From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu May 20 1999 - 11:31:12 MDT
Damien Broderick wrote:
>
> At 07:07 AM 20/05/99 GMT, Randy wrote:
>
> >I say, turn it around: Don't feel--think!
>
> No, no, *no*, damn it!
>
> "Don't just feel - think as well! Don't just think - feel as well! Think
> *and* feel!"
Actually, the damaging part of the concept isn't the idea "Don't
think--feel!" The damaging part is the idea that there's a sharp
distinction. Any information the brain processes is input to
rationality. That includes instinct, and intuition, and any other data
that gets produced by any cognitive process.
I remember studying for the SAT at age 11. I took the first Math
practice section and got a 600. I took the second one and got a 560. I
took the third one and got a 540. Going over the problems, I realized
that my first guess, my first impression, was right more often than my
second-guessing; as I tried to compensate by increasing second-guessing,
my scores went down. So I took another practice test, rapidly and
without self-consciousness, acting, as Obi-Wan would say, "on instinct",
and got a 640. I figured that was good enough and stopped practicing;
on the eventual SAT a few months later, I got a 740 in Math. I *trust*
my intuitions, not for any mystical reason, but because they're always right.
My father has a lecture about how Star Trek destroyed American
engineering by teaching managers to say "Dammit, Scotty, I need it done
in five minutes, not two weeks." I think that Star Trek destroyed
American culture through the Mr. Spock stereotype, that "rational
thinking" is high-precision math incapable of understanding emotions.
Star Trek is also responsible for the failure of AI, psychiatric idiocy,
Skinnerian behaviorism, string theory, and the hole in the ozone layer,
but I digress.
By comparision, Star Wars's "Use the Force" would simply seem to state
an additional input. What Lorrey said.
Of course, I haven't seen Episode I. I don't think I plan to, since the
nonstop hype has managed to instill feelings of nausea whenever I hear
the words "Star Wars". If they'd just *released* it, I would have gone
to see it. As it is, I'd rather see _The Matrix_ a third time.
--
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.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:03:46 MST