Jay Carlson

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• Commented on The Biggest Little SF Publisher you never heard of pulls on the jackboots
  Creatures other than canines can hear that awful signal; have a heart....
• Commented on Over-Extended Metaphor for the day
  Microsoft is a different family of world-organizing memes: city-states, feudalism, empire, colonialism, mercantilism, the White Man's Burden, "free markets", globalization. It is difficult to wholly separate the early Protestant church from opposition to the Holy Roman Empire....
• Commented on Over-Extended Metaphor for the day
  When I was playing too much Civilization II, I had a dream in which my science adviser told me, "I think we should research LAMBDA CALCULUS so we can build LISP MACHINES." The breaking of the MIT AI Lab does...
• Commented on PSA: Why there won't be a third book in the Halting State trilogy
  Buried powerlines means you don't think about your personal trees. In the countryside, I've come to think of the number of trees per person. Through some kind of folk-math dimensional analysis, the length of above-ground power lines cancels by the...
• Commented on PSA: Why there won't be a third book in the Halting State trilogy
  The observational physical sciences have done well with the meme of deep time. But 50 years ago an Asimov story looked at solid time, which seems equally productive....
• Commented on Blogging for Orbit
  It's the only way to be sure....
• 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...