Recently I heard the news that Max Tegmark has joined the Advisory Board of
SIAI (The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, see
http://www.singinst.org/blog/2010/03/03/mit-professor-and-cosmologist-max-tegmark-joins-siai-advisory-board/).
This news was surprising to me, but in retrospect perhaps shouldn't have
been. Out of the three authors of papers I cited in the original
everything-list charter/invitation, two others had already effectively
declared themselves to be Singularitarians (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularitarianism): Nick Bostrom has been on
SIAI's Advisory Board for a while, and Juergen Schmidhuber spoke at the
Singularity Summit 2009. I was also recently invited to visit SIAI for a
decision theory mini-workshop, where I found the ultimate ensemble idea to
be very well-received. It turns out that many SIAI people have been
following the everything-list for years.
There seems to be a very strong correlation between interest in the kind of
ideas we discuss here, and interest in the technological singularity. (I
myself have been interested in the Singularity even before starting this
mailing list.) So the main point of this post is to let the list members who
are not already familiar with the Singularity know that there is another set
of ideas out there that they are likely to find fascinating.
Another reason for this post is to let you know that I've been spending most
of my online discussion time at Less Wrong
(http://lesswrong.com/lw/1/about_less_wrong/, "a community blog devoted to
refining the art of human rationality" which is sponsored by the Future
Humanity Institute, founded by Nick Bostrom, and effectively "owned" by
Eliezer Yudkowsky, founder of SIAI). There I wrote a sequence of posts
summarizing my current thoughts about decision theory, interpretations of
probability, anthropic reasoning, and the ultimate ensemble theory.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/15m/towards_a_new_decision_theory/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/175/torture_vs_dust_vs_the_presumptuous_philosopher/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/182/the_absentminded_driver/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1a5/scott_aaronson_on_born_probabilities/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1b8/anticipation_vs_faith_at_what_cost_rationality/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1cd/why_the_beliefsvalues_dichotomy/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1fu/why_and_why_not_bayesian_updating/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1hg/the_moral_status_of_independent_identical_copies/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1iy/what_are_probabilities_anyway/
I initially wanted to reach a difference audience with these ideas, but
found that the Less Wrong format has several of advantages: both posts and
comments can be voted upon, the site's members uphold fairly strict
standards of clarity and logic, and the threaded presentation of comments
makes discussions much easier to follow. So I plan to continue to spend most
of my time there, and invite other everything-list members to join me. But
please note that the site has a different set customs and emphases in
topics. New members are also expected to have a good grasp of the current
state of the art in human rationality in general (Bayesianism, heuristics
and biases, Aumann agreement, etc., see
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences) before posting, and especially
before getting into disagreements and arguments with others.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
