Jay Carlson

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Commented on The Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis
Predictability is interesting, especially where it interacts with control. Does non-"stupidity" (per <title/>) mean more likely to see social control systems? And then less likely to cooperate?...
Commented on The Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis
Humans have a lot of symbiotes, so our clade isn't just common descent. How many niches could maize and digestive fauna and housecats evolve to fill?...
Commented on The Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis
I hope the moral of this story isn't that beer in cans allows apes in cans. Given the population bottlenecks, the new life in the outer colonies sounds a lot like "My Own Private Easter Island", except with even weirder...
Commented on The Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis
Civilization certainly doesn't select for intelligence. If it did, there wouldn't be negative correlations between intelligence and fertility, would there? I think you're teasing, since I'm pretty sure you know Dawkins's frame: count the genotype, not the phenotype; count propagation...
Commented on The Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis
Michael Wengler's comment on Robin Hanson's musings on They Live: "Robin identifies with the aliens! (Not that there's anything wrong with that...)" http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/09/we-live-unequally.html#comment-518331202...
Commented on The Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis
No, I am stating how some AIs will be created. How many people or governments will balk at a bit of torture and murder when there's trillions at stake? That's the end of "A Colder War", right?...
Commented on The Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis
"hard" AI - which, in my opinion, won't happen until we have a "computer" with as many cross connections as the human brain I associate "hard AI" with the symbol manipulation paradigm. Part of the Boolean Dream is that intelligence...
Commented on The Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis
General intelligence is handy in times of strife and rapid change, a broad range of mental skills may be boost survival over narrow skill sets. While possibly true at the individual level, at population/species scale it sounds more iffy. Genetic...
Commented on The Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis
The only self-made humans are feral....
Commented on The Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis
Counter to the "who needs to think up arithmetic when we have calculators/Wikipedia" the following article on the difficulties in teaching "critical thinking skills" slid across my desk: http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/summer2007/Crit_Thinking.pdf "Children are not as dumb as you might think, and adults...
Commented on The Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis
Humans are actually pretty smart. Speculation: there are a bunch of different genes encouraging various clusters of talent. Above-average intelligence appears to be distributed randomly throughout the gene pool. But why haven't the Draka bred themselves into a cadre of...

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shimonhaber123 commented on The Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis
"We don't have to invent everything for ourselves, we just need to learn how to use others inventions." - this doesn't stop there. Most of the tools were not invented for what they are used today. They get redesigned, reshaped and end up being used for completely different purposes. Just look at the PVC. Some two centuries ago, when it was discovered, it wasn't intended to become one of the most widely produced plastic. - Shimon Haber...
guthrie commented on The Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis
Certainly I found that cabbage was alright when steamed, rather than boiled. I still refuse to try that with broccoli, sprouts or cauliflower though....
justoneoff2 commented on The Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis
@ 470 imho agreed about perceiving control systems and ability to game the system efficiently. Not so sure about cooperation as we are already sensitive to tit-tat with initial tat economics. @ 471 using others inventions for mass market profits requires/presupposes constancy in the environment which may be social rather than base environmental. We don't see much market for 8track tape adapters or old style printer cables ...so tooling up to make them might not be economically advantageous. On the other hand, a suitable "killer app" in social context could well sustain a growth industry in designer accessories for that...
Charlie Stross commented on The Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis
I wonder ... I've met a couple of other people who couldn't/wouldn't eat same, mainly because of the really crap cooking methods they had endured. No, Greg. There's a well-known category of supertasters who are sensitive to certain plant alkaloids -- notably found in Brassica oleracea and grapefruit juice, coffee, green tea, and various other foods. In my case, grapefruit juice tastes unspeakably bitter, and just the smell of cauliflower makes me nauseous: something in it reminds me of diarrhoea....
jseliger commented on The Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis
I'm late to this party, but regarding your list set of comments, I'm reminded of comments in Joel Mokyr's The Enlightened Economy, in which he says that even if only a minority of people are actually reading about improved efficiency and techniques, efficiency as a whole may move forward through the spread of information from books to interpersonal contacts. Mokyr uses the example of farming: In the long run, it may not have mattered all that much that only a small minority of farmers took the trouble to read these books. Knowledge spread and filtered down through networks of personal...

Responses to Comments from Jay Carlson

Common Misconceptions About Publishing—a series of essays about the industry I work in.
How I Got Here In The End —my non-writing autobiography, or what I did before becoming a full-time writer.
Unwirer—an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction.
Shaping the Future—a talk I gave on the social implications of Moore's Law.
Japan: first impressions — or, what I did on my holidays
Inside the MIT Media Lab—what it’s like to spend a day wandering around the Media Lab.
The High Frontier, Redux — space colonization: feasible or futile?
“Nothing like this will be built again”—inside a nuclear reactor complex.
Old blog—2003-2006 (RIP)

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