From: Richard Loosemore (rpwl@lightlink.com)
Date: Wed Aug 23 2006 - 11:16:44 MDT
Ben Goertzel wrote:
[snip]
> Anyway, this may not be a particularly pointful thread, and I'm going
> to abandon it shortly as I'm leaving this afternoon for a 2-week trip
> to Europe (for a combination of Novamente-related visits, a
> non-Novamente-related academic conference presentation, and hiking in
> the Alps). I suppose the reason I launched on this rant is that the
> focus on testing people irritates me. It's not the right focus. If
> we're going to think and yakk about things besides Singularity-focused
> technology, IMO the stupid organization of our society is more
> important and relevant and interesting than the capability or
> otherwise of some particular test to assess anything interesting...
>
> -- Ben G
I have got to speak up and say I emphatically agree with Ben here.
Not only do I think that an Apollo-style project [I prefer to liken it
to Apollo, rather than Manhattan, but we could come back to that] is by
far the best way to go ....
But I also find the repeated outbreaks of IQ discussion on this list to
be something bordering on the ridiculous.
{Let's see: there hasn't been a great symphonist in the world since
Dmitri Shostakovitch popped his clogs ..... so do you suppose we could
get another set of truly historic symphonies if we put one hundred
high-IQ folks in a composing retreat, or if we put one hundred of the
world's best musicians in a composing retreat? Answers on a postcard
please, and DO NOT get distracted by red herrings, like whether g is a
good predictor of various boring measures like income or publications or
the ability to hold back farts).
Frankly, I think that the subset of high-IQ folks who know they are
high-IQ, and who are activist about it, have an alarming tendency to be
deluded about the power of pure thought .... as if there is something
inherently better about any pure thoughts that they themselves have,
compared with the thoughts of other people.
Too many of those folks, in my experience, are hell on wheels at
crossword puzzles and/or mathematics ... while at the same time being
closed-minded, opinionated fools who wouldn't recognize a scientific
method if it bit their head off.
So let's please drop the IQ discussions and talk about whether an Apollo
or Manhattan Project would make sense.
Any takers?
Richard Loosemore
[The main part of Ben's message is included below, for completeness.]
> But I don't suppose testing really address the main problems. Forget
> about the test... if we
> -- took 100 technically, scientifically and conceptually gifted, and
> sane people from the membership of lists like SL4, extropy, AGI,
> wta-talk and the futurist community generally
> -- put them all (er, us all ;-) in some isolated facility [Los Alamos
> is nice, but I'll advocate a Caribbean island]
> -- added in our in our families as well, as desired on a case by case
basis
> -- added in a crew of system administrators (not to imply that
> sys-admins aren't highly intelligent, many would be included in the
> above groups), cooks, maids, and other useful support staff, and some
> competent managers to rule them all
> -- added a couple hundred million dollars of standard and experimental
> computing equipment
> -- added a big annual budget to fund research in university labs, so
> as to bring other minds into the picture
> -- let everyone just work on creating a positive Singularity, without
> the need to earn $$ in other ways
>
> How much faster would this bring the Singularity about, and how much
> would it increase the odds of the Singularity being positive?
>
> Gee, this is a crazy fantasy -- except this, or some approximation of
> it, would easily be achievable if someone like Bill Gates or Larry
> Ellison or George W Bush decided it was important
>
> The point is: the problem has to do with the allocation of people and
> funds, not with isolating who is good or not. I know plenty of folks
> who are very good at Singularity-critical work, and have a passion for
> it as well, but very few are focusing their time and energy
> exclusively on this (even I am not) due to the socially-imposed need
> to earn money to support families and so forth; and furthermore the
> powerful cross-pollination of thinking that would come from a
> Manhattan-project type collaboration does not exist ... instead people
> are mostly working in isolation, often replicating each others'
> mistakes over and over again.
>
>> >Intelligence and humanity are too multidimensional for that.
>>
>> But the binary ability to contribute or lack of such an ability to a
>> particular project is surely not multidimensional at all.
>
> Ability to contribute may be defined as binary but depends on multiple
> dimensions of attributes...
>
>> >If we want to maximize the odds of
>> >positive Singularity we should create an environment in which the
>> >diversity of natural intelligence is generally fostered.
>> >(Of course, none of that really matters if I'm right about Novamente,
>> >and the project is properly funded and flourishes and we create a
>> >superhuman AGI on a time-scale much faster than any education reform
>> >can plausibly happen.
>>
>> Aah. There's the rub. I'm sure many others here feel the same way
about
>> their projects.
>
> Yes, and IMO, at this stage, all these projects (ultimately there are
> not THAT many of them) with any degree of plausibility shouldn't be
> funded well and thought about hard by a community of passionate,
> dedicated, knowledgeable and intelligent people....
>
> Unfortunately our society is organized to promote the proliferation of
> chocolates, cookies, and weapons instead, so getting the (difficult,
> but not so hard as people think) technical problems solved is taking a
> lot longer than it really needs to....
>
> But testing to find the N most Singularity-creation-able people
> wouldn't solve anything -- what would we do? pat them on the back and
> say "Good! Now go apply for funding to do some Singularity work! Or,
> since you're so clever, please feel morally obliged to quit your job,
> dump your kids in the orphanage, and move into my basement and program
> and calculate full time" ;-)
>
> Anyway, this may not be a particularly pointful thread, and I'm going
> to abandon it shortly as I'm leaving this afternoon for a 2-week trip
> to Europe (for a combination of Novamente-related visits, a
> non-Novamente-related academic conference presentation, and hiking in
> the Alps). I suppose the reason I launched on this rant is that the
> focus on testing people irritates me. It's not the right focus. If
> we're going to think and yakk about things besides Singularity-focused
> technology, IMO the stupid organization of our society is more
> important and relevant and interesting than the capability or
> otherwise of some particular test to assess anything interesting...
>
> -- Ben G
>
>
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