From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue May 18 1999 - 02:57:29 MDT
Damien Broderick wrote:
>
> At 02:50 AM 18/05/99 -0500, Eli wrote:
>
> >Greg Egan and _Quarantine_ would be the best SF.
> >Evolutionary psychology is the best we've got now.
>
> Highly doubtful. It's potentially the best *explanatory* system, in the
> broad. But it offers very little of practical benefit, as yet.
> Transmitter-modulators and cognitive/emotional discursive methods are not
> incredibly effective, but they are the coal-face for intervention.
> Speculations about life in the Pleistocene, however engaing and brilliant,
> don't help a depressive get out of the trough.
I suppose it depends on what you're trying to accomplish. Remember, I
don't give a damn about stopping depression. Quite the opposite. *All*
I care about is raising intelligence - in this case, that aspect of
intelligence known as self-awareness. For that, you want to be able to
sort out which parts of your thinking are really *you* and which parts
are some script that hasn't been valid in 10,000 years. I find
evolutionary psychology to be extraordinarily useful in keeping a clean mind.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/AI_design.temp.html
http://pobox.com/~sentience/singul_arity.html
Disclaimer: Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you
everything I think I know.
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