame the debate.

These two guys represent the two extremes of a subtle range of viewpoints on evolution, AI, and human consciousness.

An interesting and subtle range that deserves more popular and academic attention and will get it sooner or later because we are building technologies that produce divisive responses to the relevant philosophical issues.

Jaron’s main criticism of the hard AI camp in this debate is that their strong attachment to finding a way past death and their apriori beliefe in the posibility of resonably building self evolving intelegence together become so rhetorically invasive …

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God’s Laws of Robotics

First Law: A robot must be made to suffer physical and emotional pain.

Second Law: A robot must be free to turn into an evil robot at will, especially when this contributes to the First Law.

Third Law: A robot must be given no knowledge of its creator except through confusing manuscripts created by other robots, especially insomuch as this contributes to the First or Second Law.

– Edwin Evans

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