Fletcher Scott

How can human intelligence face this? Can I ensure my behaviours aggregate into outcomes that are locally effective as well as ethically worth living under. Could I possibly tell the difference?

The same theory seems to implicate a radical lack of empathy as also a possibly stable outcome, something like an attractor, or a strategy that gets repeatedly selected for, that maintains an equilibrium in the aggregate interactions of a complex system.

If that’s true, then doesn't a lot of behaviour deserve a more radical type of empathy? Even when it looks like something self-defeating, this tells me its something like distributed causation or an emergent solution to an environment usually interpreted at the individual level.

Genetic algorithms and complexity theory suggest that iterative selection processes can discover strategies that aren’t intelligible at the level of the individual components combining and varying. And yet, those strategies can still produce reliable success without design.

How can human intelligence face this problem? Can I ensure my behaviours aggregate into outcomes that are locally effective as well as ethically worth living under. Could I possibly tell the difference?

How can human intelligence face this problem? Can I ensure my behaviours aggregate into outcomes that are locally effective as well as ethically worth living under. Could I possibly tell the difference?

The problem, of which I am aware, is that the same theory implicates even a radical lack of empathy, which seems to be a stable outcome/attractor, as a strategy repeatedly selected for, maintaining in some way an equilibrium at the aggregate interactions of a complex system.

Could a lot of human behaviour, now offered a radical form of empathy by this theory, even when it is morally-baffling or self-defeating, be understood as distributed causation, an emergent solution for an environment typically interpreted at the individual level?

thanks to step-by-step reasoning and Deep Thinking, our model can fail faster, stronger, and more understandably than ever before

Being bad at board games is a sign of intelligence because the brain is implicitly realizing that the task is meaningless and should factor it out of its computations.

As progress speeds, the time between ourselves and what we are nostalgic for can only shrink, until it is only a time years before that we are missing, weeks before, then days, then seconds, until the nostalgic-singularity happens... whatever that means.

We may have to accept that the intended audience for tech isn’t the current generation, but a future one they hypothesize will exist, either those sufficiently addicted, or sufficiently impeded by their infrastructure, that a special product will be needed to manage either or both of the problems

There has been only one Christian. They caught him and crucified him early. - Mark Twain

One of the unexpected problems of convenience culture is that we now treat "talking to a real person," the choice of the cashier over the machine, as a kind of moral triumph. As if this was ever something that belonged in public debate, and not an embedded fact of our everyday life.

Thanks Damiano!