All Thoughts Being Equal

Source In the annals of philosophical thought experiments, it is written : There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks . Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two options: (1) Do nothing, and the trolley kills the five people on the main track. (2) Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person. Which is the correct choice? And lo, there were many variations: Fat Man Trolley As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by putting something very heavy in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you – your onl...

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...

Yes, this is where I'm going to express an official blog-opinion on #GamerGate—in the most abstract way possible. [WARNING: This post is very long... one might even say excessively so.] I. Richard Feynman, in a 1978 commencement address at Caltech (and also in the last chapter of his book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! ), describes a phenomena he calls "Cargo Cult Science": I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land....

Consider the following scenario: Someone who identifies as a member of Group A winds up in the "wrong part of town." Before they can get to friendlier territory, a band of members of Group B surround the person, calling them A-slurs and brandishing weapons. When the person tries to escape, the Bs chase them down and beat them to within an inch of their life. As the person lies bleeding in the street, the Bs walk off, laughing, only to yell back, "That's what happens when we catch a fucking A in our neighborhood!" Now run over possible real-world identities to fit into A and B. Maybe A is white and the Bs are black. Maybe it's the other way around. Maybe A is a woman and the Bs are men. Maybe A is LGBT and the Bs are gay- or trans-bashing religious hardliners. Maybe A is Jewish and the Bs are skinheads. Maybe there are other, more implausible possibilities (women beating up a man, e.g.). The point, though, is this: If you consider any choice of A and B ...