All Thoughts Being Equal

Recently the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a research arm of the World Health Organization, classified processed meat as a known carcinogen and red meat as a probable one. Some people took it as a strong argument against meat. Industry PR called it "dramatic and alarmist overreach." I think this is an example of how poor science reporting, from the original press release to mainstream and secondary follow-ups, plus public innumeracy, can lead to over-political science news. I. Let's start at the source: What did the IARC 's press release [ pdf ] actually say? After thoroughly reviewing the accumulated scientific literature, a Working Group of 22 experts from 10 countries convened by the IARC Monographs Programme classified the consumption of red meat as probably carcinogenic to humans (Group 2A), based on limited evidence that the consumption of red meat causes cancer in humans and strong mechanistic evidence supporting a carcinogenic ef...

I.   I just finished an ebook by Stuart Armstrong called Smarter Than Us: The Rise of Machine Intelligence , and it's increasing my skepticism of the singulatarians—those whacky A.I.-vangelists such as inhabit MIRI, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. They're doing (what they think is) an important public service, by trying to warn the public about the dangers of a fully-godlike, insufficiently-friendly machine intelligence. Except I'm not so convinced that we could stumble on the kind of superintelligence they usually preach in fear about, an alien god with boundless powers: You [the machine superintelligence] are currently having twenty million simultaneous conversations. Your predictive software shows that about five of those you are interacting with show strong signs of violent psychopathic tendencies. You can predict at least two murder sprees, with great certainty, by one of those individuals over the next year. You consider your options. The human poli...